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The BLDGBLOG book will likely be as interesting as the BLDGBLOG blog. Topics will include “plate tectonics and J.G. Ballard to geomagnetic harddrives and undiscovered New York bedrooms, by way of offshore oil derricks, airborne utopias, wind power, inflatable cathedrals, statue disease, science fiction and the city, pedestrianization schemes, architecture and the near-death experience, Scottish archaeology, green roofs…”
Architecture idea: a skyscraper with a single floor. See also the tower to be built in Dubai where every floor rotates.
Map of the cracks in the Guggenheim’s facade. “Since the Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright’s massive spiral facade has been showing signs of cracking, mainly from seasonal temperature fluctuations that cause the concrete walls, built without expansion joints, to contract and expand.”
Video of the inside and outside of the just-completed new IAC headquarters. Building by Frank Gehry, his first in NYC. (via zach)
The McMansion page on Wikipedia is surprisingly detailed. Other terms for a McMansion include Faux Chateau, Frankenhouse, Starter Castle, and Parachute Home. The Lawyer Foyer refers to “the two-story entry space typically found on many McMansions which is meant to be visually overwhelming but which contributes little to the useful space of the house”.
Things Magazine reports on The Pentominium, a 1670-foot luxury residential building planned for construction in Dubai. “The building’s concept (penthouse + condominium, you see) means that each apartment spans an entire floor, meaning that chance meetings with the other occupants, save in the blinding lobby areas, are out of the question.”
For the past five years, artist Jackie Sumell has been helping Herman Wallace, who has been in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary for the last 34 years, design his dream house, a house that will probably never be built. “Traces of a prison mindset crop up. When the placement of his computer meant his back would face the office door, Ms. Sumell said that he asked that a mirror be installed above, so he could see anyone entering the room. A sense of security is important to him, she explained. The master bedroom sits safely above the very center of the house. A wraparound porch adds a layer of perimeter, as does the surrounding garden. There is even a special door leading to an underground bunker, equipped with its own water supply.” A book on the project is available for a $20 donation and this PDF gives a good overview of the project.
BLDGBLOG is teaming up with Materials & Applications to curate an architectural film festival. “The obvious caveat is that your film has to be about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment - or, at least, it has to involve architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment, and in a way that isn’t just backdrop. Even more specifically, we’d love to show a whole bunch of architectural machinima, site animations, project fly-throughs, or other cinematic spaces.” Entry deadline in April 6.
In 1940, an ultra orthodox Jewish group known as the Lubavitchers bought a building at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. The building became so well-known and revered within the community that other “770s” have been built around the world and subsequently captured by photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher. (via paks)
A list of the ugliest buildings in NYC as determined by a bunch of architects and the like.
A bunch of really uncomfortable women’s shoes. These are almost architecture, not fashion. (via ahhhhhh!!!!)
Photography of Tin Tabernacles and Other Buildings by Alasdair Ogilvie. “Largely unnoticed and ignored, corrugated iron buildings can be discovered scattered across Britain and the Empire. […] With not existing infrastructures, these newly created communities had an urgent need for churches, chapels and schools. Corrugated iron buildings fulfilled this demand.” More photos at Ogilvie’s site.
Two structural engineers pick their ten favorite man-made structures.
For the Designing the City of the Future contest held by the History Channel, New York-based architecture firm ARO developed “a vision of New York recovering from massive flooding in low lying areas of New York as a result of global warming”. Photos of their entry are available on Flickr. “In order to co-exist with fluctuating sea levels, ARO proposed a new building type called a ‘vane.’ Part skyscraper, part viaduct, ‘vanes’ are built in, on, and over flooded streets, reconnecting to the classic street grid and making up for lost square footage.”
Hong Kong architect Gary Chang travels so often that he’s become an expert hotel enthusiast. I spoke with Gary at Ars Electronica this year; he showed me some of his drawings and photos (he extensively documents his hotel stays in the form of photos and hand-drawn floor plans)…really cool. Chang’s Suitcase House is also worth a look.
Pruned takes us on a short tour of grain elevators. Wonderful old industrial buildings…the small town I grew up in had a huge grain elevator rising from the center of town, like a skyscraper in a cornfield.
