Steven Holl Architects wins competition for Tirana expo center and wine hotel

weird

Holl has moved from doing watercolors in bed to sending photos of random scribbles for his interns to turn to buildings

This extrude-o-matic style seems more like Zaha's wheelhouse, no?

Riverside Museum by Zaha Hadid Architects | Dezeen

Please publish images of the losers, no conspiracies, just curious

@alberto: 

This Instagram account has several posts featuring the other entries:

https://www.instagram.com/akpt...

Agnieszka Kurant's "End of Signature" that influenced the design:

https://listart.mit.edu/art-artists/end-signature-2021-2022

To make The End of Signature, Agnieszka Kurant used artificial intelligence to create two different collective signatures realized as monumental light sculptures adorning the facades of two new buildings in Kendall Square.

Together they designed a neural network that was trained with a dataset of real signatures, which Kurant collected from scientists and other academics working in the building, as well as residents of the area. These individual signatures were then scanned and transformed by the algorithm into an “averaged” signature, which looks less like something signed by a human hand and more like an abstract, illegible scrawl that is trying to make sense of signatures that often lack clear alphabetical characters to begin with. As critic Christy Lange has written, “The hovering signatures in The End of Signature, similarly, make a kind of immaterial value visible—not only that of the artwork, but of the cognitive labor going on at MIT and the collective contributions of the wider community that supports it.” 

The scribble, then, is an image of the collective identity of individuals, the image itself an individual and idiosyncratic expression. The work is interesting, certainly in the age of AI. Appreciating it, however, depends on this knowledge. Uniformed, however, we might take it as a symbol of loss of identity into collective noise, a meaningless scribble. At some point, the image has to speak for itself, regardless of intent.

How the scribble works for a whole building, however, may be another matter. I can't decide. It may hold meaning for locals, in the know, but it only works if we are told what's going on. And again, I wonder how this image might be received, again regardless of purpose. It's still a squiggly building.

There is a point to what Holl is doing, however. The design is not just groundless fancy, and I'm somewhat happy someone trying something out based on a set of ideas and perceptions. Cf. Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower, designed to reflect the physicist's theories.

Then there's the question of how long the image will hold up and sustain interest. Artwork can be taken down. A building remains a long time.