Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

This week's dose features Brian C. Nevin Welcome Center in Ithaca, New York by Baird Sampson Neuert Architects:


The featured past dose is First Nations Garden Pavilion in Montreal, Quebec, Canada by Saucier + Perrotte:


This week's book review is St. Louis Architecture: Three Centuries of Classic Design by Robert Sharoff and William Zbaren:


american-architects.com Building of the Week:

Children's Library Discovery Center at Queens Library in Jamaica, Queens by 1100 Architect:


Unrelated links will return next week.

Half Dose #97: Concrete Factory

[Photograph copyright Javier Azurmendi | Click images for larger views.]

This renovated Concrete Factory in east-northeast Madrid is in a location increasingly surrounded by office buildings. Rather than move the working factory, the owners enlisted Lorenzo Alonso Arquitectos (Lorenzo Alonso, Jose Luis Cerezo, Enrique García) to help integrate the industrial building into its changing context.


[Photograph copyright Javier Azurmendi]

At its most basic level, the factory shifted from a surface-collection system to a silo-based system; or to put it another way, from horizontal to vertical, from suburban to urban in form and character. By keeping the factory in its current location, truck trips are reduced for construction projects in the city, relative to moving the factory further afield. Truck trips are also reduced from the increased storage capacity of the silos. Another benefit of the silo system, combined with the wrapper designed by the architects, is a reduction in dust emissions and noise; as the architects put it, the skin acts as a filter.


[Photograph copyright Javier Azurmendi]

The skin is the most striking aspect of the architectural intervention, although the choice to round the corners seems appropriate for this cladding, as the breaks or interruptions that come with corners are abolished in favor of an apparently continuous wrapper. The skin is reminiscent of a toned-down Sauerbruch Hutton; its various blue, translucent, and clear vertical bands in a random composition give the impression that anything could be behind the glass. Minus the truck docks and blank facades at grade, one may think offices are inside; the horizontal bands between the glass give the impression that floors are found behind the facade.


[Photograph copyright Javier Azurmendi]

But the glass also does something inside, in effect lightening the large spaces that are filled with structure, access walkways, and other functional components. These photos may show the interior free of trucks and the materials that make the building a concrete factory, but it's clear that the quality of space is high for an industrial structure. Kudos to the architects for making a well-integrated urban statement without forgetting about the people who work inside day after day.


[Floor plan]


[Building section]

Today's archidose #533

amsterdam mediamatic supermarkt 01 2002 verburg t_hoogendijk r (rapenburg), originally uploaded by Klaas5.

A Markt in Amsterdam, Netherlands by Verburg Hoogendijk Architects (VHArch), 2000.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

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

Architecture+Urbanism recommends "Richard W. Hayes - Agency and Activism : The Yale Building Project"

Richard W. Hayes will be discussing his recent book The Yale Building Project: The First Forty Years as part of the MARC lecture series

Date 1 November 2011 2-4 pm
Venue Coupland 1 Pear Lecture Theatre University of Manchester

In the video below Mr. Hayes discusses the book at The Architecture Foundation

Agency and Activism: The Yale Building Project from The Architecture Foundation on Vimeo.

The dirty politics of taste

Charles Jencks will join Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland, and Sam Jacob of FAT on Monday, October 31st, at the Architectural Association, celebrating Halloween with a discussion of "radical postmodernism" and launching their new, co-edited issue of AD.

That issue "marks the resurgence of a critical architecture that engages in a far-reaching way with issues of taste, space, character and ornament. Bridging high and low cultures," the editors explain, radical postmodernism "immerses itself in the age of information, embracing meaning and communication, embroiling itself in the dirty politics of taste by drawing ideas from beyond the narrow confines of architecture. It is a multi-dimensional, amorphous category, which is heavily influenced by contemporary art, cultural theory, modern literature and everyday life."

The event is free and open to the public, and kicks off at 6pm.

Radical Covers

When I was putting together my review of Michael Sorkin's latest last week, I browsed publisher Verso's web page. One thing that stood out in their redesigned site, which makes the covers more prominent, is the Radical Thinkers series, especially the covers of the last three sets; a smattering is shown here. I like that they opt for simplicity and lots of white space over designs that might be more, well, radical. As well, each shape, form, or few lines relates to the book, title, or author in some way; they are not arbitrary. When an overload of information prevails on most surfaces, paper or screen, these quiet designs speak to a need to channel the rest out and focus on the ideas within. In this regard, these covers might just be radical after all.



On a related note, see my blog post on Bruce Mau's covers for Zone Books.

