A Daily Dose of Architecture

Kundig Mechanics

2012-01-27T23:30:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday architect Tom Kundig -- of Seattle-based Olson Kundig Architects -- spoke at the New York Public Library, conversing with Town & Country editor Mark Rozzo about Tom Kundig: Houses 2, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

In the lecture portion of the evening Kundig spoke about his inspirations, ranging from his architect-father to the landscape of eastern Washington state where he grew up and even hot rodding. In line with the DIY mechanics of the latter is Jean Tinguely's fountain in Basel, what Kundig described as straddling the "thin line between highbrow and lowbrow art." See for yourself:

The aspect of Kundig's architecture that these kinetic sculptures influence is obviously the moving walls and other elements found especially in his residences. One case in point is the Chicken Point Cabin in northern Idaho, found in the first monograph on his houses:

The project features a huge 7-ton window wall that is raised and lowered by a mechanism that even a child can operate:

Kundig acknowledge the important contribution of Phil Turner, whom he met while designing Chicken Point Cabin and whom developed the below gizmo -- a flyball governor, which safely regulates and maintains the speed of the gears when in motion (Phil now works in the office). It's like a house meets a hot rod*:

*Kundig designed a later house in Seattle that actually goes by the name Hot Rod House.

Dear Concept Of Phenomenology In Architecture As Developed By The Norwegian Theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz,

2012-01-26T22:00:00.000-05:00

This is too funny -- to architects that read history and theory books, at least -- not to pass along. In an issue last September The Onion's advice column was Ask The Concept Of Phenomenology In Architecture As Developed By The Norwegian Theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz. I'll guess this elicits either a smile that something so architecturally esoteric would make it in The Onion, or a "huh?"

[Christian Norberg-Schulz | image source]

Here's a taste:

Read more Ask The Concept Of Phenomenology In Architecture As Developed By The Norwegian Theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz at The Onion.

Bau des Jahres

2012-01-25T14:30:00.000-05:00

The 2011 Bau des Jahres -- Building of the Year -- at Swiss-Architects.com is Janus, the redevelopment the City Museum in Rapperswil-Jona by Biel-based :mlzd. The selection is the result of readers choosing from the 50 projects featured in the Swiss-Architects.com eMagazine last year.

Today's archidose #553

2012-01-24T16:30:00.000-05:00

Here are some photos of ROC Leiden Lammenschans Park in Leiden, The Netherlands by RAU, 2011. Photos are by Klaas Vermaas.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

Monday, Monday

2012-01-23T23:00:00.000-05:00

My weekly page update:

This week's dose features Shou Sugi Ban in Maarn, Netherlands by BYTR Architects:

The featured past dose is Palmwood House in London, England by Undercurrent Architects:

This week's book review is Wonderland Manual for Emerging Architects edited by Wonderland - Platform for Architecture, Silvia Forlati, Anne Isopp:

american-architects.com Building of the Week:

Caterpillar House in Carmel, California by Feldman Architecture:

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Today's archidose #552

2012-01-22T20:30:00.000-05:00

Here are a couple photos of Unipark Nonntal (University of Salzburg) in Salzburg, Austria by Storch Ehlers Partner, 2011. Photos are by M. Correia Campos.

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Wrapping a Diamond

2012-01-21T00:15:00.000-05:00

The other day I was in Midtown and caught my first glimpse of the facade going up on the International Gem Tower, designed by SOM and developed by Extell. Unfortunately I only had my phone with me to snap a photo from the plaza on 46th Street east of Sixth Avenue:

Located on a stretch of West 47th Street that is home to the Diamond District, the building is appropriately billed as "New York's only 21st century commercial condo designed specifically for the diamond, gem and jewelry trade." And while SOM's web page does not have any mention of the project, it seems like a safe bet that diamonds and gems influenced the building's skin. Here's a close-up of the above photo.

