Houseboat Havens

Home in Seattle
(http://realestate.msn.com/slideshow.aspx?cp-documentid=28126392&Gt1=35006#5)

House on the Columbia River
(http://realestate.msn.com/slideshow.aspx?cp-documentid=28126392&Gt1=35006#13)

The Metroship
like an updated Frank Lloyd Wright home, but with an open New York loft-condo style mixed with a mid-century Joseph Eichler home, post-and-beam style
(http://realestate.msn.com/slideshow.aspx?cp-documentid=28126392&Gt1=35006#8)

(Contemporary Art)

The Goodman House in Alexandria

(Photo John McDonnel for W. Post)

A dream house in a dream town: the Goodman House in Alexandria, Northern Virginia. I found in W. Post its story.

Back in 1952 there was a 100-year-old farmhouse for sale atop a ridge on North Quaker Lane in Alexandria. It sat near the edge of seven acres and, it is said, could boast a view of the Potomac River. Those who looked at buying the old frame dwelling probably thought of two courses of action: Either lovingly restore the simple two-story house or tear it down and use the lot for something new and less modest.

The slate floor underfoot has radiant heat
(Photo John McDonnel for W. Post)

But the buyer turned out to be Charles M. Goodman, well on his way to becoming the hottest modern architect of the period in Washington, and he found a third way: He lived with his family in the farmhouse for a while, then gutted it, preserving the shell, and in 1954 attached a long, modern glass pavilion to it.

(Photo John McDonnel for W. Post)

Today, the view of the Potomac is long gone, obscured by the past 60 years of development. Six and a half of the seven acres are gone, too, sold to developers years ago. Gone, too, are Goodman, who died in 1992 at 85, and his widow, Dorothy, who sold the house about a decade ago and lives in a nearby condominium.

But the midcentury-modern Goodman House still stands, sheltered by trees, its perimeter marked by about 2,000 square feet of stone patios and walkways that divide the garden areas and offer places for relaxation or entertaining.

Read more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/18/AR2011021803845.html?wprss=rss_realestate

The dining room
(Photo John McDonnel for W. Post)

In the living room, a cantilevered concrete fireplace and ledge are anchored in a massive stone wall that rises to meet the ceiling
(Photo John McDonnel for W. Post)

The inner courtyard
(Photo John McDonnel for W. Post)

(Alexandria)

(Contemporary Art)

Masdar, the Zero-Carbon City of Thousand and One Nights

Evolution is no myth, but we may be evolving backward (Maureen Dowd in NY Times). While American society argues on Evolution theory and stem cell research China is doing moonshots (Tom Friedman in NY Times): building a network of ultramodern airports, building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities, launching its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry, starting an electric car industry in 20 pilot cities. Maybe the same Tom Friedman is right: we need to be in a race with China, not just Al Qaeda.

I would add to this, Islam and Arabs narrative is not only Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood. 20 miles from Abu Dhabi, a new city has emerged: Masdar, the Thousand and One Nights miracle of nowadays.

Terra-cotta-like Exterior of a Residential Building (photo Duncan Chard / NYT)

This was conceived from start as a zero-carbon city. Electricity is supplied by solar panels, and normal cars are not allowed: there is an underground network of driverless electric cars instead. You enter the car and touch on a monitor the destination and that's it!

The city was designed by Foster & Partners. The architects have blended high-tech design and ancient construction practices to get the perfect model of a sustainable community where local traditions and the drive toward modernization are no longer in conflict (Nicolai Ouroussoff).

Read here a presentation of Masdar (the column of Nicolai Ourousoff in NY Times)...

Raising the Entire City off the Desert Floor takes Advantage of the Cooling Capacity of Stronger Winds (photo Duncan Chard / NYT)

Narrow Streets (photo Duncan Chard / NYT)

Solar Panels on Rooftops (photo Duncan Chard / NYT)

Dome of the Library Building (photo Duncan Chard / NYT)

the Personal Rapid Transit Station with a fleet of driverless electric cars

(Contemporary Art)

Burj Khalifa - the Opening Day

The location of the tallest construction on Earth returned to Middle East, the region of the legendary Tower of Babel. It's Burj Khalifa in Dubai, of 828 m. It is hosting the highest mosque in the world (600 m).

For me, the name of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe comes to mind: his design for the Friedrichstraße skyscraper. It makes sense, after all: the genius of the German architect foresaw in 1919 what today is known as Post-Modernism.

