Book Review: 2012 Competitions Annual

2012 Competitions Annual edited by G. Stanley Collyer with Daniel Madryga
The Competition Project, 2013
Paperback, 240 pages



At the start of the 1990s, Competitions magazine began publishing quarterly issues with notices and results on architectural competitions. In 2011 the publication went the way of many magazines and is now online-only, though its print output has segued to an annual book that collects the results of some prominent competitions. The second edition, covering competitions in parts of 2011 and 2012, features the winners and runners up for 16 competitions.

Competitions is based in Kentucky, so it's no surprise that the (now e)magazine tends to focus on the United States, but as the back cover attests: "the majority of competitions for real projects in this volume reflect not only the institutional commitment of foreign nations to this process, but the dire economic straits our governing bodies find themselves in." This quote points to an emphasis on "real" competitions versus "ideas" competitions, while indicating that U.S. competitions in the annual are few; in fact only 5 of the 16 projects are located in the United States, 7 if we broaden the criteria to North America by adding Canada. But of course competitions in any locale are geared to entice as many architects from different countries (often pairing up with local architects) to enter, hopefully leading to more ideas and potentially bigger names. Therefore U.S. participation, as the Annual attests elsewhere in its pages, goes far beyond the locations of competitions.


[OMA: Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec. Image: © OMA, rendering by Luxigon]

That said, the U.S. competitions tend to be less flashy and with fewer (or no) big names. This doesn't mean these competitions don't have value, but the mix of international/local and famous/not-so-famous in the book broadens its appeal to a wider spectrum of architects and fans of architecture. An example of the international/famous side of things is the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec competition, won by OMA, with Allied Works, David Chipperfield and others as runners up. On the local/not-so-famous side can be found the Atlanta History Center competition, won by Pfeiffer Partners, with Stanley Beaman & Sears, MSTSD and others as runners up. Given Competitions' focus on results in its annual, we do not learn what really happened to these and other "real" projects. In these cases, OMA's design, officially called the Pierre Lassonde Pavilion, started construction in 2013 and is slated for a 2015 opening, while Pfeiffer Partners' winning design was shelved in favor of an arguably inferior design by Atlanta's MSTSD, but not their runner-up entry they did with Kallman McKinnel & Wood.


[Pfeiffer Partners: Atlanta History Center. Image via waltercrimm.com]

But the big question, the elephant in the room if you will, is the obvious one: What is the value of the Annual in the age of Arch Daily, Bustler, and other websites featuring competitions results with plenty of images and text from the architects? The answer is threefold: The first has already been alluded to, as the book includes competitions that these websites do not feel the need to feature (Arch Daily's coverage of the Atlanta competition is solely a 2011 call for architects announcement, for example). The second is that Competitions includes editorial commentary and jury comments, which these websites don't include and sometimes include, respectively. Third is having the winner and the runners up in one place, which makes it easy for comparison and to have a mental picture of reactions to the competition brief, easier to achieve in a book than on separate web pages online; often websites highlight only the winner and/or only it and a couple runners up. Even if every notable competition isn't covered (an appendix with other competitions, some of them ideas competitions, and their winners is included) the thoroughness of the 2012 Annual should be commended.

Purchase at Amazon:

Book Review: Three Books about Chicago

AIA Guide to Chicago edited by Alice Sinkevitch and Laurie McGovern Petersen
University of Illinois Press, 2014, Third Edition
Paperback, 568 pages

Building Ideas: An Architectural Guide to the University of Chicago by Jay Pridmore
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Paperback, 160 pages

Chicagoisms: The City as Catalyst for Architectural Speculation edited by Alexander Eisenschmidt with Jonathan Mekinda
Park Books, 2013
Hardcover, 184 pages



Recently I received review copies of three books on Chicago, so it seems appropriate to put them together into one review, discussed in alphabetical order.

