The World on Paper

Architect Valentines

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Contemporary Drawings design by Raleigh Architect Coffee with an Architect

'The Risk of Being Too Nice'

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:56:00 +0000

An intriguing article on Architecture:

Martin Filler, The New York Review of Books
Book: Visual Art in the Oslo Opera House (edited by Jørn Mortensen)

1.
Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise. Although the parti (basic organizing principle) of a design may sometimes be the product of one intelligence, the realization of a structure of even moderate complexity depends on a broad range of expertise seldom encompassed by any individual, no matter how singularly gifted. As an artistic endeavor, present-day architecture most closely resembles filmmaking, in which the prime creative mover, the director—even the most visionary of auteurs—requires the specialized technical skills of a large cohort of indispensable collaborators.

Jens Passoth/Snøhetta

The Oslo Opera House, which, according to Martin Filler, ‘has given the Norwegian capital one of Europe’s most enjoyable and instantly beloved public spaces of the past half-century.’ It was designed by the architectural firm Snøhetta and completed in 2008.

Thus an architectural team today comprises not only the long-familiar roster of structural engineers, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) specialists, acousticians, interior designers, lighting engineers, and landscape architects, but also computer software engineers, environmental impact managers, and (for certain public buildings) security analysts and anti-terrorism consultants, positions that did not exist a generation ago. One leading New York architectural headhunter reports an even wider array of new job descriptions, including sustainability director, virtual design coordinator, and digital librarian.

Given the growing complexity of architectural tasks and the ever-advancing technologies available to resolve them, that high degree of interdependence is only likely to increase. As Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, a founding member of the Norwegian architectural collaborative Snøhetta, told me in his Oslo office in 2011:

Architecture is now far too complex to be designed by any one person. It is truly a much more communal process than it ever has been. Our conceptual model is “the singular in the plural,” in which all of us are shareholders and each individual takes on responsibility for the company.

Perhaps only a post-industrial social democracy as progressive as Norway—surely among the most enlightened of all contemporary nations, with as good a claim as any other to being a thoroughly evolved and humane society—could have produced an architectural office such as this. A self-described non-hierarchical cooperative whose principals avowedly seek to avoid the personal celebrity we associate with Zaha Hadid or Daniel Libeskind, Snøhetta is far different from the top-down model adopted during the postwar period by large American architectural firms exemplified by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which patterned its organizational structure and management methods on those of the large corporations they hoped to attract as clients.

Instead, this far more informal group aims to give quite the opposite impression, that of mutually supportive friends who have banded together to come up with ingenious ideas that will make life better for everyone, primarily but not exclusively their sponsors. It is an uplifting ethos that a younger generation of enlightened clients has found irresistible.

Snøhetta promotes a more democratic workplace atmosphere than most other architectural offices. This may merely reflect prevalent employment practices in Scandinavia, but Snøhetta places a stronger emphasis on group participation in the design process than typical high-style firms. Rather than consigning junior assistants to repetitive backroom drudgery like detailing fire stairs and other minutiae of building-code compliance, the Norwegian collaborative makes a habit of handing over relatively small commissions to younger associates in order to develop their problem-solving skills. As Thorsen told me, the jobs handled by his less experienced colleagues are carefully monitored “so that they cannot get into too much trouble.”

Even the group’s unconventional nomenclature works toward egalitarian ends. Snøhetta, which means “snow cap” in Norwegian—a cryptic choice for an organization with such international aspirations—comes from the eponymous 7,500-foot-high mountain that is the tallest peak in the Dovrefjell range 240 miles north of Oslo. (As a group “bonding” exercise, Snøhetta employees make an annual pilgrimage to the mountain in central Norway.) The name was picked in 1987 by the firm’s six original organizers, all landscape architects committed to interdisciplinary group practice. The firm’s gradual evolution from landscape architecture specialists to a more full-service operation remains evident in an unusual attentiveness to environmental conditions and an exceptional aptitude for site planning. The only two of the original group still with the organization are Thorsen, who heads the main office housed in a converted pierside warehouse on the Oslo harborfront, and Snøhetta’s other principal (there are also five partners), the American Craig Dykers, who directs the US office in Lower Manhattan near their project at Ground Zero.

Since the turn of the millennium, Snøhetta has risen quickly with a series of well-received schemes that in turn have won them other prestigious commissions now in planning or construction. Their meteoric emergence after two decades of practice is a phenomenon on a par with that of their closest American counterparts, the New York firm of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, who likewise display a keen instinct for contemporary urbanism. Although the firm is based principally in the Norwegian capital—site of the firm’s best-known work to date, the Oslo Opera House of 2003–2008—its increasingly busy branch in New York City oversees its American commissions, which include the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion, begun in 2004 at Ground Zero; a 2010 proposal for reconfiguring Manhattan’s chronically amorphous and chaotic Times Square; and an addition to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art awarded in 2010.