(video by itnnews)

(Contemporary Art)

News from Hirshhorn

I was so many times at Hirshhorn; on any given Sunday I was spending there one or two hours in the afternoon: the Black Box in the basement, with the amazing videos of Kimsooja, and Ori Gersht, and Van der Verwe; and paintings by Chuck Close and Jasper Johns on the walls there, in the basement's lobby; and the Hyper-Realist exhibitions; on the first floor the small art bookstore, with albums and DVDs; on the second floor exhibitions of Conceptual Art or challenging contemporary short movies; and the sculptures of all the masters of the vanguard; and the third floor with rooms devoted to Clyfford Still, and Calder, and de Kooning, Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly; the room where Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol were together; and the Sculpture Garden, in front of the museum, with Rodin, Bourdelle, Moore - Brancusi is just a little bit in the museum, he has a place of honor at the National Gallery.

Gordon Bunshaft created the building of the museum, with a great Sci-Fi allure: a building that is perhaps distant, while fascinating, giving the impression of an inter-planetary station. A building that can send you to the atmosphere in the movies of Antonioni, of a petrified world, or to the novels of Lem, or Clarke, or the Strugatkys, the gate to leave the Earth for ever, to start your cosmic adventure: Antonioni or Clarke, death or renewal, depending on your mood.

Now the director of the museum, Richard Koshalek, decided to add a huge conference hall to this building. Diller Scofidio & Renfro (known for their interdisciplinary approach, mixing architecture, installation art, video and electronic art) designed a huge inflatable hall with a bulge at the top. Nicolai Ouroussoff has a review in today's NY Times. I took the two images from there.



And now, Hirshhorn became the true gate toward Cosmos.

(Hirshhorn Museum)

MAXXI: The New Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome

(Photo: Roland Halbe)

Rome's MAXXI, the new Museo Nazionale delle Arti Del XXI Secolo, opens on Saturday for a two-days preview. MAXXI is the newest creation of Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.

Zaha Hadid became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. She is known for the powerful, curving lines of her elongated structures. She was born in Iraq in 1950, a time of glamour and progressive thinking in the Middle East, and was raised in one of Baghdad’s first houses inspired by Bauhaus, a highly influential movement aimed at unifying art, craft and technology (The Roman Forum).

(Photo: Helene Binet)

Nicolai Ouroussoff has the story in NY Times:

What would Pope Urban VIII have made of MAXXI, the new museum of contemporary art designed by Zaha Hadid on the outskirts of this city’s historic quarter? My guess is that he would have been ecstatic.

This 17th-century pope, one of the most prominent cultural patrons in Roman history, understood that great cities are not frozen in time. He loved dreaming up lavish new projects over breakfast with his artistic soul mate, the Baroque sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini. When Bernini needed bronze for the baldachin in St. Peter’s, the pope simply ordered it torn out of the Pantheon. Neither was afraid to make his mark on the city.

Since then the architectural scene here has become a lot duller. True, Mussolini commissioned some impressive civic works, most notably for the fascist EUR district. But for most of the last half-century Romans have been content to gaze languidly toward the past. The handful of ambitious new cultural buildings that have appeared, like Renzo Piano’s marvelous Parco della Musica, tend toward the dignified and respectable.

MAXXI, which opens to the public on Saturday for a two-day architectural preview, jolts this city back to the present like a thunderclap. Its sensual lines seem to draw the energy of the city right up into its belly, making everything around it look timid. The galleries (which will remain empty of art until the spring, when the museum is scheduled to hold its first exhibition) would probably have sent a shiver of joy up the old pope’s spine. Even Bernini, I suspect, would have appreciated their curves.

(Photo: Helene Binet)

The completion of the museum is proof that this city is no longer allergic to the new and a rebuke to those who still see Rome as a catalog of architectural relics for scholars or tourists. It affirms the view that cities thrive when each generation attempts to rise to the challenges of the past while remaining true to contemporary values. That means that yes, we too — the living — have something to contribute.

The museum stands in a drowsy neighborhood of early-20th-century apartment buildings and former army barracks called Flaminio.

Set back from the street in the middle of a block and overlooking a gravel plaza, the building offers no big visual fireworks, and at first glance it looks surprisingly sedate. From the south, its smooth, almost silky, concrete forms are largely hidden behind an old factory building that has been transformed into a gallery for temporary exhibitions. From the north it is shielded by the long curved wall of the main galleries.

The energy builds as you walk toward it. The best route is along Via Luigi Poletti, which approaches the site at an angle from the northwest. As you get close, the road veers to the east, but you continue forward, following a path along the convex exterior of the building as it curves toward the plaza. The path narrows as it approaches the main entry, creating a sense of acceleration.

At the entrance, a concrete box that houses an upper-level gallery projects out above your head, its front tilted forward menacingly.

