10(+) MORE architects i have been thinking about

I feel bad picking on something so small & pointless, but I guess if you send it to design blogs it's fair game. Worst project/proposal of the year?

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/9/view/16418/lava-digital-origami-emergency-shelter.html

Weird, you JUST posted that link but it seems like design boom is down right now.

It wouldn't mind having it at the top of my garden but as an emergency shelter?
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/images/images_2/lauren/origami%20cave/oc01.jpg

‘the project plays with ideas of prefabrication and personalised inhabitation, as well as stacking of multiple units,
while giving an opportunity for individual expression.' - chris bosse, founder and director of LAVA

That's just what you need in an emergency.

the form is fine but i've seen a lot of that. the problem is that as a shelter it doesn't shelter. it's, like, made of holes. you can't lie down in it. you can probably barely sit down in it.

You can express your individuality though, while trying to put it together in a hurricane.

They can do projects like this if they want to of course, but when it's put on public display it gives the whole profession a bad name. I don't understand why people just can't say "we generated this form because we think it looks cool, it doesn't really have a purpose".

Also it's pretty stunning that design blogs post this kind of utter shit without considering it for a second. Gotta find a way to make those 20 posts a day I guess.

Yeah, that last is a real problem - there's a real absence of critical thinking on most design blogs. Not that I want people to be knee-jerk negative, or offer really sophisticated consideration of every project that crosses their desks, but, like, have some sort of opinion beyond 'Looks cool! Pass it on!,' y'know?

This is a good reason why I end up looking at design blogs for a week or two, then give up on them completely. To be fair, I encountered the same type of shit thinking in design school as well. Like, here are some really fantastic programs to work with, that are going to generate some really good looking models and renderings, but not one of them could ever be feasibly built in the real world. It was like my school was afraid of introducing concepts of "budgets", "structural engineering", and "buildability" for fear of stifling creativity. Which, is fine for your first couple of semesters of design, but by senior year you should be learning to work with clients and real-world challenges. Which is why when it came time to choose a focus in grad school, I went with "construction administration" over "design" because I wanted reall, applicable experience and not another two years of designing in a vacuum.

Anyway, I digress. Its a gorgeous object of art, but an utter failure at the function with which the program called for, so in my mind it should be getting lambasted instead of praised.

http://www.dezeen.com/2012/01/27/wood-old-house-by-tadashi-yoshimura-architects/

Oh my god this is a beautiful project. So rare to see such a great richness of texture, space, and lighting all in one place.

http://api.ning.com/files/9oSHtbFPPBubV43B2AZXsD*61Cqikm32bnt486xEPRKxE6Z1GA*RNCmE4iL*CxDobhDMaC*GJAVitas4J6Yd2xniTGS0Imzb/mosesbridge5.jpeg

This bridge is pretty cool.

Not completely the right place, but I wanted to admit that I've been using one of Doctor Casino's flickr albums as the screensaver on my Apple TV for a bit. I hope that's OK and non-creepy, but it's one with a lot of amazing building pictures.

Some day I hope to be able to weigh in on this thread more knowledgably!

Love that bridge project, but could never quite figure out how they manage to regulate the water level. I guess it must be a pond with overflow drains? So ballsy to make it out of wood, too!

mh - Awww, no, that is super flattering! Which album, if I may ask?

I'm currently in the midst of a CHINA BARRAGE, haven't been writing as much since I just want to get out from under the photo backlog. Might post a few choice things to this thread once I get my ideas a little more organized.

Doctor Casino, please publish a monograph titled CHINA BARRAGE: THEY ARE JUST MAKING A SHITLOAD OF BUILDINGS OVER THERE

hahaha yeah pretty much. We're actually kicking around some homebrewed book ideas, depends how much spare time I end up having next quarter. "THIS IS CHINA" is kind of recommending itself, after being used by our good Cantonese buddy in response to any time we got too uppity and demanding of explanations for things. "T. I. C."

I'll have to check which album! I think I just had it set to your photostream for a bit it's obviously all your pictures including personal ones and I felt like a creepy stalker. Think I grabbed some of the "archictecture by architect" ones, naturally

omg Doctor Casino, please get him to start saying "Forget it, Jake. It's China."

mh - Ha, well, I'm flattered in any case!

I DIED - hahahaha, I need to pitch that. Would also make a good subtitle for the book, eg "THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SUPERCITY: FORGET IT JAKE, IT'S CHINA"

(Although we were kind of thinking along the lines of THIS IS CHINA: ARCHITECTURE & URBANISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SUPERCITY...but who knows?)

I would buy that book

doctor casino, your flickr is like a walk down memory lane. salut!

Woohoo, thanks for the support, y'all!

China trip was 16 days and I'm on Day, uh, 3...but the point is, much more coming soon!!

I always thought that the hsbc building was just really ugly. cheers for the write-up! NB: I've never been inside it.

Just wrote a longish blog giving props to URBANUS, definitely one of the 10+ firms I've been thinking about. Here's a Flickr set, and here's some choice imagery:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7145/6769031077_c2c21438fc.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7006/6769075413_b45a253808.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7018/6773897569_823935a947.jpg

how the hell have I not been following your blog?

btw what is your opinion of bjarke ingels & co?

thanks mh!

Ingels... man, I've struggled to come to grips with that guy. It's tempting to see him as a cynical salesperson who masks a lack of critical ambition behind a positive "Yes Is More" attitude - - - in which reading, reading, his tenure at OMA was spent learning form-making and salesmanship tactics rather than absorbing any of the social polemic that (at one time anyway) seemed to be behind the OMA stuff. In other words, they're basically MVRDV, but much more eager to get work.