Having produced my own guide to architecture in New York City, and therefore having researched many guidebooks, one of my pet peeves with guidebooks (architectural or otherwise) is when they are not designed with their use in mind. By this I mean being carried around, having easy-to-find entries and easy-to-navigate maps, and giving the reader something of interest while seeing the site in person. Although the AIA Guide to Chicago excels in many respects (to be discussed soon), the third edition actually takes a step back from the 2004 edition in one important area: maps. The new edition forgets one thing the previous edition was aware of: books have folds where information gets lost, so don't put anything within about 1/4" or 1/2" of the fold. Unfortunately the maps don't heed this advice, so many streets and buildings in the two-page maps are lost, only to be found by those that break the binding or cut the book apart. This is unfortunate, more a mistake for a first edition than a third, especially when the second edition got it right.

With that out of the way, the positive aspects of the guidebook are many, building upon the previous edition (also edited by Sinkevitch) with better navigation (page-end tabs make the chapters easy to find), thorough histories of the city and neighborhoods, commendable fact-checking (unlike the AIA Guide to New York, as I wrote in my review), and good additions with the many contemporary buildings that are once again making Chicago an exciting place to be an architect and archi-tourist. Things were not so optimistic when the previous edition came out in 2004, timed, like the third edition, to the AIA Convention descending on the city.

I'll admit that in the decade I worked as an architect in Chicago (1997-2006), there was a general malaise with architects in the city, brought on by important projects going to outsiders and bland buildings being erected by locals (Millennium Park was just completed in 2004, so its impact was not yet felt). There were bright spots with Jeanne Gang, John Ronan, Wheeler Kearns, and Brininstool + Lynch, among others, but mediocrity was the norm over the design excellence Chicago is known for, rose-colored glasses or not. But positive momentum has been in swing as Gang, Ronan (below photo) and others have received more commissions and created some of the best architecture in the city, with buildings that are drawing attention to far-flung parts of the globe – Gang's Aqua Tower, the most obvious expression of this, graces the cover for good reason. Of course, there is much more to see than Aqua, and this book (warts and all) is a good companion to exploring the city from what's left of its 19th-century origins to the present.


[Poetry Foundation, John Ronan Architects, 2011 | Photo by John Hill]

When a review copy of Building Ideas: An Architectural Guide to the University of Chicago landed on my doorstep, the first thing my wife asked was, "what do they say about the Smart Museum?" where we got married in 2006. Turns out the answer was "nothing." I could find the museum labeled #2 on a map near the front of the book, but when I flipped through the book to find the same, thinking it might be arranged in order of the 31 buildings on the map, I couldn't find it. The chapters are chronological/thematic, moving from "The Gothic Campus" to "Building Ideas with Modern Architecture," so projects are out of sync with the numbering on the map. OK. But looking in the index, the only mention of the Smart Museum of Art is for the two-page spread of the map. I checked the 30 other buildings and discovered only one other building (International House) in the same predicament; every other building is discussed at some length in the book.

So what does the inclusion of the Smart Museum in the map but its omission from any description say about the book? First, combined with the somewhat large size of the book (10"x9"), it's not an "architectural guide" in the sense of the AIA Guide to Chicago or any other portable, keyed-and-mapped guidebook. A more accurate subtitle would have been "an architectural history of the University of Chicago," given the way the chapters are arranged, the narrative flow of Pridmore's writing, and the way the reader learns about the planning and evolution of the physical campus. Most people will not notice the omission of the Smart Museum from the text, but if they used it as a guide to the campus, as the subtitle indicates, they most certainly would have noticed. (That said, Pridmore did produce an architectural tour of the campus in 2006 as part of PAPress's campus guide series, a more traditional guide that predates the university's latest building boom.)

Aside from the quibble of "guide" versus "history," how is the book? While it does a great job in describing the evolution of the campus from its origins, selection of architect/planner, and even selection of style (less obvious and more important in the late 1800s than today) to its modern plans by Eero Saarinen and Edward Larrabee Barnes (he was architect of the Smart Museum, but in the book's one mention of the museum – not by name – it and other Barnes-era buildings "did not meet expectations") and the latest boom with buildings by Helmut Jahn, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and Valerio Dewalt Train. But when it comes to the overall tone of the book and descriptions of the individual buildings, the book is more "booster" than either history or guide, as if the book is a promotion for the school rather than a scholarly or independent voice on it. Regardless of the Smart Museum's omission, people like me, with a fondness for the school in their hearts (this goes for alumni, professors and others who have spent time there for whatever reason), will find the book rewarding, but those looking for a proper guide should go with the AIA Guide, which devotes nearly 20 pages to more than 80 buildings on its Hyde Park campus.


