3d Poche

This is nuts.

I was right brained first, but then got her to spin the other way.  Makes me wonder what I could do with a rendering…

Filed under: architecture

Groundhog Day

The statement, again (ty, K, B, and J):

“We are not coeval / With a locality / But we imagine others are, / We encounter them. Actually / A populace flows/ Thru the city. This is a language, therefore, of New York” George Oppen

In 1914, a small theater was constructed in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn New York. While the population went from Dutch to Italian to Polish to Hispanic to Hasidic and back again, the building itself underwent a series of mutations from a theater, to a cinema, to a ball room, to a restaurant, until finally today it has been repurposed as a 99 cent store, apartments, and assorted retail spaces. The fluctuation of the program and the population of the site have to do, in part, with its proximity to several major forms of transportation. The site sits on directly on the JMZ line of the subway (added in , sits at the foot of the new pedestrian addition to the Williamsburg Bridge, and is a block from the BQE. Broadway Avenue a four lane roadway, which runs underneath the JMZ, is the commercial hub; streets running parallel to Broadway have relatively little retail businesses.

Although at one time Brooklyn was home to dozens of theaters, very few have survived. Though some of those businesses survived the Depression in the 30’s most eventually fled or failed during the 70’s when recession and crime crippled the area. In the last 10 years, the surrounding neighborhood – particularly to the north – has become more and more economically solvent; even so, there is still a lack of public programmatic space near the site. Part of the problem is that this area has remained relatively poor compared to neighborhoods like North Williamsburg, Brooklyn Heights and Prospect Park. The last decade’s influx of cash went primarily to North Williamsburg where developers have been swarming to construct high rise apartment buildings along the waterfront. 

Working within an idea of community and attempting a development that is successful in financial and social terms, this thesis leaves behind bourgeois minimalism (and its associated critical discourse), which has been not been consistently or successfully adopted by the whole population of the site, and replaces it with a revised postmodern, post-critical approach aimed at community building.

An aesthetic which encourages nostalgia, through reference to the past, can endear a design to a community. Robert M. Stern’s practice has used this technique with great financial success to cater to affluent financiers, but it might also be used on a different population. To find this nostalgic beauty, this thesis will revisit antique typologies like that of the movie palace, out-dated architectural techniques like poche and pastiche, and forgotten forms of ornament. Iconography and ornamentation, rather than being mere decoration of the interior, form a membrane which acts as a cultural interface to site the building in a strong, diverse, and ultimately stubborn community.

———————————

Under current economic conditions, South Williamsburg could probably not support a large performance complex, like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example.

Filed under: architecture

Limping Dog

Pulling an all nighter. I’m up to one a week, which is actually pretty good. I’ll have to start doing more, though.

Approximately six weeks until detonation. The umbilicus will be cut, an omphalos will form and I will gaze at it. I promised myself one week of this (until my eyes bleed) when finish thesis:

btw, Radiohead’s new album is lovely.

Filed under: architecture

Lilacs out of the dead land.

T was kind enough to alert me that Cosma’s genius was now in a delicious new form.

Well, I think it’s paid off already. Stolen from his links is a reference to this new graphic novel:

Martin Rowson, who I’ve never heard of, but wish I had, has rewritten T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a hard boiled noirish graphic novel. Hot hot hot. If anyone out there has this and can let me borrow it, I would be grateful. Or if anyone has any of Rowson’s work I’d love to check it out.

Apparently, he’s also done a graphic novel of “The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy” a movie (and novel, ahem)  that I love so much I titled my “retrospective” speech at Dartmouth after it.

I’m still on my books with pictures kick. And I just finished Volume 1 of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha. The art is nothing special, but the story of the Buddha, which oddly both my parents were happy to tell me about when I was young, is wonderfully reinterpreted.

Filed under: architecture

Just like Columbus

Today’s Mantra “Be Aggressive”

Filed under: architecture

Graphic, but not in a good way

I’ll say this first. Sin City is a not a good graphic novel and a really bad movie.

Buuuut, considering my thesis has been in black and white, stealing some of Frank Miller’s style might not be a bad thing. He knows how to throw down the ink. There are times when it seems like he’s positioned the characters solely to make the composition work in two tones.

Jackson mentioned last night about how black and white (in film) forces shot composition. I think he’s right though I’m struggling to make something similar with architecture.

Filed under: architecture

I’m sorry I don’t speak Spanish

A magazine is featuring the work of some of the students I taught at the last workshop in Chile in a nice spread. You can see the pages here. The students did some awesome work and it’s nice to see it featured.

And the magazine’s online presence is here.

