A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Over at MSNBC, David "Hardblogger" Shuster is hardblogging up a storm about Lower Manhattan's controversial Freedom Tower. But more importantly he's pushing the alternative of rebuilding the Twin Towers, a questionable act in this "softblogger's" opinion. His first post criticizes the design and engineering of the Freedom Tower, basically saying that the design isn't something to be proud of, and that it does not send the proper message to those who want to terrorize and scare our nation. He also insinuates that the monetary ties of the Lauder family (heirs of Estee Lauder's cosmetics fortune) to New York governor George Pataki played a deciding role in Libeskind's selection for the WTC site's master plan, since the architect is a friend of the family, after all. In his next post Shuster tells us there is an evident lack of pride and confidence in the Freedom Tower design, and he proposes the only (in his mind, apparently) alternat...

Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye edited by Kari Dahlgren, Kamilah Foreman and Tricia Van Eck, published by D.A.P./MCA, 2005. Paperback, 272 pages. ( Amazon ) Taking aim at tourism, the largest industry in the world, curator Francesco Bonami compiled a diverse range of artwork for the Universal Experience exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art . Filling the whole museum and its exterior, obvious pieces like Andy Warhol's Empire and Double Mona Lisa are present alongside lesser known works artists Zhan Wang, Thomas Hirschhorn, and others. Photography, film and sculpture dominate; the first two are appropriate for tourism's exposure to "the other" and its transient nature, while the la...

Cirque du Soleil Dormitory in Montreal, Quebec by Les Architects FABG As an element in Cirque du Soleil 's ever-expanding campus in Montréal, the 110 residences by Les Architectes FABG continue their goal of transforming a " no-man's land into an urban treasure ." Located on the edge of a garbage dump, the world-renowned troupe is a good drive from the expensive land of downtown Montréal, but with close to 2,000 personnel and a need for larger practice and performance spaces, the cheap and wide-open site is oddly appropriate. This dormitory gives residence for those trained down the street, but it also injects life into an otherwise desolate area that, no doubt, will change over time from the Ci...

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In what has to be the best exhibition title I've heard in a long time, Frances Glessner and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death opens tonight at, appropriately, the Glessner House Museum at 1800 South Prairie Avenue. From Glessner House's web page: The only daughter of John and Frances Glessner...Frances Glessner Lee founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed honorary captain in the New Hampshire state police....she noticed how often officers mishandled evidence and mistook accidents for murders and vise versa. In the 1940s and 1950s, she built stunningly detailed dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases to train detectives to assess visual evidence. She called these teaching tools the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death , inspired by the police saying: "Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell."...Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen dioramas [in the exhibition] are ...

Archinect reports on the launch of VOLUME , a project by Archis , AMO (the research and design portion of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, aka Rem Koolhaas's office), and CLAB (The Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting). A press conference (VE#1) will be held on Monday, February 28 at 6:30 at the Wood Auditorium in Avery Hall at Columbia, with Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, and Mark Wigley, unveiling the project. According to Archis' press release on this endeavor, VOLUME will exist because of the following arguable statement: Architecture has reached three of its most respected limits: - its definition as the art of making buildings - its discourse through scripted printed media and static exhibitions - its training as a matter of master and apprentice further saying, The pushing of these limits challenges the mandate and self conception of architecture. Architecture needs new modes of operation, converging the creation, the mediation and the appreciation o...

Archinect posts some wild images of a "tennis" match staged on the Burj Dubai 's helipad, from an article at This is London . Obviously a publicity stunt (though more literally too, because I don't see any harnesses on them, and the safety railing seems pretty inadequate for such a high altitude) for a tennis tourney in Dubai, the hotel, and the city itself, Andre Agassi battles Roger Federer for "King of the Skyscraper." Photo by Getty Images But on a serious note, the image is rather surreal, as alluded to on the Archinect post. Outside of the obvious fact that two pros are volleying 700 feet above the beach on lush, bright green grass in a desert climate, I think what fools us is the background. The environment veils the water, beaches and city in a haze, so the contrast between background and foreground is great, making it appear like two images melded together. A similar fooling of the mind occurs in Olive Barbieri's site specific_roma 04 , below. ...

Like some of his Japanese contemporaries, Kei'ichi Irie's houses have generic names that make them sound like experiments or parts of a larger set. O House is part of a portfolio that includes the C House, the W House, the Ta House, and so forth. Simplicity of materials and complexity of space seem to be a consistency for these mostly Tokyo residences on small urban sites. The O House is located in the Meguro district (which borders the well-known Shibuya district), in a residential portion of Tokyo. Its most outstanding feature is a large window with a curling concrete projection on three sides. This elevated feature indicates that the living area is lifted off the ground, with bedrooms occupying this lowest level. The interior is a plethora of concrete defining irregular spaces. It resembles more a museum than a house. The house was completed last May. Links: - kei'ichi IRIE + Power Unit Studio home page. - MoCo Tokyo page on the architect's houses. - Architecture i...