Dye-Tracing Archaeology

Toxic chemicals leaking from an old wastewater treatment plant in Alabama have unexpectedly led to the discovery of a 1,700-year old "pre-historic village" buried in the ground nearby. Chemicals "have seeped into the ground surrounding the old plant," according to a local news station, so "the soil needs to be removed and taken to a toxic waste facility."

However, a survey of the contaminated site soon revealed that the ground also contained extremely well-preserved artifacts "from a village that once thrived" there. "Lo and behold," the head excavator remarked to the news show: "we found a massive late-middle Woodland period village."

It's not hard to imagine someone another 1,700 years from now accidentally discovering the forgotten city of, say, New York—or Chicago, or Bangkok, swallowed by mud—after a chemical leak at a nearby factory: radioactive liquids drain down through the topsoil, flowing around buried walls and ruins, forming iridescent pools on floors in basements—slow and toxic streams tracing the shapes of old stairways, lighting a path for future excavation and descent. Like giving the earth a radiopharmaceutical, you fire up a ground-scanning machine, trace the pollution underground, and, lo and behold, the dark outlines of buried cities start to glow.

[Images: Dye-tracing cave systems; note that the chemical used is supposedly non-toxic].

In fact, I'm reminded of dye-tracing techniques used for mapping otherwise impenetrable or overly complex cave systems. In James Tabor's wildly uneven 2010 book Blind Descent, for instance, we read about legendary caver Alexander Klimchouk, who set about dye-tracing caves on the Arabika Massif, including Krubera Cave, currently the deepest known cave in the world.

"In 1984 and 1985," Tabor explains, "[Klimchouk] poured fluorescein dye into several caves, including Krubera, high on the Arabika. Traces of that dye later flowed out of springs on the shore of the Black Sea far below. More traces tinged the water 400 feet beneath the surface of the Black Sea, miles offshore," indicating genuinely—in fact, record-breakingly—huge dimensions for the overall system of caves.

[Images: Dye-tracing caves].

But even the most remote, fictional possibility that future spelunking archaeologists might someday map lost cities—London, Moscow, Beijing, Rome—by using dye-tracing packs to illuminate that underground world of collapsed halls and buried rooms is extraordinary. Cartographers in mountaineering gear and helmet-mounted floodlights descend into the New York subway system in 5,161 A.D., following luminescent trails of fluorescein dye, crawling, walking, rappelling into the underworld on the trail of shining rivers as subterranean ruins begin to shine.

(Alabama story found via @ArchaeologyTime).

Today's archidose #532

Raif Dinçkök Yalova Cultural Center (EEA), originally uploaded by Burçin YILDIRIM.

Raif Dinçkök Yalova Cultural Center in Yalova, Turkey by Emre Arolat Architects, 2011. The building is one of eleven projects in Turkey shortlisted for the 2011 WAF Awards.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

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

Useless in Lisbon

A group of MA A+U students will be visiting Lisbon in November, with other students from Manchester School of Art, to participate in a workshop for this autumn's design biennale. Useless is the proposed theme for EXD’11, the international biennale dedicated to design, architecture and creativity. The programme seeks to provide insight and incentive, challenging the audience to discuss and reflect on concepts and preconceptions connected to use and its absence. The theme is provocative and stirring and leads to concrete issues: questioning creative production and consumption from the point of view of usefulness, function and use of resources to answer problems; putting the production process within a framework of contemporary ethical and aesthetical concepts, in an increasingly global world. Likewise, Useless can inspire a more conceptual and symbolic reflection on the importance of things like beauty, dream and invention.

The 6th edition of the Biennale brings to Lisbon some of the most thought-provoking leading figures in graphic design, product design, social design and architecture, among others. The Portuguese capital will once again become the setting for an international multidisciplinary platform where curators propose new, bespoke content in the sphere of design culture and contemporary creativity. Mixing academic theorists and specialist practitioners, EXD addresses not only the creative community but also the audience at large.

While in Lisbon the students have also been charged with scoping out potential speakers for the third MA A+U Symposium due to be held in the spring of 2012.

El Resplandor

[Image: "Meelas Yadee" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Nettle's newest album, El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai, released last month by Sub Rosa, comes with an awesome premise: it is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining, set in a mothballed luxury hotel in Dubai. It is sonic architecture fiction.

Less a horror film, however, than its predecessor, Nettle's version seems instead to offer a melancholy audio glimpse of a world in decline: the album's family lost in circumstances far too large—and too alienating, too foreign—to comprehend fully, unraveling alone in the hotel's empty rooms and hallways.

