towards a critique of sustainability

From the latest issue of Volume: a decent critique of that ever-elusive term "sustainability." The very word, emptied of meaning through overuse, increasingly dominates architectural design and discourse, and—frankly—it drives me crazy. People use it all the time without really knowing what they are talking about. I always ask: sustainable of what? Too often the word becomes appropriated as a band-aid, cure-all additive that can be applied as environmental/ecological veneer to an architectural project, like icing on a cake. But the word has become such a all-encompassing buzzword, a signifier onto which so many different aspirations and agendas have been projected, that it doesn't really mean anything anymore.

Panayiota Pyla's article in Volume starts to address these concerns and formulate a real critique of sustainability. Pyla focuses on the the historical underpinnings of the contemporary sustainability movement—from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to the UN environmental conferences of the 1970's—and how these precedents can inform the potential pitfalls that we face by investing such uncritical faith in the S-word.

The crux of Pyla's argument: "Perhaps the key issue here is to be vigilantly aware that as a concept and as a practice sustainability is constantly running the danger of turning into a totalizing doctrine that subsumes critical thinking."

And another key section:

Maybe it is good that sustainability does not have a fixed or coherent definition. Maybe it should never have one! Because if the technical questions of energy efficiency or the technocratic questions of efficient resource use or even the questions of socioeconomic management end up constituting THE definition of sustainability in architecture, this will threaten to reduce design to a series of small decisions (on materials, energy or feasibility) that will ultimately have less to do with design and more with management or with political correctness.

Apropos of the flawed LEED rating system, which constitutes the mainstream standard of sustainable design in this country, these are some wise words.

Worth a read.

[via Archinect]

now this is what i'm talking about

Ada Louise Huxtable valiantly reenters the fray this week with a piece in the Wall Street Journal on the endless 2 Columbus Circle debates. It's fitting that the critical history of 2CC both begins and ends with Huxtable: she is the critic who initially catapulted the original Edward Durell Stone building into infamy in the 1960s with her branding of those "lollipop" columns, and with this article, it is she who has the final word on the building's latest incarnation.

It's also fair to say that this week's piece is nothing less than a critical tour de force, indicting not only the building and it's architects, but also the entire discourse surrounding 2CC. And while I don't entirely agree with her on all the counts (see my thoughts on the matter), you can't help but give credit where credit is due. Huxtable is as ever a critical force to be reckoned with. if there's one thing we probably do agree on, it's that the whole tortured history of this little building—for the moment complete—makes me nostalgic for a time when critics both had something to say and knew how to say it.

2 columbus circle redux

With all the talk of the impending opening of the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle, I thought I would preempt Ourossoff's review (coming any day now, I presume) with a reference to my own take, written back in May.

I also wanted to mention the conversation with critics Justin Davidson and Jerry Saltz printed in New York Magazine. It's short but worth reading - I especially agree with Davidson's final comments on how the design just doesn't go far enough with any of the concepts at hand.

I still haven't been inside, so we'll leave that for another post.

From May: "The Ghost of Huntington Hartford"

goldberger on 2 columbus circle

Paul Goldberger returns—in true, clueless form—to the pages of the New Yorker this week with a real doozy of a review of Allied Works' redo of 2 Columbus Circle. As you've no doubt heard me lament before, dear reader, it is unconscionable how a publication of such supposed critical esteem can contract someone as critically impotent as Paul Goldberger to be their in-house architectural authority. It's a travesty.

With regard to the new building, I haven't been inside yet, but I still stand by my earlier thoughts.