As a result of such conspicuous jobs, Snøhetta has been appearing on short lists for major commissions alongside avant-garde grandees like Jean Nouvel, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA—all Pritzker Prize winners. Perhaps because Norway, small and off the beaten path, has been less than central to the narrative of modern architecture, Snøhetta has downplayed its geographic origins to the extent that other Norwegian architects now view the firm as a multinational venture that has priced itself out of the local market for architectural services. That perception may be contradicted by Snøhetta’s participation in Norway’s admirable government-sponsored National Tourist Routes program—which has underwritten small but exquisite architectural interventions including rest stations, bicycle shelters, scenic viewing platforms, and the like in remote locales to encourage tourism to far reaches of the country—yet there is no question that the firm’s growing presence in the United States is part of a global-minded strategy.

2.
During the mid-twentieth-century heyday of the Modern Movement—which became closely identified with Scandinavia in the popular imagination thanks to that region’s widely distributed, user-friendly contemporary household furnishings—Norway had no internationally recognized master until Sverre Fehn (1924–2009) won the Pritzker Prize in 1997, even though Fehn’s late-life overnight rediscovery overlooked his youthful coup as designer of the much-admired Norwegian Pavilion at the Brussels Universal and International Exhibition of 1958, which brought to mind a woodsy version of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s renowned German Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exposition of 1929. This low profile no doubt had more to do with Norway’s relatively small population—in 1940 it numbered just under three million inhabitants, less than half the size of Sweden, a ratio still more or less maintained with five million Norwegians and nine-and-a-half million Swedes today—and commensurate level of building activity than it reflected any inherent lack of native talent.

To be sure, Norwegians eagerly embraced International Style architecture—which they call funksjonalisme (Functionalism)—without any of the conservative resistance to it that has never quite died out in the US. The new, unadorned architecture of modernism was suited to the rational, egalitarian tenor of Norway’s emergent social democracy, which was further informed by research in the social sciences—specialists called hvite frakker (white coats) in Norwegian—and steadily institutionalized as the twentieth century progressed. Since then, Norway has quietly developed one of the most impressive contemporary architectural cultures in Europe, sustaining an overall level of architectural excellence lately equaled on the continent only by Holland and Spain.

Two years after Snøhetta was first organized as a studio called Snøhetta arkitektur og landskap in 1987, it produced the winning entry in an open competition for a modern reincarnation of the fabled library of ancient Alexandria, one of the marvels of classical antiquity: their Bibliotheca Alexandrina of 1989–2001. The significance of this prestigious contest, which attracted submissions from seventy-seven countries—jointly sponsored by the city and the University of Alexandria, the Egyptian government, UNESCO, and the United Nations Development Programme, among others—was further enhanced by the spectacular waterfront site allotted to the scheme, not unlike that which the designers would later enjoy with their acclaimed Oslo Opera House.

For the new library, Snøhetta devised a structure that is at once monumental and humane, seemingly contradictory values that on more than one occasion these designers have demonstrated a particular aptitude for combining without the slightest incongruity. The building’s most notable aspect is a vast, windowless, slightly tilting, granite-clad cylindrical form that appears like some Ptolemaic vestige as one approaches from the south and enters it, either via a narrow elevated pedestrian footbridge that spans the wide traffic thoroughfare fronting the facility, or at street level, both of which routes lead to an overscaled, unframed oblong portal cut deeply into the curving stone façade.

As one nears the building it becomes clear that the masonry exterior is densely carved with inscriptions in lettering from all known alphabets, ancient and modern, a variation on the traditional practice of engraving the names of famous authors on the outer walls of libraries. This massive, fortress-like, yet propulsive enclosure also serves a practical purpose—to protect the interior from the sandstorms that blow up from the south and toward the Mediterranean just behind it.

Viewed from the sea, however, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina presents an entirely different appearance. Instead of the monolithic cylinder visible as one faces the library’s south elevation, the northern prospect is dominated by an immense glazed disc that slopes downward, almost to ground level, toward the water. With its regular pattern of triangular skylights, this gently angled roof brings to mind the composite telescopic mirror of an astral observatory. Beneath it lies the institution’s principal space, the great reading hall—a huge, nearly circular room, its roof supported by a modular grid of slender supporting columns that brings to mind both the domed and skylit salle de travail of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France of 1862–1868 in Paris, as well as the forest-like profusion of columned arches in the Great Mosque of Córdoba. With such evocative cross-cultural references and strong civic presence, Snøhetta deservedly won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the triennial prize for outstanding construction in the Islamic world, in 2004.

Gerald Zugmann/Snøhetta
The interior of the Oslo Opera House. The curved panels are the back of the grand hall in which operas are performed.

The work that launched Snøhetta into the architectural big leagues was their Oslo Opera House, which will certainly rank among the firm’s highlights whatever else they may do. Although this is by any measure a triumph of city planning, the building itself is not quite a masterpiece, though very fine indeed. It suffers from a clash of mixed stylistic metaphors. The crisply faceted exterior—which is clad with white marble, granite, and aluminum—and the soaring forty-nine-foot-high glass-walled entry hall with gigantic tilting columns have an insistent angularity that seems almost Deconstructivist, to use the word associated with the dislocated and distorted shapes of such architects as Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi, whose work was included in the 1988 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture,” which gave credence to this intentionally fragmentary style. These elements are in contrast to the undulating vertical-wood-slatted surface of the auditorium’s exterior and balcony promenades, which swell into the lobby like a remonstrative visitation from the ghost of Alvar Aalto, Modernism’s Mr. Natural.

