loud paper

something familiar

While I was checking out Santiago Calatrava's Chord Bridge in Jerusalem, my Berkeley-based parents hit the road. Engineering fans, they grabbed lattes, jumped in the SUV, and drove to Redding, CA to see the designer's 2004 Sun Dial Bridge. Crossing the Sacramento, the  pedestrian bridge connects the walking trails with the Turtle Bay Exploration Park and McConnell Arboretum.

From my dad, the electrical engineer and cub reporter:

Dear Mimi

I am attaching some photos of the Sun Dial bridge for your Calatrava collection.

It is not very noticeable from afar, but many of the surfaces at the abutements and elsewhere including the pathlights are covered in white broken ceramic tile ala Antonio Gaudi

Also the bridge cable stays penetrate the deck off-center and after awhile I began to be aware of it and that made be think about how that was accomplished structurally and it balancing act that was neatly done.

The single spire support tower was beautifully shaped steel clad, painted white. There was a small access panel for maintenance at the bottom near the ground, but that is only hole or blemish on the entire surface.

The glass deck was a interesting thing to experience as you at first thought it might be clear and you could look down to the river below because of the brightness of the green-glass, but no, the glass is actually more translucent, and seeing down is impossible.

Actually, the deck is lighted from below at night from floodlights attached to the understructure, totally concealed from view.  To bad is could not experience the nighttime drama of the bridge.

The spire actually casts its shadow onto a ceramic covered "curb", that lays a grassy stretch and has brass inset time—markers, and so a local Redding booster named the bridge the "Sun Dial Bridge", as he liked the cache and all that.

Lots of public interaction with the bridge, and obvious delight, was apparent from watching the crowds: bikers, strollers, wedding party.

Love, Dad

traveling for tiny (or it's a small world, afterall)

In the early days of this blog I was obsessed with miniatures. One of my first posts linked to the tiny ceramic apartment buildings offered by the Bauhaus Center in Tel Aviv. Well, now after two twelve hour flights; a week-long press junket in Israel (a boondoggle, says a friend); and a visit to the opening of Calatrava's lovely, but not without a slew of issues, bridge in Jerusalem (pics); I have my very own wee White City replica. A model of the Bauhaus apartment building on Yehuda Halevi St. 58, scaled 1:270.

In 2003 UNESCO declared that the city of Tel Aviv a World Cultural Heritage site, owing to over 4,000 Bauhaus buildings which are spread over the city. Tel Aviv is a super-cosmopolitan and is quickly gentrifying. The same apartment buildings that spent the better part of the last century crumbling into themselves are now hot commodities. Changed development regulations encourages preservation by allowing additions and expansions. It is a weird trade-off and results are certainly mixed: some apartment buildings are beautifully restored, some still moldering, and others, with two or three new floor of construction resemble Bauhaus wedding cakes. Can I get a huppa?

For more of a taste of the variety Tel Aviv architecture, check out Open House Tel Aviv, architect Alon Bin Nun modeled the weekend event on the New York City shindig.

Doing the funky chicken:
On another note, can someone explain the chickens at PF1 (Public Farm 1)? Does poultry and dancing really mix anywhere except at weddings?

department of building and power

Loud paper contributor Alexis Bhagat sends over a call for submissions for Anarchitecture / Building / Power, an issue of the Perspectives on Anarchist Theory journal. The issue is guest edited by Alexis Bhagat, Francesca Manning and Etienne Turpin:

The editors of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory are seeking essays, photo-essays, project documentation, interviews and book reviews for an issue of theoretical, practical and activist engagements with architecture and urbanism.

Theory & History: ANARCHITECTURE We are seeking anarchist reflections on the relationship between social change and the built environment, the peculiar relationship of modern construction to capitalism, and aphorisms that fumble towards an anarchist theory of the city.

Practice: BUILDING We are seeking documentation of alternative practices in the built environment, detailed discussions of alternative models of property or the architecture of anarchist communes, discussion of vernacular architectures and practical examples of autonomous construction.

Struggle: POWER Domination unfolds in space: How have people challenged domination in space? We are interested in everything here from professionals engaged in combating Eminent Domain / displacement and grassroots organizations challenging the spatial agenda of the War on Drugs/Terror to collective efforts to reimagine the city and private spatial experiments in freedom.