The bulk of the facade is made of mirrored glass that is faceted along the spandrel and in verticals that alternate on every floor. These combine to give the whole wrapper a repeated stepping pattern. Renderings, like these and the one below, give the wall more transparency than the current reality. Eventually nighttime will reveal some of what is behind the faceted skin, but during the day it will be all mirrors and reflection. Granted it's appropriate for the Diamond District, but more in the vein of tacky than elegant jewelry.

[International Gem Tower exterior rendering | image source]

"Cityscape Census"

2012-01-19T22:00:00.000-05:00

Today The Architect's Newspaper posted a review by Jan Lakin of my Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture (W. W. Norton, 2012). Lakin's review is very thoughtful, picking up on my predilection for architecture at the level of the pedestrian rather than of the skyline. To wit: "Hill is focused on assembling contemporary designs that engage us in interesting ways at street level throughout New York’s neighborhoods. The result is a nuanced perspective of the city’s recent architecture."

I could easily pull more flattering quotes like the one above, but instead head over to Archpaper to read Lakin's review.

Charles Renfro, J.Crew-Wearing Architect

2012-01-18T20:00:00.000-05:00

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed I have a thing for the intersection of architecture and advertising, be it iconic buildings used as a backdrop for a product, clothiers using the profession for style "cred," or an architect hawking merchandise. The last two converge in a J.Crew ad I noticed today on the inside cover of February's Fast Company:

Pushing the Ludlow Suit, the ad features six gents sporting six variations on the "bespoke-inspired" suit. Two are restauranteurs, one is a journalist/activist, one is a business analyst, one is a creative director, and one is an architect, Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Given the firm where he is partner, his name is fairly well known with architects, but not his mug. This ad will certainly change that, while also making people wonder what his sock drawer looks like.

Each of this six stylish professionals has their own idiosyncratic way of personalizing the J.Crew suit. Renfro has those socks; the creative director ditches socks altogether; one restauranteur shows off a wallet chain; you get the idea. Architecture, or any other profession, does not prevail over others. Instead five are used to cover a larger stylistic and professional spectrum, leaving out only jobs like caddy, dishwasher, and bookstore clerk (all hats I donned before architect), where bespoke-inspired fashion just isn't that important.

Today's archidose #551

2012-01-17T23:00:00.000-05:00

A potpourri of buildings from the archidose flickr pool:

[Bilbao City Hall in Bilbao, Spain by IMB Arquitectos, 2011 | Photograph by Wojtek Gurak]

[House K 05 in Buggenhout, Belgium by Graux & Baeyens, 2012 | Photograph by Philippe Brysse]

[Menomonee Valley Community Park Pavilion in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, designed and built as part of the SARUP Marcus Prize by students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Architecture and Urban Planning, taught by Barkow Leibinger Architects and Kyle Talbot, 2008 | Photograph by trevor.patt]

[Tenement House in Prague, Czech Republic by DaM spol. s r.o., 2011 | Photograph by M. Correia Campos]

[Euskalduna Conference Centre and Concert Hall in Bilbao, Spain by Federico Soriano & Dolores Palacios, 1999 | Photograph by Wojtek Gurak]

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

Monday, Monday

2012-01-16T15:30:00.000-05:00

My weekly page update:

This week's dose features Pier 15 in New York City by SHoP Architects:

The featured past dose is Porter House Condominium in Manhattan, New York by SHoP Architects:

This week's book review is SHoP: Out of Practice by SHoP Architects:

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

Today's archidose #550

2012-01-15T19:00:00.000-05:00

Here are a couple photos of the REM Island Restaurant in Amsterdam, Netherlands by Concrete, 2011. The restaurant occupies a re-purposed ~~helicopter landing platform from~~ "offshore broadcast platform [built] to circumvent Dutch licensing laws in the 1960s" that was moved to Minerva Harbor in Amsterdam. Photographs are by Klaas Vermaas.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

Half Dose #100: Frick Portico Gallery

2012-01-14T17:00:00.000-05:00

[Looking northeast from the Fifth Avenue Garden.]

