Archinect - Another Architecture

Istanbul, the Bosphorous, Corbusier's sketches, Rex

2013-05-20T19:34:00-04:00

How much of the history of urban design as a discipline can be traced back to Corbusier's reading of foreground and background in Istanbul? He took his first research trip abroad to Istanbul in 1911 and wrote of the relationship between the massive forms of the mosques and the repeated typology of the wooden houses. Waterfront, trees, density - the contemporary concerns of urban design are already here. (His sketches and watercolor below are from "Turkish Architecture and Urbanism Through the Eyes of L.C.")

It is very unfair to position Rex's Vakko headquarters next to the New Mosque of 1597 and a detail of the Marble Door at Hagia Sophia. But the slumped glass holds its own. The interior of the Vakko, not so much. One reads the hurriedness of the project, which was, however, a major aspect of its intelligence.

These towers below, photographed quickly from a taxi on the Asian side, are far from the business parks, much less the Bosphorous or t...

Peter Zumthor's Kunsthaus Bregenz

2013-05-06T12:13:00-04:00

It's sort of 2 and a half buildings in one. A functional envelope that might remind one of the Eames' house, if the Eame's house were 4 stories and all glazed. Outside of that are the overlapped panels of glass that come all the way down to the sidewalk.

Inside is concrete - interior walls and stairs of the same finish. The brightest finish of concrete is reserved for the floor. The ceilings are also glass, clipped together - the clips showing, of course.

The ceiling brings in a filtered light from fixtures far enough away that the light becomes diffused. This is probably the most decadent aspect of the project - it's what enables us to read the stairs and floors through the envelope. It's the sort of ultimate 'reveal' - a gap between floors that functionally provides an amazing lighting effect.

Urbanistically, the building basically participates in the dominant pattern of the city blocks near the lake. That means facing away from the lake. (There's rail ...

Messe Basel - when big architecture knows its neighborhood

2013-04-15T12:23:00-04:00

There is not much I could add to Herzog + de Meuron's own description of their Messeplatz Basel project, which is quoted in length here on Dezeen, along with photos. Often in our field a project description can sound a bit like an artist statement, heavy on intent and concept, but maybe overblown compared to the everyday effect of whatever is built. But the Messeplatz project delivers, even as Herzog + de Meuron states:

The surrounding Kleinbasel district will also benefit from the continuing upgrade of the Messeplatz and, at the same time, regaining former exhibition areas to convert into apartments and offices that will contribute to Basel's urban development.

Indeed, walking from Claraplatz to Messeplatz - one epicenter of the artworld - the streetscape is surprisingly inconsistent. Of course, the same was true of Chelsea until fairly recently, post-Highline. Maybe I am reading too much into this sentence and the sensitive architectural strategies that I will talk abo...

[Not Luxury] concept furniture

2013-03-14T10:38:16-04:00

[Not Luxury] concept furniture line, on view with exhibition design for chessmaster Vera Nebolsina's performance next Saturday for Lange Nacht der Museen 2013 (Long Night of the Museums) at Römerstasse 2 gallery space, Stuttgart.

The furniture is based not only on affordable recyclable materials but on the possibility of buying without credit (layaway assembly). The forms are based on modern classics, including the Eames La Chaise.

(Click for animated GIF)

Chess master visits architecture workshop

2013-03-06T10:03:00-05:00

A month ago already in this blog I mentioned a collaboration I had started with a chessmaster. Here's a video of her visit to the workshop I led at Stuttgart's Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste.

Presented in the context of a workshop that I directed at ABK Stuttgart called "Parameters of Chess: Designing with Decisions," Vera Nebolsina lectures as a chess theorist to architecture students. Starting with Deleuze's theories about chess, go and the 'ideal game', Nebolsina talks about comparative value of chess pieces, the game of go and Japanese business strategies, lines of desire on the board, and the relationship between materiality and space.