(Photo: Roland Halbe)

Ms. Hadid has used similar ideas before, most notably in a factory she designed for BMW on the outskirts of Leipzig, Germany. The idea is to weave her buildings into the network of streets and sidewalks that surround them — into the infrastructure that binds us together. But it is also a way of making architecture — which is about static objects — more dynamic by capturing the energy of bodies charging through space.

In Rome this strategy reaches a crescendo in the museum’s towering lobby. A bookstore, cafe and information counter are scattered informally around the hall; corridors snake off in different directions. A monumental black staircase climbs up through the space, one end disappearing into a narrow canyonlike crevice and hinting at more mysteries to come.

If a question remains about the building, it has to do with the galleries, which are arranged as a series of long intertwining bands, some 300 feet long, as if the ramps of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim had somehow come unraveled. The slight curves of the spaces lure you forward in anticipation of what’s around the next bend.

The sense of forward momentum is reinforced by the lighting system: a glass skylight that is broken up by long, knifelike metal fins that run the entire length of the room. The fins protect the artworks from direct sunlight while allowing those inside the galleries to see an occasional patch of sky. A second system just above, of steel grids, blocks out the harshest southern light. I was there on an overcast afternoon, and the light was lively and warm without being distracting.

What we don’t know, however, and won’t know for a while, is whether the galleries strike the right balance between the need to move crowds and the stillness required for contemplating art. Ms. Hadid has created a flexible system of hanging partitions that can be used to divide the spaces into smaller galleries; and as you climb to the top, one of the bands breaks into several discrete spaces on different levels.

(Photo: Roland Halbe)

At the moment, though, the flow of spaces seems a bit relentless. And until partitions are installed, art is hung and rehung, and curators begin to get a feel for the spaces that only comes after several years of organizing exhibitions in them, we won’t know for sure how well the galleries work. There are some, I expect, who will point to the decision to show off the museum while it is still empty — indeed, before its collection has even been put together — as yet more proof that contemporary architecture always overshadows the art it houses. More patient minds will wait to see for themselves.

Meanwhile, Rome’s faith in Ms. Hadid, and in the new world she represents, has been fully rewarded. For years she has been steadily building up a body of work that demonstrates she is about more than glamour — she is one of architecture’s most original and powerful voices — and MAXXI will only add to her legacy. A generation of Romans can now walk out their front doors knowing that the conversation with the past is not so one-sided.

(Photo: Roland Halbe)

If Pope Urban were alive today, I’m certain he and Ms. Hadid would be having breakfast right now, plotting the next move.

(Photo: Helene Binet)

(Contemporary Art)

Charles Gwathmey Remained Loyal to the High Modernism Spirit

House on Bluff Road, Amagansett, Eastern Long Island

If you look at this house, some villas designed in the Twenties come to mind: Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto... The house from Eastern Long Island was designed in 1965: cubes, cylinders and triangles joining their efforts to teach us something at the confluence between geometry and poetry.

Or look a little bit at the Condominium Tower from Astor Place in Manhattan, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe will come to mind, with his 1921's Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper project.

Astor Place Condominium Tower

Architect Charles Gwathmey, who passed away on August 3rd, remained always loyal to the spirit of the Twenty's Vanguard.

You should read the articles devoted to Charles Gwathmey in NY Times and in The NewYorker.

Charles Gwathmey Addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's design of the Guggenheim

Charles Gwathmey Proposal for the World Trade Center Site

(Contemporary Art)

Architect Toyo Ito

- Kaohsiung 2009 World Games Stadium -

Toyo Ito, the architect with strange and ethereal buildings, sometimes delicate like paper cutouts (Tama Art University Library), sometimes with a python-like form (Kaohsiung 2009 World Games Stadium), sometimes porous, like a gigantic sponge (Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, or Mikimoto Ginza, or Serpentine Pavilion in London): read the article of Nicolai Ouroussoff in NY Times, and click on each image, to see them in their whole splendor. And enjoy!

- Mikimoto Ginza -

- London, Serpentine Pavilion -

- Taichung Metropolitan Opera House -

- Tama Art University Library -

- Tower of Winds -

(Contemporary Art)

An Icon of the Future Soon To Be Demolished

Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa. It was completed in 1972: an icon of the future. It was completely modular, and each module resembled a space capsule.


Now it is a forgotten icon and they want to demolish it. Here is what Nicolai Ouroussoff says in NY Times:

How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations?

Those are the questions that instantly come to mind over the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s historic Nakagin Capsule Tower.

A rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence, the 1972 Capsule Tower is in a decrepit state. Its residents, tired of living in squalid, cramped conditions, voted two years ago to demolish it and are now searching for a developer to replace it with a bigger, more modern tower. That the building is still standing has more to do with the current financial malaise than with an understanding of its historical worth.

