Book Review: Storefront Newsprints

Storefront Newsprints: 1982-2009 by Storefront for Art and Architecture
Storefront Books, 2009
2-volume paperback with slip case, 1,000 pages



Anybody who has visited the Storefront for Art and Architecture has probably walked away with a folded piece of newsprint with details on the exhibition on display. Since my first visit in 1997 I've amassed quite a few, storing them in a shoebox with pamphlets from other museums and venues I've visited in New York City and beyond. The Storefront newsprints have a way of standing out from the rest, in large part from the material they are printed on as well as the monochrome graphics employed. They are anachronistic without being reactionary. They recall a time before ink-jet printers and digital publishing, a time of literal cut-and-paste graphic design and printing in local copy shops. Yet the newsprint is a consistent medium in the nearly 30-year Storefront history, spanning a time of great changes arising from digital technologies, be it graphic design, publishing, or architecture. That Storefront continues to use the format points to a desire to keep in mind the organization's origins, even as it grows in scope and influence beyond the confines of 97 Kenmare Street.



Storefront Newsprints collects over 150 of the newsletters from its early days on Prince Street to last year, reprinted in two volumes nicely packaged in a black slip case. This is book as historical artifact, focused on what could be considered Storefront's unintentional archive. Not all of the text in the reprints is legible (essays by Lebbeus Woods, Michael Webb, and Vito Acconci are reprinted in easy-to-read format), but it is the images, layouts, and most of all the subject matter that rises to the fore while perusing the collection.

Storefront Newsprints comes at the end of Joseph Grima's three-year directorship. Heading for Italy and Domus, he followed Sarah Herda, who is now at the helm of the Graham Foundation in Chicago after her eight-years at Storefront. Before them founder Kyong Park directed the space's exhibitions, and Grima's interview with him is particularly revealing about the organization and its newsprints. As the Storefront searches for Grima's replacement, the past tenuousness of its existence seems to have given way to a widespread appreciation of the organizations, its space (restored in 2008), and its place within the broader architectural community. The influence of its programs reaches beyond its 868sf home (PDF link), but the newsprints are unique artifacts for those able to visit the gallery in person...and now for those willing to spend $49.

US: or at Storefront Bookstore

Extracts of local distance

Extracts of local distance is a project by Benjamin Maus, Frederic Gmeiner and Thorsten Posselt. "Countless fragments of existing architectural photography are merged into multilayered shapes. The resulting collages introduce a third abstract point of view next to the original ones of architect and photographer." Take a look at the project video:

Extracts of Local Distance from STOESELTNTPRO on Vimeo.

Now take a look at one of the finished pieces:


[Elbberg Campus, top with detail below | image source]

The project, Elbberg Campus by BRT Architekten was featured on my weekly page in 2004:





The original photographer is Klaus Frahm, though I'm not sure if the three photos from my feature are the ones used for manipulation. Pieces of the wood louvers, curling metal facade, and wood decking can be seen in the collage, taking the space between the buildings and making it 100 times more dynamic. The image recalls Zaha Hadid's paintings, but it also makes me think of exploded diagrams, where pieces are pulled away from their final location for ease of understanding. In a sense these collages do the same thing, they extract information from the architectural photography and isolate individual pieces for regrouping into something new yet still recalling the original. Do the technique and its result have the potential to reorient how architects design space? Or are they just a commentary on the fairly consistent world of architectural photography today? Whatever their influence, they are striking images that I'm sure most architects would love to have gracing their walls.

(via PYTR 75)

Pritzker Musing

It's virtually impossible to write about The Pritzker Architecture Prize without discussing what other people are saying about the newest recipient. Coverage is fast and furious (see yesterday's ArchNewsNow for a few links and Google News for many more), and questions of "are they worthy" seem to take precedence over other concerns. This year's winners, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (aka SANAA), are known for minimal, ethereal designs of glass, metal and concrete. This fact is seen by James S. Russell (Bloomberg) as a disservice "at a time of profound challenges in the field." That they are the second duo (after Herzog & de Meuron) and Sejima is the second woman (after Zaha Hadid) to win the coveted prize is mentioned in just about all coverage (Cityscapes), and Christopher Hawthorne (LA Times) focuses on the former. While he quotes how the jury believes "it is virtually impossible to untangle which individual is responsible for what aspect of a particular project," there is one thing missing from this and other coverage: the individual practices of Sejima and Nishizawa that exist alongside SANAA.

