Hardblog Tactics

Over at MSNBC, David "Hardblogger" Shuster is hardblogging up a storm about Lower Manhattan's controversial Freedom Tower. But more importantly he's pushing the alternative of rebuilding the Twin Towers, a questionable act in this "softblogger's" opinion.

His first post criticizes the design and engineering of the Freedom Tower, basically saying that the design isn't something to be proud of, and that it does not send the proper message to those who want to terrorize and scare our nation. He also insinuates that the monetary ties of the Lauder family (heirs of Estee Lauder's cosmetics fortune) to New York governor George Pataki played a deciding role in Libeskind's selection for the WTC site's master plan, since the architect is a friend of the family, after all.

In his next post Shuster tells us there is an evident lack of pride and confidence in the Freedom Tower design, and he proposes the only (in his mind, apparently) alternative: rebuild the Twin Towers "slightly off-set from where the old ones stood." A vote is put to the readers to choose between "America's Freedom Tower" and "A new Twin Towers."

His most recent post from last Friday indicates that 80% of the 3,483 respondents to the poll voted for the Twin Towers to be rebuilt, "stronger and mightier than ever." To Shuster, the reality is that Americans want the Twin Towers to "rise again."

Compare:

SOM's Freedom Tower montaged with the rest of the master plan in Lower Manhattan is on the left; a replica of the Twin Towers is on the right.

The desire to rebuild has been in evidence since September 12, 2001, but Shuster appears to be going beyond his journalistic limits into activism, under the guise of exposing the "truth" behind Libeskind's selection. Granted that many people don't like Freedom Tower and its surrounding master plan, but here's what I think is wrong with Shuster's argument and tactics:

The Twin Tower weren't loved until they were destroyed. They were a unique presence on the skyline, but they were terrible on the ground and cut off different parts of Lower Manhattan from each other. So we must ask if rebuilding the towers should be done in this regard.

Shuster frames his argument as either/or; either we rebuild the Twin Towers or we build the Freedom Tower. Besides ignoring other options (such as Michael Sorkin's idea of a park on the site and the distribution of building over the five boroughs), he's arguing apples and oranges, since the Freedom Tower is but one component of the WTC site's plan which spreads out the 10 million s.f. of office space over five towers, not one (or two in the case of rebuilding). And even though the Twin Towers were two buildings, they were twins, in effect acting like one entity split by a gap.

With quotes like "not rebuilding [the Twin Towers] is a defeat" and "Anything less is a memorial to fear," symbolism is taking priority over the improvement of the urban environment. Rebuilding them would indicate we haven't learned anything, about our situation or the people that attacked us (necessary but never the part of the equation in these arguments).

Influence over the Freedom Tower design does not appear to be an option, instead the argument becomes, "We don't want that. Rebuild the Twin Towers!" Perhaps Mr. Shuster needs to look somewhere in between these two. Seeing that the design of the Freedom Tower has malleability (since it never existed and is only a collection of ideas on "paper") is much better than settling for an already-designed relic...at least in my opinion. This malleability wouldn't seem to be the case, but that's due to the egos involved more than the desire to create something meaningful on the WTC site. The tower's - and the master plan's - fate aren't written in stone, so the activism Shuster proposes can possibly have effect, but let's hope it's not for his original aim.

But I'm not writing all this because I like the Freedom Tower design (I don't) or hate the Twin Towers (I always like the space in-between each tower and the way they anchored Manhattan on the skyline), but because I think the whole rebuilding (the site, not the Twin Towers) process needs to be open to many alternatives, not just the either/or situation Shuster poses, a proposition as dire as Bush's "you're either with us or against us."

Update 03.13: Deroy Murdock, at the National Review Online, pushes for a reconstruction of the Twin Towers (via Archinect).

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:


Cirque du Soleil Dormitory in Montréal, Québec by Les Architectes FABG.

The updated book feature is Universal Experience, edited by Kari Dahlgren, Kamilah Foreman, and Tricia Van Eck.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Time Out Chicago
The newest installment of the popular weekly happenings magazine, on sale now or coming soon, depending on what you see and who you believe.

Cubistro
Ongoing construction images of Daniel Libeskind's Denver Art Museum Addition, photographed by John Boak.

"Who's gonna get me a beer?"
Roger Ebert's 1970 interview with Lee Marvin, a few years after his role in John Boorman's Point Blank.