Write your manifesto in 60 - 80 words

2013-02-13T17:03:00-05:00

A friend of mine, a colleague who also manages a practice in Brooklyn, asked me to contribute to his collection of manifestos and influences for a presentation. Here are the instructions, followed by my own manifesto below. What would yours be?

(1) Write a theory that conceptually frames your ideas or a principle that drives your work. We imagine it to be longer than a sentence but shorter than a paragraph: 60-80 words.

(2) In partner with the preceding, provide one of your project images, from any time frame, that illustrates that principle.

(3) And lastly, we would love to hear what has influenced you. It could be a book, project, film, magazine, etc. If at all possible, this influence wants be something that students could look up.

Result:

There are too many problems in the world for architects to allocate our time and intelligence to making up new ones. To make a new architecture, make an architecture capable of participating in all of the values...

Parameters of chess

2013-02-04T12:02:00-05:00

Photo by Vera Nebolsina, Grandmaster

As I've alluded to before (Brunelleschi = BIM), I tend not to see digital design methods - such as Building Information Modeling or parametric design - as paradigmatic ruptures within architecture and its history. The capacity of parametric modeling as a means of reading and predicting the sea of boxes that comprises most of industrialized space may, ultimately, be more significant than its implementation in form-finding with differentiated and repeated components. (Summary of a course I taught at Columbia GSAPP about this is here)

That said, I have been working recently with Vera Nebolsina, a Chess Grandmaster here at the Akademie, on a project that has got me enthusiastic about the conceptual implications of using Grasshopper (the Rhino plug-in). We are designing an environment that could host both formal and informal chess tournaments and workshops. One of the primary goals is to enable a Grandmaster to play up to 20 people simulta...

Sweating Tanks at Tate

2013-01-24T11:24:00-05:00

The Tanks at Tate Modern opened this past summer. They are spaces dedicated to performance that also launch the next phase of the Herzog & de Meuron expansion. As Herzog & de Meuron explain one aspect of this connection to the expansion " A row of new and inclined concrete columns penetrate the space and introduce a moment of structural force of what will be built above over the next years."

Concrete columns do exactly that without taming the scale of the open spaces or their rawness. On a visit to the Tanks last week I was impressed that the space was even more rough than implied in the opening photos. Without bright lights washing out the tones, a visitor to the Tanks enters spaces with ladders to nowhere, patched up openings, dark discolorations and even writing on the concrete. One could read this as a mood shifter from the clean white galleries above or as an art historically savvy homage to the late 20th century history of performance art. On a wall asking for com...

Ceci n'est pas un BMW

2012-12-29T18:40:00-05:00

Am I the only person who mistakenly thought Coop Himmelb(l)au had designed both the BMW Museum and the Porsche Museum? I saw Wolf Prix present the BMW Museum project 7 or 8 years ago. Maybe it's because some of the structural feats are similar that I got them mixed up. (UN Studio's Mercedes Benz Museum is also in Stuttgart.)

Let me be very clear. Below are some pics and a few comments about the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, which is designed by **Delugan Meissl Associated Architects.**

Porsche Museum. Delugan Meissi. Let's go:

The primary gesture of separating and lifting the exhibition floors translates into this interior of a sky-lit lobby with central circulation to the exhibition floors.

(It is a bit odd for a client company that has designed seating to treat seating as such an after-thought. This is consistent throughout.)

One strains to find the sense of high velocity movement or precision that defines the Porsche brand, though the exhibition is lai...

Brunelleschi = BIM

2012-12-24T14:24:00-05:00

Last week I had the great fortune to go to Pisa, Italy, for the first time and Florence for the second time. I am struck by many parallels between the era of the early 14th century and our own time, more than I can go into in this brief post. I am not talking about the post-modernist concern with visual communication. Rather, questions of process and disciplinarity are my primary interest.

