Archinect - News

Social Media: Architecture's double-edged sword

2019-12-24T12:00:00-05:00

Before the internet and social media, architecture projects and the work of architects were viewed and documented differently. Similar to other professions like the culinary arts and fashion, the public's understanding and exposure to these industries has changed as new technologies have proliferated. The public's experience of the built environment, for example, is no longer reliant on physically visiting a space. Instead, anyone at any time can see iconic architectural feats in the palm of their hand.

For architects, this accessibility can be a good thing, as it enables their projects to travel faster and, even, into the hands of potential clients. However, how are design professionals shaping their work in response to the influx and demand for online sharing? How have architects adapted their designs and marketing models to satisfy online platforms like Instagram and Twitter? Have architects and designers succumbed to "Instagrammable Architecture" and finding ways to "design Ins...

Nearly three decades old, Eisenman's (still laser-less) Greater Columbus Convention Center revisited

2019-01-09T14:35:00-05:00

With full theatrical trappings—nu-age Philip Glass music, smoke machines, mood lighting--the Eisenman team unveiled to the crowd a scale model of the building, which produced a light show to rival a Laser Floyd spectacular. These dozen red-hued Death Star beams [...] were to be placed on the building and neighboring structures, flashing, blinking, sweeping across downtown like some insane city-scale laser security system. Three years later, it was opened. Sans lasers.

Nathan Eddy, architecture documentary director and most recently a driving force to save Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building in New York, pens a delightful review of Peter Eisenman's 1990 competition-winning proposal for the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio.

"Forget the Bilbao Effect—today’s clients demand the Instagram Effect, with architects all but forced to include social media experiences into their designs," writes Eddy. "In 2018, a quarter century feels like forever ago, and Eisenman’s building, with its peculiar colors, slanted walls and cocky posturing, is still somehow both out of and ahead of its time, a futuristic anachronism."

Renzo Piano's new museum in Spain shuns the 'Bilbao Effect'

2017-06-23T13:41:00-04:00

Almost 20 years since Frank Gehry’s $100m titanium-clad Guggenheim Bilbao opened, another city on Spain’s north coast is getting a major contemporary art centre designed by an internationally acclaimed “starchitect”.

Renzo Piano's first big commission in Spain, The Centro Botín, is opening today. The architect claims that its comparisons with the museum that became a model for culture-driven regeneration schemes worldwide are too simplistic. According the president of the Fundación Botín’s visual arts committee, Vicente Todolí, the center's primary mission is to serve the local community by providing the city with appropriate cultural infrastructure.

The 10,300 sq. m building is covered in thousands of light-diffusing ceramic tiles, prioritizing "luminosity and lightness" and making it almost invisible from the city center. Split into two, the structure houses 2,500 sq. m of galleries and a 300-seat auditorium respectively. (This compares to around 11,000 sq. m of exhibition space across 19 galleries at the Guggenheim Bilbao.) With vast amount of green space around, the museum is raised on four-meter pillars to preserve the views of the waterfront.

Renzo Piano’s Centro Botín arts centre. Photogr...

One last chance for the Guggenheim Helsinki

2016-11-07T14:13:00-05:00

Earlier this year, news broke that the Finnish government had vetoed plans for the Guggenheim Helsinki Museum, a controversial satellite of the famed New York institution. Now, a new proposal has been prepared by the City government and the museum’s support foundation, which will be presented to the City for a final vote on the fate of the project.

The Guggenheim Helsinki was first proposed in 2011 but was voted down by the City of Helsinki in 2012. Afterwards, the Guggenheim Foundation prepared a new proposal and helped organize a massive design competition—one of the largest ever. The relatively-unknown studio Moreau Kusunoki Architectes won the competition.

According to estimates, the museum would cost around €130 million. The new plan proposes that the City of Helsinki would finance the majority of the costs, around €80 million, while the Supporting Foundation would put in €15 million. The rest would come from private sources, which already are said to have reached unprecedented l...

