Whatever becomes of Facebook’s corporate future – and therefore the consequential Internet – will play out in the world of Frank Gehry. The architect’s new HQ for Facebook in Menlo Park, MPK20, opened earlier this week with plentiful Instagrammed fanfare, and Facebook recently submitted plans to build two more Gehry buildings in the area. As we discuss on this week’s podcast, MPK20 is refreshingly old-school FOG, designed to embrace Facebook's “work in progress” feel that Gehry’s rougher materiality embraces. It’s Facebook’s and FOG’s world; we’re just living in it.
This episode, we also discuss the arrival of Airbnb in Cuba – whether this style of tourism could encourage architectural preservation, and what the company’s disruptive cachet means when there’s no status quo to disrupt. We’re also featuring part 1 of an interview I did with Kevin Roche, the Pritzker Prize winning architect who got his start over sixty years ago, working with Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen. The 92-year old Roche, now at Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates outside of New Haven, Connecticut, shares his thoughts on the media’s role in architecture, the ideal client, and 21st century workplaces.
Listen to episode twenty-four of Archinect Sessions, "American Disruption, at Home and Abroad":
Shownotes:
New York Times' piece on California's drought
Oliver Wainwright's piece on MPK20 over at The Guardian's architecture & design blog
Redesign of DC's main Mies library tip-toes around the good and the bad
AIA's "ARCHItypes Project" (halfway down page)
Eero Saarinen and Documenting Modern Living
AIA on ethics: "The Architect's Hat and Shoes"
"Socialismo o Muerte" documentary about the punk movement under Castro, via Radiolab
Redesign of DC's main Mies library tip-toes around the good and the bad
Working out of the Box: Abraham Burickson, poet, conceptual artist and founder of "Odyssey Works"
25 Comments
I think the comment about people disliking what he's done despite getting away from previous criticisms is off base. There were two things people disliked about the Ghery residence in LA. 1) the deconstructivism 2) material pallet
He's gotten away from the outlandish deconstructivist design, for which I am happy, but he's jumped right back on board with the material pallet. It's just another criticism, he's not just being criticized because he's Ghery.
Yay Fascism!
Can we spell his name correctly at least?
^no
Outlandish deconstruction? Really? Has "Ghery" ever used the word deconstruction, to describe his work? Raw materials? Turning the ubiquitous into the sublime, and you have problem with that? I haven't seen any criticism about his use of materials, other than from last people, and simpletons.
haven't heard the podcast yet, but to Beta's point - Gehry was not happy when he was included in the famous Deconstruction exhibit at MOMA I think back in the 80's. This is well documented. (see Hays' Anthology on architecture theory 1968-)
Kevin Roche: the best client is one who is educated to the needs of the community, environment, has a sense of history, good education. Bad client only sees dollar signs.
so about that FB hanger..... When is cheap not "retro-gehry" and just cheap?
I'm guessing Hitler - Speer model fits that definition. #snark
Folk Art Museum demoed in 2014
Archinect slobbers all over a giant Facebook shed in 2015
Love where architecture is going, thanks guys.
First, I never said raw materials, I said material pallet. I for one think that plywood is a nice material, but as I said on the previous thread about this building it literally looks like a shed, where you keep garden tools. I don't see it as transformative. I don't dislike the building, I just don't think that people are jumping on him for being him. I did not throw this out as a general criticism, rather I aligned it with one of his previous, and very well known works, which has received that criticism.
As for him being deconstrutivist... maybe that isn't the best description of his work, but it's how he and his work have often been labeled. Maybe I am adding to an unfair assessment of his style, but calling much of his work outlandish is hardly a stretch, which is really more the point.
I would like to apologize for spelling his name wrong though, there is no excuse for that.
Lighty, just tell me which architects I should cotton, because my liberal mind is too cluttered to make a good decision. Thanks. By five?
Lightperson, Archinect was overall loudly opposed to the demolition of the Folk Art. There's room for both int he world.
The Chiat/Day ad agency was the office project by Gaetano Pesce I referenced. here is a link to an article from when it was groundbreaking.
"They built things that my imagination could inhabit." - Ken, that was such a beautiful thing to say, especially in relation to Hejduk and Lebbeus Woods. Lovely.
I don't think there is room for the new conventional wisdom that architecture isn't important because it can't be quantified or datafied
Ken,
You might be interested in Personality Assessment Through Movement by Marion North.
Lightperson, interesting. I'm still pre-coffee this morning so I'll just ask for help: how could we quantify and/or datafy architecture? I can only think of very messy data like post-occupancy evaluations right now.
b3ta's definition of sublime:
The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit deconstructivist "styles" is characterized by unpredictability and controlled chaos. wiki
In other words the appearance of what is very often bad design, and the foundation of Gehry's anti-architecture philosophy.
