Out of the Shoebox

After Functionalism
I dusted off another old essay from 1993, never before published, but which has helped me in countless other articles since then. It's called After Functionalism  and I've filled it under the original date that I first signed it.

Help Save a Rudolph Building

© New York Times- Tony Cenicola

Paul Rudolph's 1971 Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York is threatened with demolition, as reported by James S. Russell on the Bloomberg web site (link here).

Please sign this petition to help try to save it:
http://www.change.org/petitions/orange-county-new-york-legislature-oppose-the-demolition-of-the-orange-county-government-center-in-goshen-ny#

Paraphrasing a note I wrote to Jim, we’ve got to fight harder for things like this. If they don’t like it, they should turn it into a library or a bed and breakfast or a luxury condo (quite a bit better than some of the latest in NY  by Nouvel, etc.). Take it apart and ship it to someplace that appreciates it, and give the county the cowshed they are pining for. Or let it alone; it would make a magnificent ruin. If we let things like this go we might as well pack up and give up.

Addendum April 8, 2012:
The debate reaches The New York Times, see article here.

One of the points made is that Victorian architecture was once just as unpopular. Here's how I explained it to a Facebook friend:  

"Brutalism is actually an architectural style, Lord Help Us. From the 1960s and 70s. It's all the rage among students now, just as the buildings are deteriorating and find few fans amid the general public. It's like what happened to Victorian architecture in the 1960s [and probably already in the 1930s] -- a lot of great things were torn down before people learned to appreciated their kinks and caprices. Now love for the Victorian is a mighty cliché. "

Images from a handsome report on the building in Archdaily Classics from various sources. Last two photos by James S. Russell for Bloomberg,

© "U Mass Dartmouth"

James S. Russell

James S, Russell

China: 30 Story Prefab Hotel Up in 15 Days

Video of the Week

From the following article:

China's high-speed building boom
"A 30-story hotel in Changsha went up in two weeks"
By Jonathan Kaiman
The Los Angeles Times
March 7, 2012
(Story picked up from Architectural Record)

Let's Twist

Architectural Record's annual Record Houses issue this month features my article on a house outside Stuttgart by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of UNStudio.

My take on the work is as an update on the New York Five with digital warping added to the play of line, plane and curve of mechanical drafting.

"There's a swirl at the center of UNStudio's House Beside a Vineyard outside Stuttgart, or what principal Ben van Berkel calls “the twist.” Two flights of stairs run diagonally across the square floor plan, crossing over each other in a single, fluid motion as they rise from the ground-floor entry to the living area and up to the gallery and master bedroom. The dynamic energy they impart sets the open living spaces into motion and directs visitors toward the cozy, glazed corners with views.... "

Full text, pictures and plans available here.
Photo from the article by Iwan Baan

Working in China

The New York Times Magazine published this story on Westerners working inside Chinese architecture firms in China: 

Building the American Dream in China
(I know, weird title)
by Brook Larmer
The New York Times
March 16, 2012

"Fueled by rising prosperity and the largest rural-to-urban shift in history — some 300 million Chinese became city dwellers over the past two decades — the boom has utterly transformed the eastern seaboard around Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The fastest growth now is taking place deep in the country’s interior or on its outer edges in cities little known in the West: Harbin, Changsha, Chengdu and dozens of others.

San Francisco architect Adam Mayer in a Chinese architecture office in Chengdu:

"The pace was relentless. From designing one or two projects a month, Mayer was soon being pushed to produce one large-scale conceptual design every week. 'The deadlines were crazy,' Mayer says. 'Sometimes we’d have three days to finish a 250,000-square-meter project.' Even so, his Chinese colleagues churned out even more. 'In terms of pure production, the local staff could work faster and more efficiently than anything I’ve ever seen in the U.S.,' Mayer says, even if in some instances they saw no shame in 'literally copying designs right out of a book.' "

Photo: Wood Sculpture Museum, Harbin by  MAD Architects, from the Times.

Call for Entries

Record Interiors 2012
The editors of Architectural Record are currently inviting submissions for the 2012 Record Interiors issue. Submissions are due June 1st.

Download the entry form (PDF)

View previous Record Interiors projects

Abusive Working Conditions

Archleaks España offers inside reports by anonymous submitters about working conditions in some of the best-known architecture studios in Spain. No one may be very surprised, but the jump from word-of-mouth into print of reports about quite a few abusive employers is an overdue call to attention.

