I thought I should find out how a standard McMansion style house is put together - having been an architect and noticing that they seemed to be really badly built. I did some reading up.

The standard construction materials are essentially: timber of the same grade used for temporary hoardings (structure); expensive garbage bags (DPMs); bubble pack grade plastic (siding, soffits, sills); staples; Tyvec envelopes and fly paper (weather proofing).

The principal American domestic architecture of the last 20 years consists of a building type based on ascetic Protestant architecture designed to minimize flamboyance or display of wealth, which is then blown up to a large scale to do just that, complete with neo-baroque trimmings (ironically from catholic architecture) which are made out of plastic.

This same building form spans an entire sub-continent with a climate that ranges from tundra to tropical and culture that varies from Appalachian to Amerindian. It is constructed using materials that are of lower quality that the packaging in most consumer goods. It is an architectural tragedy, whose only saving grace is that, unlike concrete brutalism, it is bio-degradable.

The NYT takes a look at Diller and Scofidio’s solid design of the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston:

Institute of Contemporary Art - Boston - Architecture - Review - New York Times

When my favorite architecture critic, Ian Nairn, drove around America in the 50s, his favorite towns were in Pennsylvania, particularly Pittsburgh, whose post-industrial transformation he would have been proud of.

On our Labor Day excursion to Philadelphia, we explored some towns on the way - particularly Bethlehem, the Moravian town with the legendary steelworks.

Bethlehem, has what suburban America, for the most part, does not - a sense of place. It is a town, once rich, once poor, which is a perfect model for viable, sustainable towns of the future.

The most stunning thing about Bethlehem is the rusted steel cathedral of the disused blast furnaces that dominate the skyline.

Given that Bethlehem, is famous for its Christmas lights, it is surprising that the blast furnaces do not form part of the decoration.

When I worked for set designers Fisher Park, there was a project in the office, to illuminate the steelworks in Duisberg (link below) - a baroque, funfair like celebration of light that would be perfect for Bethlehem.

TrekEarth | The steel mill Photo

Metropolis Magazine reviews Google’s horrid new offices.

It takes the ‘working here is so much fun we’re so playful’ spin to its most simplistic architectural representation - bright colors and toys.

All of these, of course, are a thin veneer over the reality - a strip lit, cubicle ridden, hell hole, like a parody of The Office.

Google’s products are still failry sophisticated - I hope the office environment doesn’t rub off.

Architects are good at building brands without people noticing that thats what they are doing, but mostly bad at capitalizing on them by doing mass produced items, such as furniture collections or hardware elements.

The Slate article below covers a very interesting topic but the conclusions are completely wrong.

“neither Foster nor Piano has a house style; their designs vary considerably from project to project”

If anyone has a house style, it is Foster. When I was there someone nearly got fired for not specifying the wrong door handles on a building - they weren’t Elementer.

The main reason that Foster or Piano buildings vary in style is that they didnt design them all - if you are a big architecture practice its just not possible for the founder to design everything. That not deception, just a function of scale. What keeps the integrity of design is precisely the house style.

Unfortunately, in the same way that art historians squabble over whether a Rembrant is authentic (as if there were a clear boundary) because they desperately want to believe in the myth of authorship, the same is true of architects, and that is precisely why they have strong brands. People want to believe in signatures.

How architects build brands. By Witold Rybczynski

I’m currently re-reading Christopher Alexander’s classic ‘A Pattern Language’, whose deterministic design approach is the antithesis of Jane Jacobs’ in many ways, but less unfashionable than other rules-based systems due to its common sense approach.

I’ve noticed that Alexander’s notion of using pools of light to define spaces virtually is born out with alomost any feature.

In New York, where the sidewalks are rarely cleaned, one way to measure people flow quantitatively is through the dark spots on the pavement that chewing gum makes.

It seems that people will hang around pretty much any pole, lamp-post etc. One the other hand the pole must be high enough to provide ‘virtual’ shelter, there tends to be much less chewing gum around fire hydrants.

When architects steal terms like Post Modernism or Deconstruction from the, shrouded in bullshit, fringes of philosophy called ‘literary criticism’ and the like, what they really mean is: ‘new buildings with decoration’ or ‘buildings that look like they are falling apart’, respectively.

That does not mean that the buildings aren’t beautiful - just that the justification is pointless and the understanding of other people’s field’s limited. Because of the nature of the scale and function of architecture, architects can pretend to be scientists when they are poor craftsmen and artists when they are bad engineers.

Seed magazine has a new piece on innovations in architecture - its true that composite materials, intelligent skins and energy efficiency concerns have created a scientific edge in some styles, but the combination of the fact that you can pretty much build anything these days with the counter swing against minimalism means that by and large architecture is more art than a science then ever.

The bottom line is that there is something deeply geeky and philistine about needing to find gadgetry in architecture for it to be innovative.

In fact practitioners of the baroque decorative style were more likely to be scientists, such as Guarini who was a mathematician and geometer.

If artists misunderstand science sometimes, then equally scientists misunderstand artists. Here is Seed getting taken in by architects who appropriate scientific jargon, when they never would be hoodwinked like this by research scientists:

“This recent project in Wolfsburg, Germany, from Zaha Hadid’s London office, is essentially a study in the displacing of the horizon… the nested lines of diverging parallels; and the exhibition spaces, whose traditional homogeneity is refigured as a quasi-random scattering of particles, like billiard balls on a crooked table. Quantum indeterminacy and undecideability reign.”

This is pure metaphor, yet the Wolfsburg project has been described as using ‘fractal geometry’ as if that is true or even innovative. Fractal geometry in the way that it exists in Hadid’s buildings has been used by architects for thousands of years.

Seed: Architecture’s Scientific Revolution

Today’s Cribcandy has a list of some of the most recent innovations in LED lighting from being directly embedded into fabrics, bathroom tiles and translucent glass.

LED’s are currently only in widespread use for applications with high maintenance costs such as traffic lights, but as their performance increases over the next 5 to 10 years, they will eventually replace standard home and office lighting and transform the way that interiors can be designed.

Aside from the tiny size of LED’s (or the even newer LECs (Light Emitting Capacitors), LED’s are approaching the lifespan of standard building materials, making it cost effective to embed them directly in structural components and architectural finishes.

The biggest change, however, is that because the currents involved are tiny, LED lighting can be directly controlled, digitally, meaning that there are almost unlimited effects that can be produced cheaply and controlled wirelessly.

Given that transparent wiring can be embedded in glass complete with transparent solar cells it should be possible to create windows with self-powered, embedded lighting to be any color or shade, display any image or be completely translucent.

Cribcandy - a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home

Josh Rubin points to the preliminary designs for Manhattan’s highline, which were unveiled at Monday’s opening at MOMA.

Manhattan’s highline project aims to take a 1.5 mile strip of disused overhead railway and turn it into a linear park.

It’s a terrible idea.

Linear parks were all the rage when I was an architect, because they could use spaces that were generally wastelands, like old railway lines and, more importantly, because the long sweeping shallow curves made it easy to do presentations that looked great and truly modern.
The problem is that linear parks don

Excellent resource listing the various projects underway to create 3d models of Manhattan: VTerrain: New York City