[Chicagoisms exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago | Photo by John Hill]

Chicago is a city whose mythologies are more prevalent to foreigners than other cities. In my travels in Europe in the mid-1990s, just about everybody I met and told I came from Chicago replied with something about Al Capone and the mob ("stick 'em up, bang, bang!), or personalities like Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, or its great architecture being limited to Frank Lloyd Wright and the "birth of the skyscraper." Even today, people tell me that it makes sense I'm an architect/architectural writer, considering I came from the city. People's impressions of Chicago are colored by personalities whose contributions were great but which overshadow the complexities and realities of the city. Many histories repeat these myths and simplifications, but this great book thankfully goes the opposite route, dismantling some of those myths and putting Chicago in an international context that shines a light on its influences.

The dismantling of myths starts right away with the first essay (of eight), Penelope Dean's comparison of two contemporaneous exhibitions in 1976: 100 Years of Architecture in Chicago: Continuity of Structure and Form and Chicago Architects. The first, organized by SOM's Peter Pran and Mies biographer Franz Schulze, was representative of the myth (still strong) that painted Chicago architecture as starting with the Chicago School, moving through Mies, and then culminating (at the time) with corporate modern firms like SOM. The second, on the other hand, argued that such a simple view was misleading, ignorant of the variety in Chicago architecture that was portrayed in the show; Stanley Tigerman and Stuart Cohen, among others, were responsible for the oppositional exhibition. Dean's analysis examines the two exhibitions but also how people in places like New York reacted to the shows and how they viewed architecture in Chicago.

The following essays take further in-depth, scholarly looks at Alvin Boyarsky, the Museum of Modern Art's 1933 exhibition on Chicago, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Burnham's Plan of Chicago, and of course Mies van der Rohe, among other subjects. Each one ties Chicago to another Place (London, New York, Berlin, etc.) as a means of lending alternative viewpoints to the city as, among other things, a testbed for innovations in architecture and urban design. Aiding the essays are 20 short-form pieces (each one a two-page spread on a pink background) that focus on a particular project from an atypical perspective (buildings by Mies, Bertrand Goldberg, and SOM, as well as projects by the likes of Greg Lynn, Sean Lally, and others). All tolled, the book is one of the freshest recent books on architecture in Chicago, one that inspired the Art Institute exhibition of the same name, in which some voices from the book use the essays as frameworks for speculating on Chicago's future evolution. Perhaps a future edition will combined the book and the exhibition to make an even better document of Chicago's realities and potential realities.

AIA Guide to Chicago:

Building Ideas:

Chicagoisms:

Playful architectural trimwork

On Cape Cod last month I noticed this charming cottage while on a bike ride and had to stop to take pictures like any self respecting architect. What I really appreciated was the playful trimwork and beautiful colors used; vintage yet fresh.

Oddly enough this house is only a block away from another I featured a few years ago, Carpenter's Gothic and has the same beachy charm.

I won't comment on the fake roofing material but the natural wood shingles and shades of green trim have my vote! What do you think?

Disappointed in Astoria

So, this is what Castle Hill in the Bronx gets for an EMS Station:

[Zerega Avenue EMS Station by Smith-Miller Hawkinson | Photo by Michael Moran/OTTO]

But this is what my neighborhood of Astoria, Queens gets:

[Hoyt Avenue EMS station made from construction trailers | Photo by John Hill]

What's up with that, DDC?

A baroque masterpiece: Fulda Cathedral

Leaving the playful rococo style seen in the last post, Amalienburg, we now visit Fulda, Germany, to tour the baroque masterpiece of Fulda Cathedral. The baroque style was a direct response to the rococo and was based on more serious Romanesque architecture. The ornament is restrained with lots of 'blank space' for contrast to let the eye rest.

My Australian penpal on his most recent European adventure had little to say about the cathedral, I think in part because this restraint in comparison to the over-the-top'ness of the profuse German rococo can be somewhat underwhelming. This architectural purity of the baroque style appeals to me personally though.