On December 13, 2011 The Frick Collection opened its doors with its first major addition in 35 years, The Portico Gallery for Decorative Arts and Sculpture. The small 815-sf spaces is a former outdoor loggia in the Carrère and Hastings original from 1914, then the Frick Mansion. Over time the elements, particularly the exhaust from Fifth Avenue traffic, did some damage to the loggia's limestone, pointing towards eventually enclosing the space as a gallery.

[Looking north from the Fifth Avenue Garden with the library's shuttered windows just visible at right.]

The opportunity to do such a thing came about when collector Henry H. Arnhold promised The Frick a gift of porcelains. With this gift and the institution's recent focus on sculpture it made sense to put the loggia to good use, taking advantage of the southern light the Fifth Avenue Garden affords, a situation that makes the space unsuitable for paintings. Not surprisingly the space's initial exhibition displays a selection of Meissan porcelain from Arnhold's gift.

[Detail of existing building and new glass wall.]

The Portico Gallery, designed by Davis Brody Bond (DBB), is accessed from inside the museum, from the library that is steps away from the covered central Garden Court. Therefore the public will not be granted the above views from the garden, which is closed to the public; these photos go to show how the new glass wall knits itself behind the loggia's three sets of paired columns. The addition required Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) approval, so DBB's design lets the original Ionic columns take precedence from the exterior, and the glass wall works such that it can be removed without any physical damage to the existing building.

[Looking west along The Portico Gallery's new glass wall.]

Spanning from floor to ceiling -- but structurally cantilevered from the floor via a 16"-deep steel shoe -- are the 14'6" pieces of glass in bronze frames. As can be seen, from inside the glass prevails over the original columns, but reflections of the gallery on the surfaces bring the focus back to the artwork on display. The bronze finish, akin to Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, also sets up a nice contrast with the limestone in terms of dark and light, yet the two materials work well together, in that up close the bronze is as variable as the stone.

[Looking west down the gallery with new display cases mounted on the limestone walls on the right.]

Since the LPC's approval extended to interior surfaces of the loggia (given that it was an outdoor space), DBB, under the leadership of partner Carl F. Krebs, cleaned the limestone, replaced the paving with bluestone that matches the previous flooring's pattern and finish, and commissioned new lanterns that match the Garden Court's John Russell Pope-designed fixtures.

[Looking east from the Rotunda.]

At the western end of The Portico Gallery is the Rotunda, an elliptical space that is now permanently occupied by Jean-Antoine Houdon's sculpture Diana the Huntress; fittingly the sculpture overlooks Central Park. This sculpture is a strong anchor at the end of the long space, and its presence draws the eye and body towards it and a view of the park beyond. From within the Rotunda the new glass walls disappear (as in the photo above), but even within the gallery space they have a diminished presence that seems appropriate for The Frick and its architecture.

The bronze frames begin to recall Carlo Scarpa's interventions in historic buildings, but without the idiosyncratic ways of accommodating art that Scarpa incorporated. Here the new is paradoxically big in order to have minimum impact; large panes of glass and sizable mullions (scaled and detailed appropriately with the Ionic columns -- not too small, not too big) are used to make as large a visible opening as possible. The new recedes in one's mind as they take in the art and the garden views.

Book Review: ARCHIZINES

2012-01-12T12:30:00.000-05:00

ARCHIZINES edited by Elias Redstone
Bedford Press/AA Publications, 2011
Paperback, 152 pages

Compared to market and professional publications, 'zines are more personal in nature, reflecting an individual or small group's passion for a particular topic. Driven by a love for a subject and the desire to explore it in ways not afforded by other publications, 'zines are as diverse as the people making them. In the realm of architecture these "little magazines" -- as they were called in the 2010 exhibition and book Clip, Stamp, Fold -- are going strong today, as is evidenced by the website, exhibition, and publication ARCHIZINES, curated and edited by London-based Jack-of-all-trades Elias Redstone.

The book is the third installment for ARCHIZINES, following on the heels of a recent exhibition at the Architectural Association and the website that has been online since early last year, and which continues to catalog the growing number of 'zines produced internationally since 2000. The website is the most comprehensive of the archives, presenting snapshots of some of the of spreads inside the various 'zines, not just their covers. The latter is how the various publications are illustrated in the slim book; each 'zine occupies one page, described through a short paragraph, the cover of a recent issue and its stats -- page size, number of pages, and print run.