Link: "Hello, Columbus" by Paul Goldberger, in the New Yorker

Sante on nostalgia

I'm currently reading Luc Sante's Low Life—something I should have done when I lived in the Lower East Side before I escaped to the Brooklyn countryside. I'm quite taken by the book's critique of nostalgia, which Sante defines in his preface as a kind of false, delusional sentimentality for a version of history that might not have actually existed in the first place. There's something quite compelling about Sante's take on nostalgia, and even though his words are directed towards a specifically New York-centric brand of repackaging the past, I think the critique can easily apply to any number of architectural or urban adventures in nostalgia. Sante:

[Nostalgia] can be generally defined as a state of inarticulate contempt for the present and fear of the future, in concert with a yearning for order, constancy, safety, and community—qualities that were last enjoyed in childhood and are retroactively imagined as gracing the whole of the time before one's birth. [Low Life, xi]

New Urbanism, anyone?

the ghost of huntington hartford

[image credit : progressive reactionary]

Huntington Hartford, retail heir and spendthrift extraordinaire, died today at age 97. Some may see this as a merciful end for Mr. Hartford: whatever suffering he endured in his final years, he has been spared from seeing his eponymous museum, left vacant and forlorn for so long on the southern side of Columbus Circle, destroyed and reborn as a building which he would surely disdain.

As you must know by now, the Huntington Hartford Museum is no more, and in short order will be reincarnated as the new Museum of Arts and Design, which opens later this summer. The scaffolding has peeled away in recent weeks to reveal the re-skinned update of Edward Durell Stone's seminal, trivial, or controversial (depending on who you ask) 1964 building. Redesigned by Portland, Oregon firm Allied Works, surprise victors over Zaha, Toshiko Mori, and locals Smith-Miller Hawkinson in a 2003 competition, the building is the latest step in Columbus Circle's long and lucrative march towards sanitized sterility.

[2 Columbus Circle in happier days. Image credit: New York Architecture Images]

It is hard to think of another site in Manhattan that has generated more controversy and ire over such a long period of time. (For a start, refer to the site's Wikipedia entry.) In recent years, the likes of Bob Stern, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Muschamp, Frank Stella, and, finally, even Sir Nicolai himself have chimed in to defend the peculiar little Stone building. All for naught, though. The building's fate was ultimately sealed by the dubious inaction of the city's Landmarks commission, which politely declined even to consider a discussion of granting landmark status. And here we find ourselves: May of 2008, the scaffolding down, and expectations are—to say the least—high.

[image credit : progressive reactionary]

Based on information gleaned from Allied Works' website and elsewhere (and elsewhere), the retrofit design basically consists of a series of strategic incisions that leave the building's existing concrete structure intact, but begin to open up the solid exterior wall (newly clad in ceramic tiles and glass) to provide views outward and allow light to penetrate the interior gallery spaces. The slicing of the facade and floor plates will no doubt provide some interesting visual moments, creative interplays of interior and exterior, and hopefully some exciting views of Central Park to the north. And one can surely expect fine detailing, as is typical for Allied Works' projects. But it all smacks of a kind of Diller-Scofidio-lite, with careful attention devoted to a few, select moments of visual calibration at the expense of the building as a whole. Indeed, the new building as a totality is, frankly, not that interesting.

[21st Century White Brick. Image credit : progressive reactionary]

The architects have put all their eggs in one basket by selecting pearly white ceramic tiles for the new building's cladding. Brad Cloepfil, the main Ally in Allied Works, will surely regret this decision—if he doesn't already. White tiles aren't very evocative of New York, to say the least, and I fear that time will be harsher to them than it was to the much-ridiculed but also endearing "lollipop" columns of Stone's building. The white color and the scale of the tile's module both suggest unfortunate connotations to the city's plethora of boring (and soot-caked) white brick buildings from the 1980s. Supposedly these special tiles, fabricated and hand-glazed in Germany, possess an "iridescence" that will lend a certain dynamism to the facade as the light changes. This is a good sound bite, for sure, but the effect is so subtle and fleeting that it will hardly deflect the inevitable "white brick" comparisons mentioned above. I daresay this choice of material represents a complete and fatal miscalculation on the part of Cloepfil and his Allies.

[image credit : progressive reactionary]

But let's go deeper: there's more going on here than what Cloepfil would have us believe. This is not just a simple, polite re-cladding operation that lets some more light into the galleries. What's at stake here is the definition of what constitutes a landmark—and what kind of values system determines which buildings deserve protection and which buildings don't.

