TROPOLISM

Tropolism took a vacation to sunny Palm Springs, California. While there we were fortunate to come across Julius Shulman: Palm Springs at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

This was our first trip to Palm Springs, and we spent the first few days looking up our favorite buildings in the area, as well as coming across some surprises, such as Albert Frey's 1960 Schiff House, now being renovated.

Only after we had done this initial exploration did we discover the Shulman show at PSAM. The show is at once a focused retrospective of Shulman's work (concentrating on only the Palm Springs buildings he photographed) and a survey of great modern buildings in Palm Springs. On display is Shulman's famous image of the Kaufmann Desert House, a picture many architects probably see in their minds when they think of Neutra. Yet equal emphasis is paid to Neutra's Maslon House, stupidly demolished in 2002. The images are supplemented throughout with original architectural renderings, floor plans, and elevations, further emphasizing this as a survey not just of Shulman, but of Palm Springs Modernism. The show is helpfully organized by architect.

Our only complaint with the show is its arrangement. Because much of the show is on free-standing partitions, either permanent or specially built for the exhibition, it does not lend itself to wrapping around corners the way a traditional 4-walled room does. Yet the show wraps, and wraps, and it is sometimes impossible to understand where to proceed next to see the rest of that particular architect's oevre. The architects are given large numbers next to their names, yet some of the architects are displayed out of numerical order. These are minor issues, but from the standpoint of anyone who has designed exhibitions, it is bewildering to see such freshman flubs at all.

Even though the architectural celebutantes are well-represented (Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, and John Lautner), lesser known architects are given equal time (Paul R. Williams and A. Quincy Jones, Dan Palmer and William Krisel, Donald Wexler, William Cody, and E. Stewart Williams). There are fewer masterpieces among this group, but they arguably have had a more powerful voice in shaping the character and culture of modernism that exists in Palm Springs. They shaped it both through the sheer number of good-to-great buildings in the Coachella Valley, and the breadth of their talent, imagination, and interests. E. Stewart Williams is case in point: he designed the 1946 Frank Sinatra House, the beautiful 1954 Edris House, and the equisitely detailed 1957 Santa Fe Savings and Loan Building. (which we drove by a dozen times on our long weekend) and, of course, the building housing the exhibition. There are few places in suburban America that can lay claim to this much per-capita Modernism.

Special thank you to Stephen Monkarsh, proprietor of Palm Springs' best collection of architectural books, who directed us to the exhibition.

Pictured is the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka. Greg Allen says it best:

Holy freakin' crap, why has no one told me The Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka was an origami rendition of a geodesic dome; obscured in a giant mist cloud produced by an all-encompassing capillary net; surrounded by Robert Breer's motorized, minimalist pod sculptures; entered through an audio-responsive, 4-color laser show--yes, using actual, frickin' lasers-- and culminating in a 90-foot mirrored mylar dome, which hosted concerts, happenings, and some 2 million slightly disoriented Japanese visitors?

Geodesic; mist; 4-color laser show; mirrored mylar. After those words we don't even need to know the rest of the details.

Today Nicholai Ourousoff puts the smack down on Renzo Piano's Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and addition to LACMA that has recently opened. From the photos in the article and the photos on LACMA's own website, we are left with a collective "HUH?". It's a little bit o'travertine, with a little bit o'Pompidou (via the 1980s). Or, perhaps bit o'Getty with bit o'Hugh Hardy (who did the awful 1986 Anderson Building at LACMA). And don't get us started on the flimsy entry pavilion, pictured. We like to think Mr. Ourousoff was channeling us when he said it:

And if to some the entrance pavilion’s flat, square canopy brings to mind a gas station, the reference falls flat. I’ve seen gas stations in Southern California with far more architectural ambition.

Work Architecture won this year's PS1 Warmup Series installation with their cardboard-tube urban farm. While the New York Times gives us some back story (heavy on the Barry Bergdoll, obviously the driving force behind the change of direction), we think that Pruned says it best:

Where sightseers once splashed about in silly algorithmic frotteurism, they will be treated this summer to an $85,000 community garden, whose “rural delights” will probably not go to supplement the nutritional needs of the disenfranchised but rather will go to make bloody marys and beer for architecture students.

Seriously folks, "silly algorithmic frotteurism" pretty much says a lot about a lot these days. That, and Pruned's brilliant comparison to Wheatfield by Agnes Denes.

We see this one as the successor to PS1 Warmup Series' last successful installation, the one in 2004 by nArchitects. The intervening years can now be forgotten, just as we forgot Lindy Roy's whatever install.

