That's really unpleasant.

hey this leebshin bashing has got to stop!

personally, i think that is one of his best looking buildings yet.

Money is his master? Does he hold the same views as Jimmy Carter than Israel is an apartheid state?

i'm kinda diggin' it too, but i'm getting this awful premonition of insulted metal panels.

Surely if it went on site recntly he must have known about the project when he made his boycott statement in February. He either doesnt know his geography, doesn't know what his office is doing, or is cynically 'gaving his cake and eating it'

Crap like this - both the building "design" and the fuzzy, self-serving ethical logic - make me embarrassed to be an architect.

But to be fair, I guess I should find out what business my newest (very wealthy) client is in before I throw stones - if he's an importer of Chinese toys, I should either bow out of my contract or shut the hell up.

$$$ talks, bullshit walks

its like me typing on my chineese made computer to boycott the olympics

i bet that that rendering was done by a chineese intern

why pray tell are architects boycotting working in china? that's absolutely silly.

i honestly find it a bit silly to... if there is one thing americans especially should know, the actions of government are hardly ever a correct representation of a societies beliefs.

However, Libeskind isn't american.

i don't get why he made the statement about not working in china in the first place

i don't get why he thinks hong kong isn't a part of china ("special region" my ass... just like how new york is "special" and london is "special"). he tries to use architecture to blur boundaries, but he goes by the book on the boundary of a certain region in china? it's not like the money generated in hong kong doesn't flow directly into the rest of the country.

i don't get why he keeps designing these buildings. each one is more preposterous than the last. i dunno... buildings that look like giant icebergs with slits cut into them... the concept seems a bit dated to me.

jafidler i agree, it is silly

What better chance can we think of than to have an influence on such a dynamicly developing country?

seriously mdler's right
theres, money
theres computers
theres interns

thier going to build one way or another.

why not work with it instead of letting it work us?

creating architecture in china is the exact opposite of what most people rail against. instead of buying crap and bringing it here (like wallmart which esentially trades our capital and wealth for crap) we would be building there and exporting the capital gains.

i would have a bigger problem with chinese architects building here.
just like i have a problem with all you building here.

if anything it should be the chinese that should have a problem with all of these foreign architects devistating their cultural heritage

i dont like this building
my problem with that building is that it has no referance to anything about china or where it is, he basicly built the same exact thing in denver

we get cheap crap at wal*mart, they get that building.

^
yea that makes me a sad panda

Did he come up with this one by combining left over sketches from the ROM and Denver Art Museum? However, it is missing his trademark slashes and gashes on the exterior, that according to him have some very deep philisophical meaning.

...talking about the first pic there

who gets the reuse fee on that?

Apurimac> can u send me the link where he said that?

btw, i live near that building in hongkong...

from what i heard, daniel had this battle with the school administration about the window treatment... and the school won...

I don't know the specific place where he said it for the first time, but he's been harping about it for a while. It is better explained in the link i posted beneath the picture.

ha, thanks! the link is so small that i missed it.

well to be fair, being in the hong kong S.A.R. actually is a different government than the chinese government (though still part of china, and i think the military is still chinese military).
Due to the residual effects of its ownership by britain it's an autonomous zone. english is still one of the official languages. it is different.

i don't, however, want to lead on that I don't believe he is a hack.

Jafidler and puddles.
Maybe it is the flatness of the non-rendered picture, but I actually like it compared to much of his recent work.
Reminds me more of larger geographical entity than most of his shard work.

Also, As Keopi points out. Hong Kong does in fact have some (if limited) more freedoms with regards to administration than mainland China.
So there is some distinction.
And personally, with regards to China. I am not calling for a boycott of building in that country, but i think to not work for the government/bureaucracy is an acceptable stance.

I don't understand why the work of Libeskind is being debated at all. Did anyone really believe in his authenticity or significance before this?

which one is more politically correct?

a school for the poor at a non-democratic state....

or

nuclear armory at a democratic state...

whoo! beautimous fenestration.

can someone kick danny off his salt crystalline fetish and put him back on his magen david kick? at least there was some authenticity to those projects...

there are even more in the pipeline (please, no!!!)

Sorry I also there stay with the impression ,that architecture on many levels lost touch with the structure.
Also this architect work within the obsolute attitude, that architecture is not about develobing new technikes so people can profit from genuine newthinking and further visions , than those that create paintings of how architects think future methods will provide.
Architecture could make cheap houses, if the architects wasn't so arogant towerds the very structure ,the structure that is the greatest challance -- anyone can paint fantasies without bothering about where architecture shuld profit develobment .
I could accept this, if it as sideeffect made cheap houses and the revolution in architecture, that would profit everyone ; architecture shuld deliver long terms progress, not here and now glitter and forms that is unnatural in terms of the outdated methods that will build the basic structure. --

Sorry I don't mention the politics, but in just delivering the Icon, and not progress a true architectural revolution even the forms again promise it, that is in itself a political statement.

