"Planting the Flag" @nytimes

 

 

APOLOGIES to Milan and Tokyo. Regrets to Stockholm and Paris. Forgive me, Eindhoven, Berlin, Barcelona and, most particularly, New York. But London is the design capital of the world.

Ounce for ounce, bloke for bloke, Britain produces better designers and design impresarios than anywhere else. They build retail emporiums, as Sir Terence Conran did. Or revolutionize household appliances, like Sir James Dyson has done. Or dream up impeccable furniture, as Jasper Morrison has. Or construct toasters from scratch by smelting their own ore and cooking their own plastic, like Thomas Thwaites did, a feat he undertook for his 2009 thesis project at the Royal College of Art.

And if the London Design Festival, a 10-day program of some 200 events, including exhibitions and studio tours, which ended on Sunday, failed to express the full radiance of contemporary British design, blame it on growing pains. Having just marked its 10th year, the festival is poised between being a regional showcase bubbling with spontaneous interventions and a smooth international canvas.

Once a satellite (or several of them) swirling around an annual trade show called 100% Design, the festival now extends from Ladbroke Grove in West London to Hackney in the east. You need an hour on the tube simply to travel its breadth.

Yet despite the scale, and the presence of more than 300,000 visitors, the London Design Festival is apparently still too small for many members of the British design elite.

To be sure, celebrities like Mr. Morrison and Sir Terence were visible. As were Tom Dixon, who organized a group of international design exhibitions near his canal-side studio at Portobello Dock, and Thomas Heatherwick, who had a popular one-man show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. (Mr. Heatherwick may be best known for designing the caldron for the 2012 Olympic Games, a rosette of 204 copper flambeaus that rose and converged like petals in a fiery dahlia.)

But only glimpses, if anything, were seen of work by renowned London-based designers and studios like Ron Arad, Ross Lovegrove, PearsonLloyd and Doshi Levien.

“Everyone with half a brain still launches in Milan,” said Caroline Roux, a writer for The Financial Times and other publications, referring to the international furniture fair held in Italy every April.

The London event offered many bright moments, like patchwork seating and floral wallpaper by the bespoke furniture company Squint Limited and an exquisite group of lamps by the Greek-born designer Michael Anastassiades. (The lamps, which will be produced by Flos, stood on three-pronged bases that resembled birds’ feet and were lighted with big glass bubbles that looked as if they were attached to their brass stems by little more than spit and static.)

But this festival was not the place to go for revolutionary ideas. Nor, despite all the Britishness on view in the form of ceramics, metalwork and a positively druidic devotion to hardwoods, was it simply a distillation of a regional design character.

What it offered, which was fascinating and redeeming in every way, was London itself.

Still glowing from the energy poured into the Olympics, London harmonized with the installations stuffed into its storefronts and leftover spaces. From the crooked houses of a revitalized East End to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, which has become a revolving showcase of contemporary design and craft, new goods basked in venerable niches, mixing it up with Turners and cobblestones.

DOWNING STREET was not open for public viewing of this eclecticism, but the Victoria and Albert Museum was. For the last few years, the V&A, that warehouse of historical spoils that sprawls like a gorgeous beached whale in West London, has been the design festival’s nominal home. Dozens of exhibitions related to the event, grand and tiny, could be found there — if you managed to get hold of a map showing their whereabouts. “We’ve almost run out,” said a woman at the information desk when she handed one to me. “Would you mind returning this when you’re done?”

I might have been better off without it. En route to displays like a collection of smartly sustainable wood chairs by Royal College of Art students and one of courtyard benches commissioned from international designers by the British company Established & Sons, I stopped at exhibits of wrought-iron ornaments, Elizabethan miniatures and Buddhist shrines. Imagine what I would have seen without any direction.

And so it was throughout London: even if the festival fare was hard to find or disappointing, you were sure to stumble on something else worth looking at. A daylong conference called the Global Design Forum, for instance, was a slog (most presenters were limited to an awkward 10 minutes, too short or too long, depending on the speaker).

But attendees could marvel at the construction zone known as the King’s Cross neighborhood and admire the new campus of Central Saint Martins art school, where the forum was held. This proto-Brutalist building, converted from an 1851 granary, had a sea of end-grain wood flooring and a foyer where an Airstream trailer was inconspicuously parked.

More often, though, the setting was a bonus rather than compensation.

Secreted in the basement of a mews house in a pop-up neighborhood called the Brompton Design District was a show of sneaky objects by several Britain-based designers. Paul Elliman fashioned a collection of mineral specimens from discarded materials like plastic pen pieces (“quartz”) and metallic plastic bags (“pyrite”). And Sam Jacob cast a basketball in terra cotta to look something like an artifact from an Etruscan pickup game.

You might call such works deceptive. The designers called them placebos. “A placebo is an inert object that looks like it works,” said Tetsuo Mukai, of Study O Portable, which had smeared sheets of glass with cinnabar, malachite and azurite (the ancient religious painter’s sources of red, green and blue) to create a modern triptych. The work, titled “RGB,” evoked the altar of the media screen.

