10(+) MORE architects i have been thinking about

Good idea Jed, that was a lovely thread to watch load ...
10(+) architects I have been thinking about
...but, yeah, getting big!

I'm on board - thanks, Jed.

The HdM above, fyi, is condos at 40 Bond Street in Manhattan. More photos starting here. Very neat, I think, and some interesting ideas going on with the fence, which suggests an upside-down arcade, some kind of hedgee, and a reinterpretation of graffiti. The shiny metal stuff on the ground level is recycled from their Forum 2004, which seems like a smart move to me.

LOVE the calligraphic fencing and like the rest of 40 Bond, but there's something lacking in the overall effect. The elements seem unrelated to one another. Like, "here's this moderately cool buidling ... and here's this ASTOUNDING decorative detail glued on for no particular reason." I've got nothing against ornamentation for its own sake, but I want all the pieces to fit together, somehow.

It's got a lovely lock!

Here's another one I've been thinking about. I mentioned this on the weird buildings thread but it's not really weird.
http://mocoloco.com/archives/jackson_clements_burrows.jpg
Jackson Clements Burrows Architects

The house shows a projection of the house it replaces.

You can read more about it on the architects website
http://www.jcba.com.au/
...but (like ALL architects websites) it's a pain to navigate and this one has an added clicky noise.

Here's another one of the same architects. They do nice houses.
http://www.contemporist.com/photos/cape_schank_010.jpg

I've found a better picture of the house in Melbourne with architects explanation.
http://static.worldarchitecturenews.com/project/uploaded_files/713_385%20Jon%20Clements%20HOTY%20Old%20House.jpg
The site was controlled by a Heritage overlay which favoured the retention of existing dwellings. In response to the clients desire to demolish the existing house, we proposed a strategy to replace the dilapidated cottage with a new house integrated within a supergraphic image of its former self.

a supergraphic image

lol architects.

Is the issue the redundancy of "graphic" and "image"? Because I get what they're going for, in that "supergraphic" refers to a specific history/movement/motif of the late 60s and early 70s, so it's an adjective modifying "image." I dunno.

contenderizer - I agree to an extent that the green grid of windows has rather little to do with the graffiti wall, but I'm also kind of okay with that. And I'm still convinced there's something going on here in reference to Aldo Rossi but I can't really explain it coherently yet...

tell more more of this supergraphic movement?

I wanted to be 40 Bond's biggest fan but seeing it in person was more than a little underwhelming. I don't know if I can elaborate much but it was an "is this all there is?" kind of moment.

Well, I mean...it's just condos, y'know?

re: supergraphics - kind of a non-architectural architectural movement growing out of Op Art and a general interest in grooooovy environments through graphics. A Flickr search should turn up some typical images...here's a nice one:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3285/2452013495_bb213fa33d_o.jpg

You know, that stuff.

John McMorrough writes in Hunch 11:

Supergraphics are those big arrows, numbers or words painted on walls and seen throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though clearly a minor occurence within the annals of architectural history during its time as a fad, it received some amount of critical attention. It was, for a time, presented as an answer (or at least a tool) to elevate to the aesthetic, social problems facing the man-made environment.

Basically, the appeal was that with just a thin coat of paint you could - without doing anything traditionally associated with architecture or interior design - transform the social conditions of a space, let's say from "boring, uptight, 1950s corporation" to "swinging, hip, groovy 1960s corporation." The limitations of this are probably pretty apparent, but that was the thinking at the time, as I understand it.

OK, fair dos, they were not just being pretentious then! (maybe just a little).

Well, they are architects. ;)

<3 all of you

also, are there any wittgenstein/popper-esque stories about famous architects beefing? i never encounter these. are architects just chill?

ALSO: do people exist who find this style strictly beautiful?

http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/oreilly/IMAGE017.jpg

Not interesting, not important, just awesomely beautiful.

Not me, but you will find a lot of love for, and images of, that breed of blocky, primary-colored postmodernism in arch. magazines from the late 80s through the mid-90s - GA would be a good place to look I think. Also the later works of Aldo Rossi and Michael Graves, off the top of my head.

Yeah, that's a Graves there. I just can't stand that kind of thing, and I've worried about it a lot and can't figure out why! The colors, the shapes...I'm just repelled by it all. Maybe it comes from being a child of the 80s and being inundated with suburban sprawl (vaguely) reminiscient of the above. I really don't know.

Damn straight, I love that deep blocky, colourful architecture, and naturally I love Aldo Rossi (these are great)and certain things by Michael Graves.

