August 19, 2008
From Paul Goldberger's review of 2 Columbus Circle, which began as Edward Durrell Stone's Gallery of Modern Art and has ended up--for now, anyway--as Brad Cloepfil's Museum of American--wait, what did the Craft Museum change its name to at the...
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9:25 PM
August 18, 2008
Here's a picture of what turns out to be the finishing tower at the Bosbaan in Amsterdamse Bos. It was demolished when the Bosbaan was widened to meet international rowing competition requirements. I can't tell, though, if this was...
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6:11 PM
August 17, 2008
Bosbaan met opzichtershuisje (gesloopt), originally uploaded by nickelvd. The Bosbaan, or Woods Course, is the oldest manmade rowing lake in the world. It was built in the Amsterdamse Bos in 1936, and it was expanded in 1954. Which gives...
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5:16 PM
caravans, originally uploaded by Elmer Kroese. Awesome, just awesome. Catherina Scholten's set design for a 2005 production of Chekhov's "Ivanov" at the outdoor theater in the Amsterdamse Bos [Woods] is just awesome. Shipping containers topped with mobile homes and...
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Posted by greg at
4:55 PM
August 12, 2008
More 1970's video awesomeness from Anton Perich's YouTube channel: this time it's John Chamberlain with a flensing knife in The Dakota. The site is a smallish, park-facing room in writer John Hersey's Dakota apartment. Much of the space is...
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Posted by greg at
1:19 PM
August 2, 2008
SLC Mies, originally uploaded by gregorg. I almost never associate Utah with great--or even good--architecture, and certainly not with modernism. Even though I've been head over heels for this eye-popping, uncompromisingly International Style house on Salt Lake City's east...
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Posted by greg at
2:11 AM
July 15, 2008
buckminster fuller sculpture at La Guardia Place, originally uploaded by yuko 'n sherlock. The Center for Architecture, Max Protetch and the Buckminster Fuller Institute have teamed up to exhibit two of the original Fly's Eye domes, the last dome...
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Posted by greg at
1:52 AM
July 12, 2008
It's been a low-intensity pleasure watching the pre-fab houses being constructed and installed for MoMA's upcoming Home Delivery exhibition. For a variety of reasons, none of which involve seeing it completed in person, mind you, I like Kieran Timberlake's...
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Posted by greg at
9:04 PM
June 17, 2008
Though I've never built a domehome or anything, I've been as much of an armchair fan of Buckminster Fuller as anyone. I mean, come on, man! DOMES! But it also bugs that most of the discussion of Fuller today is...
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Posted by greg at
2:54 PM
May 29, 2008
The $19 million deal for Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs has been canceled by the sellers for breach of terms. The Rockefeller Guest House was a New York anomaly. The Farnsworth House was bought by the architecture collector. The....
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Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
April 28, 2008
I finally pulled some pictures off my camera from last summer. That's when I noticed this little bungalow--with a sweet, vertical addition--just off the mainstreet in Morehead City, NC. There are a couple more shots on flickr....
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Posted by greg at
12:07 AM
April 26, 2008
Well, he and his studio do. Spatial Vibration documents a series of collaboration/experiments concerning the relationship of sound and space. Several of the experiments are on view in a show of the same name, "Spatial Vibration, String-Based Instrument, Study...
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Posted by greg at
1:08 AM
April 8, 2008
If you had to name one American, for instance, who clubbed together with a couple of friends in 1965 and spent more than three weeks building a futuristic seven-foot vertical city out of Lego, you might not immediately think of...
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Posted by greg at
5:55 PM
April 6, 2008
Choire's interview with Elizabeth Berkley reminded me of some unfinished Showgirls business here on greg.org. Back in 2002, right after Beyer Blinder Belle released the first, banal master plans for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, a...
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Posted by greg at
8:31 PM
March 19, 2008
So after the Whitney opens its downtown branch, it'll sell its Marcel Breuer building on Madison? That's the way I read the blueprints being unfurled in the NY Times the last couple of months. Buried in a late December...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 AM
March 17, 2008
Holy smokes. On Archinect, Orhan has launched into a free-ranging, fantastical, and ill-informed lamentation over the impending doom that the callous, uncaring, neglectful architectural aficionado community is somehow foisting on the Neutra VDL Research House in Silverlake:I wouldn’t elaborate...
