The NYT takes a look at Diller and Scofidio's solid design of the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston:
Institute of Contemporary Art - Boston - Architecture - Review - New York Times
When my favorite architecture critic, Ian Nairn, drove around America in the 50s, his favorite towns were in Pennsylvania, particularly Pittsburgh, whose post-industrial transformation he would have been proud of.
On our Labor Day excursion to Philadelphia, we explored some towns on the way - particularly Bethlehem, the Moravian town with the legendary steelworks.
Bethlehem, has what suburban America, for the most part, does not - a sense of place. It is a town, once rich, once poor, which is a perfect model for viable, sustainable towns of the future.
The most stunning thing about Bethlehem is the rusted steel cathedral of the disused blast furnaces that dominate the skyline.
Given that Bethlehem, is famous for its Christmas lights, it is surprising that the blast furnaces do not form part of the decoration.
When I worked for set designers Fisher Park, there was a project in the office, to illuminate the steelworks in Duisberg (link below) - a baroque, funfair like celebration of light that would be perfect for Bethlehem.
TrekEarth | The steel mill Photo
Metropolis Magazine reviews Google's horrid new offices.
It takes the 'working here is so much fun we're so playful' spin to its most simplistic architectural representation - bright colors and toys.
All of these, of course, are a thin veneer over the reality - a strip lit, cubicle ridden, hell hole, like a parody of The Office.
Google's products are still failry sophisticated - I hope the office environment doesn't rub off.
Architects are good at building brands without people noticing that thats what they are doing, but mostly bad at capitalizing on them by doing mass produced items, such as furniture collections or hardware elements.
The Slate article below covers a very interesting topic but the conclusions are completely wrong.
"neither Foster nor Piano has a house style; their designs vary considerably from project to project"
If anyone has a house style, it is Foster. When I was there someone nearly got fired for not specifying the wrong door handles on a building - they weren't Elementer.
The main reason that Foster or Piano buildings vary in style is that they didnt design them all - if you are a big architecture practice its just not possible for the founder to design everything. That not deception, just a function of scale. What keeps the integrity of design is precisely the house style.
Unfortunately, in the same way that art historians squabble over whether a Rembrant is authentic (as if there were a clear boundary) because they desperately want to believe in the myth of authorship, the same is true of architects, and that is precisely why they have strong brands. People want to believe in signatures.
How architects build brands. By Witold Rybczynski
I'm currently re-reading Christopher Alexander's classic 'A Pattern Language', whose deterministic design approach is the antithesis of Jane Jacobs' in many ways, but less unfashionable than other rules-based systems due to its common sense approach.
I've noticed that Alexander's notion of using pools of light to define spaces virtually is born out with alomost any feature.
In New York, where the sidewalks are rarely cleaned, one way to measure people flow quantitatively is through the dark spots on the pavement that chewing gum makes.
It seems that people will hang around pretty much any pole, lamp-post etc. One the other hand the pole must be high enough to provide 'virtual' shelter, there tends to be much less chewing gum around fire hydrants.
When architects steal terms like Post Modernism or Deconstruction from the, shrouded in bullshit, fringes of philosophy called 'literary criticism' and the like, what they really mean is: 'new buildings with decoration' or 'buildings that look like they are falling apart', respectively.
That does not mean that the buildings aren't beautiful - just that the justification is pointless and the understanding of other people's field's limited. Because of the nature of the scale and function of architecture, architects can pretend to be scientists when they are poor craftsmen and artists when they are bad engineers.
Seed magazine has a new piece on innovations in architecture - its true that composite materials, intelligent skins and energy efficiency concerns have created a scientific edge in some styles, but the combination of the fact that you can pretty much build anything these days with the counter swing against minimalism means that by and large architecture is more art than a science then ever.
The bottom line is that there is something deeply geeky and philistine about needing to find gadgetry in architecture for it to be innovative.
In fact practitioners of the baroque decorative style were more likely to be scientists, such as Guarini who was a mathematician and geometer.
If artists misunderstand science sometimes, then equally scientists misunderstand artists. Here is Seed getting taken in by architects who appropriate scientific jargon, when they never would be hoodwinked like this by research scientists:
"This recent project in Wolfsburg, Germany, from Zaha Hadid's London office, is essentially a study in the displacing of the horizon... the nested lines of diverging parallels; and the exhibition spaces, whose traditional homogeneity is refigured as a quasi-random scattering of particles, like billiard balls on a crooked table. Quantum indeterminacy and undecideability reign."
This is pure metaphor, yet the Wolfsburg project has been described as using 'fractal geometry' as if that is true or even innovative. Fractal geometry in the way that it exists in Hadid's buildings has been used by architects for thousands of years.
Seed: Architecture's Scientific Revolution
Today's Cribcandy has a list of some of the most recent innovations in LED lighting from being directly embedded into fabrics, bathroom tiles and translucent glass.
