TROPOLISM

In the unlikely event you do not read Archinect, we bring you this news. The Eiffel Tower, itself a temporary structure, is going to get a temporary addition to celebrate its 120th anniversary, designed by Parisian firm Serero Architects. We're not sure if this is clumsy irony or really, a really sophisticated absurdist play. What is undeniable is that the new temporary observation continues the bolt-together Industrial Age technology with 21st Century profiles to create a unique new tower. The French don't fool around.

Tipped off by io9.

Pruned points us to a sophisticated set of designs for Shelby Farms Park in Memphis, Tennessee. We tend to see these as iterations in designs that started with Fresh Kills Park, made a big splash at Orange County Great Park, and have now continued to the Midwest/South. American landscape design is finally asking the big questions about the function of large parks in cities and suburbs, and we're happy to see the ideas keep flowing.

With an acronym title that makes us envious for not thinking of it first, MONU is difficult to resist. The production and art direction is decidedly low-res: they use only the Photoshop techniques that remind you of the punk posters from the 1980s, or the architecture school posters you made with Photoshop 1.5 in 1991 when you had access to one of the first 300dpi laser printers.

But what is truly special is the breadth of talent contributing. From artist Joep Van Leishout to the always-available (and always interesting) Teddy Cruz, the current issue alone is worth picking up. But there are also a raft of young artists, PhD candidates, and other members of the cross-disciplinary inclined.

MONU issue #8 is out now. A thumbnail of every spread in the issue is also available.

Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture will be showing off their set of passive solar houses at the Hem & Villa housing fair in Malmö, Sweden this summer. The passive solar concept is simple (and ancient): massive walls store the heat of the sun which keeps the house warm, as well as using smartly placed windows to directly warm the house during the day. These strategies tend to work well in dry climates with large day/night temperature swings (like the American southwest, where thermal wall technology was used by Native Americans long ago).

The architects call their designs Passive Houses. Pictured is Villa Atrium, a donut-shaped building with a tree growing in the central courtyard. The ideal climates for these designs are not specified. What is remarkable about these is that not only do they use an ancient concept to create energy efficiency, they do it while creating modern, playful houses.

Maps Of Manhattan combines two of our obsessions: the representational power of maps and the density that is our home base. The Skyscraper Museum's Manhattan Timeformations remains one of our favorite online versions of this genre (and we will dare to date ourselves by reminding you that this project existed on paper/mylar long before it was put it into a computer).

So you might imagine our delight when we came across the online home for culturenow.org's physical map of Manhattan, locating all the public artworks on this fair island. What started out as (I think) an LMDC funded map to attract tourists to Lower Manhattan has blown up into an encyclopedic go-to for public art. Of course, the only way to improve upon it is to make it a searchable database, which it what gives it a place here at Tropolism.

Koolhaas and OMA have officially lost their marbles. One of them found its way into the new design for Dubai, as a Death Star like 44-story sphere floating on the water. This kind of lunacy we can respect. Mr. Ourousoff gives us the details.

Over the weekend Daily Dose pointed us to the crazy-wavy Chicago building called Aqua, which, despite its so-so renderings, is turning out to be completely awesome in real-life rendering. Also known as reinforced concrete.

(If concrete is poured in Chicago, does anyone notice? Sorry, I didn't want you to think I'd mellowed out too much on Chicago. I've mellowed out just a little.)

The construction photos remind us of a love child between Harrison's swoopiness at NYC's Metropolitan Opera House and Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City. Complete with plinth holding the waviness above the city grid. The project was designed by Studio Gang Architects. Check out their website for more pictures, including a great inspiration picture of an eroded boulder and some more construction photos. This may be an example of the built work being better than its renderings.

Tropolism took a vacation to sunny Palm Springs, California. While there we were fortunate to come across Julius Shulman: Palm Springs at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

This was our first trip to Palm Springs, and we spent the first few days looking up our favorite buildings in the area, as well as coming across some surprises, such as Albert Frey's 1960 Schiff House, now being renovated.

Only after we had done this initial exploration did we discover the Shulman show at PSAM. The show is at once a focused retrospective of Shulman's work (concentrating on only the Palm Springs buildings he photographed) and a survey of great modern buildings in Palm Springs. On display is Shulman's famous image of the Kaufmann Desert House, a picture many architects probably see in their minds when they think of Neutra. Yet equal emphasis is paid to Neutra's Maslon House, stupidly demolished in 2002. The images are supplemented throughout with original architectural renderings, floor plans, and elevations, further emphasizing this as a survey not just of Shulman, but of Palm Springs Modernism. The show is helpfully organized by architect.

Our only complaint with the show is its arrangement. Because much of the show is on free-standing partitions, either permanent or specially built for the exhibition, it does not lend itself to wrapping around corners the way a traditional 4-walled room does. Yet the show wraps, and wraps, and it is sometimes impossible to understand where to proceed next to see the rest of that particular architect's oevre. The architects are given large numbers next to their names, yet some of the architects are displayed out of numerical order. These are minor issues, but from the standpoint of anyone who has designed exhibitions, it is bewildering to see such freshman flubs at all.

Even though the architectural celebutantes are well-represented (Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, and John Lautner), lesser known architects are given equal time (Paul R. Williams and A. Quincy Jones, Dan Palmer and William Krisel, Donald Wexler, William Cody, and E. Stewart Williams). There are fewer masterpieces among this group, but they arguably have had a more powerful voice in shaping the character and culture of modernism that exists in Palm Springs. They shaped it both through the sheer number of good-to-great buildings in the Coachella Valley, and the breadth of their talent, imagination, and interests. E. Stewart Williams is case in point: he designed the 1946 Frank Sinatra House, the beautiful 1954 Edris House, and the equisitely detailed 1957 Santa Fe Savings and Loan Building. (which we drove by a dozen times on our long weekend) and, of course, the building housing the exhibition. There are few places in suburban America that can lay claim to this much per-capita Modernism.

Special thank you to Stephen Monkarsh, proprietor of Palm Springs' best collection of architectural books, who directed us to the exhibition. Julius Shulman: Palm Springs is also a great book, available on Amazon.

From Roldan + Berengue, arqts. in Barcelona comes a very interesting assemblage inspired by the ultimate in architectural references: a Kurasawa film. Taking their cue from the opening scene of Kurasawa's 1985 Ran, where the main characters are seated in an outdoor room defined by a fabric wall, the architects have created a textile-textured wall using bent ceramic tile modules and irregularly shaped support vertical units. The project, particularly floorplans, bear the unmistakable fingerprints of another Catalan master we like. Not only that, the thing got built for this product fair.

Core 77 has a great piece on turning bamboo into building products, including a follow-up piece here. Most of this isn't news to anyone who has taken an continuing education course on the topic, but it's a great overview nonetheless.

After Zaha's much trumped-up by kind of 'eh' ski lift thingy, she continues to rock out in Innsbruck, Austria (as one does) by doing a whole system full of stations. Out of concrete and swoopy white glass. Pictured. Yeah, just scroll down that link alone for pictured swoopy white glass goodness. And if that doesn't do it for you, check out the crazy light show from the grand opening of the system.

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File under ephemera: a model of Mies Van Der Rohe's grave stone, by Strangeharvest, complete with pdf so you can make your own. The text is slightly different than the rubbing I took as a wee graduate student in 1994, but the proportions are just right.