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Posted by greg at
9:12 PM
March 11, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Géode, originally uploaded by zyber. But darned if it isn't pretty damn close. La Géode...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 AM
March 5, 2008
So I'm staring at these Solar Balloons by Coolearth Technology, caught like a deer in some headlights [actually, with this pair, maybe it's "caught like a spring breaker in some headlights, but whatever], and I can't figure them out....
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Posted by greg at
2:17 PM
February 27, 2008
After riding the It's a Small World ride half a dozen times on my first trip to Disneyland, I sent off for information on how to become an Imagineer. I was seven. Yet somehow it's taken me until this week...
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Posted by greg at
11:53 PM
Now I've been a fan of Joep van Lieshout's work for a long time, even if a lot of it's too irreverent or too bombastically oversexualized to evangelize about regularly. ["You see, mom, he builds these room-sized uteruses with built-in...
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Posted by greg at
10:31 PM
February 16, 2008
Here's a description of the American Pavilion at the Osaka '70 Expo from an online exhibit at Columbia called, "Housing The Spectacle: The Emergence of America's Domed Stadiums":Trying to best R. Buckminister Fuller's Geodesic Dome built for the U.S....
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Posted by greg at
11:06 AM
February 15, 2008
Of course, I'd only need to recreate The Pepsi Pavilion from Osaka 70 if it didn't exist anymore. Does it? No. As relations between Pepsi and Billy Kluver, the engineer founder of E.A.T., deteriorated over issues of budget and esoteric...
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Posted by greg at
5:38 PM
Let's get one thing out of the way first: I'm a Diet Coke guy. The very fact that The Pepsi Generation existed in 1970 should blow a hole in their brand's supposed youthy credibility big enough to drive a 90-foot...
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Posted by greg at
3:53 PM
February 4, 2008
純粋階段, originally uploaded by nor1. Atelier Bow Wow is my favorite Japanese architecture firm. Rather than by building or proposing some kind of Roarkian vision, they first made a name for themselves [besides the catchy name they made for...
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Posted by greg at
4:49 PM
January 28, 2008
At the risk of devolving into an Olafur fanboi site, I'll mention that I was flipping through Take Your Time, the photodocumentary magazine published by the studio in November. Turns out there are multiple shots of the making of...
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Posted by greg at
6:52 PM
January 26, 2008
He's a tough guy and a really wonderful architect whose work has sent me on more than one pilgrimage in my life. But even so, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Tadao Ando. The most dazzling,...
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Posted by greg at
2:48 PM
January 17, 2008
As they say in the bayou, when it comes to preserving our modernist architectural heritage, you can't trust a hillbilly as far as you can throw him. The Union Tank Car Dome, the first industrial-scale geodesic dome, built by Buckminster...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 AM
November 28, 2007
Buckminster Fuller wha? It was the photo caption in the photo spread of the Foreign Office Architects country house project in the November 2007 World of Interiors on the coffee table. I snapped a quick phonecam photo, thinking I'd look...
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Posted by greg at
1:27 PM
November 23, 2007
Hello, what?? from Page Six via Gawker, we learn that Norman Mailer "built a 15,000- piece "City of the Future" with two pals in his Brooklyn apartment - but where it will go next, nobody knows." The obvious answer is...
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Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
November 15, 2007
I guess when you're a hammer, everything looks like MoMA. It's "Subverting The Dominant Installation" Week at Modern Art Notes, where Tyler is taking inordinate pleasure in shadow boxing with an opponent who retired long ago: Alfred Barr's rickety, linear...
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Posted by greg at
1:13 PM
October 25, 2007
Modular, prefab, minimalist, outdoor space, nice matte finish, shipping containers... Just slap a couple of solar panels on the roof and get a book stylist in there to add a Moholy-Nagy monograph to the coffee table, I think we...
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Posted by greg at
2:44 PM
October 24, 2007
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } se/sthlm/swedish shell/04, originally uploaded by Hagen Stier. where we'll live in this unused 1954 Shell...
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Posted by greg at
10:23 AM
October 8, 2007
Yes, I do have a ton of other things I should be doing, but I can't seem to get Project Echo out of my head. I really want to see this, 100+ foot spherical satellite balloon, "the most beautiful...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
September 7, 2007
For some reason, I was thinking of totally livable, modernist gas stations yesterday [actually, it was because I heard fellow prefab gas station fan Mister Hoopty on the radio] and so I started digging, trying to find out more...