Also see that Loyola Law school by Frank Gehry, which, being somewhat of a Gehry-naysayer myself, I think is way better than his other stuff.

http://www.pixelmap.com/images/Arch/dma_gehry_23.jpg

x-post, that is

Wait, you can't stand it/are repelled by it, but still find it awesomely beautiful?

Just personally, I think a lot of this stuff does play out in a really plainly dialectic fashion - so a lot of that stuff emerged specifically out of people being sick of white-box modernism in whatever its forms, which the architects in question had all been inundated with in their own formative years. And so similarly, we grew up in a world where every movie theater, doctor's office, student rec center, etc. looked like THAT stuff and we can't bloody stand it.

This is an oversimplification in a lot of ways - the architects in question are a lot smarter than I'm giving them credit for - but it does play a role.

The other story (in terms of how it became so ubiquitous) is that postmodernism's own hype had to do with communicating directly with the people, providing symbols that could be understood, etc. Whether or not the people could understand them, it reflects an interest in playing ball with the market. The architects themselves were singing the voices of cheap materials, historical quotation, and so on. The color palette might just be zeitgeist - I mean the 80s and early 90s were not, in my opinion, great times for color in general...

As a side note, I'm learning to leave room in my own tastes for things I Just Plain Like and Just Plain Don't Like, even if I can't intellectualize them yet. I can't fully rationalize my hatred of the 80s stuff or my love of Art Nouveau, the latter's just pretty and the former's just grody.

I'm generally just interested in them on aesthetic levels, especially when they're really pared down, minimal forms.
cf. http://farm1.static.flickr.com/21/29467421_191cb9f563.jpg?v=0
Michael Graves, on the other hand, does tend to be repulsive in, I guess, depending on 'postmodernism's own hype' and tend to make some disgusting buildings. Stuff like the above, though, I really like.
It feels like forever since I read anything about architecture though, so I'm out of touch.

the above meaning that Theatre Square building.

Xpost to myself, I misread your post. And the answer is yes, me.

I don't mind the early Rossi (the image mehlt's just posted for example) which I think is onto a specifically interesting kick about type, history, collective memory, a lot of other dry and spooky stuff that makes a lot of sense for something like a crematorium. Rossi runs into trouble later trying to articulate things like conference centers and I don't know what else, but they start getting gross IMO.

Early Graves is also really good - let's say pre-1980, but there might be some good stuff later. In general I'm interested in everything about postmodernism EXCEPT the historicist language and material palette of the 1980s. Like, if you read Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction, everything he's talking about sounds great - complexity, multiplicity, layering of meaning, etc. The Hollein I posted to the last thread would be an example of that (to me), or for that matter this Ricardo Bofill project which I don't think I posted:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3205/2782368241_b5f7c28885.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3224/2783232228_a3d7163df8.jpg

The language is cloying, but the spaces are fantastic!

x-post, that is

Wait, you can't stand it/are repelled by it, but still find it awesomely beautiful?

― Girlfriend, you've been scooped like ice cream (mehlt), Friday, January 2, 2009 9:27 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

No, I find it awesomely ugly, I was asking if anyone else found it awesome beautiful.

Postmodernism breaks my heart, it's architecture's loss of innocence. Before that there had always been a utopian bent to the profession - even if the buildings were failures there was at least a continual hope and search for a better way to do things and a desire to lift society. Postmodernism purposefully stepped away from that in the face of modernism's defeat and didn't aspire to anything greater than a series of classical reference punchlines without the dignity of proportion. The buildings were never going to be awesomely beautiful because they weren't even trying to be, which is sad. I love beaux arts neoclassicism because it was at least made with a real BELIEF in classicism, I don't think postmodernists believed in anything.

Hrm, well, I think that varies a bit...one thread of postmodernism was certainly the "Collage City"/Jane Jacobs line (that eventually leads to new urbanism) where there's an active project of trying to save the city, move away from the monumental and embrace the fabric - that seems like a project with social ambition to me. Or in the Bofill posted above, maybe those images don't quite get it across but there was a clear desire to give "palaces to the people," quoting history specifically to create something that the residents would recognize as grand and honorific.

I used to think that the only thing unifying about postmodernist thought (or the only thing postmodernists "believe in") is a rejection of enlightenment ideals, but that's obviously glossing over a lot. For me, it is easy to view Modernism as truly beautiful as applied to one building, but equally as easy to view it as one-note as an archtectural movement, and even potentially oppressive. One manifestation of post-modernism's "social concern" (lol) would be multivalence, and the presentation of a variety (I was going to say "of aesthetic sensibilities", but I think "variety" is enough).

