My review of Deane Simpson's Young-Old is published in the June 3, 2015, issue of the Architect's Newspaper. Click here or on the image below to read the review in larger PDF format.
Saarinen Houses by Jari Jetsonen, Sirkkaliisa Jetsonen Princeton Architectural Press, 2014 Hardcover, 224 pages
I have never been to Finland, so the only Eliel Saarinen house I've seen in person is his own residence on the campus of the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit. It was probably fifteen years ago that I saw it, and even though I was more excited by the prospects of the newer campus buildings by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Steven Holl, and Rafael Moneo, the tour of the Saarinen House was a highlight of the visit. Though pleasantly integrated into the campus landscape, and with its own garden courtyard, it was on the inside where the house shone. Each room was distinct and designed down to the fraction of an inch, from its scale and proportions, to its windows and furnishings, much of the last built-in. It was clearly a home as work of art, a phrase used by Jari Jetsonen and Sirkkaliisa Jetsonen in the introduction to their collection of houses by both Saarinens: Eliel and his son Eero.
Jari is a photographer based in Helsinki and Sirkkaliisa is an architect who teaches in Helsinki and St. Louis, so it's not surprising that most of the houses in the book – 12 of 17 – are found in Finland and designed by Eliel, either on his own or in partnership with Hermen Gesellius and Armas Lindgren. Therefore the book presents buildings little published elsewhere, much less in one place. The whole undertaking benefits from Jari's photography, which gives the book a visual consistency with, somewhat surprisingly (like my first encounter with the house at Cranbrook), rich and diverse colors, from the tile roofs and blue interior walls of Hvitträsk (1902) to the conversation pit inside Eero's Miller House (1957) in Columbus, Indiana.
The Miller House, for Cummins Engine Company head J. Irwin Miller, was designed with Saarinen's lead designer Kevin Roche and architect and textile designer Alexander Girard. The authors call the result of their collaboration "one of the finest postwar dwellings in the United States." One then has to wonder where Eero may have gone with residential architecture if he had not died four years after the completion of that house at the age of only 51. Might he have designed a dozen more houses, like his father had, instead of just a few? If so, where would he have taken the modern "home as a work of art"? We will never know, but his houses were evidently an extension of his father's attention to detail throughout the whole living environment, something that comes across by grouping their houses in one book.
Earlier today I received a newsletter with updates on the work of Losada Garcia Architects, a firm based in Spain and San Diego, California. One of their projects, La Gota Cultural Center - Tobacco Museum in Cáceres, Spain, was inaugurated on Wednesday. The design of five shifted boxes is a decent one (attributed, by the architects, "to the structure of the tobacco plant based on principles of equality and diversity that are seen in their leaves"), but what draws me to the project is LG's multifaceted documentation of it, which reveals the various media architects use in the design process as well as the numerous steps in a building's construction.
There's a LEGO model:
An illuminated model (of foam and cork, it appears):
A line drawing showing natural ventilation:
A full-blown rendering:
A construction photo showing the Domino-like concrete columns and slabs:
The glass window walls installed and the concrete slabs painted:
Rem Koolhaas has been part of the international avant-garde since the nineteen-seventies and has been named the Pritzker Architecture Prize for the year 2000. This book, which builds on six canonical Koolhaas projects [Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture; Ville Nouvelle Melun-Sénart; Maison à Bordeaux; Dutch Embassy; Seattle Public Library; and CCTV], traces the discursive practice behind the design methods used by Koolhaas and his office OMA. It uncovers recurring key themes—such as wall, void, montage, trajectory, infrastructure, and shape—that have structured this design discourse over the span of Koolhaas's oeuvre. The book moves beyond the six core pieces, as well: It explores how these identified thematic design principles manifest in other works by Koolhaas as both practical re-applications and further elaborations.
In addition to Koolhaas's individual genius, these textual and material layers are accounted for shaping the very context of his work's relevance. By comparing the design principles with relevant concepts from the architectural Zeitgeist in which Koolhaas has operated, the study moves beyond its specific subject—Rem Koolhaas—and provides novel insight into the broader history of architectural ideas.
Continuing the conversation on urbanism, this issue of MONU Magazine picks up on a topic opened in MONU #8 on border urbanism. Transnational Urbanism expands the topic of trans-border relations between cities close to nation state borders, to interrogate the flux of exchanges that crisscross a multiplicity of borders. As MONU has accustomed its readers, architects, urban planners and designers, policy makers, sociologists, educators, photographers and filmmakers take part in the conversation. They make up a transnational community of researchers spanning from Rotterdam, the headquarters of MONU, to the United States, and East Asia, passing through Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. As Merve Bedir stresses in her essay, they themselves live intense transnational lives.
