30 in 30: #1

With thirty days until my next semester of classes start, I've decided to take the opportunity to document my exploration of New York City over that month with thirty buildings or places of interest. We start with a church near City College that I've always want to see but haven't done during the past semester when venturing to school or leaving to go home.



The Church of the Crucifixion is located on the corner of 149th Street and Convent Avenue in Hamilton Heights. It was completed in 1967 and was designed by Costas Machlouzarides, "the architect of the audacious," according to the New York Times, who was born in Cyprus in 1928, graduated from Columbia University in 1953, and does very little architecture these days.



With its floating roof and curving exterior walls, the church is a strange melding of Le Corbusier's Ronchamp (the AIA Guide to NYC calls it "a hallucinogenic version of ... Ronchamp) and an American grain elevator. The first thing that struck me was its relatively small size; I was expecting something much bigger given the late-Modernist formal vocabulary. What seems like a building that would occupy a full block and be visible from all sides actually sits on a small corner lot, addressing its context mainly via the piercing cross and adjacent narrow window. Nevertheless it's a strong presence in an area becoming more and more popular for its stock of brownstones, some more recognizable than others.

Directions:
Take A, B, C or D (if going uptown use a car near the front; downtown near the back) to West 145th Street station. Exit on St. Nicholas Avenue, between 147th and 148th Street, walk to 149th Street and then one block to Convent Avenue.

Inflationary Spaces of the Aero-Gothic Future

In the summer of 2005, a Swiss architecture firm called Instant designed an inflatable addition to the Berlin art space KW.

[Image: Courtesy of Instant].

According to I.D.'s Michael Dumiak, the inflatable, "fiber-reinforced PVC foil" design served as "a temporary summer entrance to the museum's bamboo garden," complete with its own staircase and balcony.
The "surprisingly strong, see-through structure," Dumiak explains, "consist[ed] of inflated stairs leading to an enclosure cantilevered over an 18th-century lane in the formerly communist east."
It was an internal prosthesis for the building, in other words, a new interior that could be deflated and moved elsewhere.

[Image: Courtesy of Instant].

To function properly, and to support the weight of museum visitors, the project used an inflatable variant on structural tensegrity, a concept first developed by sculptor Kenneth Snelson with the input of Buckminster Fuller.
From I.D.: "By attaching two spiral tension cables beneath the weakest part of a strut, and connecting the parts to an air-inflated shell, [Instant's project engineer Mauro Pedretti] found he could use thin and light – even transparent – materials and still carry heavy loads. One inflatable demo structure supports a light truck."

[Image: Two renderings of the project, courtesy of Instant].

"Unfortunately," we read, in Instant's own project recap, "the structure was rigid enough to withstand the loads but not its aggressive social urban context. As much as it was successful as a catalyst during the day, it was repeatedly vandalized during the night."
You can see films of the structure, both real and rendered, on Instant's website (click on "Detail," then go to "ON_AIR").
When I first saw the project, however, flipping through back issues of I.D. last night, I initially misunderstood it as being an entire museum addition, of perhaps indefinite duration – alas, it was a temporary installation, now long gone.
While thus deluded, though, I found myself imagining what might happen if you could design inflatable additions to suburban houses: your in-laws come to visit, or your weird and apparently unemployed uncle who doesn't really talk to anyone stops by, but there's literally no room for them inside the house. No worries: the smiling matron of this lucky household pops open some hinges on the back French doors and voilà: the house's central air-conditioning doubles as an air pump, and you all watch in pleased awe as a twin house, identical in all respects to the one you're now standing in, takes bloated shape in the lawn behind you. Even your uncle manages to say he's impressed.
Whole suburbs of inflatable houses!
So I imagined a new chapter for Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, in which our untrustworthy narrator is taken out into the gardens of the king – whose courtiers proceed to inflate an entire palace, over a half-dozen acres, full of flamingos and orchids, unrolling in the summer heat. A thousand rooms. Turrets and hallways.
Somewhere in the midst of all that is the chamber you'll be staying in...
Which reminded me of Tobias Hill's novel The Cryptographer, in which an ultra-rich Bill Gates-figure purchases literally an entire borough of London, walling it off and transforming it into a private homestead (an agonizingly brilliant set-up for a book, although the story itself falls flat) – at which point I thought: you could inflate an entire borough that has never otherwise existed, sprawling across the marshy floodplains of SE London.
Call it Hackney 2, or Stoke Airington.
It's one seamless piece of fiber-reinforced PVC foil. It looks like a huge plastic bag lying across the landscape – until the fans kick in. Two days later there's a whole new city, complete with streets and traffic lights built into the plastic. The lamps have shades, the windows shutters. It's a Gesamtkunstwerk so total it would make Mies van der Rohe panic.
To pay the investors back, you hire it out as a film set and produce award-winning mobile phone commercials there. Or strangely elaborate pornos, using transparent sets, described as "artistically stunning."

