TROPOLISM

Yes, that is the Sagrada Familia Cathedral by Gaudi...rendered in LEGO. From Piece of Peace exhibition in Shibuya.

More of these at DTYBYWL.

[Editor's note: Our correspondent Saharat Surattatnont had so much fun at Tuesday's Fourth Annual Master Disaster Architects duel that his post on the evening showed up last night. Enjoy!]

Click Continue Reading for Sah's complete review.

The South Pole got a new building. Replacing the 1975 geodesic dome at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, architects Ferraro Choi designed a low-impact building that does two things really well. The building is elevated and shaped so that it creates air movement that sweeps snow away from its underside, preventing the special Antarctic building hazard death-by-snow-drift. It also is supported on columns that can be extended, so that when the snow does drift the building simply raises up. There is an awesome flash animation of this process, created with what is undoubtedly the first version of PowerPoint.

The building includes amenities such as a hydroponic greenhouse and some recreational areas. While this high-tech structure sounds like paradise for escape-from-civilization freaks, please remember that its inhabitants are in the middle of nowhere, and are only allowed two showers a week. Don't take our word for it, you can check in on the station yourself with one of the many webcams (with weather updates!) out there (seriously, do we need more than one of these?).

I know that we started our career as a writer publicly slamming Gwathmey Siegal Associates for the Sculpture for Living, and because of that, you might think that we have something against the firm. Particularly since we basically didn't let the issue to rest for two years. Three, if you include this paragrph, which borders on apophasis.

But the core point we wish to make is that the firm does great work in non-NYC cities, at times, and the promise of Gwathmey's early work, the stuff that made him one of the New York Five, is simply unfulfilled. Projects like Whig Hall addition/renovation of 1972 shows an out-of-the-gate appreciation of the surreal tension created when Corbusian modernism stitched into American urban and rural contexts. It's a project that presages not pomo kitsch, but what happened after pomo, when 1920s modernism became just another historical meme to be played with, creating something entirely new. Or, viewed differently, that all historial memes would lose their historical significance, and everything from caves to pediments to s-curves and ship's handrails all were simply legitimate tools for the expression of architectural ideas. Some bigger projects (the addition to the Fogg at Harvard included) are extensions on this theme.

Unfortunately, until the firm stops doing these segmented curved corners out of cheap aluminum curtainwall systems, with 80s-grid spandrel panels, with another blocky volume stuck on top of the building, as they are doing at 240 Park Avenue South, we are going to have to keep waiting for Gwathmey's promise to be fulfilled.

Geek Architecture News: at 1:58pm (timezone unknown) today, the LEGO brick celebrates its 50th anniversary. Via Slashdot.

Awesome NYC bookstore alert: Storefront for Art and Architecture is having a micro-bookstore in the "eastern end" of the gallery. The bookstore is curated by Storefront luminaries known for their amazing book collections (ie Beatriz Colomina).

NYC has a dearth of great Architectural bookstores, at least in terms of the scale of those to be found on the west coast. Daily Dose, which pointed us to the Storefront bookstore, has also compiled a list of NYC bookshops.

From Lausanne: a steel and wood tree furniture/architecture piece designed by Samuel Wilkinson & Oloom. Interior design for outdoor rooms. Via architechnophilia.

We are specifications junkies. We admit it. See the recent book review. And we would never have posted about the city colors if they hadn't included the exact pantone numbers.

And so this article about how to build your own Apple store, over at Oobject, which includes exact specifications, was destined to excite us. Add it to the list.

To continue the thread of interesting mapping of data, we present a long-bookmarked favorite, Radical Cartography. The simple interface yields dozens of mapping exercises, from the data-filled to the unconventional. Our favorite: Area Codes.

One of the things we like to celebrate is color. Certain design professions have more sophisticated approaches and dialogues about color than architects: interior designers and graphic designers, to name two. The latter category, in the person of Todd Falkowsky, has created a series of color strips for each of Canada's provincial and territorial capitals. The result is interesting, particularly the observation about how intuition informs the process. What we'd like to see is a whole color pallette, not just a test strip of three, for each urban area. Huge samples that would represent each city.

Via Brand Avenue.

Olafur Eliasson is apparently conquering the world. From Archidose comes the news of an installation of around 7,000 platinum-glazed ceramic tiles in a courtyard of a house by Tadao Ando, in Tokyo. You already know of our love for golden legos; this just brings us one step closer to our dream.

The original article at Architectural Digest focuses more on the building, and has a good slideshow of the project.

We have long known about the conferences sponsored by Urban Age, but only recently did we discover their wonderful website. It's a handy repository of all the data generated do date from their conferences and research. Some of this work undoubtedly shows up in their new book (note to Phaidon: send us a review copy already), but it is irresistible to flip through it online.

Not only do they have pretty, if simple, comparisons of basic information of their key cities. They also have some extensive raw data from each city collected in both PDF and protected spreadsheet formats. Happy reading.

New York City's Standard Hotel, the gorgeous building going up in New York City's Meatpacking district, proudly straddling the High Line as it rises, now has a website to match the building's awesomeness. The construction photo updates every 15 minutes.

Via the ever-vigilant Curbed.

Title: Transmaterial 2: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment
Author: Blaine Brownell

Publication Date: February 19, 2008

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

ISBN: 156898748X

What is the definition of transmaterial? The title of the upcoming catalog sequel from Princeton Architectural Press has us asking a lot of great questions.

Click Continue Reading for the full book review.

Greg Allen directs us to the destruction of the Union Tank Car Dome of 1958 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The dome was the first geodesic dome on an industrial scale, and was demolished without notice last November.

Or was it? Greg points out that the building had had the attention of some preservationists for about ten years, yet no one bought it, even when it was going for only $500,000. That's less than half of the median price of a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Greg's observations about what is missing from the process of saving important but not-yet-landmarked modernist structures are not to be missed.