AFH - What Do You See?

'Tis the season for, among other things, giving. One organization worthy of some year-end loosening of purse-strings is Architecture for Humanity, who are "building a more sustainable future using the power of design." What Do Yo See doesn't just ask for money, it asks people to describe a vision for their own community. Check it out...



...and then DONATE.

Electromagnetic Test Town

[Image: An otherwise only conceptually related photo by Steve Rowell shows the LAPD's Edward M. Davis Emergency Vehicle Operations Center & Tactics/Firearms Training Facility in Granada Hills, CA; courtesy of the Center for Land Use Intrepretation].

I was fascinated to read yesterday that a cyberwarfare training city is under construction, to be opened by March 2013, "a small-scale city located close by the New Jersey Turnpike complete with a bank, hospital, water tower, train system, electric power grid, and a coffee shop."

I envisioned whole empty streets and bank towers—suburban houses and replica transportation depots—sitting there in the rain whilst troops of code-wielding warriors hurl electromagnetic spells from laptops against elevator circuit boards, sump pumps, and garage doors, flooding basements, popping open underground gold vaults, and frying traffic lights, like some gonzo version of The Italian Job wed with the digital wizardry of a new sorcerer class, the "first-line cyber defenders" who will be trained in this place, our 21st-century Hogwarts along the freeway. Then they clean it all and start again tomorrow.

Alas. Although this, in many ways, is even more interesting, the entire "test city" truly is miniature: indeed, the whole thing "fits in a six by eight foot area and was created using miniature buildings and houses, [and] the underlying power control systems, hospital software, and other infrastructures are directly from the real world."

Nonetheless, this 6-x-8 surrogate urban world will be under near-constant microcosmic attack: "NetWars CyberCity participants, which include cyber warriors from the Department of Defense and other defenders within the U.S. Government, will be tasked with protecting the city's critical infrastructure and systems as they come under attack. Cyber warriors will be presented with potential real-world attacks; their job is to defend against them. Missions will include fending off attacks on the city's power company, hospital, water system and transportation services."

Which means, in the end, that this is really just an enlarged board game with an eye-catching press release—but there is still something compelling about the notion of an anointed patch of circuits and wifi routers, accepted as an adequate stand-in—an electromagnetic stunt double—for something like all of New York City, let alone the United States. A voodoo doll made of light, animated from within by packet switches, under constant surveillance in an invisible war.

(Via @pd_smith).

Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond

While in Richmond I visited the lovely Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  The beautiful original building, seen above, was designed in 1936 by Norfolk VA,  architects Peebles and Ferguson in English Renaissance or Georgian style.

Sadly that is no longer the main entrance, but rather a nice but blandly modern addition by London architect Rick Mather from 2010 serves that purpose. I know I know, I'm always baised towards beautiful early 20th century classical buildings, so sue me, it's my blog afterall!

The recent additions include a lot of work to the extensive site which holds a lot of other structures from the former lives of the property.

I admit to loving the landscape and hardscape, especially the water features.

The full length of Mather's addition.

The interior is large, bright, and open and features nicely detailed modern stairs.

It's a huge museum!

If you do a little wandering, you can find the original entryway and stair which is reminiscent of an English country house foyer.

I love this limestone detailing.

And the ironwork and wood railing is beautiful.

This colorful enclosed Roman courtyard in the original building houses an amazing Roman mosaic depicting the 4 seasons. More on that tomorrow when I share some of my favorite pieces from the collection.

As I mentioned the site has had previous incarnations, primarily as the Confederate Soldier's home campus until 1941 when the last resident passed away.

The charming carpenter Gothic style chapel, known as the Confederate Memorial Chapel, was designed by architect Marion J. Dimmock in 1887.

The other large building on the grounds is the Home for Needy Confederate Women (what a name!). 

Designed in 1932 by architect Merrill Lee, the residence was in use until 1989 when the last residents were moved to a nearby nursing facility.

And I know you're thinking it; Yes, Lee based the neoclassical structure on the White House!

The World Has Been Empty Since The Romans: Architecture + Urbanism recommends 'Ian Hamilton Finlay'

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was one of the most original artists of the twentieth century. Early in his career he was Britain’s foremost concrete poet and his approach to his work – whatever material he used, whether wood, stone, neon, bronze or paper – remained that of a poet giving form to ideas. This display at Tate Britain focuses on Ian Hamilton Finlay’s recourse to a neo-classical idiom and his creation of sculptures that, by their conjunction of word and image, play with an emblematic use of reference and metaphor whose adopted form is most often that of the idyll. Until 17 February 2013

Book Review: Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island

Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island by Barney Kulok
Aperture, 2012
Hardcover, 80 pages



Last month the FDR Four Freedoms Park finally opened, close to 40 years after Louis I. Kahn's death, at which time he had completed most of the design. Alongside the pomp surrounding the opening came a number of reviews (all very positive) and lots of photos along the lines of my two batches. While photos focusing on the completed park and memorial are important, documentation of the design's realization is also valuable. For that we can thank photographer Barney Kulok, who was given access to the construction site about a year ago to document the construction.

