TROPOLISM

For anyone who has been a regular visitor to Chelsea art galleries in the last eight years, the new Gordon Matta-Clark show at the Whitney will hold little that is new. At some point, most of the works in the show have been on display. In fact, the only works I cannot recall seeing were the film of Day's End, the hair piece, the Anarchitecture photographs, and some of the early energy-force drawings (in fact, some works are missing, like Graffiti Truck.) Yet what the show does offer is collecting all of these works in one room, the top floor of the Whitney, in a sassy-titled show You Are The Measure.

Read the rest of the review by clicking "Continue Reading".

It's been a while since a project emerged that is at once a beautiful proposal and an act of political critique. The proposal for a suspended funeral structure for Baghdad by Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo O. C. de Ostos (warning: flash heavy website) combines the two qualities with an elegance not seen since Archigram. And, like Archigram, we are left wondering if this is a rhetorical proposal, or a visionary understanding of our current cultural conditions. This project will appear in the next issue of Pamphlet Architecture.

Pruned points the way to this proposal with some wonderful observations about how some aspects of it it already exists.

We love it when a weblog hits their stride. Do You Want Some Coffee? has been summarizing, and making informed commentary, on some of the lectures it lists, offering something unique to online architectural discourse. It's fascinating, and brilliantly useful. Architecture lectures, like many lectures, disappear without this kind of public note-taking. It's a way of seeing what's happening in lectures without having to be at each one.

The best example of this is the post about a recent symposium on Building Information Management (BIM). The post gives us the takeaway up front, and places the conversation in the world of other conversations.

Graffiti Research Lab may seem more up Coolhunting's alley, but we were turned on when a fellow architect sent along the link to The Drip Sessions, which incorporates a lot of DIY technology, from paint bottles to high-power projectors, all in service of creating light graffiti on New York City buildings (pictured). This project is our favorite, because it is one of the most beautiful. It can be interpreted as an act of defacement, or enhancement, depending on your perspective. Perhaps the best part is that the video is like an instruction video. I want a drippy paint bottle too.

Some of the other projects are more guerilla, like the brilliant and politically charged Threat Advisory Tower. Although the guy leaning over the parapet freaked us out. Life/safety, yo, we have a license for a reason. We received a more unadultered thrill watching the Light Criticism project in action, when hoodie'd artists walk up to and tape up black masks over those stupid moving billboards that endlessly repeat the same ad for television shows, and in the process create a moving work of art.

Tropolism stands corrected. The smashup panes of glass at IIT, subject of one of our very first posts, were replacement glass from a 1970s renovation. The source of this is a press release describing the origin of the panes. The same press release we linked to in our original post. Whether our fact checker simply neglected to read the last sentence of the press release, the one that would have made our little rant entirely moot, or the release was post-tropolism revised, is not important. Mies' glass was long gone by the time the demolition derby came to town.

The February issue of Artforum includes an article appraising the renovations of Crown Hall at IIT and Yale University Art Gallery. You'll recall our irritation at the destruction of the original glass from IIT. We haven't seen Crown Hall since its renovation, but we're looking forward to it after reading this article. This kind of attention is why we are architects:

Stopping this spontaneous defenestration (and meeting present-day code) required doubling the glass thickness to half an inch. To hold the extra weight, the “bite” of the stops on the glass needed to be increased from five-eighths of an inch to three-quarters. Great controversy surrounded how this should be done. Simply using thicker stops would make the black steel profile too heavy. The eventual solution was to use stops that tapered from five-eighths on the outside to three-quarters at the point of contact with the glass. This was visually and practically acceptable, but it introduced nonorthogonal planes to Mies’s obsessively rectilinear world; it also meant replacing the original stock steel stops with custom-made ones.

When the renderings first broke, and sites like Triple Mint wrote love letters to the development called 40 Mercer, we were skeptical. Sure, the retractable glass walls were amazing. Nouvel is a wonderful architect, but his designs often teeter toward the garish and gimmick. Would the proof be in the pudding?

We are happy to say that 40 Mercer is now #1 on our Two Dozen Lis, our always-updated list of recent residential buildings by celebrity architects in Manhattan. The building's curtain wall out-details Meier3 in beauty and complexity. The complexity in this case is in the service of giving the glass the correct scale for a Soho loft building, bringing the curtain wall life with color and prismatic glass, and lending a rhythm that is entirely consistent with cast iron building facades. For those looking to champion modern design in an historic district, this is the best example we can find.

