September 02, 2010
I have been amiss, becaused of my alleged vacation, in not responding to two comments on my article on developments at Ground Zero. First, there is a clarification from the critic Judith Dobrzynski (whom I quoted in my piece).
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August 31, 2010
The winners of the Golden Lions in Venice on Saturday provoked the usual reaction: “You’re kidding.” Nobody, including this blogger and former Biennale curator, had expected them. The one for lifetime achievement was already known—Rem Koolhaas—and it is difficult to argue with that. The Golden Lion for an individual artist, though, went to Junya Ishigami, for a project that only the jury saw: a construction of monofilament meant to describe at full scale a roughly 12-foot cube building to be constructed “somewhere in Europe” out of material so thin that it's almost invisible—would have been difficult to find if one of the Biennale’s resident cats had not crept into the Arsenale the night before the preview and destroyed most of it. Cats are harsh architecture critics, as is widely known, but this seemed like a particularly ham-pawed reaction. Nonetheless, I certainly did not see what the jury saw, either literally or figuratively.
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August 27, 2010
This year's Venice Architecture Biennale is a reduction. There are fewer pieces, the objects and images are more minimal, and the ambitions are less overarching. What is also remarkable is who is missing: Other than Rem Koolhaas and Toyo Ito, none of the much-derided "starchitects" are here—Frank Gehry is only in the Biennale headquarters offices, there is no Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Thom Mayne, Daniel Libeskind, or any of the English high-tech lords. A new generation, less interested in large gestures and changing the world, dominates.
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August 23, 2010
This morning, I installed my birthday present: a George Nelson "cigar" lamp. As fresh and sensuous of form as when it was designed, the lamp will help me fight the dimming of the days in months to come. Inside the package, however, was a nasty surprise: a compact fluorescent. Is nothing sacred?
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August 19, 2010
Have you ever wondered how architects manage to get splashy buildings over on clients and the public? They say things such as: “Changes in architectural fashion do not divert ... [us] from our chief objective to fulfill the needs of the people who will use our buildings. A prime concern in the design of our buildings is to create environments which encourage the human spirit, while incorporating state-of-the-art technology.” That bit of pablum is the philosophy of Davis Brody Bond Aedas (DBB), according to the World Architects website.
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