You can see the attack on architects by data-empiricists as an attack on humanism in architecture via its most extreme examples. Gehry seems to be almost giving up in favor of his own "gehry technologies." This building is unknowable from photographs, but the critique is more of the message that it sends.
Post-occupancy critique can have its own shortfalls--the inability of people to put these things into words. Maybe its just using media to see the value of each individual building, whether it is designed by an architect or not. Just seeing the value of what buildings are.
It reminds me of the Moneyball approach to baseball... Sabermetrics might tell you something, but they aren't the game itself.
But you are right donna there's room for both as long as both are valued
As someone who went over to the dark side (brand design), I was very interested in the comments about clients who want their buildings to be an expression of their brand. I must confess I was surprised to hear some derision in the tone on that one, and wanted to dig into that—why is that a bad thing to people? We make fun of companies if their building is contrary to their brand (e.g. they want to appear so humble but they built themselves a big phallic symbol), so isn't it just the next step in brand evolution for everything a company does—from their communications to their workplace policies to yes, their buildings—be an expression of their brand?
^ because a corporation is a detached entity...a building whos main task is to express that entity will be naturally detached as well. detached from site, place, culture, nature....its only goal and responsibility is to profit...to take...manipulate...grow...it is dishonest in every respect. The only thing remotely similar throughout history was the church/mosque/temple. While they tectonically adapted to the locale they still connected to a centralized foreign entity and expressed/demanded/spread its message. bringing a roman cathlioc church to 17th century mexico was an imperialist act as is bringing a dominos pizza to Brooklyn. Today, our cities are full of imperialist buildings. nearly every single one is just a local rep for something somewhere else. nothing is about here. its all shallow, cheap, sly... "Sal the baker" has been replaced by "the friendly bakery section of albertsons". Google waves its majic wand and plops a BIG glass blob on a big ass site. To design for this economic/spatial imperialism is similar (imo) as designing new camoflage for some invasive species. When colin Rowe spoke of "Pocket Utopia" He probably didn't realise that 40 years later we would end up with pocket imperialism....a "selfish herd" of cheap soul less spaces...globalization, cetralization...
Wait, jla-x: haven't you ever seen It's A Wonderful Life? The Bailey Building and Loan was a part of a community, that's the whole message of the movie! My question was: when did taking pride in the community and showing that pride through a built edifice turn into "branding" as a dirty word?
IMO, sometime in the 80s when everybody and everything turned against everybody and everything. Corporations used to care somewhat about their employees. I don't think it is corporations per se but the mentality running them.
Capitalism, although never perfect, did used to be an economic system that could provide a means to improve the lives of a vast majority of people.
Now unfortunately, it is a system of repression grinding most of the country under the jackboot of unbridled greed.
Donna, What we have now is much different. The corporations of 2015 are global and removed from locale. For instance, look at the garment industry in post ww2 NY...There were many many tiers to that industry...sure you had big-wig moguls sitting in big penthouse towers, but alongside there were factories, small shops, street vendors, housing...it was an ecology....The industries of the Wonderful Life era were part of a local urban ecology.....Sure they were just as ruthless and greedy but their spatial/cultural/urban impact was limited...The predators of the past were native to that urban ecology...they evolved from it...with it....not typically an invasive as it is today...With the exception of mining industries and such...
As for the architectural differences...old industries were honest assholes (at least with their architecture)....they represented money and power and the buildings looked like it...When Warhol was asked what he thinks of when he sees the Towers of NY, he famously replied "Money." He didn't say..."well that one looks like sustainability and that one looks like social connectedness." Philip Morris didn't build a tower that looked like 2 pink lungs...their ad campaign was about bullshitting....buildings remained immune to this in most cases (churchs, etc...) The old world commercial buildings represented the goals of the corporation....to get richer and richer....No Bullshitting required...The Art Deco Buildings of that era were monuments to industry and wealth...Today they are instead trying to use architecture to disguise their true insidious nature...A wolf in sheeps clothing...and we have become their tailors.... Architecture has slipped into the world of advertising...Philip Johnsons generation may have been "whores"...but we (our generation) are whores / propagandists posing as revolutionaries and humanitarians...We have conveniently bullshitted ourselves to the point where we can operate comfortably with our liberal / ecologically conscious / socially conscious ideals while working for companies that act completely in opposition to them...And its not a matter of companies trying to do good or bad, or being full of good or bad people, rather its the inherent nature of the system of centralized corporation that is to blame...The google executives are just people too who probably also want to do good...Its just that the system itself is broken and rather than changing it, or at least acknowledging it, we paint over it with a fresh green coat of positivity...
A Bullshit economy will generate Bullshit architecture period.
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