East of Brompton, in a 120,000-square-foot decommissioned postal sorting office, the trade show Design Junction presented the festival’s most efficient concentration of talent. Here, among clusters of well-groomed furniture and lighting (including impressive variations on the Windsor chair), noted British designers like Simon Pengelly, Bethan Gray and Simon Hasan exhibited alongside sympathetic Scandinavians, Italians and Chileans.

Americans turned up at Design Junction as well. Thirteen designers from the United States, including Mike & Maaike and Lindsey Adelman, pooled their experiments with streamlined forms and seductive materials in a show called “America Made Me.” And a transcontinental marriage was contracted between the London furniture maker Russell Pinch and the New York design shop the Future Perfect. The latter is now moving into manufacturing and will be the sole distributor of Mr. Pinch’s voluptuous new Goddard sofa.

NO milieu, however, was more transporting than the East End neighborhood of Shoreditch. It’s not just that the area harbors a disproportionate share of creative workers. Or that you can find a unique retail typology here: the combined design gallery and cafe (go for the lasagna, leave with the ceramics).

It’s that residents of this former manufacturing quarter turned their spaces and practices into time machines as they displayed their loyalty to British industry and craft.

“Shoreditch was the center of the furniture industry, which is why I’m here,” said Sheridan Coakley, founder of the 27-year-old furniture company SCP. Mr. Coakley’s shop on Curtain Road offered not only Matthew Hilton sofas and Donna Wilson poufs but also demonstrations of willow basket weaving by the young Dublin design company Makers & Brothers.

At Lee Broom’s studio on Rivington Street, which looked like a cross between a stable and a high-end saloon, sawdust covered the floor, and dozens of crystal light bulbs cut through the gloaming. Mr. Broom, an interior and product designer, worked with a lead crystal factory in Cumbria to produce the bulbs, which were inspired by traditional cut-glass liquor decanters and lighted by LEDs.

At the KK Outlet gallery at Hoxton Square, a one-man show of work by Dominic Wilcox included a pair of GPS shoes Mr. Wilcox made with a bespoke cobbler in the shoemaking region of Northamptonshire.

Wearers load computerized mapping information into the footwear with a USB cable. LEDs in the left shoe light up when the toe is pointed in the correct direction. LEDs in the right shoe turn green as the destination is approached. The shoes are activated when the heels click together — one reason Mr. Wilcox calls his invention No Place Like Home.

And at Labour and Wait, a vintage housewares store on Redchurch Street, the featured product was a 60-year-old aluminum measuring cup called the Tala Cook’s Measure, which is still made by hand in Liverpool. Vitrines installed in the tiny shop laid out its history with loving photos of the inventors and factory.

It’s not nostalgia, Mr. Coakley of SCP corrected when I floated that word. “It’s positive,” he said.

Still, an emerging generation of British designers, like their counterparts throughout the world, are finding poetry in a kind of traditionalism their parents abhorred. Sir Terence Conran might be an apostle of modernism, but evidence suggests that his son Jasper, a fashion designer who recently took charge of the family retail business, may become the Ralph Lauren of Britain.

I submit as evidence “Country,” a book just released in the United States, which is the younger Mr. Conran’s paean to rural England. The book is filled with photos of thatched roofs, rose-choked gardens and weather-beaten villagers, which all appear to have been snapped in one 15-minute window of late-afternoon September light. Everyone, no matter how broken with the effort of existing for decades without running water, is bathed in the same honeyed hue.

Also consider “Red,” a show at Conran of 50 design products that were reissued in limited editions in the same hot-pepper shade. Rather than peppers, however, Mr. Conran was thinking of the classic British mailbox.

Visually, the conceit worked well. Like the golden-light trick, Pantone 032 brought an ennobling uniformity to a Dyson heater and a pair of Manolo Blahnik boots, so that you wanted to own anything touched by that magic paintbrush. It evoked the question of how color plays against form. It also made me wonder whether a change of shade really adds enough value to make it worth spending $1,764 for a Bertoia chair that normally sells for around $500.

At a dinner celebrating the opening of “Red,” Sir Terence thanked his son for bringing clarity back to Conran in his new capacity. “There was a freshness to the shop that has been lost in the last 25 years,” he said humbly, adding that Jasper’s perspective was not “bogged down with what is happening in Milan.”

Strikingly, however, Sir Terence also referred to red as the color of Marxism. It was the feistiest invocation I heard at the London Design Festival, where most participants, far from exhorting the workers of the world to unite, seemed to be asking gently that the workers of one’s homeland be loved. And employed.

The revolution will have to wait until next year.

-JULIE LASKY

"Redefining Baseball From the Outside In" in @wsj #miamimarlins

By STEVE KNOPPER

After a lengthy architectural discussion about image-making, color quadrants, function following form and dynamic thinking, Earl Santee gets a nostalgic catch in his voice. "I remember sitting in old Tiger Stadium, right next to the dugout, just marveling about how intimate it was, and how loud it was," said the 56-year-old architect, "and I could smell Italian sausages and green peppers and onions cooking in the concourses.

"There's just a spirit in the place, even if no one's there," continued the senior principal for the firm Populous, based in Kansas City, Mo., where Mr. Santee grew up. "It's hard to forget that."

image

Ryan Nicholson for The Wall Street Journal

Earl Santee, with a model of Marlins Park, at the Populous office in Kansas City, Mo.

A lifelong Royals fan who took courses as a kid at the Kansas City Art Institute, Mr. Santee has designed 18 Major League Baseball stadiums. In 1992, he and his team came up with Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which started a trend of friendly, open-air throwbacks. In 2009, Populous was responsible for the new Yankee Stadium, whose limestone-and-granite facade recalls the original House That Ruth Built. In early March, the Miami Marlins opened Marlins Park, a Populous design that is like no other ballpark. It's supremely modern, a flat, white part-sphere with sapphire-blue glass that brings to mind the teeth of a space alien. More than that: With its perfect sightlines to the Bermuda-grass outfield and with hot dogs and Cuban sandwiches for sale throughout the park, it retains that peppers-and-onions ambience.

"They nailed it," said Jeffrey Loria, the Marlins owner who made his millions over the decades as an art dealer. "They had been used to doing buildings and baseball stadiums in a traditional way. This was not a traditional way of approaching a ballpark."

Populous signed on in 2003, the year the Marlins won the World Series. Mr. Santee and his staff began by renting apartments in Fort Lauderdale and Miami, eating at local restaurants and, for nine years, generally becoming part of the community. By 2006, they were leaning toward the site of the former Orange Bowl, in part because East Little Havana, an impoverished neighborhood full of great old theater buildings and beloved eateries, was ripe for an upgrade. Miami, Miami-Dade County and the Marlins ultimately picked the same site, and Populous went to work.

At that point, the architects turned their attention to the ballpark itself. "They all have different ways of how they express themselves," Mr. Santee said. "Some people can't hand-draw very well, but they can do 3-D modeling. Some people doodle. Some people sketch. That's part of the process."

Greg Sherlock, a senior architect, was keeper of the sketchbook. By project's end, it contained 140 pages by several different people, some doodled with felt-tip pen, others painted with watercolors. Eventually Mr. Sherlock drew an abstract sketch that he describes as "nothing more than a swirl of lines" that approximated what a curvy, stadium-size mass might look like, with the Miami skyline in the background and the ocean in the distance.

When Messrs. Santee and Loria happened to be in London at the same time, they met at a Claridge's hotel restaurant. Mr. Santee showed Mr. Loria a book that contained Mr. Sherlock's drawing and others. Mr. Loria, who studied art history in college, liked "bits and pieces" and made a sketch of his own on a napkin. Mr. Santee drew a few things, too.

Mr. Santee shared the napkins with his Marlins project staff of about 35 people. They tinkered in their design labs, working to reconcile the broad art ideas (Mr. Loria was obsessed with Spanish sculptor Joan Miró's colorful surrealism) with ironclad specifications (a retractable roof that would withstand hurricane winds of 137 miles per hour).

Finally, Mr. Sherlock walked down the street from his office to a Hobby Lobby to buy modeling clay. "I started to sort of sculpt," he said. "And it quickly came to fruition in a lot of ways." Mr. Loria's napkin was what Mr. Santee calls "a moment." Mr. Sherlock's clay model was another—it broadly shaped the final design. "Our philosophy is, whatever it takes to get it out of your mind and on the table, do so," Mr. Sherlock said.

While the Populous architects were working on fitting the elements together, Mr. Loria and the Marlins were coming up with ideas of their own. They invited artists to apply for a Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places commission to design a sculpture to loudly celebrate every Marlins home run. Pop artist Red Grooms won with a whizzing, brightly colored sculpture made of water, spinning fish and flamingos. David Samson, the team's president, suggested the two large aquariums that wound up on either side of home plate. "I had reservations: 'How is that going to work?' " Mr. Santee said. "But they have a kind of luminescence to them. They're kind of a calling card."

Mr. Loria crammed the park with art, by Miró and Roy Lichtenstein, and the overall effect of the 37,442-seat structure is both soothingly contemporary and ridiculously over the top.

Economically, the ballpark is a work in progress. Attendance was up 52% by early August, from 18,700 per game in 2011 to 28,400. But none of the nine other teams that built a new stadium during the last 10 years has had lower average attendance in the first year of a new park, according to baseball-reference.com data. And some Miami critics are already fretting that the $515 million park, mostly funded with public money, is turning into a disaster given the Marlins' disappointing play this season.

Mr. Santee's standard for success is different. After a decade of turning himself into a Miamian, he wants locals to see themselves in the stadium. "When you've done so many buildings, that's really the fun part of the job—trying to create different ways to come up with an original idea, where people say, 'That's me,' " he said. "It's for them. It's not something they've seen anywhere else."

Making Marlins Park

 

image

Populous

BE LOCAL: The architects made a point of integrating the look and feel of Miami's skyline into the park, above.