[Image: "Fatima's Kitchen Cupboard" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

El Resplandor's liner notes feature these photographs by Lamya Gargash, depicting extravagantly furnished rooms in afternoon darkness, empty kitchens, halls, and ruined stairways in the UAE.

As the artist herself explains, many of the houses seen here "are recently vacant, whereas others have been deserted for a long time. There were some houses that still had people living in them when I started my project; the families residing there were preparing to move to newer homes." Many more images from the series can be found here.

[Images: (top) "Blue Purple Chair" (2005-2006) and (bottom) "The Staircase" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Jace Clayton and Lindsay Cuff of Nettle will be at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 on Friday afternoon, October 28th, to talk about the album, the entirety of which will be streamed throughout the day.

[Image: "Mona Lisa" (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Stop by if you're in the area, not only to learn more about the concept behind the album—after all, there's something highly compelling about the idea of a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake (perhaps this could be the first soundtrack optioned by Hollywood for a film it later serves to score)—but also about the technical set-up used by the band during studio production and live sets. Nettle's more sonically aggressive earlier work, Build a Fort, Set that On Fire, is also worth a listen in the meantime.

Book Review: DASH

DASH - Delft Architectural Studies on Housing edited by Lara Schrijver, Elain Harwood, Dirk van den Heuvel, Pierijn van der Putt, Dick van Gameren, Christopher Woodward
NAi Publishers, in association with Delft University of Technology

The Architect's Newspaper just published my review of DASH in their October 19 East Coast Edition. The review looks at the periodical in general but focuses on the fifth and most recent issue, The Urban Enclave. The beginning of the review is below, but for the rest head over to Archpaper.



In the introduction to the inaugural issue of the journal DASH – Delft Architectural Studies on Housing, the editors assert that “the Netherlands has built up a housing tradition that is renowned throughout the world.” I would definitely agree with this statement, having worked on multi-family residential projects spanning from the American Midwest to Asia where modern and contemporary Dutch precedents were mined for inspiration. Yet the editors further contend in the first issue that repetition of tried solutions has become the norm, leading to “stagnation in the development of Dutch residential architecture.” DASH can therefore be seen as a call for a reinvestigation of the typology and for a consideration of overlooked issues, “such as those related to density, privacy, and mobility.”

Click over to Archpaper for the rest.

DASH 05: The Urban Enclave:
US: CA: UK:

Shapes and Ladders

A comment by Ken Lee on a "Today's archidose" post with his photos of Toyo Ito's Ken Iwata Mother and Child Museum in Imabari City, Ehime, Japan tipped readers off to a nearby museum by the same architect. The Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture (no joke) consists of a Steel Hut and a Silver Hut; the former is made up of steel panels of geometric shapes perched on a concrete base:



Seeing the above, I immediately thought of something I'd seen for the first time and photographed just a week earlier:



St. George's Play Yard is adjacent to St. George's Episcopal Church on East 16th Street, only a half block from Stuyvesant Square in the Gramercy Park area. It is also next door to the Jack and Jill School and the Friends Seminary School. The play yard is striking for being the antithesis of contemporary safety-first playgrounds: it is steel instead of plastic, angular instead of soft, muted instead of colorful, and so forth.



Formally the play yard and TIMO are quite similar, given that they each have stacked shapes (triangles, squares, parallelograms, octagons), are finished in brown, and have ladders for climbing/access. This last aspect is what I find most interesting, since the inclusion of ladders (and railings) on TIMO points to the roof being accessible for visitors. Ito's design is definitely playful, and while I'd wager he wasn't influenced by St. George's Play Yard he's basically created a building-size playground.

Walking Tour - Saturday, October 29

On Saturday I'll again be conducting the tour that I did about a week ago as part of OHNY. But this time it will be backwards, meaning it will start at Union Square Park and snake its way up towards Madison Square Park, ending at Van Alen Books. Details from the Van Alen Institute events page are below ($5 suggested donation); be sure to RSVP for the tour if you're interested. The bookstore also has a lot of events happening this week, including a brown bag lunch with John Tauranac (New York from the Air), Nicholas de Monchaux (Spacesuit), and Thom Mayne (Combinatory Urbanism).



Saturday, October 29
2:00-4:00 p.m. John Hill
Contemporary Architecture Walking Tour
The last decade's building boom in New York City gave rise to a host of new and cutting-edge residential, corporate, institutional, academic, and commercial structures designed by big names and up-and-comers alike. This walking tour, starting at the northeast corner of Union Square Park, next to the Comfort Station, highlights recent additions to the area east of Broadway roughly between 14th and 23rd Streets. The approximate duration of the tour is two hours, and it is about 2.5 miles in length, so please wear comfortable walking shoes. The tour is led by John Hill, architect, blogger, and author of the forthcoming Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture (W. W. Norton, 2012). RSVP required, rsvp@vanalen.org.

