Metropolis POV | Metropolis Magazine

Like eBay, for Wealthy Architecture Nerds

George Beane — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:39:55 +0000

The vast majority of the architects and artists that submitted work to Contemplating the Void--an ongoing exhibition at the Guggenheim that re-imagines Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic building in fanciful, and often humorous, ways--have also contributed those pieces to an online auction that will run through next week.

About half of the 178 items up for auction have yet to receive any bids, and only a quarter elicited more than one offer. The works range from the whimsical, to the psychedelic, to the esoteric, but if there's a trend, it has more to do with the art-makers than the objects themselves; generally, it’s the fine artists and not the architects that have garnered more, and higher, bids (maybe because they’re easier to collect). Beyond that, it’s hard to see broad differences in approach or style. Some projects look like schematic architectural sketches, others more like plans, paintings, or posters. The works range in estimated value from $500 to $25,000, which, we’re guessing, is a little steep for most people. But with opening bids starting at $150 (and all proceeds going to future museum programming) it’s probably as close as many of us will get to owning a museum-quality print. After all, if you can’t afford a Toyo Ito house, at least you can buy his drawing.

After the jump, images of some of the lots and their auction status as of this morning. (more...)

Clinical Care, Industrial Setting

Mason Currey — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:17:04 +0000

Last fall we wrote about the architecture firm Anshen + Allen's Green Patient Lab, a traveling mock-up of a hospital room stocked with the latest and best in sustainable health-care technology and design. Today the firm let us know that it has also begun working with Containers to Clinics (C2C), a Dover, Massachusetts-based nonprofit that's developing a prototype portable health clinic constructed from industrial shipping containers. C2C was founded in 2008 by a Boston-area physician's assistant named Elizabeth Sheehan; it aims to deliver routine preventive care to underserved areas of the developing world. (Right now, it's working to deploy its first prototype in Haiti.) Sheehan estimates that one C2C unit will cost approximately $100,00, but that figure includes transport, equipment, medications, and salaries for seven local staff members. You can watch the retrofit process in the video above; read more at containerstoclinics.org.

After the jump, Anshen + Allen's renderings of the prototype clinic provide a better idea of the distribution of medical facilities within the 8-by-20-foot steel containers. (more...)

In Like a Lion

Mason Currey — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:00:07 +0000

It's only the ninth of March and already we're having trouble keeping up with all this month's design news. If you're like us (harried, easily distracted, constantly hungry, etc.), then read on for a quick, painless recap of the month's biggest design news, so far.

President Obama Appoints Edward Tufte to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel

In his new role, the information-design guru (and vocal PowerPoint critic) will help track and explain the $787 billion in federal stimulus funds. "I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service," Tufte wrote on his Web site. "And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do."
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MIT's New Media Lab Building Opens

Fumohiko Maki's design draws on Piet Mondrian, George Seurat, and Japanese paper lanterns for a 163,000-square-foot exercise in transparency.

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Your Afternoon Time-Lapse Video Fix

Mason Currey — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:44:17 +0000

As much as we love to read around here--and even though we rely on the printed word (and the e-printed word, or whatever you want to call it) for our livelihoods--by some Friday afternoons, we've reached our limit; it's all we can do to drag our text-saturated eyeballs across another line of type. If you're feeling about the same--and a quick nap isn't an option--then perhaps a video diversion will help. And we think we have just the thing: a collection of time-lapse architecture videos from around the Web. (more...)

Accessibility Watch: Navigating New York’s Building Code

George Beane — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:34:19 +0000

In our running series on accessibility issues in buildings and cities, we’ve looked at some ways that New York City in particular may fall short when it comes to providing easy, well-maintained design for people with limited mobility. So when our publisher noticed what appeared to be a dearth of handicap-friendly design at a well-known restaurant--one that happens to sit in a landmarked building--we took it upon ourselves to investigate.

What we found was one small-scale instance of just how complex these issues can be. In this case, the restaurant blamed the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) for rejecting its request to install an exterior-stairwell hand rail. The LPC countered that it had never received such a request, and that it would almost certainly have approved one if it had. The restaurant’s architect had only worked on the interiors, and therefore claimed ignorance of the whole situation.

It didn’t seem productive to investigate the matter beyond this impasse—but we did want to take a closer look at the larger issues at play here. What interested us most about this case was the building’s historic status. How do city government and private owners reconcile the desire to protect the character of historic buildings with the need to promote accessibility?

In theory, the solution is pretty straightforward. When asked about accessibility features in commercial spaces, a representative from the LPC said, “We’ve never turned down a request for barrier-free access. Our job is to try to figure out a way to solve a problem without detracting from the historic building or diminishing its significance.” To prove the point, LPC provided us with a list of landmarked buildings where new additions had been approved. Where accessibility features like ramps or lifts are necessary, the agency works with building owners to mitigate the visual effect of those additions, sometimes suggesting an appropriate color or material palette or camouflaging the new design with landscaping.

But exploring the bureaucratic world of design regulation made us curious to know more about which buildings fall under what regulations—and since we’d already started, we decided to follow the rabbit hole of building code just a little further. Here, for those curious about how these things work, is what we learned: (more...)

A Lamp Made From a Hamster’s Ovary?

Mason Currey — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:13:01 +0000

What is happening in the murky video clip to your left? To be honest, I'm not entirely certain. All I can tell you for sure is that this is a preview of the new work by Joris Laarman Lab to be exhibited at Friedman Benda Gallery, in New York, beginning Friday.

Laarman is the young Dutch designer best known for creating the Bone Chair and Bone Chaise, among other bone furniture. For those limited-edition pieces, he used computer algorithms and a trademarked CAD casting method to mimic the growing patterns of bones in bizarre-looking aluminum or polyurethane seats.