'Urban convenience:' when museums move and their effect on the city

2016-10-10T18:25:00-04:00

For all of the dubious attention attracted by the “Bilbao Effect” theory [...] a more prosaic, and arguably more important aspect of museum location has received little attention: not which city a museum is built in, but where in that city. Locations that would once have seemed inevitable, such as Chicago parkland, are hugely contentious in the 2000s, while locations previously unthinkable in that year – an abandoned lumbermill in Bilbao [...] – are now commonplace.

How NYC institutions raise billions of dollars for new projects

2015-10-26T12:06:00-04:00

But still strong is the seduction of the Bilbao Effect — when an architecturally exciting project makes an institution more of a destination, like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Spain. And with the success of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, which is drawing droves downtown, everyone seems to be grabbing for hammers

Robin Pogrebin explores how with more than a dozen New York cultural institutions planning major projects, fundraisers are hoping to tap into the deepest pockets. Strategies include selling naming rights, targeting heavyweights donors, remembering certain 'Dos and Don’ts' and expanding boards to increase the pool of donors.

All that being said, perhaps these organizations would be wise to remember the 2012 results of Set in Stone, from The Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago. The authors found that "It found that in many instances, building new or expanding existing facilities proved challenging and put enormous strain on institutions" or as the NYT summarized For Arts Institutions, Thinking Big Can Be Suicidal.

Editor's Picks #429

2015-09-18T12:46:00-04:00

Today's Editor's Picks is a special themed "place based" edition - highlighting content (old/newish) from the archives/site - about Denver and Colorado. Partly as an apology for the brief/unexpected lull in the Picks. Also, inspired by my own recent relocation to The Mile High City. Just one part of an ongoing attempt to learn about my new home.

While MArch students at the University of Colorado, Denver, Patrick Beseda and Lacy Williams realized a design/build project for a micro-dwelling. FOUNDhouse inspired by the WikiHouse project, was an exploration of digital fabrication, the possibilities of DIY and the democratization of housing/shelter.

News
Back in the 1990s the Denver area was site of an extreme makeover (aka environmental remediation) for the 6,500 acre Rocky Flats DOE nuclear industrial site.

Archinect ex-Editor in Chief | Staff Editor John Jourden coined Bil(Denver)bao in response to the news that David Adjaye, Steven Holl, and Daniel Libeskind, all had active projects in the same city - Denver. Similarly in a post on how cities across America are gambling on architecture to revitalize aging downtowns, Orhan Ayyüce criticized "i hate the new 'ready made culture' trend. new museums=starbucks".

Richard Florida used occupational data from the labor market data and research firm EMSI to map America's Leading Design Cit...

Art museums are more popular than ever – but what about the art inside?

2015-08-17T18:14:00-04:00

...What [Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao] showed, [is that] if you picked a remote part of the world and put a world-class museum in it, the world would beat a path to your door. That's the so-called "Bilbao Effect," but you'll notice that doesn't mention art; it mentions tourism, travel and finance. I feel we're in a strange time where we're building furious Potemkin villages of seeming life, behind which, if you looked with the right eyes, you would see cobwebs and skeletons.

NPR has curated a list of noteworthy-quotes from Michael Lewis, an art history professor at Williams College, who's interviewed in the recent issue of Commentary Magazine.

Never before has art sold better or museums drawn larger crowds. Yet, according to Lewis at least, most Americans have become "indifferent" to art.

Lewis isn't the first to note that today's spectacular museums serve as a façade that hides a pitiful situation in contemporary art. The contemporary artist and pioneer of institutional critique, Andrea Fraser, made a video in 2001 that touched on exactly this issue.

Entitled, Little Frank and His Carp, the work (posted below; warning, vaguely NSFW) features Fraser as she tours the lobby of the newly-opened Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. As Fraser listens to the audio guide describe the architecture in gushing, ecstatic terms, the artist herself verges on a near-sexual experience.

In a 2005 interview, excerpted on UbuWeb, Fraser explains, "What struck me about the audio tour...

The tiny village library that draws Beijingers in droves

2015-07-06T14:44:00-04:00

“The library is a tool to attract people to the village,” said Mr. Li, a professor of architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing. When visitors come to see the library, he said, they also spend money at the village’s few restaurants, pay parking fees and donate money for the building’s upkeep. “The place is special,” said Li Wenli, 45, an insurance saleswoman from Beijing [...].