Don't get me wrong. Our dear Huntington was a reactionary patron who squandered a sizable fortune largely in the name of a bizarre crusade of anti-modernism. The building itself, constructed in the heyday of International Style curtain-wall ecstasy and designed by Stone just as he began to hit his stride in opposition to this new, cold status quo, was itself a polemic statement: a symbol of a world view that sought to terminate Western art history somewhere before the turn of the last century. Furthermore, the building was certainly no masterpiece; it had plenty of problems inherent to its design and construction that contributed to its decay and disuse.

But remember, this progressive is also a reactionary. Ever a proponent of the creative destruction of modern architecture, I also have great respect for history, especially those moments, too rare if you ask me, when a small cadre of iconoclasts have banded together and, with a collective "fuck you," decided to turn the tables on a stale status quo. This building, to me, represents one of these "fuck you" moments that deserves not necessarily celebration or repetition, but certainly recognition and preservation. The building (were it still with us) is a valuable relic of a time when not being modern was itself a provocative idea. I don't think it's possible for us today to fully recognize the gravity of such a move; there really is no contemporary equivalent, at least in architecture culture, that I can think of.

[Historic Preservation, by Allied Works. Image credit : progressive reactionary]

This is not all to say that the building should have been left as an untouched, decaying memorial to some episodic, bygone aesthetic rebellion of the 1960s. I do support the new Museum's ambition to establish itself in a new and prominent location, and I wish it luck. But I think the architects could have come up with a more creative way to address and engage the storied and tortuous past of this structure and this site. Cloepfil heralds the preservation of the iconic lollipop columns at the building's base as some kind of concessionary offering to the Sterns of this world. But this is nothing more than petty lip-service to preservationists, and Cloepfil should be ashamed for his brazen contextual ignorance. His project ends up so anodyne, so plain, and so gutless that it fails to make any statement at all about anything other than the 2-foot wide light slots that wind around the facade. (And which, by the way, are completely out of scale and exhibit the innovative capacity of a 1st-year graduate school project.)

[image credit: New York Architecture Images]

Sure, the Stone building oozed kitsch and ersatz, and its faux-Venetian mystique had absolutely nothing to do with Columbus Circle or New York City. But at least it had something to say: about its place in history, about its relationship to the evolution of modernism in architecture, about something. The more I think about it, the more I realize that in a strange and twisted irony, Huntington Hartford may indeed have had the last word. Progress seems to have hit a brick wall at Columbus Circle—and maybe Mr. Hartford wouldn't mind that at all.


A coda: I couldn't go without mentioning once again the late Herbert Muschamp's totally bizarre ponderings on the building's social history, from January of 2006. One wishes there were more scandal, but the article was just plain weird.

hudson yards: a critique

From Metropolis: Stephen Zacks offers a critique of the recent bid contest for the development rights to the West Side rail yards in Manhattan. Without going into too much detail: in the wake of several failed attempts to develop this mega-site with public funding (Olympic stadium, Jets stadium, Javits Center expansion, etc. etc.), the MTA, owner of the site, solicited bids from developer-bank teams for the air rights to the railroad yards. Teams included, among others, architects Steven Holl, a KPF-Stern partnership, and a super-st.architecture lineup of Di-Sco-Fro/SANAA/SOM/Field Operations/Thomas Phifer/SHoP/Gary Handel. In the end, a Helmut Jahn / Peter Walker scheme for developers Tishman Speyer / Morgan Stanley took the cake. Needless to say, the winner's a real doozy.

[image: Tishman Speyer's scheme for Hudson Yards, from Metropolis]

I had some reservations with Zacks' piece on Dubai a few months back, and his positioning with regard to the role of corporate capitalism in architectural patronage is still a tad too accommodating for my tastes (for example: "I don’t have that much of a problem with corporations per se"). But I can agree to disagree: this is a fine piece, full of bite and wit, and it deserves a close read.

link: "Follow the Money" by Stephen Zacks, in Metropolis

what lies beyond the spectacle?