Yes - and then you have even more severe examples like Lucien Kroll (I think it's Kroll) where the architect's office has an open door, serving soda to the people who are going to live in the building and inviting them to make design decisions. Or Leon Krier, who believed that industrial building practice was so dehumanizing that it was better not to build, so as to avoid participating in the alienation of the worker. Postmodernism was a big umbrella, for a while there - I mean if you read an early edition of Jencks's Language of Post-Modern Architecture it really seems exciting. By the fifth or sixth edition all the photos look like the late Graves and the jig is up.

Oh, and I finally posted my pics of WORKac's Public Farm 1. On the previous thread, I wrote:

"re: P.F.1 - Yeah, it was great - particularly in light of the kind of stuff that typically wins. They seem to feel that the committee or jury or whoever realized they were getting really tired of atmospheric projects. "We could have won last year, but not ten years ago." It was refreshing to me as a living example of Dutch-ness here on our shores (they both worked at OMA) by architects young enough that you could imagine "hey, that could be me!" So that's always going to be encouraging. But I also loved how much it was filled in with fun little gimmicks and gizmos - the periscope, the audio and video of working farms, the chicken coop...it was cool."

Extended, archi-nerd ramblings here.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3088/3168274579_7f3be8bd3d.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3261/3168038169_3319f1dd4e.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1144/3167947285_c3d182ea3f.jpg

Jencks's Language of Post-Modern Architecture

This is what got me into architecture in the first place!

Haha! Just read it last year after it seemed to keep coming up. Good stuff, I read a later-ish edition that was starting to really drag by the end though. Needed a fresh edit I think, got repetitious, but as a showcase of just neat stuff and ideas the first half is essential. The "Death of Modern Architecture" chapter is classic.

I still remember where I was when I read that.

...don't leave us hanging!

Well, it's not exciting in re: this thread, but I was in Nashville sitting on a couch at Douglas Corners waiting to go play a show. It's just a vivid memory because I enjoyed the reading so much.

Know just what you mean - although in these grad school years there's pretty much one of three places I'm ever reading anything.

i got the other thread locked, i hope no one objects to this? i think it's just confusing having 2 threads being revived and it's more of a rolling discussion thread at this point so it makes sense. if you do i'm sure we can get it reopened.

last post on the previous thread was hyggeligt helpfully linking us to SpaceInvading

http://www.spaceinvading.com/

thanks for that, it's actually a great link and saves quite a bit of trawling around various different blogs although it still has links to those blogs for more description, which is cool.

Sou Fujimoto Architects' Wooden House. love it or hate it, you've never seen anything like it.

http://www.archdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/293969968_13.jpg

http://www.archdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/636003070_02.jpg

http://www.archdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/1789314738_01.jpg

http://www.archdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/1483004884_detailed-section.jpg

!!!

I think anybody who ever had blocks as a kid has seen something like it.

ha, i was just about to add a similar caveat.

BLOOMFRAME®
The BLOOMFRAME® breaks out of the 2-dimensional facade to add to the usable space in this innovative design by Hofman Dujardin Architects.

prototype that is expected to go into actual production early this year:

http://www.architecture-page.com/assets/images/content/prd_hofm_bloo/2.jpg
http://www.architecture-page.com/assets/images/content/prd_hofm_bloo/3.jpg
http://www.architecture-page.com/assets/images/content/prd_hofm_bloo/1.jpg

Bloomframe® is an innovative window frame that can be transformed into a balcony allowing an increase in usable space with minimal intervention.

Bloomframe® offers the user a flexible living environment. By opening the window frame, it is possible to walk out through the facade and to enjoy a comfortable balcony. The dynamic balcony enables adding outdoor space to compact apartments in urban high-rise areas.

The Bloomframe® balcony can be operated automatically with a simple push of the button. The system includes provisions to guarantee collapse safety during opening and closing.

The drive consists of an rpm-controlled electric motor that operates the balcony at two points via an auto-braking reduction (drop safety). The movement is transferred by tie rods from these linear guides.

The fully open position is limited mechanically, which guarantees optimum safety of the converted balcony. The application of a combined powered/mechanical movement makes the system user-friendly and easy to open and close for everyone.

I don't think I really understand the Bloomframe? It creates a not very attractive half-window when closed and doesn't seem to offer any advantages over a regular building other than potentially animating the building facade more - and you have to keep your patio furniture inside when you're not using it. I think I'd like it more with a glass bottom panel since it'll be up 80% of the time.