Call it a rural Bilbao Effect or not, we're still quite excited that Archinect was one of the very first outlets to publish Li Xiaodong's stunning Liyuan Library building: First spotted on the popular China Builds blog and then, in a little more detail, as a ShowCase installment in the Features section.

The poetic envelope for the small village library has been well recognized since then — last fall, Li Xiaodong was presented the inaugural 2014 Moriyama RAIC International Prize of $100,000 CAD.

Will Pamplona's "Bilbao Effect" gamble pay off?

2015-01-26T13:27:00-05:00

The Museo Universidad de Navarra, a brand new gallery designed by the renowned Rafael Moneo, may lead to a stampede of art lovers every bit as important to Pamplona as the running of the bulls [...] The architect is Rafael Moneo, a Pritzker prizewinner and native of Navarre province. [...] If the architecture of the new gallery is not as eye-catching as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, the collection is more impressive [...].

‘Museum directors hated Bilbao’

2014-10-13T18:00:00-04:00

At 85, the architect Frank Gehry has neither stopped building nor started repeating himself and this month offers plenty of proof. Besides the unveiling of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which he designed for the billionaire Bernard Arnault, the explosively coloured Biomuseo in Panama opened on 2 October followed by a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, which opened on Wednesday, 8 October (until 26 January 2015). Gehry dispels some common misconceptions about his museum designs.

Berlin hopes Germany's tallest residential tower has the 'Bilbao effect'

2014-01-28T14:38:00-05:00

The tallest residential block in Germany is to rise up next to Berlin's needle-like TV tower by 2017. Designed by the US architect Frank Gehry and paid for by US real estate firm Hines, the 150-metre (492ft) building on Alexanderplatz will have 39 floors, with about 300 apartments, restaurants, a hotel and a spa. [...] Nonetheless, the city senate's building director, Regula Lüscher, welcomed the plans for "an extremely striking new landmark".

Lessons from North Korean urbanism, pt. 2

2014-01-10T14:56:00-05:00

I foresee that major urban spaces of Pyongyang, such as Kim Il Sung Square, will be used as “public” space with a greater variety of urban activities, such as commercial activities and show events. [...] The last thing that may happen in North Korea, or the thing that should not happen in some sense, is the Chinese model. Considering the scale of the economy and the potential of the North Korean market compared to China, it is hard to picture radical and massive urban development in Pyongyang.

Part two of NK News' interview with Dongwoo Yim pushes the discussion of North Korean urbanism into the future, comparing potential development methods to those seen in China and South Korea. Focusing on capital Pyongyang, Yim proposes a "Bilbao effect" development strategy that is heavy on catalytic architecture, and soft on strategy -- Pyongyang has very strict development restrictions that keep it from expanding, and will not be remodeling its mass-demonstration public spaces anytime soon.

Yim suggests that those spaces can be relevant in a post-dictatorship North Korea, and that they should be re-appropriated rather than razed for their history. How a hypothetical reunification with South Korea would look depends on how North Korean statehood is interpreted, as either autonomous or an infringement on South Korean land. But the prevailing lesson in Yim's interview is that Pyongyang is not going to be another Seoul, Guangzhou or Shenzhen, and will ultimately have to rely on it...

Containers without Content

2013-07-22T12:33:00-04:00

Far from being anchored in the local context, the project (the disastrous City of Culture of Galicia outside Santiago de Compostela, designed by Peter Eisenman) has decapitated Monte de Gaias and replaced it with a phony landscape with curves like those of a fun-fair roller coaster. These cynical intellectual manipulations cannot mask the reality of structures resembling supermarkets twisted about with algorithms and camouflaged with a thin veneer of granite (imported from Brasil!).

In a short sweet and illustrated article writer historian William J.R. Curtis puts several Bilbao effect projects in the trash can. It might as well be called "f..k content."

$300 Million "No Frank Gehry" Award

2011-04-26T11:31:15-04:00

An Iowa-based philanthropist and architecture aficionado has offered a $300 million reward to any city anywhere in the world that dares to hire someone other than Frank Gehry to design its gleaming new art museum.