In the building’s frosty-white reception area one encounters the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s The Other Wall (2004–2008), among several pieces commissioned for the building, an initiative documented in Jørn Mortensen’s handsomely illustrated monograph Visual Art in the Oslo Opera House. This sculptural mural installation, composed of white-painted medium-density fiberboard and backed with lime-green LED (light-emitting diode) illumination, is patterned in a molded-and-pierced harlequin motif that gives the lobby a retro-hip air reminiscent of a 1950s resort hotel. Far more successful is Pae White’s MetaFoil (2004), the stage curtain illusionistically woven from cotton, wool, and polyester to mimic an expanse of crumpled metal sheeting. This shimmering silvery Vorhang, ingeniously fabricated without recourse to any metallic fibers, provides an ideal foil for the auditorium’s somber elegance.

Paneled in dark fumed oak, the grand hall, which seats 1,364, is a superb example of how to give a modern auditorium an appropriate sense of occasion without digging into the threadbare grab bag of sham-classical decor. (Diller, Scofidio + Renfro’s much smaller Starr Theater of 2009 in New York’s Alice Tully Hall is another.) The most striking feature of the Oslo hall—which also has excellent acoustics—is Snøhetta’s reinterpretation of the once-obligatory opera house chandelier. Here, in a minimalist reduction that recalls the roof of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a huge disc of 5,800 notched crystal prisms is set flush into the big room’s ceiling and backed with LED lights to create a hovering, radiant effect that infuses the majestic space with an appropriate feeling of incipient excitement and democratic splendor.

Most importantly, the Oslo Opera House has given the Norwegian capital one of Europe’s most enjoyable and instantly beloved public spaces of the past half-century. This is largely due to the clever massing of the building’s exterior, which allows the general public to ascend broad ramps that frame the lateral walls and lead uninterruptedly up to the top. The roof thus becomes an extension of the plaza below as well as an observation deck that affords visitors to the building panoramic views of the city and its meandering waterways. In winter it is not uncommon to see skiers schussing down its ice-covered inclines, an utterly captivating spectacle that epitomizes these designers’ popular appeal. The paradox that superb urbanism is not automatically synonymous with great architecture underscores the frequent disparity between Snøhetta’s knack for effective city planning and some of its structures, which lack either the conceptual audacity of Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas on the one hand or the technical suavity of Norman Foster and Renzo Piano on the other.

The Oslo Opera House is reminiscent of Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House of 1956–1973 not only because of their similar white exteriors, sail-like profiles, and waterside sites, but also because both have become cherished national symbols in an age when new works of public architecture rarely achieve a high degree of general acclaim, as was shown by the spectacular reception that greeted Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of 1991–1997. In recent years, new concert halls have become nearly as ubiquitous as new art museums, a surfeit that can only be attributed to the same competitive civic urge that sparked the international art gallery boom a generation earlier, which was motivated in large part by the widespread (if erroneous) belief that cultural tourism is guaranteed to recoup the cost of such overreaching schemes.

There is no better cautionary example than present-day Spain when it comes to the folly of reckless deficit spending to fund economically dubious, albeit socially beneficial, visual- and performing-arts projects. The treasuries of Valencia, Santiago de Compostela, and Avilés have been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy thanks to excessive expenditures on large-scale cultural enterprises designed, respectively, by Santiago Calatrava, Peter Eisenman, and Oscar Niemeyer, each venture prompted by the vain hope that these colossal investments would yield “the next Bilbao.” Such speculations had no bearing on the $707 million Oslo Opera House, which was subsidized by the most solvent government in present-day Europe, a beneficence made possible by Norway’s plentiful offshore oil reserves, the income from which is nationalized.
3.
Snøhetta’s biggest current American commission is their 225,000-square-foot addition to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), scheduled to open in 2016. Their selection for that project is yet another example of the increasingly common trend for museums to seek additions from architects other than the last ones they employed. It used to be almost an ethical imperative to ask the designer of a building to expand it, and thus maintain visual continuity with the original structure. Only if the initial architect had died or if the firm did not want the new commission was it considered permissible to seek another practitioner.

Snøhetta
Snøhetta’s planned expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to be completed in 2016

That attitude began to change in the 1990s, around the time the High Museum of Art in Atlanta decided to add to Richard Meier’s building of 1980–1983. Although that eye-catching design gave the small regional institution a dynamic new image, the structure was soon found to be functionally deficient because of light-control problems, skylight leaks, and planning that seemed to favor circulation areas over display space. In a move widely interpreted as a critique of his flawed design, Meier did not get the expansion job, which went instead to Renzo Piano, whose extension of 1999–2005 added three wings, doubled the museum’s exhibition capacity, and effectively reduced Meier’s showy but problem-plagued structure to a glorified entry pavilion.

A similar rejection occurred with Mario Botta’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art of 1989–1995. This ponderous brick-clad Postmodernist pile was quickly deemed both stylistically passé and also too small for the museum’s many recent acquisitions, including the coveted collection of Doris and Donald Fisher, longtime benefactors who unsuccessfully tried to build a private gallery in the Presidio, the disused military base next to the Golden Gate Bridge. Botta’s heavy-handed scheme was nonetheless notable for its stepped-back massing, which gave almost all the galleries natural overhead illumination and took into account the need for future expansion on an adjoining strip of land (used in the interim for staff parking). Given the unpredictable vagaries of architectural taste, it might be argued that the museum’s trustees—several of whom had generously contributed toward the Botta design—ought to have had the courage of their convictions and returned to him, however démodé his aesthetic had become.