[image]Populous

THINK IN PEN: Earl Santee and Greg Sherlock drew these frameworks of the tree columns that support the roof. 'I have a little book,' Mr. Santee said of his sketching habit. 'I'm just thinking and doodling. It's all pen. I don't usually erase.'

"An Architect’s Vision: Bare Elegance in China" in @nytimes

Wang Shu and his wife, Lu Wenyu, also an architect, at the China Academy of Art.

By
8/9/12
Hangzhou, China


Fusing Old and New, to International Acclaim
WANG SHU, the first Chinese architect to win the Pritzker prize, arrives at his studio here most mornings and sits at a desk with sheets of soft brown paper, a cup for mixing black ink with water, and a brush. He reads seventh-century poetry and then begins to write calligraphy, quick short strokes up and down the page. The ritual, he says, infuses calm into the day ahead.

The ancient art is not the only thing that sets Mr. Wang and his work apart from the glitzy marble-and-glass commercial architecture that has dominated China’s urban boom. His bold yet refined buildings that often recall nature fuse old-world Chinese and modern idioms, using inexpensive materials, like recycled bricks and tiles, as building material. His studio, called the Amateur Architecture Studio, does not have a Mac. A few dusty terminals, from the 1990s, surrounded by piles of old newspapers, are scattered across the tabletops. His six assistants, students at the nearby academy of art in this still, pretty lakeside city, show up as needed. This particular afternoon Mr. Wang, and his wife and fellow architect, Lu Wenyu, unlocked the front door — a big slab of wood — to find no one around.

In awarding this year’s Pritzker Prize to Mr. Wang, 48, in February, the jury catapulted to center stage an architect who profoundly disagrees with China’s rush to urbanization and has found a way to criticize it through his own style of work. Mr. Wang, who grew up in China’s far western reaches in Xinjiang province, is an outlier in his profession here. He has designed only one apartment building, a series of 14-story blocks with deep verandas, in Hangzhou. His museums, academies, homes, and a garden of ancient tiles are all touched by old China. Yet China’s vice prime minister, Li Keqiang, a master of the economy that has produced the cities Mr. Wang abhors, embraced him at the Pritzker award ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in May. Images of the pair — the man who will most likely become prime minister in the coming leadership changes, and the architect, dressed in black — were splashed across China’s news media.

It is the rush to emulate the West and the insistence on trashing what makes China so distinctive that upsets Mr. Wang. Why should China become something it’s not, he asks. “We want to copy Manhattan,” he said over lunch near his studio. “I love Manhattan. It’s a very interesting place. But if you want to copy something that was accomplished in 200 years, it’s very difficult. New York was not designed by architects, it was designed by time.”

Part of his criticism is driven by a recognition that a nexus of government officials and crony investors have made enormous amounts of money clearing land of old dwellings and broken roads to build highways, airports, rail stations and housing. “Sixty percent of government income comes not from normal tax but from the sale of land,” he said. Some reports put the percentage of take from land sales even higher. Phoenix New Media, a company in Hong Kong that is sympathetic to the Chinese government, recently quoted a report from the Ministry of Land and Resources that said that 74.1 percent of government revenues in 2010 came from land sales, up from virtually zero in 1989.

Mr. Wang is sympathetic to poor farmers who yearn for cities with air-conditioning and supermarkets. But if given the chance to renew villages in a sustainable way, rural people would be better off, he argues. One of his latest projects involves persuading a Communist Party secretary in a village near Hangzhou not to tear down the dwellings but to renovate using the original tiles and bricks. “People see black-and-white choices,” he said. “But in fact we have much potential, and can do very simple things and have a modern, comfortable life.”

Two architects who know Mr. Wang’s work emphasize his ability to combine the old and the new, Chinese and Western. “It’s possible to see Wang Shu’s work as a new vernacular,” said Mohsen Mostafavi, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “He’s actually deeply rooted in modernism. His work is not something that is just a replica of Chinese architecture or just a replica of Western architecture. It’s a fusion of different sensibilities.”

Zhang Yonghe, a prominent Chinese architect who headed the school of architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described Mr. Wang as enabling “us to see the vitality of the traditional in contemporary culture, that modernization is not the same as Westernization.” He praised Mr. Wang for having unusual integrity: “In today’s China it’s not easy to resist market pressures and maintain independent values as Wang Shu has done.”

His work includes an eclectic mix of museums, universities and living spaces. In its citation the Pritzker jury singled out the History Museum of Ningbo, in a port city near Shanghai, for “its strength, pragmatism and emotions all in one.” The museum looks bulky from a distance; up close the recycled ceramic tiles and vintage bricks in hues of gray, orange and blue lend a feeling of earthiness. The China Academy of Art at Xiangshan in Hangzhou, a half-dozen buildings, is dominated by white walls reminiscent of traditional Chinese homes depicted in old watercolor paintings. A work from 2000, the library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University in Suzhou, consists of a white cube jutting into a lake with front walls of glass.

Even with the prominence that his Pritzker prize has conferred, Mr. Wang is not venturing abroad. His post-Pritzker projects include a rammed-earth building that will serve as a hotel for professors visiting the campus of the art academy.

