arkitrave :: log

Along with several other models from the University at Buffalo, my work is going to be exhibited at Cannon Design’s atrium gallery in Grand Island. The model is of Renzo Piano’s Beyeler Foundation Museum in Basel, Switzerland. (His website is Flash sans URLs, so you’ll have to click “works” and then the picture that looks kind of like this model)

My model was also chosen for the postcard advertising the exhibit. The opening reception is Friday, 6 May, at 5:30pm at Cannon.

Seen in Chicago, a city with as many Mies buildings as Florida has trailer parks.

Compare to a similar pavilion in an office tower complex, the Dominion Centre in Toronto.

For those of you who are not architecturally versed, it’s unlikely that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the codifier of the modernist office skyscraper in America, would approve of this marriage. The melding of the commercial with architecture was, of course, part and parcel to modernist office architecture, but it had to be on Mies’s terms. If Mickey D had actually hired Mies, the logo may have looked something like this:

The Albright-Knox is one of the best art museums outside of New York City and DC. It is a local treasure, and part of the reason why Buffalo ranked #4 in American Style’s survey of the best arts cities in the United States.

I enjoy visiting the Albright immensely. It’s a small museum, so you can get through the entire building in a visit. Yet it has a huge permanent collection, and the curator is constantly rotating this large collection. The museum is always new, though there are some particularly significant pieces that are always displayed. In particular, their collection of mid-century modern art is extensive and high-quality.

The thing with minimalist art is that every detail counts, and the slightest addition to the work can create an entirely new composition. I believe firmly that a good curator can position a work in a way that allows me to see it in an entirely different perspective. That said, I’m still trying to figure out what the curator was hoping I would see in this work after the museum’s addition:

Goodbye, Philip Johnson.

He was a man I would love to have met, someone who not only was on the cutting edge of architecture for longer than many of us get to be on this earth, but who was also a fascinating human being, one with a deep understanding of the human condition, an amazing candor about the profession of architecture, and an appreciation of students and young architects as the future of the field.

He was born in 1906, just a few years after Frank Lloyd Wright built the Martin House complex and just near the end of the Victorian period of American architecture. He died on the 26th of January, at the age of 98.

Architectural Record article
The Late, Great, and Colorful Philip Johnson
Still the Bad Boy, Philip Johnson Looks Ahead at Age 95

And, an alternate viewpoint from Slate:
Lived in Glass Houses, Threw Stones

In response to the article at Slate, which essentially bemoans the wandering of Johnson into the terrain of Postmodernism, I have a few things to say.

I respect Johnson a great deal for his willingness to change and find the new. If art does not stay active and progressive, it stagnates, and Johnson realized this. The criticism from Slate that “in less capable hands, Postmodernism quickly degenerated into a facile and repetitive pastiche of old and new,” is certainly true; but this does not invalidate the work of those who were capable. For example, the American saltbox has been ripped off by developers in countless banal suburban tracts, but this does not take away from the power of the real thing anchored on the New England coast.

Johnson valued change. He valued the young. And while Postmodernism was not the greatest thing that ever happened to architecture, it probably needed to happen and was inevitable, and Johnson was fortunate to have lived long enough to see the next generation of architects after postmodernists such as Graves and Stern. He supported such young architects as Rem Koolhaas, for example. Koolhaas is one of the greatest architectural minds of our time, and his Seattle Public Library is the best building built since Bilbao, in my opinion. You must go. It is truly a stunning space.

Yes, valuing change is inherently risky. But it is only in this risk that exciting art occurs. Thanks, Philip Johnson, for continually pushing architecture forward and embracing change. The built environment is better for it. You knew you were not as good as Mies or Corbusier, but you found your strengths and capitalized on them, and in the process won the respect and friendship of much of the architectural world. You used the capital you earned to support and advance others who you believed in, and many owe their success to your faith in their abilities and ideas.

As much as you hated the idea of your mantle passing onto others, I truly hope that there will be those in the profession who will be as passionate as you were in embracing the young and supporting my generation as we seek to take architecture to a new place in the next thirty (or sixty, if we’re as fortunate as you were) years of our careers.

OK. All the architecture students have seen this. But I needed a break, so I wasted a few minutes putting this list together.

I’ve italicized the ones that apply more or less to me and left a few comments.

You know you’re an Architecture Student when…

you know the janitors by name.

And how many slices of pizza they buy at lunch.

your roommate/wife says “good morning,” and you reply “good night.”

you spend more time in studio than with your wife.

Sad but true.

you see showering as a waste of time.

you analyze everything as if it were a building.

This gets worse directly proportional to hours of sleep.

concept of time is not forward, but a countdown from the time a project is due (”What time is it?”"4 hours ’till”).

