The Dr Chau Chak Wing building, which will house a new business school in the inner-city campus, is being hailed as a masterpiece to rival the Sydney Opera House [...]
Traditional lecture halls have been replaced with undulating walls, circular classrooms and a grand chrome-silver staircase. [...]
“The 19th-century buildings in Sydney are the most accessible. They have a humanity while the modern buildings tend to be cold and off-putting,” Gehry said.
— theguardian.com
43 Comments
Wow. And we thought it looked bad from a distance.
"...hailed as a masterpiece to rival the Sydney Opera House..." Here's to the hiring of Sydney's first blind architecture critic.
A building with herpes ... eewww.
↑ silence troll
I....I...oh dear. Overall I like it, and I'm a fan of Gehry, but those protruding bricks really do look like a skin condition.
Those bricks are like Neo-rustication.
It says it would rival the Opera House in "distinctiveness." That completely changes the sentiment of the quote. Does no one read the article anymore?
Context is everything. Much of Gehry's work is distinctive(ly bad).
As an amateur climbing/boulderer, I approve of the protruding bricks.
Donna and Miles. Too much anthropomorphizing here.... and not just you. Almost everybody connects human anatomy and physiology to inert, non-living things. projection perhaps. And the govenor's 'best crumpled bag' compariosn is just his attempt to find semantic meaning to an abstract form. Is this the fallacy of looking at architercture as a 'langauge'?
would have looked better if those windows were recessed into the mass rather than looking like boxes caught in a mudslide....and get some antibiotics for those bumps...ewww
what a pile of shit.
I love that Gehry still irritates the aesthetically prudish.
I love that Gehry still irritates the aesthetically prudish
so... are you saying that every aesthetic must be liked or else one is prude?
what about a giant building sized replica of a hairy asshole?
Where do you draw the line?
I love it when interns think they know everything.
I love it even more when the children of Architects think they know Architecture.
jla-x, when you said "giant building-sized butthole" my mind went right to this. That's what I've seen here from day one:
Sorry MVRDV, I do like a lot of your work!
Eric, I'm a little confused by your comment, but we do tend to analyse the material world by comparison to our own material bodies because that's how we experience the world, yes? It's interesting to think of words like "skin": curtain glass towers certainly seem to have a "skin" while Richardsonian Romanesque maybe not so much.
Or the Comme Des Garcons store in Chelsea.
You've opened my eyes jla-x.
^haha
davvid finally sees the light.
Mr. PotatoHead
Donna, et al.
Pesonification, anthropomorphism, much of phenomenolgical criticism are psychologicalism, that is as I see it , attributing human 'psychologies' to non-human physical objects. 'A bulding with a brain' 'skin looks like it has herpes' (yours), 'building wants to be (fill in the blank), lot more. Every crit I go to there is someone attributing a 'mental state' to an inanimate object.
Think of Kahn, 'a brick 'wants' to be an arch' .Chales Jenck, an old hosemate, was the king of these. Abd of course I did the same. But now I watch myself.
If I remember right (long ago) Robbe-Grilet wrote an essay against psychologicism (hard tom say that one) in a collection of literary criticisms THE NEW NOVEL I think thats where i got this from. eric
Excellent point Eric.
but these "non physical" objects ARE made by humans who project these traits, consciously or not, onto their work. Its not like we are saying "that rock formation looks like a weiner". Its actually the opposite of what eric is saying imo...the compulsion to project anthropomorphic forms may limit the ultimate outcome. For example, one huge peeve of mine (being a sci-fi nerd) is when aliens look too human. Its like a default setting on our creativity...
As anthropomorphism is a basic and natural part of human perception and behavior that predates history, I'm wondering what you point is.
What can architect's learn from object-oriented ontology?
When architects refuse the archetype, they have to expect that people will assign cultural and aesthetic references to their buildings, ones that they never intended. When houses no longer look like houses, and courthouses no longer look like courthouses, and churches no longer look like churches, we can't be upset when they call them gherkins or cheese graters or Walkie talkies.
What can architect's learn from object-oriented ontology?
How to talk like Patrik Schumacher.
which archetype? the fucking hut?
what does repetition become after farce?
cue miles LOL.
I feel like this is a little over my head, but I'm going to try to work it out as I write this. Excuse the navel-gazing, please.
I've been reading this book "Supersense" by Bruce Hood that discusses how the human brain tends to believe in the supernatural. I think his point is that our brains *are* supernatural - meaning, our thoughts are non-physical but cause physical changes that we can experience, which is a commonly accepted definition of what "supernatural" means: non-physical phenomena affecting the physical world.
