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Jul

2009

Architecture - Kisho Kurokawa’s Future Vision, Banished to Past - NYTimes.com

Ourossoff raises some important question regarding heritage and preservation - who gets to decide (and why) that something should be preserved, and why is 20th century modernism still neglected?
QUOTE
How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations?
UNQUOTE

www.nytimes.com/...07capsule.html

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tokyo architecture modernism kisho_kurokawa nicolai_ouroussoff metabolism capsule_tower

How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations?
Those are the questions that instantly come to mind over the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s historic Nakagin Capsule Tower.
9 more annotation(s)...
- A rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence, the 1972 Capsule Tower is in a decrepit state. Its residents, tired of living in squalid, cramped conditions, voted two years ago to demolish it and are now searching for a developer to replace it with a bigger, more modern tower. That the building is still standing has more to do with the current financial malaise than with an understanding of its historical worth.
- The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal.
- Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan’s transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.
- The Nakagin Capsule Tower was completed as the movement’s influence was beginning to wane. Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.
- But the project’s lasting importance has more to do with its structural innovations, and how they reflect the Metabolists’ views on the evolution of cities. Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.
- In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.
- But the issue is not just the fate of this one building; it is why certain landmarks — in Japan and throughout the developed world — are preserved, and others are not. Dozens of private houses, after all, from Palladian villas to late Modernist masterpieces, have been lovingly restored over the years, some in worse condition than the tower. Government agencies and nonprofit groups have also put significant amounts of money toward the restoration of important civic works.
- But when an aging Kurokawa pleaded with the apartment owners to save his masterpiece, he got nowhere. And after his death two years ago, few preservationists rallied to the building’s defense. There’s been no serious effort to look into what exactly it would cost to retrofit the 140 units. Nor has any institution, public or private, stepped up with a viable plan for how to save it.
  Why is that so? Partly it is because all over the world, postwar architecture is still treated with a measure of suspicion by the cultural mainstream, which often associates it with brutal city housing developments or clinical office blocks. Partly, too, it has to do with the nature of housing blocks in general. They are not sexy investments; they do not feed an investor’s vanity or offer the cultural prestige that owning a landmark house does.
  But another concern is that all too often, private developments like the Capsule Tower, no matter how historically important, are regarded in terms of property rights. They are about business first, not culture. Governments don’t like to interfere; the voices of preservationists are shrugged off. “Want to save it?” the prevailing sentiment goes. “Pay for it.”
  Until that mentality changes, landmarks like Kurokawa’s will continue to be threatened by the wrecking ball, and the cultural loss will be tremendous. This is not only an architectural tragedy, it is also a distortion of history.

Apr

2008

New Urbanists Point the Way Forward by Catesby Leigh, City Journal 18 April 2008

"The New Urbanism and suburban sprawl have something in common: they’re uncool. New Urbanism is uncool because it is basically traditional; modernism is still the thing in architecture, notes Andrés Duany, the most influential New Urbanist."

For some reason, City Journal is impossible to annotate (neither highlights and consequently "stickies" work), which is too bad. Some good ideas in this article, but I can't mark it up.

www.city-journal.org/...bc0418cl.html

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urbanism new_urbanism suburbia sprawl smartgrowth density modernism architecture style city_journal

A gifted crew of architects and planners, they have changed the conversation about urban planning in the United States. They reject conventional postwar developers’ essentially quantitative, two-dimensional, single-use-oriented blueprints for residential subdivisions and office parks in favor of a qualitative, three-dimensional, mixed-use approach to designing neighborhoods and towns that generally involves reliance on traditional architectural styles.
To make the most of these changing public preferences, the New Urbanists need to focus on a vision that supports the resurgence of an architectural culture—which is precisely what we haven’t got now.
1 more annotation(s)...
- Perhaps the New Urbanists should cherish their outsider status. A gifted crew of architects and planners, they have changed the conversation about urban planning in the United States. They reject conventional postwar developers’ essentially quantitative, two-dimensional, single-use-oriented blueprints for residential subdivisions and office parks in favor of a qualitative, three-dimensional, mixed-use approach to designing neighborhoods and towns that generally involves reliance on traditional architectural styles.

