architecture

Things architectural, buildings and the built environment.

Maps / North Korea’s Hotel of Doom

28 October 2008 in architecture, the ancient past | No comments

Last night, Mara and I were messing around with Google Maps, checking out giant Japanese buddhas from the air. [Check out this one in Kamakura, near Tokyo]. Then we decided to see what North Korea looked like, and we raced over the Pyongyang and suddenly found this crazy thing with a giant triangular shadow. What the?

Turns out that it’s the Ryugyong Hotel. It has 105 stories, and it is indeed shaped like an arrowhead, with a broad base that tapers steeply to a pointy top. The craziest thing: It was abandoned in the mid-80’s, during construction; hence its moniker: the Hotel of Doom. (Apparently, North Korea had already sunk 2% of its GDP into it when they decided to pull the plug. Ouch.)

Esquire calls it worst-designed building in the world, which seems a little harsh. Would the world’s worst-designed building inspire this: An animated short presenting a sort of Blade-Runner-meets-Disney-meets-Shinjuku vision for how the Ryugyong will be adapted in the future? Actually, maybe it would.

See it for yourself here.

New Yorks, new museums, new coffees

5 March 2008 in architecture, new york, travel, urban | 1 comment

This is an incredible mosaic in the bathroom of the New Museum of Contemporary art in New York. It is also EASILY the most impressive thing in the whole museum.

New York was filled with good times, as usual, but a couple of the things that totally blew my mind (and that are link-friendly) were Jamaican beef patties at a place called Christie’s in Flatbush and an offshoot of San Francisco’s Blue Bottle juggernaut that recently opened in New York, Abraco [a nice NY mag review]. Yoshi insisted that we stop at Christie’s even though we’d just eaten a big brunch, and we got a couple of warm, spicy patties to share on a walk through chilly Prospect Park. The first thing I noticed is that they’re not really “patties” in the sense of hamburger patties. They’re like hot pockets, but freshly baked, with an amazing crust and filled with super-spicy beef. Pretty much the perfect walking food.

On an unrelated note, last week’s This American Life was the best I’ve heard in a long time. Every segment is good, but the third is about what happens to chimpanzees after they “retire” from movies, and it reveals that Cheeta — the chimp from the 40’s-era Tarzan movies — is still alive, living in Palm Springs, enjoys drinking Diet Iced Tea, and was once quite fond of beer and cigars. There’s more in this funny National Geo piece from 2003, awkwardly titled Tarzan’s Cheeta’s Life as a Retired Movie Star.

Readings / Design, westerns, obsolete vernaculars

17 October 2007 in architecture, ideas, lit | No comments

This is a photo by Thomas Allen. I first noticed his stuff when I saw the covers of Vintage reissues of James Ellroy’s novels (like this one for Suicide Hill). The photo above is from a series of dioramas that Allen created from cut-outs of 50’s pulp novels. I love the use of the book-ends as textured underwater scenery here. Genius. Photo: Foley Gallery.

A lot of what I’ve been reading seems to resonate with my 9-to-5 work. Last night, I was reading architect Witold Rybczynski’s account of a shed-building exercise that turns into a much, much more — The Most Beautiful House in the World, and this passage jumped out at me, mostly because it spoke so eloquently of the stuff I value in design work:

The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim once characterized children’s play as an activity “characterized by freedom from all but personally imposed rules (which are changed at will), by free-wheeling fantasy involvement, and by absence of any goals outside the activity itself” ...

Bettelheim quotes a four year-old who asks, “Is this a fun game or a winning game?” The solitary building game is a fun game – there is no opponent. The concept of fun is elusive and resists easy definition, but it is an undisputed element – perhaps the element – of play. In the present context, it is enough to note that fun does not imply folly or lack of seriousness – quite the opposite ... What keeps [the architect] involved for such long periods of time is that the outcome of the design process is unpredictable: it is the result of chance, as in play. He does not know ahead of time exactly what the result will be. He could save himself a lot of time and look for a similar building to reproduce exactly; but this would make as little sense as building the same house of cards again and again, or solving the same crossword puzzle. The issue here is not originality but fun.