[Image: Courtesy of Instant].

Finally, I came back to Instant and their inflatable design for KW.
What if it had been slimmer and less bulky, for instance, taking up less space inside the museum – and, in a way, more ambitious, with better funding? In other words, what if you could show up at KW with a bunch of air pumps and a different design, and – after clearing the building – you'd inflate a whole new interior, perfectly matched to the architectural plan, subdividing galleries, adding stairways and lofted office space?
You come back a day later and twist a valve, blocking air from entering one room – and so another room unfolds somewhere deeper in the structure. Which, in turn, causes a corridor to inflate, leading onward to another room – where you have a choice: you can either open a valve and inflate the rest of the ground plan, or you can leave the valve closed, and thus a four-story tower of inflated rooms will gradually lift itself above the courtyard...
Leading me to wonder if there's some Hindu myth, or an obscure Upanishad, in which a multi-lunged god of air parades his wizardry of inflated worlds to stunned worshippers – or if there was a Christian heresy, from medieval Spain, in which the breath of God, a holy spirit animating base flesh, became interpreted as God, Inflationist, Lord of Balloons.
Had the heresy survived, a new breed of cathedrals would now dot the European landscape, supported by inflatable buttresses – inaugurating the Aero-Gothic. Aero-Romanesque. Aero-Baroque.

(To see how easy some of this could really be, take a long stroll through we make money not art's inflatable projects archive).

Today's archidose #53

ando's space #1 by F.j.
A Tadao Ando project in Tokyo.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

2006: The Year in Construction

Engineering News-Record has released its "Images of the Year" – and some of them are really fantastic.

[Image: Merle Prosofsky, Edmonton, Canada; "Backlighting diffused by early-morning fog dramatizes the beginning of the five-hour erection of a 310-tonne vacuum distillation tower. The 37-meter-long, 8.5-m-diameter tower will extract oil for OPTI Nexen’s $3.6-billion Long Lake steam-assisted gravity drainage project from northern Alberta’s oil sands." Via ENR].

[Image: Timothy J. Gattie, Boise, ID; "The $330-million Otay River Bridge in Chula Vista, Calif. rises into the morning mist. 'As the sun peeked through the fog, I couldn’t make out the bridge,' says Gattie, area engineer for Washington Group. 'So I put the sun behind the columns, and the picture came out.'" Via ENR].

[Image: Leah C. Palmer; "The scaffolded 'village green' of the recently completed St. Coletta School charter school in Washington, D.C., felt like the belly of the beast to Palmer... Palmer, who studied architecture, is fascinated by the framework of buildings." Via ENR].

[Image: Brian Fulcher, Walnut, CA; "A tunnel construction enthusiast, Fulcher took this shot of workers on the Gotthard Base Tunnel, Sedrun, Switzerland, a Bilfinger Berger-led joint venture. The crew is installing steel support ribs which, with the shotcrete applied to the tunnel’s forward wall, prevent collapse. This portion of the tunnel was bored through 'squeezing ground, which pushes in on the tunnel walls,' Fulcher says. 'It’s very dangerous work.'" Via ENR].

I've only uploaded four of my favorites; go to ENR for two dozen or so that I didn't choose. Many of the images are like photographic updates of Fernand Léger and his Constructors, including this bizarre sky bicycle, or these two guys with their roped bottles of water.

All rights belong to the photographers credited above.

Mies van der Rogaine

I was thinking today about performance art pieces involving architecture, and I thought maybe someday there should be a man who travels around the world, visiting cities and jungles and deserts and islands – and it's all so he can take Flomax inside famous architectural structures.

[Image: A bunch of pills, via the European School of Oncology].