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Posted by greg at
2:03 PM
August 21, 2007
This is what I get for not going to the Serpentine Summer Party this year...Publisher of a new magazine that melds artistic and architectural experimentation, Eliasson is currently involved in numerous architectural projects such as the Icelandic National Concert...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
August 18, 2007
"the relentless glossiness of contemporary visualisation makes us wonder whether there is an 'uncanny valley' for buildings" - things magazine on architecture and gaming engines I would ascribe the uneasiness to the different purposes and agendas of architects, developers (real...
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Posted by greg at
8:30 AM
July 31, 2007
In less than thirty seconds, I could rattle off a dozen people in the real estate business, and another easy dozen in the video and film business, and a dozen in the finance business, who have incredibly, admirably, even enviably...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
July 19, 2007
No way, how much do I love MVRDV? The Rotterdam architecture firm just won the competition to build an extension to the city's Museum Boijmans van Beuningen that will house some public space, but also storerooms and archives for...
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Posted by greg at
11:12 AM
July 7, 2007
Walter Murch writing on BLDGBLOG:Sometime after the success of his film Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni visited Manhattan, thinking of setting his next project in New York. Confused and overwhelmed by the city's visual foreignness, he decided to...
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Posted by greg at
1:44 AM
June 29, 2007
There's an excellent, loong interview on Archinect with Kenneth Goldsmith, the artist, poet, dj, theory karaokeist [?], professor, and web developer behind the incomparable UbuWeb. Ubu began with just texts, and as collections and formats and partners came their way,...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 PM
June 26, 2007
So if you're going to see the Richard Serra exhibition at MoMA--and you should, it's really quite spectacular--you should see it when the museum is closed, because then you have the whole place to yourself. A friend John and...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
June 1, 2007
Missing Postopolis, the architecture and urban situational blogfest at Storefront For Art & Architecture, has been one of my big regrets for being out of the city this week. Fortunately, I've been following along on City of Sound's excellent liveblog...
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Posted by greg at
11:27 PM
May 21, 2007
So a couple of weeks ago, Sir Norman Foster and his firm announced the creation of Masdar, a 6 million sqm square, solar-powered development in Abu Dhabi that will be "the world’s first zero-carbon and zero-waste city." Now Rem...
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1:37 PM
May 19, 2007
As part of Rotterdam 2007 - City of Architecture, the city commemorated the 15-minute-long German bombing on May 14, 1940 that destroyed the city center, precipitated the Dutch surrender in WWII--and ultimately provided the occasion for all that new...
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Posted by greg at
11:11 AM
May 10, 2007
Ay caramba, I haven't even clicked through the article yet, and already my head is going to explode:Aspiring To The Throne A growing number of small stores are challenging Murray Moss’s supremacy as the arbiter of design in America.If the...
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Posted by greg at
7:23 AM
May 3, 2007
We finally made it to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco last weekend. I'll see a Sheeler show any time, any place, but except for a nice population of Diebenkorns and the well-stocked Oceanic galleries--oh, and Gerhard Richter's disorienting photomural...
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Posted by greg at
8:55 AM
April 20, 2007
Uh, they both announced giant Frank Gehry showpieces that never made it past the drawing board because there was never any actual money behind them? Here's a FOXnews Utah [redundant, I know] report on the 85-acre multi-use development announced...
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Posted by greg at
2:45 PM
First off, what is up with the Seventies? Those folks was funny. This 1972 documentary about what a lovable failure of a city Los Angeles is stars pioneering urban planning theorist Reyner Banham, who fairly bumbles through hippie dippy,...
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Posted by greg at
8:16 AM
April 17, 2007
Richard Neutra's office building in Silver Lake is for sale. It's about 4900sf, plus two apartments in back, with some Neutra built-ins and fixtures. No price is mentioned, but the broker does helpfully provide a ceiling:RECENT SALES OF IMPORTANT...
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8:40 PM
April 14, 2007
I'll come clean. We've started contemplating a dip of the toe into the real real estate market in Washington, DC. There's precious little to choose from, though. DC's longstanding status as an officetown means there are almost no industrial...
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4:08 PM
Holy smokes, I'm in like. Geoff sat down with editor/polymath Walter Murch for BLDGBLOG to discuss, of all things, the music of spheres. At least obliquely. I'd say they were Renaissance men, but as their discussion shows, the Renaissance was...
