“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 estate, not game), gamers, and critics. Has anyone made a FPS map of Gehry’s Peter Lewis Building at Case Western yet?
previously: SWAT team blames Gehry architecture for delay in trapping Cleveland shooter
Category: architecture
You Stay Classy, Bruce Ratner
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 sophisticated views of art and the art world.
And yet, in two short emailed paragraphs, a hapless Atlantic Yard minion resets the real estate and banking cultural clocks to zero:
Hi, I’m working on an in house promotional video for Frank Gehry and the Atlantic Yards Project. We will be taping in Williamsburg this Thursday or Friday and are interested in videoing an artist in his or her work space. The work should be large and colorful and the space should be interesting, windows or some nice architecture. It should also be at least 700 to 1000 square feet or bigger.
This video will be shown to investors and could be an opportunity to highlight the artists work. We will have a small crew of about 8 people and shouldn’t be there longer than an hour or two. We can give the artist a nominal fee of 250.00 as we have no location budget.
I don’t know what giant, controversial idea lurking beneath which blithely unaware comment is more entertaining to contemplate:
You stay classy, too, Frank.
Calling All ‘Burg Artists: Want to Sell Out for Atlantic Yards? [curbed]
Once You Have Lack, You Never Go Back
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 the collection.
Their design, which preserves the open space of the museum site, looks like an Ikea Lack side table. I only hope it’s not made of pressed sawdust and glue shrinkwrapped in PVC.
MVRDV planen Museumserweiterung in Rotterdam [baunetz.de, google trans, via archinect]
IKEA Lack side table, $14.99 [ikea.com]
Antonioni Hears New York
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 listen rather than to look: to eavesdrop on the city’s mutterings as it emerged into consciousness from the previous night’s sleep. Sitting in his room on the 34th floor of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, Antonioni kept a journal of everything he heard from six to nine in the morning… Perhaps some inadvertent sound might provide the key to unlock the mysteries of this foreign world.
The only way this could be cooler is if Soderbergh showed up with footage he shot of a Scott Sforza-produced photo-op at the Spiral Jetty.
“Manhattan Symphony” by Walter Murch
“New York from the 34th floor overlooking Central Park/ The soundtrack for a film set in New York – circa 1970” by Michelangelo Antonioni
New York City In Sound [bldgblog]
UbuWeb Sitdown With Archinect
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, it’s expanded into other media: sound, performance documentation, artist film and experimental video. The focus remains resolutely on the undeservedly inaccessable and out of print/circulation.
Goldsmith: “My only regret though is that there aren’t fifteen or twenty UbuWebs.” They talk about theater, dance, and architecture Ubus, but I confess, I have a hard time seeing how those might come together as well as Ubu’s collection of conceptual/concrete poetry. Could happen, though. Anyone have some unlimited bandwidth and server space? There may be a MacArthur in it for you.
UbuWeb Vu – Kenneth Goldsmith [archinect]
Huge Props
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 I went last Tuesday morning, and we started on the sixth floor. By the second room, it was obvious that the experience of the show was really incredible. Serra’s an artist who, by design, almost prevents you from seeing multiple examples of his work; they’re site-specific–not just permanently installed in or made for, but actually about the site and the experience of being in it. By the second Serra, then, you realize you’re in rarified territory. And the first three room-filling works you encounter at the entrance of the sixth floor space really makes this clear.
The silence was shortlived; there was a crowd of middle school students sitting on the floor in the next gallery, which was crowded with very early works. I wanted to go grab each of these kids by the shoulders and shake him, saying “Do you know where you are? Remember this!” But I figured they’d figure it out by the time they got downstairs.
Was it Peter Schejldahl who mentioned how sad and domesticated the corral of prop pieces looked? I’m afraid he was right. I’m also afraid I couldn’t imagine any other way MoMA, with its constant crowds, could show the precarious work. These delicate, human-scale pieces are not the Serras around which the new building was designed, and it shows. [The hands-down best prop piece I’ve ever seen, by the way, was in the office of a dealer on 24th street. It was a square metal sheet held up by a roll that sat on the floor like a lead umbrella. The fleshy soft surface was in seductively pristine condition, too, a testament to a life in careful storage, I guess.]