The collaborative aspect of SANAA that Hawthorne and the jury praises is certainly nothing new, but that each retains their own individual practice is very unique. Many partnerships splinter as two or more designers and their egos do battle. Thom Mayne received the prize in 2005, but for a long time Morphosis was him and Michael Rotondi, who formed ROTO Architects in 1995. It's cliche but oftentimes true to say that a firm does not have room for more than one great designer. I think SANAA manage by allowing their own practices to exist and be treated equally; SANAA does not take precedence over the others, even though the commissions may get more press. But what is also important about this three-part structure, and is something that makes their choice for the Pritzker a little more complicated, is how the projects of each practice are not so easily distinguishable from the others. To be sure SANAA's commissions tend to be larger, but the minimalism, pristine surfaces and complex spaces are present in all their output. The award is given to Sejima and Nishizawa, but it can also be seen as a validation of all their work, whichever name gets the formal credit.

Previous Sejima/Nishizawa/SANAA coverage on my web pages:

:: Dior Building (Sejima)
:: Moriyama House (Nishizawa)
:: New Museum of Contemporary Art (SANAA, building)
:: New Museum of Contemporary Art (SANAA, project)
:: Onishi Hall (Sejima)
:: Rolex Learning Center (SANAA)
:: SANAA Houses (Sejima, Nishizawa, SANAA)
:: SHIFT: SANAA and the New Museum (SANAA)

03-31 Correction: Christopher Hawthorne does indeed mention the separate practices of Sejima and Nishizawa: "Both continue to operate their own smaller, separate firms."

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

This week's dose features Kirkwood Public Library in Wilmington, Delaware by ikon.5 architects:


The featured past dose is Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas by Polshek Partnership:


This week's book review is Hunch 13: Consensus edited by Salomon Frausto:


Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize
The $100,000 prize goes to SANAA, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. (More coverage to follow.)

Architectural Braindump
"The ever-changing profession of architecture." (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

architecture for the masses
Blog of Populous, the firm formerly known as HOK Sport. (added to sidebar under blogs::offices/architects)

arkinet
"Sharing architecture - connecting architects." (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

Today's archidose #404

London Olympics 2012, originally uploaded by Manuel.A.69.

The View Tube for the London Olympics 2012 in London, England, 2009. Please comment if you know the architect responsible for the View Tube's design.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

Rising Currents and Open Piers

On Monday the first section of Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, opened to the public, and on Wednesday the exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront opened at MoMA. The first is a six-acre portion of an 85-acre park that stretches from roughly Atlantic Avenue on the south to the Brooklyn Bridge on the north (see interactive map) along the East River. The second consists of artists-in-residence at P.S.1 addressing the challenge of sea levels rising from global climate change. So how do we reconcile these apparently opposite ways of thinking about New York's waterfront, when issues of public space (short term) and eco-sustainability (long term) are both seen as important?


[Brooklyn Bridge Park Opening | image source]

Brooklyn Bridge Park is the result of a post-industrial landscape shaped by storage and shipping. The park can be seen as the successor to the warehouses that lasted about a century. But if predictions for rising water levels come true, the waterfront's use as a park would have an even shorter lifespan. The Brooklyn Height Promenade overlooking the park will be okay, but the playgrounds and other features designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh would become submerged by the East River. But can lessons from the MoMA exhibition be applied to the design before it's complete? Or will infrastructure addressing rising waters address this and other stretches of New York City shoreline?


[Rising Currents Zones | image source]

Brooklyn Bridge Park sits just north of Zone 4 above, to the right of Zone 0. These and the other zones correspond to the teams developing suitable responses for each; all are based on research by Guy Nordenson and others for Palisades Bay, the New York/New Jersey Upper Bay area. All the responses run counter the traditional, muscular ways of dealing with this sort of infrastructure, i.e. the levees of New Orleans. Holding back the rising currents is not the name of the game. Instead learning from nature's processes and utilizing "soft" infrastructure are the means of exploration for the different contexts.

