Entries Tagged 'Architecture' ↓

The Wonder of Warsaw

Rise, Zaha, rise!

I’ve adored the work of Iraqi-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid for years, and soon 1.7 million Poles will, also. Notes The New York Times, the Pritzker Prize-winning Hadid—the only woman to have been awarded the field’s “Nobel”—is about to construct a residential structure towering 790 feet above Warsaw’s streets.

Called Lilium Tower, the sleek, glass-covered building, with floor space of 1.1 million square feet has a fleur-de-lis motif and is to house apartments, a condominium hotel and commercial and recreational facilities on a site facing the city’s Palace of Culture. Some planning permits are still needed; completion is expected in 2012.

Remember when the extant question about Hadid was, “Yes, but when will she actually build something?” Now it’s “When will she stop?”

Bravo, Zaha. Keep ’em guessing….

Now, All You Need To Find Your Way Around NYC is a Plasma Screen, an Xbox, and a Very Long Cord.

Hearst Building and twin…
I can see Gayle King from here: New York’s Hearst Building (57th St. and 8th Ave.), home to O Magazine and others, and its GTA IV twin

I. Cannot. Wait.With the April 29 release of Rockstar Games’ (and, full disclosure, my former employer’s) Grand Theft Auto IV now nearly a month behind us, many are raving over the game’s raucus gameplay and sophisticated storyline. Still others are flabbergasted by the company’s reported game sales of over 6 million copies sold in the first week, including 3.6 million the first day, for a gross of half a billion dollars the first seven days of release, beating analyst projections widely. (These also beat Microsoft’s Halo 3 numbers, ’til now the biggest release. Little-known fact: In 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas also beat Halo 2‘s sales with, much the same, little fanfare.)

But whether you love video games, like I do, detest them, like my wife does, or are a voice actor for the GTA IV who doesn’t believe Take 2, Rockstar’s parent company, paid you enough, like Michael Hollick, if you’re New Yorkers playing GTA IV, there’s one thing you can all agree upon: The striking sense of verisimilitude with which the game overwhelms the player.

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Jean Nouvel, Dr. Evil: Were They Separated at Birth?

Who gets the prize?

Jean Nouvel is one of the most imaginative architects in the world, and the innovativeness of his vision has been rewarded with the 2008 Pritzker, considered the “Nobel Prize” of architecture.

But, in fact, is he hiding his true identity: Dr. Evil, of Austin Powers fame? Think about it: Have you noticed that you’ve never seen them together in the same room, at the same time?

Thanks to mirage.studio.7 blog for pointing this out.

A Future That Was So Totally Pimpin’

Pimpin’ Future

As a child born in the early 1960s, I can remember when every print ad in National Geographic seemed to be done in this style: Painting of athletic and slim white man and woman in some otherwise impossible, wildly desirable setting, madly enjoying some consumer item that, it seems, would not be that all interesting, actually, if you, say, lived in a bleeding-edge, part-glass, woodland home cantilevered over a stream, or a couple dozen stories above a headlamp-lit New York City street.

Sky-high bachelor pad

Both are by illustrator Charles Schridde. As the awesome Paleo-Future notes, the top pic is from a Motorola television print campaign:

This series ran in Life Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post from 1961 until 1963 and was immensely popular for its elegant, futuristic look.

Though the Western-themed stuff Schridde seems to most paint these days does zero for me, thankfully, his work is preserved on the web, in books like Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising and The Golden Age of Advertising – the 70s. Click on the pics to see close-ups. Thanks to FFFFOUND, StrangeHarvest, Paleo-Future, and The World of Kane for the links.

Eisenman is the Illest….

University of Phoenix Stadium, designed by Peter Eisenman

Peter Eisenman does not cheer at football games.

Peter Eisenman is a hardcore football fan. (The Wall Street Journal called him “an unrepentant sports nut.”) He has been buying season tickets to NY Giants games for a half-century.

He doesn’t cheer at them.

A month ago, he had what most sports fans could have only described as an out-of-body experience: He went and saw his favorite pro football team—50 years running—win one of the most amazing championship victories in sports history—Super Bowl XLII, his first.

He didn’t cheer.

But even more, of the 60,000 people who saw the event live, Peter Eisenman was the only person sitting in University of Phoenix Stadium, pictured above, who, while watching those men do battle, could look out at the retractable roof; its roll-in natural grass field; the completely unobstructed seating; and the massive supercolumns supporting the whole structure, say two little words, and be telling the truth.

“My baby.”

Eisenman draws a masterpiecePeter Eisenman, of Eisenman Architects, designed University of Phoenix Stadium. Peter Eisenman watched his first live Super Bowl as it was won with feats of superhuman cunning and strength by a team he’s loved all of his adult life in a massive stadium people are raving about but that he remembers when it weighed less than a paper clip, when it was nothing but a pattern of neurons firing in his formidable brain.

And he still didn’t cheer.

He’s either the coolest or the most tightly-wound person ever made. Me? If I’d held all that passion, history, talent, and juice inside me, after Plaxico Burress’s game-ending catch, I’d have let out a Cuba-Gooding-Jr.-winning-best-supporting-actor-at-the-Academy-Awards style war cry squared, run out onto the field naked, and set myself on fire. But I guess that’s why I’m not Peter Eisenman.

That I’m not Peter Eisenman is also why I didn’t spend Super Bowl Sunday seated next to the smart, slender, friendly, and blonde Cynthia Davidson. The person who knows that Eisenman doesn’t scream over great plays (“We high-five! He yells when he’s angry, not when he’s happy”) knows an awful lot more about him, enough to fill a book. So she did one.

Tracing Eisenman coverI’m talking with Cynthia about that book tomorrow, Friday, March 7, at 2 pm ET, on NONFICTION, my weekly WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, broadcasting terrestrially in the NYC tri-state, and streaming live here. The book’s called Tracing Eisenman: Peter Eisenman Complete Works (Thames & Hudson). It details Eisenman’s history and ouevre as only someone who knows him well, understands his intent, but who was an architectural critic and theorist before she met him, might do. Cynthia is cofounder of the nonprofit Anyone Corporation, and editor on a dozen books for MIT Press’s Writing Architecture series. As well, she publishes Log, an architectural journal.

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Love You, Inside and Out

PreFab Modern coverI met Jill Herbers at a WBAI fete which she attended with a friend, then proceeded to spend almost all the rest of that evening talking to her. Thoughtful, more than a little opinionated, and utterly serious about the art and science of fabricating living spaces, what was not to love? I’ve grabbed her books: 1996’s Tile, and 1990’s Great Adaptations to find out more on her ideas. But I would have picked up 2004’s Prefab Modern for the cover alone. O.K.: The cover, and pages 50-59 alone.

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