Update 03.01: According to WBEZ's Hello Beautiful!, Time Out Chicago will launch this Thursday, March 3. Listen to Steve Rhodes of Chicago Magazine talk about the new addition to Chicago.

Mark Your Lucky Calendars

♠ FEELING LUCKY? ♠

Come to TENbyTEN's RELAUNCH and "LUCK" ISSUE RELEASE PARTY on FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2005 and your chances of a prosperous future will increase dramatically!

♠ Start out your evening by testing your wits at TENbyTEN's "UNIVERSAL EXPERIENCE" TREASURE HUNT at the MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART's First Friday (220 E. Chicago Avenue) from 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm.
Glorious prizes will be up for grabs!
($7 MCA members, $14 non–members)

♠ Then go to our RELEASE PARTY at DARKROOM
(2210 W. Chicago Avenue)
9:30 pm to 2:00 am

DJs LIZ ARMSTRONG and HUNTER HUSAR
Live music by THE NEW CONSTITUTION

COMPLIMENTARY COCKTAILS by Absolut Citron and FREE PSYCHIC READINGS from 9:30 to 10:30 pm Free REVIVE VITAMIN WATER chasers for the next day's hangover

FREE ADMISSION
312.738.2990 or for more details

In a Nutshell

In what has to be the best exhibition title I've heard in a long time, Frances Glessner and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death opens tonight at, appropriately, the Glessner House Museum at 1800 South Prairie Avenue.

From Glessner House's web page:

The only daughter of John and Frances Glessner...Frances Glessner Lee founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed honorary captain in the New Hampshire state police....she noticed how often officers mishandled evidence and mistook accidents for murders and vise versa. In the 1940s and 1950s, she built stunningly detailed dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases to train detectives to assess visual evidence. She called these teaching tools the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, inspired by the police saying: "Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell."...Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen dioramas [in the exhibition] are engaging and shocking visual masterpieces. Built on a scale of 1:12, they each display an astounding level of precision: pencils write, window shades move, and every detail -- a newspaper headline, a bloodstain on the rug, an outdated wall calendar, a cartridge casing-- becomes a potential clue to the crime."

Amazing. Take that, CSI!

A 1992 essay from the American Medical News by Bruce Goldfarb, "Small-Scale Tragedies," has more information and images on these models.

(via Chicagoist)

Magazine "Event" of the Moment

Archinect reports on the launch of VOLUME, a project by Archis, AMO (the research and design portion of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, aka Rem Koolhaas's office), and CLAB (The Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting).

A press conference (VE#1) will be held on Monday, February 28 at 6:30 at the Wood Auditorium in Avery Hall at Columbia, with Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, and Mark Wigley, unveiling the project.

According to Archis' press release on this endeavor, VOLUME will exist because of the following arguable statement:

Architecture has reached three of its most respected limits:
- its definition as the art of making buildings
- its discourse through scripted printed media and static exhibitions
- its training as a matter of master and apprentice

further saying,

The pushing of these limits challenges the mandate and self conception of architecture. Architecture needs new modes of operation, converging the creation, the mediation and the appreciation of space.

and that VOLUME will be a

Global idea platform to voice architecture, anyway, anywhere, anytime...an engine for architectural practice, a test ground for world class architectural thinking. An instrument of cultural invention, and re-invention. It will be dedicated to experimentation and the production of new forms of architectural discourse.

I think what all this means is that this thing is going to be different. Not strictly a magazine, it's also a "platform," an "engine," and an "instrument." Regardless of all the jargon, it will be interesting to see what's up their collective sleeves. I'm of the opinion that the more architectural discourse the better (my favorite tagline is Loud Paper's "dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse"), so VOLUME will be a welcome addition. If it lives up to its rhetorical hype is another thing... stay tuned.

Update 03.01: A couple pages at Archinect deal with the VE#1 Press Conference, including a discussion and GSAP student George Showman's coverage of the event.

Our Surreal World

Archinect posts some wild images of a "tennis" match staged on the Burj Dubai's helipad, from an article at This is London. Obviously a publicity stunt (though more literally too, because I don't see any harnesses on them, and the safety railing seems pretty inadequate for such a high altitude) for a tennis tourney in Dubai, the hotel, and the city itself, Andre Agassi battles Roger Federer for "King of the Skyscraper."