We welcome finished essays as well as proposals for new work. If you are interested in writing for this issue, but do not have a specific topic, please send us a statement of interest and we may provide you with a project to respond to. We also welcome suggestion of projects / actions that we should consider.

anarchitecture@nadalex.net

This issue will be published in Spring 2009. Statements of interest, suggestions and proposals for new essays should be submitted by July 15th, 2008. A statement of interest is not required for submissions of completed works: Completed works may be submitted before September 15th, 2008. (Please inform us if any submissions have been published previously.) Final drafts of all submissions will be due in December 2008.

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory is the publication of the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), a nonprofit foundation established in 1996 to support the development of anarchism. The aim of the IAS is to promote critical scholarship that explores social domination and reconstructive visions of a free society. Primarily, the IAS is a grant-giving body, supporting work by radical writers. To date, the IAS has funded almost sixty projects by authors from countries around the world, including Argentina, Canada, New Zealand, Lebanon, Chile, Ireland, Nigeria, Mexico, the Philippines, Germany, Uruguay, South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the United States. Additionally, the IAS annually organizes the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference in Vermont and the Radical Theory Track at the National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR).

now everyone hearts haertling

From what I can ascertain talking to the friends and family of the late Charles Haertling, the Boulder-area architect was passionately devoted to the natural world and to radical, forward-thinking architecture. His designs blend the two into an organic style totally his own, unabashedly. I wrote a portrait of Haertling and his work for the Archive section of this month's Dwell. I think it captures his iconoclastic dedication to architecture. I couldn't have done it without the help of my lovely and talented friends, graphic designer and artist Laura Haertling (his daughter) and photographer Cody Andresen, who directed me the work and connected me to the rest of the family and to clients. Thank you.

Below, Brenton House, 1969, a foam and steel wonder that made a brief appearance in Woody Allen's Sleeper.

Here is a black and white PDF of the piece, sadly, it isn't online and my copy of Dwell hasn't arrived to get a crisp color version.

Download Dwell_retrospective_july_august_2008.pdf

  

trip the elastic fantastic

Big props to Archinect's Aaron Plewke who managed to wrangle reviews of MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition out of a bunch of ne'er-do-well architects, designers, and thinkers. My contribution (an extension of wig in a box) is included among a fine bunch: Brian Moroz, Rosten Woo (who nails review with the line "...being there feels less like stuffy MoMA and more like being at a world’s fair or Expo 86"), Michael Surtees, Adam Greenfield (blessedly barbed as ever), Addie Wagenknecht, and Fred Scharmen. The exhibit is kinda great and kinda muddled. Having seven reviewers wade through it doesn't exactly create a common consensus as much as it surveys the messy territory. On the other hand, since the show feels like it springs from Internet culture, it seems homey and appropriate to have multiple posts.

Everyone's featured here.

fwd: thinking

Braulio of Architect magazine just wrote in to say that his new blog, Fwd: Architecture, is finally live. I've been on the receiving end of his link-filled emails for awhile, so I know that he's got great, broad taste in architecture, music, and tech.

And I am totally biased, since Fwd: Architecture's second post links to an article I wrote on 4-D Cities. That piece covers research going on at Georgia Tech. The team's developing software that creates a 4-D virtual model of the urban environment out of historic and new photographs. If it resembles Photosynth, that's because both spring from the same research department and have similar core code. But 4-D Cities adds a snazzy timeline to the program making it possible to time travel the model.

pink and green

This weekend is the AIA Conference in Boston, exciting, no? No.

Sure, I'll roam the expo floor, but I am really going to Beantown for the new exhibition, Parti Wall, Hanging Green, at pinkcomma gallery. The show features some of my fave firms, young offices that I've been lucky enough to write about or work with over the last couple of years, including: Höweler + Yoon Architecture; MOS; over,under; Studio Luz Architects; and UNI. I love it when the world gets small.

Here's the info:

Ten emerging architecture and design firms collaborated to create a prototype green wall. The planted installation will be suspended from a blank brick surface on the newly converted loft building at 90 Wareham Street in Boston’s South End. The five-story-high structure will be visible from the entrance to the gallery, where the installation’s collaborative design process and works of individual firms will be on display. The ten firms—all of which were formed in the last six years—joined together to establish the Young Architects Boston Group in January. The group’s prototype green wall will illustrate how Boston’s scattered brick surfaces could become opportunities for zero footprint public art that improves the city visually and environmentally.