Yet for many of us who believe that the way we treat our cultural patrimony is a fair measure of how enlightened we are as a society, the building’s demolition would be a bitter loss. The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.

Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan’s transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.

Of the five members who made up the group, Kurokawa was the most glamorous. A photo taken in 1958 at a Moscow student conference, when he was just 24, shows him surrounded by fawning girls, signing autographs. Trim and handsome, often outfitted in elegantly tailored suits and a bow tie, he became a regular at Tokyo nightclubs. His Space Capsule Disco, opened in the 1960s, was a hot spot for young creative types.

The Nakagin Capsule Tower was completed as the movement’s influence was beginning to wane. Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.

Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath.

Part of the design’s appeal is voyeuristic. The portholes evoke gigantic peepholes. Their enormous size, coupled with the small scale of the rooms, exposes the entire apartment to the city outside. Many of the midlevel units look directly onto an elevated freeway, so you are almost face to face with people in passing cars. (On my first visit there, a tenant told me that during rush hour, drivers stuck in traffic often point or wave at residents.)

But the project’s lasting importance has more to do with its structural innovations, and how they reflect the Metabolists’ views on the evolution of cities. Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.

In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.

No one doubts how difficult it would be to revive that vision today. The building was never as flexible in reality as it was in theory: adding and removing the capsules was prohibitively expensive. And the capsule notion itself was obviously limited, since it didn’t account for the possibility of sharing space with others. It hasn’t helped, too, that the lack of regular maintenance has taken a severe toll on the structure — and on the few remaining tenants.

When I visited several weeks ago, it was pouring rain. Corridors smelled of mildew. Some tenants had taped plastic bags to their door frames to catch leaks, and many of them were bulging with gray water. At one point a tenant took me up to a bridge that connected the two towers, where I could see chunks of concrete breaking off from the corner of one of the capsules. Nothing short of a full-scale restoration would save it.

But the issue is not just the fate of this one building; it is why certain landmarks — in Japan and throughout the developed world — are preserved, and others are not. Dozens of private houses, after all, from Palladian villas to late Modernist masterpieces, have been lovingly restored over the years, some in worse condition than the tower. Government agencies and nonprofit groups have also put significant amounts of money toward the restoration of important civic works.

But when an aging Kurokawa pleaded with the apartment owners to save his masterpiece, he got nowhere. And after his death two years ago, few preservationists rallied to the building’s defense. There’s been no serious effort to look into what exactly it would cost to retrofit the 140 units. Nor has any institution, public or private, stepped up with a viable plan for how to save it.

Why is that so? Partly it is because all over the world, postwar architecture is still treated with a measure of suspicion by the cultural mainstream, which often associates it with brutal city housing developments or clinical office blocks. Partly, too, it has to do with the nature of housing blocks in general. They are not sexy investments; they do not feed an investor’s vanity or offer the cultural prestige that owning a landmark house does.

But another concern is that all too often, private developments like the Capsule Tower, no matter how historically important, are regarded in terms of property rights. They are about business first, not culture. Governments don’t like to interfere; the voices of preservationists are shrugged off. Want to save it? the prevailing sentiment goes. Pay for it.

Until that mentality changes, landmarks like Kurokawa’s will continue to be threatened by the wrecking ball, and the cultural loss will be tremendous. This is not only an architectural tragedy, it is also a distortion of history.


(Contemporary Art)

Peter Zumthor received the 2009 Pritzker Prize

Swiss Architect Peter Zumthor is the recipient of 2009 Pritzker Prize, one of world's premier architecture awards.

Mr. Zumthor is not the kind of a celebrity architect: he has lived in a remote Alpine village for the last 30 years and hasn't design grandiose concert halls or museums. His best known project is a thermal bath in a mountain village.

Brother Klaus Field Chapel, Wachendorf, Eifel, Germany (2007)

The nine-member Pritzker jury decided to award Peter Zumthor for the great integrity of his buildings: in Zumthor’s skillful hands, like those of the consummate craftsman, materials from cedar shingles to sandblasted glass are used in a way that celebrates their own unique qualities, all in the service of an architecture of permanence; In paring down architecture to its barest yet most sumptuous essentials, he has reaffirmed architecture’s indispensable place in a fragile world.

Thermal Bath Vals, Graubünden, Switzerland (1996)

Says Peter Zumthor, I work a little bit like a sculptor; When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It’s not about paper, it’s not about forms. It’s about space and material.