Interspersed throughout the alphabetical catalog of 60 titles are essays by producers of 'zines: Pedro Gadanho (Beyond), Iker Gil (MAS Context), Adam Murray (Preston is my Paris), Rob Wilson (Block), Mimi Zeiger (Maximum Maxim MMX/loudpaper), and Matthew Clarke, Ang Li & Matthew Storrie (PIDGIN). These essays serve to make the book a unique piece of the ARCHIZINES triumvirate, and they are worth it. Each contribution gives a unique perspective on a different aspect of 'zines, while giving background on how they are made, obviously stemming from them all having done so.

As Redstone recounts in his introduction to the book, ARCHIZINES began as a personal interest, as he started collecting fanzines about architecture some five years before the website. I've had a fondness for 'zines, but never enough to amass more than a few, Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films being the most recent. Nevertheless, being passionate for printed matter in various shapes and sizes (magazines, books, newsprints, maps), I am certainly sympathetic towards a desire to collect something like architectural fanzines. (It should be noted that many of the publications that Redstone catalogs are peer-reviewed academic titles and magazines with advertising, extending the reach of ARCHIZINES beyond 'zines in the limited sense of the term.) ARCHIZINES contributor Mimi Zeiger has opined about collecting collections in the digital realm, but bits and bytes are no replacement for actual 'zines. So Redstone's website and book only whets our appetite for getting our hands on the real things.

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Architecture Within Reach

2012-01-11T23:30:00.000-05:00

Head over to ELLE DECOR for a feature on my Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture. After a brief intro (screenshot below) comes a slideshow with excerpts from some buildings featured in the book.

Today's archidose #549

2012-01-10T22:30:00.000-05:00

Here are some photos taken by ken mccown of the Agave Library in Phoenix, Arizona by Will Bruder + Partners, 2009. See also Today's archidose #304 from April 2009.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

Monday, Monday

2012-01-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

My weekly page update:

This week's dose features Kindergarten (KIGA) in Neufeld an der Leitha, Austria by SOLID architecture:

The featured past dose is Living Tebogo in Johannesburg, South Africa by BASEhabitat:

This week's book review is Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America by Writers for the 99%:

american-architects.com Building of the Week:

Little Owl Preschool in Long Beach, California by Architecture M:

Unrelated links will return next week.

Today's archidose #548

2012-01-07T21:30:00.000-05:00

Here are some photos I took of the Woman's Home Companion House in Warson Woods, St. Louis County, Missouri by Paul Rudolph, 1956. I learned about the house at B.E.L.T. and found it via Triangle Modernist Houses.

Per a link on this page at the UMass Dartmouth site Paul Rudolph & his Architecture, the below rendering by Rudolph is for the same project. I can see the similarities in the open gable roof at the front of the house, but it is also quite different. I can't help but wonder what happened as the project was realized, turning it into a hybrid between the original and a fairly traditional suburban ranch house. This is a Rudolph design that is not very well documented, so the details will probably remain a mystery.

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Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy

2012-01-06T19:30:00.000-05:00

This is a "stop-motion tour of Castiglion-Fiorentino, Italy, where [Brandon Vento, an environmental design student at Texas A&M], and fellow study abroad students created proposals to revitalize a piazza in the medieval city; the video includes time-lapse views of students at work and images of their design proposals."

Study abroad students in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy from TAMU College of Architecture on Vimeo.

This is also where I spent a semester in early 1995 in KSU's study abroad program. The memory floodgates have opened.

(via Jeff S. and Bradley S. on Facebook)

Smoldering Speelhuis

2012-01-05T18:00:00.000-05:00

BOLLES+WILSON, whose City Library Helmond I featured previously, informed me yesterday that the nearby 't Speelhuis (Playhouse) designed by Piet Blom in the 1970swas burned down in a recent fire. Their library was not touched by the fire, but some of Blom's adjacent Tree Houses were damaged. Below are some screenshots from a video at ED.nl.

