The Two Dozen List is always in motion. Condos rise, and condos fall. Seasons Change. Everything changes. Like the city. End of Metaphor. Readers have added, addled, and actively pursued some additions, revisions, and updates, and the List has sharpened. Read the updated list, with an addition, after the jump...
Somewhere at a previous writing job, I mentioned the possibility of compiling a list of about two dozen celebrity-architect-designed luxury condominium buildings in New York, all between 20 and 40something units. It's a moment, with many similarities to when Mies was hired by Herbert Greenwald to develop then-unknown modernist glass boxes for Chicago's booming housing market. Like that moment, there is money, and therefore appetite, for experimentation and star branding.
My invitation to you, dear reader, is to point me in the direction of something missing. FYI, there are a few that I know about it, but I cannot talk about it. Non disclosures, yo.
The incomplete list after the jump.
Living near the third Richard Meier apartment building on the West Side Highway, at Charles Street, affords the unique opportunity to take in the previous day's construction work while eating breakfast. The building differs from its older twin siblings in significant ways, particularly its shape (an almost perfect extrusion of the lot it is on), and the fact that the back is as gorgeous as the front. Meier has pulled back on the clip-on accessories he put on the first two towers, and has instead focused attention on the triple-glazed curtain wall.
The mix of pure building volume with attention on the connection details defines, in my mind, classic modern elegance. It is satisfying to see another architect do this with the latest building technologies, and not treat this technique as something reserved for historical Modernism and Mies van der Rohe's oevre complete.
On that list of two dozen celebrity-designed development buildings built between 2000 and 2006 I keep proposing, I venture to guess that Meier tower #3 is going to be at the top.
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I don't like the Sculpture for Living. But please, don't take my word for it. Our friend and reader Renee Turman, Interior Designer, comments on the latest advertisement for Sculpture for Living, showing a rendering of unit 16A, after the jump:
Just for the record, I do not want to be Brad Pitt. But only good things can come when celebrities try on the profession of architecture (Tropolism means saying things like that with a straight face, so you can get to the pithy punch line) because there will be less whining about how difficult it is to get something done.
Our friends over at The Gutter point us to the Post's Page Six: Brad Pitt has skipped the designer stint and gone straight to developer! Ocean's Thirteen is not an auspicious name for a casino, but who's counting?
Please note your reaction to the above statement about BP's skipping the designer stuff and becoming a developer. Look at it for a while. Breathe Deep. Great. Now, consider that I don't mean that as a perjorative. In fact, I am excited by the fact that someone who has an interest in architecture, and film, would do what most of us architects should do: become the people who cause buildings to appear because they paid for it.
After all, some of my best friends are developers.
Yet another good-force reminder from someone who wants to change the world:
"Architecture is not created by individuals. The genius sketch . . . is a myth. Architecture is made by a team of committed people who work together, and in fact, success usually has more to do with dumb determination than with genius."
I prefer to think that dumb determination is genius, after our friend and ghost Thomas Edison.
(I found the link from our friends at Ye Olden Guttere)
Like the good-force protagonists in Star Wars (you KNOW this is going to be a great post), good architects never die: their building designs just keep getting built. Their glowing ghosts hang out, literally, over everything we in the business do. Shakespeare taught us that patricide is never rewarded, because the ghost creeps around your studio until you fess up to everyone for what you did.
Philip Johnson's building going up (probably). Enric Miralles's market is nearing completion (of course, his wife is a designer too, so this one is perhaps a bit unfair). And, of course, Le Corb has a building nearing completion. At this rate, we in the world of design and publications can just relax and stick to the greats of the last fifty years. New talent will show up later, after it's dead.
The LA Times' new critic, Christopher Hawthorne, reviews OMA's just-opened Concert Hall in Porto.
Mr. Hawthorne states
"Still, had Koolhaas managed to pull it off � had he created a box of space that looked flat and cool but sounded rich and detailed � we would simply have had to acknowledge and admire the feat."
in the second-to-last paragraph. Strange, because the paragraph before, he compares Koolhaas' approach to that of Gehry, who designed a hall that is "manages to be architecturally adventurous, acoustically impressive and humanely welcoming all at once." The logic of the argument is vague. So Koolhaas didn't do what Gehry did, and if he'd pulled off what he DID set out to do, it would have been great. Of course, he has no measures for success for Koolhaas' approach, in addition to not supporting the claim that the Porto hall did not meet these non-measures. It's unclear whether the critic even attended a performance in the space. For all we know, the sound is completely rich and seductive, and the tension between such a banal form and a rich sound is huge.
The Allianz Arena, a new football stadium in Munich, is almost complete.
The main site is here, and the gallery of construction is here. My favorite is picture #7, shown above.
The best part: it reminds me of the triangulated geometry in Gunther Behnisch & Frei Otto's 1972 Munich Olympic Stadium. There's nothing worse than a city that abandons a bizarre architectural trope for something really average and overdone. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's new stadium has all the tensegrity without all the yucky cables, all the lightness without the heaviness-that's-trying-to-look-light. It has a scalelessness about it, like a pillow, or a big soccer ball, that heightens the surreal effect of the light-projections and patterns.
And all we get is the hyper-average corpora-tectural West Side Stadium, like it was straight out of an Ellerbe Beckett rendering from 1993.
The surrounding buildings is a little architectural history microcosm of New York. Below, 19th century brick. It is nice. Therefore, goes 'contextual' architectural thinking, Brick equals Nice. Fast forward through the period of real modernism, of which only a few buildings made it into New York anyway. To the west, late 1960s brick, where one attempts to create a Seagram Building, only...Brick! They demolished the nearby CCC, another white-brick modernist compromise, so we know how that is going to end. To the north, 1980s Multi-Brick, also known as Po-Mo Brick, where one attempts to create a 19th Century Brick building, only using brick (or in this case, metal panels, same diff, yo) in a lot of non-brick like colors and patterns, thus creating a recognizable extension of context for the building, only...it's completely flat, like a billboard. It's like irony, without the irony.