Jan

2008

Städtezerfall: München verschwindet

- interesting article on Munich's "caught in aspic/ amber" mentality of resisting modernism, as well as height, which relates to Social-Democrat long-time mayor Georg Kronawitter's argument that Munich must be small and surveyable, which the author argues contributed to rent inflation and exacerbated problems of affordability generally. Kronawitter also had this dimwit idea that no new buildings anywhere in Munich could exceed the Frauenkirche (99m) in height.

www.faz.net/...4EF~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

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architecture faz georg_kronawitter heritage modernism munich urbanplanning

Dec

2007

Britain's Lost Cities by Gavin Stamp - Times Online

- review of Gavin Stamp's "Britain's Lost Cities, an engrossing, no-punches-pulled denunciation of the wilful destruction of our urban landscape since the 1930s..."

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/...article3050987.ece

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architecture britain cities modernism redevelopment style urban_renewal

What the Luftwaffe began, arrogant, philistine town planners finished off. Now a new study names the guilty men, Stephen McClarence says
5 more annotation(s)...
- Stamp describes today's Bradford, one of the 19 cities whose fate he chronicles, as a pale shadow of “the dense, complex and lively pre-war city recorded in old photographs”. Seething with elegant outrage, he hits out at planners who have vandalised so much of its almost exclusively Victorian fabric.
  They sent in the bulldozers and wrecking balls, replacing arcades, markets and warehouses with buildings that were either dreary or dreadful and which systematically squandered the city's dignity. “As in other cities,” he writes, “the inadequate and unnecessary postwar rebuilding of Bradford now seems a criminal waste of money, energy and materials.”
  - Yule Heibel on 2007-12-22
    - I guess now we can fathom the *real* secret affinity between Victoria, BC and the UK, because similar trends were inflicted on the former, too...
  Add Sticky Note
- Until the 20th century, he points out, change in cities “tended to be piecemeal, occasional and organic”, even though Victorian railway companies ruthlessly slashed their lines through anything in their path.
  The religion of the motor car changed all that. Councils dismembered their cities to build ring roads, flyovers and car parks. They used any excuse for demolition — that old buildings had a limited life; that Victorian architecture was at best unfashionable, at worst sinfully ugly; that the mess left by Luftwaffe raids needed tidying up.
  The Nazis became convenient scapegoats for plans already under way. Coventry's medieval Butcher Row was razed in 1936, four years before the first bombers flew in. It had become, the Lord Mayor sniffed, “a blot on the city”. Planners in Canterbury welcomed the wartime destruction and set about their own.
  - Yule Heibel on 2007-12-22
    - the rule of the automobile -- also sometimes characterized as the city's "suburbanization" -- certainly contributed to the vandalism of finely stitched urban fabric here, too.
  Add Sticky Note
- Naming names, Stamp tells a tale of neglect, incompetence, philistinism and sheer bloody-minded malice, encapsulated in a comment by Herbert Manzoni, the City Engineer and Surveyor of Birmingham from 1935 to 1963: “I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past,” he said in 1957. “As to Birmingham's buildings, there is little of real worth in our architecture. Its replacement should be an improvement, provided we keep a few monuments as museum pieces to past ages.”
  City after city was blighted with modernist buildings that, in an almost totalitarian way, were obsessed with function and efficiency and often looked like multistorey car parks, even when they weren't.
- Keith Waterhouse summed things up in 1975 in two sentences that will resonate with anyone who has ever sat narcoleptically through a local council meeting: “I would put most of the blame on the councillors who invite and encourage the laying-waste of their own townships. The trouble is that many of them are not very bright.”
  - Yule Heibel on 2007-12-22
    - ha!, how true...
  Add Sticky Note
- Their legacy is the desperate sense of loss engendered by Stamp's book, with its 200 stylishly presented archive photographs. I lost count of the number of pictures of smart, historic, charming streets captioned: “Every building in this photograph has since disappeared.”

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