Critics are complaining about a scheme for a Renzo Piano Tower:
“London will become a high-rise city, with the dome of St Paul’s slowly reduced to a pimple.”
Planners should be realistic and play the New York game of ‘air rights’, allow tall buidings and get something in return such as some green space.
The NYT says that the terrain of Baghdad does not pose the same dangers as Grozny of Mogadishu.
“The old city in Baghdad does have narrow roads, but most of the city, especially the parts around many of Mr. Hussein’s compounds, is crisscrossed with wide boulevards that would be harder to block.”
Saddam, like many dictators has really bad taste, - from giant monuments with bronze castings of hands holding massive ceremonial swords (made in Basingstoke in England) to huge sterile avenues created by tearing down historic prototypical arab courtyard houses along a labyrinth of narrow streets. The shelter that these alleys would have provided could have saved him.
‘The paperless office is as useful as the paperless office’, so goes the saying. Since computers have become ubiquitous, paper consumption has actually increased.
It always amazes me that banks and credit card companies have to store vast amounts of paper copies of transactions, that there is still no low cost EDI network and people still send paper invoices and purchase orders and that paper exists at all for anything other than luxury items such as books. Paper documents are often an inefficient, costly, dangerous anachronism and yet the pace of their replacement is business is seemingly glacial.
Take architecture. The vast majority of litigation in architecture (and there is a vast amount of litigation - buildings are complicated and often leak etc.) stems from inconsistencies between contract documents. In the UK there are three principal documents, the plans themselves, the specifications and the bills of quantities. CAD software was supposed to change all of that, since one electronic document could contain all the contract information. Like many things in computing this goal is from fruition, as this latest initiative by Autodesk highlights.
Jeff is disappointed that the THINK proposal did not win the WTC competition.
Although innovative, there are two reasons why I believe the decision may be sound:
1. the project was very ambitious structurally and could have suffered dramatically from the effects of watering down the initial idea on grounds of cost and practicality.
2. THINK is a collaboration and could have suffered the perils of committee design. A great monument needs a great artist, a single minded signature designer with the resoluteness of a Frank Lloyd Wright.
Libeskind has won and although his scheme looks more conventional at first glance, his past record will stand testament that this will be a fittingly triumphant project unlike anything else in Manhattan today. This will include the first deconstructionist skyscraper.
Jon Udell writes about the architecture of data rich spaces
Modernism removed decoration from architecture. Or so the perceived wisdom goes.
But few could argue that Times square, triumphantly modern, is not decorative. Robert Venturi, the father of post modernist architectural criticism used Vegas as his model but the decoration here was a throwback, Egyptian or Classical pastiche.
What is going on at times square is something new, its influences are from Archigram to Bladerunner. More importantly it is a continuation of what has happened throughout the capitalist world, where neon and billboard advertising have kept decoration alive and well. The difference is that the advertising is part of the architecture and now, part of the network. Media architecture is just beginning.
One liner: “##”
Summary: Simplistic, rectilinear shapes created from two groups of three towers at right angles to each other and linked by bridges. In addition to the new towers, there is a proposal for landscaped piers representing shadows form the original towers. Multiple memorials are constructed at ground level and in the new buildings.
Plus: The pier proposal is very simple and elegant. Being the same size as the original towers they would allow their scale to be grasped.
Minus:
The towers are simple without the elegant simplicity of the originals that made them so iconic. The ‘multiple memorials’ idea is pointless. The cantilevered gardens/balconies would be prohibitively expensive, would disappear from the working drawings and would therefore change the design altogether.
The designs for the WTC site are out, its taken a day to digest all the proposals.
The bad news: they are all either mediocre or unbuildable.
The good news: the architects themselves are not all mediocre and the eventual buildings will be nothing like the original competition entries. The favorite appears to be Foster. I have some knowledge of the way the Foster office operates, since I used to work there when I was an architect. If he wins he will change the design entirely, just as he did for the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank’s headquarters in Hong Kong, the skyscraper which made his name. I would guess that the competition entry was largely conceived by others in the office (possibly Ken Shuttleworth), but if it wins Foster will want to get more involved, as it is such a high profile scheme.
Great works of architecture a relatively rare, even rarer are those buildings that define an entire movement. One of these buildings has just been built, Foreign Office Architect’s Yokohama Port Terminal. It is the first building to use the type of organic, contoured surface that defined the style of many University projects a few years ago, as 3D computer models evolved from illustrative use for presentations to being the primary design tool.
Best Quicktime VR panorama ever: Times square
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