Is the effort, time and struggle to design that very significant building worth the effort?
Non Sequitur
Jan 30, 19 7:42 pm
I've got more important things to worry about that leaving a built legacy. Fuck obsessing about building yourself a podium to ego. You do the best with the conditions you have, anything extra is just that: extra.
OneLostArchitect
Jan 30, 19 7:54 pm
Yea. I just trying to butter my toast too.
curtkram
Jan 30, 19 11:33 pm
i'm building a podium to my client's ego
geezertect
Jan 31, 19 7:01 am
A paid off house will be my architectural legacy.
bowling_ball
Feb 1, 19 9:30 am
You're going to bed able to pay off your house before you die? No need to show off, baller.
Non Sequitur
Feb 1, 19 9:54 am
^that's not a particular high-bar Bowlin. Mine will likely be paid off a full decade earlier relative to when my parents paid theirs.
bowling_ball
Feb 1, 19 11:13 am
That's true. But I'm still paying off my school debt, which is like 60% of a monthly mortgage payment. I'm on the slow track, unfortunately. (Anyway, I wasn't being serious)
SneakyPete
Jan 30, 19 7:56 pm
I've been part of teams that have designed buildings that will almost certainly outlast my time breathing, but that's the point. I want my efforts to be a net positive to the places I care about. That's how I choose my employers. It's not about ego, it's about purpose.
Rusty!
Jan 30, 19 8:36 pm
You have clearly not seen the level of quality control we put into our work. Sure the buildings that we put together may outlive the construction workers who are building them, but only by mere seconds.
Miles Jaffe
Jan 30, 19 8:48 pm
You will outlive any building you design and not be remembered.
You are speaking for yourself.
Bloopox
Jan 30, 19 8:55 pm
I'm probably going to live another 35 years or so. I've designed hundreds of buildings. The odds are very slim that I'll outlive them all - if I do then I'll celebrate the amazing weirdness of statistics and probability.
citizen
Jan 30, 19 10:27 pm
Maybe contrive a poetic, Roarkian ending? This time, pushing the TNT plunger while inside the building... none of this "demolish from a safe distance" crap.
You and your building will achieve oneness (and flatness) in the same moment.
Volunteer
Jan 31, 19 7:29 am
Practically speaking a lot of buildings are torn down because they can't be economically maintained. They can't be economically maintained because they were an ego trip for the architect in the first place.
Non Sequitur
Jan 31, 19 8:57 am
That’s a very small minority of buildings.
Miles Jaffe
Jan 31, 19 9:17 am
Most buildings are reed for economic reasons, and not because they are too expensive to maintain, but because they have not been developed to their maximum profit potential.
geezertect
Jan 31, 19 9:41 am
Many perfectly "good" buildings are torn down because the land can be put to higher use.
Miles Jaffe
Jan 31, 19 10:43 am
*razed
Zbig
Jan 31, 19 8:33 am
My first job as an intern was for a firm that designed exhibition hall booths. It took a week to design, a week to build, and it stood for three or four days. Then it got torn down in an hour. Great times.
x-jla
Jan 31, 19 9:18 am
Even the pyramids are just a blip in cosmic time.
Volunteer
Jan 31, 19 9:38 am
"The Information and Computer Science/Engineering Research Facility (ICS/ERF) at the University of California at Irvine—an early and energetic P/A Award–winning work by Frank Gehry—was completed in 1986 as designed, and has already been demolished.....Leaking roofs, rotting wood, and failing ventilation systems were cited as reasons for the building’s removal."
I have clothes that have lasted longer.
Non Sequitur
Jan 31, 19 9:40 am
Late 80s clothing? Awesome. Besides that, one example is not a rule.
Volunteer
Jan 31, 19 10:07 am
How do you design a building that rots in a semi-arid climate? Come to think of it Gehry's house in New Orleans he designed at the behest of the Bradster is uninhabitable because of the mold. Would you like more?
Non Sequitur
Jan 31, 19 10:21 am
Still all very moot points. We get it, you hate FOG. My original point still stands.
JLC-1
Jan 31, 19 10:46 am
I drove a 1986 SAAB until 2014.
Volunteer
Jan 31, 19 10:46 am
It is not just Gehry. The Brutalists buildings as a class are deteriorating rapidly with severe leaks and concrete chunks falling off of them to the extent some entrances have to be roped closed as in the FBI Building in DC. One 200 pound chunk of concrete fell off the overhead of a Zaha Hadid building less than a year old. That was the second instance for that building. In our age it is more important for the architect to make a design statement that it is to design a building that lasts and can be maintained.
kjdt
Jan 31, 19 10:52 am
I don't think of the vast majority of brutalist buildings as being from "our age". Most are 45-70 years old, their architects are long dead, and most of those buildings did outlast their architects. There are individual examples of dysfunctional buildings that are the result of architect egos run amok. Still most architects will be outlived by most of their work.
