Adding to an already impressive couple of blocks in West Chelsea, Manhattan, is Shigeru Ban's new design for The Metal Shutter Houses. That's the name for a condo with nine duplex apartments with jaw-dropping exterior features. Renderings are unveiled today in the New York Times. Simply amazing, and surely to rate high on the two-dozen list, whenever we get around to updating it with Nouvel's second apartment building, Herzog & DeMeuron's 40 Bond Street, and the like.
Inhabitat gives us a list of ways design students can live sustainably. What is intriguing is that the tips include not only actions that affect our physical environment, global and local, but tips for personal wellness. Nothing earth-shattering, to those of us in the working world who must manage our time and commitments, but to students, this will be front page news.
Someone thankfully advised Virgin Galactic to come to their senses after releasing their underwhelming concept ideas for a spaceport design: they held a design competition and hired Foster and Partners. The recently announced design, while being far from the Star Wars style Rebel Base we have always imagined, promises to be a thoughtful building prototype for an equally unique flying experience. This might just be the Saarinen TWA terminal for the Space Age.
Title: Green Roof—A Case Study: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' Design For the Headquarters of the American Society of Landscape Architects
Author: Christian Werthmann
Publication Date: October 1, 2007
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 1568986858
Title: Natural Architecture
Author: Alessandro Rocca
Publication Date: November 5, 2007
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 1568987218
The folks at Princeton Architectural Press have done it again: they have sent us a two-pack that again begs for a comparative review.
Green Roof is the rarest of architectural books. It is a case study of a single project (the green roof for the Headquarters of the American Society of Landscape Architects) that successfully balances theoretical concerns, models and sketches and computer renderings from a messy design process, reproductions of key construction drawings and details, documentation of the construction process, and great, informative photography of the final project. Every page is filled with useful, clear, and beautifully presented information. The photography is stunning. The project's design is fairly simple, and not the most formally interesting of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' work. And yet the book contains a persuasive point of view (the United States need more green roof projects), with a theoretical bias (green roof projects are an integral part of modern living), a position on how the project fits into the larger urban whole, all the while being a powerfully pragmatic reference book (complete with product manufacturers and descriptions of every plant species used) for how to do a project like this, from beginning to end. After years of blah rendering-filled monographs and cheeky formal explorations, this kind of book is not only welcome, but long overdue.
Natural Architecture is a cursory survey of artists whose works are sculptures using materials found in nature: trees, branches, rocks, soil, and streams. The artists surveys are all contemporary, and a wide range of explorations and concerns are covered. Included are a few big names (Olafur Eliasson, nArchitects), but the majority of the artists are probably known only to people who follow this sort of thing. The author makes the correct decisions to show work that is post-Land Art (if there is such a thing), work that both borders on interesting vernacular construction as well as the cutting edge of contemporary art and architecture, and work that is being done by artists worldwide. While some of the images are grainy and underexposed, they do capture the ephemeral nature of works made by natural materials, and the labor and processes needed to build them. The graphic design is mostly unobtrusive, except for some titles that seem ripped from my graduating portfolio circa 1997. But these are minor points. Like many surveys of particular themes of art, this book is one of the more useful compilations, with enough breadth of images to appeal to a wide range of artists and architects.
Green Roof: A Case Study: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' Design For the Headquarters of the American Society of Landscape Architects
Forgive us for being so slow on the ball on this; a travelling exhibition of Maya Lin's gorgeous new installations, Systematic Landscapes, opens at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis this week. Pictured from the show is Water Line, as captured by Jen S on flickr.
From Future Feeder:
0lll’s exhaustive photo diary of the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion 2007 by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen
Brilliant as ever.