Even though a lot of news articles about the fire can be found on Google News, they are just about all in Dutch, so the details are filtered by Google's crude translation. Most of what I can glean focuses on whether to rebuild Blom's design -- a notable structure that is echoed in his more well-known Cubic Houses in Rotterdam -- or build a larger theater elsewhere. About a week after the fire nothing is certain, not even the cause of the blaze.

Here is a photo from the web page of 't Speelhuis:

And I did finally find an English-language account of the fire at Foxcrawl.com with more video and photos (including below). Click over for more information, whatever little there is, on the unfortunate fire.

[Aerial view of Helmond's "Speelhuis" fire disaster which threatened also the cube houses around. Foto:Peter Warmerdam | image source]

Favorites of 2011

2012-01-01T22:30:00.000-05:00

I'm starting 2012 by taking a quick look back at the projects and books featured in 2011 on my web pages. Here are my dozen favorite projects from the 70 that were featured on my weekly and daily pages last year, listed in chronological order:

And below are my favorite books from the 85 that I reviewed in 2011 on my weekly and daily pages, 13 of them in chronological order. Note, these books weren't necessarily released in 2011; for my list of Notable Books that were released in 2011, with some overlap below, see my list at Designers & Books.

Book Review: New York Dozen

2011-12-29T23:00:00.000-05:00

New York Dozen: Gen X Architects by Michael J. Crosbie
Images Publishing, 2011
Hardcover, 224 pages

The following review appears in slightly edited form in Yale School of Architecture's Constructs, Fall 2011 issue.

A June 2011 report by the Center for an Urban Future on the economic impact of New York City’s architecture and design fields asserts, not surprisingly, that the city has “the largest collection of architecture firms of any city in the U.S.” With 8 percent of the nation’s architects, over 1,300 architecture firms call NYC home; as well the number of designers working in the city has almost doubled in the last decade. This density and diversity of talent make singling out particular architects above the rest a difficult task, but Michael J. Crosbie, Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Hartford, has taken it upon himself to highlight a dozen young offices that are emblematic of their generation in these still early days of the 21st century.

Inspired by the popular 1972 book Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier—what then New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger called the “New York Five,” a moniker that has stuck—Crosbie’s “New York Dozen” includes Andre Kikoski Architect, Architecture in Formation, Arts Corporation, Christoff:Finio Architecture, Della Valle Bernheimer, Leroy Street Studio, LEVENBETTS, MOS, nARCHITECTS, Studio SUMO, Work Architecture Company (WORKac), and WXY Architecture. In a different way Crosbie is also inspired by another former Times critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, who asserted, when Charles Gwathmey of the New York Five passed away in mid-2009, that in the ensuing decades since the New York Five the country’s creative energy shifted to Los Angeles to nurture a younger generation of architects without equal in New York. (The next day New York Dozen’s Andrew Bernheimer penned an open letter to Ouroussoff at Design Observer, challenging the critic’s assertion.) This collection of 50 projects by 12 firms clearly shows that some of the best architecture of their generation is being created in New York, be it installations, interiors, houses, apartment buildings, or ambitious unbuilt projects of various types. Crosbie’s list, like any, is definitely open to debate, but his semi-objective methods (referencing MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program and AIANY’s Oculus journal, in particular) have yielded a diverse yet representative crop of architects who embrace collaboration, social and environmental responsibility, and experimentation.

In his introduction Crosbie calls Five Architects “the first self-promotional publication to appear in the new age of media attention to architecture.” Self-promotion in architecture is at an apparent saturation point today, with print and online media encompassing monographs, contemporary collections (of which New York Dozen is a part), magazines, blogs, and architects’ own web pages. In essence, Crosbie’s book resembles the last, in the way it collects photographs, drawings, and the architects’ own words, sometimes adding more than a firm’s own online documentation. Concise statements by the Dozen on their values, philosophies, and practices are helpful lead-ins to the projects, but pushing the content even further beyond what can be found online would have been appreciated; of course, in the print-to-digital content shift underway, that is becoming harder every day.

