TROPOLISM

Sorry for being so late on props to Marion Mahony. A century plus late. The first woman to obtain an architect's license in Illinois was also the talent behind the groundbreaking rendering style of the Frank Lloyd Wright's 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio. The portfolio all architecture students learn about, the one that influenced spatial ideas in Bauhaus modernism by its use of Japanese representational and, well, spatial ideas. It wasn't FLW, it was MM.

Being a woman, Mahony could not even get her memoir published before she died. Manuscripts are available in Chicago and New York, but it is now online, and in a groundbreaking way: a manuscript that is published and formatted for web viewing. Take that, FLW!

In what has rapidly become our favorite new meme, yet another reader has directed our attention toward yet another beautiful gas station. This one appears to be actually functioning, and still gorgeous after 70 years, based on the photos in this great gallery. It's by Arne Jacobsen, in Copenhagen, and dates to 1937.

You might remember the Southpoint Competition a year or so ago, which proposed preserving the old asylum at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, NYC. We do: we submitted an entry for it. The former building is load bearing masonry, with stone facing, and is vaguely castle-like. For some this building represents some kind of pinnacle of Gothic Revival Architecture. We don't get that, probably because we attended a university that was designed by Cope and Stewardson. A few castellated cornices does not groundbreaking Gothic Revival make, but that is our opinion.

Anyone who has visited the asylum knows that the old building is little more than a ruin, stabilized by luck, some steel, and a lot of ivy. And some theatrical uplighting. Which made the idea of preserving it something short of silly, both from a cost standpoint and a use standpoint. It's frankly more interesting as a ruin...turning it into a building again would make it bland again.

At any rate, the old walls have tipped definitively (ouch, sorry for unintended pun) into the ruin category. It has partially collapsed. If a building collapses on Roosevelt Island, does anyone see it? Well, yes. A week later, we totally get word of it.

Via Curbed, who also has some other interesting links to follow on the subject of crumbling NYC buildings.

A few months ago (which is like four entries ago) we linked to The Most Beautiful Gas Station of the world. Our tardy reading of Tropomail this weekend tipped us off to a contender for the title: a gas station by Jean Prouve, as installed at the Vitra headquarters (pictured). Tipped off by the photographer, Vigggo.

It's that time of year: the end-of-year lists. We don't have one. But we're on one list's top 100! At 98. But still!

We've made no secret about our admiration for Bob AM Stern's approach to education. The Times throws some respect his way today, too. Not enough to get mentioned in Ourousoff's article, but he probably prefers to be the sole subject of an article than to be grouped together with everyone else.

Sorry to be so tardy on this. Greg Allen gives us another insightful article on the effect of an Art World with lots of rich people buying up everything in sight. And he is searching for the art that is going to be around when the rich folks stick to investing in real estate.

And, he links to a huge and interesting PDF document from the Olafur Eliasson studio. Just in time for the holidays!

We usually don't link to websites from architects: our inbox is filled with them, and the navigation alone usually causes us to run the other way. This one got our attention though. The CCA has launched a companion website for their imaginative exhibition Sorry, Out Of Gas. With this exhibition, CCA has taken the world of architecture to Green 2.0: seeing energy crises and environmental concerns in a cultural and recent-historical context, as a way to shape the dialogue and practices of the present day.

The website interface is simple, and the information is presented as a series of slideshows. We think the touch of having the slide transitions look like real live slides flipping forward (in the days before digital slide programs) is particularly elegant. It's a way of visiting the exhibition that is effective, and saves you the trip to Montreal. If the installed exhibition is big documentary photos on a wall, I'd rather see it online anyway.

Also presented is a work that was found in the press kit: An Endangered Species, a booklet amusingly illustrated by Harriet Russell.

We can't get enough of this design. And we stand by our statements after seeing the plethora of renderings at Dezeen.

It's difficult to believe, but after Jean Nouvel's sensitive-yet-stunning 40 Mercer, his sparkly-yet-stunning 100 Eleventh Avenue, Jean Nouvel comes through with another groundbreaking design for Manhattan. This time it's for a mixed-use tower next to MoMA. The height will rival the Chrysler Building, and with its open lattice structural top, it may rival the old bird's iconic status as well.

Also of note is Ourousoff's article on the building, which calls attention to the most important issues the building addresses. How private developers are doing more daring architecture than MoMA itself commissioned only a few years back. How this will hopefully correct MoMA's craptacular gallery situation. How an architect can produce a design for a tower while playing with the essential elements of towers that up until now felt played out (the structural system, the curtainwall, the profile), yet all the while creating something new, of our time, and dazzlingly buildable.

Our favorite part is that the developer has chosen to build what others might consider unsellable floors: the penthouse apartment with a huge elevator/stair core. It is brilliantly described as "the pied-a-terre at the top of the Eiffel Tower from which Gustave Eiffel used to survey his handiwork below."

In today's New York Times, a happy preservation story about Richard Neutra's 1946 Kaufmann House. What is most intriguing is that this is a preservation project undertaken by a couple who just really like architecture. By "really like" we mean "obsessed to the point of doing an insane amount of research." And just so you know, this kind of obsession is something we respect. We hope they publish a book: We Preserved It, And So Can You!.

After about a decade of design competitions, developer attention, and all sorts of community wrangling, Pier 40 is the site that just won't quit. It's understandable; we ourselves designed for the first competition way back in '98 or whenever, and the parking-garage-on-the-water is too good to pass up. Pictured is the most interesting proposal, by Arquitectonica.

Curbed has some exclusive advance renderings of some new proposals, scheduled to be exhibited. None of them strike us as particularly appealing, at least from the renderings they chose to release. Most of the designs give the USPS building across the West Side Highway--the long building that spans the street approaches to Pier 40 and effectively cuts the view of it--the right to live. They then compound the obstacle by creating plinth-parks, which haven't worked since they were invented. If you're going to go hella crazy, just propose new buildings for the entire area and run with it.

Greg Allen does his thing and uncovers the most beautiful gas station in the world. And we have to agree. Which is saying a lot. We grew up in Ohio, where there are plenty of beautiful gas stations. In a 'Wal-Mart construction is sublime beauty when it's empty' kind of way.

The architect is Peter Celsing and it was built 1954-56.

The only competition would be one other gas station. We will take this moment to remind the world that Mies Van Der Rohe designed a gas station (scroll down), and we have forever been in love with it.

Herbert Muschamp died yesterday in New York. While we were never a fan of his writings, we have to give the guy credit: he was consistent, loud, and all over the map. Just the way we like our New Yorkers.