i voted for H&dM but i think not building this project is the best of all. it really alienates the history and rich cultural heritage of the place.
one other thing, the website is quite inconsistent in terms of content. yesterday it had WMV videos today it has DivX versions. and the photos change too.. strange...
RMJM (...but not just them... thats what I think, not "peter") et al seem ready to continue the tradition of architecture as man's answer to natural disasters.
So they propose to be party to doing to one of the world's finest cities more damage than Stalin dared or Hitler succeeded in inflicting.
Also did you hear that Rem said Liebeskinds design looks like a limp poodle by Brancusi.... I think he has a point. Such as shame his own design is presented so badly. Doesn't even look like a building.
...Given the array of talent involved in this competition, the results overall were surprisingly tame. The lipstick form and vertical gardens of a tower proposed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are virtually a cliché of contemporary architecture at this point. And while Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel made sincere efforts to address the nature of the site, both capped their towers with brutish geometric forms that feel strangely tacked on: in Mr. Koolhaas's case, with four blocks that cantilever out from near the top of the tower, and in Mr. Nouvel's with an upside down U-shaped mirrored form that suggests nothing so much as a gigantic magnet.
the NYT article mentioned gazprom but overall twas talkin bout the contestants for morphosis' tower in paris. do you have any idea if they have published images of the other contender's work?
I'm also curious about the other design proposals for paris... could not find anything... maybe they are trying to avoid the recycling-fuksas-gate.
back to Gasprom
.....Six protesters — one for each of the six designs — stood on the boat, dressed as patients from a mental health institute.
Wearing signs that said, “A high rise tower for every idiot,” and “A tower for every fool,” the protesters got off the boat, walked to a waiting vehicle, apparently an ambulance, and drove off.
“It is illegal,” said Vladimir Popov, head of the St. Petersburg Union of Architects, adding that no one had authorized the contest. “You can’t construct that kind of building in St. Petersburg.”
St. Petersburg lawmakers Mikhail Amosov, Natalya Yevdokimova and Sergei Gulyayev sent a protest to the General Prosecutor’s Office, asking that the legitimacy of the contest and the deal between the city and Gazprom be investigated.
The city government has agreed to spend 60 billion rubles ($2.3 billion) on building Gazprom-City, using up to half of the tax revenues that it will receive from the company over the next 10 years.
Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage Museum, has been among the most strident critics of the project. “Visitors get pleasure from the unique aura of St. Petersburg. ... If we destroy its aura, we will lose the economic foundation for our future existence,” Piotrovsky wrote in a comment last month for Vedomosti.
“In this part of town, the maximum height of buildings set by the local law is 48 meters but almost all projects that made it to the final of the competition go beyond this limitation,” Amosov said.
A Gazprom spokesman denied this was the case. “The television tower is 311 meters, and it isn’t visible from all parts of the city,” he said.
Supporters of the project have compared the furor to the reaction in Paris when the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. Amosov, who heads the City Planning Commission at the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly said his commission had already received a series of mass complaints about the plan including a joint protest signed by 950 residents of the Krasnogvardeisky district, close to the planned construction site.
Tony Kettle, managing director of RMJM in Britain, and lead architect on the project, told the Financial Times: “When you consider Paris, a city with an equally precious environment, it has been made even more special by the 324-meter high Eiffel Tower.”
Gazprom even didn't ask the people, whether they want this building in their city or not. The tower (people call it "corn" or "pop-corn") doesn' suite anything in the City.
If anyone out there knows how to do something genuinely interesting with a super-tall building that hasn't been done before *and* could sleep (without pills) at night if they got this environmentally disasterous type actually built, I would offer them a biscuit to go with their tea, smile alot and nick their idea.
is it possible that exagerrated verticality encourages, if not inherently incurs, kitch? it is quite rare for recent towers not to seem, to me, kitch perhaps because the issue of verticality itself has been banalized into, especially recently, a game of highest and wackiest. the vertical expanse seems like nothing more than a scape-excuse for an eccentric gymnastics of form and sculptural-structural-programmatic physics. in fact, the very reason for having a tower in place is partially if not usually a (kitch) ploy to agrandize the city/company's image-reputation and achieve iconicity. i would say that it would be difficult for a tower not to be kitch. furthermore, the tower invites a neurotic and reductive desire towards a formal ideal or utopia translating into the provision of a singular, uncomplex and solipsistic outline around the immensity and the far-removedness. this precludes a poetry of going up: the heavens do not dip down to meet the human effort in going up.
of course this is not always the case. with proposals such as jean nouvel's older unbuilt tour sans fin, the curiosity about verticality and our experience of it is built into the design. a convincing poetic that does not see the tower or space in a cartoon kind of space, an isotropic medium waiting for an outline and a colouring-in. i even find this recent proposal of his not at all as bad as the others. the towers look like pretty shiny wingless dragon flies stuck in a horizontally striated spider's web.