Photo by Getty Images

But on a serious note, the image is rather surreal, as alluded to on the Archinect post. Outside of the obvious fact that two pros are volleying 700 feet above the beach on lush, bright green grass in a desert climate, I think what fools us is the background. The environment veils the water, beaches and city in a haze, so the contrast between background and foreground is great, making it appear like two images melded together.

A similar fooling of the mind occurs in Olive Barbieri's site specific_roma 04, below.



On display as part of the MCA's Universal Experience exhibit, the film was taken by the artist from a helicopter flying over parts of Rome, here the Colosseum. But it's shot in such a way that the edges become blurred, flattening the context to the point that we think we're looking at a miniature. Paying close attention to the film, though, one notices that the cars and people below are moving. Even though this verifies that we're looking at the real Rome, it's still hard to shake the thought of a model when looking at Barbieri's imagery, just like it's hard to believe that Agassi and Federer are playing a leisurely game of tennis on a helipad.

Half Dose #5: O House

Like some of his Japanese contemporaries, Kei'ichi Irie's houses have generic names that make them sound like experiments or parts of a larger set. O House is part of a portfolio that includes the C House, the W House, the Ta House, and so forth. Simplicity of materials and complexity of space seem to be a consistency for these mostly Tokyo residences on small urban sites.



The O House is located in the Meguro district (which borders the well-known Shibuya district), in a residential portion of Tokyo. Its most outstanding feature is a large window with a curling concrete projection on three sides. This elevated feature indicates that the living area is lifted off the ground, with bedrooms occupying this lowest level.



The interior is a plethora of concrete defining irregular spaces. It resembles more a museum than a house. The house was completed last May.

Links:

- kei'ichi IRIE + Power Unit Studio home page.
- MoCo Tokyo page on the architect's houses.
- Architecture in the "Information Scape", their contribution to the 1996 Venezia Biennale.

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:


Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The updated book feature is St. Louis Union Station, by Albert Montesi and Richard Deposki.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Architecture For Sale
International site listing architectural properties for sale, including one by Coop Himmelb(l)au (sold), and many by Frank Lloyd Wright, R.M. Schindler, and others. Get out your checkbook!
(thanks to Melissa C. for the link)

Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses
Les Freres Corbusier "finally puts the punk rock back into urban planning: Amidst a blaze of streaming media, ridiculous choreography, and dozens of live fornicating rabbits, a desperate battle is waged over the creation of New York's bridges, highways, and public housing." At The Ohio Theatre in New York City until March 5.

Urban Design Precedents
Student work from the University of Toronto's School of Landscape Architecture Urban Design Studio, intended to "encourage the comparative analysis of specific urban types, and to enhance students' knowledge of a variety of urban contexts."

This Just In

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize will be awarded in Chicago, an event that has typically taken place outside of the family's hometown.

Not surprisingly, the festivities will be centered on Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion, designed by the Pritzker-award-winning architect Frank Gehry. The winner will be announced on April 4 with the ceremony held May 31 - one day before the groundbreaking for Renzo Piano's Art Institute expansion takes place.

Piano - himself a winner of the Pritzker in 1998 - is expected to attend both ceremonies, the first featuring a panel discussion with him, Gehry, critic Ada Louise Huxtable, moderated by everybody's favorite PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose. Piano was actually interviewed by Rose just last week, an illuminating one-hour discussion about the architect's working methods, his four projects in New York, and his recent book On Tour with Renzo Piano. It is apparent, as the Sun-Times points out, that Rose is an architecture enthusiast himself. That should make for an interesting discussion.

Universal Tourist, Part II

Continuing upstairs for the rest of the MCA's Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye exhibition, the best is yet to come. I apologize, though, for the shortage of images this time.



After ascending the elliptical stairs past a couple small galleries, one is immediately struck by the bright orange carpet laid across most of the fourth floor. Attributed to Rudolph Stingel, the artist responsible for carpeting Grand Central Terminal last year in a patterned graphic. Here the effect is just as jarring, adding an explosion of color to the otherwise colorless galleries.

Michael Workman's review in Newcity talks about the orange blinding the visitor during the daylight hours as it's reflected off the white surfaces, though visiting after sunset the effect is different, yet of equal interest. With the contrast between the illuminated galleries inside and the darkness outside, the gallery windows act like a mirror, creating the illusion of a space twice as big.