Inside the Spa at Hotel Therme

Here is an article from today's NY Times about Peter Zumthor. The author is Robin Pogrebin:

He is not a celebrity architect, not one of the names that show up on shortlists for museums and concert hall projects or known beyond architecture circles. He hasn’t designed many buildings; the one he is best known for is a thermal spa in an Alpine commune. And he has toiled in relative obscurity for the last 30 years in a remote village in the Swiss mountains.

But on Monday the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor is to be named the winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize, the highest recognition for architects.

He has conceived his method of practice almost as carefully as each of his projects, the citation from the nine-member Pritzker jury says. He develops buildings of great integrity — untouched by fad or fashion. Declining a majority of the commissions that come his way, he only accepts a project if he feels a deep affinity for its program, and from the moment of commitment, his devotion is complete, overseeing the project’s realization to the very last detail.

For Mr. Zumthor, 65, winning the Pritzker, which is awarded annually to a living architect and regarded as architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, is a kind of vindication. You can do your work, you do your thing, and it gets recognized, he said in a telephone interview from Haldenstein, the Swiss village where he lives and works.

Mr. Zumthor is the 33rd laureate to receive the prize, which consists of a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion and is awarded at a different architecturally significant location each year. This year’s ceremony is to be held on May 29 in Buenos Aires.

The project most closely associated with Mr. Zumthor is the spa he completed in 1996 for the Hotel Therme in Vals, an Alpine village in Switzerland. Using slabs of quartzite that evoke stacked Roman bricks, Mr. Zumthor created a contemporary take on the baths of antiquity.

He is also known for his use of wood, as in St. Benedict Chapel in Sumvitg, Switzerland, which evokes a giant hot tub.

The Pritzker jury praised Mr. Zumthor’s use of materials. In Zumthor’s skillful hands, like those of the consummate craftsman, materials from cedar shingles to sandblasted glass are used in a way that celebrates their own unique qualities, all in the service of an architecture of permanence, the citation said, adding, in paring down architecture to its barest yet most sumptuous essentials, he has reaffirmed architecture’s indispensable place in a fragile world.

Mr. Zumthor said that his projects generally originated with materials. I work a little bit like a sculptor, he said. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It’s not about paper, it’s not about forms. It’s about space and material.

Mr. Zumthor’s buildings do not share a common vernacular. They range from tall and circular to low-slung and boxy. For his Field Chapel to St. Nikolaus von der Flüe, completed in 2007, in Mechernich, Germany, Mr. Zumthor formed the interior from 112 tree trunks configured like a tent. Over 24 days, layers of concrete were poured around the structure. Then for three weeks a fire was kept burning inside so that the dried tree trunks could be easily removed from the concrete shell. The chapel floor was covered with lead, which was melted on site and manually ladled onto the floor.

For an art museum in Bregenz, Austria — a four-story cube of concrete, steel and glass that opened in 1997 — Mr. Zumthor used glass walls that at night can become giant billboards or video screens.

His Kolumba Art Museum in Cologne, Germany, completed in 2007, rises out of the ruins of the Gothic St. Kolumba Church, destroyed in World War II. The Pritzker jury called the project a startling contemporary work, but also one that is completely at ease with its many layers of history.

Mr. Zumthor said that he deliberately kept his office small— no more than 20 people. That’s the way it’s going to be so that I can be the author of everything, he said.

I’m not a producer of images, he added. I’m this guy who, when I take on a commission, I do it inside out, everything myself, with my team.

One of Mr. Zumthor’s best-known designs never came to fruition. In 1993 he won the competition for a museum and documentation center on the horrors of Nazism to be built on the site of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Mr. Zumthor’s submission called for an extended three-story building with a framework consisting of concrete rods. The project, called the Topography of Terror, was partly built and then abandoned when the government decided not to go ahead for financial reasons. The unfinished building was demolished in 2004.

Born in Basel, Switzerland, Mr. Zumthor as a teenager served a four-year apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker. He studied at the Basel Arts and Crafts School and spent a year at Pratt Institute in New York. In the 1970s he moved to Graubünden, Switzerland, to work for the Department for the Preservation of Monuments. He established his own practice in 1979 in Haldenstein, where he and his wife, Annalisa Zumthor-Cuorad, brought up their three children.

Mr. Zumthor said that his village had been an inspiration and a refuge. It helps you concentrate, he said. And also collaborators coming here are not distracted by all the things of the big city. To come up with me, you’re in the Alps. It’s sort of a commitment. It’s a beautiful feeling. Of course you have to like the mountains.

Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Graubünden, Switzerland (1988)

(Contemporary Art)

Contemporary Architecture in the Meatpacking District

Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District
designed by Polshek Partnership

What makes Manhattan crazily beautiful is this frenetic mix of disparate styles: brutal, unexpected, careless about any taste, about any balance, and thus sophisticated. It is about architecture, it is about people: Manhattan is life, just life.

