Today's archidose #791

Here are some photos of the Fondation Louis Vuitton (2014) in Paris by Gehry Partners, photographed by C D _Fr.













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Happy Halloween!

Do you decorate for Halloween? I've never been interested in the holiday other than the candy (and I don't even have much of a sweet tooth!) but I do enjoy seeing how people have fun decorating their houses. This house above in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington (recently renovated by BarnesVanze Architects) got into the spirit with this spooky ghost in the vestibule.

Georgetown is particularly spooky over Halloween with many houses decorating their front yards. Trick or treating in Georgetown is INSANE. I loved this corrugated plastic BOO! along O street in the East Village. Don't forget to brush your teeth!

Why Bother with Facebook?

On Tuesday I tooted my own horn, and today I vent some steam – Facebook steam.

If, like me, you have or administer a Facebook fan page, you probably know that the number of people who see your posts on their walls is at the mercy of Facebook's algorithms. In late 2013 Facebook implemented a change to the algorithm that determines what content appears on people's walls, greatly affecting fan pages. Cynically, it can be seen as a ploy to get more money through post-boosting (paying for more eyes to see the posts), but at the time it was said to be directed at getting more "news" on people's walls over "viral memes," which were seen by Facebook honchos as shallow and unappealing.

What the above tweaking did to my archidose fan page, which can't really be considered news and is hardly a page that sells anything and therefore can't afford to boost posts, was to make its "reach" (number of people seeing posts on their walls) plummet – from roughly 1,000-3,000 per post (or 10-30% of my ~10,000 fans) right before the tweak to about 100-300 per post after (1-3%). This screenshot of a post from summer 2014 illustrates just how small a reach is now taking place:


[Screenshot from my archidose fan page]

Now I'm aware that a whole industry exists to help companies take advantage of Facebook, keeping on top of the weekly tweaks that range from minor to, in the above case, pretty major. But I use Facebook as a way to let people know about a blog post or a book received, or sometimes to link to content on another site; it's more about sharing than profiting, even if clicks to my site notch up the ads being counted and chances of people buying books via the Amazon sidebar; we're talking pennies at a time – nothing for me to get upset about. I'm not going to pay for tips and tricks, and I'm not going to pay Facebook hundreds of dollars per post to get a thousand more eyes scrolling past my posts on their walls.

So basically I'm venting because the question posed in the title of this post is serious: Why bother with Facebook? What is the point of me manually posting to Facebook if only 1.6% of my fans see my posts on their walls? (1.6% is based on the 180 people reached in the Book Briefs #19 post and the 10,656 fans I have right now.) My emails sent to subscribers are automated, and I'm pretty sure a lot more people see my blog posts in their inbox than on Facebook (and they don't even have to click over the website to read the content, since it's all in the email – that's how much I don't care about traffic to my site).

So what do you think, should I bother with Facebook?

Today's archidose #790

Here are some of my photos of Situation NY by Jana Winderen and Marc Fornes / THEVERYMANY now at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. See a dozen more photos of the installation in my Situation NY Flickr set.











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A Sometimes (Published) Photographer

Pardon some tooting of my own horn, but it's not everyday (or every year, to be more accurate) that my photos are found in not one, not two, but three publications. Such is the case with the below magazine and books.

Now, I'm no pro at photography, but photographing buildings is important for me in understanding them and then writing about them on this blog. So over the years I've amassed a good number of them (hopefully improving in that time) and occasionally gotten requests to publish them. In many cases my photos aren't used, or more often they are but I never see those results. But in the last few months the below publications have been released, so I've received the shock of seeing my photos on paper – a shock often due to the lag time of print publications, as I had forgotten about my contributions in the intervening months and years.