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Seasons Greetings

2011-12-24T00:30:00.000-05:00

Posts will be slim for the next week or so as I enjoy the holidays.

MERRY XMAS + HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Two Exhibitions

2011-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

Two exhibitions worth checking out are now on display in New York City: Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, organized by the Cooper-Hewitt yet exhibited at the United Nations, runs until January 9, 2012; and Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City is on display at the Noguchi Museum until April 22, 2012. The first "features sixty projects, proposals, and solutions that address the complex issues arising from the unprecedented rise of informal settlements in emerging and developing economies," while the second exhibits "new approaches to development in this area of Long Island City [where the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park are located] that [artists Isamu] Noguchi and [Mark] di Suvero helped to shape." In the number of ways that each is different -- in terms of population, geography, diversity, etc. -- they are also very similar, especially in how bottom-up approaches are embraced for urban change. Some thoughts on my visits to each exhibition follow.

Design with the Other 90%: CITIES:

Design with the Other 90%: CITIES is a follow up to the Cooper-Hewitt's 2007 exhibition Design for the Other 90%, which presented "cost-effective ways to increase access to food and water, energy, education, healthcare, revenue-generating activities, and affordable transportation for those who most need them." In that exhibition the canvas was broad, looking at design from the small and the personal (the cover of the companion book shows a tool for drinking from standing water) to the large and infrastructural. In the successor it's clear that cities are the focus, yet this does not mean that small interventions are not to be found; instead they are situated within the context of the growing urban population -- over half of the earth's roughly 7 billion people live in cities, close to one billion in informal settlements.

The exhibition is structured into six themes -- Exchange, Reveal, Adapt, Include, Prosper and Access -- which are inserted into the public lobby of the United Nations Visitor Center (the Cooper-Hewitt is closed until 2013 for renovation). Given the efforts of the UN towards transforming informal settlements and their residents, especially through its Habitat and Development entities, it makes perfect sense for the exhibition to be housed at the UN, which is actually undergoing its own renovation. A series of parallel walls sit perpendicular to the flow of traffic, with plenty of room between the walls for models and full-scale prototypes; the latter are some of the best aspects of the exhibition.

A couple architectural projects that are illustrated via full-scale mock-ups include "Make a House Intelligent" by Arturo Ortiz Struck and others (above) and the "10x10 Sandbag House" by architect Luyanda Mpahlwa (below). The first responds to the necessity in parts of Mexico City to occupy a lot within 30 days; the architects designed a flexible system of sand, concrete blocks, gabions, and steel beams, which can be erected by five people in less than a week. The second consist of two-story, wood-frame houses with sandbag infill that are replacing dwellings of corrugated metal and scrap materials in Cape Town, South Africa's Mitchell's Plain township. In each case an understanding of the construction that comes from the mock-ups increases an appreciation of the designs and applications.

On a much larger scale is the "Medellín Metrocable and Northeast Integral Urban Project," which also addresses informal housing but does it differently than the two construction schemes above. Instead of tackling housing, the project focuses on access, such that by improving the connections between informal settlements and other parts of the city, "an inclusive metropolis" is created. While this is a top-down approach requiring government spending to build on a large scale, it has as much merit as bottom-up approaches that enable residents to improve their immediate living conditions. Ultimately the two types of development need to happen -- perhaps converging at some ideal point -- for informal settlements to lift themselves up above their origins. The exhibition implies that even though these and other designs are site specific they offer lessons that can be applied in other places in need.

While Design with the Other 90%: CITIES is closing soon, it is "available for travel" in the US and abroad from February 2012, so it may be coming to a city near you. Regardless, a catalog accompanies the exhibition.

Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City:

Across the East River, inside the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens, sits the Civic Action exhibition that presents ideas for transforming the neighborhood around the museum and the nearby Socrates Sculpture Park. The two arts institutions collaborated to develop the initiative, in response to new development, rezoning, and an increased residential population. I live nearby in Astoria, but my neighborhood is primarily residential with a little light industry on certain streets; the area around Noguchi and Socrates is much different, marked by more substantial industrial buildings, big box retail, large open spaces, and the Big Allis power generator. The striped stacks of the last are obviously a point of departure for artist Mary Miss and her team's installation, pictured above and below.