I am a regular reader of MONU ever since my work colleagues got me a subscription for my birthday a couple of years ago. But when I got my copy of MONU #22 for reviewing, instead of zapping through it, like I normally do, I started reading it like a book and letting myself be guided by the editorial skills of Bernd Upmeyer. And what I discovered along the way was the conversation between the articles, as each of them builds on a thread launched by a previous one.
To begin with, as MONU’s trademark and opening piece, the interview in #22 is with sociologist Jean-Louis Missika, assistant mayor of Paris. He depicts an image of the global that comprises the world in itself. While Paris’s elected challenge is to provide shared infrastructure and housing for the global city’s mobile dwellers, Agatino Rizzo’s proposition for building a sustainable global city in between Malaysia and Singapore is to offer public space able to downplay social inequalities.
What we read through the pages of this issue is the incredible porosity of borders, as even the most impenetrable of them, like the one between North and South Korea are crossed by cooperation and negotiation efforts that ultimately link joint economic, touristic, and knowledge spaces. Of course, as Yehre Sul shows, such projects are always at risk of being temporarily shut down by unpredicted incidents, or "the fog of international policy." We can equally read how conflict pushes established trade routes between countries officially at war underground, and reconfigures trade landscapes, as Arab traders reorient themselves to China after 9/11 and China’s joining the WTO. Caught up in between are Syrians and other asylum seekers whose trajectories are highly controlled and regulated. In spite of this, but also because of it, transnational friendships leak out of detention regimes, as Kolar Aparna’s research illustrates.
Stories of work-migration present us the Philippine work-migration industry, and former Mozambican guest workers in the former German Democratic Republic caught in limbo as the fall of socialist regimes in the early nineties has only revealed their work as paying for their country’s debt. Splinters of the colonial gaze and the construction of "otherness" are shown to construct also "other" spaces, like the segregated spaces of Philippine workers in the Arab Emirates. Such gazes obscure sight and push urbanism into ‘magical’ interpretations, like the one offered by half architect – half media philosopher Thomas Mical. However, it is the constant effort of translation that constitutes "the challenge of transnationalism," as Kolar Aparna writes.
Speaking from a European perspective, and the debate on closing the gates of "Fortress Europe," the articles in MONU #22 open up ways for understanding. In particular, one question is raised concerning African migration: how does it articulate with massive development projects around Africa’s mineral resources?
Architects and urban planners and designers are gaining momentum in border studies. Next to MONU #22 on Transnational Urbanism, a recent conference at the Sheffield School of Architecture on Border Topologies in October 2014 is proof of the professions' deep engagement with this topic. While MONU is definitely oriented towards the architectural profession, the current number tackles a trans-disciplinary theme, and that is what makes it such a good read, not only for architects. It represents a fresh alternative to a standard academic journal, as much of the articles are indeed by architects involved in academia. However, the freshness is in the practice, as Bernd Upmeyer’s editorial skills of construing a conversation from the different articles are definitely an architect’s trademark.
Iulia Hurducaș is an architect and urban designer. After studying architecture and urbanism in Cluj, Romania, and Hamburg, Germany, she worked for the Romanian-German architecture practice Planwerk, in Cluj. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Sheffield School of Architecture in the UK on the topic of transnational urban transformations.
Mark your calendars: MAD (Museum of Arts and Design) is presenting a retrospective of director Andrei Tarkovsky's films this Summer. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time "presents the work of the revolutionary director and includes screenings – all on 35 mm – of all seven feature films and a behind-the-scenes documentary." The retrospective starts on July 10, with one film screened per week until August 28.
[Nostalghia, 1983, Andrei Tarkovsky, image courtesy of Kino Lorber]
To date I've only seen Nostalghia from 1983, his first film made outside of Russia. It is, like the rest of his films (or so I've been told and read), a slow and meditative film. It is so full of poetic images that it is easily one of the best films I've ever seen; it is cinema as a true art form. It made me want to see the rest of the films, but it's often hard to devote more than two hours to one of Tarkovsky's films or to get in the mood for them – they are the antithesis of today's binge-watching screen culture. Perhaps I needed MAD's retrospective as an excuse to finally see Solaris, Stalker, Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice, not to mention the documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky that came out in 1988, two years after the director died.
[Nostalghia, 1983, Andrei Tarkovsky, image courtesy of Kino Lorber]
The name of the MAD program takes its name from a book by Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, of which I've read only parts but can nevertheless see the parallels between his words and his images. He writes near the end: "Today it seems to me far more important to talk not so much about art in general or the function of cinema in particular, as about life itself; for the artist who is not conscious of its meaning is unlikely to be capable of making any coherent statement in the language of his own art." Tarkovsky's statements may not always be obvious, but like any poetry, his films are worth watching to discover meaning and to behold as things of beauty.