On the other hand, if you take him at his word that the "yes" thing has to do with inserting the architect into normally non-architectural decision-making, offering out-of-left-field policy solutions, then maybe there actually is more of a social activist component to the work than there is in Koolhaas's at this point. The idea that the architect can actually shape the debate is pretty appealing, and the kinds of things BIG seems to want to create suggest a sort of nonpartisan but forward-looking utopianism. The architect, judging from the renderings, can make people party in the streets and so on. Always happy to see these 60s throwbacks but sometimes they just seem so stock and auto-pilotish.

Taken purely on its own terms, though, I think the form-making and program analysis stuff is totally brilliant. Not sure every apartment in the building would benefit from being a bizarre one-off in response to supposed advantages discovered in the loopholes of zoning and sun angles (etc), but as far as applications of the OMA formula go, I think they have a better knack than most. The buildings are striking and memorable and often in despite of crap budgets and restrictive circumstances. I dunno. I think the material sensibility is kind of ghastly though.

Man, I definitely shouldn't try to write about architecture after a few drinks...

Btw, you might be interested that my friend is a contractor on a Steven Holl project right now and the stuff coming from his office sucks. No follow-through, details or lack thereof probably being fleshed out by cheap apprentices.

Huh, that's interesting! I really did find the Chinese projects to be the best-built "foreign starchitect" things we saw there. But I think a lot of that might actually be down to Li Hu, who was at the time the head of Holl's Beijing office....

To be fair, it seems like it's pretty common on non-flagship projects. Said friend is an architect who is working as the head of the engineering department of a company that does curtain walls for a variety of projects and it seems like he runs into constant headaches due to either poor planning or a lack of actual engineering follow-through on plans.

http://bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/02/12/how-boston-city-hall-was-born/DtfspyXVbKBIKi8iSXHX6J/story.html

^^^ great read.

^ yes loved that article. So many people don't realize that the failures of grand scale brutalism were largely due to the lack of adherence to the initial plans in terms of pedestrian access, ground level retail, etc.

And I agree that there's something good in BIG's work in the utopian suggestion that we're finally moving away from the post-modernism mindset that buildings don't really matter. But at the same time his unique one off responses to sites tend to generate sloped buildings in the same way that Diller Scofidio Renfro's responses to a site tend to generate broad public stair sitting areas and viewing windows.

I certainly don't see him having the vision of even aesthetic range of OMA or H&dM, but maybe BIG's best contribution will be that if they can get a bunch of crazy looking buildings built that still have a programmatic sobriety then it might help break down the public perception of architecture as either flash or substance with little middleground.

Generally agree with the above - although I think DS+R are a pretty darn good firm and have less of a "branded" feel to their work. There are certain devices that recur, yeah, but they do seem to actually care about the specificities of site, or at least of architectural context. Landscape maybe not so much, but they seem to favor urban contexts, at least in the stuff that I've seen.

Absolutely! With DS+R I think it's more a case of "we did this before and it worked really well" rather than a branding element.

Here are before & after images of a high end restaurant I finished this past summer. It's in a former auto garage in an alley and it's hard to tell from the photo but the kitchen is a series of open islands in the middle with tables all around, so no seat is more than about 10 feet from the cooking. One of the goals was trying to figure out how to make a 4 star experience in a raw space and we decided to keep the shell as rough as possible while everything at a tactile level during the course of the meal (chairs, carpet, table finish) would be very refined. Got a bunch of other projects I need to have shot and some more opening soon.

http://i41.tinypic.com/23kw6ld.jpg

http://i41.tinypic.com/vg4gns.jpg

I DIED, that's lovely! The exposed ductwork seems like a nice mediator between the raw oldness of the wall surfaces and the shiny newness of the kitchen hood etc. Adds up well to me.

thanks!

I may slap the next client who says they're going for a "farmhouse aesthetic". Unless they're doing a farm.

Have these people actually been in farmhouses? I could unload some genuine farmhouse paraphernalia if they need some.

Amateur Architecture principal Wang Shu won the Pritzker Prize! First winner I've really been stoked for in my time of being an archinerd - we got to visit a bunch of their stuff on this last trip and it was all awesome.

So unexpected and great! Glad the Pritzker committee seems to have moved to recognizing people doing great work when it's actually being done rather than as a lifetime achievement award.

Yeah, I think this was a pretty great choice for pretty much the exact reason I DIED mentioned.

http://places.designobserver.com/feature/how-to-be-an-architecture-critic/32278/

So I made a point of uploading all my Amateur Architecture (Wang Shu/Lu Wenyu) photos last week to celebrate/capitalize upon the Pritzker excitement... full set here and here's a few faves...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7178/6940309289_d3907f59e2.jpg http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7043/6950798251_ebe54391b6.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7040/6937397041_75ef3bc94b.jpg http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7196/6940260785_778fbe38f1.jpg

(If you follow the link, my apologies - I've recently gone digital and while I love lots of things about it, it seems to be weakening me as an editor, that's a lot of pictures!)

Photos still great! I showed some of your recent pics to an architect friend at the bar last week. On my phone so... not the presentation they deserved, but good.

Aw gee thanks! I hope to soon be famous at bars across the nation.

great photos. particularly like the bottom two.

Thanks - yeah, their firm has a really nice handle on texture, for lack of a better way of putting it.

http://furrrocious-forms.tumblr.com/ geeeenius

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1xz1p2Gfa1rsiucno1_500.jpg

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1w1ca9Kyv1rsiucno1_500.jpg