bldgs

Sunday, October 25, 2009

The Architect in Fiction: Battle for the Ultimate TV Architect.

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Ted Mosby Vs. Mike Brady Vs. Marshall Darling

Let's look, first, as to why they’re similar:

They are all men and TV Dads who are all the ultimate authority when you’ve accidentally stolen something, or have hit your sister with a football, breaking her nose and ruining her chances for romance at the dance (or did it?). While they all proudly state they are architects, we rarely see them working. A little odd, since architects LOVE to work and rarely do anything else. When we do see them working, the work is beautifully crafted or impeccably drawn and pretty much finished. In my limited experience, that is pretty much impossible on a first go.

Ok so that is how they are similar. How are the Different?

Contestant Number One: Ted Mosby How I Met Your Mother

How do you make holidays special?

· I watch my friends slap each other

What do you look for in a woman?

· I always ask is she the kind of woman who I could marry and discuss constantly but never meet until my show is no longer profitable?

Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?

· Oh My God I want to be married.

Ted Mosby is a funny dude, and out of all three of these men, most blatantly carries on the quirks common amongst architects. Ted is equal parts neurotic, egomaniacal, earnest and sneaky. He will a become a Mike Brady but he is still in the early stages, making mistakes and finding his Carol. Ted is more ready to geek-out then his rivals, I think my favorite moment being when he goes on and on about the 5 architects he would like to have dinner with, I realized I had done that myself, many a time.

Contestant Number Two: Mike Brady The Brady Bunch

You need to cancel your weekend plans because of rain, what do you do instead?

· Might I recommend a house of cards to settle a family dispute?

What color best describes your personality and why?

· Either Burnt-Sienna or a Chocolate Brown. Neutral, safe and probably smells like meat-loaf.

Your work let's you out early, what do you do with this free time?

· Potato Sack Race, Bitches.

Mike Brady, The most stereotypical TV Dad available just happens to be an Architect. He does that thing where he pauses before speaking, as if what he is about to say is the smartest thing you have ever heard, even if it doesn’t make any sense. Throwing Latin around all willy-nilly and yet we still believe him. Unlike the other two, Mr. Brady is a vague architect, never really showing any interest in his work, which is understandable, because, well, he has 6 kids.

Contestant Number Three: Marshall Darling Clarissa Explains It All

Your house is on fire, what do you grab as you run out?

· Besides my children? My awards.

If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it?

· I would design more buildings that look like things.

What do you wish you could change, if you could change one thing?

· I wish my Mies-esque mentor would remember my name.

Marshall Darling is a mix of Mike and Ted. He has the vague wisdom of a Brady, but the endearing quirks of a Mosby. Unlike the other two, we get a clear window into the kind of Architecture Mr. Darling works on. He designs buildings that look like things, making him an inexplicable post-modernist. Unlike Mike Brady, Darling embarrasses his children with his excitement rather than his general lameness.

So who wins the TV Architect-off?

Personally, I think Ted Mosby wins this one, even though not technically a “TV Architect Dad”, (He is a father in the show, but we never see him actually interacting with his children, as they are in the future after the story-line is concluded.) He is the best portrayed TV Architect.

So why Ted?

Because he is the narrator and protagonist, we get the most feel for him out of the three so unlike Darling and Brady, Ted is not a satellite character who is in constant but distant control. Ted tells you he is facing hardships with a rival, or that he had to turn to academics when his attempted one-man firm failed. That insecurity, timed with the Older Mosby’s witty interjections, work to create a fuller kind of depiction of an architect. Ted Mosby proves that architects aren’t born old or wise, but many become that way just because they keep finding new ways of messing up their lives and live to embarrass themselves further.

But that’s just my opinion: you be the judge, do you pick:

Immature yet Sincere, Ted Mosby
Boring yet Wise, Mike Brady
Geeky yet Handy, Marshall Darling

Friday, October 9, 2009

Escapism

So here is what I've decided to do: every so often I decide to get away, while sitting on my couch. So I design imaginary hide-outs. I'll post them all when I get to 50, 50 is a good number of hide-outs to have. Keep watch.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Magical History Tour

I forgot to put this up last summer... enjoy!

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Busta Guggenheim-en

Too graphic?

Anyway, today was my first venture into the facility known as the Guggenheim New York. 'twas most appropriate as a first visit as the primary exhibition contained the life's work of a certain Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright. (More on him in a subsequent post.)

