Architecture

OUTSIDERS

I recently received an unusual request from the architectural writer Fred Bernstein. “Since Trump was elected, as a subtle political statement, I have been posting profiles on Facebook of immigrants who have made a contribution to the built environment.” His request brought me up short. I’ve never thought of myself as an immigrant. Born in Scotland to Polish parents displaced by the Second World War (my father served in the Polish army), I was not technically an immigrant, but I was hardly a Scot. I grew up in England, a proper cricket-playing English schoolboy, but that was just a surface impression.

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IKE MEMORIAL

new tapestry art -- cliffs 09.08.17

The Eisenhower Memorial is slowly edging towards realization as the  GSA has recently hired a construction company to begin work. Now a major change is revealed. The long mesh screen in front of the Education Building originally carried a photographic image of the Kansas prairie (Ike’s birthplace). This was later changed to another image, the landscape around Omaha Beach, one of the landing sites of the WWII Normandy invasion of which Eisenhower was Supreme Commander. Neither image was particularly striking, or for that matter, particularly recognizable. In any case, I’ve always thought that photography was the wrong inspiration for what Gehry insisted on calling a “tapestry.” A block-long photographic image doesn’t make me think of a Gobelin,

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COPYCATS

“Our lust for originality is wrecking the city, delivering a rash of formally new, but ultimately anti-urban hideous skyline baubles reducing city-making to a spectacle of super-size billboard branding gestures while inhibiting the multiplication of good ideas,” writes Phineas Harper in a recent post on Dezeen. He correctly questions the modern obsession with originality, and asks rhetorically, “Is bad originality really preferable to a brilliant copy?” Of course, it isn’t—never has been. What Harper does not mention is that copying had a long and honorable tradition in architecture. Scamozzi copied Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, so did Colen Campbell,

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NORTH OF THE BORDER

serveimage-2The Canadian design mag, Azure, ran a post recently titled “Canada 150: Canada’s Future Role in Architecture and Design.” The magazine posed the question to a number of prominent and not-so-prominent architects. Predictably, perhaps, the answers were uniformly upbeat: a world leader in sustainable design, a catalyst for change, and my favorite, in the forefront of developing pluralistic cultural identity. Perhaps it’s worth looking back to get an idea of the future. International leadership doesn’t loom large. The list of Canadian architects whose names would appear in an encyclopedia of world architecture covering 1867-2017 would not be long.

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FAKE NEWS

serveimageThe other day I read in The Architects Newspaper that the dean of IIT had stepped down. While this is undoubtedly of keen interest to IIT faculty and students why is it considered news? Perhaps because five years ago, when Wiel Arets was appointed dean, that decision was widely reported. But why was that event newsworthy? Architecture schools operate under a handicap where publicity is concerned. Law schools periodically gain attention when their graduates attain high positions, the Supreme Court or even the White House; business schools are lauded for the wealth of their graduates;

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COMMUNITY-ORGANIZER-IN-CHIEF

90According to a report in Politico, unlike all previous presidential libraries since FDR’s, the Obama “library” will not contain any presidential papers; the actual archives will be located elsewhere. This means that the  building in Lincoln Park will not be owned and operated by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

Why did Obama opt for this unusual solution? According to Politico, the rationale may have been financial. “If the Obama Center chose to include a “presidential archival facility,” the private Obama Foundation would be required to provide NARA with an endowment equal to 60 percent of the total cost to build and equip that facility for ongoing operation and maintenance expenses,” it reported.

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THE LAYERS OF THE PAST

90Ian Volner’s review of Robert A. M. Stern’s Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia is more even-handed that Inga Saffron’s mean-spirited screed in the Inquirer. But both critics miss an important aspect of Stern’s design: its relation to the nearby U.S. Custom House. That 17-story tower is the most prominent building in the area and provides a backdrop to the museum, evident in Peter Aaron’s evocative photograph. The museum echoes some of the brick and limestone details, as well as the crowning lantern. The Custom House, a WPA project completed in 1934,

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SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE DAY

serveimageThere is a long tradition of architectural research in structures—one thinks of Nervi, Candela, Torroja, and Frei Otto, the pioneers of concrete like Perret, and much earlier the Byzantine and Gothic builders. Architects have sometimes experimented successfully with new building techniques and materials (Rudolph invented striated concrete blocks; Foster was the first to use structural glass fins). But research into how people use buildings is rare. The profession has always recognized the value of so-called post-occupancy evaluation, and the need for knowledge based on how people actually behave in and use buildings. The problem has been that this kind of research is extremely complicated,

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