Two performance theatre Fisher Hall at Bard College.
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Calgary is officially ‘Target-ed’.
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A temporary transformation of pre-demolition houses in Calgary. Wreck City started as an epilogue for the 809 Gallery. Community members and the developer supported the project. Artists, musicians and performers brought their magic.
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Lebbeus Woods, Architect is currently on view at SFMOMA, and throughout the run of the exhibition, we’ll be using Tumblr as a place to sequentially share Woods’s wonderful sketchbooks, since only a fraction of the pages can be on view in the galleries.
Image: Lebbeus Woods, Sketchbook, 2000; Courtesy of Aleksandra Wagner; © Estate of Lebbeus Woods
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“Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.”
NYT: Farewell to Penn Station, 1963 -
Merry Christmas!
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A visit to Siemensstadt Metropolitan Settlement yesterday evening was enlightening. It is one of six of the Berlin Modern Housing Estates built between 1913 and 1934 that represents a housing reform movement recognized for fresh architectural typology and a more socially-focused development and planning policy.
Siemensstadt is a collection of buildings designed by Hans Scharoun, Walter Groupius, Otto Bartning, Hugo Haring, Fred Forbat, and Paul Rudlof Henning. A total of 1370 units, connected to district energy…in 1934. UNESCO recognized the six housing estates as world heritage sites in 2008 and the buildings are in the process of preservation.
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A tour inside the Netherlands Embassy in the mitte district was a highlight today. Design constraints were interesting: the building had to complete a city block, have an interior courtyard, accommodate a portion of housing, and the embassy required a separate building. OMA’s resulting structure is an embassy cube and a residential building fulfilling the remaining perimeters of the block. A courtyard in-between the two is the main entrance.
The cube is a series of carved out spaces. From the entrance (and security check) the first staircase opens up at the top to a three-sided glass walkway…look down to see the street below. Turn the corner to find a near-Dutch viewscape overlooking the Spree river. The staircase continues to wrap as it climbs. Rooms are carved, angles pull and tug forming new shapes. Aluminum floor meets aluminum clad wall. A horizontal slice of light on the wall is a hidden handrail, place your hand inside to find a rounded aluminum handrail. Trajectory is often used in describing the space, and it is. A highlight in one of the smaller meeting rooms was a series of four hand-stitched wall hangings, called the four seasons and made by Claudy Jongstra who is known for raising her own sheep.
The transparency and beauty of the space is made even better by the nice people working in the little white security guard booth this morning.
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Happened upon a fairly popular statute today. Watching the photo-op tradeoff for the two men cast in bronze, there was not a second when the statute was unoccupied. For the two decade-old controversy proposing re-location, today it remains in the park in the centre of the city and seems a popular tourist destination.
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I’ll leave the translation up to the imagination and/or google translator.
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Mis en place for construction in Mitte.
