10(+) MORE architects i have been thinking about

(Although we were kind of thinking along the lines of THIS IS CHINA: ARCHITECTURE & URBANISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SUPERCITY...but who knows?)

I would buy that book

doctor casino, your flickr is like a walk down memory lane. salut!

Woohoo, thanks for the support, y'all!

China trip was 16 days and I'm on Day, uh, 3...but the point is, much more coming soon!!

I always thought that the hsbc building was just really ugly. cheers for the write-up! NB: I've never been inside it.

Just wrote a longish blog giving props to URBANUS, definitely one of the 10+ firms I've been thinking about. Here's a Flickr set, and here's some choice imagery:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7145/6769031077_c2c21438fc.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7006/6769075413_b45a253808.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7018/6773897569_823935a947.jpg

how the hell have I not been following your blog?

btw what is your opinion of bjarke ingels & co?

thanks mh!

Ingels... man, I've struggled to come to grips with that guy. It's tempting to see him as a cynical salesperson who masks a lack of critical ambition behind a positive "Yes Is More" attitude - - - in which reading, reading, his tenure at OMA was spent learning form-making and salesmanship tactics rather than absorbing any of the social polemic that (at one time anyway) seemed to be behind the OMA stuff. In other words, they're basically MVRDV, but much more eager to get work.

On the other hand, if you take him at his word that the "yes" thing has to do with inserting the architect into normally non-architectural decision-making, offering out-of-left-field policy solutions, then maybe there actually is more of a social activist component to the work than there is in Koolhaas's at this point. The idea that the architect can actually shape the debate is pretty appealing, and the kinds of things BIG seems to want to create suggest a sort of nonpartisan but forward-looking utopianism. The architect, judging from the renderings, can make people party in the streets and so on. Always happy to see these 60s throwbacks but sometimes they just seem so stock and auto-pilotish.

Taken purely on its own terms, though, I think the form-making and program analysis stuff is totally brilliant. Not sure every apartment in the building would benefit from being a bizarre one-off in response to supposed advantages discovered in the loopholes of zoning and sun angles (etc), but as far as applications of the OMA formula go, I think they have a better knack than most. The buildings are striking and memorable and often in despite of crap budgets and restrictive circumstances. I dunno. I think the material sensibility is kind of ghastly though.

Man, I definitely shouldn't try to write about architecture after a few drinks...

Btw, you might be interested that my friend is a contractor on a Steven Holl project right now and the stuff coming from his office sucks. No follow-through, details or lack thereof probably being fleshed out by cheap apprentices.

Huh, that's interesting! I really did find the Chinese projects to be the best-built "foreign starchitect" things we saw there. But I think a lot of that might actually be down to Li Hu, who was at the time the head of Holl's Beijing office....

To be fair, it seems like it's pretty common on non-flagship projects. Said friend is an architect who is working as the head of the engineering department of a company that does curtain walls for a variety of projects and it seems like he runs into constant headaches due to either poor planning or a lack of actual engineering follow-through on plans.

http://bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/02/12/how-boston-city-hall-was-born/DtfspyXVbKBIKi8iSXHX6J/story.html

^^^ great read.

^ yes loved that article. So many people don't realize that the failures of grand scale brutalism were largely due to the lack of adherence to the initial plans in terms of pedestrian access, ground level retail, etc.

And I agree that there's something good in BIG's work in the utopian suggestion that we're finally moving away from the post-modernism mindset that buildings don't really matter. But at the same time his unique one off responses to sites tend to generate sloped buildings in the same way that Diller Scofidio Renfro's responses to a site tend to generate broad public stair sitting areas and viewing windows.

I certainly don't see him having the vision of even aesthetic range of OMA or H&dM, but maybe BIG's best contribution will be that if they can get a bunch of crazy looking buildings built that still have a programmatic sobriety then it might help break down the public perception of architecture as either flash or substance with little middleground.

Generally agree with the above - although I think DS+R are a pretty darn good firm and have less of a "branded" feel to their work. There are certain devices that recur, yeah, but they do seem to actually care about the specificities of site, or at least of architectural context. Landscape maybe not so much, but they seem to favor urban contexts, at least in the stuff that I've seen.

Absolutely! With DS+R I think it's more a case of "we did this before and it worked really well" rather than a branding element.

Here are before & after images of a high end restaurant I finished this past summer. It's in a former auto garage in an alley and it's hard to tell from the photo but the kitchen is a series of open islands in the middle with tables all around, so no seat is more than about 10 feet from the cooking. One of the goals was trying to figure out how to make a 4 star experience in a raw space and we decided to keep the shell as rough as possible while everything at a tactile level during the course of the meal (chairs, carpet, table finish) would be very refined. Got a bunch of other projects I need to have shot and some more opening soon.

http://i41.tinypic.com/23kw6ld.jpg

http://i41.tinypic.com/vg4gns.jpg

I DIED, that's lovely! The exposed ductwork seems like a nice mediator between the raw oldness of the wall surfaces and the shiny newness of the kitchen hood etc. Adds up well to me.

thanks!

I may slap the next client who says they're going for a "farmhouse aesthetic". Unless they're doing a farm.

Have these people actually been in farmhouses? I could unload some genuine farmhouse paraphernalia if they need some.

