Today's archidose #737

Here are some photos of the BRAC Kanon ("first ever green retail outlet in Bangladesh," 2011) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, by Iqbal Habib, photographed by William Veerbeek.



















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Odile Decq / Manchester / 1 May

Odile Decq, the internationally renowned French architect, is to speak in Manchester on 1 May 2014 at MANUFACTURING UTOPIA: Happiness in Emerging Environments the Fifth Annual MA Architecture + Urbanism Symposium. Further details are available on the event website here.

'Homo Erectus Fossils Museum’ Nanjing, China (completion 2014)

Public spaces of the Biltmore hotel, Arizona

The Arizona Biltmore is not only a hotel as I've mentioned but a huge resort regularly used for conferences, weddings, and other events. Many of these spaces are original to the hotel and in the main building and I thought I'd share them with you here today!

One of the first rooms one comes upon while entering the hotel is the Aztec Room which was designed as a lounge and theater in the original to the 1929 hotel.

Featuring a spectacular gold leaf ceiling, 2 fireplaces, garden access, and a curtained stage, no wonder this is so popular for weddings!

One of the 2 unusual fireplaces in the Aztec Room.

The Gold Room off the lobby was originally designed as the main dining room and also features a stunning gold leafed ceiling.

Much larger than the Aztec room it also features french doors out to a terrace.

I love the unusual shape to these windows!

This beautiful wood and metal screen was near the entry.

Two enormous murals featuring Native American scenes add color to the room flanking the wall of glass.

As you can see the room is enormous!

Upon entering the hotel you don't enter directly into the main 2 story lobby but rather a discrete anteroom which features an unusual water feature built of the textile blocks. Here you can see how some of the textile blocks are actually glass and provide ambient light.

Also in the lobby is a stained glass window designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1927 (Saguaro Forms and Cactus) and donated to the hotel by his wife after his death.

One of numerous hotels is named after the architect who inspired the design, Wright's.

This pleasant sunny space was at one point the hotel's sun lounge or conservatory. It also features a gold leafed ceiling and pleasant garden views as well as an enormous terrace.

This pretty little garden is the view from the restaurant.

And rising above the restaurant is the hotel itself. Notice the unusual pierced roof overhang above.

The hotel has become a campus and the outbuildings which host conferences, apartments, and other guest rooms are designed in the same Wright'ian style incorporating his textile blocks. As you can see despite the warm weather the trees do loose their leaves which surprised me!  This brings to an end my sharing of the Biltmore Hotel but I will be bringing you Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West shortly!

Book Talk and Review: How to Study Public Life

How to Study Public Life by Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre
Island Press, 2013
Hardcover, 200 pages



In the question-and-answer session that followed a book talk given by Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre at the Center for Architecture on February 5, Gehl said that politicians in Copenhagen revealed to him quite a compliment: "If you had not made those studies, we would not have tried to make Copenhagen a better city." Those and other public space studies are highlighted in the book he penned with Svarre, yet the evening focused mainly on what can be learned from their home city. How the Danish city has improved in the last five decades – the span of Gehl's career – is obvious to many people, especially those in the packed house at the Center. Nevertheless, Gehl clearly likes to recount how closing streets to cars, promoting bicycling and other measures have made Copenhagen lively, attractive, safe, sustainable, and healthy – the five-fold barometer he uses to gauge how much public space improvements actually improve public life.


[Jan Gehl. Photo by John Hill]

For those who have seen Gehl speak, like myself, the book talk held few surprises. He bashed modernist planning that was the norm when he graduated from college in the early 1960s, most memorably described as the "Brasilia Syndrome" (designing patterns from the air) and 50 years later in the "bird-shit architects dropping their buildings on Dubai." He spoke about the influence of Jane Jacobs, William H. Whyte, and other contemporaries both on himself and other practitioners, admitting that it's been slow to seeing their ideas having tangible impacts on cities. Gehl also spoke about his work with the Bloomberg administration on pedestrianizing Times Square and in the creation of "more bike lanes in NYC in 4 years than Copenhagen made in 50 years." Yet even as these and other stories or statements are repeated in Gehl's talks, they are delivered with such zest and humor that it is easy to get swept along on his ideas aimed at achieving the five-fold improvements that have transformed Copenhagen, Melbourne, New York City, and most recently Moscow through his work around the globe.