Filed under: architecture

Higher and Higher

I am in bed with the flu today. I’m sick like a dog. It blows.

Yesterday my crit went pretty well. Mostly thanks to the input from my friends Pete, Stephen, and Bryan. One of the results is that I have a new precedent (other than Monticello) and she’s gorgeous:

Such nice hands!

And of course her star turn in this movie, which is what my project is secretly based on. I had a conversation recently with someone, I don’t remember who exactly, who insisted that Ghostbusters II was better than the original. Something so contrarian must be you, right T? The argument (which I think was very quickly abandoned) was that the Statue of Liberty scene was “really uplifting”. Hopefully, my good friend Mason (who’s coming to visit, yay!) will rattle off the countless lines of dialog from the original, all spoken entirely by Rick Moranis. Although in defense of GB II, “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” is a great song and deserves a cover. Maybe by someone like Cat Power.

Last but not least, I’ve put up a “new” blog for all the Rhinoscripting stuff I work on. It can be found here. And unlike the Invivia blog, it will actually be updated with real content. A workshop at MIT is planned for mid-January. Stay tuned!

Filed under: architecture

Regression trumps Transgression

Here’s my abstract rewritten yet again, more developer like this time. Although, it’s basically just me cutting and pasting from the Goldberger article…maybe he should present my thesis for me.

————————————–

Paul Goldberger, writing in the New Yorker about Robert Sterns new building at 15 Central Park West in Manhattan, said:

I have never seen anything quite like it: historical pastiche is common enough in country houses or museums, but it’s rare on the scale of a skyscraper.

He goes on the express his surprise that this building, which harkens back to the golden years of Rosario Candela, “looks as if it had been put up 75 years ago”, yet it is, in his words, “the most financially successful building in the history of New York.”

“All the apartments were sold before the building was finished, at prices that started at more than two thousand dollars a square foot and were subsequently raised nineteen times. Demand was so extreme that brokers started to worry that the building was taking all the business away from other high-end buildings nearby.”

As Goldberger puts it: “The idea is to create, ready-made, the kind of place you would get by renovating an old apartment.” Atavistic spaces once used by butlers and maids become eat-in kitchens and picture windows. The 45 million dollar penthouse apartment in Stern’s building was at one point the most expensive apartment in all of New York. This pastiched building, not Herzog and DeMueron’s 40 Bond or Calatrava’s tower on 80 South Street, is a potential goldmine for architects.

A short train ride away is a site in South Williamsburg, a place should be swarmed by developers, but instead is being ignored in favor of development in North Williamsburg. It’s positioned close to both the newly constructed addition to the Williamsburg Bridge, directly on the Myrtle stop of the JMZ, near a park, and the BQE. It is one of the largest contiguous single owned blocks in the area and extends from street to street. Most importantly, the building that currently inhabits the site is a classic theater built in the early 1900’s reused at a 99 cent store and apartments. Sadly, the renovation has completely effaced the original theater. This renovated theater could have been an architectural jewel in South Williamsburg, a place that retro hipsters, wealthy Manhattan-ites, conservative Hasids, and Hispanic business owners could all support. And a place that could have been a highly profitable investment for a developer.

The thesis proposes a “renovation” that puts the theater back into the building . That is, the building will be designed to appear as if it is actually a renovated, re-purposed theater that expands both the residential component and the retail component of the existing building. This thesis will revisit antique typologies like that of the movie palace, out-dated architectural techniques like poche and pastiche, and forgotten forms of ornament and plaster.

————————————–

Hmmm this is not coming out quite right, especially when I transition from Stern’s building to my site… I need to work on it. But I think I like this better than the Jefferson one. Criticism anyone?

Filed under: architecture

White and Black

My former professor, who I meet with this Thursday, a meeting that I’m a little nervous about… wrote this on William Dyce:

The formal stages of education, through which art is pared down to its essentials, are not assimilable to the actual stages of its historical progress. Method, or the analytic, is posterior to the originary deductions of imitative practice. Pedagogy, on the other hand, cannot pursue the same progression: method has to be taught before imitation.

-A. Dutta

Something to think about for thesis…. I had great talk with my friend T yesterday, who gave me a bunch of awesome pointers on how to proceed. It also reminded me how much I have to explain what thesis is to people outside of architecture.

No, my designs aren’t going to be built. I’m not just presenting a beautiful product, but a thought process that can be examined critically in an academic setting. Etc. Etc.

Some of this stuff I find sort of annoying…I’m not sure why…I feel pretty unsuccessful at it (the school, part, I mean) but I like what I’m doing.

Filed under: architecture