10(+) MORE architects i have been thinking about

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/509

upcoming Lebbeus Woods exhibit at SF MOMA

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/oscar-niemeyer-brazilian-architect-died-17890045

Rest in peace, Oscar Niemeyer - 1907-2012. The last heroic Modern.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/arts/design/ada-louise-huxtable-architecture-critic-dies-at-91.html

damn, Niemeyer and now Ada Louise Huxtable, all the greats I thought would live forever are going. When all is said and done I don't know if there will be any 20th century architects seen to have changed architecture more than Huxtable's writing.

[http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/509

upcoming Lebbeus Woods exhibit at SF MO MA

We are almost finished with this show, it is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G

opens saturday
please don't touch, the models are disturbingly fragile (every one arrived broken)

how can you even tell if a Lebbeus Woods model is broken

It made for a very difficult conservation task.

Planning on seeing this when I'm in SF on vacation in March (please do not break them before then)

Guys, this Woods thing at SF MOMA is so awesome

lebbeus?

Of course!

http://www.archdaily.com/346374/can-we-please-stop-drawing-trees-on-top-of-skyscrapers/

TRUTH

Hahaha, totally. Also I would live in terror of branches, or whole trees, ripped loose and careening down 50 stories to the street. Would make a good moment in a disaster, superhero, or shit Transformer movie, but otherwise, yikes.

Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas in the 1970s

http://25.media.tumblr.com/a4f39c2e50dad17a667faa6a63776b38/tumblr_mlf9qcFGoD1qdi0ydo1_500.jpg

DEMONS

haha yeah, love young Rem

http://www.tomorrowstarted.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Architects-rem-koolhaas-young-480x651.jpg

late 60s?

http://www.dorothyalexander.com/assets/architects/Koolhaas%20Harrison/Harrison%20Koolhaas500px.jpg

with dear old Wallace Harrison, 1977

http://archpaper.com/uploads/arch_institute_07.jpg

Ken Frampton & Peter Eisenman, 1970

http://sma.sciarc.edu/wp-content/uploads/video_pimages/1528_tschumi_bernard-1978_2of2.jpg

Bernard Tschumi, 1978

http://www.marvin.com/images/architectchallenge/2013/showdown/0873/02_Vermont-Mountain-House-2_412x273.jpg

My best friend’s firm is competing in the following contest.

I think about her work a lot. If you like it, you should vote for M4rcu5 Gl3y5t33n Architects.

My ongoing obsession with Roosevelt Island has put Josep Lluís Sert back on my radar:

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5530/9217686723_9148b604b6_z.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7342/9226352450_5e005300f2_z.jpg

Lots more pics linked from my sprawling Roosevelt Island Flickr project starting here but also check out his buildings at Harvard - best kind of Brutalism perhaps. Real presence in these, good sense of relief and texture.

Cool photos. I have a vague obsession with Roosevelt Island too - probably from watching Nighthawks as a kid. It's the only place in the states I've been that feels Soviet - especially in winter.

Thanks! Yeah, it's so unusual as a world in the States, even most other big urban renewal schemes of that period don't have that kind of sequence of spaces. Apparently it also was a shooting location for the Bruce Willis/Tracy Morgan picture Cop Out but I haven't seen that so I have no idea what exactly it looks like. The tramway seems to figure incidentally in a lot of movies (notably Spider-Man) but I think the only thing really "set" on the island is Dark Water which I've heard good things about...?

check out his buildings at Harvard - best kind of Brutalism perhaps. Real presence in these, good sense of relief and texture.

Can totally get behind this - love the Holyoke Center and Peabody Terrace (skip-stops, neighborhood hatred, and all). It was a great experience to interact with these places long before, during, and after a design education - what seemed like some uneasy but mysteriously lively spaces came to seem like little miracles of civility wrought out of HVD hegemony.

I think the only thing really "set" on the island is Dark Water which I've heard good things about...?

I haven't seen the original version to compare, but i liked it. Check it out, especially with the R.I. connection.

Thanks! Yeah, it's so unusual as a world in the States, even most other big urban renewal schemes of that period don't have that kind of sequence of spaces.

It has much more of a European feel to it. I think the (lack of) topography just forces the design to be far more mindful of space (horizontal and vertical). Most big urban projects of that era had the advantage of sprawl - and a "blight" rubber stamp to make what space you needed.