Friday, May 16, 2008
Viewing, 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
After Party, 10:00 p.m. - midnight

pinkcomma gallery
81B Wareham Street, Boston, Massachusetts

gone fishing

Last week I watched a team of artisans paint fake moss on a fake Cyprus tree, which soaks in a fake swamp intended for very real alligators (including an albino one). I was on a building tour of the California Academy of Science in San Francisco, home of the Steinhart Aquarium. In addition to a research center, offices, exhibits, dioramas, and fish tanks, the building contains a spherical planetarium, the form mirrored by a four-story rainforest biosphere. Let’s not forget the three different interactive aquariums, holding up to 100,000 gallons of water each. On top, a green roof planted with native species molds itself over the whole kit and caboodle.

Renzo Piano is given due credit as architect, but the building is so complex even that term seems to be overreaching. So then, who to laud? Arup did a bang up job with the sustainability, MEP, and structural features.  Stantec Architecture (formerly Chong Partners Architecture) is the architect of record. Rana Creek Living Architecture consulted on the living roof. And there are exhibition designers Thinc and Cinnabar, aquarium experts PBS&J, and the dozens of people who hand-painted the tide pools…or the rollercoaster designer who was called in to craft the helix ramp in the rainforest.   

Consider the photo above: I took this shot from within a 9-inch-thick acrylic tunnel, looking through a 100,000-gallon tank (the flooded Amazon rainforest will eventually contain arapaima, giant catfish, vegetarian piranhas, and a giant anaconda) and into the curve of the glass biosphere. That dappled light is from the skylights punched in the living roof.

An interlocking network of designers, contractors, engineers, and artisans isn’t really unique (well, until you start adding scientists, biologists, and 38,000 animals), but maybe, just maybe, it chips away at the starchitect mantle.

prairie style

Via.

The March 31 issue of the New Yorker features a droll short story by Jeffrey Eugenides. Set in Chicago, Great Experiment mixes doses of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with a former-Baffler proofreader’s midlife crisis. Straight out of the gate it offers a blissfully succinct critique of green building:

The gray Gothic stone of the Tribune Tower, the black steel of the Mies building just next door—these weren’t the colors of the new Chicago. Developers were listening to Danish architects who were listening to nature, and so the latest condominium towers were going organic. They had light-green facades and undulating rooflines, like blades of grass bending in the wind.

There had been a prairie here once. The condos told you so.

Just wait until he describes the interiors of the hip and aging. Spot on, Beck poster included. Also, check out Eugenides’ sweeping and perverse Middlesex—it is one of my all-time favorite reads.

whether underground

Early on in Rob Walker’s upcoming book, Buying In: the Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, he discusses the “new consumer’s” slightly irrational obsession with authenticity. He writes:

While evoked constantly, the word is seldom defined. But one can presume that the authentic symbol is grounded in some kind of empirical, provable reality—that if you burrow down behind it, you will find exactly the things that the symbol purports to represent.

I was reading an advance copy of Rob’s book on the train up to Columbia on Monday night, so it was still resonating in my head as took my seat for Ant Farm: Radical Hardware, a panel discussion featuring Ant Farm members, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, and moderated by professors Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta. Ant Farm’s the kind of countercultural, prankster, media-savvy, architecturally off-the-wall group for whom I always have a soft spot. The sixties/seventies work is great, but also kind of awful: equal parts spectacle, pop, psychedelia, hi-tech, and Krazy Kat. A postcard of their piece, Media Burn (1975), where they drove a tricked-out Cadillac into a wall of burning TVs used to hang above my desk. If anyone was looking to latch onto something authentic, this was it.

Ant Farm’s been on the university circuit before, but what were these former radicals doing this time around in an academic institution, aside from helping Scott promote her new book on their work? Were they not there as authentic symbols of a history rapidly being embraced by architecture historians, even as they were brushed off when contemporary? Introducing the panel, Dean Mark Wigley, who likes to stir the pot a bit, remarked that Ant Farm’s appearance and exhibition at the Buell Center was not nostalgic, but all about the future.

And yes, in some ways it is. Scott and Wasiuta awkwardly attempted to mine the seventies oil crisis, environmental architecture, and communal living scene for its present day resonances, but seemed more comfortable in the past, focusing on the pre-Media Burn work. By contrast, Lord and Schreier, as working artists/architects fully versed in television and web 2.0, and with new installations in the works, made fluid leaps into today. Their easy demeanor was real, yet somehow dismissible (or dismissed) within the lecture auditorium context.

Lord summed it up best in a quip: “How to make subversion suitable for the institution? Add time.”