My name is Monika and I'm an undergraduate student of Interior_Architecture. I'm doing a survey for my dissertation. I would be grateful if you could spend some time sharing your story.
‘There is the magic of painting and potery, of words and images, there is the magic of the real, of the physical, of substance, of the things around me that I see and touch, that I smell and hear. Sometimes, at certain moments, the magic conveyed by a specific architecture or landscape...‘ Peter Zumthor/ Thinking Architecture
We all experience architecture in our lives without thinking about it, and we all have our special places that put us in a special mood.
I would like to know the works or moments of architecture that you fell passion for and why? What is so important about that place. I would like to know your special moments of personal architectural experience.
Thank you, I really appreciate your time and story.
Forbidden Palace / Versailles / US Capitol / Reichstag : Places of history and power, shown with an awe inspiring scale and yet subtly detailed to show care and pride.
Notre Dame Cathedral / La Sagrada Familia / Ulm Dom / Church of the Jacobins (Toulouse): the care and love of craft over generations of construction in stone and concrete. and the light through the filigree of masonry is divine.
There are few places that truly change the way you perceive the world around you - Serra's torus sculptures in an outdoor setting of gravel is one I feel particularly strongly (the change of wind and the soft crunching of gravel echoing along the steel); FLW's Guggenheim rotunda is another the eyes and ears convey the magic.
Mine was the realization that the cross-section profile of the wood handrail in the main lobby of Alvar Aalto's Baker House (1946 M.I.T.) was an abstraction of the building's shape. I was starting 4th year at the time and it instantly made me reconsider the level and quality of attention we can incorporate into the most seemingly mundane details.
As for that sublime architectural experience akin to the OP image, I would say standing below the Portuguese pavilion by Siza for expo 98 in Lisbon is second only to the trembling feeling I experienced staring up at Gaudi's columns in Sagrada Familia.
Donna, Saarinen's Chapel is one helluva site to experience.
I remember being totally stunned the first time I walked by MIT's Stata Center at night. It was super cold, middle of winter, I was on my way to the art store, and I caught a glimpse of it down a side street. Caught me completely off guard. It was beautifully up-lit, and regardless whether or not you like this theoretical approach to design, I think the experience of that type of space is something great for new design students (myself included at the time) to be exposed to.
For me it was Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. Some of those spaces are very moving. The tour group in-front of mine was a bunch of elderly people - when they entered the Holocaust Tower, a completely empty space that is pitch black save for a sliver of light at the very top, they broke out in tears. We found out later that they were holocaust survivors.
The Garden of Exile is also a very neat space there. The whole museum really changed my perspective of what is possible within this field.
Each winter when the river freezes ( and becomes the longest skating surface in the world), my city holds a design competition for "warming huts." And each year more and more warming huts are added. Winners have included Gehry, the Patkaus, Antoine Predock....
Well, a good friend decided to do a guerilla pop-up restaurant on the frozen ice last year to accompany the warming huts and ice skaters. He got the city's top chefs to make custom menus (and cook on a rotating basis), then we built the structure and furniture, including a 20 foot long table for everybody to sit together.
Here's more info, and a few of the photos my partner took. Keep in mind it was -40 degrees, and the ground you're seeing is 2 foot thick ice (though we did have heat...)
In the British museum, Great Court is the work I felt that I should design something like it in my future.
It gives possibility of combining the our historical space/architecture and new technique/materials to create a beautiful space in contemporary life.
As I'm a student in Canada, I feel like North America often turn down old building and establish new contemporary architecture, but I don't think that's the best way we deal with our environment.
we should think that keeping our historical space is great resource for future generation as well.
As a person who really care about different history and cultures in all around the world,
the Great Court is good example of keeping historical monument and using new material/technique that makes me challenge to think about my future project.
Pretty much every temple and park I've been to in Japan from Ise to Ritsurin to Todaiji and Kiyomizu-dera as well as most every little shrine and park I've been to on several visits.
The appreciation for nature, both visual and in the use and craft of material is incredibly beautiful, amazing to experience and humbling in respect to my own lack of tradition and ability to craft. They inspire not only my work but my life.
Of buildings by famous architects, it would be the TWA Terminal at JFK airport in NYC by Eero Saarinen. It was so fluid and full of motion, and really harkened to "flight." I first saw it in an old National Geographic I dug up, and fell in love with it, and then got to see it from the rain-streaked windows of a TWA 747 when a kid, when FCO-JFK-LAX did not require a plane change, so I never got to go inside. I was once inside the terminal as an early 20-something, but I was less interested in architecture at that point, so I didn't analyze it but ... hey ... I knew who Eero Saarinen was. In general, I like a lot of his work because it is, as they say, "frozen music."
