Studio Launch

Chicago II

Second day touring. More interesting signs.

In case you need help finding your way...

And face as sign...

Chicago

What a great chance to tour some buildings with our University of Utah School of Business clients in Chicago. Weather has been great. Company, tours, and food even better. We are visiting these "case studies" to understand the use of them...and to research what the design served well and what it has not served well.

But on a much smaller note. I love to see how humans interact with buildings. Close up. From placing helpful tips to each other in the form of signs...

To observing with laughter the "trick" of continuing the marker tray around and along the wall thereby "fooling" the users into thinking the white board continued as well...Who would have predicted?

To discovering messages left on the drawers to file cabinets in basement storage rooms...no, I didn't open it. What's in there?

More touring tomorrow.

The Diagrid Revisited - Again

As I said in two previous posts > first here and > and then here regarding Foster’s million square feet of offices perched atop an existing Art Deco structure in New York...while I was critical, a visit to the building was warranted, certainly. And as of late summer, I've read the architect's statements and I've completed that visit.

First, I have a greater appreciation for the way the New York critics responded to the Diagrid. It acheives some success in simply doing things differently to overcome the sheer inevitability of most high-rise-architecture-box-shapes. It is more unique in person than in photos. Upon reflection I understand that sometimes simple moves are best appreciated up close. Foster started with a box, and where others would have stopped, he went on and sliced off the corners. For New Yorkers to focus so much attention on and to say that “the triangles give the building a jubilantly jagged shape” makes more sense to me now.

Second, the Hearst tower is sleek and refined. The space and materials, in balance, are well composed, light, and humane. It is hard not to say that it is one of the better towers in the city.

So, I do understand better the constraints of the context and the lens that Goldberger and Sudjic use to view architecture in Manhattan. Still, for me, Goldberger’s praise that Foster, “rescued the high-rise from creative exhaustion” remains an overstatement. I saw other recent high-rises I thought were better; the CNN tower complex at Central Park and the new Times building to mention a couple.

With my greater appreciation of the New York context I also confirmed that many of the observations made in my earlier posts based on photographs still held true. The structural logic is far from being able to carry the day. The four story diagrid, for me, remains a few steps away from that “jubilant shape” whose “whole form shimmers” as the critics exuberantly describe. And the lack of acknowledgement of the “thing it sits on” remains somewhat coarse; there is no real meaningful conversation between new and old architecture.

But, all in all, still a good visit if you are in New York. It remains better than most of the stuff our profession fills the environment with.

Travel Log 5

Moderism, or its current incarnation, has begun incorporating ideas of experience that previously seemed unimportant.  There was something to be learned by the impetus of Post-Modernism.  Now these beach portals are not modern by any stretch of the imagination.  But they do show how the purely functional can be enhanced with the expression of the event; of the function.

Certainly, beach entries-boardwalks do not need roofs at all.  There is no activity furthered by the roofs or the gateways-portals.  No activity, that is, but the expression and identiy of Threshold and Entry.I think they are better for it.  A modern, more austere approach to making this transition from the mainland to the beach would simply be that.

Celebration of the function enriches it...as long as we don't sink to the bathos of Post-Modernism or the current nostalgic-common-demoninator architecture.

Travel Log 4

Beach architecture is relaxed.  But it is also tall...thin...vertical.  I love tall.  And the beach house architecture gets right to it.

Tall is important.  Each building stretches on its tippie toes to see over the next to the ocean.  The higher the better.

They have perfected tall.  Something about tall.  I love it.

Travel Log 3

This is the road I’ve been jogging on while on vacation.  On my morning jogs I pass a lot of buildings.  There are basically two categories here: the beach-house-resort-condo-hotel category unique to beach communities and the convenience-store-suburbs-housing-trailer-park category that exists in other parts of the country.  The second category is found along the highway.

Where I jog there are only pretty houses of all different styles, or should I say different combinations of different styles.  Different arch geometries happily coexist with church window mullions, deco curvy railings, shake shingles and Dryvit capitals-belt coursing-moldings(?).

Not a place for a purist for sure.  Ionic columns may not be enough here…no problem, how about adding some barn style shutters to finish it off?  Of course, even in an environment where anything goes, acceptable design can still be challenging.  Bad choices can still be made, it is harder to mess up, but it happens.

More dramatically, for people here, I get the feeling that Modernism is something that evidently occurs elsewhere…far off in what could be a distant country.  For them it is simply not an issue.  Not so unlike the Midwest.  And I wonder as I jog, architecturally, could I live in a place like this?  And the answer is, of course.  The place I live currently is not that much different.  Of course the styles differ, but not the architectural approach.

My neighborhood has goofy-stylistic-hybridized buildings as well…many of them.  And I kinda like living there.  But the draw to the kinds of beach community buildings that I jog by is their relaxed nature, and more specifically, their “beach-y,” cavalier approach to style and environment.  They don’t try too hard.  It is what they do best.  And hey, that’s precisely why I’m here isn’t it, to relax, to take a break?  Yes, yes, indeed.  Then I ask myself, later on in the jog, could I live here and design these buildings for a living?  There would be benefits.  It would be easier for one.  It would probably pay the same.  Couldn’t I do that and live a more relaxed lifestyle?  Seriously?  No way.  Now I know there will be those who ask, how can you turn your back on a project type?  And there will be those who challenge, if you are so good, you should make them better yourself.

Well, jogging along, I think that I prefer to simply leave that to others.  I don’t mind if other folks choose to do those things.  It’s just not my choice.  Making something 10% better at the end of a professional effort leaves me hungry for more.  I didn’t always think so.  But my experience in striving for and having successfully gained marginal improvement in the design of buildings increasing them from a D- to a C has been unfulfilling. And a business person would tell you that’s not leveraging your ability; that’s not realizing your potential.  And I agree.  I prefer the struggle.  And I want to surround myself with folks who want more; whatever we collectively discover “more” is.  Making something transformational, better than any one of us could imagine, collaborating with others in a serious expenditure of professional and personal effort is simply more rewarding.
Let the other folks do the beach houses.  For me, it’s the sports equivalent of “mailing it in.”  Somehow I am always more satisfied, exhausted at the end of a very hard run…

Travel Log 2

Advice is sometimes so valuable that it deserves to be posted on a sign...What kind of advice would you post in your studio?

Vacation Pics...

 

OK, so I am on vacation this week.  And you can blame this on Kira and Donna...and Alain now.  If they had been writing lately I wouldn't feel compelled to sink this low.  So low, that I post vacation pics.  Scene.  Gulf Shores, Alabama.  Beautiful weather.  Good company.  Great sandy beaches and clear ocean water.  38 in-laws total.  23 of them kids.  You can do the math.  Yes, we are seriously outnumbered.  And it isn't pretty.  (My wife and I are responsible for numbers 4, 9, and 19.)