Category: architecture

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 of Italian drywall? Anybody?] Watch for the just-arrived merch to show up, freshly drycleaned, at a TJ Maxx far from you, very soon.
And what’s this? The Guggenheim is still hanging out in the building? Did landlord collector Peter Brant get his forever for-sale Warhol Last Supper out of their gallery in time?
Verbose Coma has pictures,, Gothamist has roundups, and modernartnotes has a draft checklist of art in the building [verbosecoma via gothamist]

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 and modernist architect Philip Johnson also work at MoMA? And hasn’t Muschamp talked about what a great pickup joint MoMA was in the 70’s?
Maybe it’s not a question of straight and gay, HM, but butch and femme. Or maybe, you know, it’s you, Herb. All I know is, Muschamp’s architecture writing has totally blossomed since he came out of that Times arch. critic closet of his. It’s a lifestyle choice [sic] we should all support.
The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle [nyt]

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 restrictions or covenants. Stewart, caught up in the Minimalist revival of the day, hired John Pawson to redo it.
Several years later the house, a gutted shambles on the brink of a poorly conceived expansion and with some of its travertine scavenged for Stewart’s Bedford, NY kitchen, was transferred to Stewart’s daughter Alexis, who put it on the market in 2004.
It sold to retro textile guy Donald Maharam, who disingenuously declared the house an unrestorable ruin and razed it in July.
The culpability compounds with each set of hands that touched this property.
Bunshaft could have put covenants on it before willing it to MoMA, but didn’t, possibly on the assumption that the Museum would, by the nature of its mission, take steps to preserve this important design.
MoMA could have put restrictions on the house when it sold it to Stewart but didn’t. MoMA’s not in the house business, so the idea that MoMA woulda shoulda kept it is naive at best. As is any idea that Bunshaft could’ve intended for MoMA to do anything but benefit from the gift of the house.
But still, the operating principles here were fiduciary, not curatorial or conservationist; and yet the “understanding” with Stewart and the publicity around it at the time, points to a perceived responsibility beyond merely maximizing the museum’s return from a donation. Q: Did the Museum set aside the proceeds from the sale for future acquisitions? “Art-for-art,” as befits a deaccession? I highly doubt it. If not, however the sale was presented–or spun– in the press, on the museum’s ledger, the house was a financial asset, not a work of art.
Stewart could have left the house as is, but didn’t. Can anyone be surprised by that? Martha Stewart is a hack. The queen of hacks. It was her penury and negligence that let the house deteriorate. She’s lucky that an over-inflated sense of your own aesthetic superiority leading to the decimation of a modernist landmark isn’t a crime, or she’d still be in jail.
Ever since the sale, MoMA said it had a “good faith agreement” with Stewart to preserve the house, which was a stripped, weed-covered shell when her lawsuits with the house’s next door neighbor were finally settled.
Pawson’s a frickin’ hack, but he coulda–no, he was just Stewart’s hack.
Alexis… this was a wealth transfer mechanism, nothing more.
Maharam’s a hack, and a spineless hack at that. He could have restored the house if he cared to, instead he hides behind the excuse that it was beyond help. The incremental expense of doing so is approximately zero compared to the price of the land. And it’s not like he can build anything else; wetlands zoning restricts him to Bunshaft’s original footprints (and whatever Stewart/Pawson managed to get approved.)
Did someone mention approvals? That’d be the East Hampton town board who sat by while one of the few interesting feats of architecture in the whole place was modified and destroyed. But then, why should important modernist design get any better treatment in the potato fields of the Hamptons than they do on the corner of Central Park?
In LA, three of Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete block houses hover on the brink of ruin. Important corporate headquarters–including one of Bunshaft’s–get redeveloped with impunity. Modernist preservation groups like Docomomo whimper to no effect. How many 20th century landmarks must be lost before something changes?
Without any explicit agreements anywhere regarding its preservation, without any laws, zoning, landmark designations or other institutional protections, and in the face of the Hamptons real estate juggernaut, the house was doomed before Mrs. Bunshaft’s assistant ever called Frank Campbell.
I used to sail and kayak on Georgica, often with the express purpose of seeing Bunshaft’s art and the luxurious simplicity of his house. So excuse me if I seem especially pissed and despondent.
Martha’s Touch [nationaltrust.org via archinect]
Also: The Architecture Newspaper’s earlier coverage [archpaper.com, includes pic]
Disrepair At Martha’s [the easthampton star, 2002]
HC&G says MoMA chose Stewart’s bid over her Georgica neighbor, developer Harry Macklowe, on the understanding that she would do righter by the house.
[11/05 update: An earlier version of this post criticized the Preservation article as cribbed from previously published accounts of the Bunshaft house saga. This speculation was prompted by similarities in quotes and by a dangling reference to a “Krinsky,” Bunshaft’s biographer who goes otherwise unmentioned in the Preservation piece. The writer of that piece has since contacted me–presumably because I unfairly called him a hack–and provided further information that shows my purely text-based speculations were incorrect. The Krinsky thing was a copy editing oversight; and guess what, the same people talking about the same thing tend to do it in similar ways, so no surprise if their quotes sound similar.
Anyway, my apologies to the writer, an innocent bystander who got hit when I started flinging all those “hack”s around.]

