Opinion: Nancy Levinson

Critical Beats

Alexandra Lange began her recent Observatory essay, "Why Nicolai Ouroussoff is Not Good Enough," with a provocative allusion to the possibility that the job of architecture critic "might be doomed," and that the current critic for the New York Times might be "the last architecture critic." Lange then concentrates on Ouroussoff's sensibility and approach, arguing eloquently that he is "making a poor case for keeping the breed." She doesn't really delve into whether the field has a future. So here we'd like to take up this thorny topic, and to suggest that architecture criticism, at least as practiced by our paper of record, is doomed, that in fact it's been losing force for years — and for reasons that have to do not just with the quality of the critical players but also with the rules of the critical game.

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Scholarship: Robert Bruegmann

The Architect as Urbanist: Part 2

Here, following this week's earlier articles on Paul Rudolph, is the second and last part of Robert Bruegmann's searching analysis of the late career of Paul Rudolph, especially the projects in southeast Asia. Part 1 of "The Architect as Urbanist" paid particular attention to the work in Hong Kong. Part 2 focuses on the work in Singapore and Jakarta, and is accompanied by a slideshow. 

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Scholarship: Robert Bruegmann

The Architect as Urbanist: Part 1

Earlier this week we featured Ian Baldwin's review of Paul Rudolph: Writings on Architecture. Now, continuing the focus on Rudolph, we present, in two parts, an essay by architectural historian Robert Bruegmann, originally published several years ago in a monograph on the architect's late work, by Roberto da Alba. "The Architect as Urbanist" reviews the architect's unusually volatile career, and offers a close and deeply observed reading of several of Rudolph's projects in southeast Asia. All were designed in the last decades of his life, and all have been comparatively neglected in the literature on an architect whose career is now exciting renewed interest — even as the built works continue to be demolished and threatened.

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Review: Ian Baldwin

Reading Rudolph

Few architects have experienced greater career swings than Paul Rudolph, who reached a pinnacle of professional and academic success in the 1960s — when as dean of architecture at Yale he designed the school's famous-notorious Art & Architecture Building — only to slide into relative obscurity in the '70s and '80s. Recent years have seen renewed interest within the discipline — not to mention a meticulous renovation of his Yale building, now Rudolph Hall — though not yet in the larger public, which never learned to like the so-called Brutalist style. Here Ian Baldwin, reviewing Paul Rudolph: Writings on Architecture, explores the architect's volatile reputation and analyzes the "image problem" that has led to the demolition of important works. Baldwin focuses particular attention on two projects of the 1960s in Massachusetts: Boston's Government Service Center and the campus at UMass Dartmouth. Later this week we will republish, in two parts, an essay by historian Robert Bruegmann that focuses on the architect's later and lesser known projects in Asia, and makes a case for the "architect as urbanist."  

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Opinion: Thomas Fisher

How Haiti Could Change Design

Earlier this month on Places we published an essay by Hector Fernando Burga, a young architect in Miami wondering how to apply his professional knowledge to the rebuilding of Haiti — and realizing that there exist few structures to organize designers' participation in what will be a lengthy and complex process. Here Thomas Fisher argues that we should expand our usual pedagogical and professional approaches, in which designers are hired by clients who generate projects, and which Fisher likens to the doctor-patient medical model. Fisher proposes that we adopt as well a public-health model emphasizing prevention, in which designers would focus less on reacting to crises after they happen and more on proactively intervening in disaster-prone areas, with the goal of limiting damage in the future.

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Fiction: Timothy Mennel

Working for the People

Earlier this week on Places architectural historian Keith Eggener explored a perceptual link between Robert Moses and the architect-vigilante played by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. Power broker, master builder, public servant — the life of Robert Moses was nothing if not big-scale. It's a life that would seem made for some sweeping narrative treatment — a movie by Orson Welles, an opera by Robert Wilson. Or a novel. To complete his doctoral degree in geography, Timothy Mennel produced not a typical dissertation but instead Everything Must Go: A Novel of Robert Moses's New York. For Mennel, the creation of a work of fiction, based on the facts, afforded the freedom to probe the complexity of Moses and his era — a complexity we inevitably grasp only in partial and contingent ways. Here we present an excerpt from a chapter that finds Robert Moses and Frank Lloyd Wright — his cousin by marriage — motoring through Harlem and the Bronx. 

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Essay: Keith Eggener

Lethal T-Square: Architecture, Violence, Renewal

Today we are increasingly aware that our infrastructure is literally crumbling and technologically dated, and that cities across the nation and around the world are stressed as never before. Little wonder that the late New York City master builder Robert Moses continues to cast a long shadow. Here architectural historian and Places contributing editor Keith Eggener makes an intriguing analogy between Moses, who titled his autobiography Public Works: A Dangerous Trade, and the vigilante-architect of Death Wish, the 1974 movie that turned Charles Bronson into an action-hero movie star.  

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Interview: Nate Berg

The Olympics and the City

On Friday February 12 the 2010 Winter Olympics begin in Vancouver. Like other host cities, Vancouver had to plan for a sprint and a marathon — it had to develop, finance, design and build a range of sport and residential venues that would not only make the two-week event a big success but also, when the world had gone back home, become a vital and enduring part of the city fabric. Vancouver planning director Brent Toderian spoke recently with journalist Nate Berg, of Planetizen, about how the city, known for progressive planning and green thinking, was meeting the Olympic challenge. 