Miss's "City as a Living Laboratory" uses floor-to-ceiling poles and tubes to provide a strong visual image and to structure displays for the various phases of the plan: 1-Using the Big Allis stacks as beacons to display the city's energy usage; 2-Repurposing utility poles and other vertical infrastructure in Big Allis-like banding to let visitors know about the new "Research Zone" in the city; 3-Re-purposing everyday elements in the area, such as scaffolding, blank walls of industrial buildings, and trailer-truck containers for, respectively, green walls, park slices, and incubator studios for developing ideas and projects about the city. I'll admit that this project in particular made me see the context around the Noguchi in a new light, as the trucks and other elements seemed to stand out more than normal after my visit. Miss's ideas are the most digestible, stemming from the striped branding and the simple yet thoughtful graphics and composition of the installation.

On the other hand, George Trakas's "Shoreline Walk" is a great idea -- bringing the community to the water's edge -- that is varied and sporadic in execution. The installation is a mix of mapping, history, and music (above) that offers suggestions for knitting the various plots along the waterfront, including Big Allis. This is not surprising to me, as Trakas is responsible for the Nature Walk at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant (PDF link) in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There Trakas wends the walk past the industrial infrastructure and directly to the water, turning it again 90 degrees to a path planted with native trees. It is a good illustration (and worth a visit) of how connecting to the water can be achieved in a small amount of space and from a point removed from the water.

Natalie Jeremijenko's "UP_2_U" spreads itself across a couple spaces with a variety of ideas on the walls and on tables (above) as part of her "Environmental Health Clinic Civic Action team." This installation reminded me of the Architectural League's Toward the Sentient City, because both integrate technology into the city in various ways. But Jeremijenko proposes more than "real-time 'smart-city' technologies...to close feedback loops and radically upgrade environmental health;" she also proposes fairly low-tech solutions, like "AgBags," that would hang from buildings to "create arable land for new edibles." In the case of the latter I like how it was presented in front of one of the museum's windows (below). The rest of the installation is also thoughtfully put together, be it the X-shaped tables, wall graphics, or the shadows cast by the solar awnings (above).

The most minimal installation is easily "GreenWay and Community Kitchen" by Rirkrit Tiravanija and team (below images). Their plan proposes to re-pave Broadway in Queens, which runs from the N/Q elevated station to Socrates Sculpture Park one block south of the Noguchi. This street is documented in the Ed Ruscha-esque photomontage below, but it is presented as a serrated composition instead of flatly, which emphasizes the smaller pockets of space that can then be closed off for special events, such as markets or film screenings.

Tiravanja's project also features the most overt piece of architecture, a Community Kitchen that would initially be placed in Socrates Sculpture Park. The design (below) is a scaled-up version of Noguchi's YA2 table lamp, a point of reference that links two arts institutions which people might not otherwise see as working together. In that regard it makes sense that Socrates will host the exhibition after it closes at the Noguchi in April next year.

Conclusion:

These two exhibitions may vary in a number of ways -- 90% is international, Civic is local; 90% presents realized examples, Civic is all speculation; 90% comes from various authors, Civic is only four teams -- but they share many qualities, particularly placing a value on creative design for addressing urban problems and prioritizing bottom-up initiatives for making change. Each exhibition requires slow, in-depth visits to best appreciate and understand the various ways of intervening. The Cooper-Hewitt show benefits from an accompanying catalog, so here's hoping the Noguchi and Socrates assemble the ideas from their show in print form, both as a way to share the projects to a larger audience and to help instigate change in their own backyard.

Today's archidose #547

2011-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00

casa bromélia, 02, urban recycle architecture studio, salvador, bahia, brasil, 2011, originally uploaded by M. Correia Campos.

Bromelia House in Salvador, Brazil by Urban Recycle, 2011.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: