What's in a Shape?

A couple days ago the LA Times published Peter Zumthor's revised design for the ~$600 million LACMA expansion. The Swiss architect generated the initial 2013 design as a sort of homage to the adjacent tar pits, so a lot of folks ended up calling the undulating shape an oil spill or oil slick. Not anymore: Christopher Hawthorne, in the article linked above, writes that the "LACMA design now looks less like an exaggerated version of a tar pit and more like a Chinese-language character or other strong calligraphic gesture."


[Site plan of LACMA | Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner]

But does it? To take a stab at determining what this latest shape might resemble I focused on the building outline and simplified it, per the images below. I then took each of these images and ran them through Google Images search to find "visually similar images." That said, this is a not-too-serious exercise in "objectively" determining what the shape resembles, rather than to find the right one.



Here are a few highlights of the cartoons, comics, fonts, icons and other illustrations I found.


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Today's archidose #824: Latin American Architecture

This morning I attended the press preview of the Latin America in Construction exhibition opening March 29 at the Museum of Modern Art. I'll have photos and comments on the MoMA show later in the week, but the visit inspired me to search out some photos of Latin American architecture in the archidose Flickr pool, though not necessarily ones in the show. By chance, Jonathan Reid added a bunch of photos from South America to the pool recently, and some of those are shown below.

Ibirapuera Auditorium in São Paulo, Brazil, by Oscar Neimeyer:



Some Brasilia buildings, all designed by Oscar Neimeyer:

Brazilian National Congress:


The Palace of Justice:


Brazilian National Library:


Pantheon of Liberty and Democracy Tancredo Neves:


Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro by Affonso Eduardo Reidy:


Municipalidad de Vitacura in Santiago, Chile, by Iglesis Prat:


Cao Museum at El Brujo Archaeological Complex in Peru (architect not known):



To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool

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Funding Two Summer Pavilions

For the first time in its short history, FIGMENT selected two projects for the City of Dreams Pavilion Competition: Billion Oyster Pavilion by BanG Studio of New York City and Organic Growth by Izaskun Chinchilla Architects of Madrid and London. In addition to securing approvals for construction, each pavilion needs fundraising. Enter Kickstarter and two campaigns, one for the Billion Oyster Pavilion and one for the Organic Growth Pavilion. Details are in the videos below and on their respective Kickstarter pages.

Billion Oyster Pavilion:


Organic Growth:

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Book Review: The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings

The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings by Marc Kushner
Simon & Schuster/TED Books, 2015
Hardcover, 164 pages



The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings is based on a March 2014 TED Talk, "Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by ... you," given by HWKN partner and Architizer co-founder Marc Kushner. In both the 18-minute talk and the roughly 150-page book Kushner argues, "we’re entering a new age in architecture – one where we expect our buildings to deliver far more than just shelter," as he puts it in a TED Ideas blog post. He does this in the talk by giving a quick tour of the last 30 years of architecture, while in the book he focuses on the immediate past through a selection and presentation of 100 projects – most of them built but some of them unbuilt proposals. Key to both the talk and the book is Kushner's optimism and media, social media, not surprising given his position at Architizer, a website that gives any architect the potential to upload projects and share them with the site's millions of visitors.

Focusing squarely on the book, Kushner presents the 100 buildings in bite-sized chunks, typically one or two per spread, with one photo, a description and a question in red type. Culled from Architizer A+ Award entries, the buildings are numbered and grouped under themes like "Shape-Shifters" and "Social Catalysts." But in the rapid-fire presentation and focus on innovative contemporary architecture the ordering and grouping of the projects doesn't really matter; they could be in any order and achieve the same goal, which is to interest a general audience in the work architects are doing, be it a small pavilion, an opera house, a park, a house or even a McDonald's.


[Spread from The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings with HWKN's Wendy installation at MoMA PS1]

Kushner's populist approach jibes with his comments elsewhere (such as a panel discussion I observed at the Center for Architecture) that evince a frustration with architects talking to each other rather than to a broader public. Architizer, his TED Talk, and its book offshoot attempt to involve more people in conversations about architecture and to respond to how they "consume architecture." But is the book successful in doing so? What is it telling readers about architecture?

I'd argue that in its cursory glances at some significant and not-so-significant buildings, the book prioritizes superficial gazes at visually striking buildings rather than an embrace of their poetics as containers of our lives, even if Kushner's words here and elsewhere point to the latter. It also equates architecture with the consumption of images over the social interaction of bodies in space. He isn't the first to do so, but the inexpensive and image-rich book aimed at a general audience continues such an approach, for better or worse.

This superficial presentation of architecture is reinforced by the questions in red that preface each project, acting like convenient, businessese-like shorthands that highlight each building's "takeaway." In a number of cases I wanted to answer many of the rhetorical questions with a "no, but..." finished by the sentence in red that follows the description: "#10: Can we live on the moon?" No, but, "architectural ingenuity isn't earthbound."

Yet these critiques of the book's format and content are coming from an architect/writer about architecture, making the words ring a little hollow. After all, would a book for a general audience that takes a more nuanced approach to discussing the poetic qualities of architecture, say, or one exploring fewer buildings in more depth, make architecture less accessible and become another instance of "architects talking to architects"? That's a strong possibility, since the ideal means of explaining architecture to non-architects has yet to be found, but not for a lack of trying. While I have issues with how Kushner presents his selection of 100 buildings, I can't fault him for trying to break through that wall that separates architects from the people who interact and "consume" the buildings they design.