"sideeffect made cheap houses and the revolution in architecture"

the latter does not necessarly lead to the former. making a cheap house might not require a revolution in architecture. i suspect that you, Per, are equally as complicit in fetishizing one aspect of architecture over others as them others you criticize of doing the same


namely ur fetishization of a particular way of considering structure :an associated (and not incontingent) link (if not muddle of) bridging humane pragmatics, solipsistic drive of technology, and a philosophical interepretation of structure (sort of miesian)

libeskind's been delivering some dogs lately, but i almost ALWAYS stop short of calling someone a hypocrite.

it seems to be in the nature of the participating in this profession that what i believe and what i have to be involved with are different.

i ASPIRE to work to my beliefs, my own personal ethical compass, but i inevitably fall short. same is probably true for libeskind.

nam, i agree. it has a bit more mass than his typical "shard" buildings. i also like the hint of depth at the fenestration and wish it was more pronounced. it reminds me more of an oma project than your standard libeskind, especially because of the dumbness of the rendering and its complete lack of materiality. i will say that the section showing how it flattens into a typical office box reminds me all too much of the sacrafices that must be made working in china.

noctilucent I realy think it's time for a paragime shift.
Architects of last century has the attitude, that structure is an alian issue, something architects thruout the past century ,learned was somthing the engineer shuld deliver -- but that don't bring the new architecture, that don't offer the tallented students the new thing in architecture -- even they master a Solid modeler, and even the most natural thing to do, when the model are there in 3D, would be to ask a program calculate the structure in a new way. Then architecture stay with the old attitudes and omit the fantastic new oppotunity, the oppotunity to focus on the detail while the program will deliver without the questions the engineers would ask.
And cheap houses aswell as a relevant new aproach to the computer is nessery --- there will be no paragimeshift within the old attitude, -- beside I hope you understand, that just like making the robots just mimic workersat the assembly line, then generating the all important structure by computer, not by hand, is what will change it all -- change it all in way's so easy and still obviously so difficult to emagine, being surrounded by architects who has no visions that go more than skin deep.

the difference is that i can say that american foreign policy is wrong and not get locked up for it. comparing amerika and china is recockulous.

all i know about this building is the image above.

politics aside, i feel that this is one of the most restrained versions of a libeskind design i've seen. the angles & window placements of denver and royal ontario seem too extreme to me. here the (relatively) softer angles and the monochrome exterior speak to me of a building that is much more comfortable in its own skin in contrast to some of his other work which looks busy and frenetic with angled detailings.

i feel that it also helps that this building is a freestanding object as compared to royal ontario which was an addition. and white was a great choice in color, with those deep set windows if it were rendered black it would feel very foreboding. i'm not sure the context but i could imagine this as a university building/research facility in an otherwise bland environment...kind of like a friendly polar bear or iceberg or something else big and white

vado, the only reason you haven't been locked up yet is because the federal authorities still view indianastan as a rogue state and are too afraid to enter...they are also too busy with the mid east right now

manufactured homes are not built by union workers. at least not in indianastan...

A little late to the game, but...

Regardless of what I think of his design, Libeskind does have a point about Hong Kong. I'm travelling to that part of the world in the summer and since all the layovers happen in Hong Kong anyway, I've decided to stop there for at least one week. And so I've been reading up on some of its history and current status.

Among other things that differ from mainland China is its legal system. To me, a place with its own legal and economic system isn't all that different from being its own country. I'd argue that the requirements that constitutes a "country" has changed over time, and varies in different places. Its not a simple clear-cut answer.

Philarch...
Exactly..One of the holdovers of being a British colony/protectorate.

Why does every Libeskind building, no matter where it is, look like an angry sharp crystal?

Just look at the renderings of his buildings, and imagine what they would be like if you were a pedestrian walking closely near the perimeter. Dreadful.

That's a pretty good description, EKE, except that crystals actually have a geometric system behind their forms. Libeskind's angry shards are just lazy.

And yes, yes, I know when I bring out the word "lazy" that someone will respond that it is a huge accomplishment to get any building, especially a non-conventional one like Libeskind's, built. Agreed. But his buildings are still lazily designed and look like crap.

I'd prefer watching the dark crystal to looking at that piece of crap. Each subsequent work of his looks like he just put his previous job through the photocopier (ad infinitum, if we're not careful) a few times until it fit on the new site.

whats wrong with that? at least its a color copier!

Because, EKE - D.Lieberschnooks is angry and sharp himself. I raise my eyebrows, swiftly and only once, in further implication of what that all means.

i don't know shit about shit, but that pic at the top of this page is of one ugly-ass building.

you know, from the layman's perspective that is. it looks like it means nothing to me, there's nothing pleasing or compelling or even remotely interesting about it.

it looks like it will be stupidly expensive to build and will in the end create horrible spaces for the occupants. whoever drank the kool-aid and agreed to let that thing get built should be forced to work in one of the jaggedy corner offices and spend their days crouching tiger hidden dragon if you know what i mean.

why is there so much dreck passed off as something special?

mighty, begone before someone drops a conceptually laden crystalline narrative on you!

is it supposed to resemble the stone tools of the paleolithic era to acknowledge the time when hong kong was first settled?

I think maybe its because libeskind is mad at the world for what the Nazis did to his family.

So now all the rest of us are made to suffer in his uncomfortable buildings, which was nice for the holocaust museum, but a school?

go rise red.star, will you?



that things a piece of junk. and it looks like he took the jewish museum from SF and piled a few more on top of it at angles based on numbers which were generated using a 12 sided die from D&D, placed a couple of bullshit windows willy-nilly and said "mama come look, i'm all done with another one!"

don't mind me though...like i said, i ain't got no pretense about what's "good" or not. i jus' know what i like, and it ain't that.

i'm sure i'm alone on this: it resembles grace jones...