From Metropolis: Stephen Zacks on Dubai.

Interpreting the Dubai phenomenon through an uncritical lens of neoliberal economics, the article comes off as pure naivete, bordering on journalistic negligence. Zacks celebrates Dubai's Disney veneer, without cracking the surface even a little bit to expose the shaky foundations that buttress the boomtown's explosive growth. An example: Zacks glosses over the whole human rights / slave labor problem, referring only fleetingly to the 60% of Dubai's population that lives and works in substandard conditions, perpetually under the threat of immediate deportation, as "guest workers." This is dangerous talk, peddling Dubai as some sort of oasis of liberty, sustainability, and social harmony in a Middle Eastern sea of instability—a tourist destination that offers all the perks of consumer capitalism. This isn't Wallpaper, though; it's Metropolis. One expects more from the magazine (and Zacks, I should add, whose writing typically offers a more critical perspective).

My recommendation: a healthy dose of Mike Davis.

link: "Beyond the Spectacle" by Stephen Zacks, in Metropolis

gluck in metropolis

An interesting article in this month's Metropolis talks about Peter Gluck's career and how he has restructured his business model with the goal of making socially-conscious projects more feasible.

I've never been particularly familiar with nor fond of Gluck's work, but I can't help but recognize the tremendous validity of his argument: that the present state of the construction industry in this country, with its redundant layering and distribution of risk, marginalizes the architect and his/her capacity to realize progressive or provocative designs with minimal means. It is interesting how he has effectively eliminated/assumed the role of general contractor -- I'm sure this is something all practicing architects have wished for at one point or another. Gluck's call for architects to take on more responsibility (and risk) is certainly right on target. But I do wonder how the numbers work out. It seems that his firm still needs to maintain a "bread and butter" business of high-end luxury residences in order to subsidize its more "social" endeavors. Excuse my capitalist argument, but following Gluck's line of reasoning, shouldn't more risk deliver more reward?

As for Gluck's argument that architecture schools do not prepare their graduates for professional practice: as a young practicing architect, I can surely sympathize with this frustration. But I do think that such an anti-academic stance is unproductive and will ultimately come back to bite architects in the ass. Gluck's clear disdain for academia (and Zacks's uninformed and misguided statement of today's "poor state of architectural education") not only discounts the valuable research underway in architecture programs worldwide, but its implicit conclusion - that architecture schools need to deemphasize "academic" or "theoretical" pursuits for a more hands-on, "practical" education - would further exacerbate the architect's present marginalized role. Sure, it is important for us all to have the expertise and knowledge of how a building goes together, but it is also just as important for architects, especially in today's world of globalized tumult and moral ambiguity, to grasp the bigger issues at stake.

Gluck is right: there has to be a better way. But resist the temptation of total reaction. We don't want to wake up one day to find our profession limited to the construction of buildings devoid of all intellectual purpose.

link: "Peter Gluck's Social Work" by Stephen Zacks, in Metropolis
link: Peter L. Gluck & Partners

fleeting fortunes of corporate architectural taste

Just read a nice little feature over at Archinect by Owen Hatherley on the London architecture of Richard Seifert. Hatherley smartly juxtaposes Seifert's glory days of the 1960s with Norman Foster's present dominance of the London corporate architecture scene. He questions the long-term appeal of Foster and suggests that perhaps twenty years from now, Foster's buildings will face the same fate of corporate obsolescence and demolition that threatens Seifert's buildings today. An interesting and prescient reminder of how the tides of architectural taste can be ruthlessly fleeting. Hatherley's piece nevertheless leaves one question unasked: If, in twenty years, the early 21st century oeuvre of Lord Foster will have fallen out of vogue, only to be replaced by the latest glitzy form of corporate architectural excess, will I find myself perversely fond of the Fosterian monuments that I so presently disdain? In other words: imagining into the future, will Foster's works acquire the kind of retro-chic appeal that I (and Hatherley, I presume, judging by the rather heroic portrayal of Seifert's architecture in the article's accompanying photographs) are so drawn to? A disturbing thought!

