Category: architecture

[2018 UPDATE: In 2018 The New York Times reports that five women who worked with Meier, either at his firm or as a contractor, have come forward to say the architect made aggressive and unwanted sexual advances and propositions to them. The report also makes painfully clear that Meier’s behavior was widely known for a long time, and that his colleagues and partners did basically nothing to stop it beyond occasionally warning young employees to not find themselves alone with him. This update has been added to every post on greg.org pertaining to Meier or his work.]

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 a Getty-produced documentary, Concert of Wills. It’s a startling moment in what’s otherwise a typically institution-stroking hagiography of the “The travertine selected was from Michelangelo’s quarry” variety.
If it’s bullshit Irwin, wanted, Meier apparently thought, it’s bullshit he got. To demarcate where the architect’s work stops and the flaky artist’s landscaping starts, Meier created what is essentially a travertine toilet bowl to empty the placid fountains of his pristine, self-conscious Acropolis. It literally sounds like a giant is taking a pee. Forever.
It’s an at-once hilarious and unbelievably petty gesture. [And as I type this, I’d be even happier to find out the fountain was actually Irwin’s backhanded joke. As if he turned Meier’s bullshit into the fertilizer for his garden.] As it is, Irwin’s baroque landscape can’t defuse the rest of the Getty’s overbearing sense of self-importance.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it fine, and there’s some hand-rubbed plaster on some of those gallery walls I’d love to have myself. But I’ve always felt the ratio of building to art–of building to life–seemed wildly out of whack there.
It doesn’t help, of course, that on my first visit, I watched someone collapse in the main rotunda. With lightning efficiency, security guards hustled the portly man out of sight. They laid him on the ground behind one of the large stone benches at the entryway and radioed around frantically, while the man’s companions tried reviving him. Transfixed, I watched the scene for nearly 20 minutes as a circle of guards shielded the man–who turned out to have a heart condition–from view until the ambulan–oh, wait, that’s not an ambulance, that’s a Getty security van they’re loading him into. They’re not letting the ambulance up the hill, they’re shuttling him down to it.
I made a note to myself then not to die in a mausoleum. Well. That’s a cheery way to start the day. Have a great weekend!

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]

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, I can’t figure out what the real story is:
It’s what New York’s all about, baby: reinvention “he considered himself more an artist than an architect.” Really? Because he used to be “the bridge guy, the engineer who also did architecture.”*
Can you believe it, he’s in a museum show! In NYC!: True, Sandy does have a show coming up at the Met six months from now. Odd that there’s no mention of his MoMA shows, either last year’s “Tall Buildings” or that little ol’ one-man show in 1993. Or the Municipal Art Society’s St John the Divine exhibit that debuted his first NYC project.
$45 million condos at the Seaport don’t sell themselves, pal: I think we’re getting warmer. Says connoisseur/condo developer Frank Sciame, “Standing there in front of his sculpture, that’s how this started.” Or as he puts it in Absolute magazine, “In addition to being a work of art… it will also be a place to live.”
He’s the only thing right about the WTC site: Ah-ha. “It helps us immensely to have someone give us a solution that is workable from an engineering point of view, as opposed to just an architecturally beautiful feature.” Translation: Thanks for playing, Danny. There are some lovely parting gifts for you on the way out.
See, if only we’d let the Port Authority make every redevelopment decision for the WTC site unilaterally, we’d be much better off. Ahh, I’m inspired already.

An Architect Embraces New York [nyt]
Calatrava’s Tower: Even More Egregiously Expensive! [curbed]
* like the suit who calls himself a filmmaker but ends up writing all the time has room to talk.

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 Media Initiatives,” there are entries about architectural minutiae like sandblasting H&deM patterns on the new sidewalk, testing semi-reflective films for the projected signage, and kiosks. Lots of kiosks. Solid, geeky museum stuff. There’s also an education-related blog.
New media initiatives [blogs.walkerart.org, via man]

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 eggs and dog’s brains on the sidewalk.
The result: the County Board of Supervisors has ordered a bunch of workers with hand sanders to climb up there and dull the thing down a bit. Meanwhile, some tourist from New Jersey, 3,000 miles away, thinks they should leave it alone.
Disney Concert Hall to lose some luster [LAT, via BoingBoing]
Related: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown house was “red-tagged,” meaning no one can enter it, after a inspectors noticed a rainsoaking-related shift in a retaining wall. [LAT, via archinect]