By the way, I'm reading this:

http://www.bloomberg.com/image/iWrpVwiTNT0I.jpg

and it's pretty great. Recommended if you're at all interested in this type of thing. Some background...

How RAND Program, Fire Chief, New York Elites Burned Down Bronx

Back in the 1970s, celebrities of all stripes, from President Jimmy Carter to Mother Teresa, would visit the South Bronx to shake their heads over how the greatest city in the U.S., or a significant part of it, all of a sudden looked like Berlin in 1945.

Fires and demolition took such a toll, as Joe Flood recounts in his book “The Fires,” that the police station once known as Fort Apache was dubbed “Little House on the Prairie.” It was as if some unseen lumberjack had clear-cut entire neighborhoods.

“The Fires” is the latest book to explain how New York City got that way. Ken Auletta’s “The Streets Were Paved With Gold” (1979) is another one. The grand-daddy of them all is Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” (1974).

The focus of Flood’s book is how fire chief John O’Hagan used computer technology to determine which firehouses to close during the administrations of John V. Lindsay and Abraham Beame. Curiously enough, they were almost all in poor neighborhoods.

This is promising new ground -- I’m not sure I ever read about the RAND Corp.’s foray into urban planning before. Yet it is a small story, almost a footnote, compared with Flood’s main theme, which is the destruction of a city by its elites, dating as far back as the days of police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt and muckraking journalist Jacob Riis.

That sounds good!

Roosevelt Island is something of a special case from the get-go though - the planners and the policy-makers (not to say the financiers) were committed to doing Something Different from most urban renewal. The thinking was that the island's desirable location and lack of an existing population to piss off made it possible to do something - close proximity of lower- and middle-income housing - that would not have been possible elsewhere. And Johnson & Burgee's master plan wasn't forced into the 'main street' concept - it was something they wanted to do as a corrective to mainstream modern planning. (Johnson would later call it his "Jane Jacobs phase"). There was definitely space to do more of a towers-in-a-perk thing; Victor Gruen actually proposed an alarming wall-of-slabs a few years earlier.

Some good background in terms of design/urbanism is online here: http://www.rioc.com/devhist/New-York-1960s-Chap-8-1977.pdf

And if you have ProQuest access or the equivalent, look for Yonah Freemark's "Roosevelt Island: Exception to a City in Crisis," in the Journal of Urban History - great background on the public policy issues, the evolving financial situation, Lindsay vs. Rockefeller vs. Nixon vs. George Romney etc. Good stuff.

Thanks for the leads.

BTW, the Pruitt-Igoe Myth is streaming on Netflix. If you're at all interested in this stuff, it's an amazing documentary.

Agreed, that is well worth a watch. I really appreciate how non-architectural it is - really avoids blaming the buildings for what happened and focuses on the money, the structure of the program, etc.

V. excited to be teaching a studio on P-I this year - that film will definitely be a key source.

The essay it takes its title from is also super good, I'm sure you know about that one though.

Can anyone here recommend some history of architecture grad programs in the US? I have a friend, a young Chilean architect, who is interested. She's mostly into modern and contemporary stuff, and also digs urban studies. If she had her way, it would be either in the northeast, California, or Chicago.

Sorry if this isn't exactly on topic, but I could think of no better place to ask.

Is your friend looking for a masters or a PhD? There are a lot of the latter, fewer of the former. Every so often I wonder if I should have looked into one of the two-year (ish) masters of criticism/history/theory/curation (they tend to be kind of catch-all programs), however you'd need to shop around carefully with those. Most of them are not funded in anything like the way PhD programs tend to be, and you have to be ready to aggressively mobilize the degree into some kind of funky hybrid career, although if you also had a convincing career as a designer then that might be enough to get a teaching position. Many of them really are pitched as pre-PhD programs. On the one hand I think that would have really helped me now as I'm working on my PhD - good way to get up to speed on a lot of the key names, debates, intellectual frameworks etc., so that your head's not spinning and you can get down to business. Also it would help you come in the door with a project already fleshed out. On the other hand, it's two more years of school. Anyway, if she was interested in something like that, I don't know where all of them are, but the sensible thing would be to look for schools that offer the PhD since that suggests they'd have the back bench of faculty to support the masters.