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Posted by greg at
10:34 AM
April 7, 2007
In 1994, Philippe Starck designed mailorder plans for a Timber House for the French department store 3 Suisses. It was sold as a numbered edition for 4900FF, or around $1,000. Last year, a copy of the kit--a wooden box...
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Posted by greg at
6:30 PM
March 22, 2007
Verner Panton chairs in prison? Custom ply built-ins? I mean, day-um. Josef Hohensinn's Loeben Justice Center is like Richard Meier's Perry & Charles Street towers, only warmer inside, with some Dominique Perraultian Bibliotheque National wooden touches. 29 photos here...
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Posted by greg at
12:25 AM
March 14, 2007
One of my big regrets was not urban scavenging the old Bendel's when I had the chance. My office used to be above the store during the gutjob renovation that followed the store's purchase by Columbus-based The Limited. See, a...
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Posted by greg at
4:55 PM
March 5, 2007
No sooner did Chanel let slip how they spent a whole extra million dollars to finish the sides of their narrow tower on 57th Street in granite to match the street facade, than rival LVMH announced they were building...
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Posted by greg at
10:54 AM
February 18, 2007
WPS1 has posted the audio for MoMA's recent symposium, "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts." Listening to a panel discussion with no access to the visuals can be a tough sell, but the two talks...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 PM
February 4, 2007
Don't get me wrong, I love me some yurts. But like the equally lovable geodesic dome, something always seems lost in between ideal sustainable concept and hippie-dippy, style-free, domestic execution. Finally, though, someone's made a yurt for the Wallpaper...
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Posted by greg at
7:21 PM
January 25, 2007
When I was a freshman at BYU, I had a hopeless crush on a girl from Hawaii. She was really nice to me, and we eventually became friends. But I never had a chance because, unlike her boyfriend at...
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Posted by greg at
5:50 PM
January 23, 2007
Philip Nobel encapsulates my hate-to-love/hate relationship with Rem Koolhaas and his work in this greatly entertaining Metropolis Mag column, "I ♥ IIT… But I Still Don’t Like Rem". [1] Rem may have changed my thinking about China with a late...
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Posted by greg at
10:38 AM
October 24, 2006
Damn, I just hate when that happens. I hate when some sick poseur geezer company who makes SUV's for orthodontists or whatever totally rips off and corrupts the free, utopian, non-commercial, creative spirit of youth--of the future, even. As...
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Posted by greg at
1:39 PM
October 15, 2006
image: Interieur 06 on halleluja's flickr stream Recently returned from abroad and holding court at Interieur 06, a trade show, HSH Arne XV, Emperor of Black Rock City and King of The Uchronians received HM Paola Queen of The Belgians....
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4:50 PM
October 9, 2006
Curator Nancy Spector described Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque, which the Guggenheim acquired in 1999 from the artist's estate [controlled by his widow Nancy Holt and represented by James Cohan Gallery] this way:Hotel Palenque perfectly embodies the artist’s notion of...
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4:45 PM
September 29, 2006
When I grow up--scratch that, IF I were to ever grow up enough, I wish I could write with half the force of Ada Louise Huxtable.Given the notoriety of the site, a passionately observant and deeply involved public, and the...
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12:03 AM
September 21, 2006
It is really hard, apparently, to come away in a good mood when you're a freelancer charged with writing about starchitects' hyper-deluxe modernist loft developments where the price per square foot is more than your fee. In Vanity Fair, AA...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
September 19, 2006
The Venice Biennale of Architecture may have been a critical bust--both the Times' and the Guardian's people panned it, complaining that it's a book in exhibition format, or text and videos but no architecture--but I have to say, it...
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9:49 PM
September 16, 2006
I know a lot of you have been asking yourselves, "Hey, what's been going on with Greg and the Belgian Waffle?" No? Too bad. Cuz I'll tell you. The Burning Man curator known as LadyBee and I have been going...
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Posted by greg at
3:51 PM
September 13, 2006
In a previous post, I characterized the Belgian designers behind Uchronia, a giant pavilion at Burning Man constructed by an army of their firms' employees and others of new wood and then burned to the ground, as "self-aggrandizing eco-idiots."...
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Posted by greg at
10:15 PM
September 4, 2006
A swoopy playground for hipsters built by an army of volunteers in an arid, rocky landscape? Alas, it appears they haven't heard of reclaimed lumber in Belgium. Uchronia, by Jan Kriekels and Arne Quinze at this year's Burning Man...