Our task as sentient humans is to overcome this tendency to ascribe supernatural properties to what are, ultimately, physical occurrences: the mind is ultimately electrical impulses, which are physical. So anything we *think* is supernatural, like ghosts or telekinesis or whatever, can be explained easily as physical phenomena when we look closely enough.
But! What makes us human is our storytelling abilities. So our minds first ascribe a supernatural existence: "Jesus' face is on my toast!" but then need to follow that up with a physical existence: "The singe marks are physical and it's only pareidolia that makes them appear to be a face."
Soooo...to me Kahn's question about a brick "wanting" to be an arch is valid, because bricks are excellent in compression and terrible in tension. That's taking the material's *physical* properties as being an essential quality. On top of that, then, we layer the storytelling/mythological aspects of brick - craftsmanlike, of the earth, retaining warmth from the kiln, scaled to the human hand, used in Colonial buildings therefore traditional, etc. - and use those meanings to create relevance, that is, to tell stories to other humans.
For this human's mind, a brick wall is *most significantly* an example of gravity, and that gravity is enough to give me the warm and fuzzies that humans seek. For many other humans, gravity isn't revealed in brick walls, for some reason, and their analysis ends at "It looks like Colonial Williamsburg so it's therefore comfortable." For that level of analysis, a faux brick applied panel is fine, because it hits the right warm and fuzzy buttons just by looking like brick.
Eric, how does this explanation fit into Robbe-Grillet's psychologicism? I've never been good at reading architectural philosophy. I feel like, for me, it's once again an example of being able to happily co-exist with both: I know a brick doesn't actually have agency that allows it to "want" to be anything, but the world is a richer place if I think about it in those terms while acknowledging that it's just poetry.
well said donna
only problem is that our physical reality is not as physical as we observe on the surface. dive deep into the world of quantum physics and you will see that the universe is made of the same things that our thoughts are made of.
in many ways, our "reality" is "supernatural." because the core mechanisms of the universe are completely counter intuitive to our limited observations of nature. truth is far stranger and more majestic than fiction.
the gravity expressed in that arch is also far more mysterious and strange than anything I can think of. We actually do not really understand what gravity is. The particle that is responsible for gravity has never been found...its effects on time, mass, etc, are weirder than gargoyles, crosses, or any other architectural expressions of the supernatural imo.
jla-x, I'll share what made me notice and thus eventually marry my husband: In a seminar on math at Cranbrook we were discussing location and how floor plans show the world flat but in fact it's not - the earth's curvature means flat is not truly flat. So my future husband says something to the affect of not only is flat not really flat, but location isn't really location, either, because the electrons in atoms are always moving, therefore all matter is always moving. That statement piqued my curiosity about the cute tall guy in the corner talking about atoms.... And now, as our 6th grader is learning about the Periodic Table, my husband still remembers all that stuff about how many missing isotopes lead to stability or whatever (I don't remember ANY of that!).
Very interesting comments Donna.
So my future husband says something to the affect of not only is flat not really flat, but location isn't really location, either, because the electrons in atoms are always moving, therefore all matter is always moving
Donna check this out! Think you will enjoy it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc
Thanks, davvid. Like I said I'm trying to work this stuff out. I'm on my skeptical journey right now, as opposed to the spiritual journey of architecture school - the two are resolving themselves quite well, but it takes work.
when he said 98 percent shit, FOG was not talking about the guggenheim potato.
When he said 98% shit, I assumed FOG was talking about his own work.
What do we do with these?
Excerpt from a review of the building by an Australian:
"Nature excels in discipline. Nature makes the classical straitjacket look like mud-painting. Nature disciplines atoms and galaxies around function honed and nuanced to the point of poetry. Gehry disdains all that. Famously dismissive of criticism, he does what he likes. Period."
"A great building is distinguished by how its yin and yang – object and space, inside and outside, material and idea – coalesce as a seamless whole. Our Gehry does the opposite. The skin promises a breathtaking interior space but does not deliver. The treehouse metaphor suggests a perched enchantment that nowhere appears. The "world's greatest architect" tag implies a coherence that never materialises, because the building has no idea."
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-verdict-on-the-gehry-building-a-brown-bag-worthy-of-the-kardashians-20150204-135i1g.html?post_id=1115382420_10203641651737923#_=_
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