[Birgitte Svarre (and a younger Gehl on the wall). Photo by John Hill]

Svarre for a little while after Gehl, before he joined her on stage for some questions from the audience. Svarre's talk focused more on what is offered in the book, while Gehl's talk was admittedly a trip from 1961 (Jane Jacobs' book) to 2009 (NYC pedestrian streets). And while Gehl has penned a number of influential books that have been translated into more than 20 languages, his book with Svarre promises to be the most helpful for urban designers and administrators as they attempt to improve their public realms, perhaps inspired to do so by Copenhagen or New York City. As Svarre put it in her talk, "Jane Jacobs created insights but not tools," so their book is like a toolbox ready to be unpacked and used.


[Svarre and Gehl. Photo by John Hill]

In the book's seven chapters, Gehl and Svarre describe: who, what and where to observe; how to count, map, track and observe people in public space; and what to read as precedents. But it is the chapter with research notes that will be the most valuable to practitioners, since the documented studies are fairly diverse in terms of geography, technique and outcome. Most studies are from Gehl's practice, but they are not limited to his work alone, so we also read about Whyte's famous observations in NYC with time-lapse photography as well as newer studies that use GPS and computers to learn about the behavior of people in particular urban spaces. If anything, the variety of the chapter illustrates that while we have core needs and desires that we hope cities fulfill (the five-fold criteria, again), all spaces are different and therefore require some form of observation to determine what, if anything, should change. Thanks to Gehl and Svarre, urban designers have a helpful reference for getting started with the process of getting outside into public spaces to look and learn.

Purchase from Amazon:

Window boxes

What do you think of window boxes? In most cases they're left derelict and forlorn -nude of any planting. In some cases I've seen them planted with horrible plastic flowers! However in Quebec City I came across these delightful planters full of creeping red (live) flowers -aren't these charming? Just something to remind us all that spring is on the way!

Santos Museum of Economic Botany

Sometimes museums which might sound rather dull (to design aficionados such as myself) can be held in the most astonishingly beautiful buildings. Such is the case with the Santos Museum of Economic Botany at the Botanic Gardens of Adelaide, Australia which my penpal recently sent to me.

This little classical gem of a building from 1879 was just extensively and sensitively renovated. The structure wasn't built as the Greek temple it resembles but rather as the science museum it remains.

The ceiling is a good example of how the Victorians were able to meld together decorative detailing with highly detailed and rather commercial looking steel structure. I love the gilded mechanical vent. If you can't hide it -make a feature of it!

The collections themselves are just as decorative as the building - these rather amazing Victorian models of mushrooms above are entirely made of wax! I remember even as a child going to the Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh which at the time was the science museum (now the Children's museum of Pittsburgh) and being more interested in the beautiful building than in the exhibits themselves. Design inspiration can come from the most surprising places, no?

Vote for A Daily Dose of Architecture

A Daily Dose of Architecture is one of eight blogs nominated in the Architecture category of the 5th Annual JDR Industry Blogger Awards. Other categories include Interior Design, Remodeling, Construction Business, Green, and Microblog, and it looks like I'm in good company, with some known and new-to-me blogs in contention. If you like this little 'ol blog, head over to JDR's website and cast your vote, taking a look at the other contenders while you're at it.



Thanks to JDR for this opportunity. Voting ends April 11.

50x50: 308 Mulberry

American-Architects Building of the Week:

308 Mulberry in Lewes, Delaware, by Robert M. Gurney, FAIA, Architect:


Last week's Building of the Week (which I forgot to post):

Biomass Heating Facility in Lakeville, Connecticut, by Centerbrook Architects and Planners:


American-Architects is taking a state-by-state look at architecture in the United States for our 2014 Building of the Week feature. "50x50 - 50 Projects in 50 Weeks" presents one recent project from each state in alphabetical order, from Alabama to Wyoming. Projects are added every Monday.

Today's archidose #736

Here are some photos of the Bagsværd Church (1976) in Bagsværd, Copenhagen, Denmark, by Jørn Utzon, photographed by Flemming Ibsen.

















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Roentgen Objects, or: Devices Larger than the Rooms that Contain Them

[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].

An extraordinary exhibition closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, featuring mechanical furniture designed by the father and son team of Abraham and David Roentgen: elaborate 18th-century technical devices disguised as desks and tables.

First, a quick bit of historical framing, courtesy of the Museum itself: "The meteoric rise of the workshop of Abraham Roentgen (1711–1793) and his son David (1743–1807) blazed across eighteenth-century continental Europe. From about 1742 to its closing in the early 1800s, the Roentgens' innovative designs were combined with intriguing mechanical devices to revolutionize traditional French and English furniture types."

Each piece, the Museum adds, was as much "an ingenious technical invention" as it was "a magnificent work of art," an "elaborate mechanism" or series of "complicated mechanical devices" that sat waiting inside palaces and parlors for someone to come along and activate them.