Libeskind's is horrible and this comes from the same guy who many centuries ago made the reading-writing thingie machine...for a person who has commited himself to architecturally react against historical crimes against humanity, he seems to be recently creating new yawping ones against, as koolhaas puts it, seriousness.
true, noctilucent. skyscrapers are one of the hardest problems, imo, and i've been fascinated by studios that take them on as 'poetic' problems rather than simply as technical ones. they lend themselves to a strategy of dumb planning with some architecture appended and overcoming that model is a big challenge.
one reason i have had to look 2,3,4 times at museum plaza/louisville. something's going on there...
they rule: "Gazprom-City" and world-class-architects
take a look at: http://www.gazprom-city.info/opros
(on gazprom, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazprom)
although this is useless: you may vote by checking your favourite, filling in the code as displayed, and click on the field below
or view results directely by clicking on: "Результаты голосования" ("poll results") on the end of page
no comments on the whole thing from me (i actually don't know what to say)
interesting, crazy... sverris don't know what do say either
Good ol' Gazprom. Albert Speer would be so proud of all of these guys.
JEAN NOUVEL is leading by 1 vote over RMJM.
i voted for OMA because it looked the most ominous.
i was diggin' the video that h&dm had up. doesn't appear to be on this link but i'm sure it's still out there somewhere.
i voted them best in show for their video animation, general production values, and sexiness. it's a fashion show, after all, right?
yeah: fashion show, with huge boo*** or rather huge pha*** . size matters and the sexiest sells best.
i voted for H&dM but i think not building this project is the best of all. it really alienates the history and rich cultural heritage of the place.
one other thing, the website is quite inconsistent in terms of content. yesterday it had WMV videos today it has DivX versions. and the photos change too.. strange...
i voted for the one with the most hair. baldness is aesthetically unacceptable to me.
Gazprom? Take Phasyme.
Anyone know where that interview is with rem talking about making projects for entities like dubai and china with dubious social responsibility?
NO but I am interrested to.
didn't know there is such an interview
some interviews are cited in the pdf in this post...:
http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=47424_0_42_50_C
REGARDING THIS COMPETITION
here a comment
PETER, Glasgow / 11:36am 22 Aug 2006
RMJM (...but not just them... thats what I think, not "peter") et al seem ready to continue the tradition of architecture as man's answer to natural disasters.
So they propose to be party to doing to one of the world's finest cities more damage than Stalin dared or Hitler succeeded in inflicting.
Fuksas design for a tower in Savona that appears in the most current issue of Domus.
Alexander Belenky viewing a model of Fuksas design for Gazprom.
nice, fuksas recycled a scheme.
That's not the only rip off. Check this!
Also did you hear that Rem said Liebeskinds design looks like a limp poodle by Brancusi.... I think he has a point. Such as shame his own design is presented so badly. Doesn't even look like a building.
Broken Link...sorry guys
For none Architecture Nerds: A 1996 design by Rem for Universal in LA
And no for the right size....
wow,
all this recycling,
maybe they think the russians are thick anyway and won't notice when they sell them recycled schemes or even their own logo as building...
All of them are pretty kitsch
.... from NYT today
...Given the array of talent involved in this competition, the results overall were surprisingly tame. The lipstick form and vertical gardens of a tower proposed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are virtually a cliché of contemporary architecture at this point. And while Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel made sincere efforts to address the nature of the site, both capped their towers with brutish geometric forms that feel strangely tacked on: in Mr. Koolhaas's case, with four blocks that cantilever out from near the top of the tower, and in Mr. Nouvel's with an upside down U-shaped mirrored form that suggests nothing so much as a gigantic magnet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/arts/design/04towe.html?_r=2&ref=arts&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
the NYT article mentioned gazprom but overall twas talkin bout the contestants for morphosis' tower in paris. do you have any idea if they have published images of the other contender's work?
sorry, the paragraph you quoted was talkin bout the paris competition.. but further below twas talkin bout gazprom...