The Cathedral was designed in 1700 by the German baroque architect Johann Dientzenhofer after a visit to Rome.  Dientzenhofer was clearly inspired by St Peter's Basilica, a masterpiece from the Renaissance which every great architect and artist had worked on: Bernini, Michelangelo, Maderno, and Bramante to name a few. Who wouldn't be inspired?

 As with most churches, light is everything.

I think it's interesting to note that unlike both earlier and later churches, stained glass wasn't a feature -here the light, space, and the architecture itself are left to speak.

One of the most noted features of this Cathedral is the world famous pipe organ which you can read about here if you're interested. Personally I always think of music when I imagine the baroque period so having a masterful pipe organ in this church makes sense!

It may be baroque but the rococo qualities are still seen in the sculptures.

What I love about a baroque church is that the ornament is purposeful -one knows where to look during a service and also knows what is important. Everything isn't ornamented equally, rather the pulpit and the alter are given pride of place.

I hope you enjoyed this little architectural history lesson and visit to Fulda Cathedral. I've added Fulda to my travel wish list!

As always click on the images to view larger

Through the Cracks Between Stars

[Image: Trevor Paglen, "PAN (Unknown; USA-207)," from The Other Night Sky].

I had the pleasure last winter of attending a lecture by Trevor Paglen in Amsterdam, where he spoke about a project of his called The Last Pictures. As Paglen describes it, "Humanity’s longest lasting remnants are found among the stars."

Over the last fifty years, hundreds of satellites have been launched into geosynchronous orbits, forming a ring of machines 36,000 kilometers from earth. Thousands of times further away than most other satellites, geostationary spacecraft remain locked as man-made moons in perpetual orbit long after their operational lifetimes. Geosynchronous spacecraft will be among civilization's most enduring remnants, quietly circling earth until the earth is no more.

Paglen ended his lecture with an amazing anecdote worth repeating here. Expanding on this notion—that humanity's longest-lasting ruins will not be cities, cathedrals, or even mines, but rather geostationary satellites orbiting the Earth, surviving for literally billions of years beyond anything we might build on the planet's surface—Paglen tried to conjure up what this could look like for other species in the far future.

Billions of years from now, he began to narrate, long after city lights and the humans who made them have disappeared from the Earth, other intelligent species might eventually begin to see traces of humanity's long-since erased presence on the planet.

Consider deep-sea squid, Paglen suggested, who would have billions of years to continue developing and perfecting their incredible eyesight, a sensory skill perfect for peering through the otherwise impenetrable darkness of the oceans—yet also an eyesight that could let them gaze out at the stars in deep space.

Perhaps, Paglen speculated, these future deep-sea squid with their extraordinary powers of sight honed precisely for focusing on tiny points of light in the darkness might drift up to the surface of the ocean on calm nights to look upward at the stars, viewing a scene that will have rearranged into whole new constellations since the last time humans walked the Earth.

And, there, the squid might notice something.

High above, seeming to move against the tides of distant planets and stars, would be tiny reflective points that never stray from their locations. They are there every night; they are more eternal than even the largest and most impressive constellations in the sky sliding nightly around them.

Seeming to look back at the squid like the eyes of patient gods, permanent and unchanging in these places reserved for them there in the firmament, those points would be nothing other than the geostationary satellites Paglen made reference to.

This would be the only real evidence, he suggested, to any terrestrial lifeforms in the distant future that humans had ever existed: strange ruins stuck there in the night, passively reflecting the sun, never falling, angelic and undisturbed, peering back through the veil of stars.

[Image: Star trails, seen from space, via Wikimedia].

Aside from the awesome, Lovecraftian poetry of this image—of tentacular creatures emerging from the benthic deep to gaze upward with eyes the size of automobiles at satellites far older than even continents and mountain ranges—the actual moment of seeing these machines for ourselves is equally shocking.

By now, for example, we have all seen so-called "star trail" photos, where the Earth's rotation stretches every point of starlight into long, perfect curves through the night sky. These are gorgeous, if somewhat clichéd, images, and they tend to evoke an almost psychedelic state of cosmic wonder, very nearly the opposite of anything sinister or disturbing.