I will preface my observations by saying that I had first read about the exhibition in, perhaps it was June's, Architectural Record. In the issue were two articles, one intended to alert readers of the summer-long exhibition and one intended to critique it. The critique was pretty... harsh? To paraphrase, "the displays suck, the tables suck, the lighting sucks, even the name of the exhibition sucks. You can't ask a museum curator to understand architecture." Perhaps I dramatize. Additionally there was an article in a recent Metropolis magazine highlighting the exhibition, though the contents of the article were far less pointed.

In mine own observations, off the bat the "bowl" portion of the museum seemed small. I reckon in the glossies, there is always a tendency to convey a much larger space than as in actuality (I felt a similar volumetric letdown at the Jubilee Church by Meier). It was a little chaotic getting started - maybe I was just exhausted from my foot trek around NYC, or I was overwhelmed by the masses of people. The elevator was an implausible first step (huge ass line), and the stairs were fragmented - a couple flights here, a couple flights there. I imagine it would be a far more enchanting experience if it weren't for the humidity and swarms of tourists. Damn people, ruining architectural space.

Descending the ramp, I found the irregular slope to be somewhat uncomfortable. Maybe that's due to my positional sensitivity and proneness to vertigo. Like how I offer jabs and follow up with excuses? As the museum is round, it does seem impractical. How many paintings or artworks do you create on a curved medium? The way they rigged the drawings against the rounded outer wall had a rather adverse effect. It made an already darkened (from age) drawing difficult to read. I guess you can't shine light directly onto 90-year-old masterworks. Also the tables in the center of the floor were odd, though I'm not sure how else one would display items in that space. I think the various models were displayed quite nicely, however. That is, the ones that were head-height. Placing a fine-crafted model at waist height is somewhat of a... waste. Pun intended.

In conclusion, the building would be a much more comfortable experience without all the people congesting it. That's somewhat of a crummy sentiment when it comes to a public building. Then again, that's just me, and heaven knows I my designs have flaws.

As for the work contained within this great white beast, I found them most satisfying. I had hoped to see more residential projects, as far as I remember only Taliesin was the only one presented. Most of his presented works were "unbuilt." Though it was definitely righteous to check those out. It is possible I missed a side room that contained more of the smaller scale projects, but somehow I doubt it. I will also note that at several drawings I couldn't help but think, "man, if I showed up to a crit with this I'd get torn up." Not to say his drawings weren't beautiful, he tended to turn each one into a composition. But some of them, I could see a juror saying, "if that's how you're going to draw cars, you should just leave them out of it." or "are those figures to scale? They look disproportionate." Or "your inconsistent hatching is distracting." Again, dramatization.

Perhaps further comments will surface in the future, for now I am spent. 'twas a long hot day and I have exhaustion. I will conclude that I am super glad I finally got to the Guggenheim and that it was for this exhibition. I wonder if it is always as crowded as it was (we waited in line about 15 minutes for tickets).

Monday, August 10, 2009

And Then There Were Three

We have all at least heard of the New York Five, a group of provocative architects who were the standard-bearers of neo-modernism, each one of them a unique individual, each one of them obedient to a common dogma. Personally, I like to think of them as the characters of a Saturday morning cartoon show or a boy-band. Just think. It totally works:

The Quiet One

The Tough One

The Funny One

The Cute One

The Nerdy One

I’ll let you guess which one I think is which. Of course, Arthur Drexler is Simon Cowell.

But on a more serious note, this month we lost Charles Gwathmey at 71 to esophageal cancer and while he may not have been the most famous of the Five, he was part of a movement that defined a lot about what architecture is today, especially in the United States. Gwathmey was born in 1938 in Charlotte, North Carolina. He did his undergraduate degree at Penn and got his masters from Yale. His first major work was the house he designed for his parents in the mid 1960’s:

This work, unlike so many early modernist works of the 1920s and 30s, is not additive, but subtractive. When looking at any Le Corbusier work you’ll see his theories of the basic Roman forms connecting to create a whole, but here in the Gwathmey House you’ll see that the building was already a whole, to which the cuts have been made and portions removed so that we may live in the nook. Like a bird living in a tree or marble as it is chipped away to become a sculpture. Where modernism stopped there the Five began.

Probably the most famous of all his works was the addition to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and opened in 1959 (Wright had died six months before the official grand opening). In the early 1990’s Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects LLC was commissioned to make an addition to the iconic building and the controversy was rampant. There were some who would have preferred an entirely new building built to house the over-flowing connection somewhere else rather than an addition to the pre-existing. When Gwathmey and Siegel’s scheme was revealed the collective snickering response was:

“They’ve made the Guggenheim into a toilet”

(This was especially true for me, because I was seven at the time and anything that has to do with a toilet was, is, and will forever be, hysterical.)