If she's thinking PhD, there are plenty of options and it depends on the intellectual climate she's interested in, which means scouring the faculty listings and the recent dissertations to feel out the milieu. I've settled into my program well (C0lumb14) but there was a little bit of whiplash at first and if I'd had infinite time in the year before applying I would have liked to at least skim a few articles by all the PhD committee members at all the schools on my shortlist just to really understand what the vibes were there. But realistically that's very hard to do.

Thanks Doctor, that's actually quite helpful. She was leaning more towards the masters, but may end up having to look at PhD's, due to the scarcity of the former. She's got an uphill road it looks like, esp. because she's looking to get a scholarship, and she's a foreign student.

FWIW I would say offhand that my program has a substantial foreign contingent and that all students have the same base level of funding, plus what people pick up through teaching gigs additional to what's required in the first few years. I can't speak to other schools but generally PhD programs have some kind of base funding package based on teaching or other assistantship work.

The real thing to think about is exactly what kind of career she's imagining herself having, or put in less ugly terms, why she thinks she needs the degree. I don't say that to discourage anyone because I think everybody should have graduate degrees in architecture! This might just be a hangover from the "what am i getting myself into" grad school thread and various associated bummed-out education/career prospects/debt threads.

The real thing to think about is exactly what kind of career she's imagining herself having, or put in less ugly terms, why she thinks she needs the degree.

Good question, DC. She wants to be a professor!

worst project of the year nominee

http://knstrct.com/2013/08/22/intoxicating-swagger-torontos-king-blue-condominiums/

Have any ilxors been to or are planning to go to Palm Springs Modernism Week? I want to, one of these days.

I haven't been but a friend is going for a 3rd time in a row, loves it

is your friend a cool person who would like a modernist friend

I'm strongly considering heading to modernism week myself, trying to decide whether I'd rather do that or explore Palm Springs when it's a little calmer.

all the DS+R / Williams & Tsien drama is HILARIOUS btw

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/nyregion/building-faces-wrecking-ball-so-does-couples-friendship.html

I think the main reason to go during that week is that there are tours of the inside of some homes that are normally not open to the public?

re: Folk Art, the whole thing is really awful. Really sad to see DS+R just happily parroting the clients' line that the Folk Art Museum's interior was so 'quirky' that it could not be adapted into anything, no way no how... and people who should know better acquiescing to the desperate claim that if you could just save the facade, you'd be saving the building. I mean, that is just not an architect talking. Annoyed that this will also now become the stock narrative around the building, which had a fabulous interior section, a real jewelbox of steppy levels. Yeah, it would have been tricky to make it a 'wing' of MOMA, but there's no reason it should have been written off as impossible.

Between Folk Art, MoMA, and the Barnes it just shows that both firms care a lot more about their own commissions more than any kind of broader artistic or cultural good. Which is fine, but at that point just admit there's no real line between firms getting big artistic commissions and the RTKLs of the world.

Also I think Folk Art was a fascinating space that showed Williams and Tsien didn't give a fuck about their client.

Hrmm. I thought it served the objects very well, but do you mean just in terms of running up a huge bill? I dunno. Would love to be able to visit it one last time and re-judge, I only got to see it once.

I think it served the objects well but was really inefficient in the way galleries and circulation worked, which limited how the collection was shown. Sure the site was touch but part of the architect's responsibility is to say "you're going to go broke building something that won't work very well as a museum."

The facade is beautiful but could have been a part of any project - I don't think it served the museum well (and neither do Williams & Tsien, from later interviews!) and it says something about the museum that 90% of the photos online are of the facade and not the collection, galleries, or interior.

completed project! finally got good photos of a building/restaurant I finished last year:

http://oi44.tinypic.com/24ymtfb.jpg

http://oi40.tinypic.com/33pfvqh.jpg

http://oi42.tinypic.com/34ysisn.jpg

http://oi41.tinypic.com/30rtjlz.jpg

are the cutout designs on the front advertising free wifi?

kidding, really like it. the lighting (the actual fixtures, that is) looks cool

all the lights over the bar are 1970s dutch and german ceramic shades, having an electrician who can rewire anything is invaluable

oh that looks lovely, i died. so much wood can be overload but the interiors look terrific.

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