CCTV progress

[CCTV construction progress, 5/2007. Image: dutch tom's flickr page]

While Flickr-surfing, I stumbled upon some recent photos of OMA's CCTV building, currently under construction in Beijing. I've been meaning to write a bit about the project since seeing last winter's small MoMA show on its construction, as I see its construction and eventual completion as an important moment for contemporary architecture. While I do think it's a bit premature for a project that isn't yet half-built to merit a show at the Modern, I must say that this project nonetheless stands to be one of the most significant architectural accomplishments in a generation. It will certainly solidify Rem Koolhaas and his OMA as the most effective architectural enterprise in terms of shepherding a design from concept to completion. And while there are definite ethical and political questions that are—and should be—raised when a firm like OMA takes a job like this for a client like CCTV in a country like China, I am [almost] convinced that the project's architectural merits will ultimately outweigh these concerns.

[CCTV construction progress, 5/2007. Image: dutch tom's flickr page]

The sheer magnitude of the project is astounding. The foundation and base of the structure required the longest concrete pour in history, and this project has single-handedly spiked the global price of steel. What impresses most, though, is not necessarily its height or overall footprint, but rather the immense logistical and programmatic complexity involved in its realization. The project truly, once and for all, validates Koolhaas's "Bigness" manifesto include in 1995's S,M,L,XL, in which he theorized an architecture "beyond a certain scale" that would have the "potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility." His claim that "only Bigness instigates the regime of complexity that mobilizes the full intelligence of architecture and its related fields" seems now like a kind of preemptive manifesto for the CCTV project. If nothing else, the building's construction is a moment of remarkable—if fifteen years delayed—consistency between theory and practice.

[CCTV construction progress, 5/2007. Image: dutch tom's flickr page]

I do have some reservations, though, before I embark on some sort of Paul Goldberger-esque eruption of praise for Mr. Koolhaas and his Beijing exploits. It cannot go unmentioned that the client in this particular case is a state-owned media organization whose prime function, one could say, is to broadcast the official message of the Communist Party. It's a paradox, of course, that the state-owned media organization is a de facto extension of the Party apparatus intent on curbing freedoms of speech and press. This is all as thinly veiled as the symbolism of CCTV's logo: while its typeface echoes that of CNN and, by extension, the American mass media, the organization's acronym ominously and perhaps more significantly evokes the dark realities of a surveillance society. I'm sure none of these ethical dilemmas escape Koolhaas; indeed, this is precisely the kind of tension he relishes. A self-proclaimed proponent of "surfing the wave" of global capitalism, Koolhaas has time and again delineated a strategy of embracing dominant power structures, working within them, and attempting to effect some measure of change from the inside. Certainly this approach, like the Bigness business, represents a (post-Modernist) reaction against old-school avant-garde strategies of opposition and resistance. But one cannot help but wonder if Rem rushing into the arms of the Chinese government is nothing more than an opportunistic architect fishing for a big commission.

[CCTV construction progress, 5/2007. Image: dutch tom's flickr page]

Still, I waver. The critique of Koolhaas for his so-called wave-surfing is well-deserved yet also overblown. It's important to recognize that Koolhaas—along with his partner Ole Scheren, whom I understand to be the main protagonist behind this particular project—really stands alone among his starchitect peers as the only one to really engage his architecture on a critical level. Unlike so many huge commissions that fixate on formal invention and structural acrobatics, I'd like to believe that OMA's architecture at least attempts to address or comment upon (if not quite solve) problems and challenges facing contemporary society. And for that, OMA deserves credit.