What I really like about the 49 black-and-white plates collected in this handsome book is the way the construction is not documented through wide-frame images capturing large swaths of the place, but through small-scale details that border on painterly abstractions. This is not a book like Brian Finke's Construction, which focused on the people constructing buildings; rather, Building attempts to give a sense of the whole by examining its parts. Yet, it's not as simple as saying that the essence of the design is found in its details, because many of the details that Kulok documents were subsequently buried or removed.

The sum of the photos in Building is akin to poetry, where interpretation is open-ended because the shots don't settle for easy presentations of what we think of when we think of "construction site"—very little machinery is present, for example, and tools appear as aesthetic objects more than useful objects. I like to think that even the most mundane detail—a guideline tied to a piece of rebar driven into the earth; a haphazard assemblage of wire, cloth, and more rebar closing a hole in a chain-link fence; a piece of wood resting on concrete steps—reveals something about the specific construction process on Roosevelt Island. Each photo is a trace of human action, even as only three of the nearly fifty plates have people within the frame; they tell stories beyond the immediate moment captured.

The most interesting plates border on the composed, and not just in terms of photography—angle, framing, aperture, etc. I wonder if a cubic piece of stone teetering on the edge of a much larger piece of stone was found by Kulok as he traversed the job site, or placed there intentionally, perhaps inspired by something he saw but manipulated to make the ideal photo. Images like these may turn on my skepticism radar, but in the end I don't think it matters if they're staged or not, because they still serve to reveal the construction. A "clean" pile of dirt on stone pavers says just as much about the filling in of the voids between stones as does a "dirty" pile of dirt on stone pavers (you'll have to trust me on this one). But the former is just a better photograph, a piece of poetry rather than part of a documentary.

For those interested in hearing Kulok speak about the book, he'll be in conversation with Joel Smith this evening at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore, 547 West 27th Street, NYC. The event is free and a book signing will follow the conversation.


US: CA: UK:

Architecture on the Edge of Darkness

In 2011 I served on the jury for the eVolo Skyscraper Competition, an experience I recounted about a year ago in a review of the massive eVolo Skyscraper book. One thing in particular that I mentioned then was "the visual darkness of the entries, the apparent gloom that seems to accompany thinking about the future." Upon receiving the eVolo Skyscraper Competition Poster, which features stamp-sized renderings of over 600 entries, I had the same thought. But actually looking at the front and back of the whole poster, below, it seems that maybe lightness is more prevalent than darkness; an optimistic turn in one year?


[eVolo 2012 Skyscraper Competition Poster | image source]

While I attributed the darkness in eVolo entries to dystopian visions of the future where skyscrapers remedied the environmental ills we created, a similar darkness is found in some of the winners and finalists for the 2012 Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition, or KRob for short.


[Winner - Robert Gilson's Best in Category - Professional Digital/Mixed | image source]

Darkness does not pervade the majority of the drawings featured this year—and it's probably less of a defining characteristic of the drawings than terms like mixed-media or moody—but where I found it, it was fairly heavy, damp even. The above winner is a case in point: The sun is out, but the shadows are deep, the air is smoggy, and the tree-like overhead constructions sit over broken-down caravans; all of it adds up to a fairly bleak scene.


[Finalist - James Blair, Cornell University - Student Digital/Mixed | image source]

The finalists above and below are from fairly subterranean vantage points, natural places for darkness to be a companion. In each case light filters down, but not enough to escape the heavy blacks and grays.


[Finalist - Joshua Harrex, University of Technology, Sydney - Student Digital/Mixed | image source]

The last example below, which comes from my alma mater, is basically a dusk or night scene where the darkness is made even thicker by the driving rain. It's like a film noir, and we are taking shelter under the canopy; we notice the building across the street but also the clock near us and the man who is holding an umbrella. The architecture is almost secondary to the feeling and the setting, both of which are much heavier than the typical rendering.


[Finalist - Justin Pohl, Kansas State University - Student Digital/Mixed | image source]

Drawing Building Hearing

There are at least two events tonight, Tuesday, November 27th, that are worth stopping by if you're in New York.

[Image: "Salvage Architecture" by production designer Paul Lasaine from Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb's Drawing Building archive].