[Image: More star trails from space, via Wikipedia].

Yet in Paglen's photo "PAN (Unknown; USA-207)"—part of another project of his called The Other Night Sky— something incredible and haunting occurs.

Amidst all those moving stars blurred across the sky like ribbons, tiny points of reflected light burn through—and they are not moving at all. There is something else up there, this image makes clear, something utterly, unnaturally still, something frozen there amidst the whirl of space, looking back down at us as if through cracks between the stars.

[Image: Cropping in to highlight the geostationary satellites—the unblurred dots between the star trails—in "PAN (Unknown; USA-207)" by Trevor Paglen, from The Other Night Sky].

The Other Night Sky, Paglen explains, "is a project to track and photograph classified American satellites, space debris, and other obscure objects in Earth orbit."

To do so, he uses "observational data produced by an international network of amateur satellite observers to calculate the position and timing of overhead transits which are photographed with telescopes and large-format cameras and other imaging devices."

The image that opens this post "depicts an array of spacecraft in geostationary orbit at 34.5 degrees east, a position over central Kenya. In the lower right of the image is a cluster of four spacecraft. The second from the left is known as 'PAN.'"

What is PAN? Well, the interesting thing is that not many people actually know. Its initials stand for "Palladium At Night," but "this is one mysterious bird," satellite watchers have claimed; it is a "mystery satellite" with "an unusual history of frequent relocations," although it is to be found in the eastern hemisphere, stationed far above the Indian Ocean (Paglen took this photograph from South Africa).

As Paglen writes, "PAN is unique among classified American satellites because it is not publically claimed by any intelligence of military agency. Space analysts have speculated that PAN may be operated by the Central Intelligence Agency." Paglen and others have speculated about other possible meanings of the name PAN—check out his website for more on that—but what strikes me here is less the political backstory behind the satellites than the visceral effect such an otherwise abstract photograph can have.

In other words, we don't actually need Paglen's deep-sea squid of the far future with their extraordinary eyesight to make the point for us that there are now uncanny constellations around the earth, sinister patterns visible against the backdrop of natural motion that weaves the sky into such an inspiring sight.

These fixed points peer back at us through the cracks, an unnatural astronomy installed there in secret by someone or something capable of resisting the normal movements of the universe, never announcing themselves while watching anonymously from space.

[Image: Cropping further into "PAN (Unknown; USA-207)" by Trevor Paglen, from The Other Night Sky].

For more on Trevor Paglen's work, including both The Last Pictures and The Other Night Sky, check out his website.

Architecture + Urbanism recommends "Identity, Sovereignty, and Global Politics in the Building of Baghdad: From Revolution to the Gulf War and Beyond"

Conference, "Identity, Sovereignty, and Global Politics in the Building of Baghdad: From Revolution to the Gulf War and Beyond"

Harvard University Graduate School of Design 18, 19 and 20 September 2014

Using the history of urban development in Baghdad as a reference point, this conference examines the extent to which interventions intended to modernize and integrate different populations in the city were part of a larger process of negotiating competing visions of political economy, sovereignty, and identity in post-WWII Iraq. By gathering political scientists, architectural and urban historians, and scholars of Iraq and the larger Arab world, the conference engages theoretical and empirical questions about the ruptures and continuities of Baghdad’s urban and political history, using the built environment of the city as a canvas for understanding struggles over Iraq’s position in a global context shaped by ongoing war tensions (from the Cold War to the Gulf War and beyond) to more recent Middle East conflicts. The full day event (September 19) will be preceded by a Keynote Panel held the prior evening, focused on the relationship between war and urbanism, a theme that will re-emerge comparatively and historically in subsequent day’s panels which focus on a range of theoretical, historical, and practical dilemmas facing Baghdad and other cities in the region. The conference ends with a half-day discussion of the urban planning, design, and governance challenges facing the city now and in the near future.


Organised by -
Professor Diane Davis, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Professor of Urban Planning and Design, and Weatherhead Center Associate; Co-organisers: Dr. Łukasz Stanek, University of Manchester, Manchester Architecture Research Centre; Phillip Baker, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Weather is the Future of Urban Design

[Image: From a newscast about Istanbul's recent tornadoes].