Restricted to a narrow plot at the rear of Botta’s structure, the addition could well have become a nearly invisible backdrop had Snøhetta not decided to make its contribution contrast as much as possible with its blocky and stolidly symmetrical precursor. The ten-story stepped-back expansion, estimated to cost $555 million, is to be clad in striated white fiber-reinforced panels with a cement finish, interspersed with glass, and will rise like an iceberg behind the original. That maritime impression will be underscored by the Botta building’s most idiosyncratic feature, a central, smokestack-like cylinder that houses a grand stairway topped by a slanting glass oculus, which, with the icy new addition looming over it, will make Titanic buffs think of that doomed ocean liner. Yet the new wing’s organization appears logical and likely to much improve visitors’ experience of SFMoMA, which heretofore has exuded the sleek and somewhat snooty air of an upscale department store.

Snøhetta’s participatory modus operandi was on full and sometimes excruciating view in Eirin Gjørv’s revealing documentary film The Sand Castle (2007), which follows the firm’s senior members as they vie with Rem Koolhaas as finalists in a limited competition for a new capital city for the United Arab Emirate of Ras al-Khaima, sixty miles north of Dubai. Koolhaas won the master-plan commission, but Snøhetta was given the consolation prize of the Ras al-Khaima Gateway, the convention-center component of the mixed-use project. At one point the cagey client intermediary, Khater Massaad, airily dismisses Snøhetta’s initial proposal for a long low-rise structure with a gracefully undulating roof because “it is not an icoon” (icon) akin to the hideously overblown skyscrapers in Dubai that have become emblematic of the emirates, exemplified by Tom Wright’s scimitar-shaped Burj-al-Arab hotel of 1997–1999, and the world’s currently tallest man-made structure, the Burj Khalifa of 2004–2010, by Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

As they prepare to meet their patron, Thorsen tells one of his colleagues, “If he doesn’t like what he sees tomorrow we’ll have to start over,” which is more or less what happens. It is dispiriting to watch the ingratiating and patient Snøhetta team bending over backward to please an obtuse and somewhat arrogant client as their subsequent schemes get progressively worse and worse, in marked contrast to the steely Koolhaas, who appears to have carefully and profitably gauged his haughty demeanor to convey an air of command commensurate with those who seek him out, a trick he learned from the past grand master of that power game, Philip Johnson, whose cool take-me-or-leave-me attitude won him far more jobs than it cost him. In any event, the vast undertaking has since been put on indefinite hold because of the emirate’s financial woes.

Snøhetta’s extreme willingness to adapt to the desires of its clients has never been more evident than in the collaboration between the firm and the New York–based Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard, for whom the architects are designing a house in Oslo that will be completed in 2014. This strange undertaking was the subject of “A House to Die In,” a small exhibition held last fall at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts. The show featured an intentionally messy-looking installation that centered around a small model for Melgaard’s wildly biomorphic house in Oslo—a freeform, blackened clam-like structure held aloft by sinister, cartoonish doll-like figures (one based on the creepy fashion designer Donatella Versace) apparently meant as contemporary versions of classical caryatids—along with a full-scale mock-up of a portion of the building’s exterior, a deeply scarified and scorched swath of lumber that seemed as if a pyromaniacal preteen had run amok with a woodburning kit, or perhaps a maquette for a Tim Burton horror tree house. Private patrons of experimental architecture are perfectly free to indulge their whims as they please; but even in a period of unprecedented architectural weirdness, this embarrassment for all concerned proves that there are necessary limits to unbridled self-expression.

If one had to choose between a pompous grand vizier or a pretentious myth-befuddled artist—both of whom bombard you with endless “suggestions” on how you should design for them—it might drive the faint of heart mad. Yet the project-to-project struggle that is contemporary high-style architecture has rarely been pursued with more equanimity, or better results, than it has been by the happy warriors of Snøhetta. The firm’s eagerness (and occasional overeagerness) to please has also been a subtext of their work at Ground Zero, a project that remains mired in disputes over its funding and thus still languishes incomplete almost two years after the dedication of Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s magnificent National September 11 Memorial of 2003–2011. (The interiors of the Snøhetta museum are the work of another firm, the New York–based Aedas.)

Even a cursory glance at Libeskind’s hypothetical renderings of the former World Trade Center site indicates that Snøhetta—which adheres to no consistent design approach but varies their response from project to project—followed the master planner’s lead much too readily in their jittery-looking, diagonally scored National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion, which appears to mimic a structure falling down, a dreadful miscalculation on this bedeviled site. Now, long after Libeskind was unceremoniously shuffled offstage, this vestige of his aborted vision looks even more out of place next to the solemn grandeur of Arad’s twin memorial pools. If Snøhetta is to advance into the very forefront of the profession, its unquestionably gifted team members must realize that as congenial and nurturing as their sheltered workshop may be, in the rough-and-tumble world of architecture there can be such a thing as being too nice for your own good.

