Design

RULES

A friend of mine recently emailed me a telling criticism of New Urbanism. “I’ve noticed a strange need to quantify everything from these guys. It’s almost like they are trying to deduce a pattern . . .  and even worse . .  many would lean toward  legislating the pattern.” There it is in a nutshell. Of course, ever since Palladio wrote Quattro Libri, architects have been fascinated by the dimensions of things—of rooms, ceilings, doors, windows, and so on. Palladio had rules about all of them. But he was always careful to allow for exceptions. Writing about the height of ceiling vaults,

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IN MEMORIAM

On January 8, 1958, a fire broke out on the Norwegian ship Earling Jarl while the vessel was docked in Bodø, a small coastal town north of the Arctic Circle. The ship was part of the Hurtigrutten (Express Route), which serves small isolated communities up and down the coast carrying mail, goods, and people. The route is between Kirkenes in the north and Bergen, about five days sailing. The Earling Jarl fire took the lives of fourteen people. A small bronze memorial stands in the town to commemorate the event—and the victims. The artist is Istvan Lisztes,

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BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK

When I went to school in England in the fifties we were obliged to wear blue blazers with the school crest. I came across this photo of a class of the Interior Design Department of Northumbria University taken in the Bauhaus building in Dessau. Apparently strict dress codes still apply, and are followed by instructors as well as students, and are even extended to hijabs. Gropius would be pleased.

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WHY THE FRENCH LIKE MODERN DESIGN

Watching the French television political soap Marseille—but anything with Gérard Depardieu can’t be all bad—I was struck, again, by how much the French like modern design. The furniture in the scenes was inevitably modernist, more so than would be the case in Madame Secretary, say. Then it struck me that while the furniture was aggressively modern, most of the background architecture was not. The Marseille city hall, for example, is a beautiful seventeenth-century building; Depardieu’s home (he plays the mayor, of course) is a fin-de-siècle villa. In one episode, a hospital room filled with the latest medical gadgetry in a private clinic,

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DESIGN AND RESEARCH

A recent article in Architect quoted Jérôme Chenal, a Swiss architecture professor: “Design is not research, that is just speculation . . .” Exactly so. For years I have heard design studio teachers maintain that what they do with their students qualifies as  research, and that it is an injustice that it is not recognized by the rest of the university as such. But Chenal is correct, design is speculation, not research. There is no real feedback. I suppose if a design were built and evaluated it might qualify as a sort of research, but studio work remains on paper—or,

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A BRIDGE TOO FAR


Reading about Venice’s new Ponte della Constituzione I was reminded—again—of the dangers of architectural experimentation. The bridge, designed by Santiago Calatrava, is full of novelty: irregular steps, illuminated glass treads, and a beautiful but very flat arch. All these innovations have created problems. The irregularly-dimensioned steps cause people to trip, steps make the bridge inaccessible to wheelchairs (a strange-looking mechanical pod has been added), and the flat arch has created structural stresses on the foundations. As for the glass treads—they become slippery when wet, and the glass gets chipped by tourists wheeling their luggage, requiring expensive replacement.

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SOMETHING BORROWED

serveimageWe recently replaced a kitchen faucet. The product is a typical example of globalization. The ceramic cartridge—the soul of a faucet—is made in Hungary, the aerator comes from Italy, and the rest of the faucet was manufactured and assembled in China. The company that markets the faucet, despite its name—Kräus—is not German but American, based on Long Island. I believe that the design is American, too, although the inspiration is German. It reminds me of the door and window handles that Walter Gropius designed in 1923. By the way, it’s an excellent faucet.

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BELLS AND WHISTLES

serveimageMy first car was a Volkswagen. It was a 1960 model bought in Hamburg in 1967, and it carried me without a hitch as far as Valencia (which is where it was stolen, but that’s another story). I’d never driven a VW before, but the simple controls required no advance knowledge. The only gauge was a large speedometer that included an odometer, turn indicators, and two (unidentified) warning lights, one for oil pressure and one for the alternator/generator. A third warning light lit up when the gas tank was empty, which required flipping a switch to access the reserve tank (about a gallon,

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