SpaceInvading is one of my favorite things about 2009

I'm glad so many designers are doing these weird 3D circulation intensive tiny houses/follies, but I'd sure like to see some upholstery in them or at least first aid kits for the inevitable bloody heads.

bloomframe would be cooler if the patio furniture folded out with it, like a pop-up book.

I'd like that! Or if the patio furniture was permanently secured to it so it stuck out from the inside wall of your house when closed.

and if it wasn't the color of an HVAC component.

haha yeah it looks like a big access panel.

well, i love it. obviously it doesn't have to be khaki/grey, it can be any colour, i would imagine. the bottom half could possibly be glass but people have vertigo. white steel is fine by me. also you just sit on a chair that you have in your lounge, or whatever. i wouldn't imagine you would have specific furniture for it unless it was some cheap folding deck chair you could keep in a cupboard?

haterz

I'm getting one

thanks - we ended up using 5 or 6 different kinds of wood in a variety of oiled/stained/painted finishes to keep it interesting

i ate there when i was in DC! on the lower level. delicious ramen, really cool space, and i loved the exterior metal cutouts

Wow, great work, I DIED! Keep 'em coming I say!

re: Williams and Tsien, I think it's a fair point, that they may have been irresponsible as architects. One of my professors summarized it yesterday as, it was a modest institution and they did not provide them with a modest building. And I think that's a criticism well-taken, but... that institution no longer occupies the building, and I feel like MOMA's decision to demolish or not demolish it could be discussed on its own terms. To me it first of all reads as a huge missed opportunity (they could do really cool stuff with it - or even make it the centerpiece of their ensemble, since they actually don't have an iconic facade, not really).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urnes_Stave_Church

was in the Viking Art programme on tv yesterday.

there are bigger examples of stave churches but i like the concise blackness of the one in Urnes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stave_church

Wow, yes please.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantoft_stave_church

was one of the churches allegedly burnt down by black metallers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aske_%28album%29

I love looking at and thinking about those.

Hadid's office really doubling down in the asshole stakes: http://www.dezeen.com/2014/03/18/architecture-not-art-patrik-schumacher-venice-architecturebiennale-rant/

saw him once on a panel his every utterance was either cipherful or inane

(i love that that page has "Latest Staircases" rather than, say, sideboob or cellulite.)

((oh, spoke too soon))

major fire at Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art :(

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/breaking-news-fire-crews-battle-3594139

Ughhhhhh. That is really depressing. Majority of the building (including archives) is apparently okay - but the library,the one absolute must-see that I've been saving for some future trip to Scotland, is completely destroyed.

people familiar with NYC, this may be a dumb question, but what is the building with all of the angled planes in the background of this shot? various google searches have turned up nothing, i keep being led back to the Hearst Tower

https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/a-leftover-relic-of-1970s-public-art-on-mercer-street/

Ah, thank you!

http://www.dezeen.com/2015/05/03/oma-fondazione-prada-art-centre-gold-leaf-cladding-wes-anderson-cafe-milan/

To add emphasis to this older structure, OMA carefully clad the building's entire exterior in 24-karat gold leaf. Only the glass of the windows was left exposed.

"It was actually a last minute inspiration, to find a way to give value to a seemingly mundane and simple element," said Koolhaas. "But we discovered that gold is actually a cheap cladding material compared to traditional claddings like marble and even paint."

c'mon man

lolll

http://www.dezeen.com/2015/08/04/nord-house-apollo-architects-loft-room-mitaka-tokyo-japan/

DEATH TRAP

omg lol

In the self-promotion department: this guide to modern and contemporary architecture in China, into which i sunk an inadvertently and inordinately large amount of time over a couple years, is now available for pre-order. I got my author copies today and while of course there are a few things I'd die to go back and change, and of course it's inevitably out of date already given how fast things get built in China.... I do feel pretty good about it! Like, it for sure is the book I'd recommend to anybody going to China who wanted to look at buildings.

So uh yeah... tell your friends or something!

Congrats! Format looks great and very useful, and it's nice to see an informed architectural guide that's style agnostic.

Thank you! Trying to be, anyway. Our own preferences definitely shaped things, in that ineffable way where you look at something and just go "this is minor and uninteresting and someone who took time out of their vacation to see it would be pissed." But in general if other people care about it, it seemed reasonable to keep it in. Most of the existing English-language books on recent architecture in China are of the coffee-table book variety, with a handful of projects selected by building type (or a handful of architects with 2-3 projects each), and most came out kinda around the Olympics and are inevitably a bit stuck in that time. So our first goal was just to make something that would work as a travel guide while massively ramping up the inclusions, and hopefully simulate what we imagine as the heady, informative atmosphere of walking around with us on one of our school trips.

