Continuing our love to websites documenting vanishing St. Louis we bring you, er, Vanishing St. Louis, a new site devoted to documenting threatened landmarks in the St. Louis area. Such a small city can't afford to have too few of these websites: they're implosion happy in that town.
We're a bit slow on the draw on this one, but we can't let the week end without pointing it out. Rafael Viñoly, one of the architects who worked under the THINK New York banner during the WTC competition, gave a lecture at 7WTC on January 18th describing how unnecessary the Freedom Tower is. The above diagram was copied from Gothamist, who also provides a complete description on the lecture.
We mentioned a little while ago about our allergy to argumentum ad hominem. It flared up in full force upon reading Philip Noble's latest column in Metropolis, so much so that we had to reach for our medication. Mr. Noble makes plain his love of the OMA-designed IIT Student Center in Chicago, but still can't bring himself to like Rem Koolhaas. The complaint gives us the so-whats. I can't say I care to care about any architect I'm not personal friends with. The list of Rem Infractions listed in the article make his argument ring of an inferiority complex that should stay in therapy sessions. However, the crux of his argument brings ad hominem to a whole new level, and something worthy of debate:
Can I not, one might also ask, separate the tics of a genius personality from the work of a genius? No, I would proudly respond, I cannot. And neither should you: when a building is itself leveraged on the personality of its builder—as it always is in the case of Rem and so many others who need not be mentioned here again (okay: Peter, Zaha, Richard, Danny)—then that personality, tics and all, becomes part of what one must assess to understand the finished work.
While we at Tropolism prefer to see buildings as most people do--apart from the journalism and gossip that surrounds their making--and entirely focus on how the body of the building interacts with the life of the city, we do agree that it's possible to gain insight into the artistic will of an architect by understanding their personal eccentricities. But what does that give us, except some more Understanding? Understanding is the booby prize. In a hundred years, IIT will still exist in some form, and the slights received by journalists from Rem in the late 20th and early 21st century will seem like trivialities. It is a rare occasion (I cannot think of a single occurence) when our squabbling is not outlived by the buildings we produce, and their effects on urban life. Besides, there are so many other conversations in the city, it's difficult to focus on a few rants, particularly from architects.
Via Greg.org.
Title: Tom Kundig: Houses
Editor: Dung Ngo
Publication Date: January 3, 2007
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 1-56898-605-X
This monograph for architect Tom Kundig is another example of how the approach to architectural works can be perfectly suited to the work itself. The five houses in this monograph are filled with obsessive details, raw materials, and blackened steel with the fabrication markings left on it. The monograph format is filled with obsessive photographs of the details, sketches, and diagrams, bringing the richness of the materials to life.
On a diagrammatic level the houses are for the most part unremarkable spaces: most of them are simple boxes. Yet it is the abundant detailing that causes a functional upending to most of the spaces. Instead of easy-access doors, the houses contain concrete cabinet doors, heavy corten steel doors, giant corten plates as house shutters, and over detailed and under bright light fixtures. The effect would be maddening--enough to warrant me not even writing this review--if it were not for the fact that many of the details serve to disrupt domestic smoothness. In a world of expensive houses, creating a simple space with domesticity-resistant details is a brilliant subversion of the task of delivering a well-built house.
This is not to imply that Mr. Kundig is this conceptual about his work, or that he thinks of his houses as anything less than the perfect home. For everyone. The Studio House, with its egg-shaped lights, egg-shaped wheels, egg-shaped fireplace, and egg-shaped soap dish, is reminiscent of the scene described in Adolf Loos' essay "The Poor Little Rich Man": a house filled with everything for living, designed by the architect. Nothing more will fit.
Yet the crafting of these pieces is beautiful and precise, while maintaining the patina of heavy construction. In the rest of the houses, the detailing is less precious but more outgrageous, by being brought to the scale of architectural device. It is pitch-perfect. In the Chicken Point Cabin (pictured after you click "Continue Reading", an entire glass facade opens by an ingenius pully system. The impossibly picturesque setting for the Delta Shelter is let in through huge sliding shutters, essentially double-height walls that can be hand-cranked to shutter the house (from a nuclear blast, one can only suppose. It's beautiful anyway.) The Hot Rod House has a beautiful winding stair made entirely out of blackened steel: an element of rawness winding through the house. The devices become more sophisticated in each house. We look forward to the next monograph.