Wherever possible he uses recyclable materials, an art he refined in the 1990s when he put aside formal architecture to work with craftsmen and builders as they converted old houses into art galleries, music halls, even hair salons. By 2000 he was appointed professor of architecture at the art academy in Hangzhou and was back in big-league architecture, entering competitions and accepting commissions.

His vision matured at a time when provincial governments and college campuses, flush with new cash, commissioned museums and additional buildings, like libraries, that intrigued Mr. Wang. In emphasizing the value of what is distinctively Chinese, he is not one of the new breed of nationalists. He and Ms. Lu enjoy taking their 11-year-old son on overseas trips, and for the last few years they jointly taught a course at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on traditional Chinese villages as a basis for creating what they called “rustic-style” new suburbs.

They are an inseparable couple, with an around-the-clock working partnership that seems easy, sometimes jokey and truly collaborative, so much so that the Pritzker jury contemplated giving the award jointly. They met in architecture class at the Nanjing Institute of Technology, when he eyed the “girl in the green sweater,” he said, who also, it turned out, came from Xinjiang. “In terms of our work, I’m more responsible for the design while Lu Wenyu is more responsible for the implementation,” he said. Mr. Wang is the serious personality, almost professorial in demeanor. Ms. Lu is more outgoing. When they met, she said, she laid down a condition: She would be his girlfriend but would not attend the after-class seminars he conducted for eager students in the university dormitory.

The new campus of the China Academy of Art at Xiangshan was one of the works that most impressed the Pritzker jurors when they visited China last fall. Mr. Wang often drives to the campus with Ms. Lu. More accurately, she drives. He does not have a license and sits in the passenger seat of their modest station wagon. No Porsche, the preferred vehicle of some Chinese architects, for Mr. Wang.

As the jury toured the site, Thomas J. Pritzker, the scion of the Hyatt hotel fortune that finances the Pritzker prize, asked Mr. Wang the cost of building the campus, he recalled. “I said the first phase was 1,500 yuan per square meter, and the second phase was 2,500 yuan per square meter,” Mr. Wang said he replied. Even before hearing the translation into dollars of about $235 and $392 per square meter, Mr. Pritzker intuitively understood. “It cost nothing,” Mr. Pritzker told his colleagues. In contrast, a prestige office building in Beijing costs $952 a square meter, according to Langdon & Seah, a project management consultancy, in Hong Kong.

The campus was a dream assignment, Mr. Wang said. The bid called for an international caliber building for 5,000 students on a low budget to be built on abandoned rice fields. The art academy’s president, Xu Jiang, an artist, was Mr. Wang’s friend, and, in this case, his client. The first decision: to keep as much of the natural environment as possible. The buildings were erected on the edge of the fields, leaving open space all around. Second: no marble clad on concrete pillars in the wasteful style of the art academy in downtown Hangzhou. The campus is distinctive, Mr. Mostafavi said, because unlike most university campuses it is not subsumed by a master plan. “Here are buildings that come together as a series of fragments that produce a sense of unity,” he said.

As he showed the academy, Mr. Wang acknowledged that the finishes were not perfect. Along the internal walkways, jagged holes were punched through the exterior walls, to bring the outside in. Reddish wood from local yew trees was used for walls and doors. “It’s very cheap and grows very fast,” he said. In 20 years the wood will need to be replaced. Bamboo railings will have to be renewed in five to seven years. “It’s sustainable,” he said, “all very easy to replace.”

That such an unconventional architect should win the Pritzker in a country that has embraced foreign architects — including the past Pritzker winners Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid — for the design of buildings in China’s big cities astounded the powerful construction interests. Mr. Wang calls them the “normal group,” professionals who greeted his award with public silence.

In his acceptance speech at the award ceremony, Mr. Wang confronted the establishment with questions, a rare and brave act. Would it be possible, he asked, to ensure that alongside “the top-down professional system of modern architecture, ordinary people’s right to initiate their own building activities is also protected?” Did China really need to “resort to gigantic symbolic and iconic structures?” Were there “smarter ways to address environmental and ecological challenges?” Such difference of opinion before top government officials was striking, said Hong Huang, a columnist for the liberal newsmagazine Nandu Weekly. “It’s voices like that that will start to change China,” she said.

Behind the scenes, among the young Chinese architects who are developing an alternative architectural style inspired by Mr. Wang’s work, he detects chatter. “Young architects are very happy,” he said. “They can see some hope.”

 

Bree Feng contributed research.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 12, 2012, on page AR1 of the National edition with the headline: An Architect’s Vision: Bare Elegance in China.

"The Sky's the Limit: Architecture With an Edge" in @wsj

GC Prostho Museum Research Center, Japan

In the early 1900s, the competition to build the tallest skyscraper was intense. Today, with innovative new materials and design tools on hand, architects are going beyond mere size and focusing on sculptural forms.