Having my own office and only one deadline this semester, this one is a memory of past years.

you slice your finger, and the first thing you think of is if you’ll be able to finish your model.

So true. The most interesting part is figuring out how to hold a compress to a finger while still trying to cut chipboard.

you say “It’s only midnight- I have plenty of time to finish.”

you confuse today and tomorrow.

you carry a toothbrush in your backpack.

Maybe I should

you confuse sunrise with sunset.

the alarm clock tells you when to go to sleep.

you strangle your roommate because he said he stayed up late studying.

you’re not ashamed of drooling in class anymore, especially in the Structures lesson.

you know what UHU tastes like.

Technically, only Testors Plastic Cement.

breakfast is your 5th meal of the day.

the morning newspaper beats you home.

the idea that you have a room to live in outside of studio is just a myth.

you hear “Didn’t you wear that yesterday?’ followed by “and the day before that?”

And an occasional “and the day before that…”

you roommate files a ‘Missing Person Report.’

someone asks you for your phone number and you give them the studio’s.

You draw perspectives of your friends room on your Japanese homework just for the fun of it.

Whenever you finish a project and don’t have any studio work to do, you are constantly wondering why you aren’t in studio working.

It’s a strange sort of guilt complex.

You buy trace paper in mass quantities.

You understand what 4B, 2B, B, HB, H, 2H, and 4H are and have lots of each type.

Your idea of splurging on yourself is buying another circle template (or other miscellaneous template).

Alas, all these old drafting-related ones have been irrelevant to me since first year. It’s all CAD now.

YOU ALWAYS WRITE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

Only sometimes.

You put a scale under everything you draw so that people know how big it is.

But I can’t sketch to scale so well, so this doesn’t usually help.

The biggest decision you have to make near the end of the term is “pencil, or ink?”

Nope. Now it’s “gloss, semi-gloss, or mylar?”

You always have a supply of bandaids around for exacto knife cuts.

That would maybe have been a good idea all these years.

You have a 30, 60, 90 and a 45, 45, 90 degree triangle. Or two. Or three. Or more.

You keep around adjustable triangles too just in case.

But the arm broke off my adjustable triangle…

You start replacing pictures of your friends and family with pictures of buildings.

Watching the sun rise means you haven’t gone to bed yet.

The only sunrises I’ve seen since I was very young.

You never have enough wall space to pin things up.

You no longer leave studio to sleep, you just crash on the couch.

I’ve never gotten into the sleeping in studio thing. My wife is at home, and warm, so I go home.

Your idea of relaxation is going to Writing 122.

Graduate school==all architecture classes. There is no escape.

You always have a supply of portable and non perishable food.

You can go for days without sunlight. (You go to class in the dark, you come home in the dark).

Midnight is considered early evening.

You put up everything on your walls with drafting tape.

Push pins become a valuable commodity.

on Halloween you trick-or-treat in studio to get arch supplies or ‘Red Bull.’

you can live without human contact, food or daylight, but if you can’t print, it’s chaos.

Pencil smudges and ink smears are the bane of your existence.

You start competing with each other for number of hours without sleep. (Less than 40 need not compete).

So true.

redbull, coffee and cokes are tools, not treats.

Time spent with friends must be scheduled way in advance.

you’ve slept more than 20 hours non-stop in a single weekend.

No more than 12, I think.

you’ve listened to all your CDs (iTunes collection) in less than 48 hours.

you’re not seen in public.

you lose your house keys for a week, and you don’t even notice.

Days don’t exist anymore, everything is based on number of hours of work.

you’ve used an entire roll of film to photograph the sidewalk.

I use digital. But I did take about 60 sidewalk photos a couple years ago.

you become excellent at recycling when making models.

you take notes and messages with a rapidograph and colour markers.

Actually, only gray Prismacolors. My Rapidographs are all jammed up.

you hear the same song on the radio 3 or more times in one night.

your parents have more of a social life than you.

your 11-year-old sister has more of a social life than you.

She did when she was 11.

you consider using broccoli for your models.

Hmm. It wouldn’t scale well to tree-trunk width.

you enjoy hanging out at Home Depot.

Of course. I even bring my wife on Friday nights.

you’re dating another architecture student.

your friends get more sleep in one night than you do in one week.

you know all the 24-hour food places in the area.

you consider 3AM an early night.

“scoring” involves an X-Acto blade.

Sad.

smoking sounds appealing.

It gives a nice rhythm to life. It’s an addiction that forces you to take breaks. And the social life it engenders is attractive. I’ve often thought of starting.

you’re out on Friday nights in studio.

the only building on campus with its lights on is your studios’.

you’ve memorized you favorite vending machine combination item (B6).