His new work includes the Half Life Lamp, which again tries to imitate a biological process in a manufacturing setting. This is a case where it may be best to let the designer speak for himself. Here's an excerpt from a statement by Laarman:

This lamp Half life – it is half made of living organism and half made of non living material recently died. It was born on February 23 in a Dutch tissue culture laboratory. On the video Half life radiated brightly when it was in healthy conditions. The cells responsible for the emission of light in the hood of the lamp originally stem from a Chinese hamster. In 1957 these CHO cells were isolated from a hamster’s ovary and kept alive as a cell culture for research purposes. In the 1990s this cell line was enriched with the fire fly’s luciferase gene. Ever since than these hamster cells glow in the dark in presence of luciferine. According to present state of knowledge in the life science the development of bioluminescence systems in living organisms occurred naturally about 20 or 30 times in evolution. Well known examples of bioluminescence are found in bacteria, fire flies, and jelly fish.

So the above video illustrates this bioluminescence. And the final result? (more...)

Refreshing Times Square

Mason Currey — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:07:25 +0000

Attention, New York artists and designers: the city's Department of Transportation just announced that it is soliciting conceptual designs to refresh the new pedestrian plazas at Times Square. As you may recall, Mayor Bloomberg decided last month to make permanent the five plazas that DOT installed in the area last May. Now the DOT is looking for "a series of economical, temporary surface treatments" to keep these spaces looking good until it's able to implement a permanent build-out (currently slated to for 2012). Designs must enhance the pedestrian experience, improve the setting for Times Square events, and accommodate fire lanes, crosswalks, and other "use zones." The complete request for proposals is supposed to go up on the DOT Web site sometime today.

Update: Here's a direct link to the RFP.

Preservation Society

Mason Currey — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:08:50 +0000

For an enlightening and occasionally amusing glimpse of the arcane world of New York City landmarks preservation, point your browser to HDC@LPC, a new Web site by the city's Historic Districts Council.

As a nonprofit advocate for New York City's historic neighborhoods, the HDC reviews and comments on hundreds of applications for alterations to landmark buildings in the five boroughs. (In fact, it is the only organization to do so.) At weekly public hearings, it testifies to the Landmarks Preservation Commission about the appropriateness of the proposed changes. Now it's also posting that testimony online, making it easy for any New Yorker to tap into the behind-the-scenes conversation about the city's historic buildings.

This afternoon I spent some time perusing the most recent entries. One thing I noticed right away: the HDC is not afraid to play the neighborhood curmudgeon, giving a resounding thumbs-down to proposals that seem relatively innocuous to this casual observer.

For instance, you may think that installing a bracket sign on an old factory building in DUMBO would easily meet HDC's approval. You would be wrong. "Bracket signs gussy up the very simple, clean lines of Industrial neo-Classical style factory buildings like 72 Front Street, and after a while they lose their effectiveness, the clutter of signs all canceling one another out," the HDC wrote.

How about a rear-yard addition to a Greek Revival house in Brooklyn Heights? (more...)

Design Activists: Raise Your Flag High!

Susan S. Szenasy — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:37:03 +0000

Design activism is on the rise. The most recent and public expression of this movement can be examined at New York’s Center for Architecture. Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Modern Landmarks recently opened to large crowds and runs through May 1. It chronicles efforts taken to save, or try to save, Modern architecture’s significant buildings. For me, the most inspiring of these initiatives is the ADGB Trade Union School (left), built in 1930 in Bernau, Germany, by architects Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer. (Meyer, you may recall from your history class, was the second director of the world-shaping Bauhaus design school where Wittwer was an instructor.) The activists in this case began working together in 2001, creating the kind of positive and sustained energy such efforts demand. Local government, business, and academia participated in devising a competition to save and restore the building. Now it’s not only a great place to learn, but a resource for the community as well as an inspiring case study for scholars and architects wanting to know more about the living, breathing buildings of the early Modernists.

Sadly, the record for saving Modernist masterpieces remains spotty. One of the most distressing losses to the cause is Paul Rudolph’s Riverview High School, built in Sarasota, Florida, in 1958 and demolished to make way for a parking lot in 2009. Our film, Site Specific: The Legacy of Regional Modernism (below) was chosen by the curators to be part of the show at the Center. It tells the story of innovative design followed by a willful resistance to new ideas and benign neglect. Though the local and international community of architects mounted a strong campaign to save Riverview—they convinced the World Monuments Fund to put it on its most endangered list—the building was in such bad condition that it was impossible for the school board and the public alike to imagine its rebirth, even though at least one proposed renovation scheme had great potential for bringing Rudolph’s design into the 21st century and creating a smart asset for the community.

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Sketch Artists

Mason Currey — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:02:37 +0000

If you've ever wished you could take a peek at some of your favorite designers' off-the-cuff sketches and exploratory doodles, you'll soon have your chance. At this year's Salone Internazionale del Mobile, in Milan, the Italian National Trust and Moleskine will present an exhibition of 462 drawings by 150 international designers. Called The Hand of the Designer, the exhibition will be accompanied by a book of the same title containing reproductions of the designers' sketches; and, on May 13, the original drawings will be auctioned at Sotheby's Milan. (All the proceeds from the book sales and the auction will go to the Trust--and, in particular, its maintenance activity for the Villa Necchi Campiglio.)

The doodling designers include the Bouroullec brothers, Michael Graves, Hella Jongerius, Karim Rashid, Matteo Thun, and many others (a few of whom were also included in last year's The Hand of the Architect.) Check out several examples after the jump. (more...)