"The Sky's the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture" (Gestalten, $78) features 135 cutting-edge projects completed in recent years, broken into categories like organic flow, sharp structures and smarter surfaces. The ultimate aim of these buildings, writes Sofia Borges in the preface, is to evoke "pure, immersive sensation."

image
Kengo Kuma & Associates

GC Prostho Museum Research Center, Japan

GC Prostho Museum Research Center, Japan

This entire building, in the small mountain town of Kasugai-shi, is made of interlocking wood poles with uniquely shaped joints—no nails or metal fittings required.

[image] 
from The Sky's the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture, Gestalten

Moses Bridge, Netherlands

Moses Bridge, Netherlands

At Fort de Roovere, this sunken bridge (made out of waterproof wood) crosses a 17th-century moat—with the waterline coming right up to the edge. From afar, the bridge blends in with the moat. Up close, the waters appear to part.

image

RO&AD Architecten

Moses Bridge, Netherlands

image
Takeshi Hosaka

Hoto Fudo, Japan

Hoto Fudo, Japan

The design of this restaurant, at the base of Mount Fuji, mirrors the clouds that surround the peak. The interior contains a large, interconnected dining space that is open to the air most seasons—no closed doors here.

imageSelgasCano/Jose Selgas & Lucia Cano

Merida Factory Youth Movement, Spain

Merida Factory Youth Movement, Spain

Completed in 2011, this multipurpose recreation space includes ramps for skateboarding and biking, as well as a vertical climbing wall. A long canopy over the complex blocks the rain and sun.

imageBNKR Arquitectura, from The Sky's the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture, Gestalten

Sunset Chapel, Acapulco, Mexico, 2011

Sunset Chapel, Acapulco, Mexico, 2011

This bunker-like concrete chapel looks like a giant boulder perched atop a mountain. It is angled to take advantage of spectacular views.

imageBNKR Arquitectura, from The Sky's the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture, Gestalten

Interior of Sunset Chapel

[image] 
from The Sky's the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture, Gestalten

Office of Ryue Nishizawa, Tokyo, Japan, 2011

Office of Ryue Nishizawa, Tokyo, Japan, 2011

Squeezed into a high density Tokyo neighborhood on a narrow 32 square meter site, these unusual stacked home provides a series of spaces that blur the inside and outside. Vertical layers of horizontal slabs that create a building without walls, bringing light and ventilation to the dark site.

image

from The Sky's the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture, Gestalten

Interior of Nishizawa buidling

image
Tomas Saraceno, from The Sky's the Limit: Applying Radical Architecture, Gestalten

Biosphere, Staens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2009

Biosphere, Staens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2009

Part ecological bounce house and part gravity-defying mind-bender, this anamorphic project fills a corridor connecting the old and new buildings of a Danish art museum. The hovering biospheres are made of plastics and some house unusual plant based ecosystems, while others are filled with water. Visitors can step inside the largest one.

via online.wsj.com

 

CornellNYC Chooses Its Architect

By 

Published: May 8, 2012

After a competition that included some of the world’s most prominent architects, Thom Mayne of the firm Morphosis has been selected to design the first academic building for Cornell University’s high-tech graduate school campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Thom Mayne

“The goal here is to develop a one-of-a-kind institution,” Mr. Mayne said in an interview at his New York office. (Morphosis also has an office in Los Angeles.) “It’s got to start from rethinking — innovating — an environment.”

The building will get extra attention as the first part of an engineering and applied-science campus charged by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with spurring New York City’s high-tech sector. It needs to embody the latest in environmental advances and to incorporate the increasingly social nature of learning today by creating ample spaces for people to interact. And to succeed, Mr. Mayne said, it must visually connect to the rest of the city, because its setting is surrounded by water.

Mr. Mayne has grappled with academic buildings before, perhaps most notably one for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in the East Village, completed in 2009, whose concave facade is clad in a perforated metal screen and punctuated by a vertical gash.

Mr. Mayne said the Cornell project presented an opportunity to contemplate what an academic building should look like in the information age. Should it have the bullpen environments of tech start-ups or the more cloistered layout of established universities? How should it use space to foster collaboration while also carving out areas for quiet reflection?

“There is no modern prototype for a campus,” Mr. Mayne said. “You have to have a completely different model which has to do with transparency and exposing social connectivity and breaking down the Balkanization that happens departmentally.”

There are no snazzy architectural images yet, nor can Mr. Mayne speculate about what shape the building will take or what materials he might use. “I haven’t even seen the site plan yet,” he said. The only certainty is that Mr. Mayne will not inaugurate Cornell’s new campus by designing some kind of ivory tower.

“I like being able to tell you that I don’t have any bloody idea what it’s going to look like,” he said.

Daniel P. Huttenlocher, dean of the new campus, to be called CornellNYC Tech, and a Cornell vice provost, said that as a computer scientist, he was “very sympathetic to the form-follows-function view of the world” and that he was “heartened by an architect who doesn’t want to get too caught up in the form too early in the process.”

At the same time, Cornell is in a hurry, having pledged to have classes up and running by September in leased space in Manhattan (location to be announced). The Mayne building is expected to break ground in 2014 and to be completed by the start of the 2017 academic year.