The massive second floor galleries, where Serra’s early lead and timber scatter piece seemed so lost in front of the Twombly when the museum reopened, now seemed complete. The torqued ellipses and ribbons of Serra’s late/current period are, as John aptly pointed out, our real Peace Dividend. They’re made possible–and made–by advances in Military Industrial design software and manufacturing. Prowling around NASA in the past, I’ve seen utterly utilitarian instruments, objects, and components whose stunning aesthetics would drive a hundred MFA’s into the web design business.
Serra seems like one of the few artists to make a sustained, legitimate attempt at actually engaging the means of production of the Cold War. And when you consider the price tag of the new MoMA as a purpose-built context machine for these works compared to, say, the Pentagon’s weekly expenditure in Iraq, the ROI is off the charts.
All that said, my favorite piece in the show was not, in fact, one of the sexy, transporting, transformative curved mazes on two, but a much earlier piece on six. [It could be, but it’s not To Lift, the 1967 piece made of sheet rubber, which is easily the most elegant.] Circuit II, [1972-86] is a giant prop piece which has been in MoMA’s collection for a while. Four straight steel plates are wedged into the corners of a room, creating an unsettling, compressed void where they would intersect. Circuit II was installed when I first moved to New York; it was in the Philip Johnson annex gallery known as the basketball court, which, at the time, had been the largest space in the Modern. The simplicity of the execution and the visceral spatial experience left a real impression on my fragile little just-graduated college mind. It was a kind of non-academic awe that my skeptical art history professor’s cursory lessons on contemporary art had not prepared me for.
I’d like to say I felt that sensation again, but to be honest, the new sixth floor galleries are so high, and the beautiful skylight overhead was so open, Serra’s once-overwhelming plates felt a bit quaint and conceptual, the idea of awe instead of awe itself. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s not so much the work, but my own spatial nostalgia, the kinaesthetic memory of it, that I’m loving so much, that thrill of paradigm-shifting discovery when you’re young and stupid–and your paradigms are due for several hefty shifts. Maybe Richard Serra’s works are not just shapers of space; after you’ve encountered them once, they become manipulators of time, too.
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years [moma.org, thanks alex]
Postopolitan Diary
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 recaps. It’s not as immersive, but it’s also not as hot and stuffy, which is both good and bad.
City of Sound coverage of Postopolis [cityofsound.com]
We’re Zero One! We’re Zero One!
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 Koolhaas is all pissed off because Masdar’s plan [above] looks too much like the Rak Gateway project for nearby Emirates [below], which OMA is set to unveil next week in Dubai.
So Rem’s all up in Foster’s grille, trying to establish credit for building a giant, geometrically idealized, self-sustaining, sun-powered megalopolis in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula by saying, “We want to establish that we launched this project in November last year”?
Excuse me, but The Animatrix came out four years ago, in 2003. So concept credit must go to the Wachowski siblings, Geof Darrow, and Mahiro Maeda. Then again, claiming credit for building Zero One is the Matrix universe’s equivalent of bragging about founding SkyNet. And what kind of inhuman, power-drunk megalomaniac would–
Aha. Verdict: Koolhaas.
Norman Foster’s Green Desert Utopia in Abu Dhabi [inhabitat]
Koolhaas, Foster clash over ‘similar’ designs [bdonline via dailydose]
Bombardment Periphery, Rotterdam
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 architecture. The area destroyed by the bombs and the ensuing firestorm is demarcated by the Brandgrens, or Fire Limits:
The Fire Limits
14.05.2007
On Monday 14 May, in the evening, Rotterdam 2007 City of Architecture will illuminate the fire limits of Rotterdam’s city centre with over one hundred light beams.
The fire limits mark the areas of the city that were destroyed by the bombing on 14 May 1940 and the ensuing fires that broke out. From 10.45 pm a blaze of light beams on these boundaries will light up the skies, making the true impact of this devastating event visible throughout the entire city.
The bombing ‘only’ lasted fifteen minutes but managed to destroy practically all of Rotterdam’s city centre. Even before the war ended, it was decided not to replicate pre-war Rotterdam when reconstruction began, but to turn the city into a modern, revitalised city. The fire limits highlight the differences between the old and the new in many places in the city centre, which although visible, have never been experienced as a whole before. On 14 May 2007, the art producer Mothership will illuminate the entire fire limits, stretching almost 12 kilometres, turning this historic event into a sight that everyone can see.