There's nothing we love more than a good argument over Bob Stern. When we were graduate students at Columbia University in the mid-1990s, everyone avoided having him for design studio, thinking that he would make everyone design in historical pastiche. One semester, I sat adjacent his studio; low and behold his criticism was insightful, pragmatic, and informed by experience. True, he was a shade conservative, and positively curmudgeonly, but he never failed to call bullshit when contemporary architectural theory failed to produce what it said it was supposed to produce. For that, I secretly admired him. He was asking the same questions I was asking, even though the forms I chose to ask them in weren't the ones his office was producing. The students who were unlucky and got stuck in his studio mistakenly argued with Bob over simple formal machinations, without creating a concrete idea of what they were trying to produce; it was clear that Bob The Critic was formally agnostic (or perhaps omnivorous), so long as what you said you were achieving were the results you actually produced. I longed to bring him over to my desk and say "hey, I think I'm doing what you are asking for, but it looks different. What do you think?" As a wee student, I never had the courage to ask him.
And so we think that we get Bob. 15 Central Park West is case in point, Mr. Stern at his finest form, New York old money luxe created anew. When the game is to make a good apartment building, make it really, really good. Use the best materials, use layouts that work, take a stand for proportions and rooms that make all New York apartment dwellers drool, and make the developer figure out who to market it to to pay for the increased cost of the building. Of course Mr. Stern's first impulse is to use tried and true forms and details from long ago. And people are vocal about liking the building, politely admiring its historical aspects but keeping their distance, or really hating it for being a photocopy of another age (this last one we never really get, because unless it's an exact replica of another building, it's always going to be new and different. This is a debate for another time.) Guess what: the historical forms and proportions still work. In that they produce something people will buy, and be passionate about living in.
Of course, after taking the gorgeous fantasy trip through 15 CPW's apartments, motor court, classic dining rooms, and grand lobby, we are left asking: why can't it be done without using the historical cues? Can I have a not-so-dowdy bathroom vanity cabinet, and a kitchen that doesn't look like the one we have at the country manor? Can we keep the good proportions, well-designed windows, and great detailing, all the while giving us a little (or a lot) of the 20th Century's uncanny? Miss Representation perfectly encapsulates the problem:
...the failure of new housing to evoke the grandeur of a 30-foot long sitting room isn't really about limestone sheathing or how big the windows are: it's about whether or not your sitting room is 30 fucking feet long. And it isn't.
Like the students I remember in his design studio, architects doing new housing in New York make the same mistake. Some exceptions, of course, can be found in #s 1-5 at the Two Dozen list. In the majority of celebutante housing designs the design concerns are about twitchy wrappers, space-age materials, sharks with lasers, or whatever else is being used to keep one branded as cutting edge. This focus of attention is an astonishingly sophomoric failure to look at what makes living spaces great, pleasurable, desirable. Because Mr. Stern creates great living spaces, elegant entries, and uses his estimable powers as a persuader to cause developers to pony up for great materials, it's easy for him to stand out in this context. And whether you like his forms or not, you cannot deny that he has won the game he set out to play, a game we think is worth playing in every housing development the world over. We'll let you know when we see someone else step up too.
From Design Verb, an architectural installation by artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck. Very Gordon Matta-Clark, except with a dash of imagination from someone who built models of the Death Star's surface when they were kids.
At Citibloc.com, a collection of very tall building projects. Not a complete list, but worth checking out.
The new London office is hopping. Today they alert us to an review by Hugh Pearman, the peerless architecture critic of the London Times. It's a review of the Global Cities show at Tate Modern. He clues us in to the surprise of the show, as well as it's predictability. A taste:
I’m fond of Gehry, but no, I don’t want to talk to him right now. No offence. Oh, blimey, there’s Zaha Hadid, too. Look, she’s great, but I really must dash. There are days when I just don’t much fancy the big business of world architecture.
A London correspondent tipped us off to something that is old news over there: Zaha Hadid won a competition for the London Architecture Foundation's new building. And redesigned it. We like the redesign better than the original project, probably because it's like a giant silver version of her gold lego project.
We can't leave for holiday without telling you about the new exhibition "The New York Bike Share Project", which opens July 7-11. Better yet, they enhance the more traditional exhibition by hosting a design charette and running a small Bike Share Project of their own. From The Storefront For Art And Architecture, you can get a free bike (for sharing, yo), July 7-11. Tropolism means proposing solutions.