LED's are currently only in widespread use for applications with high maintenance costs such as traffic lights, but as their performance increases over the next 5 to 10 years, they will eventually replace standard home and office lighting and transform the way that interiors can be designed.
Aside from the tiny size of LED's (or the even newer LECs (Light Emitting Capacitors), LED's are approaching the lifespan of standard building materials, making it cost effective to embed them directly in structural components and architectural finishes.
The biggest change, however, is that because the currents involved are tiny, LED lighting can be directly controlled, digitally, meaning that there are almost unlimited effects that can be produced cheaply and controlled wirelessly.
Given that transparent wiring can be embedded in glass complete with transparent solar cells it should be possible to create windows with self-powered, embedded lighting to be any color or shade, display any image or be completely translucent.
Cribcandy - a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home
Josh Rubin points to the preliminary designs for Manhattan's highline, which were unveiled at Monday's opening at MOMA.
Manhattan's highline project aims to take a 1.5 mile strip of disused overhead railway and turn it into a linear park.
It's a terrible idea.
Linear parks were all the rage when I was an architect, because they could use spaces that were generally wastelands, like old railway lines and, more importantly, because the long sweeping shallow curves made it easy to do presentations that looked great and truly modern.
The problem is that linear parks don’t really ever function as parks, a place to hang around and enjoy nature, they are often built (like the highline) in a place that does not lend itself to mature plant [oops - plant originally spelled as 'planet'] growth and the spaces themselves are not 'static' - in short they become expensive, fancy, shrub lined, bike lanes.
The double whammy for the Highline project is that it is a raised linear park, with all of the problems that separating pedestrian flow from the ground produced in large urbanism projects in the 50's and 60's.
The biggest problem the Highway has is that it is built on a Victorian cast-iron structure [update - it was actually built as late as 1930, still feels like Victorian engineering IMHO] that creates really nasty urban spaces beneath it - the challenge of this project is not so much the park but what is done to renovate it underneath.
Diller, Scofidio and now Renfro may do a better job here than most, if enough money is poured in to do something interesting and quirky, but over time whatever they do will decay and return to the inevitable character that 19th century iron structures seem to have.
Given the challenges of creating a park where the benefits of it being on a raised deck outweigh the negative aspects of the potentially dank, dreary space beneath, there is another option for the highline, which doesn't result in pretty drawings -
Tear it down
And free up another small piece of Manhattan from its curse - shadow.
Excellent resource listing the various projects underway to create 3d models of Manhattan: VTerrain: New York City
"Tornadoes cause 'hundreds' of dollars of damage to mobile homes every year and some trailer dwellers take measures against them. Others just let nature help them with their decorating."
Great Mobile Homes of Mississippi - The Trailer Park
"none of the 20-odd patrons scattered about the restaurant's two dining areas appears to have a laptop computer or wireless PDA on hand"
A McDonalds rep says:
"Why would these customers use this service when they can go back to their offices to use their computers?"
Is this the real reason, or is it the fact that McDonalds architecture is designed to have people pass through quickly, with harsh lighting and hard seating? McDonalds is the artithesis of an environment where you would want to hang out.
"Digital dawn, functions as a traditional window blind with a reactive surface that is in constant flux, growing in luminosity in response to its surroundings."
Calatrava's Vision for a Trade Center Transit Hub via Anil
Architecture is like computer programming in that the details suck you in, and its sometimes difficult to see the big picture, the overall design. In fact ability to see the wood from the trees is the principal skill that architects have to offer when they use their skills in other disciplines.
Detailing has become a fetish in architecture as projects follow where the money is. Corporate buildings are designed like Porsches, but there are still architects like Rem Koolhaas that don't get drawn into details at the expense of the space they are trying to create. Even Corbusier's detailing wasn't that great.
Calatrava is undoubtedly a master builder, but sometimes the overall form is dictated by impressive structures rather than the space they create, and as such shows the difference between great engineering and great architecture.
Great Independent interview with maverick, Robert Hughes, the worlds most renowned art critic who has just written a book about Goya.
"I think he [Goya] is genuinely anti-war, anti- the degradation caused by war, which is a function of human desire for cruelty, which is at least as deep-rooted as mankind's desire for sex".
Hughes is a superb writer and a no-bullshit critic, with a distaste for the fashion driven whims of the art world, so I can't wait for Hughes' next book which is about my old boss, Norman Foster.
BBC Radio 3 looks at a variety of architectural subjects for the remainder of the year. Check out the archive links for interviews with Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano and Daniel Libeskind.
BBC - Radio 3 - Architecture on 3 homepage
Nick Aster points out that the 'World Council on Tall Buildings' (straight out of the X-men) decided that the Petronas Towers in KL are the tallest building in the world despite the fact that the Sears tower in Chicago is blatantly taller.