It's the new art of pharmaco-architourism.
Similarly, I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago about "gonzo" architectural journalism, and how most people seem to think that just means getting high before interviewing Rem Koolhaas, or taking hallucinogens, or a cannabinoid, etc., and then off you go on a plane to Dubai – but who's to say a building would be any less interesting if you experienced it all jacked up on prescription diuretics? Or high on Cialis, for that matter? Every church in Rome, visited in a libidinal haze – surely some interesting journalism would result? You could sign yourself "The Cialisian." Soon, you've got a monthly column in Vanity Fair.
For Christmas, you receive a specially tailored set of loose trousers.
Or you cover your head with a spot of Rogaine foam inside every building Mies van der Rohe ever designed – except, by the end of the piece, your hair is so long you're actually refused entrance to Berlin's National Gallery. Your book would be an instant, if controversial, bestseller.
It would be called Mies van der Rogaine.
Or you take heroic quantities of Prilosec in buildings built before 1500AD, and you pitch the resulting articles to Archinect. Pop some Adderall and plow through the High Gothic monuments of Europe, publishing your research in The New York Times.
The next year it's Lipitor, or Effexor, or a whole rucksack full of Brovana inhalers, as you write about anything built by Le Corbusier.
Because then, of course, there's Clozaril, for your upcoming feature on Gaudí...

Going behind that door

[Image: 10 Downing Street, from the new virtual tour].

The BBC reports that London's 10 Downing Street "has opened its famous front door to the public after more than 270 years, with a virtual tour for web users. Visitors can look at rooms, find out historical information and click on objects such as paintings and furniture for extra details. Tony Blair told the BBC the tour was 'an excellent way of showing the tremendous history of this building'."

[Image: 10 Downing Street, from the new virtual tour].

So I immediately thought of security risks: people casing the place to check for back doors, routes, cameras, blindspots. What to steal, whether it's alarmed, where the nearest windows are. While all of that has no doubt been considered by the tour's developers and their legion of security consultants, it would still be interesting to know how they did it, what specific steps were taken to deter possible burglars, terrorists, midnight visitors, and other unwanted guests. Were the truly expensive objects removed from display? Were surveillance cameras detached from the walls, and hidden?
Or, more architecturally, were whole internal stretches of the building somehow faked: some extra wainscoting and temporary wallpaper, all mounted on movable plasterboard, so that we, the unsuspecting public, never realize that the Prime Minister's main study actually has two more doors... leading back to a series of rooms that aren't in the tour at all – but that pop out and around to a dark corridor connected to the kitchen, through another door that's been conveniently blocked with a refrigerator digitally added after the fact?
Who would know?
If it's not uncommon for some governments to issue fake maps, or at least maps with whole cities missing – military bases left as empty mountain ranges, and so on – who's to say a virtual tour of the ruler's actual home would be any different?
From the BBC: "The tour's developer, Aral Balkan, said: 'I thought it was too interesting a project to pass up. Working on it has been very exciting and a great privilege. Downing Street is an extraordinary place and I hope to have captured a real sense of the history and importance that comes from going behind that door.'"

The Year in Photos

Back in July I started a new feature on this page, called Today's archidose, where I periodically post an image from Flickr's archidose pool or tagged archidose. Here's a slide show of that pool, which includes images posted here over the past six months, as well as others not so lucky. Move your mouse over the bottom of the slide show to see thumbnail images and skip around; move your mouse over the top to adjust slideshow speed, move back and forth, and to pause the show; and click the images for more information. Enjoy!



To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

The Art of Living in 2:33

Here's a "A video exploration of a Soho loft designed by Azin Valy & Suzan Wines of I-Beam Design in New York City."



(Thanks to Glenn for the head's up!)

When the doors of the earth slam shut

[Image: Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica].

"Imagine if plate tectonics stopped tomorrow," New Scientist suggests. A world without tectonics would be a world without earthquakes, the continents frozen in place, coastlines locked where they are. New mountains could never form, islands would stop emerging from the sea, and apartment insurance would be considerably cheaper.
While the end of tectonics is "not likely to happen any time soon," the article reminds us, "a controversial new theory says it could [come to an end] in about 350 million years." In fact, global tectonic activity may have ceased once before – "around 1.6 to 1.1 billion years ago, as a supercontinent called Rodinia formed." At that point, "all plate tectonics could have ceased for 100 million years." This caused the earth's surface to thicken, forming "a large band of granites" that now "stretches across the northern hemisphere."
But the internal roiling heat and liquid rock of the earth's core and mantle gradually intensified, growing strong enough to punch through the earth's rocky surface; this, kick-starting an era of volcanic eruption strong enough to break the continents apart, "would have got plate tectonics going again."
The belts of the earth were soon turning; new mountains began to rise; island chains drifted, crashing into one another; coasts trembled from below as their guts turned to gravel.
And it all may happen again: according to Paul Silver, of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, the doors of the earth may slam shut in 350 million years, locking closed – perhaps initiating another one-hunded million years of terrestrial calm.