While cleaning out old bookmarks today, we hit upon B.E.L.T. (B.E.L.T.: Built Environment In Layman's Terms), which we had apparently urgently bookmarked twelve months ago.
The weblog documents many of the hidden treasures in greater the St. Louis area, that wonderful crossroads between the south, the southwest, and the midwest. Because St. Louis is a very small city that a century ago was competing with Chicago for midwest dominance, so living there is like living in your great-grandmother's attic: there are unique treasures everywhere, decaying and long forgotten. We should know: we lived there for five years, when we attended Washington University as an architecture undergraduate. The architectural treasures of St. Louis span from the World's Fair of 1904 (The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, which gave Washington University most of its original buildings), to the mid-century midwest modernists, to the modernist prototype department stores, to art deco inspired Route 66 motels, to a few scattered inspired post-structuralist architects in the late 1980s. The treasures are in many cases rapidly disappearing. We're glad that B.E.L.T. is there to document it.
Today's New York Times reports about the development of WTC Towers 2, 3, and 4. Employees of Foster, Maki, and Rogers are sharing a single, huge office space on the 11th Floor of 7 WTC, opened three weeks ago. The super studio also combines engineers and the lone architect of record for the project. In short, Silverstein (A master planner for the 21st Century? Urban heir to Robert Moses?) has created what no agency, competition, public comments hearing, or collaborative not-for-profit study has been able to produce: a working, collaborative effort. It's the single brilliant thing to come of the WTC site.
Because of this turn of events, our first-glance gloomy estimation of the towers' design now appears to have been hasty. We've changed our assessment to "intriguing enough to wait for more information".
Update Bonus Add-On to yesterday's post about the Shenzen Stock Exchange: More pictures and a press release, all given to dezeen directly from OMA. The project is definitely brutal, fabulous, and over the top. We're still curious about how it's physically connected to the city. Click Continue Reading for a reader-submitted visual of the unbuilt Mies convention center.
BLDGBLOG points us to a gorgeous site hailing from London called StrangeHarvest. I like to think of it as an English cousin of BLDGBLOG, reflecting an appetite for constructed environments and their relationship to nature. Case in point: the post about astroturfing Texas Highway medians from the January 1971 issue of Texas Highways, whose current manifestation is TexasFreeway.com. This stuff keeps us warm at night.
Unique to StrangeHarvest are some original visual artworks. Our favorite: the highway collages.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted against the proposed development of 980 Madison Avenue, featuring the glass towers atop a low existing structure. After all the fireworks we were hoping for something a little more conciliatory. Is the LPC getting gunshy? Did the project never have a chance in hell from the get-go? Will the developer continue at this location?
Via Curbed, where they include entertaining quotes from the Commission.
Now that OMA is without AMO and Prince-Ramus, it appears that they have gone back to their earliest roots: cutting, pasting, and morphing disappeared Mies Van der Rohe projects to delirious ends (also, see S, M, L, XL for the 1986 Milan Triennale installation). Recently the Shenzhen Stock Exchange announced that OMA had designed their new exchange and offices, pictured above.
We're not sure what to think. Brilliant, or contrived? Cutting edge, or jumped the shark? Brutal, or excess hubris? We can't find more than this rendering, so we'll wait for more pretty pictures before forming our opinion.
Last year we visited The Laurel Canyon House, a project designed by Orenj (principals and friends of ours Mike Jacobs and Aaron Neubert) and completed late last year. The house is approached on zippy, hilly, and furiously trafficked Laural Canyon Boulevard; I turned into the driveway much the way one would in a stunt turn on an television car chase. Skid to a stop.
The house is a mute wall along the highway, mitigating its noise, presenting a blank stucco face to the road. One enters through the side of the house, around the blank wall, as if to turn one's attention away from the hectic nature of your near-death approach. Once inside, the house is breezily open, white, and oriented toward a dense thicket of woods improbably close to the road you were just on. The rear wall of the house is entirely glass, and because the ground slopes down from the road, the back of the house is high above a creek. You are living in the trees. The effect is nothing short of serene. At that moment, I lost interest in the house itself, and was captivated by the experience of watching the trees and the water.
Today's LA Times parallels my experience pretty well, as well as enumerating the challenges encountered while building on such a difficult site. Of interest is the trend toward sites like this: Los Angeles's version of "urban infill".