The Ground Floor: Restaurant & Garden Cafe
(Photo: Matthew Weinstein for the NY Times)

A new hotel with a SciFi lounge on the eighteenth floor comes over the abandoned elevated freight railroad (the High Line). The restaurant and a garden cafe are positioned under the old trackage. From the garden patrons have a view of the railroad underbelly.

The Lounge
(Photo: Matthew Weinstein for the NY Times)

Actually the Standard Hotel is the first project in a string that will make use exactly of this old trackage. The High Line will become a park running through such hotels.

Elevator Bank
(Photo: Nikolas Koenig)

Nicolai Ouroussoff has this article in NY Times:

It would be easy to dismiss the new Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District as a final shout-out to the age of excess. The entire area, whose trendy shops and cafes must still contend with the occasional whiff of rotten meat, reflects a development culture run amok.

Well, that would be a mistake. The boutique hotel, designed by Polshek Partnership, is serious architecture. The first of a string of projects linked to the development of the High Line, a park being built on a segment of abandoned elevated rail tracks, the new building’s muscular form is strong enough to stand up to both its tacky neighbors and the area’s older industrial structures. Its location, on Washington Street at West 13th Street, exploits the clash of scales that has always been a gripping aspect of the city’s character.

In short, it is the kind of straightforward, thoughtfully conceived building that is all too rare in the city today.

Part of this is due to its stunning position. The partially open hotel — 19 floors and 337 rooms — is the only new building that rises directly over the elevated park. The towering structure is supported on massive concrete pillars, while a ground-floor restaurant and garden cafe are tucked underneath the High Line’s hefty steel frame.

I admit to some mixed feelings about the restaurant. Clad in recycled brick, it’s meant to reflect the neighborhood’s old identity as the city’s meat market. A slick black metal canopy is a spiffed-up version of the decrepit canopies that once lined the neighborhood’s sidewalks, without the beef carcasses. The garden’s brick paving and industrial light fixtures look quaintly European. Over all the effect feels about as genuine as a Hollywood back lot.

Still, Polshek smartly plays up the contrast between these spaces and the tough brick, concrete and steel structures that surround it. From the garden cafe people can look up at the High Line’s gorgeous steel underbelly. One of the most enticing fire stairs runs down the side of a concrete leg supporting the hotel, crashing down on the restaurant’s roof before tumbling out on the sidewalk.

Polshek was also careful to segregate the various entries — to the hotel, restaurant and a lounge that will open this summer on the 18th floor — so that hotel guests won’t feel as though they are trapped in an entertainment hell for 20-somethings. (The Standard’s owner, André Balazs, is negotiating with the city to create a more direct connection between the hotel and the High Line, which would significantly diminish this effect as well as compromise the park’s public quality.)

It’s only once you get off the ground, however, that you appreciate the design’s true flair. The hotel is set at a slight angle to the High Line (part of which is to open in June), creating a delicious tension as its deck passes underneath. The building bends slightly near the center, giving it a more streamlined appearance in the skyline and orienting the rooms toward the most spectacular views. To the southwest the facade is angled toward a sweeping view across the Hudson River to the Statue of Liberty. To the northeast, guests look out across jagged rooftops to the Empire State Building.

This sense of floating within the city is reinforced by the arrangement of some of the rooms. The rectangular ones on the south side of the building are laid out with their long side along floor-to-ceiling windows. The effect is to bring you up closer to the glass, so that you feel as though you were suspended in midair, with the city just underneath your feet. (Mr. Balazs confessed to an instant of vertigo when he first stepped into one of these rooms.)

These are simple but powerful moves. And they are a reminder that enveloping a structure in a flamboyant wrapper is not always the most effective way to create lasting architecture. In the wrong hands, too much creative freedom can be outright dangerous.

With the Standard Hotel, Polshek Partnership joins a handful of other midlevel firms that are beginning to find the right balance between innovation and restraint. These include the designers of the Bank of America building in Midtown and 1 Madison Park, two projects under construction that suggest a revival of the kind of smart, sleek and confident architecture popularized by architects as diverse as Morris Lapidus and Gordon Bunshaft in the 1950s and ’60s. Those architects didn’t want to start a revolution; they wanted to make glamorous buildings.

Whether this trend will survive the current financial climate, of course, is another matter.

(Photo: Nikolas Koenig)

(New York, New York)

(Contemporary Art)

I. M. Pei: The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar

(Photo Hassan Ammar/Associated Press)

The Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, Qatar is created by I. M. Pei, the architect who is also the author of the East Building of the Washington Art Gallery, the Pyramid at Louvre, the Hong-Kong Bank of China Tower, among others. He is now 91 old.

