John Jay Walkthrough

Here are some of my photos of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City by SOM. The building is a cube-like addition on 11th Avenue that is connected to the existing school on 10th Avenue via a long concourse that is capped by a green roof.

The west-facing elevation on 11th Avenue, at West 58th Street:


A close-up of the addition's elevation on West 59th Street:


Looking west along West 59th Street; the main entrance is in the foreground:


Another view of the main entrance:


A close-up of the main entrance:


The main-entrance signage from the other side:


The main entrance drops people into this light-filled space at the eastern end of the concourse:


A view of the skylight from the mezzanine:


And a close-up of the lighting below the skylight:


Moving west along the main level of the concourse:


A little bit more west:


The steps and seating at the western end of the concourse:


A view from atop those steps, looking east:


The 11th Avenue entrance; this seating area is where The Good Wife filmed a scene (with the school posing as an FBI building):


The 11th Avenue entrance, looking the other way (this entrance is entered below the big "JAY" lettering visible in the first photo):


Up on the green roof above the concourse, looking west toward the addition:


Atop the steps visible in the previous photo, looking east:


Turning left 90-degrees from the previous photo to look at the fins on the addition:


The red is made up of a grid of small dots:


Heading up the 8th-floor lounge in the addition:


The east-looking view from the lounge:


(Many thanks to Holly K. for the tour of John Jay!)

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Today's archidose #756

Here are some photos of Het Eemhuis (2013) in Amersfoort, Netherlands, by Neutelings Riedijk Architects, photographed by Matthijs Borghgraef.













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SuperPuesto

Mark your calendars: On Saturday, July 14, from 3 to 5pm, SuperPuesto opens at the Andrew Freedman Home Garden, 1125 Grand Concourse between 166th and McClellan Streets, in the Bronx. The temporary pavilion by artist Terence Gower is being erected in concert with the Bronx Museum of the Arts' Beyond the Supersquare exhibition, which explores the "indelible influence of Latin American and Caribbean modernist architecture on contemporary art." The pavilion is actually located across the street and one block north of the museum.


[Terence Gower, SuperPuesto, 2014. Pavilion: wood, concrete, hardware, vinyl tarpaulins, 18 x 66 x 48 feet overall. Courtesy of the artist and Bronx Museum of the Arts]

Pavilion description from the Bronx Museum of the Arts:

SuperPuesto applies the sharp, clean forms of modernist architecture to the rudimentary building technology of the puesto, the traditional market stalls found throughout Latin America that have become the face of the informal economies prevalent in the region. Drawing from the iconic form of Marcel Breuer’s House in the Museum Garden, a commissioned structure exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden in 1949, SuperPuesto explores the connections between the European-influenced modernist movement that emerged in Latin America after 1945, and the informal economic systems that contrast the progressive ideals promoted in the region during this period.

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10-Year 9/11 Memorial Museum Time-Lapse

Best watched without the sound on:



(via ArchNewsNow)

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Book Review: Atelier Bow-Wow: A Primer

Atelier Bow-Wow: A Primer edited by Laurent Stalder, Cornelia Escher, Megumi Komura, Meruro Washida, with photographic prints by Lena Amuat
Walther König, 2013
Paperback, 252 pages



Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momojo Kajima of Atelier Bow-Wow are in a unique position among architects for being able to bridge the apparently irreconcilable poles of popular culture and high culture. While in regards to the former they may not be as strictly popular as fellow countrymen Tadao Ando and the SANAA duo, they find inspiration in the everyday and have written books on everyday, if idiosyncratic, buildings (Pet Architecture); the name Atelier Bow-Wow also exhibits their sense of humor.

On the other hand, the duo is very serious about their designs and research, carrying out much of the latter with the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Tsukuba. This serious side of their work comes through in the deeply nuanced definitions that pepper their writings (Behaviorology being the most obvious) and in this "primer" that comes out of the 2013 exhibition at ETH Zurich. In this book the editors intersperse a chronological presentation of select projects with scholarly definition of key terms - like Behaviorology, but also Orientation, Occupancy, and Smallness - resulting in a book that unites these two sides of Atelier Bow-Wow.


[The Making of a Public Drawing, 2011, from "Zoom Out" entry in Atelier Bow-Wow: A Primer]

So in the work of Tsukamoto and Kajima what bridges pop culture and high culture? I'd argue first that their drawings accomplish this. Most famous are their three-dimensional "graphic-anatomy" sections that are detailed enough to describe construction while also illustrating how the spaces are scaled and used through entourage figures and furnishings. A few of these drawings are found in Primer, accompanying houses as they primarily do, but what impresses me as much (and are new to me, to boot) are the "public drawings" made for projects like the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York's Lower East Side. Just as the 3-D sections exude life through the detailed poses of imaginary occupants, BMW and other public projects are surrounded by buildings, cars, trees, people, and other elements that make cities like New York and Tokyo so dense with life.


[BMW Guggenheim Lab, 2011. Photo by archidose]

The second way that Atelier Bow-Wow bridges high and low is, quite obviously, through their buildings, via both their forms and the ideas underlying their designs. Formally, their buildings often allude to traditional buildings, yet slightly askew in some way. The Gae House's asymmetrical pitched roof, for example, fills the eaves with glass to create a surprising space under the roof that is nevertheless rooted in the vernacular. Similarly, all of the duo's designs are based on an appreciation of the people that use them as well as the people who have shaped spaces in the past and will do so in the future. One way this appreciation comes across, beyond the highly populated drawings, is in the way designs like Miyashita Park keep elements from what came before, while also allowing for evolution, for future changes.

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Today's archidose #755

Here are some photos of the Building for Environmental Research & Teaching (2014, renovation and expansion) at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, by Toshiko Mori Architect, photographed by Hassan Bagheri.







To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

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Interactive Tour: LeFrak Center at Lakeside

As a means of experimenting with how to best present buildings online, I've been working with Joel Sanders on an interactive tour of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects' LeFrak Center at Lakeside, which opened in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in December. Rather than presenting Michael Moran's photographs of the project interspersed with my text – the norm for projects on this blog and other websites – the tour overlays clickable "hotspots" that allow for descriptions about a specific area in an image, as well as for additional images and even videos. This is a first-pass at doing such a thing – and hopefully the first of more tours to come – so if you have any comments on the content, the usability, or any other features of the tour please comment on this post

The 75,000-sf, year-round LeFrak Center, designed by New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, replaces a winter-only rink and comfort station in Prospect Park that was built in the 1960s. Most notably, the duo’s design shifts the rink and related buildings to the southeast to restore the waterline and incorporate an esplanade that fits to the original design of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. A signature blue canopy carved with curving lines dramatizes the experience of ice skating in the winter and roller skating in warm months. Click any of the arrows below to take an interactive tour of the project that was completed in December 2013.

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