This orange-carpeted space is littered with surprisingly comfortable wooden chairs grouped around suspended monitors, intended to resemble an airport but feeling like something between an airport and a museum. Regardless of the intention, it's a great space to sit down in, not only for the film and videos but for the enjoyment of the space. Since I don't have a picture of the gallery, you'll either have to take my word for it or just visit for yourself. I definitely recommend the latter.

Once past the orange carpet and into the southwest corner of the fourth floor, the effect of the color is almost immediately forgotten. Sitting in a mirrored space is Urban Landscape by Zhan Wang, containing hundreds of pots, pans, utensils, and other items all in stainless steel. The effect is intense.

Stainless steel is found in other parts of the exhibition, most notably Jeff Koons's Rabbit, but here - combined with the mirrors - the symbolism isn't as subtle. We are confronted with a number of standardized objects with their ageless shine, their position based on Chicago postcards the artist saw (in 2003, the same exhibit used dry ice and irregular boulder shapes to resemble the Chinese landscape), definitely a critique of Western ideals and ways upon other cultures.

Everybody's favorite "bean" artist, Anish Kapoor, contributes a piece titled My Body Your Body from 1993. Unlike his Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, this piece seems to absorb light rather than reflect it. What at first glance is a two-dimensional painting reveals itself over time, much like a James Turrell light installation, to be a deep abyss cut into the wall. Looking up at the skylight, it's apparent that the wall was built out to accommodate the artwork. The blue pigment is so consistently devoid of depth that the overall effect is eerie. If it were possible to reach into it I would have, but we are left to our mental constructs, which contributes to its eeriness.



Nearby is Vito Acconci's Convertible Clam Shelter (above), two large clams that invite interaction. A softly-glowing built-in orb and relaxing music lull the weary visitor into a relaxed state, an interesting paradox for something (visiting an art museum) that's typically seen as a meditative act. But with MOMA's recent expansion and the blossoming of museums all over the world, the experience of going to a museum is changing - towards something more akin to a shopping mall than a place of refuge - definitely something this exhibition is keenly aware of.

Many other artists have works on display on this half of the fourth floor, from Warhol and Smithson to Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Philippe Parreno. But on the other half of this floor, only a few pieces are on display, with two of them taking up the majority of the space.

Peter Fischli & David Weiss's Visible World collects thousands of brightly colored travel photographs from all over the world, culminating 15 years of globetrotting. These small format transparencies lie on a continuous 92-foot light table. Many images are familiar tourist sites, be them natural or man-made, though scenes of daily life are interspersed, indicating the tourist value of "culture watching", or the flaneur. The table takes up most of the space, one wall showing Andy Warhol's 8-hour ode to the Empire State Building.

Thomas Hirschhorn's Chalet Lost History takes up one full gallery, an immersive installation made with cheap materials and containing everything from refrigerators and fans to sex objects and pages from hardcore magazines. A consistency across each of the three rooms is Egypt, be it through books, cheaply-fabricated crypts and pyramids, or the space itself, a cramped environment that in some ways replicates the tombs of past pharaohs. It's a somewhat confusing work that can be difficult to digest for some people, but its scale and immersive qualities are undeniable. Aesthetically, it's not my thing, but the act of actually moving through art I find appealing.

To loosely sum up, Universal Experience has something for everybody. The exhibition is much like traveling to a distant land that holds a variety of objects and images to be discovered.

Previously: Part I, Downstairs.

Universal Tourist, Part I

Yesterday I visited the MCA for their BIG exhibition, Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye, and I must say I was impressed. Comprising all floors of the museum and its front door, it is the first exhibition to take over all the facilities since 2000's show At the End of the Century: 100 Years of Architecture. Unlike that show, Universal Experience is starting in Chicago, usually the recipient of exhibitions started in other cities. Nice to be on the giving end for a change.



Two large sculptural installations greet the visitor outside, Elmgreen and Dragset's Short Cut ripping up the plaza, and Thomas Schutte's Ganz Grosse Geister (Big Spirits XL), three figures hanging out on a low roof adjacent to the museum's steps. The sharp difference between the two artworks sets the stage for the variety of objects and images inside.



One of the greatest aspects of the MCA's otherwise banal building is the large wall visible from the plaza through the wall of glass at the top of the steps. The curators always take advantage of the location with interesting murals and 3-d objects; in this case curator Francesco Bonami lets Jim Hodge's don't be afraid (image above) greet visitors with the phrase of the title written by United Nations members in their native language. Immediately, it's made aware that the exhibit isn't solely about tourism but also about cultural interaction on different levels.