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 09:51:00 +0000

I thought this sign can be my aphorism for 2013 and is appropriate for my aspirations for the new year: “without which it could not be” - and the possibilities are endless. Wishing everyone the best of what 2013 has to offer!

Merry Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 12:39:00 +0000

Merry Christmas everyone!

Wishing you all a festive holiday season and an exciting 2013!

North Terrace, Adelaide: Liberal Club Building

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 06:36:00 +0000

One my favourite building facades along North Terrace in Adelaide is the Liberal Club Building (175-177 North Terrace). Completed in 1924-1925, the building was designed by Frank H. Counsell.

Architectural style: Beaux-arts
Height: 33m with 7 floors above ground and 1 floor below ground

Verco Building and Liberal Club Building c. 1924

Liberal Club Building along North Terrace, c. 1927

Verco Building and Liberal Club Building, c. 1930s

Verco Building, Liberal Club Building and Goldsbrough Building c. 1950s

Images above are from the archives of the State Library of South Australia and the National Library of Australia. The opening of the club rooms was in featured in The Register, Adelaide, 21 May 1926 and reported the 'handsome' interior furnishings in detail.

Interesting facts about the former Liberal Club Building:

The demand for light and air were met by the architect who designed the building to have six light areas and glazed partition walls.
The architect also ensured equable temperatures in the building by means of cavity walls and a 'super' roof that consisted of a concrete ceiling over the top storey.
The building was popular with the medical and dental professions, as patients could rest on the large balconies after light operations.
Architecturally the building is dominated by deep balconies between prominently detailed bow windows.
The façade is robustly handled with great use made of the interplay of light and shade.
The large public hall features a dance floor on the main floor.
The façade is vertically terminated by a great arch above the tiered balconies on the top floor.

In 1989, much of the Liberal Club Building was demolished leaving only its facade. Today, the building's facade is part of Myer Centre along with three adjacent heritage listed buildings. The majestic architectural facades of the Liberal Club Building along with those of Verco Building (1911-1915, 178-179 North Terrace), Goldsbrough House (1935, 172 North Terrace) and Shell House (1931-1932, 169-171 North Terrace) are significant streetscape elements on North Terrace.

Liberal Club Building, 2008

Liberal Club Building, 2010

R U Ok?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 11:16:00 +0000

Tomorrow, the 13th of September, is "R U Ok?" Day. Remember to connect (and re-connect) with your work colleagues, friends and family. These simple words might just be what those around you need to hear at that very moment. :-)

on Starchitecture

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 06:21:00 +0000

A book review by Scott Carlson of a version of the Three Little Pigs using three of the most famous architects - starchitects. I thought the illustrator Steven Guarnaccia's version of the popular children's fairy tale was delightfully smart.

Scott Carlson, Buildings & Grounds, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 June 2010:

This isn’t exactly college-level reading, but anyone who has dealt with a starchitecture project might appreciate this: We recently received a version of The Three Little Pigs, but the pigs look quite a bit like some of the most famous architects of the past 100 years—Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

There is a certain genius to this reimagining. After all, the original children’s tale was grounded in the lessons of choosing good materials and planning well. Modern architects haven’t always followed those ethics, resulting in nightmares for various building owners (and entertaining stories for people who love to hate starchitects). If Frank Gehry’s buildings couldn’t stand up to Boston winters, then how would they survive the Big Bad Wolf (especially one wolf dressed in a black leather jacket, buzzing around on a Voxan GTV 1200)? Not well, it turns out. You see, “the first little pig decided to build his house of scraps,” the book tells us. And you can guess what happened when the gusty wolf showed up. Even worse, the second made his a glass house. (Fun fact: Flying debris—particularly glass—is one of the main causes of injury and death in a windstorm.)

“But the third little pig decided to build his house of stone and concrete,” the book says, showing the pig with blueprints for Fallingwater.

From here, the story proceeds like a conventional three-pigs tale—on behalf of his brothers, the third pig plays various tricks on the wolf, until he finally lures him down the chimney. (No fiery death here; the scorched wolf runs for his GTV 1200 and is never seen again.) Fun story, but there are a couple of problems with this retelling: First of all, Frank Lloyd Wright was a famously self-absorbed man and a hypercompetitive architect. Yet, the Wright pig risks his curly tail to help his architect-brothers. Second, anyone who follows architecture knows that Wright’s buildings have had their problems—Fallingwater, in particular. Maybe the wolf should have just waited around for the house to fall down on its own.

A delightful book - perhaps a must-have in an architect's library.

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:42:00 +0000

New year's greetings from Melbourne! Stay tuned for posts on interesting edifices and architectural details. Amazing architectural marvels with accompanying (and equally) interesting history just abounds.

The Burj Khalifa

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 06:05:00 +0000

4 January 2010 saw the opening of the world's tallest building, the 200-storey Burj Khalifa (Skidmore, Owings & Merill). The following article by Binoy Kampmark (reprinted from Crikey of the InDaily - Independent Weekly, 8 January 2010) offers an interesting viewpoint on Dubai's living in an age of excess:

Omens of Doom: Dubais Burj Khalifa Tower

It is a colossus, towering over the Dubai skyline. The company behind it claims to have made a successful return of 10 percent. The local paper, the Khaleej Times, did not shy away from hyperbole, seeing the building as an example of human courage and humankind's ability to dream and deliver, giving the world an achievement difficult to surpass.