Miles Jaffe
Jan 31, 19 11:29 am
Shitty architects like Gehry and Zaha notwithstanding, the driving force behind demolition is economics. You argument ignores the rapid and massive gentrification of US cities where perfectly serviceable building are being replaced with upscale condos.
Volunteer
Jan 31, 19 11:48 am
Well, tearing down the JP Morgan Chase building, designed by a woman no less, is a crime. If the women want to march about something credible that would be a place to start. In many smaller cities they are running out of old buildings to convert to condos so they are designing new ones to look like old buildings that
have been converted.
Non Sequitur
Jan 31, 19 12:01 pm
Must be nice to be so easily swayed by so little.
SneakyPete
Jan 31, 19 12:10 pm
Volunteer, your chauvinism
is showing.
Volunteer
Jan 31, 19 12:21 pm
Why? I would join them. The building was originally the Union Carbide Building and is gorgeous. No point in tearing it down.
TIQM
Jan 31, 19 4:36 pm
If the building were lovable, someone might have tried to correct its deficiencies and save it. But no one could find a reason to make the effort.
arch76
Jan 31, 19 9:37 pm
FOG? Orenthal?! nope...Owen...bummer...
JLC-1
Jan 31, 19 10:48 am
hey jawknee, this is not real ,nothing is, we are in an artificial simulation. you ego is an implanted reaction.
thisisnotmyname
Jan 31, 19 11:23 am
Other architects will come and renovate your buildings. Most of the work will not make them better, just different.
Rusty!
Jan 31, 19 11:38 am
The original is so much friendlier for public urination. So many nooks! Definitely a downgrade.
thisisnotmyname
Jan 31, 19 12:02 pm
It's not really public if you are in a nook.
tduds
Jan 31, 19 11:44 am
What a relief. I can't wait to be forgotten.
citizen
Jan 31, 19 1:38 pm
++++
Especially 'the incident' of 1989
randomised
Jan 31, 19 3:11 pm
Shouldn't have thrown the boombox into the ocean.
jeiffert
Jan 31, 19 12:36 pm
Rather than all the useless hand-wringing, it might be more useful to try to design better buildings. Commodity, firmness and delight go a long way.
I knew Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and I still remember him fondly, but not his buildings.
SpontaneousCombustion
Jan 31, 19 3:43 pm
The average lifespan of a building is about 70 years. The average architect's time in the workforce spans approximately 40 years. Even if architects were known for long retirements and exceptional lifespans, it would still be likely that most architects would be outlived by most of their work - whether it's significant work, or even any good, or not.
Donna Sink
Jan 31, 19 4:04 pm
The project, so far, that I'm most proud of is a 60' long sidewalk. It connects a bus stop on a very busy street to the entry gate to the museum destination. It replaced what had been a muddy stretch of grass leading to an always-locked human gate, a path so bad and thwarting that walkers were constantly forced to walk in the street instead, and turned it into a path where a human being can process with dignity.
I don't know whether or not I'll outlive that stretch of sidewalk, but I'm pretty sure the *accommodation* of being able to walk there will remain now that it's been asserted. So yeah, I'm proud. But no one will remember I did it and that's totally ok.
Non Sequitur
Jan 31, 19 4:25 pm
If that sidewalk is not a monument to your ego Donna, then
i don’t know what is. I bet it leaks all over too.
Wilma Buttfit
Jan 31, 19 6:53 pm
I'm working on a big sidewalk project now. Nothing but sidewalks!
Erik Evens
Jan 31, 19 4:42 pm
my life
It don’t count for nothing
When I look at this world, I feel so small.
my life
Is only a season
A passing September that no one will recall.
But I gave joy to my mother
I made my lover smile
I can give comfort to my friends when they’re hurting
And I can make it seem better, for awhile.
Everyday Architect
Feb 1, 19 12:37 am
those whom I've mentored
and those they mentor in kind
... lasting legacy
Miles Jaffe
Feb 1, 19 11:19 am
+++
randomised
Feb 1, 19 2:03 am
There's nothing wrong with a job well done...
Not that it matters but I'm sure some of the projects I've worked on will outlive me, especially since they are still years away from even getting close to execution and will take years if not decades to finish.
x-jla
Feb 1, 19 9:45 am
I think it’s incredibly important for people to understand the cosmological context in which they operate.
