TROPOLISM

The new de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco by Herzog and De Meuron is an experience of unfolding, revealing a range of unexpected and captivating spaces. The building cannot be understood by a single vantage point, but rather reveals itself as one moves through it. From a distance the de Young appears uniform wrapped in a continuous copper skin. The skin is punctured in an inconsistent texture, giving a clue to the complexity which lies within.

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You are not going to believe this, but 2 Columbus Circle, the much-argued-about renovation (or preservation! depending on who you ask) project designed by Allied Works, is happening because there is a tenant who bought the building and needs the space! We were stunned. But it appears in the New York Times yesterday (sorry, two drawing sets due this week) and includes a rendering of the lobby.

About that. After creating such a lovely exterior, we are wondering which intern or rendering staff person created the generic furniture, ceiling, and off-the-shelf glass doors for this project?

Special add-on bonus: Curbed links to the hilariously killed ShameCam. Robert AM Stern's new art deco building gets in the way. See? Contextualism always wins.

Way back in 1990, when I was an undergraduate at Washington University, trips home to Lima, Ohio were an architectural drag, from the point of view that there was little but amazing barns to look at. No modern architecture at all, and only a tiny bit of suburban detritus to study. I love barns, but there weren't that many of them.

However, two buildings within a couple hours' drive popped up. Contemporary buildings by famous architects whose work I was studying. First, The Wexner Center. Yes, the building isn't a great art space, or even a great critique of art space, and it certainly has enough pastiche and bad detailing and bad circulation for an entire oeuvre complete. But it rocked my college brain having such a wildly absurd failure in gray Christmas-break-time winter Ohio.

Second was Gehry's addition to the Toledo Art Museum, something between his later Bilbao-esque buildings with lead coated copper scales and his earlier 80s pomo-volumes-fracturing thing. Again, not so great building, but interesting having work by an architect I otherwise admire close by. It kind of fit Ohio to have average works by famous architects sitting semi-ignored in the middle of such a diffuse population.

SANAA is about to change that. The construction photos of their glass pavilion for the Toledo Art Museum, as well as the mockup (pictured above) of the curved glass walls show a building that is both quiet and revolutionary. In Ohio. I get it.

One of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's renderings is taking shape in the northern burgh called Boston. The new ICA building is on the Boston Harbor waterfront and scheduled to open in September 2006. Bonus: the cantelever looks exactly the way it was rendered. Gorgeous.

Progress photographs of the structure's assembly are worth the trip to ICA's website.

Mr. Ourousoff's review of the design for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, by SANAA, appears today in the New York Times. Unlike his previous love letters (to Zaha, for example), he is back to his articulate and fact-supporting self, without giving up his enthusiasm for the possibility the building presents.

When I was directing the competition for Eyebeam for my former office, we discussed at length how a building can be a laboratory for art, something that creates, educates, and exhibits artwork, reflecting the volatile world of contemporary art (and in Eyebeam's case, 'new media art'). Buildings like PS1 were a great inspiration: build a structure that is not sacred. I share Mr. Ourousoff's enthusiasm for this building, and the future it can live up to.

Some interesting shows opening and closing this week for those of us on the West Coast:

This is the final weekend for a Julius Shulman : Modernity and the Metropolis at the Getty Center. The exhibit covers images shot over the course of seventy years.

Shigeru Ban's Nomadic Museum has just been re-assembled in Santa Monica featuring photographs by Gregory Colbert called Ashes and Snow, and runs January 14th through May 14th.

Opening January 21 and running through April 22 is Dark Places features the work of several Artists and Architects exploring memory and social space. Exhibit design by Servo.

Contributed by Colin Peeples.

New York is home to not one but two fashion shows that are not at the Costume Institute at The Met. Special Correspondant Barrett Feldman gives us her take:

"I went to two thoughtfully curated shows on Fashion: The Fashion of Architecture: Constructing The Architecture of Fashion at the Center for Architecture and Fashion in Colors at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. It was interesting to go to both fashion shows back to back. The show at the Center for Architecture had a few pieces by Lucy Orta's which challenges us to rethink the boundary between body and city. The show uptown at the Cooper Hewitt was categorized primarily according to color, such that each room had designs from the 1820s to 2005. I learned that in the 1700s red pigment was made from beetle juice and tumeric! The clothing in both shows had a level of complexity in which each stitch, pleat and hem worked not only to clad the body but to create an exterior layer which is well-crafted, surprising, and the interface layer with the world. It reminded me that architecture emerges as much from its relationship to the body as it does from its relationship to site."

Speaking of Luminarias, our friends at Archidose gives us some wonderful in-progress photos of the Nelson-Atkins Museum expansion by Steven Holl, now named the Bloch Building. The building continues on the glass channel system theme, seen in his Helsinki Kiasma building and at Pratt Institute Higgins Hall, but at a scale that lets the glass channel system look elegant, fluid, landscape-like.

The fact checker takes an early Christmas Vacation and look what happens. Tropolism misses some big news! Zaha's Louvre competition entry, the one we so breathlessly admired below, is, alas, on the cutting room floor. Javier at Archinect gives us the full story:

you might be interested to know and should note that the Zaha louvre project is a competition entry that will never be. apparently kultureflash posted images of it and it has spread around the design blogs as if it were to be built. the winning entry was announced in july and went to Mario Bellini with Rudy Ricciotti (sp?). Search Archinect news for Louvre for more info.

