Bruce Naumann: Can you hear the space?

A review in the NY Times of the Bruce Nauman exhibit at the Philly art museum recalls the light transformer, artist research, and musuem projects, architecture as experience, museums…

Happy Holidays! – Kai

The Year 2009 in Architecture

At the end of the year, I always enjoy thinking back upon the year, what were the notable moments of the year architecturally.  Nicholai Ouroussouf, the current critic of the NY Times, reviews the year with the headline “A Few Triumphs Pierce the Clouds of a Bleak Time,” and celebrate’s Zaha’s Maxxi Museum in Rome, Gehry’s Beekman Tower, and Morphosis’ Cooper Union building, among others, and notes the increasing interest in, and study of Infrastructure, both in the profession and in schools.

Paul Goldberger, the former critic for the NY Times, and now critic for The New Yorker, recently created a “Top 10″ list.  They included the High Line, Cooper Union, Alice Tully Hall, the Guggenheim, and Piano’s addition to the Chicago A.I., all of which we discussed on the CMU blog at some point, but also others that were not mentioned.  Are there other candidates for events, buildings, and plans around the world you’d nominate? What will 2009 be remembered for in history classes years from now, if anything? Are there other “best of” lists you can recommend?

Goldberger’s articles for The New Yorker have just come out in an anthology Building up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture (2009).  It complements his recent book Why Architecture Matters (2009).  Both are well worth reading in your month off.  The late Herbert Muschamp’s articles for the NY Times have also just come out as an anthology called Hearts of the City (2009), edited by Nicholai Ouroussouf, the current critic of the NY Times (an article on Architect Magazine offers an honest review).  The NY Times newspaper, through the voice of it’s architecture critic, and the city as a whole, continue to weild extraordinary power in the world architectural scene.  It’s always worthwhile to keep an eye on current events there, and to read these critics, not just their day-to-day musings, but the larger “projects” which they are working on through their writing.

Congrats on finishing the semester: enjoy the holidays, and the upcoming semester(s).

Kai

Make Concepts Buildable

Inspiration and overview for the final push: a great slogan from the SHoP Architects site, an advertisement for Dupont, for a software company, and images from the Stanford Art Department’s front page.

Crisis and Pandemonium in Architecture Education?

Educators are increasingly warning about a “crisis” in architecture education today, especially related to a misuse of modeling software and simple form-generating paradigms as a substitute for teaching and learning fundamentals.  They warn of architecture’s loss of authority and autonomy, of education’s increasing irrelevance with respect to the profession and the future.  But the voices are far from unified in how to approach the problem.

In 2004, Jorge Silvetti’s article “The Muses are Not Amused” (in Harvard Design Magazine, no. 19, special issue on Architecture as Conceptual Art?) railed against a “pandemonium in the house of architecture.”  Silvetti was disturbed by a “progressive dissipation of the centrality of our mission as educators to teach and learn rigorously and vigorously about form-making and its consequences.”  He considers the “neglect” of form-making to be “nothing less than suicidal for a profession whose creativity and standing depends ultimately on its absolute command of this unique and difficult task.”  He writes of a “deceptive euphoria” about a proliferation of design approaches that purport to create significant form, but don’t.  His “victims” or targets of attack are “programatism,” “thematization,” “blobs,” and “literalism.”  These problematic but increasingly popular approaches to design “are turning the architect into a dazed observer of seductive wonders.”

Instead of using sources outside of architecture to drive the creation of facile forms, Silvetti calls for architecture to return to itself: “architecture as the sole course of architecture could look at anything as formal inspiration, but from its inside out, keeping footings in its building core, anchoring its imagination in programmatic research beyond literal formal translations, and continuing in the flow of its own cultural trajectory, both responsive to and critical of its conventions, which does not imply the literal figurative use of referents.”  He calls for more disciplinary “autonomy,” a return to the specific muse of architecture, without denying the “intertextuality” and cultural “contamination” that we so much appreciate now in architecture.

In 2005, Thom Mayne’s address to the AIA urged all architects to embrace the computer, integrated practice, building information modeling (BIM), and the new possibilities these bring to the profession.  He writes of how the profession has changed since he graduated from school  in 1969: “Since then architecture has been eviscerated. We’re cake decorators, we’re stylists. If you’re not dealing in the direct performance of a work and if you’re not building it and taking responsibility for it, and standing behind your product, you will not exist as a profession.”

