Happy 20th, Rural Studio!

It was 1994 when Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth started Auburn University's Rural Studio, an undergraduate design/build program in Western Alabama. Since then the participating third- and fifth-year students have designed and built innumerable houses and community projects for the residents of Hale County, Alabama, in the process becoming a model for other university design/build programs in the United States and other countries.

In conjunction with Rural Studio's anniversary, photographer Timothy Hursley "fired up the Alabama silo" last Friday:

[Photograph courtesy of Timothy Hursley. For more on the silo, watch "SoLost: The Beauty of a Broken Silo."]

This two-decade milestone also sees the publication of Rural Studio at Twenty, by current director Andrew Freear, Elena Barthel, Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, who penned the first two PAPress books on Rural Studio, and Hursley, who shot the studio's projects for all three books. A review of Rural Studio at Twenty will follow on this blog soon after its May 20 publication.

Lastly, this anniversary inspired me to profile the Rural Studio and nine other university design/build programs in the piece "Architecture Students Designing AND Building" for the World-Architects eMagazine. Rural Studio is certainly the most famous, but the piece also includes AA Design & Make, Studio 804, University of Tokyo's DFL, and Yale's Vlock Building Project, among others.

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Deux Folies

Earlier today I received an email from Lesétablissements Tourneux in regards to their Lieu-Dit le Temple, a wooden temple in the archeological part of Bliesbruck, France.



It's an appealing construction in the vein of the folly in the landscape.



It has a strong presence at night, and it begs to be climbed.



But it's a far cry from their Astronef, a rocket-like construction in the castle Malbrouck à Manderen.



But what at first glance looks like a goof and arbitrary piece meant to shock...



...is very carefully placed, especially when seen from a distance:



And like the wooden folly, the rocket is a means of experiencing the landscape, in this case via a periscope.



It's hard to see each design coming from the same studio, but each folly is playful in its own way.

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Today's archidose #751

Here are some photos of Marchesi Antinori Winery (2012) in Bargino, San Casciano Val di Pesa, Italy, by Archea Associati, photographed by Marco Forgione. See my previous posts on the project from 2005, 2011, and 2012.









To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

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Book Review: Platform 6

GSD Platform 6 edited by Rosetta Elkin
Actar, 2014
Paperback, 368 pages



While every student from every architecture school probably thinks that each year they is deserving of a book that sums up the projects, lectures, exhibitions, events, seminars, publications, and other happenings, not that many schools are able to make it happen. In particular a few Ivy League schools come to mind: Columbia GSAPP's Abstract, Yale SOA's Retrospecta, and Harvard GSD's Platform (the successor to Studio Works). The latter is especially significant given its size (nearly 400 pages), its international distribution through publisher Actar, and the amount of material inside. A prospective student would no doubt be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff happening at the Graduate School of Design as evidenced by the projects, transcripts, and personalities throughout.



Harvard GSD is not unique in needing to find an adequate book structure and graphic design to make sense of the multitudes of output. GSAPP's publications in recent years have been handled by star designer Stefan Sagmeister, who tends for bold statements like holes or an empty box. But Harvard opts for a simple approach that delineates the different work performed through subtle changes in color and graphic treatment. Gray pages signal lectures and publications, for example, and the color blue signals historical content. Unique moments happen with the essays that are printed on slightly smaller and lighter-weight green pages (spread above). The various types of output are interspersed to make the book most suitable for browsing; that is about the only way to go about it, since the book lacks a table of contents (it does have an index, though).



As a visually rich feast for browsing, Platform 6 does a great job of giving people a taste of what Harvard GSD is all about, at least within a particular school year. Yet for those looking to dig deeper they have to venture elsewhere. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture must have yielded plenty of valuable insight, but all we are treated to is a photo of Billie opposite four short quotes from the talk. This is one example of how the book covers just about everything that happened throughout the year without giving the reader more than just a taste. Only the green inserts really give the reader something substantial, and there are only four of them. Well, five actually, but the last one is by editor Rosetta Elkin on the complications of compiling one year of pedagogy into one volume!

Elkin's essay does elucidate some of the intent of how the book was structured and designed, but the page-to-page juxtapositions are quite subtle: Toyo Ito referencing metabolism on one page followed by "an architecture thesis that questions the autonomy of the urban dwelling" on the next followed by an urban planning project in Burkina Faso that proposes modular housing after that. Perhaps these relationships are a "tool for revealing emergent patterns that operate across public event, individual thesis, and global narrative," but I would not use the word "powerful" as Elkin does to describe it. Nevertheless, Elkin's words do point to the rewards that come with close reading of the school's consistently high-quality output documented in these pages.

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Today's archidose #750

Here are some photos of New Headquarters for BBVA (2015) in Madrid, Spain, by Herzog & de Meuron, photographed by Ximo Michavila.













To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

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Memory, Authenticity, Scale, Emotion

On Tuesday, April 29, the team from Davis Brody Bond will discuss the design of the 9/11 Memorial Museum at The New School. Details are below.

Memory, Authenticity, Scale, Emotion: A Discussion with the Architects of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum

Tuesday, April 29, 2014 at 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm

The Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall

Join the lead design architects of the 9/11 Memorial Museum and scholars for a discussion of designing and building this new landmark museum located beneath the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan in New York, due to open this May.

Architects from Davis Brody Bond will discuss the technically challenging and emotional task of building a museum to present and preserve the history and memories of the events of 9/11 and the challenges of translating the existing geometries of the site into a series of coherent spaces punctuated by surface, texture, and volume. A panel discussion with scholars will explore the four principles that guided the architects work: memory, authenticity, scale and emotion, and explore the larger global context of memorials and museums built or planned on the sites of traumatic events. A Q&A will follow.

Davis Brody Bond will be represented by partners Steven M. Davis, FAIA, Carl F. Krebs, AIA, and Mark Wagner, AIA, Associate Partner, who have been involved with the project since its inception in 2004. Steven Davis developed the Public Space Master Plan for the World Trade Center in 1992 and Carl Krebs was the Partner-in-Charge for Davis Brody Bond’s participation in the conception of the 9/11 Memorial. Davis Brody Bond is also part of the core team that designed the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, currently under construction on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and the Portico Galley at The Frick Collection in New York City completed in 2011.

The panel discussion includes Jonathan Bach, chair of the Global Studies Program at The New School; Marita Sturken, professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU and author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero; and Brigitte Sion, co-organizer of the Transdisciplinary Project “The Politics of Memory in Global Context” at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought.

Sponsored by the Global Studies Program at The New School.

Free. No tickets or reservations required.

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Peanuts Aloft

I've featured Swiss artists Zimoun a couple times before, and each time I see one of their installations made with cardboard boxes, cork balls and motors, I wonder what else they are capable of. A new avenue that achieves similar effects of sound and vision through aggregation and movement can be found in an installation at Art Museum Lugano:



Instead of cardboard and cork, Zimoun uses 36 ventilators and 4.7 cubic meters (166 cubic feet) of packing peanuts to create a bubbling, foamy presence in one of the museum's galleries. What's most interesting is that while previous installations used objects (cardboard boxes) to create spaces for sounds, this one fills an existing space with a medium that enables visitors to visualize the movement of air.

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