The Great (Weekly) Migration

Due to problems with my web host, in which my weekly web page would unexpectedly go blank from a couple lines of code, I decided earlier this year to migrate A Weekly Dose of Architecture – the website I started in 1999 and ran until 2014 – to this blog. So now you can find all 671 of the weekly doses under the "weekly dose" tag, and the few-hundred book reviews under the "book reviews" tag, combined with the ones from this blog.

The migration of that website to this blog, and the subsequent canceling of services with my web host, mean a few things:

1. Any visits to the old home of the weekly doses will yield a "404 - Not Found"
2. Many links to the weekly projects and book reviews will yield the same
3. Many images on this blog will be broken
4. Some articles (Kowloon Walled City, academic essays, articles for other publications) are gone altogether.

I'm hoping the Google bots take care of #1, but with this post making the total number on my blog 4,338, I'm surely not going to be fixing #2 and #3 across the whole site; I will fix them on a post-by-post basis, such as when I want to link to an old post and notice it has a missing image. I'll add the content from #4 to this blog as I see fit, either as standalone pages or as backdated posts, the same way I handled the weekly dose migration.

That said, I hope this necessary but fairly ad hoc migration does not raise the ire of any readers of this blog and my old weekly page. Considering the short-term memory of the Internet these days, I'm not too worried. Nevertheless this blog is an archive of my interests and output, so I'll do my best to fix any issues that come about from something I should have done a long time ago, namely consolidating all of my "doses" in one place. Please comment if you see any problems I'm not aware of.

March 16 Update: I've reinstated some of the directories from my old server, such that in reference to the above:

1. Visits to individual pages on my old weekly home still yield a 404 error, but the root page points to this blog
2. No change
3. I've fixed most of the images on this blog
4. I've reinstated my articles and KWC page in the same locations

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Today's archidose #821

Yesterday Michael Graves died of natural causes in his Princeton home at the age of 80. Here are some photos of MGA&D's Hyatt Regency Fukuoka (1994) in Fukuoka, Japan, photographed by Ken Lee.









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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Scenes from the life of Raimund Abraham

Those who find themselves in Copenhagen in a couple weeks will be in for a treat, as Jonas Mekas's Scenes from the life of Raimund Abraham will be making its world premiere on March 22 as part of the Copenhagen Architecture Festival CAFx. Details on the 300-minute (!) film can be found below, but also check out the long list of other films that will be screening over the course of CAFx's five days (March 18 - 22).

Scenes from the life of Raimund Abraham

World Premiere of an architect-portrait from an avant-garde film-legend.

This until now unpublished film by the American independent director Jonas Mekas is a portrait of the architect Raimund Abraham. Characteristically for Mekas, he interweaves footage of both everyday and important events together into an unhierarchic mosaic of moods and moments. Lectures, dinner parties, kitchen table conversations and studio life meshed together and framed by the New York director’s personal understanding of film. The shape of the portrait is not classic, but tries instead to present a fragmented, sensitive portrayal of a life. Abraham’s creative environment and social circle plays a significant role in the film, where you meet notables such as Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk and Patti Smith.

Raimund Abraham was born and educated in Austria but moved in 1964 to the United States, where he played a leading role in the architectural avant-garde environment. He taught at Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union, among other places.

The film is introduced by the architect, Professor Anders Abraham.

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Charles Jencks's Evolving 'Evolutionary Trees'

I'm not going to attempt to explain or decipher architect and historian Charles Jencks's famous Evolutionary Tree diagrams, but with the publication of one in an article at Architectural Review, and having had one from 2000 on my Flickr account for a while (easily the most frequented image on my account, with over 20,000 views), I decided to see what other iterations are floating around the Internet. So four of his Evolutionary Trees are below in reverse chronological order, but if you can point me to more versions please leave a comment and I'll add them to this post.


"The author’s diagrams of Late, Neo and Postmodernism have never featured less than six streams to each of these large composite rivers, making 12 to 18 competitors at any one time" (image found online in article by Jencks, "In what style shall we build?" in Architectural Review, published March 12, 2015):



"Post-Modern Evolution – Evolutionary Tree" in The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism, published 2002 (scan found at Remix the School House):



"The Century is Over, Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture" (scanned from Architectural Review, July 2000, p. 77):



"Charles Jencks, Evolutionary Tree of Post-Modern Architecture, 1960-1980" (image found at Archive of Affinities):

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Today's archidose #820

Yesterdays one-two punch was the announcement that Frei Otto is the 2015 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, made one day after he died at the age of 89. To honor his work, here are some photos culled from the archidose flickr pool of his most well known project, the roof for the main sports facilities in the Munich Olympic Park, 1972.