On a more local scale, there are 2 buildings in California and which are not exactly famous the world over, but both of them caught my eye when I was a kid:
1) Hearst Castle - San Simeon, CA, on the Central California coast, architect: Julia Morgan. It is eclectic, picking up neo-classical, Spanish colonial, Moorish (?), and other elements, and even mixing them up. It seems to work. It is so decadent, being a place where a wealthy businessman and his movie star friends partied, but the placement of the main house, the Casa Grande, to the auxiliary homes and inclusion of both the outdoor Neptune Pool and the indoor Roman Pool is well-coordinated and guaranteed to impress the visitor. And no AutoCAD or Revit was used!
2) Carson Mansion / Ingomar Club - Eureka, CA, architect: unknown, at least to me. It was built for a lumber baron at the turn of the 20th century in this logging town/port where time still stands still by California standards. I think it's mostly Tudor, with some "stick style" thrown into the mix. It looks like a cross between a gigantic gingerbread house and a haunted house. I thought it WAS haunted when I first saw the pictures as a kid. It was turned into a private club called the Ingomar Club. I don't know what its current use is.
For the last two items listed, I liked that they were stately, ornately crafted, and also sort of playful. Of the two, I think the Carson Mansion is better proportioned than the Casa Grande at Hearst Castle. Big works that start looking like wedding cakes can sort of get "out of whack." I think that California has always been more experimental in its architecture, and eclecticism was, and maybe is, better received.
Salk Institute - I lived in La Jolla about 1 1/2 miles away. I would run by there every Saturday for the 4 years I was an architecture student, and would use Salk as a case study for many of my school projects. We had our graduation ceremony there on a very bright June day. There is something about the place - kind of a spiritual quality that my professors told us about - then to actually experience that in the courtyard as my name was called out to to receive my M.arch. I remember that day and the hard promises made - we are all Louis Kahn
Visiting the Farnsworth House in the dead of Chicago winter was sublime. There was probably 6 inches of snow on the ground, first tour of the morning. I was standing outside for probably an hour or so taking photos and walking around the site so my feet were quite cold. They make you take your shoes off inside the Farnsworth House and for those not in the know, it was built with radiant floor heating. The combination of the brilliantly warm travertine on my frozen feet and the feeling of levitation the space achieves was really something else. I'll never forget it.
Dec 8, 13 10:14 am ·
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Special moments of personal architectural experience.
Hello,
My name is Monika and I'm an undergraduate student of Interior_Architecture. I'm doing a survey for my dissertation. I would be grateful if you could spend some time sharing your story.
‘There is the magic of painting and potery, of words and images, there is the magic of the real, of the physical, of substance, of the things around me that I see and touch, that I smell and hear. Sometimes, at certain moments, the magic conveyed by a specific architecture or landscape...‘ Peter Zumthor/ Thinking Architecture
We all experience architecture in our lives without thinking about it, and we all have our special places that put us in a special mood.
I would like to know the works or moments of architecture that you fell passion for and why? What is so important about that place. I would like to know your special moments of personal architectural experience.
Thank you, I really appreciate your time and story.
Forbidden Palace / Versailles / US Capitol / Reichstag : Places of history and power, shown with an awe inspiring scale and yet subtly detailed to show care and pride.
Notre Dame Cathedral / La Sagrada Familia / Ulm Dom / Church of the Jacobins (Toulouse): the care and love of craft over generations of construction in stone and concrete. and the light through the filigree of masonry is divine.
There are few places that truly change the way you perceive the world around you - Serra's torus sculptures in an outdoor setting of gravel is one I feel particularly strongly (the change of wind and the soft crunching of gravel echoing along the steel); FLW's Guggenheim rotunda is another the eyes and ears convey the magic.
Thank you 3tk!
Saarinen's MIT chapel changed my life and view of how architecture - interior spaces in particular - could affect all our senses.
Mine was the realization that the cross-section profile of the wood handrail in the main lobby of Alvar Aalto's Baker House (1946 M.I.T.) was an abstraction of the building's shape. I was starting 4th year at the time and it instantly made me reconsider the level and quality of attention we can incorporate into the most seemingly mundane details.
As for that sublime architectural experience akin to the OP image, I would say standing below the Portuguese pavilion by Siza for expo 98 in Lisbon is second only to the trembling feeling I experienced staring up at Gaudi's columns in Sagrada Familia.
Donna, Saarinen's Chapel is one helluva site to experience.
I remember being totally stunned the first time I walked by MIT's Stata Center at night. It was super cold, middle of winter, I was on my way to the art store, and I caught a glimpse of it down a side street. Caught me completely off guard. It was beautifully up-lit, and regardless whether or not you like this theoretical approach to design, I think the experience of that type of space is something great for new design students (myself included at the time) to be exposed to.
For me it was Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. Some of those spaces are very moving. The tour group in-front of mine was a bunch of elderly people - when they entered the Holocaust Tower, a completely empty space that is pitch black save for a sliver of light at the very top, they broke out in tears. We found out later that they were holocaust survivors.