Hot new architecture trend: installing secret rooms in your home. “I always wanted one since watching Scooby-Doo way back when.” (via bb)
Witold Rybczynski on the problem with underground architecture…it’s not the seamless hidden-away experience that one might think.
In 1965, the Washburn A mill, the last operating flour mill in Minneapolis, became also the last flour mill to close its doors, having been preceded by an entire industry that, at one time, produced more flour than any other place in the U.S. The closure came when the mill’s operating company, General Mills, moved its headquarters to Golden Valley, where real estate was plentiful and inexpensive. The area around St. Anthony Falls, the geological feature responsible for the beginnings of industry in the area, had long since fallen into general disrepair and it wasn’t long before the Washburn A was deserted and inhabited by the homeless.
The area started to show signs of life again in the 70s and 80s after being added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Old mill buildings were converted for non-industrial business and residential use as people began to recognize the unique character and history of the area around the falls. In 1991, the Washburn A building burned and part of its structure collapsed, but firefighters saved the rest of the historic building from destruction. The remnants of the building and the adjacent grain elevators remained empty for years afterwards, save for the occasional graffiti artist and urban spelunker.
I knew very little of this when I moved to the Twin Cities in 1996 and not much more when I left Minneapolis for San Francisco in 2000. Almost every weekday for two years I drove or pedaled past the shell of the Washburn A mill on the way to and from work on Washington Avenue in the warehouse district, where we manufactured web pages to fill a growing online space. Topped by the Gold Medal Flour sign, the mill became my favorite building in the Twin Cities, leading me to include it in The Minneapolis Sign Project I did for 0sil8 shortly before I left for the West Coast.
It seemed the perfect symbol of a time and industry long past, broken down but not entirely wiped away. I returned to visit Minneapolis occasionally and would drive past the Falls, wondering what would happen to my building, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t eventually tear it down. With the structure in such bad shape, demolition seemed to be the only option.
Last week, Meg and I spent a day in Minneapolis on our way to visit my parents in Wisconsin, my first stay in Mpls since mid-2002. Meg wanted to investigate running trails and I wanted to sneak a peek at the Gold Medal Flour Building (as I had taken to calling it), so we walked the three blocks to the river from our hotel, housed in the former Milwaukee Depot. The Gold Medal Flour sign was visible from several blocks away, so I knew they hadn’t torn down the grain elevators, but it wasn’t until I saw the shell of the Washburn A building peeking out around one of the other mill buildings that I knew it had been spared as well. As more of the building came into view, I saw a glass elevator rising from the ruins, backed by a glass facade.
What the??!?
Now practically running along the river in excitement and bewilderment, dragging poor Meg along with me in a preview of her jog the next morning, I saw a wooden boardwalk in front of the building and headed for what looked like the entrance. The burned out windows and broken glass remained; except for the elevator and the 8-story glass building sticking out the top, it looked much the same as it had after burning in 1991. I scrambled through the entrance and, lo, the Mill City Museum.
And what a museum. It was just closing when we got there, but we returned the next morning for a full tour of the museum and the Mill Ruins Park. The highlight of the museum is an elevator tour of the mill as it was back in the early 20th century. They load 30 people at a time into a giant freight elevator, which takes the group up to the 8th floor of the museum, stopping at floors along the way to view and hear scenes from the mills workings, narrated by former mill workers. After the elevator tour, you’re directed to an outdoor deck on the 9th floor, where you can view the shell of the mill building, St. Anthony Falls, the Stone Arch Bridge, the Gold Medal Flour sign, and the rest of the historic area.
Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle are the architects responsible for the project, and they deserve all the accolades they get from one of the most unique museums I’ve ever been to. The statement from the American Institute of Architects jury explains the design of the museum:
A creative adaptive reuse of an extant shell of a mill building, with contrasting insertion of contemporary materials, weaving the old and the new into a seamless whole…A complex and intriguing social and regional story that reveals itself as the visitor progresses through the spaces. It is museum as a verb…A gutsy, crystalline, glowing courtyard for a reemerging waterfront district that attracts young and old and has stimulated adjacent development.