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Posted by greg at
12:21 AM
September 3, 2006
At Adam Greenfield of v-2.org and elsewhere will be giving a talk I'd go to just for the title alone, even if it weren't about rethinking the superheroes of 20th century urbanism: "Killing The Fathers, or: If You See Jane...
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Posted by greg at
8:51 PM
August 30, 2006
Fortunately, Tropolism is on the job. MetLife puts 80 Manhattan acres and 110 buildings up for sale, hinting $5 billion. [nyt]...
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Posted by greg at
1:47 PM
August 16, 2006
For a couple of months now, I've been really pre-occupied by this discussion of the color white and its association with modernism. It's between Olafur Eliasson, curator Daniel Birnbaum, and Mark Wigley, the dean of Columbia's architecture school and...
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Posted by greg at
11:13 AM
August 2, 2006
Much like the 24-hour interview-a-thon itself, Claire Bishop's report from the Serpentine Pavilion starts out hilariously--my original title for this post was to be "LOLOLOL"--and ends with unexpected substance and insight. Whether her declaration is the first, I don't care,...
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Posted by greg at
6:06 PM
July 25, 2006
Somewhere else, I saw someone licking the feet of the real estate developers who licensed Jade Jagger's name for their galley kitchens. But it wasn't on Tropolism. No, that's where I saw the suh-weet Taiwanese pod living architecture, inexplicably abandoned....
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Posted by greg at
11:03 PM
July 1, 2006
especially when I read something like this--and to be honest, I haven't even finished it yet: Design. Architecture. Football. [cityofsound.com via bldgblog]...
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Posted by greg at
12:30 AM
June 30, 2006
From Hennessy & Papanek's classic 1973 hippie DIY book, Nomadic Furniture comes the "Resource Tower":It organizes living space in a radically different way. Usually we put bookcases and storage walls all over the room's walls. We suggest [as shown in...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
May 13, 2006
Supposedly reluctant starchitect Rem Koolhaas talked with the NYT's Robin Pogrebin about the mutiny in his firm, OMA's NY office, which is headed by supposedly reluctant starchitect-in-training Josh Prince-Ramus. Since the completion of the office's Seattle Library in 2004, PR...
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Posted by greg at
10:16 AM
May 1, 2006
I still can't tell if I was the only one kind of weirded out by the sudden and overwhelming outpouring of nostalgic loss and ruminating over the death of Jane Jacobs. Archinect, Tropolism, Curbed, Kottke, even the Home of the...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
March 18, 2006
In 2004, Kyohei Sakaguchi published 0 Yen Houses, a book of photographs of street people architecture in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. A burgeoning urban street population, mostly men in their 50's and 60's, is one consequence of the Japanese...
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Posted by greg at
2:18 AM
March 11, 2006
The 71-year-old scion of a real estate family, Mori inaugurated his latest city, Omotesando Hills, in one of Tokyo's most fashionable neighborhoods last month. There, well-heeled residents can now live just above some of the priciest retail shops on Earth,...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 AM
February 24, 2006
If he didn't exist, Rem Koolhaas would have to invent him. Of course, then he'd be included in the Whitney Biennial. Business Week has an interview with Rem's Mini-me, Josh Prince-Ramus, the Gen X starchitect-in-training running OMA's New York office....
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Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
January 27, 2006
Here's a picture of the interior courtyard of Tadao Ando's Omotesando Hills, which opens in a few weeks. Like everything else on Omotesando these days, the facade is a frosty glass scrim. [image: Harajuku-ss via jeansnow.net] previously: Tokyo snapshots...
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Posted by greg at
11:01 AM
January 23, 2006
On Saturday, the Rem Koolhaas Prada store in SoHo was either engulfed in flames, soaked in water and smoke, or both. The ostentatiously exposed drywall was Prada green and imported, if not actually manufactured to spec. [What's the stock color...
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Posted by greg at
2:44 AM
January 9, 2006
A tabloid summary of Herbert Muschamp's long essay on 2 Columbus Circle: back in the day AbEx: straight Historicism, Pop: gay Museum of Modern Art: straight Gallery of Modern Art [aka 2 Columbus]: gay But didn't AbEx evangelizer Frank O'Hara...