For Mayne, the solution is the 3D design thinking enabled by the computer, especially 3D modeling, both in the screen, and the new fabrication methods, for models, and construction.  “The tools we now utilize simplify potentialities and make them logical, allowing us to produce spaces that even ten years ago would have been difficult to conceive, much less build.  Anything that is possible is realizable… There exists a new medium, a continuity, a flow of thinking, a design methodology which is more cohesive from the first generative ideas, through construction, coordinating millions of bits of discrete data.”  His mandate is to “change or perish”: “You need to prepare yourself for a profession that you’re not going to recognize a decade from now, that the next generation is going to occupy.”  He seeks “less emphasis on designing in the traditional sense–styling, let’s say–and more emphasis on making.” With respect to education, he writes: “I haven’t drawn a plan for five years. I go to schools now that are still drawing plans and sections, and I have no idea what to talk about. Because once you start getting used to these tools, it’s like flying a jet plane and then going back and flying a prop… Once you get used to working three-dimensionally, there’s no going back. It represents a new totality.”

This month, Tim Love’s article “Between Mission Statement and Parametric Model” (Places blog), wrote provocatively: “A crisis in architectural education is brewing. I refer to the increasingly contentious divide between that cadre of junior faculty who espouse the gee-whiz form-making made possible by speculative parametric modeling and an Inconvenient Truth-influenced student body demanding design studios that prioritize social relevance and environmental stewardship.  The inherent tension between these cultural positions has not yet been fully registered by design faculties nor acted upon with specific curricular reform — yet it’s hard to miss.”

Love continues: “On the one hand, the situation is generating strange, hybridized manifestations in design studios — notably the ubiquitous son-of-the-Yokohama Port Terminal proposal: an undulating green roofscape blanketing habitable space below.  On the other hand, many schools and departments are busy reforming their programs to better integrate sustainability criteria into studio exercises, often at the expense of other aspects of design thinking. But in this swing from decontextualized digital experimentation to heightened social responsibility, design education is being compromised. A generation of young architects is graduating into professional practice with scant ability to construe and elaborate an architectural agenda that begins with a set of a priori social and cultural intentions and ends with a constructed environment. Only by examining both the causes of this situation and current pedagogical tendencies can a better approach to design education emerge.”  In the end, he calls for educators to look at practice for ways to solve the dilemma.

Pittsburgh Architectural Club

The Pittsburgh Architectural Club (PAC) is starting up again, after a long dormant period.   First founded in 1896 by apprentices working in Pittsburgh architectural firms, PAC once again seeks to promote architecture and the interaction of architects in Pittsburgh in many ways.   It is a club open to all interested in architecture, as a social club, to educate members, and to disseminate architecture to a wider public through lectures, exhibits, competitions, publications, public service, job site visits, social events, and more.

A brief history of the club was written as a school paper in 1981 by Helen Lofink.   In it, she notes that the club was first incorporated in 1901, and states: “From the beginning, the club had as its main objective, the advancement of architecture and the allied arts. The founders saw the club as a working rather than merely a social organization.”  Lofink goes on to quote the first yearbook of the club, from 1901: “while recognizing our modest position in the field of American architecture, we believe that by an earnest effort and a hearty cooperation, we shall succeed not only in the education of our members, but also aid bringing the general public to a better appreciation of Architecture as a fine art; in developing that sense of the beautiful in all things which will prompt us to pause in our headlong chase after material gain long enough to reflect that mere utility has too long been worshipped to the exclusion of beauty, and that progress consists not so much in material prosperity as in spiritual and mental advancement.”  This seems like an objective and cause still worth pursuing.

Through the efforts of Gerard Damiani and Debbie Battistone, prospective club members met for the first time on Thu. Sept. 17, 2009, at 6:30 in the CMU Library archives.  Librarian and historian Martin Aurand had set up a small exhibit of club memorabiliarom the archives’ collections, and long time members Joe LaRocca  and Milan Liptak attended to relate and help transfer the living memory of the club.

We met the second time on Thu. Nov. 12, 6:30, in the Intelligent Workplace of the CMU School of Architecture.  We discussed our varied visions of the club, similar clubs elsewhere in the US and abroad, and agreed to begin by creating a Facebook group page and a website, and to collect dues at a Dec. 17 meeting.

If you are interested in joining the Pittsburgh Architectural Club (PAC), please email Gerard Damiani, AIA, at gdamiani@sdapgh.com.  Or check out the club on Facebook or LinkedIn.

The club held annual exhibits of Pittsburgh architecturefrom 1901-1917.  See Google books for reprints.