I still can’t quite believe they turned my favorite Minneapolis building (of all buildings) into a museum….and that it was done so well. More than anything, I’m happy and relieved that the Gold Medal Flour Building will always be there when I go back to visit. If you’re ever in Minneapolis, do yourself a favor and check it out.
Photos on Flickr tagged “mill city”
Photos on Flickr tagged “mill city museum”
Mill City: A Visual History of the Minneapolis Mill District was helpful in writing this post
A Washington Post review of the museum from September 2005
The new Guthrie Theater is right next door and is a dazzling building in its own right (photo, more photos)
Jane Jacobs revisited. “The mistake made by Jacobs’s detractors and acolytes alike is to regard her as a champion of stasis — to believe she was advocating the world’s cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960.”
Regarding the doublestrike on the Guggenheim, Design Observer has a little more information about it. “I don’t think [Frank Lloyd Wright] ever floated text.”
They’re refurbishing the outside of the Guggenheim and stripping away the facade reveals a doublestrike on the “T” in “The”. It’s like they started putting the printing on the building and then the architect stops by and says, whoa! that text is supposed to be lower, you morons.
Photographer Michael Wolf, he of the Architecture of Density photos of Hong Kong, has a new project called 100x100, which is a series of photographs “of residents in their flats in hong kong’s oldest public housing estate”. Each of the apartments is only 100 square feet in size so the photos show a wide variety of dense living spaces.
NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff on the legacy of Jane Jacobs and why her views on cities aren’t universally applicable:
The activists of Ms. Jacobs’s generation may have saved SoHo from Mr. Moses’ bulldozers, but they could not stop it from becoming an open-air mall. The old buildings are still there, the streets are once again paved in cobblestone, but the rich mix of manufacturers, artists and gallery owners has been replaced by homogenous crowds of lemming-like shoppers. Nothing is produced there any more. It is a corner of the city that is nearly as soulless, in its way, as the superblocks that Ms. Jacobs so reviled.
But I have a hard time believing — as Mr. Ouroussoff does — that:
…on an urban island packed with visual noise, the plaza at Lincoln Center — or even at the old World Trade Center — can be a welcome contrast in scale, a moment of haunting silence amid the chaos. Similarly, the shimmering glass towers that frame lower Park Avenue are awe-inspiring precisely because they offer a sharp contrast to the quiet tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side.
Surely we can devise better ways of introducing contrasts in scale into our cities than building Lincoln Centers.
Ouroussoff’s article includes a companion audio slideshow of him talking about Jacobs and also of West Village residents sharing their views on their neighborhood that Jacbos lived in and wrote about long ago.
Among the many things New York is famous for is the tiny apartments of its inhabitants. Our first apartment here was about 400 square feet and somehow the people who lived downstairs from us in an apartment with the same footprint fit two people and two pitbull-type dogs into that space. In a recently released book, Apartment Therapy’s Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan reveals that he and his wife live in a 250 square foot apartment in the West Village.
Having such small apartments, city residents want to make the most of the space that they have. In designing a loft apartment for his son, architect Kyu Sung Woo came up with an interesting solution to the space problem…he fit two stories into a one-story apartment. The result is The Interlocking Puzzle Loft, a surprisingly spacious two-bedroom palace crammed into 700 square feet.
As shown and described in this article from Dwell, the key element in the loft is the half-height bedroom above the kitchen and the bedroom’s walkway positioned above the short downstairs hall closet and back kitchen counter, which allows the apartment’s inhabitants to stand up in the bedroom. Pretty genius idea.
I can’t find a permanent link to it, but for the next week or so, you can see the NY Times package on the Empire State Building, which turns 75 this year. Lots of photos, rememberances, etc.
Interview with Miuccia Prada and Rem Koolhaas on the occasion of the reopening the of Soho store here in NYC. In it, she rebuts the rumor that she might do a design for H&M. And 3.5 years on, Prada still doesn’t know what to do with their web site. (thx, anne)
Photos of the top 15 city skylines in the world. Hong Kong is #1 and I can’t disagree.
Modernist prefab houses are all the rage these days. “Designed by architects, constructed in factories and trucked to their sites, these houses had the look the couple wanted, at a lower price.” The Dwell House had a lot to do with current interest is modern prefab housing.
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