Such a prominent spatial use of spotlights as a memorial these days obviously evokes references to the Towers of Light memorial. Like the World Trade Center version, this project, produced by the art collective Mothership, is intended as a temporary, ephemeral precursor to a permanent memorial demarcating the Brandgrens. But that’s actually not the most interesting part of this project for me.
Though the memorial’s official path through the city was only recognized in February, the idea of the Brandgrens has been as integral to the post-war identity of Rotterdam. The Fire Limits [or as Mothership translates with a bit more thesaurian flair, Bombardment Periphery; Babelfish translates Brandgrens as “Fire Boundaries”] is a commemoration of a Nazi attack that uses the Nazis’ own vocabulary of spectacle, specifically Albert Speer‘s 1934 Lichtdom, the Cathedral of Light, at Nuremburg. The rendering [above] reads almost like a direct quote of Lichtdom, in fact.
As it turned out, Bombardment Periphery looked uncannily like a re-creation of a nighttime bombing, with evocations of anti-aircraft searchlights, groundlevel glow, and illuminated cloud cover. I’d be very interested to hear what the reaction was to this event [the commemorating, that is, not the attack.]
It’s a bit absurd, but the first image that comes up in my search for night-time air raid photos was from Los Angeles.
In the early morning of February 25, 1942, unidentified flying objects were spotted over Los Angeles, triggering a massive anti-aircraft barrage that killed three civilians [three more died of heart attacks] and sparked a flood of bitter criticism and controversy. No definitive explanation has ever been made of the objects. The incident was inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s comedy [sic], 1941.
The caption for this photo, which ran on the front page of the LA Times, is incredible:
Scores of searchlights built a wigwam of light beams over Los Angeles early yesterday morning during the alarm. This picture was taken during blackout; shows nine beams converging on an object in sky in Culver City area. The blobs of light which show at apex of beam angles were made by anti-aircraft shells.
The obvious question, of course: Is next February 25th too soon for someone to recreate a wigwam of light beams over Culver City?
Bombardment Periphery Gallery [enterthemothership.com]
Rotterdam2007: The Fire Limits [rotterdam2007.nl]
West Coast Air Raid [wikipedia]
A Rolling Moss Warrants No Throne
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 American design world really so feeble that Moss is considered the supreme arbiter, I guess we get what we deserve.
It’s true that through inertia, his fussy, museum-style presentation, and his subsequent expansion, Moss has mitigated to some degree his knockoffish origins. But I can’t forget.
I was traveling to Amsterdam a lot during the mid-90’s, those early, crucial years when Moss was building its own reputation as a design gallery, promoting European designers like the Droog gang. And I came to love a visionary design store on Prinsengracht called Frozen Fountain. Around 1992, when it moved to its current location, Frozen Fountain began curating shows of designers’ work, reaching into the deep bench for Dutch design, and featuring work from around Europe as well.
There was literally nothing at Moss that wasn’t at Frozen Fountain already, and it stung to reconcile the praises for Moss’s incredible innovation with the reality that his entire program was basically bagged up and repotted, like a giant amaryllis bulb, from Amsterdam.
The Times piece buries the lede [I’ve read it by now, yeah. Just in case it was a takedown in disguise], noting how many dynamic developments of the design world Moss’s blinkered incuriousity has missed: American design, sustainable design, furniture under $25,000 design. The most damning quote is from Stefan Lawrence, whose LA store Twentieth dances circles around Moss’s vitrine: “And Mr. Lawrence himself, while quick to say that ‘Murray Moss is a genius,’ added that he had discovered designers that ‘Murray hasn’t even heard of.'” Granted, that’s a mighty long list.
This Japanese-American Internment Camp Life
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 commissioned for the atrium, and a few other little pieces I photographed and may post later–I’m afraid the de Young’s Herzog & de Meuron building left more of an impression on me than their collection.
With two notable exceptions: there was a painting that looked like a charcoal drawing and dated 1944, which appears to have been done in the Japanese American internment camps. I’ve been armchair-fascinated–and since 2002, increasingly outraged–by the camps and how my country managed to incarcerate its own citizens–over half of them children–in the name of defending freedom.