However! If we look past the one-liner, we can see that by creating an addition specifically different in form, texture, philosophy and soul, Gwathmey wanted to create a balance for the Guggenheim. Gwathmey put up something so radically unlike the original that no one would ever confuse them. By creating a building that is a humble backdrop (though he would never agree that the addition is either humble or a backdrop), Gwathmey may have saved Frank Lloyd Wright’s magnum opus the shame of having a pretentious copy built next to it. Can’t you just see it? Just lying there, embarrassing everyone who would have had to walk by. Love it or hate it you have to admit Gwathmey was wise not to try and imitate or intimidate a master.

As for his affiliation with the New York five, they went the way all boy-bands go. One of them flirts with an equally volatile pop-singer who drives a wedge in the group (I’m looking at YOU Michael Graves/Postmodernism) and eventually they all break off and start solo-careers. Some of them can escape the Teen Scene (Architectural Record), Tiger Beat (Harvard Design Magazine) and, god help you, BOP (Architectural Digest) posters but most can never shake what they used to be. But Gwathmey didn’t want to, like Richard Meier, he truly believed that modernism holds the answers to Architecture. This is not to say his style didn’t evolve and mature, but he never lost what the New York Five was really about.

Also, in case you were wondering:

John Hejduk

Richard Meier
Peter Eisenmann

Michael Graves

Charles Gwathmey

In that order specifically.

R.I.P. Charlie you'll be missed.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

2009 Design Awards

So here are the winners of the 2009 Design Awards from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum :

TADA!

#1: SHoP Architects -

On their website SHoP architects have a flash intro on their basic beliefs.

"Efficiency and great design are not mutually exclusive"
"Push Design, embrace responsibility"

These two statements are clearly a reference to sustainable design. I have to complement them on the fact that they could touch on sustainability without having to use a word that is getting simultaneously tired and taboo: Green. Throughout my time in architecture school one of the driving points was to create a building that was as "green" as possible, that is, environmentally friendly. This often meant that the grand gestures were either:

a. diminished
b. bullshit.

This lead me to believe that the only truly environmental building is this:

I think SHoP design follows a great change in the discussion about sustainability: through these two dogmatic statements they explain that environmentalism is not the goal of architecture, it is a method in which architecture will flourish. I believe this method that will become standard. Just like steel 100 years ago.

they also had another one:

"Building Buildings is better than talking about buildings"

ooooh SHoP you're so edgy. You know, I like this.....I especially liked it when Frank Furness said it in 1880.

nice try.

SHoP Architecture Projects:

this one is almost a little too much Shigeru Ban. But I buy it.

#2: Architecture Research Office

"ARO communicates ideas clearly in a consistent language. It frames city life as well as natural beauty. Ideas about site, program, and daily activity are conveyed through its use. Compelling to look at, appealing to touch, this architecture is as sensuous as it is intellectually rigorous."

How retro. Architecture that is concerned with texture and materiality more than their statement about texture and materiality. The other thing I find interesting about this particular firm is that they're not afraid to have an individual style. Sometimes it's nice to look at a building and know whose behind it.

#3 Michael Maltzan

"Michael Maltzan... creates progressive, transfomative experiences throughout the concentrated exploration of movement and perception, charting new trajectories for architecture, urbanism and the public realm"

Transformative? I'm sorry but if spell check is confused by your word choice: I start getting suspicious.

So I began to research: going strictly textbook, the word "Transformative" comes from Transformative Learning Theory. which is:
"becoming critically aware of one's own tacit assumptions and expectations and those of others and assessing their relevance for making an interpretation"

So let me get this straight: you are "critically thinking". No matter how usefull you think your thesaurus is, there is only so far you can go with it. The only thing Maltzan really proved with that statement is that he likes to make cool forms and thinks that he needs some Mezirowian filler to make it legitimate...that and he passed freshman english 101.

Michael Maltzan Projects:

I had one other problem with Maltzan:

Can you tell who was the architect between these buildings? On the left is Michael Maltzan on the right is another, much more famous architect. I know it's sometimes considered unsporting to base an opinion solely on aesthetics and I don't even know if Maltzan is influenced by the other architect. But all I can say about Michael Maltzan's aesthetics is that: