10(+) MORE architects i have been thinking about

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

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.