After spending ten minutes to figure out where the search feature was on Archinect (click news, then the search bar comes up) I see that Archinect has a little blurb on the winners, dating back to August 8. Who knew? The winners are a little more subtle, but just as surreal.

While we admit some disappointment with Zaha's latest buildings (the car factory, and the project that Ourousoff wrote his love note to in the New York Times last month), projects like this one give us cause to get excited. We agree with the folks at Daily Dose, who brought this to our attention: the curvature is somewhat arbitrary, but in the view above, it seems perfectly arbitrary. Paris is a city used to architectural disjunctions of this sort, it fits in perfectly. Plus, it's covered in gold Legos.

We love MoMA. We really do. But sometimes, it just is workin' our nerves. Mercifully, there are some facts in this article, which state that 70% of the work shown in the upcoming review of contemporary Spanish Architecture at MoMA is by Spanish Architects. Of course, this is web page three. The first two pages are devoted to quotes by Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel talking about Spain. And, of course, Terry Riley talking about contemporary Spanish Architecture in an historical context. Apparently, it all began with Gehry's building in Bilbao!

Also, the article mention Martínez Lapeña-Torres as if they 1)haven't been around forever and 2) we all don't have books about them already. And, there's no quote from them. Or any of the 70%. Doe they not speak Spanish.

I'm sure many of you knew about the dialogue between Peter Zumthor and Olafur Eliasson last Monday. And, given your hectic holiday party schedule, you knew about it and missed it anyway. Like us.

Fear not, Tropolism Special Correspondant Saharat Surattanont was there to capture the goods. His copious notes, after the jump. It promised to be a lively exchange, given Olafur's massive and gorgous reworking of Zumthor's Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2001. According to Sah, it was, except not in the synergetic way we all thought. Olafur apparently lumped Zumthor in to the category every other architect is in (including me, yo), that is, someone who mediates reality. And Olafur wants to undo that. Read on...

Parsons Students, true to form, have taken on the LMCC's Swing Space program with brilliant ease. The LMCC program is designed to use underutilized real estate in Lower Manhattan. It's gentrification with a built-in obselesence: the LMCC secures temporary space and they get someone to put art in it for a while. Hey, whatever works! In this case, the early 90s bank lobby at the Equitable Building has been brutally appropriated with a system of heavy conduit designed for flexibile exhibitions. It definitely has the hand of David Lewis of LTL behind it, and it's gorgeous anyway.

AMOOMA, in true mirrorspeak fashion, has released the most fascinating, and at the same time most lame, press release ever. First, they break the news that they are working on a study to re-define art museums (and, that the director of the Hermitage trekked to Amsterdam to sign the proposal). Normally, we would call this the lame part, but after the masterwork that is the Seattle Library, we're willing to ride with them on this one. Second, they break the news that AMO will have...just this project this year! Which begs the questions: what is AMO's staff working on right now? Picking up redlines for OMA?

In this proposal, we are reminded of the initial promise behind the Eyebeam competition, a new museum for all kinds of art, one that may not just show art, but produce it, too.

Side note: we are grateful to have under-25yo friends who can decipher Archinect for us. They send us links like this one so we don't have to spend our time figuring out how to navigate their interface.

Friday, a friend invited me to go to Creative Time's latest event, an opening for a show inspired by the High Line, after we supped, and I said yes. It was only an 80% yes, these things often turn out to be hideous: a hundred people occupancy but the event-throwers invite 10,000 to see it, creating a fight at the door. Still, the promise to see the one Matta-Clark film I haven't seen yet was exciting enough to get me walking in the rain.

Read about the show by clicking for more...

Polis has a piece on the New New Museum of Contemporary Art's groundbreaking October 11. Suddenly, the Lower East Side is looking, well, less like the modern architectural wasteland it has always been.

The building reminds me of the Whitney, and of Tokyo.

MoMA has an exhibition on 3 of Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro's winning entry for the High Line competition of last year. Please note that I led the competition entry for one of the seven firms invited to compete for this commission.

When we found out that we didn't win, I was immensely disappointed. Now, I am very happy that the project is in good hands.

The design has gone from a strange cartoon to a lush vision of a possible future for the High Line. It is irresistable, even for this critic of images. I looked at the illustrations and model the way I approached my first Star Wars film: with wonder.

The illustrations were dense with information, combining real data about the city, about how people occupy parks, about the technical requirements of the project (10" of concrete), with intutive moves and observations about city life. The project accomodates all of this information with ease, without ever feeling like it's a lame resultant of all the information thrown into the hopper. The project is a sythensis of a lot of information, yet never feels overwrought or overgestured. The project requires a lot of technical information, and I'm sure the amount of problems they will uncover during construction will cause years of headaches, but the view from above is of effortless flow and blending.

I am a particular fan of the linear planking system, the grain of which reminds me of the repetition of the long, parallel heavy steel girders below. The planks melt into areas for trees and grasses.