I could go on an on about much of the artwork on display, but I'll limit myself to pieces of interest "architecturally" and the way the exhibition is laid out itself.



To enter the two main galleries on the ground floor, one walks under a mural wrapping the wall and ceiling by Rem Koolhaas, Robert Somol and Jeffrey Inaba, titled Roman Operating System, Project on the City (R/OS) (above). A product of their research on ancient Rome, the image is a blowup of the ancient Peutinger Table, a scroll that acted like a contemporary "Let's Go" guide. It's an appropriate, "ceremonial" archway to the exhibition's beginning.



Of the two large galleries on the main floor, one contains many small pieces - most notably Hiroshi Sugimoto's photograph of a wax The Last Supper in Japan (portion above) and Matthew Buckingham's 16mm film of a man following another man around Vienna - while the other contains only two: a dark space filled with suspended displays of people waking in foreign places, and a room full of child-like models and drawings that are made by people who haven't visited the place they're depicting, going by the artist's physical description. At first I was put off by the latter, wondering what it was doing in the museum, but the idea explains not only the execution of the pieces but also some psychological aspects of how we experience and remember places, be it directly or indirectly. It reminded my girlfriend Karen of Aldo Rossi work, and given the importance of memory in his work and the child-like quality of his drawings, that comparison seems appropriate.



Moving into the cafe, two large murals cover the walls looking towards the museum's garden beyond. NL Architects envision two scenarios involving ships: aircraft carriers turned into amusement parks in the ocean waters and large cruise ships apparently docked inland, disturbing the tranquility of an Italian city. Titled Cruise City, City Cruise, there's something appealing about these images, be it the juxtaposition of contradictory things or the sheer joy they express.

Tomorrow: Part II, Upstairs.

Half Dose #4: Courtyard House

Milwaukee's Johnsen Schmaling Architects are riding a nice, little wave at the moment. They're featured in archrecord2 this month and have an exhibition of their work - titled "Extending the Surface" - at I-space in Chicago until February 26.

Archrecord2 covers a couple built projects - a penthouse pavilion (for which they won a 2004 AIA Wisconsin Award) and a prototype duplex - as well as a couple projects - a house and a parking garage renovation in downtown Milwaukee. All these are featured in the exhibition at I-space I visited over the weekend, though the project that stood out for me was the Courtyard House.



The one-story house in Lake Forest, Illinois (about 20 miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan) is roughly square in plan and punctuated by two rectangular courtyards, positioned at opposite corners from each other.



The placement of the courtyards allows the interior spaces to have views of landscape on all sides, filling the house with greenery.



The exterior is similar to many of their other projects: a layered and seemingly random facade veils the house while allowing selective views in both directions, as the image above illustrates.

Links:

- Johnsen Schmaling Architects web page.
- archrecord2's feature on the firm.
- OnMilwaukee.com's article on the firm.
- Europaconcorsi's page on the firm with five projects featured (Duplex 01 and 02, the Borke House, the parking garage, and the penthouse pavilion).

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:


GGG House in Mexico City, Mexico by Alberto Kalach.

The updated book feature is City Planning According to Artistic Principles, by Camillo Sitte.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Chris Marker: La Jetée
A post at Design Observer on both the 28-minute sci-fi film that uses (almost) all still frames and the book on the film by Bruce Mau. I picked this book up at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park years ago not thinking it would now be worth from $500 to $1,000.

The Gates Reviewed
Tyler Green's review of the Central Park spectacle at ArtsJournal.

Land of Lincoln Photo Contest
Chicagoist is hosting its first photo contest, asking for creative images with Lincoln, this city's favorite president of yore. Deadline for entries is March 5.

Baby Name Wizard
A java-based page that creatively illustrates the popularity of different names over the last 100 years. Just start typing a name in the upper-left corner and see what happens. (via kegz.net)

Half Dose #3: T-Mobile Center

Searching the internet for information on Camillo Sitte for my weekly page, I came across the Camillo Sitte Institute and this project by Gunther Domenig in Vienna, Austria:



Unfortunately both the Sitte Institute's and Domenig's web sites are only in German, so I can't really give you any more information than what you see, though a Google search indicates the project was completed last summer.



The dynamic architecture seems appropriate for a mobile phone company, who probably strive for a contemporary image.


