Tag: architecture
Beijing Olympic Stadium: Sneak Peek
Comparison Maps of American Universities
This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.
Now this is more like it! Just like the subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale, here is a similar project: Comparison Maps of American Universities by Ayers Saint Gross Architects + Planners.
This is a fantastic collection of urban information. What I would like to see are comparisons by geographic location – for example, looking at the similarities and contrasts between Yale and the University of Cincinnati (UC) shown above; comparisons by date of campus construction; comparisons of context and relative urbanity, etc.
Having had a fair amount of experience at both campuses, it is interesting to look at Yale versus UC. Yale’s present campus dating from 1716, is the direct result of lack of central heat and (most importantly) lack of electrical illumination. The technology of the time fostered long, thin masonry buildings with double-loaded corridors with regular windows to maximize light. Later additions were required to mimic this style for political and taste reasons. Visit Yale today, and you would be hard pressed to pick out contemporary buildings (Art and Architecture excepted) from new.
UC on the other hand, was founded in 1819 but was established at its’ present site in 1870, well after the first arc lamps were available and during the golden age of incandescent invention. However, its’ two growth spurts were post-WWII and in the last 20 years. As a result, you get larger buildings with larger footprints which take advantage of central heat and cooling, electric lighting, and other economies of scale.
These maps, along with Sanborn Maps, are invaluable tools for designers and historians.
By the way: for those New Yorkers out there, here are comparison maps for Bronx Zoo and Rutgers (no Columbia or NYU).
A relatively dark conversation with Frank Gehry.
Sao Paulo outlaws all public advertising
2 Fatal Blazes Renew Focus on Fraternities’ Lack of Sprinklers
The Smog Eating Church of Rome
The Dio Padre Misericordioso by Richard Meier has become the Smog Eating Church of Rome:
3 Louis Sullivan buildings in Chicago have burned down in the last 6 months
What’s That Crashing Sound, Or, Eisenman in Cincinnati
Michael Bierut pens a tribute to the University of Cincinnati DAAP Aronoff Center entitled, What’s That Crashing Sound, Or, Eisenman in Cincinnati
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.