So how does public space, especially that alongside the city's waterways, change as we move forward? A post at the MoMA exhibition blog by NYC Parks & Rec Commissioner Adrian Benepe starts to address this issue:

"the proposals represent some innovative ways to create new realms of public space, places that are not traditional parks, but rather are flexible zones of water and land and plants and animals. We currently tend to look at parks as distinct from other urban forms, with fences, walls, planted buffers— different vocabularies of building materials. While each team has proposed concepts very different from the others, they all redefine the interaction of streets, parks, seawalls, canals, piers, and even the harbor itself."

So Brooklyn Bridge Park's interaction with the East River would then be the logical place for addressing a rise in the water level. The hard edge of Pier 1 may give way to a soft zone that allows the rising waters to be dealt with in some manner besides holding it back. If one thing is clear from the exhibition, New York City's solutions to rising sea levels will be a combination of approaches implemented in a multitude of areas. There is no single fix for one area; and even if there were, the ignorance of other shorelines and the interdependence of them all is irresponsible. We'll see if the exhibition shapes Brooklyn Bridge and other NYC park projects as talk about rising sea levels moves from conviction that it is a problem to practical solutions for the future.

Today's archidose #403

casa em santa teresa, arq. angelo bucci, rio de janeiro, 2008, originally uploaded by m correia campos.

Casa em Santa Teresa in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil by Angelo Bucci (spbr), 2008

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

Formique #2

Formique is an ongoing series that comments on contemporary architecture that ignores some of the basic human, environmental and other concerns that architecture should address, all in the name of formal invention.


[166 Perry Street by Asymptote Architecture | image source]

A story in NY Daily News on Asymptote Architecture's first ground-up building in Manhattan at 166 Perry Street in the West Village is aptly titled Reflect On This! One thing the faceted glass curtain wall reflects is the sky, which makes me want to quote Eartheasy's post on a side effect of such a thing: "Birds often strike windows because they see a reflection of clouds, sky or trees which gives the mistaken impression that they are flying into open air." The prevalence of all-glass exterior facades is mind-boggling when one takes into consideration the avoidable harm to our fine-feathered friends. Very few architects actually address this concern (Studio Gang comes to mind), and in the case of 166 Perry Street the privacy of the residents trumps the lives of birds.

All Nouvel, All the Time

Jean Nouvel is the architect of the moment, with news on three major projects blanketing the digital airwaves: the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, the National Museum of Qatar, and 100 Eleventh Avenue in New York City.


[Serpentine Gallery Pavilion | © Ateliers Jean Nouvel]

The breaking news is Nouvel's selection for the Serpentine Gallery, an annual temporary structure in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park. Past commissions have gone to SANAA, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Toyo Ito, and Daniel Libeskind, many with Arup for engineering, including Nouvel's design. It's a who's-who list of starchitects, given free reign (not so free in the case of MVRDV's unrealized "mountain") to build a no-budget pavilion with few programmatic requirements. Experimentation is the name of the game here.


[Serpentine Gallery Pavilion | © Ateliers Jean Nouvel]

The bright red pavilion immediately recalls Bernard Tschumi's folies for Parc de la Villette in Paris, realized nearly 20 years ago. Of course he was inspired by Russian Constructivist art and architecture, so the lineage of inspiration extends far beyond the immediate past. It also recalls another Nouvel design, the Brembo Research Office in Italy, another bright red building integrating a highway noise barrier. The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion--whose red "reflects the iconic British images of traditional telephone boxes, post boxes and London buses"--consists of "bold geometric forms, large retractable awnings and a freestanding wall that climbs 12m above the lawn, sloping at a gravity defying angle." It's fun with a capital F!


[National Museum of Qatar | image source]

The other big news is the unveiling of Nouvel's design for the Naitonal Museum of Qatar, covered by Nicolai Ouroussoff, who drools over it as the "French architect’s most overtly poetic act of cultural synthesis yet." Last week the New York Times critic praised 100 Eleventh Avenue's "mix of grit and glamour," as the building nears completion in Chelsea, visible from the High Line.


[100 Eleventh Avenue | photo by archidose]

These last two designs and their treatment by Ourousoff spur me to link to Alexandra Lange's recent analysis of the critic's writings at the Times. I tend to agree with Lange's position that the architecture critic at the nation's newspaper of record should be much better, but the comments show that opinion is hardly unanimous. I think what's missing from discussions of celebrity architecture and fashionable, eye-catching designs is how these designs come about, the role of the client and the cultural context. Architects do not design these sorts of buildings in a vacuum and then happen to have them built; it is a two-way street of a desire for what Nouvel and his comrades are very good at doing: creating unprecedented architecture that receives the widest attention, this blog included.