Call for Entries: PA29

Pamphlet Architecture has extended its call for entries for its 29th issue until January 16, 2007.

To promote and foster the development and circulation of architectural ideas, Pamphlet Architecture is again offering an opportunity for architects, designers, theorists, urbanists, and landscape architects to publish their designs, manifestos, ideas, theories, ruminations, hopes, and insights for the future of the designed and built world. With far-ranging topics including the alphabet, algorithms, machines, and music, each Pamphlet is unique to the individual or group that authors it. This call for ideas seeks projects that possess the rigor and excitement found throughout the rich history of Pamphlet Architecture.

More information here.

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden by Ake Larsson.

The udpated book feature is Above Paris: The Aerial Photography of Roger Henrard by Jean-Louis Cohen.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Redesigning Christmas
Pentagram redesigns Christmas for public radio's Studio 360. [slide show and audio]

Kosmograd
"Postcards from the edge of the 1000-mile city." (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

Jetson Green
A well-done blog "trying to flaunt the business case for green building." (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

Frank's Home

"Frank's Home" is a new play by Richard Nelson, directed by Robert Falls and starring Peter "Robocop" Weller. After a preview run at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, the play moves to New York and Playwrights Horizons next month, from January 13 - February 18.

"Frank's Home" is described as,

"a lyrical, heartbreaking story about one of our greatest, if less than perfect, visionaries – a man who created a new architectural vocabulary but couldn't create a home for himself and his family."

Photo of Peter Weller by Brian Warling

Special Discount Offer

Order by January 30th and receive $40 tickets (reg. $65) for performances thru Jan 21. $50 thru Feb 18.

Mention code FHBL to receive discount:

:: Online
:: Call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily)
:: Visit the Ticket Central Box Office, 416 W 42nd Street (Noon-8pm daily)

A Daily 2006 in Review

This year's been a big one for me, getting married, moving to New York, and going back to school. And judging from all the posts in my archives from this year, it's been a big year for architecture in general. Below I give you a brief recap of the year in daily doses. Posts will be light for the next week or two as I relax and celebrate the holiday season. Happy Holidays!

The state of Chicago architecture:

:: Preservation and One South Dearborn
:: Low-rise residential
:: Wrigley Field bleachers
:: Navy (crap)Pier and not so crappy
:: Bucket Boys
:: Studio Gang's Aqua once, twice, thrice
:: Crate & Barrel's urban referent
:: 3 blocks, 5 buildings
:: HUB 116
:: Soldier Field loses landmark status
:: Turrell's Chicago Skyspace opens
:: Glass is the new painted concrete
:: Dirk Denison's Culver House
:: Zoka Zola reworks Chicago's zoning
:: VDT's north-side retail complex
:: Mies on a beam
:: McDonalds buys a bike station
:: Bike 2015 Plan
:: Fun with developer taglines
:: The Rockwell Brown Line station reopens
:: Smith leaves SOM

Architecture in NYC:

:: New York gets new bus stops
:: The connection between Rockwell and Ando
:: The handrail memorial
:: Gehry and Tschumi before & during
:: Astoria pool
:: Mocking up 40 Bond Street
:: WTC towers unveiled
:: Upper West Side photos
:: StoryCorps booth
:: New Museum progress
:: Hollywood in Astoria

Beyond Chicago and New York:

:: Steven Holl's Nelson-Atkins Bloch addition, not once but twice
:: VDT's Kresge Foundation
:: Chavez Ravine
:: Paolo Soleri in New Orleans
:: OMA in KY
:: Hotel Puerta America's corridors and rooms
:: Golconde
:: Porous Drape
:: Congotronics
:: Dubai Strike
:: Cretto, revisited
:: Novy Dvur Monastery
:: Tikopia, part I and part II
:: Urban Plough
:: Wind and Earth
:: Richard Meier's Ara Pacis
:: Chicago Square (in Hamburg, Germany)
:: Wind and earth
:: Ferrous Park
:: Slaughterhouse architecture
:: Herzog & de Meuron's Tate expansion
:: The state of starchitecture
:: House of Terror
:: My trip to Ecuador in one-two-three-four parts
:: Leviathan Thot

The year in half doses:

:: Mercat de Santa Caterina by EMBT


:: S(ch)austall by FNP Architekten


:: Mother's by Clive Wilkinson


:: Metropol Parasol by J. Mayer H.