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Review: Ian Baldwin

Architect, Park Thyself

In the 20th century the United States became a nation of drivers, and for decades now our cities have been adapting to the automobile, with notably mixed results. "The auto-urban relationship — fumbling, overheated, unsatisfying for both parties — never stands still long enough to be rationally inspected," writes architect Ian Baldwin. "But there is one place where city and car merge into stasis: the parking garage." Baldwin reviews House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage, now at the National Building Museum. The exhibition takes a long look of the evolution of a building type that, as Baldwin notes, "makes the modern city possible." Baldwin also reviews The Architecture of Parking, by British architect Simon Henley, which offers an overview of international garage design.

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Observed

Peak Water: Peter Gleick, founder of the San Francisco-based Pacific Institute, gave a recent talk at the World Affairs Council, "From Peak Oil to Peak Water," on the looming crisis of diminishing access to safe water and the critical role of conservation — a major challenge for urban policy and design. How bad will it get? Read Rebecca Solnit's review in the London Review of Books of James Powell's Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West.  [NL]

Gallery: Aaron Rothman

This Place is a Message

Arizona-based artist and photographer Aaron Rothman focuses on mundane rather than recognizable landscapes, in order to create works that allow us to see their subjects afresh. He focuses on buildings under construction — "ruins in reverse" — in order to explore "how we occupy the surface of the earth." And about both natural and built landscapes, he wonders: How do we, as individuals, relate to such places? Here we present two sets of recent photographs.>>

Partner Schools: MIT

Introducing MIT's New Media Lab Complex

Open House: 3.5.2010More Information >>

Observed

Artist Pete Dungey's ongoing series of public installations highlighting the problem of surface imperfections on Britain's roads. Take a look at his pothole gardens. [KL]

Partner Schools: Georgia Tech

Imagining – A Better Future

Keynote: 3.12.2010
Debate and Discussions: 3.13.2010

The Georgia Tech College of Architecture is hosting a major symposium as part of its T. Gordon Little Lecture Series in the Imagination. IMAGINING — A Better Future will feature debates and discussions with Thom Mayne, Liz Diller, Michael Meredith, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Paul Finch, Jeffrey Kipnis, Alan Balfour, Jennifer Bonner and Mack Scogin.>>

Observed

Stoss LU, the Boston-based landscape architecture practice founded by Chris Reed, is this year's recipient of the Topos Landscape Award. Reed's review of The Infrastructural City appeared last fall in Places. [NL]

Observed

How Architecture Transformed a Violent City: the Utne Reader features a summary of the dramatic changes in Medellín, Colombia, with a link to an interview in Bomb with the city's former mayor, who got the connection between good design and dignity. Via DSGN AGNC. [NL]

Observed

Imagine traveling just 2 hours by train from Boston to Washington, or Chicago to Pittsburgh, or Los Angeles to San Francisco? Or how about 3 hours from Washington to Atlanta, or Detroit to New York? We could do that, if the cities weren't in the U.S. but in China. In the New York Times, yet more evidence of the People's Republic's High Speed Economy. [NL]

Partner Schools: Arizona State University

Phoenix – Barcelona: Cities in Transformation

Arizona State University

Symposium: 2.8.2010

Exhibition: 2.8.2010 - 2.26.2010

This month ASU will sponsor a symposium and exhibition which builds on the work of a previous exhibition and symposium, The Desert as a Client, held in Barcelona in October 2009. >>

Gallery: Alan Thomas

Chicago Self-Park

For several years Chicago-based editor and photographer Alan Thomas has been focusing on the city's self-park garages, large multistory structures that provide "a particular way of framing the cityscape beyond." Here, with a gallery of Thomas's photographs, we continue to look at the architecture of parking, at more "houses of cars." >>

Partner Schools: Auburn University

"Think Tall"

An interdisciplinary team of students from the Masters programs in Architecture and Building Sciences at Auburn University has won a competition to design a pedestrian bridge for the new Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, TN.>>

Observed

Tugendhat House on talk radio: this week the Diane Rehm show features a fascinating discussion of The Glass Room, the new novel by Simon Mawr inspired by the complex history of Mies's glass-and-steel villa in prewar Czechoslovakia. Participants include the National Building Museum curator Susan Piedmont-Palladino. [NL]

Gallery: Gavin Browning, Michelle Fornabai

ink

Tonight Studio-X — an initiative of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia — is opening "ink," a show of ink-on-Mylar drawings by artist-architect Michelle Fornabai. The exhibition was shown last summer at Studio-X Beijing, and tonight's event will feature a simulcast between participants in Bejing and New York including Fornabai, GSAPP dean Mark Wigley, and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Places is pleased to present a selection of images from "ink."  >>

Gallery: Christine Macy

Dams Across America

Last week we featured articles and videos that focus on the prospect of a new era of public works — and the challenges of making that happen. So naturally we were interested in Dams, the latest in the Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks, just published by Norton. As Christine Macy notes, dams are a monumental presence in the landscape, and controversial too — hailed as feats of engineering and vilified as destroyers of habitat. Here we offer an excerpt and a slideshow focusing on the legacy of the 1930s and '40s, with period images suggesting  the complex, years-long construction processes of Tennessee Valley Authority dams and of Hoover and Grand Coulee, two of the largest hydroelectric dams in the U.S. Something to contemplate as the current administration struggles to stimulate the economy and smarten the energy grid. >>

Partner Schools: UC Berkeley

Visualizing the Future of
Environmental Design

UC Berkeley Spring Program
College of Environmental Design
2.3.10 – 2.6.10

UC Berkeley's spring celebration will focus on the global dynamics and sustainability challenges that could have not been foreseen when the CED was founded in 1959.

More information >>