Jean Tschumi, Bernard Tschumi & DOCOMOMO

On Wednesday evening I attended a party at Vitra celebrating the publication of a long overdue monograph on architect Jean Tschumi, written by Jacques Gubler and published by Skira. Jean Tschumi: Architecture at Full Scale documents the brief career of the Swiss architect who eschewed his Beaux Arts training in favor of "the polemical field of modernity and its technological expression." In the US, the name Tschumi is more well known prefaced by Bernard, rather than Jean, who died in 1962 at the age of 57, when his son was only 18 years old. His early death may have cut his architectural career short, but the quality of the architecture that he produced is evidenced in the pages of this monograph and in the Archizoom exhibition last year, curated also by Gubler.



I'm especially taken by the image on the party invitation of the Aula de Cèdres, a conference center and auditorium at HEP Lausanne:



On Wednesday Gubler spoke of Tschumi's architecture relative to color (embraced by the architect, but rarely captured in documentation of buildings) and scale, referring to the book's subtitle and the architect's consideration of design from furniture to the city. The book offers an in-depth exploration of Tschumi's career, which includes a number of office headquarters, for Nestlé, La Mutuelle Vaudoise, and the World Health Organization. (This blog post at New Switzerland gives a decent overview of the qualities of Jean's architecture.)

One is tempted to break down how the father's architecture influenced Bernard Tschumi's, though if an influence on the latter is evident, it is in the year's since his father's passing. Some brief words on Wednesday by the architect of the new Acropolis Museum pointed to little discussion between the two regarding architecture. In fact Bernard admits that he didn't decide to pursue architecture until a trip to Chicago, only a few weeks before his father died. But with time to study his father's buildings, and a role in Architecture at Full Scale, it would be difficult not to find Jean's influence on his son.


[new Acropolis Museum | image source]

Looking at the two buildings shown above, I would say the influence of Jean on Bernard happens primarily with thinking about site. The above clearly illustrates how the new Acropolis Museum's top relates to the distant Parthenon, while the lower floor contends with the ruins preserved below. In between, the museum is all about movement and the clarity of the exhibition, but it can be seen as the byproduct of contending with the site below and distant. The elder Tschumi's HEP building skillfully addresses the site's topography (as can be seen here) and adjacent buildings, standing out formally but fitting into the multi-faceted landscape.



In the Wednesday-night party's introduction by Nina Rappaport, Chair of DOCOMOMO-New York/Tristate, the preservation of Jean Tschumi's architecture in Switzerland was commended, an unspoken difference between an appreciation of Modernism's gems and the demolition of the same in part or in full an ocean away. The US chapter of DOCOMOMO (international working party for DOcumentation and COnservation of building sites and neighborhoods of the MOdern MOvement) includes ten regional chapters (all tolled the international DOCOMOMO is 53 chapters strong), but fights for preservation seem to be lost more often than won.

While this fact points to a limited appreciation in this country for architecture produced in the middle of last century, I can't help but wonder if this situation is more about ideology than taste. Modernism was predicated on progress and responses to the changes sweeping across the developed world from industrialization and world wars, so the preservation of the movement's buildings seems anithetical to their origin. That people equate modern architecture with the tabula rasa clearing of neighborhoods, towards the erection of towers in the park in that time does not help matters.

A couple issues further complicate matters: how many modern buildings were not built with the longevity of buildings centuries before; the open plans and platonic forms of modernism did not turn out to be as flexible as envisioned. These point to the necessity of preservation less than 75 years after many buildings of the era were completed and the creativity needed by architects to propose and carry out the adaptive reuse of modernist structures. I think the latter is key in efforts to preserve modern architecture, especially when faced with opponents arguing that demolition and new construction is cheaper and therefore better. The fact that many modern buildings are ingrained and important elements in their neighborhoods (ironically, like the older buildings many modern structures replaced) is perhaps the strongest argument for DOCOMOMO's continued relevance today.

New Local Worlds in Section

[Image: "Moravian Mount" from New Local Zlín by Margaret Bursa].