The Burj Khalifa Tower, renamed in tribute to Dubai's bailout donor, Abu Dhabi's Sheik Khalifa, dwarfs all that have come before it. It is a monstrous compilation of gimmicks in some ways, another addition to the mix of Vegas-styled faux islands, shopping centres and ski runs. Dubai portends to be a place of trickery, entertainment and massive expense accounts. The building itself boasts 200 floors, and rises to 828 meters. It promises to be the home of the first Armani Hotel. Patrons are whisked between floors in elevators at the speed of 18 metres a second. But what does this building suggest about Dubai and the architectural madness that characterizes such efforts?

For one thing, the creation strikes deeply at the apocalyptic language of the recently concluded Copenhagen Climate Change conference. The Sheiks seem less interested in carbon footprints than oil-financed structures of glass and steel. They keep company with architects such as Adrian Smith, the designer of the Burj Khalifa and Cesar Pelli, who gave England the One Canada Square and Malaysia the Petronas Twin Towers.

Dubai suffers, like tyrants, from an overwhelming edifice complex. Its spending complex resembles the efforts of the Pharaohs and their pyramid projects, or those of the medieval Catholic Church: bigger is better, huge monuments to progress, humanity and God. Sometimes, the smaller the state, the more obsessed the efforts in building the Tower of Babel. Megalomania is the classic byproduct of inferiority complexes, often induced by money without sense.

All of these point to a thesis formulated in 1999 by Andrew Lawrence he dubbed the Skyscraper Index. These figures of modernity seem to precede periods of crisis. At low points of the business cycle, these architectural Cyclops seem to rise. The Empire State building was conceived in 1929, the same year of Black Tuesday (October 29) and the onset of the Great Depression. The Sears Tower of the 1970s towered over a society in the grip of stagflation and oil shocks. The monumental Petronas Twin Towers opened in 1997, the year when Asian currencies took a pummeling, humbling Asia's Tiger economies.

In the civilisational sense, this may also be true: the big building, or building project, is a symptom of decay. The American novelist Henry James certainly thought so, though he was thinking of it more in the aesthetic sense. In an economic sense, the great building project tends to forecast ruin. Athens passed quietly into the shade after the building of the Acropolis. Henry VIII of England and Christian IV of Denmark were builders who drained their treasuries, left magnificent buildings, yet failed consistently on the battlefield. The building efforts of the Pharaohs, as Paul Johnson pointed out in 2005, suggest a hubristic tendency that eventually will meet nemesis. The Wall Street Journal (5 January 2010) was confident that such a building mania would not last, sniping at Dubais paltry credentials on economic freedom, rule of law, hard work and sound management relative to such cities as Houston and Hong Kong. Without these, nations and cities alike build nothing but foundations of sand.

Given the precedents set by previous failed civilizations, the omens are not good. Dubai's economy is in a mess. Sheik Khalifa has been generous to the tune of $10 billion. In an age of environmental sensitivities and proliferating green fan clubs, we might well be witnessing a dying breed. When the excitement does die down, the business of preventing Dubai from sliding into oblivion will begin.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lecturers at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Happy new and safe 2010!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:10:00 +0000

Happy Holidays!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 08:32:00 +0000

Christmas has come and gone and I missed posting a holiday greeting. But since we're only halfway through the holiday break, I'll get one in just the same.

To everyone, Happy Holidays! I hope you all had a Merry Christmas spent with family, loved ones and friends.

I'd like to say thank you to those who took the time to read my posts in the past year - even though I haven't been consistent in posting in the last few months.

Wishing everyone a new year filled with more joy and blessings!

Mea Culpa

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:36:00 +0000

I have been neglectful of this blog for over two months that I don't know where to begin. But with so many things that happened in the last 11 weeks or so, I should have plenty of 'blog' material. The pressure!

August saw a trip home - a 10-day visit to the family, among others, to be godmother to my second nephew - Miguel Pedro. As always, it is wonderful to be with the family and see my nieces and nephew - they now number 7! September brought in a change in my resident status DownUnder (Oi! Oi!).

Apart from the overseas trip, I also made a couple of interstate trips (yes, up goes my CO2 emissions!). I have been swamped with work deadlines and morever, preoccupied with career plans. Such pressure!

Interesting two months though with everybody(?) on tenterhooks with the Wall Street meltdown, the US economic recession and its global impact. Following on to my last post, September also saw the release of the Garnaut Climate Change Review Final Report.

But all is well. I hope to put in my two cents' worth on these interesting current events. Stay tuned.

To tread on Earth lightly...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:40:00 +0000

This past week Australia is abuzz with "Think climate, Think change" with the government's release of the green paper, Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme following the release early this month of the draft report of the Garnaut Climate Change Review, a commissioned review to examine the impacts, challenges and opportunities for climate change in Australia.

The public responds to tangible environmental problems (Matthew Warren, 2008). Unlike other environmental problems such as those associated with the use of plastic bags which have been given much focus because of its visibility, climate change has been harder to sell and be accepted by the wider public because anthropogenic emissions, by its nature, are invisible. However, as Warren (2008) indicated, putting a price on greenhouse emissions will certainly get the public's attention.