Many good architects work on the fringe of economic possibility (and others have made millions). Many dedicate themselves to their work to the same extreme lengths they expect of their employees. But the over-reliance on underpaid (or even unpaid) students and interns must be seriously examined. And not just in Spain. The site also has versions in English (with many international firms) and Italian.

The page is in its starting stages, so I would encourage everyone to honestly share their experience.

However, a lot of the comments are quite abusive themselves, using the safety of anonymity for insults and exaggerated sarcasms. The site claims to be screened. but it could well do with a lot more. And it needs work on a very sloppy web presentation.

Thanks to Fredy Massad  for the "heads up" on this.

Ups and Downs

News Briefs

Zaera-Polo

Alejandro Zaera-Polo Named Dean at Princeton
Architectural Record, New York, March 27, 2012
See also: Scalae, Arquitectura Viva
The comments section of the Record report has some interesting and heated debate from Princeton students and others over the appointment.

García-Abril

Antón García-Abril to curate Spanish Pavilion at Venice Biennial 
Scalae, March 20, 2012 (in Spanish)

Grand Canal bridge: Venice files 3.5 million euro claim for damages against Calatrava
ABC, Madrid, March 20., 2012 (in Spanish)

Claim based on construction errors. Initial budget 3.8 million euros, total cost, 11.2 million, an overrun of 340 percent. The bridge's problems require constant vigilance and expenditures, according to the suit.


Seville to sue Jürgen Mayer, architect of Metropol Parasol for cost overruns
ABC newspaper, Sevilla, March 26, 2012

Here the change in city government last May, the economic crisis, and the search to pin blame for past excesses seem to be behind the case, according to an analysis in Scalae.

Photos
Zaera-Polo: Wikipedia
García-Abril: Scalae

Press Clips

Royal Academy of Spain in Rome
Grant application deadline, March 22, 2012
Open to citizens of Spain and Iberoamérica


Beware of phony competitions!
BD Online, March 7. 2012

Mies' Tugendhat House restored again
The International Herald Tribune / New York Times, Feb. 27, 2012

Hans Haacke on Vallecas at the Reina Sofía
El País, February 17, 2012

The Whitney Biennial
Rave review by Roberta Smith
The New York Times, March 1, 2012

Jonathan Glancey bids farewell 
The Guardian, Feb, 12, 2012
With a handful of stunning images

Miniaret, Great Mosque in Samarra, Iraq

Norman Foster's Tarn Valley Viaduct

Tough Elegance in the Raval

 My article on Josep Lluís Mateo's Filmoteca de Catalunya in Barcelona appears in the March issue of The Architectural Review.  

"The Film Archive ... is a cultural beachhead in the ongoing battle for Barcelona's Raval.... The urban strategy and material texture of [the building] are well-attuned to the Raval's tough character. While Richard Meier's gleaming Neo-Purist composition, located a few blocks north, couldn't be more alien, Mateo's building is built of board-formed concrete, whose rough texture he compares to nearby peeling walls...."

Screen Play
The Architectural Review

March 2012, pages 50 - 59

Photos:  © Adrià Goula
Courtesy of MateoArquitectura
 

 

True to my take on previous works by Mateo, I express some reservations about this project, notwithstanding its adroit urban pose: chiefly, the structural gymnastics employed for a raltively simple program of lobby, offices and library (the movie theaters are underground).

View from Filmoteca office floor towards plaza.

America's Six Miillion

Reading List
Adam Gopnik writes in the January 30 New Yorker on the second largest city in the United States, with a population of over six million: its prisons.

Gopnik writes:

"....it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

" 'I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.' "

One of his interesting arguments:

"William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School [in his book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice] ... suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man.... 

"The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles....  Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong."

His solution:

"Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. 'Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges' is usually the very best thing to do with a problem.... To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime."

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1nzsz3hrN

 

Illustration: Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, 1829.

Image from Opacity.

José Mª Rodríguez-Pastrana, 1952 - 2012

Felipe Artengo & José María R. Pastrana (left to right)

I just received an email from his office announcing his death today, February 29, 2012.

José María was one of the partners in AMP Architects in Tenerife (Canary Islands), with Feilpe Artengo and former partner Fernando Menis (who has worked independently for some time). Their projects include the Presidency Building, which I covered for Architectural Record  (March 2001) and Casabella.

Following the death of Luis Mansilla and Manuel de Solà-Morales, it's been a terrible week.

AMP website.
Photo: El País

More later:
An obituary in the Canary Island paper Diaro de Avisos reports his death "after a long illness."

