Move the Lucas Museum?

As most people probably know by now, on Monday MAD Architects released its design of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, planned for a site on Chicago's lakefront between Soldier Field and McCormick Place.

Here is one of the three renderings released:


The proposed site plan, with Lucas Museum as #5:


Not surprisingly, critics have had a fun time tearing apart the design of MAD's Ma Yansong, saying:

• "the museum proposal is needlessly massive...a fumbled essay in 'blog architecture,' leaden and lumpy" (Blair Kamin)
•  "a gooey, mountainous slug of a building with two squinty windows and a silvery halo, making it look like a sainted Jabba the Hut" (Justin Davidson)
• "much needs to be worked out to keep this challenging work from being just weird" (Edward Keegan)
• "an alien land mass, ringed with a rather tacky Space Mountain-inspired top"(Martin Pedersen)
• "a pile of Chicago snow with a hubcap on top...Hollywood kitsch pretending to sophistication" (Chicago Sun-Times editors, apparently since they don't have an architectural critic)

But buried beneath these and other fairly shallow critiques are concerns about the proposed building's location. The given site is currently a parking lot, but more importantly it falls within the parkland east of Lake Shore Drive that many Chicagoans define as sacred. To the Friends of the Park, Blair Kamin, and other staunch defenders of the lakefront, there shouldn't be any new buildings east of LSD (heck, there shouldn't be Soldier Field, Field Museum, McCormick Place East, etc.), so the problems with MAD's design are exacerbated by this location – no design would be good enough for the site in their eyes.

So if the issue is, as they say, location, location, location, should the museum be moved? And if so, where? Kamin seems to be the only one making a suggestion, arguing for the old Michael Reese Hospital campus about 1.5 miles south, but I'd argue for simply throwing the building to the west side of Lake Shore Drive, per my quick and dirty Photoshop site plan below:


As illustrated above, MAD's design is flipped about LSD and moved north a couple blocks, placing the floating disc on axis with the proposed bridge to Northerly Island (a part of the Lucas Museum plan that will be spearheaded by Studio Gang Architects). Moving it there, in its current form or not, would have some benefits:

• It would deck over part of the Metra tracks with the building and parkland, long a goal of the Central Station development but one that hasn't happened due to expense and other practical reasons.
• The design could incorporate an improved Metra platform/station design into it.
• It would connect the lakefront to Central Station and other South Loop neighborhoods via a bridge on axis with the proposed bridge to Northerly Island; this would be an improvement over the spindly walkway over the Metra tracks and the underpass at 18th Drive.
• Since the building is located west of LSD, where height is less of a concern, the increased elevation created by decking over the Metra tracks shouldn't be a problem.
• The parking lot site east of LSD could become a mix of garage and parkland...anything better than the surface lot it is now (sure, this isn't dependent upon where the museum would move to, but something should be done here).

I realize that this move does not take into account a number of factors (impact on adjacent residential buildings, future Central Station plans, dealing with the freight line that bends by the site, etc.), but I like the idea of keeping the museum in the area but setting aside the grumbles with being on the sacred lakefront property. A few more steps to the west and north is not that big a deal in my mind, considering that it could be dealt with via a bridge that melds into the mountain-like design, thereby maintaining a connection to the lakefront and Northerly Island. Mainly I'm proposing this because I'm a bit disappointed in the reaction of critics, who are taking some predictable potshots at the design without offering much in the way of helpful alternatives.

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CLOG : Unpublished Panel Discussion

For those in NYC, there is a panel discussion on architectural publishing taking place at McNally Jackson Books on Monday. Details are below.

On Monday, November 10, 2014, CLOG will be moderating a panel discussion based on CLOG : Unpublished, which is a critical analysis of the architectural publishing industry.

Panelists will include:
Cathleen McGuigan (Editor in Chief, Architectural Record),
Fred Bernstein (Journalist),
Alan Rapp (Senior Editor, Architecture + Design, The Monacelli Press), and
Vanessa Quirk (Managing Editor, ArchDaily)

McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012

Monday, November 10, 2014
7:00 PM to 8:30 PM
The panelists will take questions from the audience after the discussion.

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Today's archidose #793

Here are some photos of Kronstad DPS (2013) in Bergen Norway, by Origo Arkitektgruppe, photographed by Sindre Ellingsen.











To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool

To contribute your Instagram images for consideration, just:

:: Tag your photos #archidose

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Lucas Museum - Chicago Tonight Roundtable

Last night, one day after MAD Architects' Ma Yansong unveiled his conceptual design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Chicago Tonight hosted a panel with Lynn Becker, Peter Exley and Edward Keegan to get some feedback on the design and its next steps. Below is an embed of the 12-minute video, but it can also be watched on WTTW11's website.