Image from Archinect

Links:

-Project page at Camillo Sitte Institute (in German).
-Gunther Domenig's home page (in German).
-T-Mobile's web page on the completed building (in German).
-Images, text (in German) and data at online architektur.
-More images and text (in German) at nextroom architektur.

Orgasm Modeled

Ronnie Gensler, student in Columbia University's architecture program, has achieved the impossible: a three-dimensional representation of an orgasm!

An article in the the Columbia Spectator cover's Gensler's project, though for the most part exposes to the rest of the University the unconventional aspects of the department's program and the day-to-day workings of a major most people find equally fascinating and baffling.



It's an interesting project hat has been quite elegantly executed.

Goodbye HaloScan

It appears that Blogger has refined its comments, streamlining the comment page with the ability to see previous ones, but more importantly now giving the user three options for posting comments: as a Blogger user, as "other" with name and web page (if applicable), and anonymous (for those really biting comments).

Because of this nice change, I'm going to phase out the HaloScan comment option over the next couple days. I'm going to transfer the comments from HaloScan to the Blogger comments (as far back as seems necessary) and then delete the HaloScan option, consolidating your contributions into one location.

The Torii at Central Park

With only three days until Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates" is unfurled in Manhattan's Central Park, web pages devoted to the undertaking are popping up over the internet, among them The Gates @ Central Park and jok/kaz, a daily weblog of two people working on the project.



While I couldn't find anything on Christo and Jeanne-Claude's website regarding any inspiration behind the work, my girlfriend Karen pointed out the striking similarity between The Gates and the Fushimi-Inari Shrine in Kyoto, Japan. Each is a repeated post-and-beam frame along curving paths, painted orange, and tightly-spaced.



See for yourself:





Image by Scott Surbeck





Karen in Kyoto



Granted that the flags, once installed, will set apart The Gates from the Torii, but nevertheless the similarities are striking.

Masterworks on Stamps

Blair Kamin reports on the United States Post Office's 2005 Commemorative Stamp Program's twelve stamps titled "Masterworks of Modern American Architecture."



I could only skim Kamin's piece, since in the very first paragraph he rips on his least favorite building, Soldier Field. He says, "I often write about BIG THINGS -- skyscrapers that soar into the clouds, exhibition halls bigger than 14 football fields, blockbusting stadiums that tower over their neighborhoods" (my italics). I think BK needs to get over this; he lost the fight to stop the renovation and he needs to move on.



Regardless, he whines about Chicago buildings (SOM's Hancock and Mies' 860/880 LSD) being featured only on two stamps. That's two of twelve. Sixteen percent. One less than New York City. That's plenty, to me.







The twelve stamps are:



:: Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright

:: Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry

:: Yale Art and Architecture Building by Paul Rudolph

:: Chrysler Building by William Van Alen

:: 860/880 Lake Shore Drive by Mies van der Rohe

:: High Museum of Art by Richard Meier

:: Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi

:: East Building of the National Gallery of Art by I.M. Pei

:: Phillips Exeter Academy Library by Louis I. Kahn

:: TWA Terminal by Eero Saarinen

:: Glass House by Philip Johnson

:: Hancock Center by SOM



More information on the stamps can be found on the USPS Press Release.

Hold the Bean

The whole blogsphere seems to be up in arms about an article by Ben Joravsky that appeared in the Chicago Reader about a photographer accosted by security guards for taking a picture of Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate" with a tripod. The article (if you have a Flickr account you can view the article via New (sub)Urbanism) indicates that the elements of Millennium Park are copyrighted by their respective authors, so no professional photographs can be taken without paying a fee. The accosted photographer actually slid security a $20 bill to bypass the higher fee.

As absurd at this is - and most people picking up this story come to that consensus - it begs the question, "Is Millennium Park a public space?" The default answer is yes, but if that were the case there wouldn't be an issue, or so it seems to me. In some way the Park has become a hybrid public/private (read: corporate) space that's confusing copyright and civic laws.

In response people have been adding their photos to Flickr, 140 and counting at the time of this post. I'll just add a few a couple of mine below.





Too bad that such a wonderful object (ironically more skewed reflections of its surroundings than a proper object, per se) is being shrouded with this mess.

Book of the Moment

Christopher "A Pattern Language" Alexander has completed his four-volume omnibus culminating his exploration of architectural theory over thirty years. Nature of Order focuses on the topic of living structure. Each book can be read separately but are also interdependent and connected.