The emphasis in that paragraph is mine.

This weekend, I was reading a New York Times feature on my man Robert Irwin, and I found myself smiling at this:

A favorite term is “participation.” [Irwin] cites, for example, his 1997 transformation of a room that overlooks the Pacific at the La Jolla branch of the San Diego museum. Reasoning that he could not compete with the sweeping view, Mr. Irwin cut three rectangles —squares almost — into the existing windows. “At first I didn’t realize the glass was tinted,” he said. “So not only did my holes let in air and sound, adding another dimension to the experience, but they made everything seen through them appear in greater focus.” You might say he opened the window, that age-old pictorial device, letting in a cool rush of reality.

Once upon a time, I wrote a long post about Irwin’s biography, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Wechsler; when I say that it blew my mind, I mean that the book expanded my mind, made me really think about the way I recognize, interpret and understand the things I see.

Finally: Cormac McCarthy. I’m reaching back in time, back to 1994, back to the night I disgustedly flung my copy of All the Pretty Horses out the window of my apartment. (Later that night, I saw the same copy for sale at 16th and Mission BART). Anyway, I’m willing to reconsider my judgment that McCarthy is no more than a smartypants Zane Grey writing for armchair gauchos. The Road stuck with me, really deeply upset me, and I respect that. So I’m giving him another try, and so far, so good: I got a nice copy of The Border Trilogy, and was quickly transported by the prose, though of course I was reminded of Owen Wilson’s character Eli Cash, in The Royal Tenanbaums. His book, Old Custer, was written in what he characterized as an “obsolete vernacular,” exhibited in this excellent bit:

The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. “Vámonos, amigos,” he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight. [More quotes from the Royal Tenanbaums]

Damn, that’s good.

Washington DC / Fortress of democracy

21 August 2007 in architecture, urban | No comments

If the government buildings are any indication, Washington DC is a city bracing for something. Makeshift barriers surround the Capitol; men with automatic weapons stand watch over random governmental doorways and intersections. Sure, this is no different than other “significant” places in the Western world – London and Frankfurt have their share of fortresses and sentries – but as a citizen and idealist I’d hope that Washington would be different. I’d hope that *we* would do it differently.

Our lawmaking buildings were designed to be approached: Sitting at the head of the Mall’s long runway, the Capitol Building inspires further investigation. Nowadays, if a person (say, me) decides to take a picture of the fences around this beacon of democracy, that person may get reprimanded by a guy with a gun. I’m just saying: It happens.

Anyway, I hope that we’ll search for solutions to the problem of security that don’t run counter to the ideals of democracy: that lawmakers operate in the open, that anyone can see how it’s done (and indeed that everyone should see how it’s done), that people are innocent until proven guilty, and that I’m paying for those fences, dammit, so I should be able to take a picture of them without getting harassed.

UPDATE: Even the new $50 bill emphasizes the approachability of the Capitol.

Check out the little white figures climbing the steps on the left-hand side of the Capitol building. This seems to imply, to me, that people can (and should) walk up the stairs to see what’s happening within the hallowed halls of democracy.

San Francisco / Maps and earthquake shacks

29 May 2007 in architecture, san francisco, the ancient past, urban | 1 comment

This weekend I got an incredible book about San Francisco called San Francisco in Maps & Views. I usually avoid glossy coffee-table historical books because they’re so often filled with disappointments — bad color, bad printing, messy layout, uninspired writing, PLUS they’re really expensive. But THIS ONE. This one is different. The maps are very well-reproduced, high-res and colorful, and all are supported by detailed and surprisingly engaging commentary.

After I got over the initial thrill of using it like a flip-book and watching my neighborhood evolve, I started to notice smaller trends in land-use evolution — a plot labeled “orphan asylum” became “hospital;” many things labeled “cemetary” became “park” or “civic center.” “Dunes” become “the Sunset.”

I was also intrigued by the use of public places as refugee camps after the big one hit in 1906. Apparently, SF carpenters sprang into action and built thousands of makeshift cottages for the earthquake/fire refugees, turning many well-known SF public spaces into refugee camps, including South Park, Dolores Park, and Precita Park, and lots of the then-outlying, undeveloped areas, like the Richmond and the Sunset.