In a recent post I included an image from Margaret Bursa's project New Local NY, which she produced while a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Bursa's tutors for that project were Mark Smout and Laura Allen, of Smout Allen; and I should right away that I'm consistently amazed at the quality of work coming out of Smout Allen's studios.

I thought, then, that I should take the occasion to share more images from Bursa's projects. You can check out her website here.

[Images: From New Local NY by Margaret Bursa].

New Local NY features "a ‘landscape of movement’," Bursa writes. It "takes the form of a condensed urban playground on the west side of Manhattan, overhanging onto the River Hudson," and it was at least partially inspired "by the ongoing relocation of immigrants and cultures to America, in particular Sokol, a Czech mass-exercise movement, promoting togetherness, flocking, fresh air and cultural pride."

The result is an intensely colorful, wind-powered megastructure, sitting comfortably astride the worlds of home craft and experimental architecture.

[Image: From New Local NY by Margaret Bursa].

Here are some amazing sectional sketches:

[Images: From New Local NY by Margaret Bursa; larger version one and two].

Then there is New Local Zlín, an earlier companion piece to New Local NY.

Zlín, Bursa explains, is the fading capital of the Bata shoe-making empire:

The Czech town of Zlín is the site of a social, industrial and architectural experiment begun by Tomas Bata in 1894. However, his shoe-making factories that were once the town’s driving force no longer operate and so the social and commercial structure of the town and its suburbs are in decline. Responding to the New Local Manifesto, a layer of facilities is laid over and interwoven into the residential neighborhoods where seven housing typologies are afforded dual functions of work and domestic life such the House of Drink, where both production and consumption are combined.

The images, again, are drenched in color and extraordinarily detailed.

[Images: "House of Drink," "Greenhouse," and town plan from New Local Zlín by Margaret Bursa].

The next project is a kind of tube-diorama: you look into the miniature landscape and see autumn trees, a ruined Greek temple, and a many-windowed architectural section standing in silhouette.

The project seems to come with the implication that, when you look inside a telescope, perhaps it's possible that you might simply be seeing a world inside the telescope—that is, an optical device that, instead of revealing new worlds from afar, actually contains local worlds within it.

[Image: From Layered Landscapes by Margaret Bursa].

Called Layered Landscapes, the project is a "compositional map," Bursa writes, and it comes complete with hardcover book and poster.

[Images: From Layered Landscapes by Margaret Bursa].

Finally, I have a weird affinity for sketches of archways, and so I'd be remiss if I didn't include this short series of brick studies—called, unsurprisingly, Brickscape.

[Images: From Brickscape by Margaret Bursa].

In any case, there's some great work in there. Check out Bursa's site for a bit more.

Mine / Stack / Vertigo

[Image: Michael Light, Bingham Pit photograph mounted and on display].

A beautiful new book of photographs by Guggenheim Fellow Michael Light has been released. Called Michael Light: Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, and released by Radius Books, it includes an essay by "experimental geographer" Trevor Paglen.

[Image: Two photos from Michael Light: Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack].

Light, well known for, among other things, his aerial photographs of the American west, "pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime," as Radius Books describes it, has put together a collection of 22 images from his surveys of the Bingham Pit and the Garfield smelter stack.

The sheer scale of each site—one a void excavated into the surface of the earth, the other one of the tallest structures in the United States—is mind-blowing:

Located at 8,000 feet in the Oquirrh Mountains—20 miles southwest of Salt Lake City—the Bingham Canyon copper mine is the largest man-made excavation on the planet. Its hole reaches more than half a mile deep and its rim is nearly three miles in width. It has produced more copper than any mine in history.

[Image: Michael Light, "Garfield Stack, Oquirrh Mountains and Ancient Beach of Great Salt Lake" (2006)].

Meanwhile:

The mine’s Garfield smelter stack, situated at the edge of the Great Salt Lake about 10 miles away, is the tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi River, and is only 35 feet shorter than the Empire State Building.