Mine’s E6. Mmm. Peanut M&Ms. Mmm.

certain songs remind you of studio.

Joni Mitchell and Celine’s All By Myself.

you can conceptually compose the food on your plate.

Pathetic. But true.

you don’t find out who wins the Presidential Election until Thanksgiving Break, if you get one at all.

Come on, I’m not under a rock or anything.

you’ve got more photos of buildings than of actual people.

Lots more.

you’ve taken your wife on a date to a construction site.

Twice.

you’ve ever dreamt about your models.

Increasingly common. And increasingly disturbing.

upon hearing ’supermodel’, you think of a nicely crafted-foam core model.

I hate foam core.

when you are being shown pictures of a trip, you ask what the human scale is.

you start wearing all black.

you carry a sweatshirt to all of your classes.

you have no life, and admit it.

you refer to outside studio as the “Real World.”

you can use Photoshop, Illustrator, and make a web page, but you don’t - know how to use Excel.

I’m getting better at Excel.

you refer to great architects (dead or alive) by the first name as if you knew them. (Frank, Corbu, Mies, Norman…).

you buy 50-dollar architectural magazines that you haven’t read yet.

Books yes. Magazines? I read Record. And I don’t buy Wallpaper or any of the other big ones.

when someone offers you a BIC pen, you feel offended.

Of course. How could you dare? I have a extra-fine Sharpie and two Prismacolors in my pocket.

all of the Christmas gifts you give are wrapped in trace.

you ask Santa Claus for architecture supplies.

“respect”, “coolness’, and “hatred” are all based on how much sleep you get, or lack of.

Everytime you tell someone what your Major is they just look at you and say, “I’m sorry.”

What we know, or what we would know if it were simply a question here of something to know, is that there has never been, never will be, a unique word, a master-name. This is why the thought of the letter a in diff?¬¨¬©rance is not the primary prescription or the prophetic annunciation of an imminent and as yet unheard-of nomination. There is nothing kerygmatic about this “word,” provided that one perceives its decapita(liza)tion. And that one puts into question the name of the name.

Derrida has died, at the age of 74, in Paris. The father of deconstruction, he invited us, in addition to being thoroughly confused by his writing, to consider binaries that we accept as fact (silence|sound, light|dark, absent|present) and not just reverse them but turn the entire system on its head. His influence in architecture can be seen in the work of Eisenman and Tschumi, and his influence in film, art, and literature is too great to even scratch the surface here.

In many ways, my thesis is a sort of deconstructivist look at silence; I’m suggesting that silence can be materially present, and functioning as silence only relative to a multiplicity of musical materials. The translation of that idea into architecture is what I’m working on right now.

So long, Derrida. The world needs more writers who make us bang our heads against the wall and THINK.

[UPDATE] Pano, the owner of the property, has stated that whether or not he is granted the demolition permit, he will have the house destroyed himself. The fine for demolishing without a permit is only $1500 in Buffalo, and he said he would simply take down the house and gladly pay the fine. In the face of close to 3500 signatures on a petition, no less.

Pano’s, an established (and I add, always packed with people) 24-hour restaurant on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, has just filed a request for a demolition permit on this house next door to their restaurant:

They do own the house. They have evicted the current tenants. No, this demolition isn’t for a fabulous new building by an internationally acclaimed architect. It isn’t because the building has been empty for years. They evicted tenants. No, they want to replace this architectural gem with a parking lot. Yes. A parking lot.

Buffalo’s downtown is 27% parking. Now Elmwood, the healthiest commercial district in the city, mainly because it isn’t all surface parking, has the opportunity for another surface lot.

I am not going to say anything more about this. It could get ugly, and this is a professional website. If you live in Buffalo, and haven’t seen this yet, sign the petition. As of this writing, they’re at 2000 signatures. They’re asking for a boycott of Pano’s, but you can sign the petition without agreeing to boycott the restaurant, if boycotts aren’t your thing.

Even if you don’t live in Buffalo, add your name to the list if you’re inclined. The petition will be delivered at the hearing on the permit in a week or so.

We don’t need another parking lot in Buffalo. And we don’t need to lose another significant building.

I am officially beginning the end.

With any luck, and quite a lot of hard work, I will be done with school this winter. My thesis is entitled “The Space Between: Silence and Light as Parallel Compositional Materials in Music and Architecture,” and will likely put most of you to sleep…I’m proposing that since we’ve discovered silence to be an element of presence rather than absence (John Cage), that we bring that idea into architecture somehow. This directly confronts Louis Kahn’s idea that silence is the nonexistent, light is present, and architecture exists between the two. Kahn is poetic, but I’d like to look at it a different way.