Peter Normand
Feb 1, 19 10:02 am
I have several projects that are now gone, the needs of the client changed, the business folded or other things happened and the built environment I had worked on was no longer useful. This is normal and a lot of work is going to be renovated or demolished because needs change. How many decently designed video stores are now gone, or university housing buildings that are now gone because they do not offer accessible accommodations. The best architecture is achieved when a client's needs are meet with a certain degree of economy while obtaining the best possible aesthetic result. Also taste change as is evident in the demolition of a lot of brutalist architecture. We are not the buildings we design there should be a little more detachment from our work and our sens of identity.
Over and OUT
Peter N
Volunteer
Feb 1, 19 11:02 am
I read an article about a Beaux Arts building on a university campus. It started out as a home for Romance Languages. After a few years it was given over to the Architecture School. Then it was transferred to the College of Engineering. A few years later it became an Administration Building. Now it is back to a Romance Languages building. It was there long before 'brutalism', 'post-modernism', 'deconstructivism', 'parametricism', et al., and hopefully will be there for a long time after those 'isms' are yellowed pages in a forgotten text.
natematt
Feb 1, 19 11:33 am
*does math*
Eh, probably 4 out of 5...
Gloominati
Feb 1, 19 2:26 pm
So far one of my projects is gone - a renovation of a single family house, sold and torn down to make way for a much larger lakefront home. It's just as well - I got my pretty photos, but knowing what I now know a few decades later, it wasn't really based on good building science. There are so many more projects though that even if I live another 50-some years there will probably be a few left, unless maybe I attract a serial killer of architecture, who systematically goes after my buildings, leaving some signature pattern of destruction. That would be fun.
Is the effort, time and struggle to design that very significant building worth the effort?
I've got more important things to worry about that leaving a built legacy. Fuck obsessing about building yourself a podium to ego. You do the best with the conditions you have, anything extra is just that: extra.
Yea. I just trying to butter my toast too.
i'm building a podium to my client's ego
A paid off house will be my architectural legacy.
You're going to bed able to pay off your house before you die? No need to show off, baller.
^that's not a particular high-bar Bowlin. Mine will likely be paid off a full decade earlier relative to when my parents paid theirs.
That's true. But I'm still paying off my school debt, which is like 60% of a monthly mortgage payment. I'm on the slow track, unfortunately. (Anyway, I wasn't being serious)
I've been part of teams that have designed buildings that will almost certainly outlast my time breathing, but that's the point. I want my efforts to be a net positive to the places I care about. That's how I choose my employers. It's not about ego, it's about purpose.
You have clearly not seen the level of quality control we put into our work. Sure the buildings that we put together may outlive the construction workers who are building them, but only by mere seconds.
You will outlive any building you design and not be remembered.
You are speaking for yourself.
I'm probably going to live another 35 years or so. I've designed hundreds of buildings. The odds are very slim that I'll outlive them all - if I do then I'll celebrate the amazing weirdness of statistics and probability.
Maybe contrive a poetic, Roarkian ending? This time, pushing the TNT plunger while inside the building... none of this "demolish from a safe distance" crap.
You and your building will achieve oneness (and flatness) in the same moment.
Practically speaking a lot of buildings are torn down because they can't be economically maintained. They can't be economically maintained because they were an ego trip for the architect in the first place.
That’s a very small minority of buildings.
Most buildings are reed for economic reasons, and not because they are too expensive to maintain, but because they have not been developed to their maximum profit potential.
Many perfectly "good" buildings are torn down because the land can be put to higher use.
*razed
My first job as an intern was for a firm that designed exhibition hall booths. It took a week to design, a week to build, and it stood for three or four days. Then it got torn down in an hour. Great times.
Even the pyramids are just a blip in cosmic time.
"The Information and Computer Science/Engineering Research Facility (ICS/ERF) at the University of California at Irvine—an early and energetic P/A Award–winning work by Frank Gehry—was completed in 1986 as designed, and has already been demolished.....Leaking roofs, rotting wood, and failing ventilation systems were cited as reasons for the building’s removal."
I have clothes that have lasted longer.
Late 80s clothing? Awesome. Besides that, one example is not a rule.
How do you design a building that rots in a semi-arid climate? Come to think of it Gehry's house in New Orleans he designed at the behest of the Bradster is uninhabitable because of the mold. Would you like more?
Still all very moot points. We get it, you hate FOG. My original point still stands.
I drove a 1986 SAAB until 2014.
It is not just Gehry. The Brutalists buildings as a class are deteriorating rapidly with severe leaks and concrete chunks falling off of them to the extent some entrances have to be roped closed as in the FBI Building in DC. One 200 pound chunk of concrete fell off the overhead of a Zaha Hadid building less than a year old. That was the second instance for that building. In our age it is more important for the architect to make a design statement that it is to design a building that lasts and can be maintained.