The only piece that doesn't fit in to what we know is the blue glass louvered canopy on the top of the building at its eastern end. But given how wonderful the rest of the building is, we have high hopes that this is something new for the area.

Click Continue Reading for more pictures.

Robert A.M. Stern was the critic no one wanted to have when I was a student at Columbia. If you put his studio as anything but last in your preferences, you would get him. It was a widely held belief that if you took his studio, you'd be forced to do po-mo work all the time. This was far from reality, as I learned by sitting in a studio immediately adjacent to Bob Stern's studio, and overhearing his desk crits. Mr. Stern was a pragmatic critic, holding students' feet to the fire on making their projects work, and making their product match their premises. In short, he was an unwavering demand that your proposal live up to your words about it. I secretly loved him for that: Columbia in the mid 1990s was a lot of words and renderings of clouds, and light on the discussion of how buildings work in the world.

Yet a continued disappointment is that while Mr. Stern's office tends to produce architecture that contributes to the city, and is even civic in a traditional sense (in that it is guided by having generous and appropriately grand public spaces), the materials, forms, and sequences rarely thrill. There is no bite.

Of course, in this day and age, good architecture is a category that is hard to find. There is bad architecture, poor architecture, lame architecture, tired architecture, acceptable architcture, not bad architecture, and, occasionally, Great Architecture. But good is a category underrepresented.

We file Mr. Stern's design for the Museum of African Art in the good-to-very-good category. It's an acceptably civic front that abstracts a non-19th century western architectural form, and it has a innovative (but workable!) mix of residential development and institutional functions. And, it's got the best salesman in the business behind an institution without a permanent home.

The exhibition "Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines", on view now at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, is in our world the perfect exhibition: about rare architectural publications, and curated by Beatriz Colomina. The show is only up until February 24th, so rush down. There can never be enough architectural book love.

Until you get there, you may soak up the magazine goodness at the show's excellent (and simple, yo. Take note architects!) website. Mr. Ourousoff from the Times has also reviewed the show today.

Back when we last checked in on Moynihan Station, Madison Square Garden was all set to cross 8th Avenue and devour a second McKim, Mead, and White building. Then...silence. The proposal seemed dead as the previous governor wrapped up his administration.

An article in The New York Observer gives us an update on what's been happening since election day, when we got a new governor. The new governor is a bit more enthusiastic about these projects, and has appointed a head of the Empire State Development Corporation that is interested in not only developper good, but hey, the public good as well. At least his reaching-out has temporarily addressed concerns by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, one of the groups opposed to the developer plan B for Penn Station. The devil is always in the details, or in this case, the large, open, sunlight filled public rooms, and so we await developments with baited breath.

Today's New York Times reports not once but twice about a planned arts supercomplex in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The articles cover all the art hot topics of the day: the pros and cons of the development, east meets west, the Bilbao effect, art as franchise is good or bad, and art as global or home-grown activity. But the real thrill of the article is the rendering of Zaha Hadid's contribution: a crazy, snakelike performing arts center. The audacity of the rendering reminds us of the immortal Gold Lego proposal for the Louvre. The image borders on completely-surreal without edging into acid-trip (while getting oh, so close).

It's cardboard from the other side of the globe: the Australian design firm DireTribe constructed a full-size replica of a classic Parisian apartment in cardboard. Then, they let kids with crayons take over, imagining what it would be like to live on the other side of the globe. You can read more about the project on their website. Click on the cardboard chair, marked "Pen Plan Paris" when you mouse over it.

What we want to know is does anyone have crayons in São Paolo?

This morning our parent site Cool Hunting unleashes upon the world pictures of Daniela Thomas and Felipe Tassara Architecture at São Paulo Fashion Week. Their installations in the Bienale building by Oscar Neimeyer are entirely composed of white cardboard. The casual nature of the material offsets the coolness of Neimeyer's famous sculptural white concrete to create new spaces and functions inside the existing building.

For more cardboard love, see some more pictures at Moto-à-Porter.

For even more cardboard love, check back here later today.