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The Future of Architecture, or “Staying Alive” 8 April 2010

“FuturTecture,” the seventh Designer Pages presentation, held at Manhattan’s Mohawk showroom, featured five Cornellians who are senior members at their respective firms. Introduced by Kristen Richards, of Oculus and ArchNewsNow.com, and moderated by Bloomberg architecture critic James Russell, the panel featured Dan Kaplanof FXFOWLE Architects (where I work), Mustafa Abadan of SOM, Todd Schliemann of Polshek, Marianne Kwok of KPF, and Scott Johnson of Richard Meier and Partners.

“Which firm or person have you found truly innovative?” opened the forum, and responses ran the gamut from the self-congratulatory, as Johnson praised Richard Meier and fellow US Embassy London competitors, to praise for the typical starchitects: Ban, Chipperfield, Nouvel for his Louvre Abu Dhabi and reinventing his “style” with each project, a praise reiterated for Renzo Piano. Surprising mentions went to BIG and Barkow Leibinger. The consensus uniting these practitioners is their continuously fresh approach to context and process, which consistently yields entirely new solutions, debatably, for each project.

The economy is forcing architects to pursue nearly any and every job to keep the books in the black. A fittingly tough question following from this situation zeroed in on where work in this economy. Russell interrogated, “Are there inappropriate projects, clients, or places to pursue work?” Kwok politically stated that KPF interviews clients as much as they get interviewed, while Kaplan forthright replied that FXFOWLE shies away from clients and places where design integrity could be compromised. Others, unlike during the rest of the panel discussion, shied from the question with little or nothing to add.

Russell, finally getting to the meat of the discussion’s title,, “What is the future of architecture?” Dan erupted, “Staying alive!” which elicited several nervous giggles. No less serious emerged the topics of sustainability, technology, and innovation. Johnson cited changing paradigms of representation, “From plastic lead on mylar to computers, know when to engage and when to step back. You can get completely absorbed.” This led Schliemann to criticize the younger generation who effortlessly navigates new software but at the expense of drawing, “They don’t have plans in their portfolios and they draw like sixth graders.” Johnson added, “They don’t understand scale.”

Kwok, returned the conversation to innovation and that “unfortunately it takes six years to test these ideas, which could fail as Fallingwater’s cantilevers did.” Schliemann, prodded by Russell’s dialectic of a functional or iconic architecture, posited the rhetorical question, “What do you want, a sealed box or an innovative symbol? The latter may leak but it still fulfills its primary function.”

The perceived industry shift from object-oriented architecture to one of systems – building envelopes, integration, and behavior rallied the panel. “Why would you put brick on a 50-story building? It’s crazy, but it’s tradition. We should look at the car industry where prototypes and iterative testing occur and new materials and processes inform the process.” Part of this problem resides inherently in the industry. Kaplan clarified, “a revolution in architecture would be in the building industry and a move toward a manufacturing base.” Most panelists lauded the building industries in Germany and Japan for practicing wide-spread customization and observing minute tolerances, something sadly lacking in the US construction industry.

During the Q and A, lighting designer Leni Schwendiger asked if the future of architecture was territorial rather than being about the object. Kaplan’s response, optimistic words in a particularly depressive economy, “It’s about the context and design of individual buildings that will build a positive future.”

Megascale at Center for Architecture 04.02.10

Moshe Safdie spoke tonight at the Center for Architecture in New York. The lecture, entitled "Megascale, Order and Complexity," gave a brief account of the archtect's beginnings with Habitat '67 and quickly moved to his contmporary work in the U.S., India, Israel, and Singapore. Safdie's work is most certainly on the order of megascale - monolithic and of slightly tweaked primary forms. How does one really mediate that degree of scale with the human? That was a question left, at least expicitly, unanswered. Implied was movement and views - all projects had some promenade architecurale. Especially the already iconic and timeless image (by Timothy Hursley) of the Yad Vashem axis-projection. The subjects of order and complexity were a little more lightly tread. One project, the ArtScience Museum for the Singapore harbor, examined simplifying geometry to make structure rationale and economic.