In a nearly 9-page interview with Afterimage, Light comments:

I work with big subjects and grand issues, and I am fascinated about that point where humans begin to become inconsequential and realize their smallness in relation to the vastness that is out there. In my archival work I also enjoy inserting a certain kind of revisionist politics into big iconic subjects that are owned by the world, where I can tell a story through my particular prism, in a way that hopefully offers a fresh perspective.

This is part of his ongoing interest in taking apart "the fundamental building blocks of landscape perception and representation."

The book is available through Radius.

Georgetown in fall

My favorite time of year - crisp air and beautiful leaves. This image of the Georgetown C&O canal near my office. Enjoy your weekend!

St Regis Bar

My new favorite place to hang out in DC is the bar at the newly renovated St. Regis hotel! Recently renovated by Sills Huniford, the space is truly amazing. The historic hotel has been beautifully renovated but updated with modern furnishings and light fixtures that are easily reversable so no fears of the space 'dating'.They have some creative cocktails and probably the best sangria I've ever had (the fruit is strained out so you don't get those nasty bits in your teeth!)But it's the atmosphere that truly gets me, especially at night. Ebony paneling, an antique ceiling and tall windows.We had our local dc design bloggers happy hour here a few weeks ago and now I'm hooked! If you're ever in dc check out the hotel!

Today's archidose #365

Here are a couple recent buildings in London photographed by z.z.


[10 Hills Place by by Amanda Levete Architects, 2009]



[Reiss HQ by Squire and Partners, 2008]

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Who would want to be an architect?

"Who would want to be an architect?" the Times asks. In answering that question, the article focuses more or less entirely on London's Bartlett School of Architecture—whose students have been producing some amazing work lately, work that I have often posted about here on BLDGBLOG. Here, here, here, and here, for instance.

But, the article claims, "Leave the future to Bartlett students and we’ll all be living in car-crash spaces that occasionally come into focus as giant mechanised spindly crustacea."

[Image: "Oops" by C. Loopus].

Reading such things easily prompts the familiar zing of schadenfreude—but it also seems totally inaccurate. If only it were as cut-and-dried as mistaking student work for what someone will produce professionally later; if only it were as easy as extrapolating from someone's earliest university sketchbooks to see how they'll someday end up.

I'm reminded here of Lebbeus Woods's recent short essay on the work of Rem Koolhaas: there was "another Rem," Lebbeus writes. Looking back at one of Rem's early projects—an unsuccessful bid for the Parc de la Villette in Paris—Lebbeus suggests:

This project reminds us that there was once a Rem Koolhaas quite different from the corporate starchitect we see today. His work in the 70s and early 80s was radical and innovative, but did not get built. Often he didn’t seem to care—it was the ideas that mattered.

Over on his own blog, Quang Truong puts it more simply: "Young Koolhaas was just so punk."

(Of course, parenthetically, Truong's formulation opens up a whole series of possible readings through which we could interpret Rem's ongoing career moves; we could say, for instance, that Rem is still "punk," to use that term deliberately, but his decisions to work for clients like the Chinese government are just him giving the finger to you. That is, if punk is a universal form of energetic rebellion, then don't assume that every punk will remain forever on your side).

[Image: From Rem Koolhaas's unbuilt proposal for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, via Lebbeus Woods].

In any case, my point in citing Lebbeus's essay in this context is to agree with the Times that student work can often stand on the absolute fringes of incomprehensibility, charged with the energy of poetry, myth, or confrontational politics, even verging on functional uselessness—but it's also an ongoing joke at nearly every architecture crit I've been to over the past few years that, upon surviving their final day of project criticism, those students "can now get back to designing minimalist boxes." In other words, there simply is not the assumption in these studios that now you are prepared only for the construction of rhizomes and biomorphopedic multi-agent typology swarms. There is obviously a problem if that is all you have been taught to do; but it's not one or the other. Being taught how to make short films about architecture—more on this, below—doesn't mean you can't simultaneously be taught how to renovate a kitchen or how to market yourself to new clients.