Albeit missing that crucial bottom line of the cost implication on cutting the country's greenhouse gas emissions through the implementation of the emissions trading scheme, surprisingly, even with the limited and/or lack of understanding of how ETS works, latest national poll indicate a 67% support for carbon pollution reduction.

With certainty, the biggest impact of the ETS on households will be rises in the cost of energy and fuel from 2010. Estimates predicted electricity costs would rise by 16 per cent and gas by 9 per cent. "The Government wants those price rises felt so we are encouraged to phase out use of carbon-producing goods and services." Under the scheme, Australian motorists are given five years notice from hereon of the impending price impact of carbon pollution reduction scheme on petrol and that motorists should prepare for this by shifting to smaller cars and driving less.

With humans as comfort-seeking creatures, almost all of our daily activities would create carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So, unless we live in caves and never gather around fire for warmth, we have a carbon footprint. Australia has the second highest carbon footprint after the U.S., a reflection of the ubiquitous energy-hungry lifestyles.

By comparison, the U.S. average is 21 tonnes, New Zealand is 13 tonnes, and Japan is 10 tonnes. The average Australian household of 2.5 people has a 14.6-tonne carbon footprint which equates to an average Australian contributing approximately 6 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere per year.

Using C02 emission calculators available online: Carbonify.com and Carbon neutral, I have worked out my impact on the environment. To my disappointment, in the last three years, I averaged 47% more than the national average at 8.16 to 8.82 tonnes of CO2 per year!

Household waste: 1.22 tonnes (13%) = 8 trees
Food emissions: 2.6 tonnes (29%) = 16 trees
Vehicle travel: 0
Air travel: 4.08 tonnes (46%) = 25 trees
Energy use: 0.92 tonnes (12%) = 6 trees

Following the rule of thumb that on average, 6 trees are needed to offset 1 tonne, I would need 40-53 trees to offset my impacts on the environment!

How to tread lightly on Earth? Being aware that offsetting should be seen as a last resort, am I willing to cut down on activities to reduce my emissions contribution?

Client vs Architect

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 06:43:00 +0000

As seen at Part IV.

Adelaide's Art Deco

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:10:00 +0000

This morning I took part in a walking tour of art deco architectural highlights of Adelaide CBD hosted by the Art Deco Society - Adelaide Chapter.

The tour revealed a number of architectural gems tucked away in the city's side streets. Notable and my favourites are the Laubman and Pank Optometrists and Gritti Palace, Bank of South Australia, Fletcher Jones Building and the Gilbert Place Apartments.

Architectural examples of this early 20th century international movement have always held some fascination along with the Bauhaus style, Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau.

In the Philippines, particularly Manila, Art Deco is associated with American colonial architecture. This architectural style flourished when the country was an American colony. Buildings that I fondly remember include the Metropolitan Theatre and Far Eastern University. However, a number of the buildings were destroyed in the Second World War or have been demolished.

In Adelaide, impressive examples that remain almost in their original designs include cinemas, residences and commercial buildings.

Edifice with character

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 25 May 2008 03:47:00 +0000

This building at the corner of Gawler Place and North Terrace in Adelaide is one of my favourites. Still in use, the building houses office suites mostly of the medical profession. It is a pity that the external appearance is compromised by the installation of window type air conditioning units.

Built it 1913-1914 by the South Australian Company, the Gawler Chambers is a five-storey office building, which is symmetrical in design. It has a red brick facade, with cement dressings, and the main entrance is finished in Murray Bridge granite and freestone. The building is eclectic in style, containing classical and Tudor Gothic features. There is a castellated parapet over a central projecting section that forms part of the entry porch at ground level. The interior contains cedar work that was transferred from the South Australian Company's former building to their offices on the western end of the first floor of Gawler Chambers. There are internal piers and beams of reinforced concrete. The foyer of the building has been altered, and there are some other minor alterations to the interior.

English and Soward were the architects of the new building, Gawler Chambers, which was built in two stages. The first stage, the eastern side, was completed in November 1913 and the second stage, the western side, in March 1914. Originally Gawler Chambers was four storeys with a Val de Travers asphalt covered flat roof. In 1935 another floor was added to the top of the building. The balconies on the 3rd and 4th floors were removed in 1965.

Design engineers awarded the contract was the South Australian Reinforced Concrete Co. with John Monash as chief engineer.

Gawler Chambers is heritage-listed due to the its association with the South Australian Company which played a central role in the foundation of South Australia, and established many industries and enterprises, including whaling, banking and pastoral enterprises. This building is one of few surviving tangible reminders of the Company, which was actively associated with the site for over one hundred years, in an earlier building from 1842 and in Gawler Chambers until 1945. The Chambers, through its association with the South Australian Company, has an important link to the early development of South Australia.

Reference: Aussie Heritage

Architecture in Shoe Design

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 01:55:00 +0000

I was amused by DesignNotes' comparison of one of the shoes in this year's Gucci collection to building design and architecture. I was reminded of this short film on the design of Nike shoes.

This Gucci Newton high heel peekaboo bootie is part of Gucci's 2008 spring summer collection. They certainly look like a piece of architectural art - streamlined design with the sleek patent black leather evoking fluid motion, elegantly embellished with the understated light gold back and with stature to boot with those pencil thin 4-1/2" heels.