"Measured to the top of the radio masts, Sears' height is 1,518ft, which easily eclipses Petronas' 1,483ft. Trouble is, the masts on top of the Sears Tower don't count, but the mast on top of Petronas' does. Hmm, confused? The masts on the Sears tower are not considered to be a part of the actual building, so the official measurement stops at 1,450ft. So Petronas gets the crown."
Critics are complaining about a scheme for a Renzo Piano Tower:
"London will become a high-rise city, with the dome of St Paul's slowly reduced to a pimple."
Planners should be realistic and play the New York game of 'air rights', allow tall buidings and get something in return such as some green space.
The NYT says that the terrain of Baghdad does not pose the same dangers as Grozny of Mogadishu.
"The old city in Baghdad does have narrow roads, but most of the city, especially the parts around many of Mr. Hussein's compounds, is crisscrossed with wide boulevards that would be harder to block."
Saddam, like many dictators has really bad taste, - from giant monuments with bronze castings of hands holding massive ceremonial swords (made in Basingstoke in England) to huge sterile avenues created by tearing down historic prototypical arab courtyard houses along a labyrinth of narrow streets. The shelter that these alleys would have provided could have saved him.
'The paperless office is as useful as the paperless office', so goes the saying. Since computers have become ubiquitous, paper consumption has actually increased.
It always amazes me that banks and credit card companies have to store vast amounts of paper copies of transactions, that there is still no low cost EDI network and people still send paper invoices and purchase orders and that paper exists at all for anything other than luxury items such as books. Paper documents are often an inefficient, costly, dangerous anachronism and yet the pace of their replacement is business is seemingly glacial.
Take architecture. The vast majority of litigation in architecture (and there is a vast amount of litigation - buildings are complicated and often leak etc.) stems from inconsistencies between contract documents. In the UK there are three principal documents, the plans themselves, the specifications and the bills of quantities. CAD software was supposed to change all of that, since one electronic document could contain all the contract information. Like many things in computing this goal is from fruition, as this latest initiative by Autodesk highlights.
AutoCAD revamp aims to cut out paper | CNET News.com
Jeff is disappointed that the THINK proposal did not win the WTC competition.
Although innovative, there are two reasons why I believe the decision may be sound:
1. the project was very ambitious structurally and could have suffered dramatically from the effects of watering down the initial idea on grounds of cost and practicality.
2. THINK is a collaboration and could have suffered the perils of committee design. A great monument needs a great artist, a single minded signature designer with the resoluteness of a Frank Lloyd Wright.
Libeskind has won and although his scheme looks more conventional at first glance, his past record will stand testament that this will be a fittingly triumphant project unlike anything else in Manhattan today. This will include the first deconstructionist skyscraper.
Jon Udell writes about the architecture of data rich spaces
Modernism removed decoration from architecture. Or so the perceived wisdom goes.
But few could argue that Times square, triumphantly modern, is not decorative. Robert Venturi, the father of post modernist architectural criticism used Vegas as his model but the decoration here was a throwback, Egyptian or Classical pastiche.
What is going on at times square is something new, its influences are from Archigram to Bladerunner. More importantly it is a continuation of what has happened throughout the capitalist world, where neon and billboard advertising have kept decoration alive and well. The difference is that the advertising is part of the architecture and now, part of the network. Media architecture is just beginning.
One liner: "##"
Summary: Simplistic, rectilinear shapes created from two groups of three towers at right angles to each other and linked by bridges. In addition to the new towers, there is a proposal for landscaped piers representing shadows form the original towers. Multiple memorials are constructed at ground level and in the new buildings.
Plus: The pier proposal is very simple and elegant. Being the same size as the original towers they would allow their scale to be grasped.
Minus:
The towers are simple without the elegant simplicity of the originals that made them so iconic. The 'multiple memorials' idea is pointless. The cantilevered gardens/balconies would be prohibitively expensive, would disappear from the working drawings and would therefore change the design altogether.
The designs for the WTC site are out, its taken a day to digest all the proposals.
The bad news: they are all either mediocre or unbuildable.
The good news: the architects themselves are not all mediocre and the eventual buildings will be nothing like the original competition entries. The favorite appears to be Foster. I have some knowledge of the way the Foster office operates, since I used to work there when I was an architect. If he wins he will change the design entirely, just as he did for the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank's headquarters in Hong Kong, the skyscraper which made his name. I would guess that the competition entry was largely conceived by others in the office (possibly Ken Shuttleworth), but if it wins Foster will want to get more involved, as it is such a high profile scheme.
Great works of architecture a relatively rare, even rarer are those buildings that define an entire movement. One of these buildings has just been built, Foreign Office Architect's Yokohama Port Terminal. It is the first building to use the type of organic, contoured surface that defined the style of many University projects a few years ago, as 3D computer models evolved from illustrative use for presentations to being the primary design tool.
Best Quicktime VR panorama ever: Times square