Magda Biernat at Clic

Photos from a year around the world. Highlights are unusual pod-like buildings in Taiwan. The show is up at Clic (424 Broome, NYC) until March. Her work will be on display in the FXFOWLE Gallery starting in May. Stay tuned for more details.

Swimming with the Red Fish

Last night was my third classical concert at Le Poisson Rouge. The first was Tamara Stefanovich (Bartók, Carter, Ligeti, and Rachmaninoff), followed by Taka Kigawa (Debussy, Ferneyhough, Dai Fujikura, and Stravinsky - Boulez as the encore), both on piano. And then last night, Johannes Moser and Phyllis Chen on electric cello and piano/toy piano, respectively,with a few computer and and assorted analog sounds thrown in as they performed Shostakovich, Debussy, and Stockhausen (see photo). Not a classical aficionado I really enjoyed the concerts at Poisson Rouge: great acoustics, intimate setting, and a relaxed environment.

Throwing Light on a Glass House - 28 Jan. 2010

I was reminded tonight of the genius of Pierre Chareau, the French architect who from 1928 to 1932 designed and built the Maison de Verre. Having first encountered this building through a small exhibition and then through Yukio Futagawa's all-encompassing tome La Maison De Verre, Pierre Chareau, I gave little thought to the house in the past few years. The memory of that building was resurrected by Robert M. Rubin's lecture at the Architecture Center. Since 2005 he has owned and been restoring the Maison de Verre. A process he revealed through historical photos, documents (including a rare announcement of a Walter Benjamin lecture at the residence that never occurred there), renovation documentation and computer diagrams. As Mr. Rubin is currently a doctoral candidate and enmeshed in academia, I certainly hope this work in progress finds its way into a richly documented publication.

Scoring Xenakis

Engineer, architect, and musician Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), most noted amongst the architecture community for his work with Le Corbusier, made key contributions on La Tourette and the Phillips Pavilon and concrete music. The extenisive exhibition at the Drawing Center's main gallery, while starting with a few architectural drawings and photos, focuses primarily on his scores for music and installation-events, notations for, essentially, event-architecture. The score sinterestingly range from seemingly extremely objective and scientific to the other end of the spectrum, subjective and purely interpretive. Videos correlate his intricate and abstract scores to their accompanying music - one tracks the score to the music making the one-to-one relation clear.

Grant Hart at the Knitting Factory 15 January 2010

Grant played a smokin' show at the Knitting Factoryin Brooklyn last night strumming out about 45 minutes of songs of yore from Husker Du - "Don't Want to Know if You Are Lonely" and "You're a Soldier" with cuts off his most recent release Hot Wax - opening with "You're the Reflection of the Moon on the Water."
See him in March 27 at the 92Y in Tribeca.

Happy New Year Two Oh Ten

After a long hiatus and a new year semi-resolution the site is back with some new posts.
Good luck in the new year!

Memory is Fiction

"Space is a fiction. Space is not one thing. It's a thing that keeps being other things. It's culturaly specific. It's poetically specific. And above all, it's completely imaginary." - Anish Kapoor

In an interview by Daniel Miller with Anish Kapoor and Sandhini Poddhar, 28 November 2008, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Copyright VernissageTV

Installation view: Artwork © Anish Kapoor Photo: Mathias Schormann © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York Anish Kapoor Memory, 2008 Cor-Ten steel, 14.5 x 9 x 4.5m Commissioned by Deutsche Bank in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin

See the amazing installation of Anish Kapoor's Memory at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NYC until March 28, 2010. If you've seen Cloud Gate at Millenium Park, Chicago, imagine experiencing the opposite: turn it inside out and see it only from three different perspectives. I really want to crawl inside.