Mr. Mayne’s building is part of a campus that will be developed over two decades. The campus will comprise more than two million square feet of building space at a cost of over $2 billion and will serve more than 2,000 students. It will include three academic buildings; three residential buildings; three buildings for research and development; and a hotel and conference center.

In December Cornell, in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, won the yearlong competition to build the campus, beating teams that included one from Stanford University and City College of New York.

The master plan is being designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which was among the six finalists for the Cornell campus. The others were Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, Steven Holl Architects and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson.

Mr. Mayne’s 150,000-square-foot building is expected to cost about $150 million, Mr. Huttenlocher said, which will be covered by a $350 million gift through an alumnus. The city is providing $100 million in infrastructure improvements, as well as the land on Roosevelt Island, currently occupied by a little-used hospital. The new building will include classrooms, laboratories, offices and meeting space.

Morphosis was chosen partly because of its track record of completing projects on time and at a reasonable cost, Mr. Huttenlocher said. “We can’t afford for the budget to be something that balloons out of control,” he added.

The campus is designed to bring academic and private-sector research and development together to speed the translation of academic work into usable products and services.

Mr. Mayne said he would start by talking with the engineering firm Arup about how to design a building with zero-net energy consumption that will use and produce geothermal and solar power.

While the building’s design should be arresting, Mr. Huttenlocher said it also must satisfy its tech-savvy generation of users, who will adapt the space to their needs if it fails to suit them.

“If the building didn’t function well, I think it would get hacked to pieces,” Mr. Huttenlocher said. He added that Cornell liked Morphosis’s “ability to create iconic structures whose form does not obscure or impede its program.”

Mr. Mayne said he designed spaces that were meant to be personalized and “not in any way pristine.”

Morphosis tries to create spaces that allow work to happen in the most effective way possible, Mr. Mayne said. “After that,” he added, “we should stay out of the way.”

 

Great architecture review for the new stadium..."A Ballpark that may be louder than the fans - Marlins Park in Miami, Baseball’s Newest Stadium" in @nytimes

MIAMI — After 20 years of retro-style ballparks since the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, nearly all decked out with brick facades and calculated quirks that came to seem as predictable and interchangeable as the old doughnut-shaped arenas, Major League Baseball has its first unapologetic 21st-century stadium.

 Lumbering and dizzyingly white in the Florida sun, the new Marlins Park is an elliptical concrete, steel and glass boulder looming above the low-rise houses and empty lots of the Little Havana neighborhood. With retail on the outside and a public plaza in front, it’s designed partly to gin up some street life. Economic development is supposed to follow — that was the rationale for the public financing that covered most of the $634 million project ($515 million for the park itself) and contributed to the recall of Miami-Dade County’s mayor. Cities are always building new stadiums with the justification that they’ll catalyze the local economy. They rarely do.

At the same time, the ballpark is unlikely to satisfy aficionados of the latest trends in architecture, but it is nonetheless a modern building, with genuine panache, as opposed to another pastiche. Give the team’s owner, Jeffrey Loria, credit. An art dealer, he cares more than most about aesthetics and took a gamble — part old-school civic improvement plan, part marketing strategy — that Miamians will recognize themselves in the stylishness of the place.

He has festooned concourses and stairwells with art, photographs and sculpture. Most fans will no doubt focus more on the grass field, air-conditioning and retractable roof, which slides over the entry plaza onto slender, palm-shaped pillars, illuminated by pulsing lights. Because of the oppressive heat and rain, the roof isn’t likely to be opened for more than a dozen or so games a year, but even when it is closed, there are sweeping views of the city skyline through 60-foot-tall windows.

The challenge now will be filling the park’s seats. With a capacity of 37,442, this is one of the smallest arenas in the big leagues, but Miamians have notoriously stayed away from Marlins games in droves. Mr. Loria and the city are banking, as so many other owners and cities have, that a new stadium can change a team’s and a neighborhood’s fortunes.

Can it? The Miami Marlins, until this year the Florida Marlins, have labored since their inaugural season in 1993 in a 75,000-seat suburban football arena, where the Dolphins play, which can be as much as an hour’s drive from downtown, with lousy sightlines, crippling summertime humidity and no roof. The Miami Herald’s Marlins beat reporter, Clark Spencer, told me on a recent night that he used to pass the time with colleagues in the press booth counting attendance.

“Once we counted 80-something people,” he said, “and that included some confused foreign tourists.”

Mr. Loria, who took over in 2002, argued that it was pointless to spend money on top players without a domed stadium. Detractors said he was blackmailing the city into paying for a new park, meanwhile pocketing revenue-sharing millions from other teams that were meant to go toward a beefier payroll.

But then in 2007, Miami officials consented to a new stadium on the site of the former Orange Bowl, a couple of miles from downtown. The city provided the land and $13 million. Miami-Dade County paid nearly $350 million for the bulk of construction, with the Marlins kicking in $161.2 million. The pliant architecture firm Populous, formerly HOK Sport, which designed Yankee Stadium and nearly every retro ballpark during the last two decades, was hired to do the architecture.