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

This week's dose features Million Donkey Hotel in Prata Sannita, Italy by feld72:


The featured past dose is Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden by Ake Larsson:


This week's book review is Build-On: Converted Architecture and Transformed Buildings edited by Robert Klanten and Luke Feireiss:


Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

ArchiTakes
A blog "committed to taking opinion and observation on architecture – in New York and beyond - to a higher level of detail and insight." (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

Design Against the Elements
"A global architectural design competition meant to find a solution to the problems presented by climate change...the project aims to draw together the most innovative minds in the fields of architecture, design, and urban planning to develop sustainable and disaster-resistant housing for communities in tropical urban settings."

BRAVE / PRAXIS
A blog "intending to convey part of the design process as it surfaces from the unconscious to the conscious" by Houston, Texas-based BRAVE / ARCHITECTURE. (added to sidebar under blogs::offices/architects)

Time Tells
"About Historic Preservation, History, Heritage, Landmarks in Chicago and the rest of the world and the technotempo of current times and past times." (added to sidebar under blogs::urban)

Vacant Plots
"A platform for speculation, observation, narration, and fictionalization." (added to sidebar under blogs::culture)

Today's archidose #402

München Hauptsynagoge " Ohel Jakob" ( Zelt Jakobs), originally uploaded by Wolfsraum.

Jewish Center Jakobsplatz in Munich, Germany by Wandel Hoefer Lorch Architekten + Stadtplaner, 2006.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

Meet Joe (and Josie) Blog

Today I received in the mail the March 2010 issue of Plan Magazine -- the one out of Ireland, not Italy. The cover story asks, "Could design blogs change the way we understand and produce architecture?" and features five blogs (Archi-Ninja, The Architecture of Fear, BLDGBLOG, we make money not art) including yours truly. Cover ninja Linda Bennett posts some details on the feature.



This article on blogs comes almost three years after Postopolis! and an Architect Magazine feature (Meet the Bloggers) both examined the popularity and influence of architecture-related blogs. Obviously their popularity hasn't let up, and the number of them (see my sidebar) just keeps getting higher and higher, particularly as more architects end up out of work and need something to fill their newly found free time. As well many blogs are now put out by practicing architects, in most cases as an extension of marketing but in others as a means for exploration.

The Plan Magazine feature also coincides with invitations to a couple panel discussions, one on architectural publishing and the other on the role of writing in architectural practice. (More details on these events I'll be participating will be posted soon.) Suffice it to say that the importance of blogs is still strong, and their role in architecture continues to be investigated.

Today's archidose #401

ASU Mesa Upper Floor Split View Down, originally uploaded by ken mccown.

ASU Polytechnic Academic Buildings by Lake|Flato Architects in collaboration with RSP Architects, 2008.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

What next, custom vans?

Here's a project I found on Architizer that makes me wonder about web sites where users can input whatever they want.


['66 Ford Mustang Restoration]

So, who will be the first to post their custom van on Architizer?

Mini 56 Leonard Street

The last half of 2008 saw the unveiling of two superstar condo developments for Manhattan: 56 Leonard Street by Herzog & de Meuron and 23 East 22nd Street by OMA. Not surprisingly each project fizzled in the ensuing economic downturn; the release of the projects in September coincides with the federal government bail out of AIG, not a good omen.

While the city will probably never see these shifted and leaning buildings on their skyline, one lucky person can own one of the three hundred lucite models made for 56 Leonard Street in an ebay auction ending Wednesday. The 20" tall model is composed of 58 stacked pieces of the transparent material that lock into a full-height core also made of lucite. The model also includes a miniature Anish Kapoor scultpture at the base and a handy carrying case lined with foam for safe keeping. The case is emblazoned with words about the development that are composed into a profile of the building.


[56 Leonard St. Building Model (Herzog & de Meuron) | image source]

Those interested in buying the model have until Mar 17, 2010 09:14:09 PDT. The Current bid is $605.00.

(via Archinect)