TROPOLISM

The new London office is hopping. Today they alert us to an review by Hugh Pearman, the peerless architecture critic of the London Times. It's a review of the Global Cities show at Tate Modern. He clues us in to the surprise of the show, as well as it's predictability. A taste:

I’m fond of Gehry, but no, I don’t want to talk to him right now. No offence. Oh, blimey, there’s Zaha Hadid, too. Look, she’s great, but I really must dash. There are days when I just don’t much fancy the big business of world architecture.

A London correspondent tipped us off to something that is old news over there: Zaha Hadid won a competition for the London Architecture Foundation's new building. And redesigned it. We like the redesign better than the original project, probably because it's like a giant silver version of her gold lego project.

Title: House: Black Swan Theory

Author: Steven Holl

Publication Date: May 2007

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

ISBN: 1-56898-587-9

Title: AT-INdex

Author: Winka Dubbeldam

Publication Date: June 2007

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

ISBN: 1-56898-535-5

Not only do the folks at Princeton Architectural Press send us lots of books to review, but they have a sense of humor.

Recently we received copies of the two books listed in this review. The two books are polar opposites, and all but begged us to do a comparative review.

Click Continue Reading for the goods...

Prouve's Maison Tropicale was designed for the African climate, but for a little while, it has a new home in Queens, New York. And, it's for sale. The New York Times gives us the details on the restored house, as well as details on the other two surviving specimens. The house is open today to the public, and is located in Long Island City, on a plot just south of the Queensboro Bridge.

Update: After running over there today, I can report that the dates the house is open are May 17-June 5, 2007. No hours were posted. It was locked at 11am today.

And yes, we've been away for a while, celebrating our second anniversary.

Yesterday's New York Times served up some technicolor imaging of Frank Lloyd Wright's cracking Guggenheim facade. For anyone that has seen a set of historic preservation documents, this kind of documentation is routine. However, the image from the times takes it to a whole new level of awesomeness.

Today's New York Times gives us a road trip to Paul Rudolph's work between here and Boston, and includes updates on the conditions of the buildings. It also divulges a lot of details about the people who inhabit them. It also includes, shockingly enough, actual addresses and directions to said buildings. Time to call the garage and have the car ready.

Ever since Modern Architecture In Europe went out of print, and the internet, er, happened, guidebooks to famous buildings have been few and far between. The AIA produces a few for major cities, but they are hardly comprehensive. Road tripping across the country means long expanses of no handheld device internet access, which means all that online information is useless, unless you print it out. Until someone finds a solution for this, we'll have to print out articles like this one.

We've often expressed our admiration for Enric Miralles. Long overlooked in our praise has been his former partner, Carme Pinos. The early design brilliance of projects like the Igualada Cemetery are of equal credit to Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos. As a distant observer of their work, and as someone who knows people in their milieu, we surmise that Miralles had the surrealist imagination, and Pinos tended toward rhythmic ordering, modularity, and beautiful material connections. Miralles' work seemed to devolve into indulgent shapes (the Scottish Parliament's execution is a great example of this) without the regulating force of Pinos. Together, they were amazing.

Somehow we missed, until now, the Torre Cube in Guadalajara, Mexico (pictured). The project is an office building with natural ventilation. Offices are arranged in staggered prismatic volumes supported by three curved concrete cores. The atrium and openings between the volumes create a natural ventilation effect. In addition, there is a double skin to the building: the offices are enclosed by glass and are shaded by a sliding wood panel system. These panels can be manually moved to create optimum shading for different work environments and times of day/year.

And, it's beautiful as all get out. Carme, it's time to get a website already.

Tipped off by Via Arquitectura.

The Louvre is going franchise. For $520 million, Abu Dhabi has licensed the Louvre name for its previously-titled "classical museum". Read all about it in the New York Times today. While the article is full of details like art exchanges, price tags, and a cursory overview of the financial and political relationship between France and the United Arab Emirates, what really interests us is the new rendering of the underside of Nouvels' dome (pictured), previously reported on here. For us, the global branding of art, a result of the commoditization of art, is of little interest. We want that amazing building to be real.

This Abu Dhabi wonderland update we are showing off pictures of the models for the designs by Jean Nouvel (pictured) and Zaha Hadid.

Nouvel's scheme for a "classical museum" (possibly a branch of the Louvre) features a huge, flattened dome over an open-air arrangement of smaller buildings. It's like a village, shaded with a space dome. We think it's gorgeous.

Click Continue Reading to see a close-up of the Nouvel dome, and to experience the Zaha model goodness.

A few weeks ago we mentioned a new design by Zaha Hadid for a planned arts supercomplex in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. A special UAE correspondant has provided us with photographs of the exhibition. We weren't prepared for the amount of detail and vigor that went into the models and design of each proposal, and for our correspondant's wonderful close-up photography.

Click Continue Reading for amazing pictures with the Tadao Ando and Frank Gehry proposals.