I don't think of the vast majority of brutalist buildings as being from "our age". Most are 45-70 years old, their architects are long dead, and most of those buildings did outlast their architects. There are individual examples of dysfunctional buildings that are the result of architect egos run amok. Still most architects will be outlived by most of their work.
Shitty architects like Gehry and Zaha notwithstanding, the driving force behind demolition is economics. You argument ignores the rapid and massive gentrification of US cities where perfectly serviceable building are being replaced with upscale condos.
Well, tearing down the JP Morgan Chase building, designed by a woman no less, is a crime. If the women want to march about something credible that would be a place to start. In many smaller cities they are running out of old buildings to convert to condos so they are designing new ones to look like old buildings that have been converted.
Must be nice to be so easily swayed by so little.
Volunteer, your chauvinism is showing.
Why? I would join them. The building was originally the Union Carbide Building and is gorgeous. No point in tearing it down.
If the building were lovable, someone might have tried to correct its deficiencies and save it. But no one could find a reason to make the effort.
FOG? Orenthal?! nope...Owen...bummer...
hey jawknee, this is not real ,nothing is, we are in an artificial simulation. you ego is an implanted reaction.
Other architects will come and renovate your buildings. Most of the work will not make them better, just different.
The original is so much friendlier for public urination. So many nooks! Definitely a downgrade.
It's not really public if you are in a nook.
What a relief. I can't wait to be forgotten.
++++
Especially 'the incident' of 1989
Shouldn't have thrown the boombox into the ocean.
Rather than all the useless hand-wringing, it might be more useful to try to design better buildings. Commodity, firmness and delight go a long way.
I knew Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and I still remember him fondly, but not his buildings.
The average lifespan of a building is about 70 years. The average architect's time in the workforce spans approximately 40 years. Even if architects were known for long retirements and exceptional lifespans, it would still be likely that most architects would be outlived by most of their work - whether it's significant work, or even any good, or not.
The project, so far, that I'm most proud of is a 60' long sidewalk. It connects a bus stop on a very busy street to the entry gate to the museum destination. It replaced what had been a muddy stretch of grass leading to an always-locked human gate, a path so bad and thwarting that walkers were constantly forced to walk in the street instead, and turned it into a path where a human being can process with dignity.
I don't know whether or not I'll outlive that stretch of sidewalk, but I'm pretty sure the *accommodation* of being able to walk there will remain now that it's been asserted. So yeah, I'm proud. But no one will remember I did it and that's totally ok.
If that sidewalk is not a monument to your ego Donna, then
i don’t know what is. I bet it leaks all over too.
I'm working on a big sidewalk project now. Nothing but sidewalks!
my life
It don’t count for nothing
When I look at this world, I feel so small.
my life
Is only a season
A passing September that no one will recall.
But I gave joy to my mother
I made my lover smile
I can give comfort to my friends when they’re hurting
And I can make it seem better, for awhile.
those whom I've mentored
and those they mentor in kind
... lasting legacy
+++
There's nothing wrong with a job well done...
Not that it matters but I'm sure some of the projects I've worked on will outlive me, especially since they are still years away from even getting close to execution and will take years if not decades to finish.
I think it’s incredibly important for people to understand the cosmological context in which they operate.
I have several projects that are now gone, the needs of the client changed, the business folded or other things happened and the built environment I had worked on was no longer useful. This is normal and a lot of work is going to be renovated or demolished because needs change. How many decently designed video stores are now gone, or university housing buildings that are now gone because they do not offer accessible accommodations. The best architecture is achieved when a client's needs are meet with a certain degree of economy while obtaining the best possible aesthetic result. Also taste change as is evident in the demolition of a lot of brutalist architecture. We are not the buildings we design there should be a little more detachment from our work and our sens of identity.
Over and OUT
Peter N
I read an article about a Beaux Arts building on a university campus. It started out as a home for Romance Languages. After a few years it was given over to the Architecture School. Then it was transferred to the College of Engineering. A few years later it became an Administration Building. Now it is back to a Romance Languages building. It was there long before 'brutalism', 'post-modernism', 'deconstructivism', 'parametricism', et al., and hopefully will be there for a long time after those 'isms' are yellowed pages in a forgotten text.
*does math*
Eh, probably 4 out of 5...
So far one of my projects is gone - a renovation of a single family house, sold and torn down to make way for a much larger lakefront home. It's just as well - I got my pretty photos, but knowing what I now know a few decades later, it wasn't really based on good building science. There are so many more projects though that even if I live another 50-some years there will probably be a few left, unless maybe I attract a serial killer of architecture, who systematically goes after my buildings, leaving some signature pattern of destruction. That would be fun.