You've probably noticed the schizophrenia of this particular critical endeavor. It's indicative of a schizophrenia within the project itself, a tension between the acceptance of and resistance to the status quo. It is this dynamic tension which gives OMA's work the bite that is so rarely found these days, especially in high-profile commissions by big-name architects. One only hopes that once the project is done and the client moves in that this rhetorical bite translates into an operational metamorphosis that produces some kind of social or cultural improvement. Otherwise, what's the point?

[CCTV construction progress, 5/2007. Image: dutch tom's flickr page]

As a final side note - I think the place where Koolhaas had his real fun with this project is actually not the looped CCTV building, but rather the adjacent TVCC. This structure programmatically seems more interesting, for two reasons. First, the high-rise hotel (Rem's first, I believe), with its enormous atrium carved out of the center, directly evokes the oeuvre of John Portman, a hero of Rem's, and no doubt a primary inspiration for his Bigness manifesto. The image above, which shows the atrium before the enclosure is built, could pass as any number of Portman hotels. Second, the base of the tower, which includes a kind of carnival of all sorts of public, cultural, entertainment, and performance programs clustered under a single, enormous, shed-like roof, proposes a densely packed, extremely interior urbanism—kind of like the IIT student center project on crack. Instead of an interior landscape of campus walkways linking different functions of a student center, the TVCC base is essentially an interiorized city of cultural monuments packed next to each other. Should be interesting.

the museum for african art: an architectural retreat

[image: Neoscape/Robert A.M. Stern Architects, from the New York Times]

I was not at all surprised the other day to see an article in the New York Times about the Museum for African Art (MAA), a New York institution that has been in search of a permanent home for over twenty years and resurfaces perenially with new hopes of finding one. What did come as a surprise, though, was the news that the indefatigable Robert A.M. Stern has completed a design for the museum's new home on a very visible site on Fifth Avenue at the northeast corner of Central Park. The last that I heard of this building and this site was a couple of years ago, when Bernard Tschumi Architects was tied up in its second or third redesign for this same project, while the MAA was attempting to triangulate various corporate and real-estate interests in order to secure its funding and land purchase. Well, it seems that the Museum was successful in this regard, but somewhere along the way Mr. Tschumi & Co. were dropped from the project, and Mr. Stern triumphantly ascended to the task of providing us with yet another of his bland, soulless towers that seem to be replicating along the perimeter of Central Park.

A quick note: Although it may seem from this post that I am unilaterally anti-Stern, those of you who are fond of Stern's work will be happy to hear that I do consider him a highly accomplished intellectual within the architectural profession. Ironically enough, I do enjoy his early, wittier work for Disney (although his cartoonish pomo has aged less well than the more idea-rich Venturi Scott-Brown portfolio), and I recognize that his deanship at Yale has made an academic impact on the profession that goes far beyond that of his built work. The fact that Stern lasted so long at Columbia while Tschumi was dean proves a certain pedagogical compatibility that priveleges openness, at least on an academic level (see this post on Tropolism for more on that).

Anyway - back to the issue at hand. What makes the MAA design even worse than previous Stern misadventures is the Museum's shocking architectural retreat from an incredibly potent design to nothing more than a cookie-cutter developer building that happens to house a museum in its base. Sure, Stern is providing mediocre aesthetic concessions to the museum (see the "dancing mullions"), but there's nothing else to preserve or express the institution's complex identity. It is worth looking at Tschumi's schemes, of which the earliest is the strongest, to really underline what is at stake in these New York architecture battles, and to understand what we lost in this one.

[image: Bernard Tschumi Architects]

The Tschumi design was very simple, actually: a sinuous wood-clad volume housing gallery space, lifted above the ground to provide public space below, and topped by a roof garden. Tschumi's tongue-in-cheek solution to New York's stringent street-wall requirements along this prominent stretch of Fifth Avenue was to clad the entire volume in glass, thus building out to the site's perimeter, preserving the Fifth Avenue vertical continuity, and creating that classic Tschumi "in-between" space of excitement that bridges exterior and interior, public and private, city and institution. It was in his stubborn refusal to accommodate his form to zoning conventions (and in the brilliantly but deceptively simple solution that he offered in response) that gave the building its bite, that urbanistic edge that can be found in most Tschumi projects. And it became especially relevant when considering the program at play: a museum for African art in New York City, which is to say a museum predicated at the very basic level on notions of difference, and various ways of preserving and exploring such difference. What better way to house an institution that deals with issues of difference and complexity than with a building capable of asking similarly complex questions on an architectural scale?

