The following is an excerpt from Building Sights, a BBC TV series which features famous works of architecture around Europe and the US– and the architects, artists, writers, and celebrities who provide short essays describing them. The parallels struck me immediately. Replace “Glasgow School of Art” with “Cooper Union” in Bruce McLean’s essay, and […]
Category: Architecture
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Flirting with Orchestration
Architects are extant Renaissance Men. Vassily L. As little as I hate to contradict or in any way undermine the prevailing layman’s impressions of architects and their profession… there is one niggling stereotype concerning one key task…. While not misconstruing this task, the stereotype does vastly shortchange it. It is so commonly allowed to subsist […]
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A New Verticality
The first question is: are humans endowed with limits– are we endowed with yokes? The answer is yes, and there is one specific yoke which I wish to highlight, one of a highly fundamental nature. It is horizontality. And it’s getting to be a burden. Our sense of physical reality is shaped almost across the […]
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Between a rock and a wet place
Yesterday afternoon I left the office for lunch. With my food I walked into the public plaza behind 776 6th Avenue in search for a place to sit. On one side there were stainless steel chairs and tables: elevated, new, and shiny. Across from them were long red granite benches; low, unassuming, and blending with […]
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Bedeviling details
Architects thrive in the jack-of-all-trades role. We fantasize about being great designers, and great builders, and great theoreticians, and great teachers, and great dressers…. But, of course, consummating a union of all aspects of building is difficult to achieve consistently on every single project, particularly the theoretician part, particularly still in the early years when recognition and craft are still developing. Imagine a […]
Lebbeus Woods called Michelangelo’s sketches one step in “the risky task of invention.” The intense precision of his lines and how ahead of their time they are– still fresh to look at, conjuring many associations– bring to my mind the peculiar case of how architecture evolves. Invention is violence. The conflict of ideas against reality. This profession, […]
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Meet me at Grand Central
Christian and I gave an architectural walking tour of midtown in September (titled “Outreach To The Elderly”). In writing it, we were ourselves surprised to discover an elegant distillation of the architectural merit of Grand Central Terminal, and a simple explanation of what architects mean by “space.” One of the unique challenges of URBAN […]
To those who haven’t watched it, this video gives some good insight into the players behind the MoMA expansion, and some good counter-arguments from the panel. Times are tough at DS+R, their feet are in some muck. Liz Diller’s presentation comes across as stilted and uninventive, which is strange coming from a firm that has successfully championed […]
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Specters of Cooper
These thoughts have taken a while to put down, partly because of so many implications in each (you will see the drift to rant mode)…. The Cooper Union’s current predicament is shitty, no matter what road is taken. However, the shittiest fact to swallow is that there seems to be an unwillingness to take risks […]
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Adaptability, Part II
This now can attach in seamless step to the end of my last post on adaptability— concluding with the thought that upcoming architectural typologies, building technologies, and client mentalities are to benefit more than anything from the ability to change and morph harmonically with their surroundings. At this moment I am most interested in the […]