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British Architect Norman Foster to Design Public Library’s Renovation - NYTimes.com

I don't know enough about the affordances and constraints of the New York Public Library building on 5th Ave to be able to have an informed opinion as to the necessity of this proposed renovation, but I'm tempted to file it under the "if it ain't broke, why fix it?" category.

The proposal sounds a bit scary, like a proposal to press a starchitect's ego what is a beloved icon. In particular, the quote by one board member (end of article) suggests a determination to proceed even if warning flags go up. Yes, libraries are very important, but they don't necessarily need *spectacular* intervention proposed.

Too bad the article doesn't link to images of the proposal.

On some levels the intervention sounds innocuous enough, as it won't visible from the outside and will affect only the interior. It could be as restorative as a heart transplant for someone who's terminally ill with heart disease. On the other hand, it could be as dangerous as a heart transplant...

Tags: nyt, libraries, norman_foster, starchitecture, new_york_public_library on 2008-10-25 -All Annotations (6) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

Mr. Foster and his London firm, Foster & Partners, are to create a new circulation library in a space below the library’s Rose Reading Room and overlooking Bryant Park that now houses seven levels of stacks and a basement.
The area, which now measures 1.25 million cubic feet, will be completely reconfigured, with new rooms for children and teenagers and numerous computer work stations. The stacks are to move to an existing three-acre storage area beneath Bryant Park that is also to be renovated. Work is expected to be completed by 2013.
“I’m very optimistic that we’ll be able to do this,” Mr. LeClerc said. He predicted that the renovated central library would “be a huge jolt of energy for the city when it’s done, the biggest comprehensive library open in the world but also in human history.”
Mr. Foster’s acclaimed work with prized historic buildings made him a particularly compelling candidate, the library said. He has designed glass-enclosed additions to the Reichstag in Berlin (1999), the British Museum in London (2000) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington (2007).
Starting with about 30 candidates and narrowing the field to 10, the library was particularly impressed by Mr. Foster’s efforts, trustees said, declining to name the other architects considered. Mr. Foster or members of his team visited the library 19 times before offering their proposal, Mr. Rose said. They designed elaborate visual presentations and even a model, which library executives declined to describe, saying that it was strictly hypothetical and that a final design was more than a year away.
“They did do a knockout proposal,” Mr. LeClerc said. “It wasn’t, ‘This is what you’ve got to do.’ It was something that was indicative of the capacity of the firm to think very, very creatively about how this could be pulled off in a way that was really interesting — indeed, brilliant.”
Because the stacks structurally support the reading room, for example, the reading room will have to be braced before the stacks are taken out. Mr. Foster’s firm has conducted engineering studies and evaluated the acoustics. Today about 1.2 million people visit the main library annually; when the new circulation library opens, that figure is expected to increase to about 4 million.

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Inhabitat » Herzog and de Meuron’s Stunning Triangular Skyscraper

Photos & text about the planned 200 m. tall triangular skyscraper (called Le Projet Triangle) by Herzon and de Meuron, for the Porte de Versailles in Paris. Allegedly so slim that it will hardly cast a shadow, it will also incorporate solar and wind power components.

Tags: herzog_demeuron, paris, architecture, starchitecture, skyscrapers, inhabitat on 2008-10-08 -All Annotations (5) -About

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"Star Cities: The World's Best-Known Architects are Turning to Planning" by Joan Ockman - Architect Online

"Joan Ockman asks: Is a new form of urbanism emerging?"

"THE MID-TO LATE ‘90S saw the realization of several colossal redevelopment projects in which superstar architects were called upon to supply window dressing for the transformation of dysfunctional urban districts into tourist and consumer meccas, from Times Square in Manhattan to Potsdam Square in Berlin. But it was the triumphal opening of Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in late 1997 that appeared, to architects, nothing short of a miracle. Gehry not only delivered a more optimistic, less intellectualized, and visually ravishing vision of architecture's potential and one, moreover, that innovatively integrated but was not entirely determined by new technologies; against all odds, he showed that it was possible to regenerate an entire city with nothing more nor less than a single, singular building."

This is an important article that has some specific relevance also for my concerns around the praxis of a local architect here in Victoria who thinks he can "envision" a certain kind of urbanism (low-rise) for this city. Should an architect be an urban planner? Can s/he be good at both? Ockham's article suggests it ain't necessarily so.

Tags: architecture, bilbao_effect, joan_ockman, starchitecture, urbanplanning on 2008-03-30 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.architectmagazine.com