Issue 981 of Domus magazine:


[Domus issue 981 cover]


[Domus issue 981 spread with my photos of Louis I. Kahn's FDR Memorial]


Le Langage hypermoderne de l’architecture by Nicolas Bruno Jacquet (Editions Parenthéses)


[Le Langage hypermoderne de l’architecture cover]


[Le Langage hypermoderne de l’architecture spread with my photo of Peter Zumthor's Thermal Vals]


Cool Chicago: an inspirational guide to what's best in the city by Kathleen Maguire (Pavilion):


[Cool Chicago cover]


[Cool Chicago spread with my photos of John Ronan's Poetry Foundation]

Couch vs. sofa - a dialogue

I was thrilled to have lunch recently with one of my favorite bloggers, The Blue Remembered Hills, while he was traveling through DC. As so often happens when bloggers meet for the first time we began chatting at once like old friends and eventually the topic naturally veered towards design.

Both of us have 'pet peeves' with wordage, his being the incorrect use of the word couch instead of sofa (mine is the incorrect use of home vs. house). Above you see the famous couch of Madame Recamier.

The term sofa is what we normally are talking about, the article of furniture found in everyone's living room. It's not a 'formal' term or interchangeable with couch -they are DIFFERENT things. A couch is a specific term reserved for pieces of furniture on which one lies. I immediately thought of Madame Recamier, so well known for having been painted in repose by numerous artists.

While in the Louvre on my last visit I loved Madame Recamier's furniture made for her by Georges Jacob as well as 2 very well known paintings of her, in which she is lying on a couch.

 The rest of her furniture is really beautiful and I just had to have an excuse to post!

In the future think of Madame Recamier on her couch and the sofa you have at home; unless you have a fainting couch or daybed, well then that's another story!

Today's archidose #789

Here are some photos of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (2014) at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, by Studio Gang Architects, photographed by Trefoil.











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Today's archidose #788

Here are some photos of House in Jura (2012) near Zawiercie, Poland, by Kropka Studio, photographed by Maciek Lulko. (See more on the project at Europaconcorsi.)











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Cloning W57

It was just a matter of time before other architects started taking the leaning-pyramid form of Bjarke Ingels Group's W57 development under construction on Manhattan's west side...

[W57 under construction | Photo by Rasmus Hjortshøj]

...and creating inferior versions of it. First up appears to be Kutnicki Bernstein Architects' 500 Metropolitan Avenue, a hotel/residential building in the early stages of construction in Brooklyn, next to the L/G stop and across from the BQE:

[Image from kba website]

For more tasty construction shots of BIG's W57, be sure to check out Rasmus Hjortshøj's website.

Guggenheim Helsinki's 1,715 Submissions

Stage One Gallery of the open, anonymous international, two-stage competition for the design of a proposed Guggenheim museum in the Finnish capital of Helsinki:

Book Review: Three Books for Kids

Sunrise to High-Rise: A wallbook of architecture through the ages by Lucy Dalzell
Cicada Books, 2014
Hardcover, 24 pages

Who Built That? Modern Houses by Didier Cornille
Princeton Architectural Press, 2014
Paperback, 84 pages

Who Built That? Skyscrapers by Didier Cornille
Princeton Architectural Press, 2014
Hardcover, 84 pages



I'm a big fan of architecture books geared toward children, mainly because knowledge of architecture in the years before college could use a boost. My background was an exception, with some classes in high school, but for kids in grade school and middle school, architecture isn't talked about as much as it should be. Books geared to them can range from fables and other stories to biographies and sketchbooks. Together, kids books about architecture convey an understanding of the subject's history, but also how to think like an architect in terms of spatial understanding and representation. The three books reviewed here are aimed at kids around 10-12 years of age, since the titles are interested with giving a sense of architectural history and conveying how buildings evolved over the years.


[Bordeaux House, Rem Koolhaas. Spread from Who Built That? Modern Houses | Photo by John Hill]

First is one of two "Who Built That?" books by Didier Cornille; this one is focused on houses and therefore takes a landscape format, while the one on skyscrapers appropriately uses the portrait format. Cornille starts with Gerrit Rietveld's Schröder House (1924) and ends ten houses later with Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till's Straw House (2002). While the title asserts the importance is in the "who," the drawings and text are really more concerned with the "how" and the "why," which is important considering that modern and contemporary houses can be more perplexing than traditional houses in these terms. Didier's drawings are colorful and have a playfulness that is commendable, though the portraits of the architects are a bit off; they capture the features of Wright, Mies, Gehry, and the rest, but nevertheless look only a little bit like their namesakes.