A shack on Bikini Ridge would have been puh-retty sweet. (This is Dolores Park, believe it or not). Photo: Western Neighborhoods Project

As the city began to return to normal a year later, a few of the refugees decided to use the cottages — or, “shacks” as they were commonly known — as more permanent residences. Some industrious people combined multiple shacks into one residence. Incredibly, a few shacks are still around, and naturally folks have organized to preserve them. (Here’s a 2002 Chronicle article about efforts to save some shacks in the outer Sunset).

I believe that this is the house that is listed as 300 Cumberland on the Western Neighborhood Project’s list of known shacks. The crazy thing is that this is at the top of an insanely steep hill, like un-bike-ably steep and long, so it must have been built there rather than transported from Dolores Park. On the other hand, who knows? People were crafty back then, right?

Finally, here’s a map of the locations of the known existing earthquake shacks. Seems like a good project for a weekend afternoon.

Architecture / Teddy Cruz’s urban acupuncture

17 April 2007 in architecture, ecology, urban | 2 comments

Last night, I saw architect Teddy Cruz deliver a fast-paced, idea-rich presentation at the San Francisco Art Institute. In a little over an hour, he tore through a slide show covering his recent work on the social, cultural, political, and economic forces at work in communities along the US-Mexico border. The slide show itself was pretty impressive — a blend of research photography, simple PowerPoint animation, and photo collages (like the ones shown in this post, courtesy of UCSD, where Cruz teaches) that looked somewhat like maps but also somewhat like actual photos of urban density.

I’d first heard of Cruz in the NYT Magazine feature from last spring, Shantytowns as a New Suburban Ideal. It details “Living Rooms at the Border,” his proposed project to turn a lot in the border community of San Ysidro into a multi-use dwelling/community center/market. He discusses it in more detail in “Urban acupuncture”, an article he wrote for Residential Architect Online:

Housing and density need to be seen not as an amount of units but as dwelling in relationship to the larger infrastructure of the city, which includes transportation, ecological networks, the politics and economics of land use, and particular cultural idiosyncrasies of place ... In a parcel where existing zoning allows only three units of housing, the project proposes (through negotiated density bonuses and by sharing kitchens) 12 affordable housing units, a community center resulting from the adaptive reuse of an existing 1927 church, offices for Casa Familiar in the church’s new attic, and a garden underpinning the community’s nonconforming micro-economies, such as street markets and kiosks. In a place where current regulation allows only one use, we propose five different uses that support each other.

Cruz discusses his architectural mission in this article at the American Institute of Architecture’s site: Border Postcard: Chronicles from the Edge.

Art / Robert Irwin, BS, and the importance of questions

29 November 2006 in architecture, inside art, visual | 2 comments

My nomination for All-Time Best Moment In An Art Documentary has to be the “Bullshit!” scene in Concert Of Wills: Making The Getty Center. Abstract-artist-turned-landscape-designer Robert Irwin literally calls bullshit on architect Richard Meier during an important Getty Center planning session. [The object of their disagreement is Irwin’s garden design, pictured at right. Thx, brewbooks.]

Design Observer’s Michael Bierut sums it up nicely in an article called “On (Design) Bullshit:”

The [Getty Foundation], against Meier’s advice, has brought in artist Robert Irwin to create the Center’s central garden. The filmmakers are there to record the unveiling of Irwin’s proposal, and Meier’s distaste is evident. The artist’s bias for whimsical organic forms, his disregard for the architecture’s rigorous orthonography, and perhaps even his Detroit Tigers baseball hat all rub Richard Meier the wrong way, and he and his team of architects begin a reasoned, strongly-felt critique of the proposed plan. Irwin, sensing (correctly, as it turns out) that he has the client in his pocket, listens patiently and then says, “You want my response?”

His response is the worst accusation you can lodge against a designer: “Bullshit.”

If I recall correctly, Meier is speechless, and the mood of the documentary shifts quite significantly. Meier’s personality and viewpoint had dominated (is “domineered” a word?) earlier scenes, he maintains a sort of icy distance in subsequent scenes. (Disclosure: While I respect Meier, I’m not a fan of his work, especially the Getty, and the documentary makes clear that he is, umm, a dick). Irwin, on the other hand, I’ve always loved, especially his dot paintings. I’m currently reading Lawrence Weschsler’s biography of Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, and it contains some useful background and context to the “Bullshit!” scene. It also complicates it; the more I read, the more Irwin and Meier seem to have quite a lot in common. I’d always assumed that Irwin’s vision was the irrational, organic counterpoint to Meier’s rational, geometric forms. The book makes clear that Irwin has quite a lot of the rational geometry on the brain himself. Perhaps they were just too similar to get along.

A large portion of the book is dedicated to Irwin’s discussion of his own process ... My favorite passage involves Irwin’s explanations of the fits and starts that characterized his output, especially during the dot painting phase:

“Most of the time, I didn’t have any idea where it was going; I had no intellectual clarity as to what it was I thought I was doing ... Maybe I was just gradually developing a trust in the act itself, that somehow, if it were pursued legitimately, the questions it would raise would be legitimate and the answers would have to exist somewhere, would be worth pursuing, and would be of consequence.

“Actually, during those years in the midsixties,” he doubled back on his formulation, “the answers seemed to matter less and less: I was becoming much more of a question person than an answer person ... The thing that really struck me as I got into developing my interest in the area of questions,” Irwin continued, “is the degree to which as a culture we are geared for just the opposite. We are past-minded, in the sense that all of our systems of measure are developed and in a sense dependent upon a kind of physical resolution. We tag our renaissances at the highest level of performance, whereas it’s fairly clear to me that once the question is raised, the performance is somewhat inevitable, almost just a mopping-up operation, merely a matter of time.“

Architecture / Front porches, refuge and prospect

11 November 2006 in architecture | No comments

Last summer, NPR did a series on one of my favorite architectural elements — the front porch. An installment from late July covered the use of the porch in contemporary home-building, specifically in New Urbanist (wikipedia entry) developments, such as Seaside, Florida and other pseudo-quaint “towns”. (More on my problems with New Urbanism another time).

The most intriguing part of the show, for me, was an allusion to the psychology of the home, and the fact that a large part of recent home-building has focused on the home as a fortress, a defensible space, rather than a vantage from which to observe and interact with the world. This was my introduction to the prospect-refuge concept; prospect representing the ability to survey the surrounding landscape, and refuge serving as a hideaway from the world. It’s simplistic, but I like it and I believe it, insofar as I can believe any theoretical concept can describe the fundamental needs of everyday life. Universal Principles of Design has a good overview, with lots of interesting related material as well.

Architecture / Daniel Libeskind’s sauna

26 August 2006 in architecture, ixd, new york, urban, visual | No comments

A few months ago, the NYT Sunday magazine ran a profile of architect Daniel Libeskind and his Tribeca loft. (Incidentally, check out that link to his website; there’s some pretty hot flouting of web conventions. For example, when you mouse over a link, almost everything on the screen disappears, except a few stray words and the other links. Hmm.) Anyway, the most memorable part of the magazine article was a photo of the interior of his sauna. In it was a very small window, perhaps 18 inches high by 4 inches wide, and through that window the saun-ee could achieve a compactly framed view of the Chrysler Building. How cool is that? The image here shows the architect’s rendering of the different landmarks visible from vantages within the loft. Neato.

Architecture / 560 Mission

24 April 2006 in architecture, visual | No comments

I ride down Mission Street everyday, and I always admire the JP Morgan Chase building at 560 Mission between First and Second Street. Most buildings in downtown SF are earth-toned, and riding among them can feel like flashing back to the Gap in the early 90’s — putty, mauve, beige, taupe, moss. In contrast, the Morgan building has black steel-and-glass facade with a greenish tint, pleasantly blending erector-set orderliness with an aquarium-like glow. Today I found out it was designed by Cesar Pelli, aka the guy/firm behind the Petronas Towers. Each architect in this review of recent architecture in the SF Business Journal describes 560 Mission as their favorite recent SF project.

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