Rem Koolhaas has been part of the international avant-garde since the nineteen-seventies and has been named the Pritzker Architecture Prize for the year 2000. This book, which builds on six canonical Koolhaas projects [Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture; Ville Nouvelle Melun-Sénart; Maison à Bordeaux; Dutch Embassy; Seattle Public Library; and CCTV], traces the discursive practice behind the design methods used by Koolhaas and his office OMA. It uncovers recurring key themes—such as wall, void, montage, trajectory, infrastructure, and shape—that have structured this design discourse over the span of Koolhaas's oeuvre. The book moves beyond the six core pieces, as well: It explores how these identified thematic design principles manifest in other works by Koolhaas as both practical re-applications and further elaborations.
In addition to Koolhaas's individual genius, these textual and material layers are accounted for shaping the very context of his work's relevance. By comparing the design principles with relevant concepts from the architectural Zeitgeist in which Koolhaas has operated, the study moves beyond its specific subject—Rem Koolhaas—and provides novel insight into the broader history of architectural ideas.
Continuing the conversation on urbanism, this issue of MONU Magazine picks up on a topic opened in MONU #8 on border urbanism. Transnational Urbanism expands the topic of trans-border relations between cities close to nation state borders, to interrogate the flux of exchanges that crisscross a multiplicity of borders. As MONU has accustomed its readers, architects, urban planners and designers, policy makers, sociologists, educators, photographers and filmmakers take part in the conversation. They make up a transnational community of researchers spanning from Rotterdam, the headquarters of MONU, to the United States, and East Asia, passing through Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. As Merve Bedir stresses in her essay, they themselves live intense transnational lives.
I am a regular reader of MONU ever since my work colleagues got me a subscription for my birthday a couple of years ago. But when I got my copy of MONU #22 for reviewing, instead of zapping through it, like I normally do, I started reading it like a book and letting myself be guided by the editorial skills of Bernd Upmeyer. And what I discovered along the way was the conversation between the articles, as each of them builds on a thread launched by a previous one.
To begin with, as MONU’s trademark and opening piece, the interview in #22 is with sociologist Jean-Louis Missika, assistant mayor of Paris. He depicts an image of the global that comprises the world in itself. While Paris’s elected challenge is to provide shared infrastructure and housing for the global city’s mobile dwellers, Agatino Rizzo’s proposition for building a sustainable global city in between Malaysia and Singapore is to offer public space able to downplay social inequalities.
What we read through the pages of this issue is the incredible porosity of borders, as even the most impenetrable of them, like the one between North and South Korea are crossed by cooperation and negotiation efforts that ultimately link joint economic, touristic, and knowledge spaces. Of course, as Yehre Sul shows, such projects are always at risk of being temporarily shut down by unpredicted incidents, or "the fog of international policy." We can equally read how conflict pushes established trade routes between countries officially at war underground, and reconfigures trade landscapes, as Arab traders reorient themselves to China after 9/11 and China’s joining the WTO. Caught up in between are Syrians and other asylum seekers whose trajectories are highly controlled and regulated. In spite of this, but also because of it, transnational friendships leak out of detention regimes, as Kolar Aparna’s research illustrates.
Stories of work-migration present us the Philippine work-migration industry, and former Mozambican guest workers in the former German Democratic Republic caught in limbo as the fall of socialist regimes in the early nineties has only revealed their work as paying for their country’s debt. Splinters of the colonial gaze and the construction of "otherness" are shown to construct also "other" spaces, like the segregated spaces of Philippine workers in the Arab Emirates. Such gazes obscure sight and push urbanism into ‘magical’ interpretations, like the one offered by half architect – half media philosopher Thomas Mical. However, it is the constant effort of translation that constitutes "the challenge of transnationalism," as Kolar Aparna writes.
Speaking from a European perspective, and the debate on closing the gates of "Fortress Europe," the articles in MONU #22 open up ways for understanding. In particular, one question is raised concerning African migration: how does it articulate with massive development projects around Africa’s mineral resources?
Architects and urban planners and designers are gaining momentum in border studies. Next to MONU #22 on Transnational Urbanism, a recent conference at the Sheffield School of Architecture on Border Topologies in October 2014 is proof of the professions' deep engagement with this topic. While MONU is definitely oriented towards the architectural profession, the current number tackles a trans-disciplinary theme, and that is what makes it such a good read, not only for architects. It represents a fresh alternative to a standard academic journal, as much of the articles are indeed by architects involved in academia. However, the freshness is in the practice, as Bernd Upmeyer’s editorial skills of construing a conversation from the different articles are definitely an architect’s trademark.