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Posted by greg at
12:34 PM
October 5, 2005
Modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft's widow willed his exquisite travertine-clad Georgica Pond home--his only domestic design-- and their carefully installed collection of modern art to MoMA when he died in 1994. MoMA sold it to Martha Stewart in 1994 without any...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 AM
October 2, 2005
The awesome and ingenious Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow (the Japanese translation, Atelier Wan, sounds nicely like "1," too) is keeping a blog of the combination house/studio they're building for themselves in Naka Meguro, a central, dense, and expensive section...
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Posted by greg at
1:44 AM
September 27, 2005
Although the pictures are nice, too. Turn-ons: urbanism, Meier's third condo tower, Gluckman Mayner's One Kenmare, long walks on sensitively adapted elevated railroad track parks, Gordon Matta-Clark exhibitions. Turn-offs: Freedom Center squabbles, deceptively meaningless master plans, Gwathmey's Sculpture for Living....
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Posted by greg at
12:32 PM
August 31, 2005
1ST TIME ON MKT!! Gdn! + outdr spc, [several, actually]Estate Cond. Nds TLC. EUR2.5M obo. Principals only. EXPO-Tower - Pavillon der Niederlande [ebay.de, via archinect]...
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Posted by greg at
2:20 AM
August 23, 2005
Metropolis Magazine's short interview with Rick Smith is so dense with fascinating information, I'd have to excerpt the whole thing, so just got read it now. He talks about convincing Frank Gehry to buy CATIA, the aerospace industry CAD/CAM software...
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Posted by greg at
1:59 AM
August 18, 2005
This new building is across the street from my in-law's apt. in Tokyo, in the Minami Azabu neighborhood about 5-min. walk from Roppongi Hills. It just went up a few months ago, and the evening I went over to examine...
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Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
August 10, 2005
Near where we've been staying in Tokyo is this striking building, which I had to check out. The screen-like facade turns out to be cinder block-colored bricks set on end in a blackened steel frame. A meter back is...
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Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
August 4, 2005
This is the Tadao Ando building complex that the ego-mad developer Mori Minoru is finishing on Omotesando, what was once the heart of alternative cultural Tokyo. With a slew of LVMH brand glass curtained flagships all around it, it should...
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Posted by greg at
3:18 AM
July 22, 2005
A report from the Herzog & deMeuron-designed Prada store in Tokyo's Minami Aoyama neighborhood. I have some good news and some bad news. First the bad news. It was reported earlier that the store smelled like feet cat urine. It...
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Posted by greg at
8:52 AM
May 14, 2005
Michael Bierut's excellent post on design bullshit has gotten a lot of attention. He starts by quoting the artist/gardner Robert Irwin, who hilariously calls bullshit on the man who would be king Of the Getty hill, architect Richard Meier, in...
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Posted by greg at
5:30 AM
May 9, 2005
Lockhart Steele, of the real estate blogging empire Steeles, has put architects in their place: The Gutter, a new sub-blog of Curbed. "Ill-mannered commentary on the architectural arts" [gutter.curbed.com]...
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Posted by greg at
2:25 AM
April 23, 2005
According to the Curbed Theory of NY Media Darling Architects, full-force Calatrava-hatin' should've kicked in in January. But here it is April, and there's a snuggly celebration in the Times by Robin Pogrebin, and it's got subtexts packed so tight,...
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8:02 AM
April 18, 2005
So the Walker Art Center reopened last week in Minneapolis, and the reviews I've seen are great. Did you know they had what amounts to a production blog for the completion of the new Herzog & deMeuron addition? Titled "New...
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9:29 AM
March 24, 2005
"Ms. Luce gave the design team at Nissan a steel wall to hide works in progress." And then Mr Serra gave Ms. Luce and the design team at Nissan a good legal shellacking. Architecture and Carchitecture [nyt] * I...
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8:53 AM
March 2, 2005
Since it was opened, the polished stainless steel roof on Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall in LA has been throwing off so much glare, people are getting baked alive in the neighboring condominiums. And on the street, fuggedaboutit. They're frying...
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1:59 AM
January 30, 2005
Philip Johnson called himself a whore, partly to diffuse critics who didn't like his constantly changing style or his intense curiousity in pursuit of new architectural ideas. Apparently, though, it didn't save him from an eviscerating obituary in the Guardian...
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2:55 AM
January 18, 2005
Check out Michael Bierut's appreciation of the bracing architecture environment photographs of Robert Polidori. Polidori's are not photos for architects, who want their buildings to look their renderings--pristine and perfect, unsullied by unpredictable humanity and the less-pedigreed landscape surrounding them....