[Torre Agbar, Jean Nouvel. Spread from Who Built That? Skyscrapers | Photo by John Hill]

Much of the same can be said about Cornille's second "Who Built That?" book, which is about skyscrapers. Yet given the complex technical requirements of tall buildings, there is an even larger emphasis on how they are built. For example, the above spread, showing Jean Nouvel's design for Torre Agbar in Barcelona, describes the sequencing of the construction and a section of its concrete core tied deep in the watery soil. Given the need for more space for the explanations, and the inclusion of additional examples by the same architects (also present in the modern houses book, but not to the same degree), the book features only eight skyscrapers, unlike the ten houses that are featured in the same amount of pages. Nevertheless, the book does not delve as deep as, say, David Macaulay in Unbuilding, but it does give enough variety in the forms and locations of the eight skyscrapers that any child should find one of interest.


[Spread from Sunrise to High-Rise | Photo by John Hill]

The third children's book here isn't really a book at all; it is a concertina binding that opens like an accordion, telling the history of architecture through buildings on one side and through styles/periods on the other. The latter is fairly dry, with text and one example highlighting everything from neolithic architecture (10,000-2000 BC) to contemporary architecture (unfortunately, postmodern architecture (1960-1990) incorrectly highlights OMA's CCTV tower, which is neither postmodern nor fitting within the timeframe), but the former's colorful panorama by Lucy Dalzell is especially beautiful, particularly when it's unfurled to over 90 inches.

The buildings – from the Göbekli Tepe in Turkey in 10,000 BC to Lacaton Vassal's Tour Bois le Prêtre in France (2006-2011) – overlap and blend into each other to create an undulating, architectural horizon line. Sure, the buildings are not scaled relative to each other, creating odd and ever-changing depths of field, but the whole expressively tells the story of major monuments over time. It is an international history that has some suspect building and layout choices here and there (Rural Studio's small Yancy Chapel is a refreshing choice, but it towers over buildings by Gehry, Libeskind, Foster, Nouvel and others in a somewhat jarring manner), but it is for the most part a well-rounded selection. It's not often that children's books have the option of becoming wall art, but in this case it's clear the illustrator and publisher wanted the history of architecture to be an ever-present part of a child's bedroom.

Sunrise to High-Rise:

Who Built That? Modern Houses:

Who Built That? Skyscrapers:

Touchscreen Landscapes

[Image: Screen grab via military.com].

This new, partly digital sand table interface developed for military planning would seem to have some pretty awesome uses in an architecture or landscape design studio.

Using 3D terrain data—in the military's case, gathered in real-time from its planetary network of satellites—and a repurposed Kinect sensor, the system can adapt to hand-sculpted transformations in the sand by projecting new landforms and elevations down onto those newly molded forms.

You can thus carve a river in real-time through the center of the sandbox, and watch as projected water flows in—

[Image: Screen grabs via military.com].

—or you can simply squeeze sand together into new hills, and even make a volcanic crater.

[Image: Screen grabs via military.com].

The idea of projecting adaptive landscape imagery down onto a sandbox is brilliant; being able to interact with both the imagery and the sand itself by way of a Kinect sensor is simply awesome.

Imagine scaling this thing up to the size of a children's playground, and you'd never see your kids again, lost in a hypnotic topography of Minecraft-like possibilities, or just donate some of these things to a landscape design department and lose several hours (weeks?) of your life, staring ahead in a state of geomorphic Zen at this touchscreen landscape of rolling hills and valleys, with its readymade rivers and a thousand on-demand plateaus.

The military, of course, uses it to track and kill people, filling their sandbox with projections of targeting coordinates and geometric representations of tanks.

[Image: Screen grabs via military.com].

But there's no reason those coordinates couldn't instead be the outlines of a chosen site for your proposed architecture project, or why those little clusters of trucks and hidden snipers couldn't instead be models of new buildings or parks you're hoping will be constructed.

Watch the original video for more.

(Spotted via the Quartz Daily Brief).