Oculus - Spring 2015 - (Page 47)
last words
Letter from tHe exeCutive direCtor
©Kent Kunstner
Eve of Construction
Bell in Brooklyn.
You may leave here for
four days in space
But when you return
it's the same old
place...
And you tell me over
and over and over and
over again my friend
You don't believe
we're on the eve of
destruction.
-P.F. Sloan in
"Eve of Destruction," 1965
Because every people
in search of itself thinks
about where to locate
the margin between its
own home and the rest
of the world....
-Milan Kundera in
Encounter, 2010
We must think not as
individuals but as a
species.
We must confront the
reality of interstellar
travel.
-Christopher Nolan &
Jonathan Nolan in
Interstellar, 2014
Am I wrong for thinking
out the box from where
I stay?
Am I wrong for saying
that I choose another
way?
I ain't tryna do what
everybody else doing
Just cause everybody
doing what they all do.
-Kahouly Nicolay Sereba &
Vincent Dery (Nico & Vinz) in
"Am I Wrong," 2014
T
he unknown can seem fearsome and far. During the Age of Discovery, European navigators
used portolan charts illustrating harbor positions
and city profiles. Yale University's Beinecke Rare
Book & Manuscript Library has a collection of
such maps, where "monsters people the chart's sea."
The New York Public Library's Hunt-Lenox Globe,
purchased by AIA founder Richard Morris Hunt
in Paris in 1855, famously has "HC SVNT DRACONES" or "here be dragons" inscribed off the
coast of East Asia.
More recently in Paris, Gehry Partners and
STUDIOS Architecture created a vessel for the
Fondation Louis Vuitton. Situated in the 846-hectare Bois de Boulogne, which also dates to 1855,
the new "ark" is at the limit of the city, as was
Central Park, commissioned at the same time and
equally remote from settlement. The Bois, three
times the size of its New York cousin, incorporated
two ponds and a river and was thought of as a
green lung for an increasingly dense metropolis.
Its interdisciplinary design benefitted from the
engineering skill of Jean-Charles Alphand and the
landscape flair of 31-year-old Jean-Pierre BarilletDeschamps. Appropriate to the site, Gehry's
distended sail-like forms float over a water feature
that also surrounds crystalline shapes described as
icebergs, creating remarkable inside-outside spaces
suggesting a shipwreck. The software allowing for
the Fondation Louis Vuitton's structural design is
still au point, and the collaborative effort to achieve
the romantic naufrage quite remarkable.
Closer to home, Brooklyn-based sculptor Tom
Fruin has an installation along the East River in
Brooklyn Bridge Park, adjacent to Jean Nouvel's
carousel pavilion. Called Kolonihavehus, the
colorful acrylic casita symbolizes the small Danish
escape-hatch garden houses that beckon Copenhagen residents out of town on weekends. Fruin
worked with lighting designers, performance artists, a sound artist, and concrete poet Vagn Steen.
"The city's greatest competitive edge is its cultural
depth and sophistication," wrote Ray Gastil in Beyond the Edge: New York's New Waterfront, "and the
waterfront is the greatest stage to show that edge."
Dialogues from the Edge of Practice
In his 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New
Frontier, Joel Garreau quotes a description by
Charles Dickens of London in 1848: "There were
a hundred thousand shapes and substances of
incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places,
upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in
the earth, moldering in the water, and unintelligible as in any dream." The ethereal qualities of the
Gehry and Fruin works are not at all accidental:
they are carefully designed and intentional. What
they have in common, more than a remote park
location, is a distance from traditional expectation
and the interaction of structural form with colorenhanced imagery. Not for nothing at the Gehry
building is there bespoke art by Ellsworth Kelly
and Olafur Eliasson.
Broad splashes of color added to monochromatic museums or courthouses can hone their
edge and engender reveries, as with the Robert
Rauschenberg House sculpture at Richard Meier's
High Museum in Atlanta, and the Boston Panels
by Ellsworth Kelly at the Pei Cobb Freed-designed
John Joseph Moakley Courthouse in Boston's Fan
Pier. Was Christopher Nolan thinking of Henry
Cobb when he cast Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion
Cotillard, and Michael Caine as Paris-based
architects in Inception, filmed at 31 locations on
four continents in 2010? In this movie about how
architects can implant dreams while continually
second-guessing reality, DiCaprio's character,
"Cobb," says to his father, an architecture professor played by Caine, "You told me that in the real
world I'd be building attic conversions and gas stations. You said that if I mastered the dream-share
I'd have a whole new way of creating and showing
people my creations. You told me it would free me."
And he enlists Cotillard's "Ariadne" by saying that
his design proposition is not about money, but "the
chance to build cathedrals, entire cities - things
that have never existed."
Whether what we design and build is on the
perimeter of our cities - or our universe - the
trans-sectorial aspiration is an evocation of the
impossible made real, the transformation of void
into meaning.
Rick Bell, FAIA
Executive Director, AIA New York Chapter
Spring 2015 Oculus
47
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Oculus - Spring 2015
First Words Letter from the President Repositioning All Around By Tomas Rossant, AIA
Letter from the Editor The Edge of New By Kristen Richards, Hon. AIA, Hon. ASLA
Center for Architecture Center Highlights
One Block Over Rough Waters: Squalls continue over the redevelopment of South Street Seaport By Claire Wilson
Opener: Thinking Into Other Boxes By David Zach
Mars in the Bronx CASE gets new environmental technologies out of labs and into buildings at (relative) warp speed By Jonathan Lerner
Spinning Research Into Practice Intense experimentation with digital technologies is yielding remarkable designs and products by ARO By Lisa Delgado
A Results-Oriented Think Tank Defining architectural practice broadly enough to include research, theory, and public discourse, Grimshaw’s Urban Research Unit is a full-circle activity leading to a richer built environment By Bill Millard
The Resilience Factor Perkins+Will is making resilience design and planning a growing area of practice and income By Richard Staub
Socrates at the Drafting Table REX champions a slow thinktank architecture of methodical problem-solving By Janet Adams Strong
Architecture in the Social Data Era Transforming our practice to engage new data sources and design intents By Melissa Marsh
Museum as Incubator The New Museum hatches a multidisciplinary workspace to nurture creative entrepreneurs By Julia van den Hout
When Bottom-up Meets Top-down The benefits of community engagement in post-disaster rebuilding plans By Deborah Gans, FAIA
In Print Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made By Tom Wilkinson Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Birth of the Modern City By Jonathan Conlin Visionaries in Urban Development: 15 Years of the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize Winners By Trisha Riggs, et al. American Urban Form: A Representative History By Sam Bass Warner and Andrew H. Whittemore Preservation is Overtaking Us By Rem Koolhaas, with a supplement by Jorge Otero-Pailos Reviews by Stanley Stark, FAIA
31-Year Watch Architectural practice once embraced dinner plates and candlesticks produced by Swid Powell By John Morris Dixon, FAIA
Last Words Eve of Construction By Rick Bell, FAIA
Index to Advertisers Alphabetical & Categorical Index
Oculus - Spring 2015
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0317
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0217
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0117
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0416
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0316
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0216
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0116
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0415
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0315
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0215
https://www.nxtbook.com/naylor/ARCQ/ARCQ0115
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com