A few weeks back, The New Yorker interviewed real estate magnate cum convicted felon Alfred Taubman. The topic was what makes a successful shopping center. He repeated a number of oft cited maxims, one of which is that you can’t get people to go more than two stories vertically. And that you need to create a circuit. I stopped in The Shops at Time Warner Center, and it seems they don’t have a subscription to The New Yorker.
Record Houses.
Architectural Record posts their yearly survey of house design. Sorry, make that, house design for the affluent. Record didn’t create this problem, they just report on it. It is rare for modest projects (the link is to a student’s 3D renderings; offline you can find a monograph and some decent documentation elsewhere) to be realized, and even less so for them to be published, but the purist can wade through the entries properly blinkered. If the measure of great work is that which makes you forget issues like these, then Ando, as usual, wins hands down. For the locals, they also have selections from an admirable, but unrealized project, to bring a modicum of restraint to eastern Long Island.
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The Gates.
The Met is sponsoring a exhibtion of the pending Christo and Jeanne-Claude project The Gates, which is to mounted in Central Park next winter. Apply to be on the paid work crew here. Calvin Trillin had an excellent peice in The New Yorker (couldn’t find a story link, sorry) a couple weeks ago about the project and their work in general. I had a vaguely negative opinion of them until reading it. That shows what the hegemony of art community can do. That, and my laziness in not doing my own research. Exhibition runs through July 25.
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Not a boys club anymore.
Zaha Hadid (it’s nice how modest the landing page is) wins the Pritzker Prize (a little stale, yes, but architecture is a slow moving profression). The site is pathetic, but informative. James Russell has a good round up of the response. My only question is: does this mean we finally won’t have to look at the Peak competition drawings every time someone wants to do a survery of who’s hot in archtiecture these days?
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Their interest is purely civic, not to fund TriBeCa Lofts.
There has been a formal RFP (Request for Proposals) issued for associate architects for the WTC Memorial, reports the Times (via Gothamist). If you want the cattier version of the story, try the Observer.
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‘Lil Danny, Happy at Last!
Given how carefully he (well, she) manages his image most of time, this appalling peice of loft porn, which includes a photo gallery that, of the six photos, two are of the architect and client(s). But, it’s “not grand”, really, “only 2,100 sq ft”. That’s meant to make all you folks living in living rooms and basement apartments feel like you almost rub elbows with the best and brightest. Cause you aren’t that different. Really.
Presented as part of the trechant Home Guide.
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MoMENTUM!
The Times reports on the progress at MoMA. What we should clearly take from this is, “whoa, ain’t it grand?” Big numbers: $858 million, 630,000 sq ft (that’s $1,361/sq ft, if you are scoring at home!), a whole block, a big lobby (expanded coat check!). Kudos to the Times for sounding like the Des Moines Chamber of Commerce.
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Get Yer CAD out.
Those of us who learned how to make building with a pencil (which makes me sound like a hopeless Luddite, but I just crossed the threshhold from punk to adult, at least in the eyes of the League, who demand a steeper duty to be a ‘sustaining’ member at the ripe old age of 35) will find this lecture presumptive and steeped in the ‘it’s too late to go back’ sensibility that justifies innumerable renderings cast in a black, ethereal field that make me just wonder: do they all have issues with their Mother? Tonight, the Lighthouse, 6:30.
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Christ, What’s With That?
Ya gotta love Joe Holtzman. I wish I had a painting to sell to fund the best (American) ‘Fuck You’ magazine since Spy. You go, Joe. I still hate him, of course.
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Boy, those Asians! Such small apartments. And so many of them!
Apparently there hasn’t been a mundane (as a matter of design) but specatular (as a matter of dystopian excess) locale in SE Asia that hasn’t been mined by one German photographer or
another. The Times does the write up and Laurence Miller Gallery does the show. Through May 15.