The first glimmer of real consciousness among architects concerning the inevitability of a new scale of architectural operations came in the early 1990s, when Rem Koolhaas, caused to rethink his worldview by his commission to design a new city center for Lille, France—an assignment that entailed a massive and apparently traumatic (for him) expansion of his previously modest-sized practice—came to reflect on “the problem of bigness.” Koolhaas shrewdly grasped that the global reorganization, expansion, and consolidation of late 20th century capital implied the emergence of a commensurate form of architecture. He envisaged an architecture of bigness more akin to the complexity and unscriptedness of the city, however, than to Architecture with a capital “A.” Bigness, as Koolhaas theorized in his book S,M,L,XL, required a giving up of “architecture's compulsive need to decide and determine” and a “surrender to technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers; to politics; to others.” However much of a historical symptom, or pragmatic rationalization, this theory was in itself (especially in the case of a personality as controlling as Koolhaas), there is no doubt that it created an irreconcilable contradiction for architects: between design and nondesign; form and formlessness; heroic monumentality and sheer, dumb size.
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- - scalability matters, and has an effect...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-30
“the disconnect between Bilbao the brand and Bilbao the city” remains palpable. Moreover, a surfeit of “icon buildings,” however creative and well-designed, especially in cities that have little else visually to recommend them, runs the risk of engendering architectural cacophony and ennui. In the case of Rotterdam, a Dutch city that has become a veritable architectural theme park with prominent contributions by Foster, Helmut Jahn, Renzo Piano, Wiel Arets, Ben van Berkel, and others, the skyline from certain viewpoints takes on the quality of a surrealist montage. If the icon derives both its logic and its energy from its uniqueness and difference from its surroundings, then its proliferation can only cancel the effect.
In this context, the current trend toward rebranding celebrity architects as planners appears as both an evolution of the Bilbao effect, expanded to a new scale, and also a departure from it.
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- - oh gawd, "rebranding celebrity [sic] architects as planners"... shades of local small-pond "celeb" FdA, who thinks he can pontificate on planning Victoria BC as a lowrise European capital... That's where it must come from! Holy cow, it's the Rem-effect...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-30
Yet perhaps the fundamental question remains what the relationship really is between architecture and urban planning. Are these two disciplines—one traditionally focused on the object and the other on the fabric—part of a continuum, or are they, in fact, opposites? Apart from the different skill sets they require, do they also involve different mindsets? In the last century, most of the acknowledged “masters,” from Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Oscar Niemeyer, Louis Kahn, and Philip Johnson, aspired to wear both hats, although only in a handful of exceptional cases did these architects succeed in realizing their largest schemes, and then not without contradiction. Gehry's dilemma of foreground versus background buildings is not a new problem for the architect, nor can it be dismissed so easily.
The extrapolation of the logic of the circumscribed object-building to the scale of the city has tended to produce the totalizing effect of the “continuous monument”—Niemeyer in Brasilia—while the absorption of the primarily symbolic and representational building into the larger urban order threatened to dilute its impact. As the critic Alan Colquhoun pointed out apropos of the irreconcilable difference between Le Corbusier's architecture and urbanism of the 1920s, the “Corbusian city seems to lack any strategy by which representational buildings could continue to exist”; the “very qualities of discreteness, difference, and lack of continuity that would make it possible for his buildings to fulfill their larger signifying ambitions” are compromised once they are turned into “a fragment of urban tissue.” Similarly, if Mies' Seagram Building and Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House changed the direction of architecture in the 1950s, they are still best appreciated against the backdrop of the more banal buildings on Park Avenue by the developer firm of Emery Roth, which, as Ada Louise Huxtable once observed, was ultimately responsible for changing the face of Manhattan.
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- - think this through to its logical conclusions and you might ...well, conclude, that we're in deep dung...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-30
THE DISCIPLINE OF URBAN DESIGN that emerged in the 1960s was, as already suggested, a reaction to the hubris of modernist master planning, yet the New Urbanism's pedestrian-scaled townscapes punctuated by static civic monuments have hardly been less doctrinaire in their imposition of an overall formal order (notwithstanding the rhetoric of community and pluralism dissembling their basic strategy of standardized diversity). In contrast, the recent urbanism is computer-driven and emphasizes fluid connectivities, organic or self-organizing urban processes, and network thinking. (For a thoughtful overview of the field, see David Grahame Shane's recent book, Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory.) In the hands—or on the screens—of many of the vanguard designers today, the urban aesthetic tends to be characterized by topologically distorted surfaces, giant landforms inspired by 1960s and ‘70s earth art, the literalization of map vectors, and the like. Yet for all the new formal and technological sophistication, the aphasia between architecture and urbanism remains unresolved. In the case of Peter Eisenman's City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, for example, a 173-acre project whose first phase is under construction, it's all or nothing: Rather than the antiformalism of Koolhaas, everything urban has become architecture.
If all these issues raise profound questions for both public policy and the culture of architecture, there is, finally, the matter of the desirability of having a single architect put his or her stamp on such a wide swath of our everyday landscape. Roland Barthes wrote of the Eiffel Tower that the only way to get away from its dominating presence in Paris was to be on top of it looking out. If not just the museum and the office tower but also the corner grocery and the street lamp are designed by Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, will we become true prisoners of architecture?

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Cool Hunting: Three New Stadiums

Description/ links to 3 new stadiums, introduced thus: "In the era of starchitecture, few projects pose more of a challenge to renowned architects than the scale and complexity of a city's crown jewel, the stadium." The 3 projects are Camp Nou (Spain), Beijing National Stadium (China), and Wembley Stadium (UK). Camp Nou's exterior in particular sounds fascinating -- it could be a terrific public art work or an annoying visual nuisance, depending on articulation...

Tags: architecture, reference, stadiums, starchitecture on 2008-01-30 -All Annotations (0) -About

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