(I. M. Pei, photo by Tony Cenicola/NYTimes)

Nicolai Ouroussoff has a chronicle in today's NY Times about the Museum of Islamic Art:

I can't seem to get the Museum of Islamic Art out of my mind. There’s nothing revolutionary about the building. But its clean, chiseled forms have a tranquillity that distinguishes it in an age that often seems trapped somewhere between gimmickry and a cloying nostalgia.

Part of the allure may have to do with I. M. Pei, the museum’s architect. Mr. Pei reached the height of his popularity decades ago with projects like the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Louvre pyramid in Paris. Since then he has been an enigmatic figure at the periphery of the profession. His best work has admirers, but it has largely been ignored within architecture’s intellectual circles. Now, at 91 and near the end of a long career, Mr. Pei seems to be enjoying the kind of revival accorded to most serious architects if they have the luck to live long enough.

But the museum is also notable for its place within a broader effort to reshape the region’s cultural identity. The myriad large-scale civic projects, from a Guggenheim museum that is planned for Abu Dhabi to Education City in Doha — a vast area of new buildings that house outposts of foreign universities — are often dismissed in Western circles as superficial fantasies. As the first to reach completion, the Museum of Islamic Art is proof that the boom is not a mirage. The building’s austere, almost primitive forms and the dazzling collections it houses underscore the seriousness of the country’s cultural ambition.

Perhaps even more compelling, the design is rooted in an optimistic worldview, — one at odds with the schism between cosmopolitan modernity and backward fundamentalism that has come to define the last few decades in the Middle East. The ideals it embodies — that the past and the present can co-exist harmoniously — are a throwback to a time when America’s overseas ambitions were still cloaked in a progressive agenda.

(Photo: Keiichi Tahara)

To Mr. Pei, whose self-deprecating charm suggests a certain noblesse oblige, all serious architecture is found somewhere between the extremes of an overly sentimental view of the past and a form of historical amnesia.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something, he said in an interview. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots. This moderation should come as no surprise to those who have followed Mr. Pei’s career closely. I recall first hearing his name during construction on his design for the Kennedy Library in Boston in the mid-1970s. The library, enclosed behind a towering glass atrium overlooking the water, was not one of Mr. Pei’s most memorable early works, nor was it particularly innovative, but the link to Kennedy lent him instant glamour.

The building’s pure geometries and muscular trusses seemed at the time to be the architectural equivalent of the space program. They suggested an enlightened, cultivated Modernism, albeit toned down to serve an educated, well-polished elite. Completed 16 years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the library’s construction seemed to be an act of hope, as if the values that Kennedy’s generation embodied could be preserved in stone, steel and glass.

In many ways Mr. Pei’s career followed the unraveling of that era, from the economic downturn of the 1970s through the hollow victories of the Reagan years. Yet his work never lost its aura of measured idealism. It reached its highest expression in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, a composition of angular stone forms completed in 1978 that remains the most visible emblem of modern Washington.

Since that popular triumph Mr. Pei has often seemed to take the kind of leisurely, slow-paced approach to design that other architects, no matter how well established, can only dream of. When first approached in 1983 to take part in a competition to design the addition to the Louvre, he refused, saying that he would not submit a preliminary design. President François Mitterrand nevertheless hired him outright. Mr. Pei then asked him if he could take several months to study French history.

I told him I wanted to learn about his culture, Pei recalled. I knew the Louvre well. But I wanted to see more than just architecture. I think he understood immediately. Mr. Pei spent months traveling across Europe and North Africa before earnestly beginning work on the final design of the glass pyramids that now anchor the museum’s central court.

In 1990, a year after the project’s completion, he left his firm, handing its reins over to his partners Harry Cobb and James Ingo Freed so that he could concentrate more on design. More recently he has lived in semi-retirement, sometimes working on the fourth floor office of his Sutton Place town house or sketching quietly in a rocking chair in his living room. He rarely takes on more than a single project at a time.

Such an attitude runs counter to the ever-accelerating pace of the global age — not to mention our obsession with novelty. But if Mr. Pei’s methods seem anachronistic, they also offer a gentle resistance to the short-sightedness of so many contemporary cultural undertakings.

(Photo: Keiichi Tahara)

Many successful architects today are global nomads, sketching ideas on paper napkins as they jet from one city to another. In their designs they tend to be more interested in exposing cultural frictions — the clashing of social, political and economic forces that undergird contemporary society — than in offering visions of harmony.