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

This week's dose features Arctic Food Network in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada by Lateral Office / InfraNet Lab:


The featured past dose is Potential Public Spaces of Fez in Morocco by Aziza Chaouni:


This week's book review is All Over the Map: Writing on Building and Cities by Michael Sorkin:


american-architects.com Building of the Week:

Indianapolis Museum of Art Visitors Pavilion in Indianapolis, Indiana by Marlon Blackwell Architect:


Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Burning Down the House - Episode 77 - Architecture Blogosphere
Jody Brown and Bob Borson join Curtis B. Wayne on his online radio show.

Bill Nguyen: The Boy In The Bubble
Of note here, because the house that Nguyen owns in Hawaii (pictured halfway down) is also known as the Slaughterhouse Beach House by Tom Kundig. "Nguyen says his wife hates his dream home in Maui: 'She thinks it’s emblematic of her husband, which is, He's obsessed with all things beautiful but cares less about whether it's functional or not.'"

Installing "Carsten Höller: Experience"
Opening Wednesday, the exhibition "Carsten Höller: Experience" involved cutting through floors of the New Museum to install a large slide.

Murakami’s Tokyo
"For his cover article on the novelist Haruki Murakami, Sam Anderson visited some key places from Murakami’s life and work. Below, he tells us about his experience."

Thrilling Wonder Stories 3

Since 2009, an annual Thrilling Wonder Stories event has taken place at the Architectural Association in London, bringing people together from multiple disciplines to explore the spaces between fiction, science, and design.

On one hand, these events take the form of an extended look into the role of architectural spaces—including real buildings, but also film sets, computer game environments, and spatial simulations—in propelling, staging, catalyzing, or otherwise framing narrative storylines. This requires speaking not only to architects, but to novelists, game developers, screenwriters, film set designers, and even Hollywood directors to discuss their own particular requirements for, and relationships to, the built environment—but also to ask, more specifically, how the spaces they design, describe, feature, or build affect the development of narrative.

This is the cultural dimension of the event—the "wonder stories."

On the other hand, Thrilling Wonder Stories has also looked both to science and science fiction as resources of ideas that might play spatial roles in future design projects—where I use the word spatial, not architectural, very deliberately, so as not to limit this to a discussion of buildings. This means bringing in robot makers and biologists, geologists and geneticists, not to ask them about architecture but simply to learn about their work. The point, in other words, is not to extract architectural ideas from their research—as if fully formed building programs could somehow be pulled from a presentation about synthetic organisms—but simply to add to the overall mix of scientific (and science fictional) ideas available for reference in future design conversations.

This is the "thrilling wonder" side of the series.

[Images: Photos from Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 at the Architectural Association].

To date, Liam Young, the event's co-organizer, and I have hosted comics author Warren Ellis, architect Sir Peter Cook of Archigram, game critic Jim Rossignol, TED Fellow and architectural biologist Rachel Armstrong, novelists Will Self and Jeff VanderMeer, spatial provocateurs Ant Farm, designer Matt Webb of BERG, and more than a dozen other figures from the worlds of film, gaming, architecture, literature, engineering, science, interaction design, and more.

[Image: From "Animal Superpowers" by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada; Woebken will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

This year, we're trying out an ambitious new format. Not only are we teaming up with Popular Science magazine as our media partner and co-organizer—so watch for content on popsci.com in the lead up to and during the event—but we are leading two simultaneous events: one at the Architectural Association in London, the other across the pond at Studio-X NYC.

So, on Friday, October 28th, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3—sponsored by the Architectural Association, Studio-X NYC, and Popular Science—kicks off in London with a truly phenomenal line-up. It's an all day blow-out, lasting from noon to 10pm, featuring:

VINCENZO NATALI*
Director of Cube, Splice, and forthcoming feature films based on J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Neuromancer by William Gibson

BRUCE STERLING
Scifi author, commentator, and futurist

KEVIN SLAVIN
Game designer and theorist of "how algorithms shape our world"

ANDREW LOCKLEY
Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor for Inception, compositing/2D supervisor for Batman Begins and Children of Men

PHILIP BEESLEY
Digital media artist and experimental architect

CHRISTIAN LORENZ SCHEURER
Concept artist and illustrator for computer games and films such as The Matrix, Dark City, The Fifth Element, and Superman Returns