House in Brejos de Azeitao by Aires Mateus


Belmont/Thurman Lofts by Holst Architecture


Big Box Housing by David Woodhouse Architects


Glass Sea by Alec French Architects


House of Sweden by Gert Wingardh


Laminata House by Kruunenberg Van der Erve Architecten


Urban Cactus by UCX Architects / Ben Huygen and Jasper Jaegers


Z-House by Eve Harlou

Architecture and media:

:: Single. Handsome. Charismatic. Architect?
:: Auctioning Daniel Libeskind's boots
:: Allianz in Legos
:: Design E-squared
:: Modern-day Leonardos
:: Graham Foundation videos
:: UGLY Rant
:: Blueprint Magazines
:: Mini Cooper and Arcosanti
:: Architecture videos
:: A couple films: La Jetee and Fitzcarraldo
:: MIT Gallery
:: Thermal Baths music video
:: Crains Chicago on quirky bosses
:: What are architects paid?
:: Holiday gift books

Your favorites (with # of comments, as of today):

:: Gettin' Hitched (27)
:: Dubai Strike (16)
:: Nelson-Atkins Bloch (15)
:: This Just In (14)
:: Aqua Redux (13)
:: 4 Weeks Notice (13)
:: Architectural Connections (11)
:: No Small Plans (10)
:: Chang-Lin Tien Center (10)
:: Single. Handsome. Charismatic. Architect? (9)
:: Urban Referent (9)
:: Skyspace Opens (9)
:: un film de ... (9)
:: S-U-C-C-E-E-S! (9)
:: Rockwell Reopens (9)
:: Handrail Memorial (8)
:: Today's archidose #19 (8)
:: Chavez Ravine (7)
:: Metropol Parasol (7)
:: Design E-squared (7)
:: Weekly Aerials (7)
:: House of Sweden (7)
:: File Under: Luminous (7)
:: Coroflot Salary Results (7)
:: Leviathan Thot (7)

Lasly, in passing:

:: Harry Seidler
:: Jane Jacobs
:: Ferd Scheeler

Architectural Sci-Fi

[Image: Steve Pike].

I picked up a few books yesterday at Hennessey + Ingalls, including a collection of student work from Unit 20 of the increasingly exciting Bartlett School of Architecture in London. The book is edited by Marcos Cruz and Salvador Pérez Arroyo, and its projects date from 1999-2002.
It's also amazingly interesting.
I can't find any links to it online, however, so I'll just give you a random walk-through of the book's contents...

[Image: James Foster].

There's James Foster's "Inhabitable Growthscape," a "series of incubators" which he constructed from vacuum-formed perspex and electronic circuitry; the system's larger architectural applications are pictured above: it's part boatyard, part aeroponic farm for the cultivation of "disease free cloned plants."
There's then a ten-page spread by Kevin Chu illustrating the industrial use of "clustering robots." Chu describes a colony of "mining robots breeding on a lake in Helsinki," as well as a cluster of similar robots "forming a silicon mining factory in Tenerife." These are "small-scale insect-like robots which form a tactile and transformable surface," although "the overall form alters according to the relocation of individual entities." In other words, it's an Artificially Intelligent swarm of robots transforming the surface of the earth into a quarry...
In fact, if I can interject something here, the book is a little preoccupied with insect shapes and machinery – to the point of looking like a deleted scene from Minority Report 2 – so I will say that architectural studios should be wary of turning themselves into machine-development classes; but that's a minor complaint, and a larger discussion.

[Image: Lisa Silver].

We then turn to RIBA Award-winner Lisa Silver, whose architecture consists of "alien objects... fused, subverted and juxtaposed to form a unified whole."
Specifically, Silver presents a space defined by "surfaces and meshes of varied transparency," made from roof suspension systems and ramps. The result is a bricolage of car chassis and old farm implements, assembled on the banks of the Mississippi River.

[Image: Lisa Silver].