If you can get past the visual styling of the furniture—after all, the dainty little details and inlays perhaps might not appeal to many BLDGBLOG readers—and concentrate instead only on the mechanical aspect of these designs, then there is something really incredible to be seen here.

[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].

Hidden amidst drawers and sliding panels are keyholes, the proper turning of which results in other unseen drawers and deeper cabinets popping open, swinging out to reveal previously undetectable interiors.

But it doesn't stop there. Further surfaces split in half to reveal yet more trays, files, and shelves that unlatch, swivel, and slide aside to expose entire other cantilevered parts of the furniture, materializing as if from nowhere on little rails and hinges.

Whole cubic feet of interior space are revealed in a flash of clacking wood flung forth on tracks and pulleys.



As the Museum phrases it, Abraham Roentgen's "mechanical ingenuity" was "exemplified by the workings of the lower section" of one of the desks on display in the show: "when the key of the lower drawer is turned to the right, the side drawers spring open; if a button is pressed on the underside of these drawers, each swings aside to reveal three other drawers."

And thus the sequence continues in bursts of self-expansion more reminiscent of a garden than a work of carpentry, a room full of wooden roses blooming in slow motion.

[Images: Photos courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].

The furniture is a process—an event—a seemingly endless sequence of new spatial conditions and states expanding outward into the room around it.

Each piece is a controlled explosion of carpentry with no real purpose other than to test the limits of volumetric self-demonstration, offering little in the way of useful storage space and simply showing off, performing, a spatial Olympics of shelves within shelves and spaces hiding spaces.

Sufficiently voluminous furniture becomes indistinguishable from a dream.

[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].

What was so fascinating about the exhibition—and this can be seen, for example, in some of the short accompanying videos (a few of which are archived on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website)—is that you always seemed to have reached the final state, the fullest possible unfolding of the furniture, only for some other little keyhole to appear or some latch to be depressed in just the right way, and the thing just keeps on going, promising infinite possible expansions, as if a single piece of furniture could pop open into endless sub-spaces that are eventually larger than the room it is stored within.

The idea of furniture larger than the space that houses it is an extraordinary topological paradox, a spatial limit-case like black holes or event horizons, a state to which all furniture makers could—and should—aspire, devising a Roentgen object of infinite volumetric density.

A single desk that, when unfolded, is larger than the building around it, hiding its own internal rooms and corridors.

Suggesting that they, too, were thrilled by the other-worldly possibilities of their furniture, the Roentgens—and I love this so much!—also decorated their pieces with perspectival illusions.

[Image: Photo courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].

The top of a table might include, for example, the accurately rendered, gridded space of a drawing room, as if you were peering, almost cinematically, into a building located elsewhere; meanwhile, pop-up panels might include a checkerboard reference to other possible spaces that thus seemed to exist somewhere within or behind the furniture, lending each piece the feel of a portal or visual gateway into vast and multidimensional mansions tucked away inside.

The giddiness of it all—at least for me—was the implication that you could decorate a house with pieces of furniture; however, when unfolded to their maximum possible extent, these same objects might volumetrically increase the internal surface area of that house several times over, doubling, tripling, quadrupling its available volume. But it's not magic or the supernatural—it's not quadraturin—it's just advanced carpentry, using millimeter-precise joinery and a constellation of unseen hinges.

[Images: Photos courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art].

You could imagine, for example, a new type of house; it's got a central service core lined with small elevators. Wooden boxes, perhaps four feet cubed, pass up and down inside the walls of the house, riding this network of dumbwaiters from floor to floor, where they occasionally stop, when a resident demands it. That resident then pops open the elevator door and begins to unfold the box inside, unlatching and expanding it outward into the room, this Roentgen object full of doors, drawers, and shelves, cantilevered panels, tabletops, and dividers.

And thus the elevators grow, simultaneously inside and outside, a liminal cabinetry both tumescent and architectural that fills up the space with spaces of its own, fractal super-furniture stretching through more than one room at a time and containing its own further rooms deep within it.

But then you reverse the process and go back through it all the other direction, painstakingly shutting panels, locking drawers, pushing small boxes inside of larger boxes, and tucking it all up again, compressing it like a JPG back into the original, ultra-dense cube it all came from. You're like some homebound god of superstrings tying up and hiding part of the universe so that others might someday rediscover it.

To have been around to drink coffee with the Roentgens and to discuss the delirious outer limits of furniture design would have been like talking to a family of cosmologists, diving deep into the quantum joinery of spatially impossible objects, something so far outside of mere cabinetry and woodwork that it almost forms a new class of industrial design. Alas, their workshop closed, their surviving objects today are limited in number, and the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now closed.