Iulia Hurducaș is an architect and urban designer. After studying architecture and urbanism in Cluj, Romania, and Hamburg, Germany, she worked for the Romanian-German architecture practice Planwerk, in Cluj. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Sheffield School of Architecture in the UK on the topic of transnational urban transformations.
Mark your calendars: MAD (Museum of Arts and Design) is presenting a retrospective of director Andrei Tarkovsky's films this Summer. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time "presents the work of the revolutionary director and includes screenings – all on 35 mm – of all seven feature films and a behind-the-scenes documentary." The retrospective starts on July 10, with one film screened per week until August 28.
[Nostalghia, 1983, Andrei Tarkovsky, image courtesy of Kino Lorber]
To date I've only seen Nostalghia from 1983, his first film made outside of Russia. It is, like the rest of his films (or so I've been told and read), a slow and meditative film. It is so full of poetic images that it is easily one of the best films I've ever seen; it is cinema as a true art form. It made me want to see the rest of the films, but it's often hard to devote more than two hours to one of Tarkovsky's films or to get in the mood for them – they are the antithesis of today's binge-watching screen culture. Perhaps I needed MAD's retrospective as an excuse to finally see Solaris, Stalker, Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice, not to mention the documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky that came out in 1988, two years after the director died.
[Nostalghia, 1983, Andrei Tarkovsky, image courtesy of Kino Lorber]
The name of the MAD program takes its name from a book by Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, of which I've read only parts but can nevertheless see the parallels between his words and his images. He writes near the end: "Today it seems to me far more important to talk not so much about art in general or the function of cinema in particular, as about life itself; for the artist who is not conscious of its meaning is unlikely to be capable of making any coherent statement in the language of his own art." Tarkovsky's statements may not always be obvious, but like any poetry, his films are worth watching to discover meaning and to behold as things of beauty.
Wired magazine has unveiled Bjarke Ingels' design for Two World Trade Center, which he took over from Norman Foster after Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox and News Corp decided to move into the tower developed by Larry Silverstein.
[All images are screenshots from the video found at the bottom of this post]
In a three-minute video from Silverstein Properties, Ingels describes the 1,340-foot-high tower as melding the glass towers of Lower Manhattan with the historic building stock of Tribeca.
Seven roughly twelve-story blocks are stacked atop each other and shifted to create terraces rising on the east side of the tower and ticker-tape soffits on the north.
Yet from the WTC memorial the tower's south and west elevations are flat, in order to fit with the other towers and complete the development's spiral of four towers.
The video is kind of a hoot, with one minute of Ingels speaking and gesturing, a one-minute voyage inside the building (blink and you'll miss Homer Simpson), and some hard-driving keyboards accompanying the various tower renderings at the end.
Last Thursday, artist Olafur Eliasson, with some architects from the area (OMA, Field Operations, Steven Holl, DS+R, BIG, etc.), unveiled The Collectivity Projecton the High Line at 30th Street. It looked like this: [Photo by Timothy Schenck, courtesy of Friends of the High Line]
Two days later, when I visited with my wife, our daughter, and some friends, it looked more like this:
My wife overheard somebody who worked at one of the participating architecture firms say that their "building" was completely unrecognizable. For me, the most signature model from the ones shown at top is the OMA contribution in the left foreground, a mini version of their unbuilt 23 West 22nd Street project (a design meant for LEGOs really). With only a bit of the walls with windows intact, the design looked pedestrian:
So as quickly as 36 hours the creations of notable architects were reduced to rubble, in some cases, or strange hybrids. Their creations will be something else entirely by the time The Collectivity Project ends in late September. There's a lesson here somewhere, but all I know is my daughter really enjoyed it, and I can't imagine any kid who wouldn't:
As the title to this coffee table book makes clear, it is the second Portraits book by photographer Richard Schulman; the first was released in 2004. Paul Goldberger, in his introduction, states Schulman didn't intend that book to be the first in a series, and when my sister got me the book for my birthday a decade ago, I can't say I considered it the first installment of a series either (in my review, though, I did say a future update would be good, to make up for a geographical bias). But it makes sense to do it again. The format – portraits of well known architects paired with photographs of one of their recent buildings – is a unique and compelling way of presenting contemporary architecture and the personalities creating it.