I'm also curious about the other design proposals for paris... could not find anything... maybe they are trying to avoid the recycling-fuksas-gate.
back to Gasprom
.....Six protesters — one for each of the six designs — stood on the boat, dressed as patients from a mental health institute.
Wearing signs that said, “A high rise tower for every idiot,” and “A tower for every fool,” the protesters got off the boat, walked to a waiting vehicle, apparently an ambulance, and drove off.
“It is illegal,” said Vladimir Popov, head of the St. Petersburg Union of Architects, adding that no one had authorized the contest. “You can’t construct that kind of building in St. Petersburg.”
St. Petersburg lawmakers Mikhail Amosov, Natalya Yevdokimova and Sergei Gulyayev sent a protest to the General Prosecutor’s Office, asking that the legitimacy of the contest and the deal between the city and Gazprom be investigated.
The city government has agreed to spend 60 billion rubles ($2.3 billion) on building Gazprom-City, using up to half of the tax revenues that it will receive from the company over the next 10 years.
Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage Museum, has been among the most strident critics of the project. “Visitors get pleasure from the unique aura of St. Petersburg. ... If we destroy its aura, we will lose the economic foundation for our future existence,” Piotrovsky wrote in a comment last month for Vedomosti.
“In this part of town, the maximum height of buildings set by the local law is 48 meters but almost all projects that made it to the final of the competition go beyond this limitation,” Amosov said.
A Gazprom spokesman denied this was the case. “The television tower is 311 meters, and it isn’t visible from all parts of the city,” he said.
Supporters of the project have compared the furor to the reaction in Paris when the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. Amosov, who heads the City Planning Commission at the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly said his commission had already received a series of mass complaints about the plan including a joint protest signed by 950 residents of the Krasnogvardeisky district, close to the planned construction site.
Tony Kettle, managing director of RMJM in Britain, and lead architect on the project, told the Financial Times: “When you consider Paris, a city with an equally precious environment, it has been made even more special by the 324-meter high Eiffel Tower.”
Here are the photoes of all projects and actions against the building of Gazprom-City in Saint-Petersburg.
http://saint-petersburg.ru/photo/section/42/
(79 pics)
There is a slider on right side.
Gazprom even didn't ask the people, whether they want this building in their city or not. The tower (people call it "corn" or "pop-corn") doesn' suite anything in the City.
If anyone out there knows how to do something genuinely interesting with a super-tall building that hasn't been done before *and* could sleep (without pills) at night if they got this environmentally disasterous type actually built, I would offer them a biscuit to go with their tea, smile alot and nick their idea.
"All of them are pretty kitsch" -abel oner office
is it possible that exagerrated verticality encourages, if not inherently incurs, kitch? it is quite rare for recent towers not to seem, to me, kitch perhaps because the issue of verticality itself has been banalized into, especially recently, a game of highest and wackiest. the vertical expanse seems like nothing more than a scape-excuse for an eccentric gymnastics of form and sculptural-structural-programmatic physics. in fact, the very reason for having a tower in place is partially if not usually a (kitch) ploy to agrandize the city/company's image-reputation and achieve iconicity. i would say that it would be difficult for a tower not to be kitch. furthermore, the tower invites a neurotic and reductive desire towards a formal ideal or utopia translating into the provision of a singular, uncomplex and solipsistic outline around the immensity and the far-removedness. this precludes a poetry of going up: the heavens do not dip down to meet the human effort in going up.
of course this is not always the case. with proposals such as jean nouvel's older unbuilt tour sans fin, the curiosity about verticality and our experience of it is built into the design. a convincing poetic that does not see the tower or space in a cartoon kind of space, an isotropic medium waiting for an outline and a colouring-in. i even find this recent proposal of his not at all as bad as the others. the towers look like pretty shiny wingless dragon flies stuck in a horizontally striated spider's web.
Libeskind's is horrible and this comes from the same guy who many centuries ago made the reading-writing thingie machine...for a person who has commited himself to architecturally react against historical crimes against humanity, he seems to be recently creating new yawping ones against, as koolhaas puts it, seriousness.
true, noctilucent. skyscrapers are one of the hardest problems, imo, and i've been fascinated by studios that take them on as 'poetic' problems rather than simply as technical ones. they lend themselves to a strategy of dumb planning with some architecture appended and overcoming that model is a big challenge.
one reason i have had to look 2,3,4 times at museum plaza/louisville. something's going on there...
what a bunch of fluffing
If we get into the whole sex thing this thread'll never stop ;-)
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