Photographs by Paweł Paniczko:



Photographs by mcorreiacampos:




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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NYC - Crowds = Richard Estes

The title equation "New York City minus crowds equals Richard Estes" is not absolute when it comes to the work of painter Richard Estes, but it's something that comes to mind when seeing the works collected in the exhibition, Richard Estes: Painting New York City, opening today at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). Here is but the most obvious example, where Estes painted an empty D Train on its way into Manhattan from Brooklyn (or is it vice-versa?):


[D Train, 1998]

In other paintings, be they earlier or later than the one above, people appear, but rarely to the extent one would expect when Manhattan is the subject. Columbus Circle, in 2009 after MAD opened in its Allied Works-designed container and the landscaped center was redesigned by Laurie Olin, was a bustling place, even in winter, as it was during yesterday's press preview. But in Estes' painting the sidewalk is empty and the only figures are those reflected in the glass storefront of the MAD building:


[Columbus Circle Looking North, 2009]

Before a lack of crowds, which has a reasoning I will get to, the overriding feature of Estes paintings is reflectivity, which arises from the subjects he paints (the city at the level of the pedestrian) and the fact he photographs his compositions. Yet the latter does not make his work photo-realist (exhibition curator Patterson Sims described it as "photo-derived"), since the reflections take on an other-wordly quality in his paintings, indicative of how he transforms his photos into paintings in an indirect manner.

Take the below painting, Horn & Hardart Automat, as an example. The reflections at the top of the painting are so strong that they prevail over the interior, which is marked by a few light pendants; but down below the seated figure inside the cafeteria takes precedence over the reflected exterior. Some of this can be chalked up to values of light and dark on the city street, but I'd wager much of it is based on the artist's intentions, in which he portrays an inner reality rather than a semi-objective reality found in the camera. Seeing the building elevations across the street and the figure inside the cafeteria equally in the painting is a reflection of the mental ability to see both even if it wouldn't happen in one gaze.


[Horn and Hardart Automat, 1967]

The way Estes picks and chooses the "realities" from his photos is clearest in the below photo of the Plaza Hotel at the southeast corner of Central Park. First, the view through the bus window on the right doesn't have any trace of reflection, which anybody riding a bus (or even a car) would know to be impossible. Second, the two figures on the far left are actually the same person in two poses, assembled by Estes from different photos. And third, the view outside the bus on the left is farther down Fifth Avenue than 60th Street. The first is fairly obvious, but number two and three are pretty subtle things that serve the painting's overall composition.

What is also apparent about this photo is the number of people, which is much greater than other Estes paintings. Compare it with the D Train painting at top, which features an empty train car. The Plaza would indicate that Estes likes crowds, but I'd argue that in each case – in all cases – his decisions are about composition. In the case of The Plaza, he is balancing the people on the bus with the people outside; in the case of the D Train, the empty car is the best means of balancing the empty East River.


[The Plaza, 1991]

One more thing I'd like to say about Estes' painterly depictions of reality via photography is that, even though they are not traced over the snapshots that capture a particular time, his paintings exist like time capsules. Again this is related to his subject matter, since his scenes of Manhattan's public realm depict the changing fashions of cars, clothes and architecture. Even the Guggenheim Museum (1959) is captured in time, since he painted it before the Charles Gwathmey-designed addition (1992), and at a time when the exterior skin exhibited the cracks that would be repaired decades later:


[Detail of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, summer 1979 | Photo: John Hill]

Richard Estes: Painting New York City runs until September 20, 2015. Here are a few of my cameraphone photos from yesterday's preview of this highly recommended show.








[Curator Patterson Sims in front of Automat, 1966-68/ ca. 1971, one of the highlights from the show.]

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Mark Your Calendars, Bookworms

Each month, the AIANY Oculus Committee presents a Book Talk at the Center for Architecture. The next two are particularly promising. Details are below.




Oculus Book Talk: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space

When: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM MONDAY, MARCH 16

Where: At The Center

Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and cables controlling our cities. It also determines the hidden rules that structure the spaces all around us – free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs, and shopping malls. Extrastatecraft charts the emergent new powers controlling this space and shows how they extend beyond the reach of government.

Keller Easterling explores areas of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world – examining everything from standards for the thinness of credit cards to the urbanism of mobile telephony, the world’s largest shared platform, to the “free zone,” the most virulent new world city paradigm. She proposes some unexpected techniques for resisting power in the modern world.

Extrastatecraft will change the way we think about urban spaces – and how we live in them.

Price: Free for AIA members and students with valid student ID; $10 for non-members

Oculus Book Talk: "Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture"

When: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM MONDAY, APRIL 6

Where: At The Center

What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city?

In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving.

Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world's murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-storey Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city.

Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from.

Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

Price: Free for AIA members and students with valid student ID; $10 for non-members

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