Architects

The Rude Building

From the Plus Ca Change Desk.

Have people read A. Trystan Edwards? Edwards (1884-1973) was a Welsh architect and town planner who studied at Liverpool, and articled under Sir Reginald Bloomfield. In 1924 he published an extraordinary book, Good and Bad Manners in Architecture that discusses many of the issues currently raised by the current New Urbanism movement. You can get an idea of the book from the frontis page: “This book asks the novel question, How do buildings behave towards one another? It contrasts the selfish building,

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Channeling Keisler

My friend Hugh Hartwell sent me a link to a CNN Money story on the late Dick Clark’s house in Malibu. The organic grotto-like home, designed by architect Phillip Jon Brown, is inevitably described by the media as a Fred Flintstone-style house. It really is a version of an idea pioneered by the Austrian architect Frederick Keisler (1890-1965). Keisler was born in what is now Ukraine, studied in Vienna, knew Loos, and was a member of the De Stijl group. In 1926, he moved to New York City, where he lived the rest of his life,

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Our John Soane

This weekend’s Washington Post magazine has a cover story on Frank Gehry and his design for the Eisenhower memorial. Philip Kennicott has done a fine job explaining the ins and outs on this only-in-Washington teapot tempest, but what struck me was the wonderful photo by Matt McClain of Gehry in his LA studio, surrounded by architectural models. It captures not only the architect’s working method, and the intensity of exploration that the scores of models represent, but also the sense of this remarkable artist in his own world. It reminds me of Joseph Michael Gandy’s 1818 painting of a room piled full with models of all the buildings designed by John Soane,

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NAMOC

An architectural competition for the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) is currently underway. The site of the vast (128,000 m2) museum is Beijing, not far from Herzog & de Meuron’s Olympic stadium. This promises to be one of the largest and most ambitious museums since the Getty Center and the Bilbao Guggenheim. Judging from some websites, unsuccessful entrants in the first stage included Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture and Ben van Berkel’s UNStudio. Not clear who else competed, but one supposes the usual suspects. Four firms have reached the final stage: Gehry Partners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel,

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Rough on Rudolph

The New York Times article about the Paul Rudolph county government center in Goshen, N.Y. that is threatened with demolition, has fueled a keen (and since this is 2012, a rather rude) debate. Many conservationists’ attitude to old buildings is that they should be treated like art, that is, carefully preserved. The problem is that buildings, unlike paintings, are fixed in place. Art that falls out of favor doesn’t have to be destroyed, it can simply be taken out of the front room and put in the back, or in a museum’s open storage,

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Great Clients

Following a recent lecture at the School of Visual Arts in New York, a D/Crit student asked me an interesting question. I had been speaking about the important role that a client can play in the architectural process, specifically how Robert Sainsbury had influenced a young Norman Foster—not least by commissioning him—in the design of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. But what about public clients, the student asked, could the public also be a great client? It is a good question. The history of architecture contains many examples of influential individual clients—Fr. Marie-Alain Couturier at both Ronchamp and La Tourette,

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Real and Unreal

My colleague Enrique Norten sent me a copy of TEN Arquitectos: The Limits of Form, which is hefty catalog of a retrospective exhibition of his firm’s work on display (March 3 – June 4) at the Museo Amparo inPuebla, Mexico. Actually, judging from the illustrations in the book, there are no limits to the forms that have been explored by TEN Arquitectos; the catalog is a dizzying array of commercial and institutional projects, rectangular, angled, round, square, torqued, canted, and slightly askew. As architects tend to do, Norten has included unbuilt as well as built work.

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Stern 1; Nouvel et al. 0

Great article by Vivian Toy in last week’s Times on the economic value of celebrity architects in New York. It turns out that many of the striking—and strikingly expensive to build—condominiums completed in the last 5 years have failed to deliver on the economic front. Units in buildings such as Jean Nouvel’s 100 11th Avenue, Enrique Norten’s One York, and Richard Meier’s173 Perry Street inBrooklyn, have either been slow to sell, or have sold at greatly discounted prices.  During the housing boom, developers convinced themselves that having a name architect attached to their projects was worth the extra cost and added real value.

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