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10:24 AM
January 13, 2005
Archinect's empire just keeps expanding. They just launched their Winter/Monsoon 2005 Collection of limited edition T-shirts. This one's designed by Christian Unverzagt of the Detroit-based M1/DTW. Also available: M/F robots made from old cathedral floor plans and a trippy...
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8:42 AM
December 29, 2004
KINKS: The way-finding isn't working. By the second or third day, we had to put up signs to help people. The bathrooms needed signs coming out, instead of being flat on the wall. The library's organization makes complete sense...
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12:57 PM
December 15, 2004
But we yearn for more than a cloakroom and gift shop in the cavernous entrance; the atrium cries for the really big gesture -- even Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" becomes a decorous gesture that ceases to alarm. This requires a...
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11:58 AM
November 22, 2004
Here we are, the week before Thanksgiving, stuffed and groggy from consuming so much MoMA-related press, which we probably have to regurgitate on Thursday for our out-of-town relatives. Then comes this new angle for the MoMA-weary: Turns out Yoshio Taniguchi's...
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1:07 AM
November 17, 2004
Jonathan Glancey gives an invigorating description of Sir Norman Foster & Co's Grand Viaduc du Millau, an awesome bridge on the A25 running from Paris to the Cote d'Azur. Come fly with me [Guardian UK]...
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2:26 AM
November 4, 2004
After the stunning success of Team America World Police [Hey, turns out they got the US political climate right after all...], puppet projects are breaking out all over. At Harvard's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, the artist Pierre Huyghe is...
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9:54 AM
October 27, 2004
1. Barney's, men's side, main floor Coming down the escalator into the underwear/robe department, there's an unbearable funk that's been there since the store opened ten years ago. Drives me crazy. 2. Prada Store, Aoyama, Tokyo [see left] Leave it...
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4:37 AM
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October 19, 2004
Archinect has an interview with Nathalie de Vries (the DV in MVRDV), where she talks about the firm's origins and work approach, and about their upcoming building/mountain for London's Serpentine Gallery. Very cool. MVRDV.nl previous MVRDV posts...
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1:09 AM
September 18, 2004
China's building boom may throw up a Rem Koolhaas now and then, but most of the time, it just looks like it's throwing up. Now, bad Chinese architecture has a home, BadJianZhu. Paul Wingfield, co-founder of the site, promises buildings...
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4:36 AM
August 17, 2004
[via archinect] Mies van der Rohe gives a rare interview to BBC Radio. (They've gotten even rarer since he died; this one's from 1959.)...
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2:12 AM
July 29, 2004
At least that's how I read this anecdote on Defective Yeti. By the way, the Tall Buildings show at MoMA looks great. Excruciatingly sexy models, tons of other information and context. You could spend 10 minutes or half the day....
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1:22 AM
July 16, 2004
A correction: Reading Herbert Muschamp's review of MoMA's "Tall Buildings" show, which includes the United Architects proposal for the WTC site. [The 'Dream Team' proposal is in there, too, but I've said all I'll say about that.] Coming after...
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7:27 AM
July 15, 2004
[via archinect] On a day when the Times praises his shoplifter-friendly, open-air Prada store on Rodeo (a feature the real customers, who valet park in back, will never see),The Project for Public Spaces pokes a sharp stick in Rem Koolhaas's...
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7:17 AM
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July 2, 2004
Christopher Hawthorne nails this weekend's Pataki Day Celebration, aka the groundbreaking for the Freedom Tower.This is what it has come to at Ground Zero: A premature, election-year press conference held on Independence Day to celebrate the start of construction on...
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9:59 AM
June 25, 2004
Curbed has a warning for NYC apartment hunters: "Fear The Lamp." Apparently, ARCO lamps--designed by the late Achille Castiglioni--are turning up in real estate listings with alarming frequency. [One possible reason: they're freakin' heavy. I had a chance to get...
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4:48 AM
June 16, 2004
If you're in London this Father's Day: The artists Elmgreen & Dragset have put together a short program (49') of film and video works which "examine architecture's complicit role in defining our enactment of psychological states." It will be shown...
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8:25 AM
June 11, 2004
There are published stories, and unpublished ones. I hear that Muschamp is moving to the Travel Section. Which makes sense to me. His last real architecture review has me planning a road trip to Seattle. Check out these excellent photos...