Charette (vols. 1-54, 1920-1974) was the journal of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club.   A reprint of the journal is available through the CMU library website, and at: http://andrew.cmu.edu/user/ma1f/ArchArch/Charette/.  Info on the journal at:  http://andrew.cmu.edu/user/ma1f/ArchArch/Charette/journal.html

For a guide to researching Pittsburgh architecture, see the helpful guides by CMU librarian Martin Aurand, at:  http://andrew.cmu.edu/user/ma1f/ArchArch/PGHARCHres/index.html and http://andrew.cmu.edu/user/ma1f/ArchArch/PGHARCHres/resources.html.

Foster Gallery in NYC

The NYTimes had an article on a small new gallery being built in NYC by Norman Foster, with nice pics of a gallery on a very tight site (next to a big ugly brick building) that reminded me of the CMoA North site.  Note how the few images presented in the article give a fairly complete expression about the main ideas and spaces: a tight site, strong street presence, separate (tall) entry space, main gallery with multi-story space at center for large art works, upper floor galleries, storage space, small outdoor display area…

Clear, concise, thoughtful, yet satisfying all the program elements.

Light, Hiroshima, and Detroit

An amazing email of images was in my inbox, relating to the studio’s emphasis on LIGHT, but also on the issue of urban context, urban development, etc.

The email was comparing Detroit and Hiroshima, the complete destruction of Hiroshima in 1945 and the vibrant city today, vs. the booming insdutrial city of Detroit in 1945 and the urban blight you see today.

The email  implied we ought to be ashamed of Detroit.  Which is true.  But they are all shameful: the bombing, the excessive greed and watefulness and light pollution of Japanese capitalism, and the poverty of shrinking cities in America.  “Progress” as we’ve defined it, is not a sustainable idea.  Bruno Taut wrote a book after WWI (Die Aufloesung der Staedte, 1920), and F.L. Wright wrote a book in the Gret Depression (The Disappearing City, 1932) that both advocated very strongly that we abandon our cities, these nightmares of industrial capitalism, and all move to the countryside for a more benign existence.  Nature, both architects were convinced, would soon take over the cities and return them to a natural state.  Anything that can create the Grand Canyon can make Wall Street look similar. It looks like that’s starting to happen in Detroit.  Like Detroit, Flint, Buffalo, Cleveland, and others, Pittsburgh too is a shrinking city.   CMU’s “Remaking Cities Institute,” and websites like www.shrinkingcities.com are working in a whole new mode of planning.  Flint was in the news this summer: they are spending city dollars removing houses and even the pavement of the streets in several neighborhoods, letting grass grow: there will be green parks there soon, they hope.  See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/business/22flint.html

Google Architects

Want to be an architect, have stuff “built” in minutes? Now you can “build” buildings for Google Earth, and be a Google architect.  I guess it’s less about being an architect, more about doing free work for Google.  But if you have a favorite building or a house that is not yet in 3D, here’s your chance to get it online in 3D, to be “published” or at least “made public.” But only if its in a list of pre-designated cities and sites for which Google has images.

Would it not be great if we could pick our own sites.  For example, the Mattress Factory, and surrounding buildings for our site are not yet in 3D on Google Earth.  Perhaps our class could help create an accurate model of the area!?

Link to Google Building maker; or see the article at Webpronews.

Moholy-Nagy Light-Space Modulator

Here a project related to your Light Transformer by the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy, his “Light-Space Modulator,” designed over many years from 1923-1932.  Also called Light Prop for an Electric Stage, this kinetic sculpture that Moholy-Nagy designed and photographed was intended to create light displays for theater, dance, or other performance spaces. With its gleaming glass and metal surfaces of mobile perforated disks, a rotating glass spiral, and a sliding ball, the Light-Space Modulator created the effect of photograms in motion.

Here is a link to the Bauhaus page on this artwork: http://www.bauhaus.de/english/bauhaus1919/kunst/kunst_modulator.htm

Here is a video clip of the Light-Space Modulator in Action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVnF9A3azSA

CMU 48-200, F09 Studio Begins

The CMU 48-200 2nd year for fall 2009 studio starts tomorrow, Mon. Aug. 24, 2009.  We will meet in MM A14, at 1:30. Several of you are not officially registered, so you may not have gotten earlier emails.  Others are registered, but CMU seems to think you are not coming back. We’ll get it all straightened out then.  We’re looking forward to a exciting and productive semester.

“Architecture” © Eric Fisher