But except for Ansel Adams’ photos of Manzanar and portraits of its internees, I hadn’t seen art that had been created in the camps. And I’ve been stalling for two paragraphs because I can’t remember the artist’s name… Danny…
Anyway, the permanent installation of sculptor Ruth Asawa‘s ethereally minimalist work was great, too, but I wish we’d been able to see the full Asawa retrospective [which left the de Young in January, and is at the Japanese American National Museum in LA until May 27.] I didn’t know but should have that Asawa was interned as a girl; at Santa Anita, the horsetrack-turned-prison camp, Asawa began taking drawing lessons from older artists who had worked at Disney before Pearl Harbor. Black Mountain was a far greater influence on her aesthetic, perhaps, but the experience in the camp is a piece of her puzzle as well. Getting up to speed on her work and career is on my shortlist.
And for another, more surreally quotidian look at life in internment, there’s Densho, the primary source/oral history initiative which has just put online a massive collection of newspapers published within the camps. The LA Times has an article about it today.
“MRS. Arikawa received a wire from Washington saying her son had been killed in action in Italy, but no one in the block knew of it for the whole day. She and Mr. Arikawa ate their meals unobtrusively and as usual at their table in the mess hall, he with his omnipresent cane laid against the bench and she quietly leaning over her plate…. Made homeless and their security jeopardized by the very agency to which they have given their sons, they must wonder what their reward will be.” — Manzanar Free Press, July 29, 1944
A movie about daily life in the camps has been brewing in my head for years now, and I’d always been seduced by the rich tones and contrasts of Ansel Adams’ photos, relying on his outsider’s eye to capture the insidiously banal contradictions of loyal Americans stripped of their rights and property and rounded up into prison camps. But obviously now, that’s because I haven’t read enough of the Manzanar Free Press. Which, despite its title, was one of the more rigorously censored camp papers around.
Previously: I Mean, Just Look At How Happy They Were!
“What Does A Lehi Project And The Guggenheim Museum Have In Common?”
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 by Provo entrepreneur Brandt Anderson last month. Frank Gehry is supposedly onboard to design the complex, though he did not attend the unveiling of the project’s master plan/massing study.
When I was in Utah a couple of weeks ago, I heard from several people in the Utah development and construction communities that the project is all smoke, and that Anderson has essentially none of the multiple billions of dollars of financing in place to actually realize his grand vision.
More and more, this Gehry Lehi project reminds me of the Triad Center. When I was in 8th Grade, we lived in Salt Lake City, and the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi blew into town with huge, shiny plans to build a new downtown right next to the old one. Khashoggi’s son Mohammed lived around the corner from us, and so we had a front row seat to the starry-eyed reception those jokers got.[1] If there’s any progress to be marked here, it’s that Utah’s monorail salesmen are now homegrown.
I’ll be the first to sign up for wakeboarding classes if Gehry’s project ever gets built, but I’ll probably be bungee jumping from his Guggenheim Downtown before that happens.
2002: Guggenheim Drops Plans For East River Museum [nyt via wirednewyork]
MOSLEMS JOIN MORMONS IN UTAH BUILDING BOOM [nyt, 1982]
[1] This all happened before Khashoggi was involved in Iran-Contra and BCCI. I had no idea he was Dodi Fayed’s uncle, though. Nor that Mohammed is now directing films?
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
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, go-go dancing California as if he were Lytton Strachey. It’s like Mondo LA, but produced by the BBC.
As a time capsule, the film’s almost quaint. Banham plays everything with bemused befuddlement, eating a pineapple sundae while he interviews “painter and photographer of the local scene” Ed Ruscha in a giant convertible at the drive-in, or innocently engaging the security guard about why he can’t cut through the ur-gated community of Rolling Hills.
It can boggle, too, though. When ruminating on the city’s preference for stand-alone homes to larger multi-story housing estates, Banham actually says about Watts, “even the ghetto people have nice, little houses.”
Some things hold up, some don’t, and in a laugh-so-you-don’t-cry way. There’s a hint of irony that LA’s great sunsets are caused by all that car pollution, but otherwise, the freeways and the car-centric culture are still only amusing.
Banham offhandedly compares the partitioned-off Rolling Hills to “the Balkans before 1914,” not knowing, of course, what would happen to the Balkans of the late 1990’s [or what would happen in the LA riots after the Rodney King verdict, for that matter].
And Banham Loves Los Angeles dovetails very unexpectedly with another outsider’s look at an inscrutable place, Antonioni’s Chung Kuo. The punchline to this narration by Banham’s imaginary 8-track freeway tour guide writes itself:
Coming up now on your right is the world’s biggest toy and game factory.