A good deal has changed in the eleven years since the first Portraits, be it in terms of architectural form making, how information about architecture is disseminated, and the architects designing the buildings that get the most media attention. In regards to the last, even though some of the architects in Portraits 2 – Tatiana Bilbao, Bjarke Ingels, nARCHITECTS, SO-IL, WORKac, etc. – are too young to have been considered for the first book, there are older generations in the same pages: David Chipperfield, Fumihiko Maki, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Rafael Moneo, Moshe Safdie, and Alvaro Siza, to name a few. This diversity indicates that Schulman takes a broad approach to presenting architects and their buildings, and that the roughly 30-50 spots in each book is not enough to cover all of the worthy architects. Perhaps a third installment will arrive sooner than 2026.
Although much has changed in the decade since the first book, Schulman's style of photography is relatively consistent; it's not unchanged, but with the portraits in particular his distinct approach to lighting, framing, and composition is apparent. As in the first book, Schulman likes strong shadows, colored lights, and settings conducive to comfort – many of the architects are filmed in their offices, at home, or inside one of their buildings. Most of the portraits are full-body or waist-up shots, and most of the architects are found indoors, so exceptions to these tendencies stand out: a close-up of Tatiana Bilbao pressing her forehead to a window to look down and Fumihiko Maki standing on a Manhattan rooftop, as two examples.
But when so many photographers (professional and amateur alike) are washing out shadows with too much white light, I most appreciate Schulman's dark shadows, more evident in the portraits but present as well in the shots of buildings. There is something to be said for using shadows to emphasize a shape or a space, whatever the case may be, and to let the shadows describe something to the viewer in a way that doesn't reveal everything. Ultimately the book – its portraits, individual buildings, and short, two-paragraph descriptions by Schulman – does a similar thing: it gives a taste of the architects and their creations, all the while using his photographs as a link between the two.
Curator and author Vladimir Belogolovsky did not set out to make a book on the celebrity phenomenon in architecture, as the name to this collection of 30 interviews with well known architects might indicate. Rather, as part of his work as a curator and a curiosity he partly attributes to the late John Hejduk, the conversations that took place starting in December 2002 were about various aspects of architecture and its profession, only occasionally about "starchitecture." Sure, the names are big ones, as evidenced by a quick glance at the cover, but this has more to do with particular projects, exhibitions, or other circumstances that led to the conversations, rather than Belogolovsky having sought out celebrity architects just for being such.
Nevertheless, Belogolovsky does not shy away from the elephant in the room, since architects have to deal with the celebrity phenomenon just like any profession, and putting all these architects into one book would eventually lead to that theme coming to the fore. As Belogolovsky spells out in his introduction, he started interviewing architects when they gained the national and international spotlight thanks to the competition for the World Trade Center master plan in late 2002. In his mind, the publicity around the competition put architects and architecture in the public eye more than ever before. The book is then a way of exploring the theme of celebrity, at least inadvertently or from another angle, rather than head on. Whatever the case, the interviews are a delight to read, thanks to Belogolovsky's probing questions and his curiosity as to an architect's motives. The best conversations are the long ones where the architects are open and when the two are able to delve further into specific projects or ways of thinking.
In addition to the interviews with architects, the book has conversations with Charles Jencks and Kenneth Frampton, both serving to provide context, like the author's introduction. Following the 30 interviews is a section with quotes by "missing architects," those who weren't interviewed or whose interviews didn't make it into the book (since 2002, Belogolovsky has interviewed over 100 architects). This short section – followed by a color page of magazines featuring architects on their covers, most of them non-trade magazines like Fast Company, Time, and Wired – extends the reach of the celebrity theme, as does the index, which includes other big-name architects who are mentioned in the interviews. Based on number of mentions in the index, the most popular celebrity architects are, in descending order, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Le Corbusier, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Mies van Der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. These names make clear that the celebrity phenomenon is not new, even though the prevalent digital and print media make it appear to be a contemporary creation.
Below are some of my photos of the ETH Zurich Pavilion that is part of the IDEAS CITY Festival in New York City. To learn more about the pavilion, which is made from old beverage cartons, head over to World-Architects to see the piece I wrote.