With only three renderings made public, and as many reservations as the above trio, I am excited about the design. For one, I like the way it departs from Chicago's two primary conditions – the vertical (skyscraper) and the horizontal (the landscape, the low-rise city around the Loop) – to propose something in-between, something that rises like a mountain and appears to be more landform than building. The coming weeks will certainly be host to more debate on the design, which still needs city approval to move forward.

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Book Review: Constructing Europe

Constructing Europe: 25 Years of Architecture edited by Diane Gray, Fundació Mies van der Rohe
Actar Publishers, 2013
Hardcover, 308 pages



In 2013 the Mies van der Rohe Foundation celebrated the 25th anniversary of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Award. Twenty-five years – one quarter of a century – is a typical milestone, but in the context of the prize it might seem a little odd, given that it happens every two years. So while the book, exhibition, and related events celebrate 25 years, it only 13 cycles of the prize happened in those years; the inaugural run happened in 1988 and the first of the new millennium took place in 2001, hence the shift from even- to odd-numbered years. A small and trite point to make, to be sure, but more importantly the decade-and-a-half time frame allows the prize organizers to reflect on the changes and important buildings that occurred in that time.



Graced by a cloud rather than one of the winners, the cover makes it clear that the organizers do not elevate one building over another, even as each year the job of the jury is to do such. Hence, the organization of the book is straightforward: a chronological presentation, in black and white photos, of the winners for each cycle, followed by essays culled from the different prizes. In terms of the latter, those with catalogs to the EU/Mies Prizes, also published by Actar, will recognize these essays, just as they will surely recognize the winners. Given that the winning and shortlisted buildings presented here are known by most fans of architecture, the value of the book is in assembling the essays, which trace the important issues of each cycle and highlight different voices: Kenneth Frampton, Elia Zenghelis, Aaron Betsky, Ricky Burdett, and so forth.



In addition to the photos and essays are a handful of new essays that look back on the prize's first 25 years and a foldout timeline that situates the winning buildings within a larger European context of politics, culture, and science. As an entirety, the book's content serves to elevate the importance of the prize to both a European audience and those outside of Europe. To date, the rule of awarding prizes to European architects realizing designs on European soil has narrowly restricted the influence of architects from Europe. When the prize returns in 2015, that limitation may be extended (per comments from the Mies Foundation's director at the Biennale this year) to European buildings overseas, something that would acknowledge the exportation of ideas and the cross-border movement of architects. Perhaps in another 25 years, the retrospective catalog will be called Constructing the World.

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Today's archidose #792

Here are some photos of the Fo Shou villa (2012) at the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, China, by Mansilla & Tuñón, photographed by Trevor Patt.





With David Adjaye's Light Box in the distance:






To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool

To contribute your Instagram images for consideration, just:

:: Tag your photos #archidose

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Book Review: Architectural Drawing

Architectural Drawing by David Dernie
Laurence King Publishing, 2014, Second Edition
Paperback, 208 pages



In addition to the author's own drawings, the first 30 pages of David Dernie's inspirational and practical guide to architectural drawing features a watercolor by Steven Holl, a computer rendering by Zaha Hadid Architects, one of Coop Himmelb(l)au's closed-eye sketches, a Lebbeus Woods hand rendering, and a photomontage by Eric Owen Moss, among others. The variety evident in these pages, which encompass the introduction and part of the first chapter, Lines, prepares the reader for the rest of the book, which does not elevate one form of drawing over another (hand drawing over computer rendering, for example). Instead, Dernie embraces the multitude of techniques today to "explore the fluidity and continuity of drawing as a creative process of 'materializing thoughts'."



The second edition of Architectural Drawing, first published in 2010, is one of publisher Laurence King's "student skills" series of books in architecture. The series also includes a title on modelmaking, reviewed here in 2010, and books on CAD, digital fabrication, technology, construction, and history. Although much of the content in the drawing and modelmaking books is from the UK, they have enough general ideas and international content to make them suitable to a much wider audience than the publisher's home country.



Dernie's book is split into three sections – Media, Types, Places – to cover as much ground as possible in 200 pages. Media is further broken down into Line, Render, and Mixed Media, with numerous step-by-step lessons covering pencils, Photoshop, charcoal, collage, and other ways of using different media. Types moves from sketches to perspectives, from the quickest to the most laborious, again presented with a number of step-by-step lessons on both hand and computer techniques. Finally, Places looks at how drawings are used to describe interiors, landscapes, and urban settings. Inserted between the many practical lessons throughout the book are case studies, highlighted by gray pages; these supply the inspiration that rounds out Dernie's intended balance of practice and inspiration.



While clearly aimed at students in architecture, the book should also appeal to young architects, given the wide range of media and techniques explored. Students are at the whims of their professors more than their own desires or interests, meaning there will be gaps in their education that this book can partly fill. I for one never ventured into linocut or screenprinting, and my experience in the computer environment tended to be narrow, having found one way over time that worked for me. For Dernie, expression isn't limited to one type or method, and his openness to the various ways of drawing should make students and young architects that much more adventurous.

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