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Today's archidose #823

Here are some photos of Stage II of 19. Dzielnica (2015) in Warsaw, Poland, by Jems Architekci, photographed by Sebastian Deptula.













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Book Review: Lessons from Modernism

Lessons from Modernism: Environmental Design Strategies in Architecture, 1925-1970 edited by Kevin Bone with Steven Hillyer and Sunnie Joh
Monacelli Press, 2014
Hardcover, 224 pages



A common view of modernist architecture sees it as anything but environmental, based on the notion that International Style modernism sought a universal style that ignored climate. Lots of single-pane glazing, hermetically sealed buildings and a lack of solar shading created the need for a good deal of mechanical heating and/or cooling and, decades later, retrofits with insulated glazing and other fixes, if not just outright demolition. This view, though, prioritizes a particular strand of modernism at the expense of much of the modern architecture that consciously addressed place and climate while maintaining modern stylings.


[Exhibition Installation View | Photographs courtesy of The Cooper Union]

Lessons from Modernism, born from a 2013 exhibition of the same name at The Cooper Union, collects 25 projects designed in the years 1925 to 1970, from Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's New Dwellings for Bordeaux (gracing the cover) to Constantinos Decavallas's Vacation House on Aegina. These projects all exhibit considerations of climate, even as their formal responses and geographic locales are diverse; a map at the beginning of the book illustrates the geographic dispersal of the projects overlaid with the different climatic zones across the globe. The thorough documentation of each project is aided by the work the Cooper students produced for the exhibition, which consists of models, drawings and diagrams. Spearheading the exhibition and book is Kevin Bone, architect and director of the Institute for Sustainable Design at The Cooper Union.


[Housing at Sunila Pulp Mill - Alvar Aalto, 1936]

In addition to the 25 projects, the book features a timeline with many more projects with a similar approach, and four academic essays that analyze the results of the research and exhibition. But it's the 25 projects that are the meat of the book and the most rewarding aspect of it. So the projects, built or unbuilt, can be compared to each other, a consistent format is used, most evident in the pages highlighting the "primary solar paths and corresponding sections." These drawings show orientation and prevailing winds, but they are all about the sun, how it moves across the sky, how much enters the buildings spaces and how it is controlled. Given that drawings illustrating natural ventilation, for example, are included only sporadically, there's a clear emphasis on environmental design equaling solar design.


[Exhibition Installation View]

The well honed focus on solar design is evident in Daniel A. Barber's essay at the end of the book, "Lessons from Lessons from Modernism," where he states that the book/exhibition "can be seen as a re-presentation of the second half of Victor and Aladar Olgyay's Solar Control and Shading Devices published in 1957." I'm not familiar with that book, which sounds like a design manual, but Bone's book can be seen as trying to rewrite history by elevating the environmentally conscious designs of modernism. I'll admit that I wasn't familiar with a number of the projects or architects in the book. Along these lines, there is definitely value in broadening ones exposure to historical precedents where solar design merges with beauty and thoughtful considerations of scale and site.


[Cocoon House: Paul Rudolph with Ralph Twitchell, 1951]

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A 'CITE' in the Desert

A few days ago, via Hyperallergic, I learned about the Center for Innovation, Testing, and Evaluation (CITE), a $1 billion project proposed in 2011 by Pegasus Global Holdings "to be the largest scale testing and evaluation center in the world." Originally slated to be built in Lea County, New Mexico, the uninhabited 400-acre project was idle from 2012 until last year, when news came out that Pegasus was going to restart the project for a site "along Interstate 10 between Las Cruces and Deming." The architect responsible for the master planning of CITE is Perkins + Will, which describes the project as "the transformation of a 22 square mile land holding in New Mexico into a serviced laboratory environment."


[All images, depicting the Lea County locale, are courtesy of Perkins + Will, unless noted otherwise.]

CITE is composed of four main areas – City Lab, Field Lab District, Backbone, and Research Campus – but it's the City Lab that draws the most attention, since it is envisioned as "a representative example of a modern day, mid-sized American city ... [of 35,000 residents with] urban, suburban and rural zones as well as the corresponding infrastructure." Or as Hyperallergic puts it, the City Lab "will have a mall, airport, city hall, churches, power plant, highway, suburbs, townhouses, and downtown office buildings, but no inhabitants" (my emphasis).



In being free of residents – seen as sources of "complication and safety issues," according to CITE – City Lab is reminiscent of places like the Playas Training and Research Center, also in New Mexico. But instead of a strictly military raison d'être, CITE is aimed at research and testing in four areas: Green Energy, Intelligent Transportation Systems (driver-less cars), Homeland Security, and Next Generation Wireless Infrastructure. CITE feeds into the notion that the world will be increasingly urbanized and technology is the key in making the city more sustainable.


[Image courtesy of CITE]

The above aerial rendering and below diagram clearly illustrate the various parts of City Lab, like a radial kit of parts taken from cities and suburbs, from a high-rise office building and interstate highway to a mock airport and a big box.



It's not surprising that the only capital-A architecture happens at the CITE Campus (renderings below), located near CITE's entrance at a remove from City Lab, and operating "as the public outreach for CITE and as an independent economic development magnet for interested parties – researchers, universities, innovators and investors." Yet the CITE Campus, with its green roofs, solar panels, trellises, fountain and surface parking, is a capable yet unremarkable design that is part of a project that borders on science fiction or fantasy. Perhaps this conservative design makes sense, given that the City Lab for 35,000 invisible residents will be chockablock of mundane buildings – if it ever gets built.

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