CHARLIE TUESDAY GATES
Taxidermy artist and sculptor—to lead a live taxidermy workshop

DR. RODERICH GROSS AND THE NATURAL ROBOTICS LAB
Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield—to lead a live Swarm Robotics demonstration

GAVIN ROTHERY
Concept artist for Duncan Jones's film Moon

GUSTAV HOEGEN
Animatronics engineer for Hellboy, Clash of the Titans, and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Prometheus

JULIAN BLEECKER
Designer, technologist, and researcher at the Los Angeles-based Near Future Laboratory

RADIO SCIENCE ORCHESTRA
Theremin-led electro-acoustic ensemble

SPOV
Motion graphics artists for Discovery Channel’s Future Weapons and Project Earth

ZELIG SOUND
Music, composition, and sound design for film and television

Better yet, Matt Jones of the ultra-talented design studio BERG will join Liam Young to serve as co-host for the day. Here's a map for how to get there; the event is free but space is limited.

[Image: "Glass Weed" from Super-Natural Garden by Simone Ferracina; Ferracina will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

That same day—Friday, October 28th—over at Studio-X NYC, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 will kick off at 1pm local time, lasting till 4 or 4:30pm. Speaking that day are:

NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX
Architect and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

HARI KUNZRU
Novelist and author of Gods Without Men, Transmission, and The Impressionist

BJARKE INGELS
Architect, WSJ Magazine 2011 architectural innovator of the year, and author of Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution

SETH FLETCHER
Science writer, senior editor of Popular Science, and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy

JACE CLAYTON AND LINDSAY CUFF OF NETTLE
Nettle’s new album, El Resplandor, is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai

[Image: One of many evolutionary robotic research projects by Hod Lipson, featured in this PDF; Lipson will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

Then, Saturday, October 29th, everything comes to a close with an epic second day—from 2-7pm—at Studio-X NYC, featuring:

JAMES FLEMING
Historian and author of Fixing The Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

MARC KAUFMAN
Science writer for the Washington Post and author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth

ANDREW BLUM
Journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

DAVID BENJAMIN
Architect and co-director of The Living

DEBBIE CHACHRA
Researcher and educator in biological materials and engineering design, featured in Wired UK's 2010 "Year In Ideas"

HOD LIPSON
Researcher in evolutionary robotics and the future of 3D printing at Cornell University

CARLOS OLGUIN
Designer at Autodesk Research working on the intersection of bio-nanotechnology and 3D visualization

CHRIS WOEBKEN
Interaction designer

SIMONE FERRACINA
Architect, winner of the 2011 Animal Architecture Awards, and author of Organs Everywhere

DAVE GRACER
Insect agriculturalist at Small Stock Foods

MORRIS BENJAMINSON
Bioengineer of in-vitro edible muscle protein and CEO of Zymotech Enterprises

ANDREW HESSEL
Science writer and open-source biologist, focusing on bacterial genomics

The events in New York will be moderated by myself, Studio-X NYC co-director Nicola Twilley, and PopSci senior associate editor Ryan Bradley. In both locations, events are free and open to the public; however, if you plan on attending the Studio-X NYC event, please register as limited space will be available. Here's a map.

[Image: The "plastic" extruded by New England's Colletes inaequalis bees; photo by Debbie Chachra].

Finally, if you can't make it in person, consider following Thrilling Wonder Stories on Twitter—and keep your eye out at the end of summer 2012, for the Thrilling Wonder Stories book, published by the Architectural Association.

But I hope to see some of you there!

*Vincenzo Natali will be speaking via Skype.

Nemours water tower

Nemours as an estate in a relatively undeveloped area had to be self-sufficient, like many country houses of the time (and today no doubt).

One enters the estate via a long drive with an allee of trees (seen at the top of the map below) before reaching the entry court, seen below with a #3 at the English gates.Unmarked on the map, directly behind the gates from the house is a beautiful marble fountain with a fairy-tale like tower in the background.

Was this some sort of folly for Dupont's grandchildren I wondered? I had visions of a playroom at the top of the tower with a Rapunzel theme. Bronze turtles feed the marble fountain.

It turns out to be much more utilitarian than all of that: the tower is filled with machinery and is the pump and water tower for the estate! A local stone base with tall stucco shaft, matching the house, is topped with an ornate wooden structure. Notice the clock and weather vane too!A very grand and picturesque necessity but maybe a tad disappointing for me; I still want Dupont's office at the top or at least the aforementioned playroom!.