Orel Hershiser, the pitcher turned ESPN analyst, got in first dibs as critic on opening night when, apropos the swooping “Star Trek” curves on the outside, he said that the stadium looked “like a cruise ship had a baby with a spaceship.”

Almost endearingly, when we met, Mr. Loria countered with a few wishful comparisons to the Getty Center in Los Angeles and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. He said the inspiration for the stadium’s electric color scheme, with its fluorescent-green outfield wall, was the palette of the Spanish painter Joan Miró. Public art and native plantings are meant to lend his building’s exterior what might be called an aspirational gravitas.

Inside Mr. Loria has also installed giant reproductions of paintings by blue-chip modernists like Roy Lichtenstein on or near the main concourse, called the Promenade, amid a souk of food stalls hawking $12 mahi-mahi tacos and $14 Cuban sandwiches. Nobody seemed to take much notice of the art the other night, fans clustering instead four-deep before a bobble-head-doll display. But Mr. Loria professed not to care. The goal is a mix of visual distractions.

These include two narrow saltwater aquariums behind home plate, giving off a bright blue glow. The intended spirit is light-hearted. For the same reason that Florida’s hockey team never installed a panther cage in its rink, it’s now clear why no one had put an aquarium in a backstop before. Animal rights activists were traumatized after the team tested the glass with a pitching machine.

The game aside, the main attraction is clearly the kinetic sculpture by the Pop maestro of kitsch, Red Grooms, in left-center field: marlins spin, flamingos flap and water splashes whenever a Marlin hits a homer. Miamians have been competing to come up with a name for it (the Marlinator and the Marlinstrosity are two, so far). This over-the-top gizmo is to the Mets’ homely home-run apple what the video game Call of Duty is to a jack-in-the-box. Considering how few homers have been hit so far, the fences might need to be brought in before too long to make sure it is exercised.

Mr. Hershiser was close to the mark about the architecture. Stadiums these days emulate cruise ships. They’ve got their first-class cabins and exclusive restaurants and nightclubs. (The one at Marlins Park even has a swimming pool.)

The game is no longer necessarily the point for many people who buy a ticket. Baseball used to be a sport of reverie, with the murmur of the crowd, the chatter of announcers on transistor radios and the crack of bats. Now parks are entertainment palaces, telling us when to cheer and selling us overpriced food and merchandise. The longest line I saw on the Promenade was to get into the team’s souvenir store.

Retro stadiums catered to nostalgia for an era before steroids and artificial turf, but even the past gets old. Fans may someday come to long for the doughnut stadiums. I almost miss Shea. Whether the tropical colors and aquariums at Marlins Park will appeal to local Latino fans, on whom Miami is relying to fill most of the seats, or play to outsiders’ clichés of the city, time will tell.

Sightlines are good. Those at the top and behind the outfield fences feel close to the action, and field-level seats benefit from the narrow foul territory. With the roof closed, Marlins Park is chilled to a dry 75 degrees, a family-friendly environment in which to pass a hot summer day or night. Angled walls and cantilevered ramps on the building’s outside create a few elegant geometries, and multicolored tiles provide decorative pizzazz. It’s more than what you find in the grim concrete corridors of Yankee Stadium.

Yes, baseball isn’t what it used to be — the modern game panders to the corporations and rich patrons who buy luxury boxes and seats behind home plate. But stadiums are about as close as many cities come today to creating large-scale public spaces. They attract untold numbers of fans who might never have gone to a game back when baseball was played before cigar-chomping men in jackets and fedoras.

“A lot of us weren’t expecting something this nice,” said Adam Brownstein, a 38-year-old native Miamian, who spoke for what seemed like every resident I met.

Ten clubs have opened new homes since 2001. The Phillies thrive in Citizens Bank Park, where they keep winning. Pittsburgh flounders in PNC Park — which may be the most beautiful of all the parks to be built in recent years — because the Pirates are perennial losers.

Now that Mr. Loria has gotten his new stadium, he is doling out big money for marquee players, talking about World Series games played with the roof open, under the stars. Through seven home games, according to ESPN, the Marlins have sold an average of more than 29,000 tickets.

If the Marlins are bottom dwellers in late September, that home-run sculpture may come to seem forlorn, the new team uniforms clownish and the cost of the stadium a renewed scandal.

But that’s then. For now, Miami has reason to cheer.

 

 

via nytimes.com

 

"Are Some Buildings Too Ugly to Survive? - Room for Debate" in @nytimes

Introduction

The Orange County government building in Goshen, N.Y.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times  

The Orange County government building in Goshen, N.Y., has a leaky roof, faulty ventilation and mold and, in the eyes of many, is just plain ugly. Officials shut it down last year and would like to demolish and replace it. But it is a prime example of Brutalism, from the noted architect Paul Rudolph, and many want to preserve it. Do even ugly, unpopular buildings deserve to be saved if they are significant? Or should a community, or owner, be allowed to eliminate architectural mistakes?

Read the Discussion »
via nytimes.com