While I will be busy co-hosting a book release party for Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb—who just published a collection of images from their Drawing Building online archive of "works that convey architectural alternatives, by-products, expansions, or critiques of our inhabited environments"—at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, at 7pm, I also wanted to post a quick note that there is an interesting sonic event happening nearby, at 291 Church Street, for a new project by Marc Weidenbaum's Disquiet Junto exploring the sonic universe of retail sounds.

Weidenbaum is a highly prolific, Bay Area-based collaborative producer of always surprising music, sound, and noise projects, including a soundtrack for the city of Lisbon and Instagr/am/bient, which produced "25 sonic postcards" inspired by musicians' images on Instragram.

Tonight's event—part of an exhibition curated by Rob Walker called As Real As It Gets—will be "an exercise in sonic branding," as the participating musicians "will gather to perform speculative sound works that employ as source material documentary audio from retail establishments." Each "will present imagined soundscapes inspired by Émile Zola's characterization of the department store, in his novel The Ladies' Paradise, as 'a machine working at high pressure.'" (Read an interview with Weidenbaum about the project at the Free Music Archive or Rob Walker's essay on the project, "Listening to Retail").

Retail soundscapes will buzz, hum, and sing starting at 6:30pm at 291 Church Street, and, a half-hour later, up the street at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, we'll be kicking things off with Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb. Stop by both if you can.

Logan Circle House tour

For those of you in DC, don't forget the Logan Circle holiday house tour this upcoming Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012 from 1-5.  The neighborhood has an assortment of restored Victorian houses through modern 'loft' apartments so the variety is always interesting and the Christmas decorations are inspiring. Hope to see you there! Tickets are available HERE.picture via WeLoveDC

sLAB Costa Rica, Part 2

Back in April I featured sLAB Costa Rica, a design-build project of NYIT that aims to build a communal recycling center in Nosara on the country's Pacific coast. Their initial Kickstarter campaign was successful, allowing students to travel over the summer to help in the project's construction. But, as professor Tobias Holler states on their new Kickstarter page, "the project is far from completed, and much work remains to be done before the building is ready to help with the local waste management problem." Holler and his students are hoping to return between semesters in January 2013 to continue volunteering on the construction site.



Check out the above video for more on the project, and please visit the sLAB Costa Rica Part 2 Kickstarter page for even more information and to donate before the December 13 deadline for this worthy project.

Where 4 are they now?

Luke Butcher graduated from MA A+U with Distinction in 2011 and completed his professional architectural education with a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 2012, achieving another Distinction and receiving the Hays Award for "Outstanding Achievement in Professional Studies". Luke is currently on the Graduate Management Training Programme at Mace in London. Luke says 'The Graduate Management Training Programme is an exciting opportunity that allows me to work alongside programme and project managers, specialists in construction delivery and cost consultancy, and facilities managers.'  Luke's MA A+U thesis The Architecture of the Profession is available to purchase here

Windsor Farms, Richmond

I spent the day in Richmond recently and drove through one of the most storied neighborhoods in the city, Windsor Farms.

Developed in 1926 by Thomas C. Williams, Jr.,  the planned neighborhood was originally meant to be created from authentic English Country houses which were to be dismantled and brought across the ocean.

Parliament put a stop to that (seriously) but 2 houses were successfully recreated from ancient British buildings and reside in Windsor Farms, both operating as house museums; Agecroft Hall, above and Virginia House, 2 above.

The rest of the houses were then designed by a who's who of 1920s (and more recent) architects and landscape designers including William Lawrence Bottomley and Charles Gillette.

 Driving through this bucolic neighborhood is as good as a house tour!

It was fun trying to decipher which houses were old and which were newer, as most are kept so immaculate that one can't age them.

 The neighborhood is an architectural dictionary of styles.

 And time periods!

 The houses range from grand estates to smaller residences.

 Everyone had a perfect yard and the old trees add so much character.

 I loved the brickwork on these tudor revival houses.

 I'm always a sucker for a white brick painted house.

 And a picket fence!

If you ever find yourself in Richmond, check out this neigborhood. Stay tuned for future posts on Agecroft Hall and Virginia House!

Monday, Monday

A Weekly Dose of Architecture Updates:

This week's dose features Écomusée du Pays de Rennes in Rennes, France, by Guinée*Potin:


The featured past dose is the Apprentice Formation Center in Saint Maur des Fossés, France by AIR:


This week's book review is Architecture: From Commission to Construction by Jennifer Hudson:
   
(R): The featured past book review is  Towards Zero-Energy Architecture by Mary Guzowski (now in paperback).

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**NOTE: The next weekly dose will be 2012.12.10.**

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World-Architects.com U.S. Building of the Week:

Uptown in Cleveland, Ohio, by Stanley Saitowitz / Natoma Architects: