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.
28 Oct 08 · filed under: architecture, the ancient past · 
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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 ...
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05 Mar 08 · filed under: architecture, new york, travel, urban · (1) ·
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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 ...
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17 Oct 07 · filed under: architecture, ideas, lit · (0) ·
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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 ...
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21 Aug 07 · filed under: architecture, urban · (0) ·
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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. ...
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29 May 07 · filed under: architecture, san francisco, the ancient past, urban · (0) ·
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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 ...
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17 Apr 07 · filed under: architecture, ecology, urban · (0) ·
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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 ...
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29 Nov 06 · filed under: architecture, inside art, visual · (2) ·
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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.
11 Nov 06 · filed under: architecture · (0) ·
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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.
26 Aug 06 · filed under: architecture, ixd, new york, urban, visual · (2) ·
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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.
24 Apr 06 · filed under: architecture, visual · (0) ·
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Located among in suburban Hartford, CT's office parks, strip malls and golf courses, the corporate headquarters of CIGNA are unexpectedly cool. Reason 1: A ROBOT delivers mail to each department. Reason 2: The building itself is low-lying and sleek, with green-tinted windows that, on sunny days, disappear into the sky. It was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, who also designed the stunning Beinecke Library at Yale and won the Pritzker Prize in 1988, and it's surrounded by gardens, courtyards and sculpture by landscaping badass Isamu Noguchi. A couple of years ago, CIGNA considered tearing the building down and selling the land to a golf course developer, but architectural preservationists intervened. CIGNA staffmembers often joked about this, the subtext being, "Can you believe that anyone would want to preserve this?" [A NYT article from 2001 details the debate]
UPDATE: The Hartford Courant recently published a grateful editorial about CIGNA's decision to preserve the ...
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22 Apr 06 · filed under: architecture, visual · (0) ·
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