Tom Foster, then, proposes a "swarm of hyper crystallisation submersible robots" that will spend an entire winter underwater in the Gulf of Helsinki, "artificially enhancing the ice sheet from underneath." This – referred to as "ice periphery management" – is done in the service of an "ice suburb" that "will exist [out on the ice] for 5 months of each year." The ice sheet can be strengthened with "coolant filled reinforcement bars," and the ice suburb will generate its own energy "from high winter winds and sea/ice movements."
So you've got an entire sci-fi trilogy, economically compressed into a few renderings and photo captions.

[Image: Annika Schollin].

Returning to land, Annika Schollin writes about urban decay, abandoned buildings, and the formation of "micro-jungles within the urban structure."
Concentrating specifically on London's Brick Lane, Schollin describes how the unmaintained city is soon "reeking of rot and humidity." Her project is a way of "[c]elebrating decay," she explains, "as the organic inhabitants of the site begin to take over, weaving through, ambivalently undermining and reinforcing the built structure." The actual architectural proposal appears to involve constructing a kind of permanent exoskeleton around the ruined markets of Brick Lane, complete with "water dispensing ducts" and a "hydro percolating roof."
So – almost literally to repeat myself – architectural design becomes more and more like science fiction.

[Image: Annika Schollin].

Other projects have a distinctly biological theme – including open bacteriological collaboration with the microbiology lab at University College London. Steve Pike, for instance, outlines an "algaetecture" of blown glass and high transparency acrylic. Inspired by the industrial manufacture of car windshields, these glass structures look simultaneously deformed, alchemic, and bio-anatomical.

[Images: Steve Pike's "vitreous occupational chambers" and "monitor vessel support infrastructure"].

Pike explains how he built glass Interaction Vessels, Monitor Vessels, and Transformer Vessels, studying so-called algaetectural "parallels to human occupation." He has an essay later in the book about contamination, the London Underground, and "non-sterile environments," in which he proposes a catchment mechanism for airborne particles (the illustrations of which look like a scene from Alphaville).
I could go on and on here. I just think the ideas are great (excuse the enthusiasm, if this isn't your thing).
For instance, there's a project by Mark Mueckenheim called "London Urban Farming." Mueckhenheim points out that the decline of farmland throughout the EU will necessitate "bring[ing] farming into the urban fabric." He thus proposes a food processing plant "with a fish hatchery attached to its façade."

[Image: One of Mark Mueckenheim's urban farms; again, note the insectile nature of student work produced for this unit].

The rest of the book confronts us with acoustic wind membranes; the city of Chicago as a kind of machine made out of retractable bridges; health clinics and sports research institutes; a hydroponic farm, by Stephen Clements, apparently modeled after the human nervous system; and even a Finnish fish farm, by Natalia Traverso Caruana, where "research labs and fish nets creat[e] a new luminous landscape" in the sea.

[Image: Natalia Traverso Caruana's cultural HQ for Texaco].

Caruana's next project is a "cultural branch" for the headquarters of Texaco – it's magnificently colored and practically leaps off the page.
There are strange photographic labs, and elevators that appear to analyze their passengers' DNA. There's even a plastic surgery lounge, or "Body Transformation" complex, proposed for Heathrow Airport, by Jia Lu (something tells me this will actually be constructed). Andy Shaw jumps in at the very end of the book with some robotic machine-space studies for "technical appliances based on the work of Eduardo Paolozzi."
Etc. etc. etc.
In other words, I like the book. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to exist anywhere online, so you'll just have to take my word for it – or you can visit the Bartlett's various Unit 20 homepages.
Finally, my larger point in citing and describing so many of these projects is to demonstrate, in perhaps exhaustive detail, that some of today's most imaginative artistic, technological, and even literary work is being produced in architectural studios. Whether you like their projects or not, in other words, architecture students are out-thinking, out-structuring, and out-performing novelists, hands down.
It is now architecture that lets us rethink the world anew.

Today's archidose #52

Campus de Vigo (Lagoas-Marcosende) by esmuz.
University Campus in Vigo, Spain by Enric Miralles Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT).

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

Hollywood in Astoria

As I type this, a movie is being shot a block from my apartment. It's obvious from the typical signs: trucks line the whole length of one side of the street; cones block access to thru traffic; cops stand around doing nothing; lights illuminate the night. This last one is what intrigues me the most about the presence of Hollywood in Astoria, Queens.