The fact of the matter, anyway, is that very few clients today will actually pay to construct "car-crash spaces that occasionally come into focus as giant mechanised spindly crustacea." If architecture school is the only time and place in which you can have the freedom to explore that sort of thing, then I don't see any reason why you should be told not to do so. Again, if that's all your architecture school offers you, leaving you alone to sort out the business of client management as you go, then of course your educational track needs reconsidering.

However, much of the Times's criticism seems predicated on the assumption that, if architecture is a vocational trade, similar to plumbing, then it cannot simultaneously be an expressive art, akin to film, painting, or literature. But, of course, it is both. In fact, the controversy more or less instantly disappears: architecture is the imaginative production of future worlds even as it is the act of building houses for the urban poor or the obtaining of technical skills necessary for rationally subdividing office floorplates.

[Image: From a project by Margaret Bursa for the Bartlett's Unit 11, taught by Smout Allen].

Having said all this, the Times article ends up being a formulaic list of reasons why such-and-such an industry is doomed to fail—too many people want to pursue it, we read, not enough people want to fund it, and hardly anyone understands anymore what made it so popular in the first place. But replace the word "architecture" with "writing," and "Bartlett School of Architecture" with "Iowa Writers Workshop"—or use "music" and "Mills College"—and you'd get a nearly identical article.

There are some very real questions to ask about the nature of architectural education today—and, when it comes to things like how architects write, I am probably in agreement with the author of the Times article (and with many of the students quoted in the piece)—but holding up the overall profitability of the industry, and the likely financial success of its individual practitioners, as the only criteria by which we should judge an architecture school seems absurd to me.

I'll end this simply by citing some provocative statements made in the article's comments thread—provocative not because I agree with them but because they're well-positioned to spark debate. I'll quote these here, unedited, and let people discuss this for themselves.

—The Bartlett "seem to want to be an architecture school and a school of alternate visual media culture at the same time. More often than not these agendas work against each other... They should make a choice and be clear about it. Are you training students to be architects or something else that has to do with architecture? What should a student expect to learn when they finish school? What are you being prepared for. If bartlett graduates go on to become film-makers, and video game designers, and such, maybe its a good idea to say it is not an architecture school and say it is a school of visual media. Then you will attract students with that goal in mind."

—From the same commenter: "Consider, if a school opens up and starts teaching alternative medicine (acupuncture, aromatherapy, Atkins diet, chiropractic medicine, herbalism, breathing meditation, yoga,etc), gives its graduates medical degrees and sent them off to hospitals and emergency rooms to perform surgery, a lot of people would have a problem with that. This is, in effect, what the architectural profession is doing when it allows schools like the Bartlett to give architecture degrees."

—"architectural education is still a leftover of that idea of the businessman/artiste producing unusual shapes for art critics"

—"The profession does not work. It’s economically non viable. Our work is pure iteration. Far too time consuming, and as a result, it’s impossible to charge anyone for the work we have actually done."

And on we go...

(Spotted via @brandavenue and @ArchitectureMNP).

Sketchbook of the Moment

Earlier today I was speaking with my publisher about the impact of digital technology on good-old-fashioned books, after which I saw the Sentient City exhibition. Needless to say I was feeling awash in the technology that is changing the way we absorb information, interact with each other, and encounter the city. So I felt a tinge of sentimentality when I came across The Hand of the Architect, a "limited edition Moleskine book filled with [378] drawings from 110 internationally renowned architects." Flipping through the pages, for a few moments the rush of the digital (if only in my head) gave way to a calm and slowness that hand drawings seem to embody.


[The Hand of the Architect | image source]

Of course hand sketches in their various media (graphite, ink, wash, crayon, marker, etc.) are good for much more than perspective in today's get-carried-away-with-technology world. They convey thoughts and ideas in particular ways that are much freer than any digital counterpart. Unencumbered by the need to learn software, the hand-brain connection allows the latter to figure things out as the former touches pen (or brush or quill or whatever) to paper. In other words, making a drawing by hand forces one to confront what one is drawing, thinking and understanding what each line, stroke, dot, field of color describes.