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 at the hands of Andrew Saint. Unlike Homer Simpson–who likes his beer cold and his homosexuals flaming–this venal Cambridge architecture professor prefers his beer warm and his homosexuals safely confined to those four years of British public school, thank you very much. At least that’s what the whole obituary is about.
Saint’s acid conflation of the evils of gayness, inherited wealth, corporations, aesthetics, modernism and Nazism was enough to drive archinect’s Javier Arbona to the typewriter to call Saint to repentance.
Philip Johnson: Flamboyant postmodern architect whose career was marred by a flirtation with nazism [Guardian]
A response to Andrew Saint, by Javier Arbona [archinect]
[update: In a NYT op-ed, Mark Stevens says basically the same thing as Saint, but with more quotes and less gay.]

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. No, Polidori makes photos that seem real; when you go to Bilbao, it’d actually look–and feel–like his picture, not the postcard. His work appears often in The New Yorker, Architecture Week, and in his books (actually, it appears all the time in his books).

Robert Polidori’s Peripheral Vision [designobserver.com]
Book Review: Polidori’s Metropolis [metropolismag.com]
Buy Robert Polidori’s Metropolis for 65 undiscounted bucks at Amazon.

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 something or other involving packing tape.
Why, they’re like getting beat with ten pounds of El Croquis.
Archinect T-Shirts
related: “beat me with ten pounds of Vogue” [Gawker T-Shirts]

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 to us. But for the public, it’s not obvious. One portion of the seventh floor is six feet higher because it spirals around. So if it says something is on seven, what does that mean?

-Deborah Jacobs, Seattle City Librarian, in the NYTimes, on actually using Rem Koolhaas’s ecstatically reviewed building

“A lot of employees are pretty upset that a lot of money was spent on the award-winning design but little was spent on things like water and restrooms,” said Stephen Beck, a consultant with the Professional Engineers of California Government union.
The 13-story, 716,200-square-foot structure has four drinking fountains, all on the ground floor. And at each end of each floor there are two bathrooms, one for women and one for men. The problem: only four urinals on each level.

-From the LAT article on complaints about Thom Maynes’ ecstatically reviewed Caltrans building.

Inside the year’s best-reviewed buildings [NYT]
Matt Howie’s photos of temporary signs at the Seattle Public Library [flickr, via waxy]
Building puts form over bodily function [LAT, via archinect]

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 powerful, perception-altering work, a site-specific creation that deals fearlessly with the scale — something new, provocative and outrageous — a naughty newcomer that must wait to be judged worthy enough to be invited in. MoMA has never looked so uptight as in this stupendous new space. Something needs to turn that void into a connection between past and future, something that takes a chance on the transformational experience only art can provide. MegaMoMA is fail-safe and risk-free.

– Ada Louise Huxtable.
It’s odd, considering there are works by Eve Sussman, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Josiah McIlheny, Peter Doig and Jeff Wall literally within spitting distance of each other, not to mention a dozen other living artists a generation or two older, but I feel an absence of contemporary energy, of connection to the immediate practice of art, at the new Modern. I think Huxtable’s phrase, risk-free, is all too apt. Is it still too early to start taking some risks?
… In MoMA’s Big, New, Elegantly Understated Home [WSJ, via archinect]

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 other silvery, $400 million-plus, urban planning tour de force, tourist mega-destination has recently opened in Hiroshima. It’s the Naka Incineration Plant, a 490,000 sf waterfront waste processing center that’s open for public tours, in order to encourage Hiroshimans to consume wisely. [and while they’re there; Taniguchi threw in a bar.]
Like its sister building in Manhattan, the NIP [hmm. let me confirm that acronym, -g.] features Taniguchi’s clean lines and meticulous attention to detail. No word on the ticket price.
Hilton Kramer, you cranky old deluded bastard, consider this an early Christmas gift. And for the rest of you MoMA critics, don’t say I never gave you anything (besides a drubbing over some of your flimsy and/or hysterical arguments, that is). As for me, I think it kind of looks like the Tate.
Beauty in Garbage: Naka Incineration Plant by Yoshio Taniguchi [Fred Bernstein in ArchNewsNow, via life without buildings]

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]

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 to a sissy to make fun of how people talk. In his retrograde column in the NY Observer, Simon Doonan reports, “As rumored, this store is bedeviled by a mysterious and unfortunate all-pervading odor of cat urine.”
My Tour de Tokyo [NYO]
Slide show of Herzog & de Meuron’s Tokyo Prada store, which opened in 2003 [dezain.net]