The hypothesis I'm announcing in the headline here - that Brunelleschi may be considered as a precedent to today's Building Information Modeling (BIM) - is not one I'm fully prepared to back up yet. My hunch is that the disciplinary position that Brunelleschi invented maps more closely onto how we work now than how architects worked in the 20th century. Here are some of the questions I am looking into:

- What is the relationship between the work of Neri di Fioravante, the dome's 14th century designer, and that of Brunelleschi?

- How did the herringbone pattern emerge? Here I am esp...

GIS across borders

2012-12-14T15:58:00-05:00

Is there any more concise record of globalization and its various militaristic and managerial operations than the Coordinate Reference System options in your standard GIS software?

For a project sited in Detroit, I have started building a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) map focused on downtown Detroit neighborhoods and the waterfront border with Windsor, Canada. The project is especially concerned with bike paths - really any alternative to automobiles. Biking is already established in neighborhoods on either side of this international border - through Mexicantown and Corktown on the Detroit side and downtown Windsor on the Canadian side. Part of what I am looking at is the possibility of local international bike paths.

In the process, of course, I am bringing together data with varied Coordinate Reference Systems.

Windsor, Canada, above, with bike paths in heavy black and potentially skate-able sidewalks in dark gray.

I have not yet got the Detroi...

Learning from stinkbugs

2012-12-10T00:54:00-05:00

On November 23rd, a biologist, an economist, a media theorist, a composer and a few other academics came here to Akademie Schloss Solitude to make a symposium on RhythmAnalysis. The title references Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, but the presenters talked broadly about rhythm from their own disciplines. In the end it was up to us to make the connections back to everyday life and space as social practice.

The presentation that offered me the most insight into re-thinking Space, Time, and Everyday Life came from a biologist who studies bugs, primarily stinkbugs. Meta Virant-Doberlet (Department of Entomology, National Institute of Biology, Ljubljana, Slovenia) records plant vibrations to study what she calls "substrate-borne communication."

Photo from Meta Virant-Doberlet via http://www.livescience.com/11201-shakin-insects-break-heard.html

These stinkbugs use plants to transmit messages-- low frequency signals that vibrate within the ...

How to Live

2012-12-02T13:15:00-05:00

Before coming to Stuttgart I didn't know anything about the Weißenhofsiedlung (residential development curated by Mies van der Rohe in a collaboration between Deutscher Werkbund and the state). It's a fascinating predecessor to the Case Study Houses, as well as to the semi-failed Ordos 100 project of a few years ago. Of course both those examples, as disparate as they are in intent and historical significance, are based on a private financing model. The Weißenhofsiedlung manages to combine public investment with a curatorial method that uses building as a mode of experimentation.

The title of this blog post is a translation of the question posed in the postcard on the left, a reproduction of the Die Wohnung exhibition publicity, which asks Wie wohnen? In German the word for apartment - Wohnung - is closer to the English word dwelling. Wie wohnen? means How to dwell / reside / live? The red X in the graphic crosses over an image of a room stuffed with 19th century furn...

Le Corbusier or Hans Scharoun?

2012-11-27T21:04:00-05:00

1927 in Stuttgart, Germany. I'll give the answer in my next real post.

Modernity and ideology

2012-11-24T12:40:00-05:00

For the past few weeks I have been thinking mostly about modernity and ideology. We talk often in architecture about the relationship between theory and practice. Like the opposition of public/private or political/autonomous, the duality of theory and practice feels both important and stale - predictably provocative to the point of being terribly boring. Understanding ideology and modernity as related phenomena may be a way around this over-wrought divide.

Science figures largely in the references I am looking at. Before getting too far from architecture, let me mention Frederick Kiesler. In 1937 Kiesler introduced a laboratory research model to the Architecture school at Columbia University with the "Laboratory for Design Correlation" - apparently the first Lab in any architecture school. Despite having invented the format that would become arguably one of the leading models of architecture education of the next century, Kiesler was ostracized in the field, and his lab o...