It's hard to resist a story where urban design is blamed for creating tornadoes. But the recent cluster of "freak mini-tornadoes" striking Istanbul offers an anomaly in search of an explanation, and the newly built outer edges of the metropolis are potentially to blame.

According to Ed Danaher at NOAA's Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News, "we know that tornadoes are exotic to Istanbul, like snow is to Florida." That article go on to suggest, however, that these tornadoes "are possibly one result of the city’s rapid urbanization," and that such a claim can be made based on their conversations with other meteorological researchers working at NOAA.

As their headline states bluntly, "Istanbul tornadoes [are] a 'result of urbanization'."

This conjures up frankly outrageous images of a city so sprawling—and so thermally ill-conceived—that huge masses of air at different temperatures are now rising into the sky to do battle, violently colliding like mythological titans above the city to generate the surreal tornadoes now ripping through the neighborhoods below.

Weather might be the future of urban design—but the rest of the news story actually includes no such quotations or any relevant evidence that would back up such a claim. They refer to climate change and its effects on regional humidity, of course, but, oddly enough, there is otherwise no attempt to back up the opening statement.

[Image: Photographer uncredited; via the Hürriyet Daily News].

But... But... It's so tempting to speculate. Beyond just being clickbait, this vision of suburban sprawl inadvertently churning the skies with the introduced turbulence of tornadoes, and thus destroying the landscape like some twisted instant karma of the atmosphere, is too awesome not to entertain for at least the length of a cup of coffee.

What weird old gods of weather have Istanbul's architects accidentally awoken? As streets and buildings continue to bulge outward into the forests and hills of the region, what else might their spatial activities unleash?

(Originally spotted via @urbanphoto_blog. Vaguely related: The Weather Bowl).

Amalienburg - heaven at Nymphenburg palace

Long time readers may remember a brief post I wrote in 2009 on Falkenlust Schloss which was based on a hunting lodge built at the palace grounds of Nymphenburg, Germany. That hunting lodge is Amalienburg which I'll discuss here.

Described as heaven on earth by my Australian penpal who provided me with these pictures, the rococo palace is Nymphenburg's answer to the Petit Trianon at Versailles (although built 20 years prior in 1739). This small building was built for the king's wife, Maria Amalia, as a hunting lodge or escape from the main palace or schloss.

 The pink and white stucco exterior is perfectly symmetrical naturally.

The main salon is mirrored and silver-leafed to within an inch of its life while the rest of the paneling is painted a dreamy light blue.

The reflection of light from the french doors in the mirrors plus the light color helps blur the boundary of the space - imagine it on a sunny day!

 Even if you don't like rococo I think you'll appreciate the workmanship and fine details.

The carved woodwork features women relaxing in nature with all manner of plants, hunting dogs, and birds.

 The furniture is as magnificent as the wall detailing.

The bedroom is no simple place to rest ones' head. The portraits flanking the bed are of Maria Amalia and her husband Karl Albrecht who commissioned the structure.

 Would you ever think yellow silk, and silver and yellow painted wood could be so pretty?

The adjacent 'hunting room' functions as a picture salon with paintings by Peter Jakob Horemans showing the couple at court hunts and functions; sort of an 18th century version of a den covered with family photographs!

 Again the furniture perfectly matches the wall decorations.

The most charming rooms feature hand painted linen wall-coverings in chinoiserie style. Below the room is called the 'pheasant room' and you can see why with the animal so prominently featured.

A closeup of this wallcovering reveals how playful and modern the lines seem!

The 'dog and gun room' features a similar linen wallcovering in blue and white -even more blatantly chinoiserie in style.

 Dogs slept beneath built-in gun storage in this charming space; quite the fancy kennel!

Even the kitchen was not spared the over-the-top decoration lavished on the rest of the palace. Delft tiles were used in profusion covering every surface including the stove.

 These tiles feature birds and flowers, certainly an inspiration to Howard Slatkin in his own kitchen!

As I mentioned I realize rococo is not everyone's favorite but the attention to detail and workmanship are incredible and should be inspiring to all designers!