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 of Tokyo. The lot they found was affordable only because it’s tiny and enclosed on all sides. Still, it’s zoned for more than 660 sqm, (including underground) of live/work space.
Because of their shape–a square-ish lot blocked in and invisible from the street, and connected to it by only a narrow passageway or easement–plots like this are called flagpole sites. The site poses just the kind of severe challenges that AB-W has specialized in addressing, though.
To fit their live/work program into the envelope of the building, they have integrated and jig-sawed the home and studio spaces together, and they seem to have managed to carve out incredible space, light, privacy, and even some views on a lot that looks like something out of a Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit. Of course, it’s all in Japanese, so good luck with that excite.co.jp translator…
House & Atelier Bow-Wow [via archinect]
Tokyo House: projects for flagpole, eel, and box sites

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 of Tokyo. The lot they found was affordable only because it’s tiny and enclosed on all sides. Still, it’s zoned for more than 660 sqm, (including underground) of live/work space.
Because of their shape–a square-ish lot blocked in and invisible from the street, and connected to it by only a narrow passageway or easement–plots like this are called flagpole sites. The site poses just the kind of severe challenges that AB-W has specialized in addressing, though.
To fit their live/work program into the envelope of the building, they have integrated and jig-sawed the home and studio spaces together, and they seem to have managed to carve out incredible space, light, privacy, and even some views on a lot that looks like something out of a Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit. Of course, it’s all in Japanese, so good luck with that excite.co.jp translator…
House & Atelier Bow-Wow [via archinect]
Tokyo House: projects for flagpole, eel, and box sites

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.

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 it close up, the young Japanese architect happened to be there with a photographer, taking pictures for the firm’s website. These pictures, in fact, at Klein Dytham.
The site used to be a tiny parking lot, he said, but then the road/sidewalk was widened, cutting into the lot. As you might expect, there’s a tiny little service core in the tapering end at left, but if there’s a basement, its entrance is well-hidden. Basically, what you see is what you get: a rare spec building with a strong architectural presence.
Now, one day back from Tokyo, just as I’m about to post this, I find that Regine has already scooped me on the building that I’ve been walking by almost daily for the last month.

Billboard House Moto Azabu [huh? klein-dytham]

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 the entry courtyard and the stark glass box of the restaurant, which feels suspended in the thick forest behind it. Of course, it’s on a busy corner of a major street (gaien higashi-doori, if you’re coming).
The restaurant is called Waketokuyama, and it’s apparently the Per Se of Tokyo, from the stunningly simple cuisine made with super-fresh ingredients, to the difficulties of getting a reservation. We’ll still look into eating there, but it was the architecture–by Kengo Kuma–which first caught my attention.

Kengo Kuma and Associates [kkaa.co.jp, such a big browser window for such little pictures]

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 appears this is no longer the case. The white carpets seemed freshly–and repeatedly–shampooed, which may explain the lack of odor.
Also, I saw no evidence to support reports that the windows were cracking and popping out, and that the clothes were fading at an excessive rate.
Worst of all, it’s actually quite nice, much nicer than the Rem Koolhaas fiasco, anyway.
Now the good news: we were the only customers in the store during the entire time we were there. Also, the kid’s all-terrain stroller left calligraphic trails in the untrodden carpet.
Prada Tokyo images at Dezain.net
previously: “damn, but that company pisses me off.”

[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]