Mr. Pei, by contrast, imagines history as a smooth continuous process — a view that is deftly embodied by the Islamic Museum, whose clean abstract surfaces are an echo of both high Modernism and ancient Islamic architecture. Conceived by the Qatari emir and his 26-year-old daughter, Sheikha al Mayassa, it is the centerpiece of a larger cultural project whose aim is to forge a cosmopolitan, urban society in a place that not so long ago was a collection of Bedouin encampments and fishing villages. The aim is to recall a time that extended from the birth of Islam through the height of the Ottoman Empire, when the Islamic world was a center of scientific experimentation and cultural tolerance.

My father’s vision was to build a cross-cultural institution, said Sheikha al Mayassa, who has been charged with overseeing the city’s cultural development, during a recent interview here. It is to reconnect the historical threads that have been broken, and finding peaceful ways to resolve conflict.

Mr. Pei’s aim was to integrate the values of that earlier era into today’s culture — to capture, as he put it, the essence of Islamic architecture.

The museum’s hard, chiseled forms take their inspiration from the ablution fountain of Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo, as well as from fortresses built in Tunisia in the eighth and ninth centuries — simple stone structures strong enough to hold their own in the barrenness of the desert landscape.

In order to create a similar sense of withdrawal from the world, Mr. Pei located his museum on a small man-made island, approachable from a short bridge. Seen from a distance, its blocklike forms are a powerful contrast to the half-finished towers and swiveling construction cranes that line the waterfront. Stepped on both sides, the apex of the main building is punctuated by a short tower with an eye-shaped opening that masks an interior dome.

From certain angles the structure has a flat, chimeric quality, like a stage set. From others it seems to be floating on the surface of the water — an effect that recalls Santa Maria della Salute, the imposing Baroque church that guards the entry to the Grand Canal in Venice.

(Photo Hassan Ammar/Associated Press)

As one approaches the building, the full weight of the structure begins to bear down, and the forms become more imposing. The bridge, flanked by rows of tall palm trees, is set diagonally to the entry, which makes the stacked geometric forms appear more angular and the contrast between light and shadow more extreme.

Soon a few traditional details begin to appear: the two small arched windows over the entry; a covered arcade that links the museum to an education center. These touches seem minor, but they provide a sense of scale, so that the size of the building can be understood according to the size of the human body.

The blend of modern and Islamic themes continues inside, where Mr. Pei draws most directly from religious precedents. The hemispherical dome, an intricate pattern of stainless steel plates pierced by a single small oculus, brings to mind the geometric patterns used in Baroque churches as well as in ancient mosques.

The weight of the interior’s chiseled stone forms, with the dome resting on a faceted drum and square base, evokes both classical precedents and the late works of Louis Kahn, whose fusion of modern structure with a timeless monumentality was a turning point in Modernist history.

Mr. Pei’s design lacks the depth and cohesion of Kahn’s greatest work. The structural system that supports the dome, for instance, is not particularly elegant; on one side the drum that supports it rests on slender three-story-tall columns, on the other it extends down to meet a wall that encloses a floor of offices before resting on a series of shorter columns, upsetting the room’s natural symmetry.

Nonetheless the meaning of the space is clear. Mr. Pei has created a temple of high art, placing culture on the same pedestal as religion. His aim is both to create a symbol of Islamic culture and to forge a common heritage for the citizens of Qatar and the region.

The grandeur of the atrium is only a prelude to the real climax: the galleries, which are as intimate as the atrium is soaring. Objects are encased in towering glass cabinets set on tables, giving them an accessibility rare in a major museum. There is also just the right amount of space between the objects — enough to let them breathe without being isolated.

And like the building itself, the collections are a reflection of the notion that Modernity and Islamic culture are not in opposition, but woven out of the same historical thread. There are dazzling scientific objects here, including a display of astrolabes, as well as priceless works of calligraphy. (Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns one of the world’s premier collections of Islamic Art, put it best when I spoke to him at the museum’s inaugural gala: Many of the pieces I’ve bid on over the past 10 years, they got.)

Yet the most moving works are those that underscore the cosmopolitan values that are at the core of this museum: the notion that the free, open exchange of ideas is what builds great — and tolerant — civilizations: a matrix of Spanish Corinthian columns with Islamic flourishes; early translations of classical texts that formed the hinge between antiquity and the European Renaissance; a silk tapestry of a couple in front of a tent, illustrating the Islamic fable Laila and Majnun that is likened to Romeo and Juliet.

These are the moments that Mr. Pei’s architecture is meant to embody. His museum reminds us that building a culture, as much as a political or social agenda, can be an act of healing. Like all great art, it requires forging seemingly conflicting values into a common whole.


(Contemporary Art)