Amateur Architecture principal Wang Shu won the Pritzker Prize! First winner I've really been stoked for in my time of being an archinerd - we got to visit a bunch of their stuff on this last trip and it was all awesome.

So unexpected and great! Glad the Pritzker committee seems to have moved to recognizing people doing great work when it's actually being done rather than as a lifetime achievement award.

Yeah, I think this was a pretty great choice for pretty much the exact reason I DIED mentioned.

http://places.designobserver.com/feature/how-to-be-an-architecture-critic/32278/

So I made a point of uploading all my Amateur Architecture (Wang Shu/Lu Wenyu) photos last week to celebrate/capitalize upon the Pritzker excitement... full set here and here's a few faves...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7178/6940309289_d3907f59e2.jpg http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7043/6950798251_ebe54391b6.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7040/6937397041_75ef3bc94b.jpg http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7196/6940260785_778fbe38f1.jpg

(If you follow the link, my apologies - I've recently gone digital and while I love lots of things about it, it seems to be weakening me as an editor, that's a lot of pictures!)

Photos still great! I showed some of your recent pics to an architect friend at the bar last week. On my phone so... not the presentation they deserved, but good.

Aw gee thanks! I hope to soon be famous at bars across the nation.

great photos. particularly like the bottom two.

Thanks - yeah, their firm has a really nice handle on texture, for lack of a better way of putting it.

http://furrrocious-forms.tumblr.com/ geeeenius

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1xz1p2Gfa1rsiucno1_500.jpg

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1w1ca9Kyv1rsiucno1_500.jpg

Meaohaus

put a cat on it

Is Daniel Libeskind the worst major contemporary architect? Cheap looking if not cheap to build structures that are notorious for user complaints. A few decent projects mixed in with a ton of shlock.

http://daniel-libeskind.com/sites/default/files/styles/fixed_width_10/public/Key%20The%20Ascent%20at%20Roeblings%20Bridge.jpg
http://daniel-libeskind.com/sites/default/files/styles/fixed_width_10/public/sm1%20%28c%29%20Kim%20yong%20Wong.jpg

http://daniel-libeskind.com/sites/default/files/styles/fixed_width_10/public/Key%20Denver%20Art%20Museum%20Residences.jpg
http://daniel-libeskind.com/sites/default/files/styles/fixed_width_10/public/IMG_3031%28c%29%20Zumtobel%20Lighting%20GmbH_0.jpg

fyi that last lighting sculpture is called "masterpiece"

Libeskind is such a tragedy to me because the Jewish Museum is kind of great (kind of badly flawed but kind of great), and at the very least a kind of definitive study on the idea of trying to use a building to produce certain emotional and perhaps bodily effects - - - and each subsequent piece that reuses the language to no effect at all just cheapens the impact of the one good building. That one in Cincy just blows IMO although I've talked to people that liked it.

Worst major name, I'd have to think about for a bit. There's plenty of people where they are just not to my taste at all but I believe they are competent builders who have something interesting they're trying to do so it's hard to say they should just be tarred and feathered. Hmm.

yes he's the worst by some distance. "competent builder" is the last way to describe him.

I think part of it may be that he just tends to accept the types of projects with questionable clients and budgets that others at his level turn down. But only a part of it.

I do not like those buildings.

so it may read different in person but the photos of the H&dM/Al Weiwei Serpentine pavilion sure are disappointing :(

it looks totally joyless from the pics. i could have forgiven the somewhat forced/undergrad nature of the "excavation" (even though there was nothing to excavate, as it turns out, which should have been obvious) if the result had some sense of fun or any other spatial interest.

having said that the nouvel pavillion seemed fun from the images but was kind of oppressive to spend time in.

architecture photography is a hell of a field

I'm pretty stoked by the concept of the pavilion but it definitely pushes up against the limits of a "statement" versus material/space/promenade/detail/whatever else might actually make up an architectural experience. I'm a fan of everybody involved so I want to give it a fair shake... we're taking the students to see it later this month hopefully.

^ yeah I think my high expectations where part of why I found the result so disappointing. Seems like they felt the need to create a sort of anti-pavilion but SANAA already stripped it back about as far as it could go.

I'm breaking my own rule of trying to ignore things called pavilions or viewing towers in architectural discourse as I generally think just providing shade or a platform is too low a bar to clear in terms of dealing with actual challenges of buildings.

Ha yeah - - they can be nice experiments for ideas though, and at their best they really can have as much thinking and care as a building, in the way that, I dunno, a haiku can take as long to write as a novel (or whatever) but it really is a whole different order of challenges.

(Viewing towers are the worst though, somehow!)

architecture photography is a hell of a field

― mh, Thursday, 7 June 2012 20:27 (2 months ago)

Might I recommend the pretty (if boring) Julius Shulman Documentary Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman?

Also since I've spent a couple of days up and down by this building this weekend I have been thinking about (and cussing the budget panel that approved such an ugly monolithic building):

http://www.theccd.ie/images/rotate/ccd-day.jpg

Kevin Roche, you should be ashamed. Actually that entire stretch at the moment is a bit shameful with the empty Anglo Irish building...

http://politico.ie/images/politico/economy/anglo-shell.jpg

I really loved the Kevin Roche exhibit I saw at the National Building Museum last month but it really glosses over some of the terrible things he's done and influenced (on the planning side even more than the aesthetic side).