Awesome NYC bookstore alert: Storefront for Art and Architecture is having a micro-bookstore in the "eastern end" of the gallery. The bookstore is curated by Storefront luminaries known for their amazing book collections (ie Beatriz Colomina).

NYC has a dearth of great Architectural bookstores, at least in terms of the scale of those to be found on the west coast. Daily Dose, which pointed us to the Storefront bookstore, has also compiled a list of NYC bookshops.

There have been many articles and images of Gehard Richter's design for the stained glass window in Cologne Cathedral since it was unveiled last August. Our favorite was pointed out by Greg Allen: it's by Ralf Stockmann.

Long fans of the Library Of Congress image website (which has been around for 8 or 10 years, they were one of the first free online image banks), we are now excited to see them moving to the next phase of the interwebs by creating flickr albums. This department obviously has gotten a lot of money to play with the 'net. Good for us!

Many of the images do not carry copyright restrictions, such as the pictured This girl in a glass house is putting finishing touches on the bombardier nose section of a B-17F navy bomber, Long Beach, Calif., and they all include links back to the LOC website.

Opening January 26th is "Imperative Design", radical furnishings from seven designers at Barbara Davis Gallery in Houston. It isn't clear whether the gallery is attempting to outdo Moss or be their retail outlet (some of the pieces are available at Moss; pictured is Arik Levy's Rock Fusion chairbenchtablerock, available for price upon request. While not all of the pieces are new (will Zaha Hadid design another chair, please?), the work presented is interesting, cutting edge, and takes a bias toward computer-generated objects being created in real space.

Oh, and we want a Rock Fusion for our birthday (April 22, we turn 3).

“One should be practical and not too pious,” he told a conference of art historians some years ago. Commercialism pays the bills, he said, and museums are not churches. But “it is the mystery, the wonder, the presence of the real that is our singular distinction and that we should proudly, joyfully proclaim.”

Sorry to be so tardy on this. Greg Allen gives us another insightful article on the effect of an Art World with lots of rich people buying up everything in sight. And he is searching for the art that is going to be around when the rich folks stick to investing in real estate.

And, he links to a huge and interesting PDF document from the Olafur Eliasson studio. Just in time for the holidays!

We usually don't link to websites from architects: our inbox is filled with them, and the navigation alone usually causes us to run the other way. This one got our attention though. The CCA has launched a companion website for their imaginative exhibition Sorry, Out Of Gas. With this exhibition, CCA has taken the world of architecture to Green 2.0: seeing energy crises and environmental concerns in a cultural and recent-historical context, as a way to shape the dialogue and practices of the present day.

The website interface is simple, and the information is presented as a series of slideshows. We think the touch of having the slide transitions look like real live slides flipping forward (in the days before digital slide programs) is particularly elegant. It's a way of visiting the exhibition that is effective, and saves you the trip to Montreal. If the installed exhibition is big documentary photos on a wall, I'd rather see it online anyway.

Also presented is a work that was found in the press kit: An Endangered Species, a booklet amusingly illustrated by Harriet Russell.

We can't get enough of this design. And we stand by our statements after seeing the plethora of renderings at Dezeen.

It's difficult to believe, but after Jean Nouvel's sensitive-yet-stunning 40 Mercer, his sparkly-yet-stunning 100 Eleventh Avenue, Jean Nouvel comes through with another groundbreaking design for Manhattan. This time it's for a mixed-use tower next to MoMA. The height will rival the Chrysler Building, and with its open lattice structural top, it may rival the old bird's iconic status as well.

Also of note is Ourousoff's article on the building, which calls attention to the most important issues the building addresses. How private developers are doing more daring architecture than MoMA itself commissioned only a few years back. How this will hopefully correct MoMA's craptacular gallery situation. How an architect can produce a design for a tower while playing with the essential elements of towers that up until now felt played out (the structural system, the curtainwall, the profile), yet all the while creating something new, of our time, and dazzlingly buildable.

Our favorite part is that the developer has chosen to build what others might consider unsellable floors: the penthouse apartment with a huge elevator/stair core. It is brilliantly described as "the pied-a-terre at the top of the Eiffel Tower from which Gustave Eiffel used to survey his handiwork below."

Forgive us for being so slow on the ball on this; a travelling exhibition of Maya Lin's gorgeous new installations, Systematic Landscapes, opens at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis this week. Pictured from the show is Water Line, as captured by Jen S on flickr.

From Future Feeder:

0lll’s exhaustive photo diary of the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion 2007 by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen

Brilliant as ever.

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.