A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Lieutenant Petrosino Park in New York, NY by I-Beam Design, 1996 This is I-Beam Design 's (Azin Valy & Suzan Wines) submission for the Biennale di Venezia , proposed for the intersection of the Soho, Chinatown and Little Italy areas of New York city. The text is written by I-Beam Design. The proposed design creates a programmatic, cultural and spatial connection between Lt. Petrosino Park and its surroundings. A hanging garden extends from the facades of the surrounding buildings to a series of columns within the park. Neighboring residents are invited to participate directly from their windows in selecting, growing and planting the flowering vines and ivy that constitute the garden. This simple gesture provides animated patterns of light and shade at street level, and a view of the entire street through a levitating tapestry of rich greenery and brightly colored flowers from the windows above. The ...

Landesgartenschau in Weil am Rhein, Germany by Zaha Hadid, 1999 Zaha Hadid 's first major executed project, the Vitra Fire Station, brought her, and the chair manufacturer's campus, international attention. Containing structures by Frank Gehry , Alvaro Siza, Nicholas Grimshaw, and Tadao Ando , in addition to Hadid, Vitra became synonymous with cutting-edge design, even though most of the company's output is early Modernist design. The adjacent German town of Weil am Rhein took advantage of Vitra's attractions, choosing Hadid because of her formally bold fire station. Though the British architect has a recognizable style - evident in her sweeping, gestural paintings - the proposal for the Landesgartenschau (state flower exhibition) stands apart from her previous works. Hadid's fire station at Vitra is an object, sitting in a concrete ca...

Visions of Light traces the evolution of cinematography from the origins of the motion picture camera to films at the close of the century. The film uses comments from cinematographers and director's of photography to illustrate the importance of light in telling a story. Arranged chronologically, the relationships between a film's visuals and technology and the culture of Hollywood are the most influential. Early films carried photography to the medium of film, most filmmakers using the motion picture camera similarly to still cameras. Over time filmmakers began to use movies to create a story. In a sense the "silent years" were movie's golden age: unencumbered by sound any expression of feeling or thought was accomplished through the camera. Sound briefly hampered film's progression as the camera grew to accommodate the aural input. Studios flowered, though, and cameramen develo...

One-Family Home in Floriac, France by Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), 1998 Rem Koolhaas became internationally popular after the release of S,M,L,XL , a book almost as big and heavy as a CMU. His firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture ( OMA ), produces work that ranges through the sizes the book indicates. Easily this one family house in Floriac, within the Bordeaux region of France, could be filed under S. But like the book illustrates common themes stream through the various scales of work, giving equal weight to each project. This house, completed after the release of the monograph, is one of OMA's strongest buildings to date and illustrates these themes: innovative and creative design solutions through thorough programmatic analysis expressed against existing architectural and urban conditions. Koolhaas's strong functionalis...

National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, Spain by José Rafael Moneo, 1984 Note: The following is transcribed from The Pritzker Architecture Prize: The First Twenty Years , published in 1999 by The Art Institute of Chicago. José Rafael Moneo is above all an architect of tremendous range. His flexibility in varying the appearance of his works based on their differing contexts is reflected in the way he takes on each new commission as a fresh new exercise. He draws on an incredible reservoir of concepts and ideas, which he filters through the specifics of the site, the purpose, the form, the climate, and other circumstances of the project. As a result, each of his buildings is unique, but at the same time, uniquely recognizable as being from his palette. Founded by legionaries of Augustus in 24 B.C., Mérida became the most important Roman city in Spain by the fall of the empire. Almost completely destroyed after the Muslim in...

I decided to add film to this collection of writings and begin with Francis Ford Coppola's relatively unknown classic, 1974's The Conversation , with Gene Hackman, Cindy Williams (yes, from Laverne & Shirley ), and Harrison Ford. Coming off the success of the first Godfather , Coppola surprisingly made a relatively low-budget film with, at the time, mostly unknown actors. Gene Hackman later reprised this role in 1998's Enemy of the State , loosely a 90s remake. The movie centers around Harry Caul (Hackman) a surveillance man in San Francisco and his growing interest in a conversation he tapes between a woman (Williams) and a man (Frederic Forrest) she is apparently having an affair with. Their conversation takes place in a crowded downtown park at lunchtime, chosen for its level of anonymity and safety. The fact they are able to be recorded by Harry, (with two directional mics, located in adjacent...

Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain by Frank Gehry, 1997 Easily the most publicized building of the 1990s, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao Spain was completed in 1997 to critical and popular praise. The completion of the building also guaranteed Gehry's presence among the great architects of this century, and a father-figure for young architects in the next century. The museum is a long way from his early work, including his own residence in Santa Monica, California, but is indicative of Gehry's development from the 1960's. Beginning with small budgets, he utilized cheap materials to arrive at formally inventive solutions not possible with expensive materials. Clearly a product of the open-minded Los Angeles environment, the possibilities of formal expression grew with each new job, due to his rising prominence and improved technology. With the erection of this 265,000 square foot museum across the Atlantic...