Manuel de Solà-Morales, 1939 - 2012

The Barcelona-based architect and urban planner transformed the Moll de la Fusta in the old Barcelona port into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard for the 1992 Olympics, and developed, with Rafael Moneo, the L'Illa Diagonal mixed-use complex in the city center.  His death was announced in El País today by the architect Luis Domènech, who describes his distinguished career as a teacher, writer, and practitioner, and his roots in the teachings of José Luis Sert at Harvard and  Ludovico Quaroni in Rome.

Solà-Morales founded and directed the Laboratory of Urbanism at Barcelona's school of architecture, the ETSAB, and was one of the founders, with Domènech, Oriol Bohigas and others, of the historic magazine Arquitecturas bis. In addition to his work in Barcelona, he has executed urban projects throughout Europe.

He was the older brother of the late architect and critic Ignasi Solà-Morales (1942-2001), and father of the architect Clara Solà-Morales. He died of a heart attack in his sleep, Domènech reports.

 Photo from http://www.manueldesola.com.

The Language of Bronze

The eighth issue of the Russian journal Speech has come out with my article on Francisco Mangado's Archaeological Museum in Vitoria, Spain. The issue is dedicated to the theme of the detail. Altho I have written about the same project in Architectural Record this past July, this is an entirely different article (though it inevitably covers some of the same ground).

Free of Record's thorough editing, for good and for ill, I was able to get in some cherished bits, such as the not-so-far-fetched comparison to  Mies' Seagram Building which, as I was pleased to find, got an article all to itself in the same issue.

Speech is now preparing its ninth issue for this June, with more from this quarter.  

The Language of Bronze
Archaeology Museum of Álava, Vitoria, Spain, by Francisco Mangado
Speech 08/2011, December 2011, pages 80 - 91

Construction photo
Courtesy of Francisco Mangado

Luis Moreno Mansilla, 1959 - 2012

http://mansilla-tunon.blogspot.com/2012/02/blog-post.html

The Madrid architect Luis Moreno Mansilla died suddenly yesterday at the age of 52, apparently due to a heart attack. In partnership with Emilio Tuñón, he was the author of key works of the past decade such as the MUSAC Museum in León, Spain.

Luis was in Barcelona with Emilio to present a book about Enric Miralles, another architect of our generation who died prematurely in 2000.  Emilio found Luis dead in his hotel room the day after the presentation.

The notice in El País (02.22.12).
The notice in English in BD Online.

Portraits and testimonials by Anaxtu Zabalbeascoa (El País, 02.23.12), and William J. Curits (also in Spanish, El País, 02.25.12).

Rafael Moneo remembers Luis, who worked in his studio in the 1990s (El País, 02.24.12, translation by DC; the full text in English is posted on Harvard's GSD site) :

 "I remember him drawing the designs for the Previsión Española [in Seville], the Seville Airport, the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum, the Miró Foundation and so many other projects. He lived with us for four months in Cambridge. Then in the decade of the 90s, his coming of age and the first commissions launched his independent career: the union of two people with a common sensibility but with differing qualities. Emilio Tuñón has great talent as an architect. Luis had the capacity to think through all that architecture can express. ....  [Their] built work up until now has always been solid and fresh, mature from the beginning.... And though the sad loss inevitably marks a before and after, it would be a very great thing if the work of the studio could continue without rupture."

From the Mansilla + Tuñón webpage:
(In original English)

(These are the last words of Luis M. Mansilla, which he spoke during the presentation of a book on the architect Enric Miralles)

Barcelona February 22, 2012

..."In the last thirty years of my professional career -that means all of it- I do not remember seeing anything more striking than the work of Enric Miralles. What a delicious and happy coincidence...How is it possible to feel the most shaken by an architecture that has been considered to be the most personal and inscrutable?

The only answer is to think that Enric’s work is the same as everyone else’s. Or at least that his preoccupations are the same as ours.

As Josep Plá used to say, "every artist plagiarizes us". Plá was a guy able to say that a person "spoke with capital letters" or to define someone as "the type of person who seemed smaller in the close distance than from afar".

Nevertheless, and this is the interesting part, Enric has plagiarized us "before" we had the feeling in which we recognize ourselves.

I am starting to think that space is not a significant part of our preoccupations in life. Just time, that spills and slips between our fingers when we try to catch it."

Bibliography

DC, Razón y Forma / Reason and Form, 
2G No. 27, Mansilla + Tuñón. Obra reciente. Recent work, 

Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2003, pages 6 - 19.

DC, Young Spanish Architects - Junge spanische Architekten,

Birkhäuser, Basel, Berlin, Boston, 2000, p. 28 - 37.

Updated 02.24.12, 02.26.12