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8:53 AM
May 24, 2004
It's Real Estate Monday in the blogosphere. The LES's resident WASP, Lockhart Steele puts to rest all those inappropriate discussions about who owns the New York real estate industry with the launch of his new weblog, Curbed. It's the Fleshbot...
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2:22 AM
May 15, 2004
But not how you think. I was really getting into my Muschamp- and Koolhaas-weary groove. So when Herbert opened his review of Rem's new Seattle Central Library, with this sentence, I was working up my jaded, righteous indignation: "In...
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11:24 AM
May 5, 2004
The Times' Sarah Boxer walks through Taniguchi & Associates' soon-to-be-completed MoMA with Glenn Lowry. The early word is, it's straight. "...two huge windows, nearly floor to ceiling, face each other at opposite ends of the Sculpture Garden. Both are topped...
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9:17 AM
April 30, 2004
Even with all their vaunted number-crunching abilities, it seems no one at MIT can say exactly how much Simmons Hall, their new Steven Holl-designed, sponge-inspired, suicidal plunge-preventing dorm actually cost. Can't? Or won't? Metropolis reports a dispute--and a possible lawsuit...
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1:09 AM
April 13, 2004
Still damp from that Prada encounter Sunday, Herbert Muschamp barely has time to come up for air before resuming the position he knows so well: kissing Diller & Scofidio's ass. Is this really fit to print? 13Musc gets worked up...
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9:52 AM
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March 25, 2004
Lightningfield snaps some fine pictures from his visit to the MusÈe des Egouts de Paris, the Paris Sewer Museum, which highlights some of the lesser known achievements of a few centuries of l'etat. Very Foucault's Pendulum....
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8:18 AM
March 4, 2004
! Herbert Muschamp calls it a "stairway to heaven penthouse paradise," which is odd, since it looks more like a zipper than a staircase. The zipper on the fly of lower Manhattan. ["Chicka-boom!" indeed, Herbert.] What is it? It's Santiago...
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12:26 PM
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February 9, 2004
If you need me, I'll be at the Time Warner Mall, getting in line for the escalator to Whole Foods, where I'll be bellying up to New York's only Jamba Juice. "Whata Juice?" you say? Soon enough, you will be...
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12:39 PM
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November 7, 2003
Continuing in my apparent "interesting, but what does it mean for The Matrix?" vein, here's a quote from Herbert Muschamp's TMI review of the Men in Skirts exhibit at the Met's Costume Institute: I knew the Wachowski Brothers had lost...
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3:12 AM
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May 10, 2003
It took police more than seven hours to shoot and capture the gunman who opened fire in the newly opened Peter B. Lewis Building for Case Western's business school. It was "almost a cat and mouse game," said Cleveland...
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10:22 AM
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February 26, 2003
It's architectural reality TV, with so many last-minute campaigns, twists and turns, you'd think Fox was running it, not the Port Authority. The final two bachelors, er architect groups in the design "competition" for the WTC site have been workin'...
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11:36 AM
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February 11, 2003
Team THINK's winning WTC design: lattice towers with a, um, museum? embedded in it image: rvapc.com Goin' to hear THINK architect/model Rafael Vinoly at Urban Center tonight (as suggested by Gawker)? Ask him if the reason he was a...
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1:41 AM
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February 5, 2003
What I hope doesn't carry through from the plans the LMDC selected from Daniel Libeskind and THINK Team: Needlessly symbolic height (1,776 feet) Why not two 911' high towers? Duh, because. Single high-profile elements that completely draw attention away from...
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1:41 AM
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January 28, 2003
Herbert Muschamp, the Professor Emile Flostre of architectural empathicalism, gives his blessing to the THINK team's proposal to build a World Cultural Center at the former WTC site. There are several things to like about the proposal, not the least...
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7:32 AM
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October 22, 2002
Took a whirlwind trip to the Yale School of Architecture to see an exhibition (mostly) of the theoretical works of the Rotterdam architecture firm, MVRDV. Ivory tower academics? Nope. They actually build. Alot. And Yale dean Robert Stern rightly...
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7:22 AM
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July 1, 2002
Usually, when you get googled for "I went to high school with Ben Affleck" or "red vines and hidden meaning," you're left to wonder who the hell that was, and what's going on in those folks' heads? So imagine...
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2:36 AM
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