Tropolism stands corrected. The smashup panes of glass at IIT, subject of one of our very first posts, were replacement glass from a 1970s renovation. The source of this is a press release describing the origin of the panes. The same press release we linked to in our original post. Whether our fact checker simply neglected to read the last sentence of the press release, the one that would have made our little rant entirely moot, or the release was post-tropolism revised, is not important. Mies' glass was long gone by the time the demolition derby came to town.

Robert A.M. Stern was the critic no one wanted to have when I was a student at Columbia. If you put his studio as anything but last in your preferences, you would get him. It was a widely held belief that if you took his studio, you'd be forced to do po-mo work all the time. This was far from reality, as I learned by sitting in a studio immediately adjacent to Bob Stern's studio, and overhearing his desk crits. Mr. Stern was a pragmatic critic, holding students' feet to the fire on making their projects work, and making their product match their premises. In short, he was an unwavering demand that your proposal live up to your words about it. I secretly loved him for that: Columbia in the mid 1990s was a lot of words and renderings of clouds, and light on the discussion of how buildings work in the world.

Yet a continued disappointment is that while Mr. Stern's office tends to produce architecture that contributes to the city, and is even civic in a traditional sense (in that it is guided by having generous and appropriately grand public spaces), the materials, forms, and sequences rarely thrill. There is no bite.

Of course, in this day and age, good architecture is a category that is hard to find. There is bad architecture, poor architecture, lame architecture, tired architecture, acceptable architcture, not bad architecture, and, occasionally, Great Architecture. But good is a category underrepresented.

We file Mr. Stern's design for the Museum of African Art in the good-to-very-good category. It's an acceptably civic front that abstracts a non-19th century western architectural form, and it has a innovative (but workable!) mix of residential development and institutional functions. And, it's got the best salesman in the business behind an institution without a permanent home.

The exhibition "Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines", on view now at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, is in our world the perfect exhibition: about rare architectural publications, and curated by Beatriz Colomina. The show is only up until February 24th, so rush down. There can never be enough architectural book love.

Until you get there, you may soak up the magazine goodness at the show's excellent (and simple, yo. Take note architects!) website. Mr. Ourousoff from the Times has also reviewed the show today.

Today's New York Times reports not once but twice about a planned arts supercomplex in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The articles cover all the art hot topics of the day: the pros and cons of the development, east meets west, the Bilbao effect, art as franchise is good or bad, and art as global or home-grown activity. But the real thrill of the article is the rendering of Zaha Hadid's contribution: a crazy, snakelike performing arts center. The audacity of the rendering reminds us of the immortal Gold Lego proposal for the Louvre. The image borders on completely-surreal without edging into acid-trip (while getting oh, so close).

We're a bit slow on the draw on this one, but we can't let the week end without pointing it out. Rafael Viñoly, one of the architects who worked under the THINK New York banner during the WTC competition, gave a lecture at 7WTC on January 18th describing how unnecessary the Freedom Tower is. The above diagram was copied from Gothamist, who also provides a complete description on the lecture.

We mentioned a little while ago about our allergy to argumentum ad hominem. It flared up in full force upon reading Philip Noble's latest column in Metropolis, so much so that we had to reach for our medication. Mr. Noble makes plain his love of the OMA-designed IIT Student Center in Chicago, but still can't bring himself to like Rem Koolhaas. The complaint gives us the so-whats. I can't say I care to care about any architect I'm not personal friends with. The list of Rem Infractions listed in the article make his argument ring of an inferiority complex that should stay in therapy sessions. However, the crux of his argument brings ad hominem to a whole new level, and something worthy of debate:

Can I not, one might also ask, separate the tics of a genius personality from the work of a genius? No, I would proudly respond, I cannot. And neither should you: when a building is itself leveraged on the personality of its builder—as it always is in the case of Rem and so many others who need not be mentioned here again (okay: Peter, Zaha, Richard, Danny)—then that personality, tics and all, becomes part of what one must assess to understand the finished work.

While we at Tropolism prefer to see buildings as most people do--apart from the journalism and gossip that surrounds their making--and entirely focus on how the body of the building interacts with the life of the city, we do agree that it's possible to gain insight into the artistic will of an architect by understanding their personal eccentricities. But what does that give us, except some more Understanding? Understanding is the booby prize. In a hundred years, IIT will still exist in some form, and the slights received by journalists from Rem in the late 20th and early 21st century will seem like trivialities. It is a rare occasion (I cannot think of a single occurence) when our squabbling is not outlived by the buildings we produce, and their effects on urban life. Besides, there are so many other conversations in the city, it's difficult to focus on a few rants, particularly from architects.

Via Greg.org.

Today's New York Times reports about the development of WTC Towers 2, 3, and 4. Employees of Foster, Maki, and Rogers are sharing a single, huge office space on the 11th Floor of 7 WTC, opened three weeks ago. The super studio also combines engineers and the lone architect of record for the project. In short, Silverstein (A master planner for the 21st Century? Urban heir to Robert Moses?) has created what no agency, competition, public comments hearing, or collaborative not-for-profit study has been able to produce: a working, collaborative effort. It's the single brilliant thing to come of the WTC site.

Because of this turn of events, our first-glance gloomy estimation of the towers' design now appears to have been hasty. We've changed our assessment to "intriguing enough to wait for more information".