Even with the whopping price of US$795, these Gucci's with killer heels are in popular demand.

Women and their shoes:
"High heels let you cheat at the gym. In the time it takes you to slide your feet into a great pair of heels, you not only get great-looking legs, you also get a butt lift of approximately twenty-five percent. What exercise equipment can beat that?" - Leanne Banks (2005)

*images as seen at DesignNotes and Zesty Perspective.

Design Methodology

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 12:51:00 +0000

I have been asked to design my sister's first house and in doing the design sketches, I found myself thinking about my thought / design process in coming up with schematics for any design project. It has been over six years since I designed something (architecturally speaking). The last design project I was involved in was in 2001 before I decided to enter graduate school and work on the PhD research - albeit still within the discipline of architecture. Even though, I have been working in an architectural firm for the past two years and have been part of a design team, my role in design projects is essentially collaborating with the design architect in terms of providing essential background material for the design solution, sustainability research and clarifiying / expounding the project brief.

Doing the initial schemes for the house, I was amazed at how the concepts I had toyed with the last few weeks took on a concrete orthographic form on paper. Having practiced and worked on predominantly residential projects for 10 years prior to graduate school, I was familiar with the design norms, code requirements, etc. But having been more research-oriented and on a totally different subject area in architecture, I didn't think that the commonsense 'design' rules I learned which have guided my design process and framed my methodology would come into play so naturally. Michael Surtees wrote a similar thing about his design process in graphics design, "the sketch of a logo may have only taken a moment to draw, but it took 25 years of observation to get those five seconds of inspiration".

In a similar vein, recent collaboration with another design team within the practice, I was reminded of this passage from Matthew Frederick's 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (2007): "Being process-oriented, not product driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop ...[and] being process-oriented means [among others], seeking to understand a design problem before chasing after solutions."

Perhaps a segue into another discourse but not really off on a tangent, what are these commonsense rules? How do these rules become entrenched in a designer's psyche or consciousness?

Again, DesignNotes pointed to a fitting post with an education bent - from an essay by Lorraine Wild, ‘That Was Then, and This Is Now: But What Is Next?’ in Looking Closer Four: Critical Writings on Graphic Design (2002).

Although refering to graphic design, Tod Roeth's How to be schooled, elaborated on the text above and is most certainly applicable to the architectural design process: "if a person wants to be the author of thoughtful, professional, and effective ... design then they must draw on their ability to exercise some real foresight, critical thinking, and common sense if they want to be ... designers."

Roeth adds, "...good designers need to first be human beings with a lot of – literally – common sense. Designers need to be students of all corners of their culture’s playing field. Designers need to have a sense of business. Designers need to have a sense of politics. Designers need to have a sense of stereotypes. Designers need to have a sense of religion, philosophy, current events and history. Designers need to have a sense of urban lifestyles, agrarian lifestyles, and minority lifestyles. Designers need have a sense of conservative viewpoints. Designers need to understand liberal viewpoints."

"Designers need a lot of common sense. In short, effective ... designers need to be able to be sensible and conscious of different viewpoints, and different styles of language (verbal and non-verbal) within their culture and the types of mindsets that speak them. Furthermore, ... designers then need to draw from their body of knowledge and experience, and employ it to cleverly, shrewdly, and creatively solve the problems graphic designers are challenged to confront."

"And that common sense is free to all who have the passion – or at least, the wherewithal – to seek it, but priceless when obtained."

Christmas-New Year Weather DownUnder

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:33:00 +0000

The temperature forecast for New Year's Eve is a sweltering 41 degC. Right now, temperature in Adelaide is still hovering at a dry 39 deg C.

As seen at ScienceWoman:

Happy New Year!

Have a Merry Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 11:49:00 +0000

"FAITH is [t]he substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1)

Merry Christmas everybody and good wishes for the coming New Year!

*Adelaide Arcade, Rundle Mall

Frank Gehry in The Simpsons

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 11:29:00 +0000

Frank Gehry designs a cultural centre for Springfield. The Simpsons - Season 16, Episode 349: The Seven-Beer Snitch (First aired: 3 April 2005).

A parody of design process. I'm a fan of this episode. It never fails to bring out a good laugh. Check A Daily Dose of Architecture and David Teoh's blog for screen shots.

Leonardo Da Vinci's Journal

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:43:00 +0000

Perhaps the most expensive 'journal of ideas', Da Vinci's Codex Leicester is on display at the Chester Beatty Library. The 500-year old "ideas jotter" showing some of the great scientific and philosophy ideas which are still in use today, was bought by Microsoft founder Bill Gates for $31m (€23m) in 1994.

Read more: Shane Hickey. Image from Independent.ie.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Duncan House

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 08:12:00 +0000

Duncan House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Illinois in 1957 was dismantled and reassembled in Pennsylvania.

Photo by Justin Merriman for The New York Times.

Women in the industry and sustainability

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 12:24:00 +0000

"Females have excelled in sustainability because it was, until very recently, not a mainstream path to professional success--and therefore an area that those with [a presumably masculine] thirst for power and recognition avoided."

Read more: Green Design, Female Values

Touch Screen Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 12:02:00 +0000

As seen at Golf's blog.