The Stern building, in this sense, represents a total failure to provide a conceptually rich architectural response to the MAA program. It essentially becomes the opposite of the Tschumi scheme: an innocuous shell into which the Museum is packed along with 115 luxury condominiums, with those "dancing mullions" and a copper "drum" on the backside as Stern's pathetic and, frankly, offensive response to the "African" nature of the Museum's mission.

But wait - there's more. Stern doubly insults Tschumi by not only having the gall to recycle the curvaceous wood wall motif, but also claiming in the Times "to make a building that is glassy and open, but not a knee-jerk glass block." Knee-jerk? There's nothing more knee-jerk in this city than another masonry developer condo building! And shame on Sewell Chan and the Times for including no mention of Tschumi's previous involvement, while printing an image of the project that is so clearly a cheap knock-off of the Tschumi scheme.

[image: Neoscape/Robert A.M. Stern Architects, from the New York Times]

[image: Bernard Tschumi Architects]

The whole situation is starting to remind me of Jean Nouvel's Musée du Quai Branly (which opened last year and happens to be on the cover of this month's Record) and a deliciously critical article (referenced in an earlier PR post) by Michael Kimmelman, in which he decontructs the many layers of colonialism, spectacle, and pretension that come together to form what he calls "a heart of darkness in the City of Light." Kimmelman's critique should be seen as a warning for what not to do with the MAA:

If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension.

The evolution from Tschumi to Stern represents at worst a rejection of understanding the city (as Tschumi did in his early and best writings) as a dynamic engine of unpredictability, a place in which differences and conflicts are to be celebrated and tapped - not separated and put on display. At the very least, it represents a loss for New York, and a loss for Architecture (with a capital A) in general. Here's to hoping that I'm wrong, and that the building's completion in 2009 won't generate the kind of critical response seen above.

link: "Museum for African Art Finds its Place" by Sewell Chan, in the New York Times

cross-cultural pollination

[image: Zaha Hadid's Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Center, from the New York Times]

There's an interesting thread over at Archinect discussing the article on Abu Dhabi by Nicolai Ourossoff that appeared in this past Sunday's Times. It all started with Javier Arbona's pointed criticism of Ourossoff's egregious celebration of the Abu Dhabi projects as successful proof of the multiculturalism possible in a globalized context. See the conversation for various reactions (including that of yours truly) - but let me just say that I think Ourossoff proves our critiques right with his own (mis)wording of the Abu Dhabi projects as "outlining a vision of cross-cultural pollination." Surely he must have meant to write "cross-pollination" instead of "pollination"? Or maybe that's the point?

link: "Abu Dhabi Object City/Baghdad Invisible City" at Archinect

40 bond update

I got a chance over the weekend to snap a few photos of the rapidly-progressing 40 Bond project, an Ian Schrager residential development designed by those Swiss hot-shot duo Herzog and de Meuron. Although I do enjoy much of Herzog and de Meuron's formal research, material treatments, and patterning techniques, I tend to regard their buildings critically and almost categorically as nothing but over-dressed boxes. 40 Bond fits perfectly into this genre: the billboards claim that "Herzog and de Meuron radically reinvent the cast-iron building," when in fact the building is nothing other than a "cast-concrete" building, soon to be covered in fancy glass tubing. Material substitution does not suffice for reinvention. And furthermore, by ignorantly invoking the imagery of New York's cast-iron architectural legacy for such a blatant cause of gentrification, H&dM neglects the typology's rich social history. The same can be said for the bling-bling, one-liner appropriation of graffiti imagery for the street-level facade. In the end, 40 Bond is nothing but another developer project, albeit one with a larger budget for ornamentation. And surely the ornamentation will be stunning and the details expertly executed -- but isn't it time for our most famous architects to take on more critical architectural pursuits?