Books like this one from Moleskine are timely reminders of how digital tools can't replace all traditional ones, particularly pen and paper. For example, the research for my book is documented via a mix of spreadsheets, digital map overlays, digital photos, and a notebook (a Muji, sorry Moleskine). The last is a collage of notes, sketches, and pasted images, an ideal canvas for me for jotting down ideas at home, on the train, in front of a building, wherever I may be. But my research cannot exist without the digital components, and I'd also have a hard time limiting myself to just the bytes and bits.

So it should not come as a surprise that in addition to the "glimpse into the sketchbooks of visionaries like Michael Graves, Zaha Hadid, Piero Lissoni, Kengo Kumo, Mario Botta, Tadao Ando, and many more" is a "companion special edition blank journal" for budding architects and others to fill up.

or

Today's archidose #364

IMG_0996, originally uploaded by jim_malone.

Guerrero Street Mixed-Use Development in San Francisco, California by Kennerly Architecture & Planning.

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Michael Smith Lecture

I had the pleasure tonight to attend a lecture given by Michael Smith (seen on the left, with Ali Wentworth speaking to his right) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art here in Washington, DC. Michael is a very talented and now very FAMOUS interior designer thanks to the coverage of his work in the private quarters for the Obamas at the White House (which he would not talk about). However, no stranger to publicity, he had his first project published at the tender age of 24 in a major publication! Images shown are from his website of one of my favorite projects he has completed, a townhouse in Eaton Square. Michael showed a great deal of images: both published and unpublished, older and recent as well as a brief rundown of his many product lines. While talking about the bedroom shown above, probably one of my top favorite published bedroom images, Michael mentioned his philosophy of a bedroom as 'a crib' or a cozy retreat. He is a fan of patterned walls and beds nestled against the wall.Michael quickly broke down his design philosphy in a very clever way and you can see examples of this throughout all his work: the mixture of 2 ideas (often opposing) that bring out the best features of both. Whether it be mostly modern with an antique painting thrown in or English country with a few pieces from Marrakesh, this tension is where the interest lies in his work- the true definition of an eclectic interior! He believes the discord "brings you into the moment by its contrast". At the same time, Michael is concerned with balance. He never wants a room to be 'too simple, too fancy, too cluttered', etc. In a very formal dining room he'll throw in a sisal rug in contrast to a patterned or scenic wallpaper.

Another of the mainstays of his work is investing in quality, classic pieces. He mentioned in his own homes (as he is always moving) keeping the same couches for decades and uphostering them when they get a bit shabby. I noticed throughout many of his own houses that he showed the same pieces kept showing up. If you love something, you will always make it work: Stay away from the overly trendy and never start from scratch!Michael said that being an interior designer is one of the most personal and private fields you can ever go into. You get to know your clients very intimately and you should never betray their trust, hence the 'don't ask don't tell' policy on the White House! He did however mention that his work there was to 'highlight the best of America' and not neccesarily the traditions of the White House.

Some of the most interesting things he talked about were during the Q&A which was cohosted by his hilarious friend Ali Wentworth, actress and wife of George Stephanopoulos (whose house was recently in Elle Decor magazine). He mentioned his use of layering numerous smaller carpets in a large room. The reason? Not for the 'look' per say, but more because he felt it was hard to find rugs he liked in appropriate sizes!

Michael easily (and often) admited to being proudly high maintenance. He said "I'm not the easiest decorator to have" because he wants to challenge his clients to be invested in their houses. He wants them to think about their choices and for their spaces to be true reflections of not just Michael's taste, but their own lives. He claims all of his projects are incredibly individualistic and won't ever take on a client who merely wants a copy of one of his previous jobs.

I hope you all enjoyed these little tidbits I gleamed from the lecture; it was an entertaining and charming way to spend a rainy evening! All quotes are in italics.