From here, Matt Mason space toys, Hot Wheels cars, and Barbie dolls go to all parts of the free world.
Antonioni’s film focuses on people, with the city as a backdrop, and ends up revealing a stunning, fascinating country that’s now been utterly transformed, including in its architecture and urban fabric. Banham’s looks at the city down–there are dozens of long helicopter shots–but most of the people we see are the passengers on the star homes bus tour.
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles [google video via landliving]
Neutra For Sale: Calling Michael Govin [sic]
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 EXAMPLES OF ARTISTS LIKE KLIMPT & POLLACK SOLD IN THE 140M RANGE! WHAT SHOULD THE UNIQUE AND ONLY SURVIVING INTACT EXAMPLE OF NEUTRA COMMERCIAL ARCHITECTURE BE WORTH?
Or is that meant as the opening bid? Either way, maybe they can add it to the LACMA collection.
An architectural landmark on the market [neutra.org via andy at reference library]
Reston, Virginia: Modernism And The Homogenous Suburb
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 or commercial loft buildings [though there’s now no shortage of “lofts,” which is shabby developerspeak for “exposed ductwork.” Besides, thanks to unchecked flippery and speculation, the condo/co-op market is a zombie, unaware of its own death.]
What passes for modernist architecture in town, too, is either a McMansion tarted up in Richard Meier drag, or is located in an ever-to-revive? neighborhood of lackluster Sixties urban revitalization gone to seed, or is an aging suburban utopia [sic] of some kind.
Almost any foray into DC mid-century-onward modernism includes stops in architect Charles Goodman’s various developments: the sylvan Hollin Hills along the Potomac and the much more ambitious, [sub]urban experiment of Reston, a city begun in the rural farmland of Virginia in the early 1960’s. Goodman’s densely packed, slightly rural-toned Interational Style homes, townhouses, and apartments are known as Hickory Cluster. They front on the manmade Lake Anne, and are connected by trails and bike paths to the rest of Reston [which has exploded into a car-centered, Galleria-style ring city of its own, ten minutes on a good day from Dulles.]
What might it be like to live in the perfect modernist suburbs, I wondered? The vintage interior photos of Hickory Cluster on the Reston Historical Trust and the Storefront Museum of Suburban History website offer a tantalizing–and tempting–glimpse.
On a clear day in Reston, for example, I might lounge in my Saarinen Womb Chair and look out past my palm trees across the valley to the mountains. Maybe I’ll even eat one of those grapefruits, picked this morning from my own tree out back.
Or maybe I could do a little work in my home office/studio, maybe polish off a film project for my client, a large, international business machines manufacturer, then head, where? Over to Outback for a Bloomin’ Onion?
Can I just say that, my entire design-sentient life, I’ve dreamed of living in just such a space? Only somehow, I always thought it would be at the end of a narrow street, up against the hill, overlooking the ocean in, say, Pacific Palisades, California. That’s the freakin’ Eames House, people.
Reston looks like this, freakin’ shoeboxes with room for a dinette set and ceilings no taller than the 8′ patio door that is the only source of light.
Does anyone know a good way to steam motor oil out of a concrete floor, because at this point, the only option for us is to live in a deconsecrated gas station.
[update: I’ve since visited Lake Anne, as the original core of Reston is known, and have learned that Hickory Cluster is actually a series of Goodman-designed townhouse neighborhoods on the other side of the ring road from the town square, which architect James Rossant designed to emulate–what else?–Portofino.
In at least one respect, he succeeded: apparently, the pedestrian-oriented center is dead in the non-summer, and businesses on the plaza can’t survive. Which is one factor driving a current government/development push for “revitalization.” The other most immediately obvious characteristic of Lake Anne is its Latino-ness. It’s like Reston Town Center for Mexicans, and visiting it makes me realize how overwhelmingly non-Latino the RTC crowds and target demographics are.
The only larger concentration of Latino Reston/Herndon residents I’d seen was in the parking lot at KMart, which serves as a kind of impromptu zocalo con coches. Rather than providing an idealized escape from the “problems” of the “inner cities,” such as density and a heterogeneous racial, cultural, and socio-economic population, Reston turns out to have [at least] two cultures and economic strata superimposed on each other, equal on the parkways, but separate on the town plazas. I wonder if anyone’s asked a Mexican about the Lake Anne “revitalization,” or is he the problem to be solved?]