"he has always been better at rhetoric than architecture"

Following up on an earlier post: Christopher Hawthorne reviews Eisenman's new stadium for the Arizona Cardinals.
link: "Grass isn't greener" in the L.A. Times

"dynamism tamed"

Ouroussoff's review in today's Times of Peter Eisenman's new Cardinals stadium misses the point by focussing primarily on the architect's compromise between formal innovation and pragmatic realities. First of all, it's a fallacy to give Peter Eisenman any recognition for reinventing the stadium typology, as Ouruossoff seems to do. A football stadium is a football stadium, and this one seems no different. Sure, the motorized field that slides outside the air-conditioned stadium for sunlight and rain is pretty cool and innovative, and it could even be spun as some sort of contemporary, mega-futuristic folly (although one that reflects poorly on our culture's environmental and land-use priorities). But there is no attempt on Eisenman's part to question stadium convention in any formal or programmatic way. An earlier scheme included a somewhat more interesting attempt to integrate the facade slots into the landscape, but apparently that quietly fell prey to value engineering. The final product clearly demonstrates Eisenman's true role of providing the fancy metal icing for your standard wedding cake football stadium. Indeed, the design team of Eisenman Architects and HOK Sport seems to me less a partnership and more a division of labor: Eisenman does the outside skin, and HOK takes care of everything else.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Don't get me wrong - when I say that Nicolai is missing the point, I mean that he fails to grasp what Eisenman is really up to down in Arizona. A lifetime football nut, Eisenman is clearly having fun, designing a container for his favorite sport. The opportunity to design your own football stadium doesn't come around that often. I've heard this sentiment from the man himself at several lectures and presentations, and at 73, after a long combative career of pissing off people, wouldn't you want to kick back and work on something fun for a change?

So forget the lesson on value engineering, Nicolai. It's a stadium. A nice stadium, but a stadium nonetheless.

link: "Dynamism Tamed by Cost-Cutters" by Nicolai Ouroussoff, in the New York Times

blandness at ground zero, cont'd

David Childs and SOM just revealed the updated design for the Freedom Tower. Seems they've converted an oppressive 187 ft. metal-covered concrete base to an oppressive 187 ft. glass-covered concrete base. Brilliant.

link: "Architects Unveil New Design for Freedom Tower" in the New York Times

goldberger, again

I FORGOT TO MENTION Paul Goldberger's equally strange review of Norman Foster's new Hearst Building in midtown Manhattan. Sure, the building's diagrid structure is certainly impressive, as is the effort to enhance the skyline of a city so inundated with generic highrise construction. But is Foster really the "Mozart of modernism"? Goldberger, as is usually the case, seems overly enthusiastic and hardly offers any critical reading of the project. Shouldn't the New Yorker, a magazine with such potent weekly political, literary, and cultural criticism, find an architectural critic who has something else to bring to the table, other than wide-eyed awe and fascination?

link: Triangulation: Norman Foster's thrilling addition to midtown Manhattan

goldberger: rouse as radical?

CHECK OUT THIS WEEK'S New Yorker for a (typically) strange piece by Paul Goldberger on the Disneyfied "festival marketplace" of Shanghai's Xintiandi district. I don't really understand his logic here, but it seems to me as if Goldberger is trying to say that that the recent fascination with Rouse-ian kitsch in Shanghai somehow has radical architectural implications for the city. Is it radical simply because it is a different urbanistic approach than the standard Shanghai development? Does that simple difference discount the enormous amount of cultural and symbolic baggage that these festival marketplace-like developments bring along with them? Maybe someone can help me here... am I missing something?

link: Paul Goldberger's Shanghai Surprise: The radical quaintness of the Xintiandi district