The fun/challenging thing was finding ways to squeeze in some comment about every last building. The map pages have lots of one-line descriptions of things that didn't become illustrated entries, so that was a great discipline for me as a writer, trying to convey what the idea of something was (and, vaguely, whose alleys it might be up) in a very very limited number of words. We were also editing each other, which was sometimes galling, but usually a "ahhh, fuck, they're right, that is dumb/confusing/pretentious."

sweet i may just order a copy, going to china in march

That's awesome! (And thanks, if you do!) Where will you be going?

Also just realized that here in this very thread, you can find my first reactions to Amateur Architecture (in Feb 2009), re: one of the buildings you now see in the preview pages of the guide! Crazy. Learning about architecture never stops being a "wait, there was a point in my life where i didn't know about (now foundational concept/person/fact X)" experience for me. Probably this is the way it is for people in whatever field, as you get deeper and deeper in.

Also: in Jan. 2012, the first intimations of dreams of a China book project, though sadly the titles discussed there did not make it - darn!

i work for an airline so i get free standby and prob won't know until the last second. we fly to shanghai beijing and hong kong direct.

Dig! Well, you will not be surprised to learn we do cover all three of those, and all three are just bursting with architecture. :)

Good News for Modern ManArchitecture (LACMA acquires Lautner house).

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/lacma-big-lebowski-house-john-lautner-428741

Oh, awesome!

good bit in LA Plays Itself where he talks about that one, iirc says it's a house that hollywood loves to hate (houses villains) but that they totally misunderstand the spirit of the building

woah.

Zaha Hadid (1950-2016)

http://www.dezeen.com/2016/05/03/vlooyberg-tower-close-to-bone-cantilevered-weathering-steel-staircase-observation-belgium/

(i do wonder why they do this sometimes)

simpsons fans, clearly

I don't think anyone's going to observe much out of those windows...

Finally made it inside the Nakagin Capsule Tower, built in 1972 and a rare remaining symbol of Japanese Metabolism. Tours by @nakagincapsule are ¥3,000 with proceeds towards building restoration. pic.twitter.com/VvSDFIz2Yo

— Dan Castellano (@ninja_padrino) March 4, 2018

:o

ha, we just taught that one this past week! would love to get inside. there used to be shockingly cheap airbnbs. didn't even bother trying when we were in town with students - it's just not set up at all for any kind of group tour, obv.

It seems kind of claustrophobic even in an area known for small apartments, but that might just be the framing from photos I've seen

I haven't decided if I'm into the design, but I need to get some photos of the Renzo Piano building under construction in my area.

the capsules are super super small. a bed, a desk, a corner shower and toilet, and shelves for your reel-to-reel tape player. no kitchen. they're basically monk's cells. the premise was that you'd swap out capsules over time, embracing obsolescence and change and all that jazz. unfortunately they didn't reach the scale of production needed for this to be economical, and anyway it's hard to imagine people really wanting their homes to become yet another type of product they're obliged to replace as it wears out or becomes outmoded. (some of the other metabolists were explicitly marxist in their outlook - presumably in their schemes the capsules would be made and provided by the state, not by a would-be capsule zaibatsu.)

they make more sense as teeny hotel rooms for business travelers, but then, holiday inn (and numerous japanese-only operations) already solved that one. one of my favorite formal precedents but really fraught with problems conceptually.

I have that Koolhaas/Obrist book on Metabolism but I need to go back and finish it. It's ok, in a Koolhaas/Obrist book way. There are probably much better works on the subject!

5 Women Accuse the Architect Richard Meier of Sexual Harassment

TW: workplace sexual harassment and assault, photo of the accused, descriptions.

once again: apparently everyone knew, and nobody did anything. the headline really undersells the accusations.

probably going to tour this recent renzo piano work at some point. a few friends did work on the project

https://www.designboom.com/architecture/renzo-piano-krause-gateway-center-des-moines-iowa-01-11-2019/

https://www.designboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/renzo-piano-krause-gateway-center-des-moines-iowa-designboom-1800.jpg

I felt extremely dumb when the pivoted top story was explained to me: the building sits at the area where the street grid goes from river-parallel to north-south jeffersonian grid style. the top of the building reflects the latter

When you're a modern forest witch pic.twitter.com/hTbYUUaAnL

— Vananarama (@fullnihilism) September 16, 2021

the Swiss pavilion at expo 70

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/79/44/31/794431e9f7ea074304571f0dcd91baa7.jpg

On Le Corbs;

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jun/25/100-years-of-le-corbusier-what-does-he-mean-to-todays-architects

Good stuff in there, thanks!