The street I live on runs under Hell Gate Bridge, the lengthy railroad corridor that runs through Astoria and roughly parallels the Triborough Bridge about three blocks to the south. For whatever reason, the filmmakers have lit up the underside of the bridge, a concrete barrel vault that's an impressive presence (something I'm guessing they were drawn to) even without the lights. The strong uplights might be required because of film's relatively low light sensitivity (compared to the human eye), but to me it points to Hollywood's tendency to exaggerate.



What intrigues me the most, though, is how Hollywood actually presents a place. Watching a movie that's shot on location, a certain level of authenticity comes across, making the story more believable to us. But is it an accurate representation of the place? Is it really authentic? If the film down the street from my apartment is any indication, the answer is no. While the exaggerated lighting doesn't necessarily lie, the overhaul of an adjacent building (unfortunately I didn't get a good photo of it) obviously does.



What the filmmakers have done to the adjacent building is change it from a home for a Greek organization (Astoria is VERY Greek and littered with Greek restaurants, stores, businesses, etc.) to a home for what appeared to be an Indian organization of some sort. Numerous extras and actors milled about in what I'm guessing was traditional dress. I have no idea how all this fits into the film's narrative, but what the filmmakers are ultimately doing is using the location for its formal attributes, and then going not one (the lighting) but two steps further by modifying that formality to fit the story. In other words, they're treating a real place like a studio or stage set and using it as a canvas for manipulation.



Nevertheless I was extremely pleased to see the lights under the Hell Gate Bridge and couldn't resist taking these photos.

The crisis of unspecified specificity

Photographer Frank van der Salm beautifully captures architecture on the edge of surreality: uninhabited and lit from within, it's a world before its people arrive – or half a second after they've left.

[Images: ©Frank van der Salm. Sequence (2004) and Square (2006)].

Van der Salm's work, according to critic Solange de Boer, "has been increasingly influenced since 1998 by other disciplines – ranging from the work of artists like Richard Long, Gerhard Richter and Andreas Gursky to the architecture of Renzo Piano."
De Boer describes the "reality content" of these photos, and how that content "is undermined in various ways – by introducing movement in the image, by alternating focus and lack of focus, his use of color and the role played by light and artificial light."

[Image: ©Frank van der Salm, Link (2004)].

However, as impressed as I am by Frank van der Salm's work – and I am – I have to say that most of the essays re-published on his website are almost unreadable.
Art historians – and art critics, in general – are constantly moaning about there being some sort of crisis in whatever field it is they're writing about – say, a remarkably well-funded New York photographer loses interest in her chosen subject matter and so becomes glum and sarcastic at cocktail parties, which gets all her other New York photographer friends depressed about the state of the industry, and so Artforum reports a "crisis" in contemporary portraiture – but the "crisis," if it even exists (and it doesn't – what was all that about fear-mongering in politics...? fake emergencies announced to receive more funding...?), is that it's almost impossible to read about art anymore. He says, stoking the fires of fear.
Instead, an outdated vocabulary with no analytic or practical use gets combined with a weirdly unnecessary check-list of theorists and their books; and, all the while, the general public awareness of art in the world becomes limited to Apocalypto.
Which just means that someone at Yale will declare a "crisis in contemporary cinema," and they'll promptly be awarded a Mellon Fellowship. Thus armed, they spend a whole year outlining their new Horkheimerian approach to cultural discourse theory – which is a field they appear to have invented.
Only then to declare a crisis in it.

[Image: ©Frank van der Salm, Quarter (2002)].

In any case, while you're on van der Salm's website, reading about the "crisis in landscape" – which was experienced by approximately three people, I believe – click on "Artist," then click on "Text," then click on "Kopsa." You'll soon read that there's "a kind of unspecified specificity" to Frank van der Salm's photographs. Indeed, van der Salm's imagery "relieves the specific" – which only "heightens the impact of the unspecified, the 'artificial', if you will." Van der Salm "shows the specific and the unspecified at the same time, creating from the specific real a (new) unspecified, average."
Apparently, Rosalind Krauss can even prove this.
Having said that, however, Frank van der Salm's images are not "average in the dull sense of the word" – not at all: "they are just the opposite."
And if you're feeling confused while looking at these images, that is because "we see, recognize and understand" what they depict, but we "cannot accept" them. It even seems "as though we are being alienated by the sheer 'logic', by the sheer 'neutrality' of these banal images while our mind incessantly runs around in circles, wrapping itself up in the (to it) irrational equation specific + unspecific = artificial."
I see.

[Image: ©Frank van der Salm, Loop (2005)].

(Frank van der Salm's work first spotted at Conscientious).