The Garden of Exile is also a very neat space there. The whole museum really changed my perspective of what is possible within this field.
Each winter when the river freezes ( and becomes the longest skating surface in the world), my city holds a design competition for "warming huts." And each year more and more warming huts are added. Winners have included Gehry, the Patkaus, Antoine Predock....
Well, a good friend decided to do a guerilla pop-up restaurant on the frozen ice last year to accompany the warming huts and ice skaters. He got the city's top chefs to make custom menus (and cook on a rotating basis), then we built the structure and furniture, including a 20 foot long table for everybody to sit together.
Here's more info, and a few of the photos my partner took. Keep in mind it was -40 degrees, and the ground you're seeing is 2 foot thick ice (though we did have heat...)
http://cargocollective.com/rawgallery/RAW-ALMOND
Anyway, absolutely breathtaking experience that included sight, smell, touch, hot and cold, sound, taste.... can't wait to do it again this year.
In the British museum, Great Court is the work I felt that I should design something like it in my future.
It gives possibility of combining the our historical space/architecture and new technique/materials to create a beautiful space in contemporary life.
As I'm a student in Canada, I feel like North America often turn down old building and establish new contemporary architecture, but I don't think that's the best way we deal with our environment.
we should think that keeping our historical space is great resource for future generation as well.
As a person who really care about different history and cultures in all around the world,
the Great Court is good example of keeping historical monument and using new material/technique that makes me challenge to think about my future project.
Thanks for all of you for helping me with my survey!
Pretty much every temple and park I've been to in Japan from Ise to Ritsurin to Todaiji and Kiyomizu-dera as well as most every little shrine and park I've been to on several visits.
The appreciation for nature, both visual and in the use and craft of material is incredibly beautiful, amazing to experience and humbling in respect to my own lack of tradition and ability to craft. They inspire not only my work but my life.
Of buildings by famous architects, it would be the TWA Terminal at JFK airport in NYC by Eero Saarinen. It was so fluid and full of motion, and really harkened to "flight." I first saw it in an old National Geographic I dug up, and fell in love with it, and then got to see it from the rain-streaked windows of a TWA 747 when a kid, when FCO-JFK-LAX did not require a plane change, so I never got to go inside. I was once inside the terminal as an early 20-something, but I was less interested in architecture at that point, so I didn't analyze it but ... hey ... I knew who Eero Saarinen was. In general, I like a lot of his work because it is, as they say, "frozen music."
On a more local scale, there are 2 buildings in California and which are not exactly famous the world over, but both of them caught my eye when I was a kid:
1) Hearst Castle - San Simeon, CA, on the Central California coast, architect: Julia Morgan. It is eclectic, picking up neo-classical, Spanish colonial, Moorish (?), and other elements, and even mixing them up. It seems to work. It is so decadent, being a place where a wealthy businessman and his movie star friends partied, but the placement of the main house, the Casa Grande, to the auxiliary homes and inclusion of both the outdoor Neptune Pool and the indoor Roman Pool is well-coordinated and guaranteed to impress the visitor. And no AutoCAD or Revit was used!
2) Carson Mansion / Ingomar Club - Eureka, CA, architect: unknown, at least to me. It was built for a lumber baron at the turn of the 20th century in this logging town/port where time still stands still by California standards. I think it's mostly Tudor, with some "stick style" thrown into the mix. It looks like a cross between a gigantic gingerbread house and a haunted house. I thought it WAS haunted when I first saw the pictures as a kid. It was turned into a private club called the Ingomar Club. I don't know what its current use is.
For the last two items listed, I liked that they were stately, ornately crafted, and also sort of playful. Of the two, I think the Carson Mansion is better proportioned than the Casa Grande at Hearst Castle. Big works that start looking like wedding cakes can sort of get "out of whack." I think that California has always been more experimental in its architecture, and eclecticism was, and maybe is, better received.
Salk Institute - I lived in La Jolla about 1 1/2 miles away. I would run by there every Saturday for the 4 years I was an architecture student, and would use Salk as a case study for many of my school projects. We had our graduation ceremony there on a very bright June day. There is something about the place - kind of a spiritual quality that my professors told us about - then to actually experience that in the courtyard as my name was called out to to receive my M.arch. I remember that day and the hard promises made - we are all Louis Kahn
Visiting the Farnsworth House in the dead of Chicago winter was sublime. There was probably 6 inches of snow on the ground, first tour of the morning. I was standing outside for probably an hour or so taking photos and walking around the site so my feet were quite cold. They make you take your shoes off inside the Farnsworth House and for those not in the know, it was built with radiant floor heating. The combination of the brilliantly warm travertine on my frozen feet and the feeling of levitation the space achieves was really something else. I'll never forget it.
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