Separated At Birth?

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

At what point do designers start recycling themselves, or take their iconoclastic style to the breaking point? How do you break out of a style, like Frank Gehry or Richard Meier, when clients come to you for the next Guggenheim or Getty Center? Or conversely, what happens when you become a chameleon flirting with styles from year to year? Philip Johnson quipped that, “After 50 years, you shouldn’t do the same thing,” but there seems to be a fine line between steady refinement and abject oscillation.

Case in point: Pritzker winner Zaha Hadid is world-renowned for her idiocentric style and design sense, and yet there are distinctly similar motif’s in the following projects; first the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Rome begun in 2003 and the Dancing Towers in Dubai, a mixed-use series of three towers combining a hotel, speculative office space, and residential space.

It is superficially easy to say that the Dubai project is merely the Rome project turned 90 degrees. It is hard not to pass judgement on Hadid’s projects from a merely visual standpoint: her projects are so iconoclastic and surface/skin dependant that it makes superficial critique easy.

Sukkah, Sukkots, Sukkot

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

Sukkots
Sukkots, originally uploaded by Peter Elk

Wondering what all of those shacks on the sides of buildings in Hasidic Williamsburg are? Well, they are Sukkahs which the holiday of Sukkot is celebrated; Sukkot is a 7-day holiday, with the first day celebrated as a full festival with special prayer services and holiday meals. Wikipedia says:

The word Sukkot is the plural of the Hebrew word sukkah, meaning booth or hut. During this holiday, Jews eat their meals, entertain guests, relax, and even sleep in a sukkah, a temporary structure (see below). The sukkah is reminiscent of the type of huts in which the ancient Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt, and reflects God’s benevolence in providing for all their needs in the desert.

In Israel (and among Reform Jews), Sukkot is a 7-day holiday, with the first day celebrated as a full festival with special prayer services and holiday meals. Outside the land of Israel, the first two days are celebrated as full festivals. The remaining days are known as Chol HaMoed (festival weekdays). The seventh day of Sukkot is called Hoshanah Rabbah and has a special observance of its own.

So there you go.

By the way, I’m told that the urban Sukkah market is quite lucrative, and just by perusing a google search of “Sukkah” finds all sorts of e-commerce supply houses for all your Sukkah needs.

Later 12-OCT-2006
From the comments, comes Sukkahs of the World, a photographic collection.