My thesis blog is at www.arkitrave.com/thesis, and will chronicle my work throughout the semester. I think best when I’m writing, so hopefully this will help me as I write a book and do a design project.

It’s also my first WordPress install, and so far I’m thrilled with it. Caution: I will modify the default template sometime soon, so it’s still not really up to my usual standards visually. This will change. Send me hate mail if it doesn’t.

I’ll try to stay off the thesis on this log and keep it relegated to the thesis log. Look for a new launch in the next couple days!

Lately I???ë?¬?ve been thinking a lot about reality and design. This was perhaps prompted by the discussions a while back about drop shadows, but it has been kicking around my head for much longer than that. It is also prompted by my, let???ë?¬?s say, extremely formulated (OK, totalitarian) views on architecture.

I hate fakeness in architecture. I can???ë?¬?t stand woodgrain plastic, marble-look vinyl, brick-patterned exterior cladding, beadboard that isn???ë?¬?t really beadboard, and Dryvit-stonework. The common denominator is that these materials are masquerading as something that they???ë?¬?re not (and they look it). I don???ë?¬?t dislike any of these materials (plastic, vinyl, plywood, MDF, Dryvit) on a basic level. I appreciate the variety of materials we have available to us. I just want them to be what they are, not pretend to be something else. For example, molded plastic is a great material for a chair ???ë?¬® sexy and smooth and formed, with a single color perhaps. Take plastic, and wood-grain it and laminate it onto a computer desk, and it looks like crap.

Having views like this makes life difficult lately, as it seems that everyone fawns over every fake material with comments like ???ë??it looks just like marble!???ë?? or ???ë??these window mullions are in between the glass panes to make cleaning easy!???ë?? In fact, I hate it when people tell me my concrete countertop looks like granite. No. It doesn???ë?¬?t look like granite. It looks like polished concrete. If I???ë?¬?d wanted granite, I would???ë?¬?ve saved my pennies and bought granite. My wife has learned to deal with my occasional tirades, and I hope someday to create architecture that uses materials honestly, like Steven Holl, Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto, several of my architectural heroes.

My elitist attitude also makes the prospect of someday working in architecture difficult. I know that my idealism will run head-on into the realities of budgets and clients who like materials that are ???ë??maintenance free???ë?? and look ???ë??exactly like wood.???ë?? I will drop ceilings. I will lay vinyl floors. Hell, I???ë?¬?ll probably spec Dryvit at some point in my life. This will make my conscience work overtime, and hopefully I won???ë?¬?t throw myself off the Millenium Bridge in angst at age 40.

This brings me to web design. Since I live in both worlds, I have been thinking lately about the fact that these ???ë??moral???ë?? issues don???ë?¬?t come up in my web design life. Instead, like the old ladies who adore their marble-look Formica, I embrace such things as drop shadows and gradients, guiltlessly creating the impression of a 3D environment where none really exists. I have made the switch to Apple in the past couple months, and love OS X and its lush screen experience (though I’m getting into the Terminal too!)

I guess it???ë?¬?s because everything is fake on the computer screen ???ë?¬® there are no real materials at all, so the moral framework that physical design sets up (or that I set up…) is nullified, and all rules are off. My idealism doesn???ë?¬?t get in the way when I build websites.

What do you think? What pseudo-moral isses does web design set up for you? Is web design an escapist pursuit for people with the sort of ideals I have?

My wife and I are leaving for a vacation with my parents and two sisters, so I will be offline for an entire week. Since my mom’s response when I mentioned perhaps taking the family to the south of France was… “I don’t understand why anyone would want to go to Europe,” (we are very different, my mother and I), we are going to do what all self-respecting American families do. Or at least that’s what the TV ads say. We’re going to Disneyworld! We were there once before, when I was, oh, about 10. So, it’s been awhile, and it will be good to spend time with them and get out of Buffalo for a little while. Kate just graduated from the University of Iowa, and I’m wrapping up grad school in (hopefully) 6 months, so it seemed like a good time to get the whole family together again.

I hope the comment spam doesn’t get too carried away while I’m off enjoying the rampant commercialism and fake European cities. EPCOT isn’t quite how Walt initially imagined it. (For another take on the circular city, check out Bucky Fuller’s scheme. Probably predated Disney’s idea.)

Now it’s just a different kind of escapist utopia. In fact, EPCOT as it is now kinda looks back at the original idea and laughs. What we really want in America is just to visit utopia. And all the “higher social good” hoo-ha of the Modernists isn’t really necessary; that takes too much effort to implement in everyday life. Better to castrate the original idea and make it palatable to the masses.

All that said, I am looking forward to the trip; I will try to not take anything too seriously and to enjoy myself and time with my family. And I’ll post a picture of Mickey for ya when I get back.