NPR features an interview with Alexander, who talks all-too-briefly about the ideas behind the books in a laid-back and understandable manner.



From Alexander's web page:

In Book 1 [The Phenomenon of Life], Alexander defines life and living structure as the necessary criteria for quality in buildings; in Book 2 [The Process of Creating Life, he] examines the kinds of process that are capable of generating living structure; in Book 3 [A Vision of a Living World, he] presents hundreds of his own buildings and those of other contemporaries who have used similar methods consistent with the theory of living process; in Book 4 [The Luminous Ground], the culmination of the quartet, [he] addresses the cosmological implications of the theory he has constructed and presented.

Alexander's 2,000+ page tome is on par with something like William Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,000+ page, 7-volume treatise on violence and terrorism.



Regardless if one agrees or disagrees with Alexander's ideas, the sheer ambition of his project, and his desire to improve the quality of life for everybody via his theories and writings is admirable, to say the least.



(via Archinect)

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:





Burr Elementary School in Fairfield, Connecticut by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.



The updated book feature is The Most Beautiful House in the World, by Witold Rybczynski.



Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Demolition of the Century Building

Ecology of Absence's site on the St. Louis structure, with photographs updated on 02/01 and 02/03.



Flight 93 National Memorial

Stage one finalists in the competition to memorialize the victims of the September 11 flight downed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.



Visible Food

A website and database created to expose the hidden costs of the globalized system that produces, processes and distributes our food, by Chicago-based artist and writer Claire Pentecost. (via we make money not art)

Short Cuts

According to the Chicago Tribune's web page, the installation "Short Cuts", by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset has been installed on the Museum of Contemporary Art's plaza.



The piece resembles a traffic accident and is part of the museum's upcoming exhibition "Universal Experience", a much-anticipated show that focuses on travel and the artist's experience of different cultures. In an unprecedented move, the show will take over the whole museum and its exterior.







"Short Cuts" has been on display in Europe, originally in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele, and in Basel above. I'll try to post a picture of the installation if I walk by the MCA this week.

Architecture A/V

A couple audio-visual links for your enjoyment:

Biographer Franz Schulze speaks about the legacy of Phillip Johnson, from Chicago Public Radio's Hello Beautiful! (RealPlayer req'd).



and



Architecture Radio features video footage from Fabrication, Acadia/AIA's Conference last November. (QuickTime req'd)

It's Groundhog Day!

Some links for your enjoyment on this day:

- My review of Ryan Gilbey's book on the Bill Murray film.

- The Internet Movie Database's page on the film.

- Groundhog Day The Movie, Buddhism and Me, a page with lots of text and links on the film's religious impact, by Paul Schindler.

- The Official Site of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club.

- The Mysteries of Groundhog Day Unveiled

Jahn Builds in Streeterville

In this morning's Chicago Sun-Times, David Roeder reports on a residential development at 600 N. Fairbanks (on the northwest corner of Ohio and Fairbanks) in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood. Designed by Helmut Jahn, and developed by Geoffrey Ruttenberg of The Brixton Group, the 27-story high-rise would offer 197 residences, generous glazing, and a celebration of the automobile via a ramp to the parking garage visible at the base of the building. The garage itself would be built over an existing three-story building to the north, currently housing such local dining favorites as Timothy O'Toole's, West Egg, and the Indian Garden.





Image scanned from the Sun-Times



Streeterville is a neighborhood of high-rises, this site being almost on its "edge", close to the Northwestern Memorial Hospital that occupies the blocks to the north (right in the image above). Having been a parking lot recently and just a plain 'ol vacant lot before that, it is refreshing to see a proposal for the site's use. I don't foresee any local opposition to the development, since 27 stories in this area is not that big (though the article mentions the units will have ten-foot ceilings, pushing up the actual height of the building to a comparable 30-story structure).



Also the simple design is inoffensive, though I hope the romantic notion of putting the parking ramp on display is successful when built. The Contemporaine takes a similar risk at its base and pulls it off, though it doesn't strive for the level of transparency that Jahn's rendering indicates. Regardless, it appears that architects are (finally!) finding creative ways to deal with Chicago's required parking for residential structures, that is beyond the common "hide it behind the facade" solution. Not only does Jahn put it on display, he lifts it up and over another building, seemingly defying gravity in the process.



Now it remains to see if the project goes ahead, though according to the article, "buyers have shown a preference toward modern designs in most of the latest projects being marketed."