St. Louis Union Station by Albert Montesi and Richard Deposki, published by Arcadia Publishing, 2001. Paperback, 128 pages. ( Amazon ) Part of the " Images of America " series already featured on this page, this book illustrates the detail the series enables. Whereas other books have looked at whole cities, here the focus is on St. Louis's Union Station , not only as a building but also as a symbol of the Midwestern city's evolution last century. Tracing its history from the Old St. Louis Union Depot to the buildings current use as an indoor mall and hotel, black and white images tell its story. Local architect Theodore Link won a competition in the late 19th century, basing his design of the station ...

Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas by Polshek Partnership The design of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center can be attributed to four parties: the Polshek Partnership for the building architecture, Ralph Appelbuam Associates for the exhibition design, Hargreaves Associates for the landscape architecture, and of course Bill Clinton for being a visionary client. When presidential libraries tend towards the traditional and bombastic, Clinton opted for a restrained high-tech architecture, with integrated exhibitions, the whole taking strides to intelligently deal with its site, situated on the edge of the Arkansas River near downtown Little Rock. Working with Clinton, the architects decided to situate the linear buil...

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize will be awarded in Chicago, an event that has typically taken place outside of the family's hometown. Not surprisingly, the festivities will be centered on Millennium Park 's Pritzker Pavilion, designed by the Pritzker-award-winning architect Frank Gehry. The winner will be announced on April 4 with the ceremony held May 31 - one day before the groundbreaking for Renzo Piano's Art Institute expansion takes place. Piano - himself a winner of the Pritzker in 1998 - is expected to attend both ceremonies, the first featuring a panel discussion with him, Gehry, critic Ada Louise Huxtable, moderated by everybody's favorite PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose . Piano was actually interviewed by Rose just last week, an illuminating one-hour discussion about the architect's working methods, his four projects in New York, and his recent book On Tour with Renzo Piano . It is apparent, as the Sun-Tim...

Continuing upstairs for the rest of the MCA 's Universal Experience : Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye exhibition, the best is yet to come. I apologize, though, for the shortage of images this time. After ascending the elliptical stairs past a couple small galleries, one is immediately struck by the bright orange carpet laid across most of the fourth floor. Attributed to Rudolph Stingel, the artist responsible for carpeting Grand Central Terminal last year in a patterned graphic. Here the effect is just as jarring, adding an explosion of color to the otherwise colorless galleries. Michael Workman's review in Newcity talks about the orange blinding the visitor during the daylight hours as it's reflected off the white surfaces, though visiting after sunset the effect is different, yet of equal interest. With the contrast between the illuminated galleries inside and the darkness outside, the gallery windows act like a mirror, creating the illusion of a space twice...

Yesterday I visited the MCA for their BIG exhibition, Universal Experience : Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye , and I must say I was impressed. Comprising all floors of the museum and its front door, it is the first exhibition to take over all the facilities since 2000's show At the End of the Century: 100 Years of Architecture . Unlike that show, Universal Experience is starting in Chicago, usually the recipient of exhibitions started in other cities. Nice to be on the giving end for a change. Two large sculptural installations greet the visitor outside, Elmgreen and Dragset's Short Cut ripping up the plaza, and Thomas Schutte's Ganz Grosse Geister (Big Spirits XL) , three figures hanging out on a low roof adjacent to the museum's steps. The sharp difference between the two artworks sets the stage for the variety of objects and images inside. One of the greatest aspects of the MCA's otherwise banal building is the large wall visible from the plaza th...

Milwaukee's Johnsen Schmaling Architects are riding a nice, little wave at the moment. They're featured in archrecord2 this month and have an exhibition of their work - titled "Extending the Surface" - at I-space in Chicago until February 26.  Archrecord2 covers a couple built projects — a penthouse pavilion (for which they won a 2004 AIA Wisconsin Award ) and a prototype duplex — as well as a couple projects: a house and a parking garage renovation in downtown Milwaukee. All these are featured in the exhibition at I-space I visited over the weekend, though the project that stood out for me was the Courtyard House. The one-story house in Lake Forest, Illinois (about 20 miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan) is roughly square in plan and punctuated by two rectangular courtyards, positioned at opposite corners from each other. The placement of the courtyards allows the interior spaces to have views of landscape on all sides, filling the house with greenery. ...

City Planning According to Artistic Principles by Camillo Sitte, published by Random House, 1964. Paperback, 205 pages. ( Amazon ) Originally published in 1889, Camillo Sitte intended his book as a guide for locating monuments in public spaces, particularly Vienna, but what resulted is a criticism of modern city planning that valued logic and mathematical solutions over artistic considerations. He looks to Italy and its Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque spaces as ideals (especially the Piazza della Signoria in Florence and Piazza San Marco in Venice), though he realizes that simply copying historical city spaces into modern plans would not work. Although he has an apparent affection of these and other spaces, they were generated ...

GGG House in Mexico City, Mexico by Albert Kalach Revisiting a project featured on this page about four years ago, the GGG House by Alberto Kalach (with Daniel Alvarez) is a complex design of concrete and light, inspired by the work of artist Jorge Yazpik , who has three sculptures placed in reflecting pools about the house. Both the sculptures and the house carve openings into mass, an intricate interrelationship of solid and void, each finding release in its surroundings. For the house, the release is its rear yard. From the solid presence at the street and entry, through the maze-like interior of tight corridors and glass bridges, to the living area overlooking the yard, this is a movement from dark to light, mass to air. Sli...