July 29, 2010
Does a building have to be ugly to be good? OK, that is an overstatement. Let me try again: Does a building have to be mediocre in its appearance and the experience you have there to meet higher standards of environmental sustainability? That, to me at least, is the nub of the four-sided debate that has arisen between the editors of Vanity Fair, Chicago Tribune critic Blair Kamin, L.A. Times critic Christopher Hawthorne, and this site’s own Lance Hosey.
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July 26, 2010
As announced last Thursday, Snøhetta has won the commission for the expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This is the most significant commission in the cultural arena after the crash of 2008, and promises to provide a major addition to this country’s stock of cultural monuments. The selection also marks the coming of age of a new generation of architects specializing in this field, replacing the list headlined by the likes of Piano, Gehry, Koolhaas, and Herzog & de Meuron that has dominated competitions and selection processes for the last decade.
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July 22, 2010
"And opening the window of his cell he pointed out with his finger the immense church of Notre–Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches, seemed an enormous two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle of the city. The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence, then extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left towards Notre–Dame, and turning a sad glance from the book to the church,—“'Alas'” he said, 'this will kill that.'" This, one of the most devastating moments for buildings in world literature, comes in the fifth book of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
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July 19, 2010
Doug and Mike Starn have gotten to Manhattan’s bones. Their new piece of art, Big Bambu, is a construction of over 18,000 pieces of bamboo (and counting) lashed together with climbling rope and currently rising on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof. After being under construction for over four months you can now finally get a sense of the whole artwork, even though it has as much to go. It is not only a forest that creates vistas among moments of intensity, but it also seems to me like the essence of Central Park.
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July 14, 2010
What is it with the Germans that they think that the best solution to a bad past is to tear down what remains of it? In the latest attempt to raze (as opposed to raise) history, the heads of the German architecture and art professionals organizations want to tear down the German Pavilion in the Giardini, the site of the Venice Art and Architecture Biennale. Banality would be a reason to tear the structure down, and the President of the German version of the AIA claims that it is the building’s rigidity and lack of connection to Venice that argues for its demolition. On that count, however, you would have to tear down every country pavilion in the Giardini, thus reinforcing Venice’s sense that nothing has gone right since the 17th century.
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