What is this blog about?

"Hello, my name is John. I'm a recovering architect."

I like all sorts of towns, cities and buildings, but what I design are Classical buildings and Traditional towns and cities. You can see some of them at www.massengale.com.

With Robert A.M. Stern I wrote a history of architecture and urbanism in the Progressive Era, New York 1900, Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890–1915 (Rizzoli, 1983) as well as an introduction to the history of suburbia before sprawl, The Anglo–American Suburb (St. Martin's Press, 1981). With Victor Dover, I am writing Street Design, The Art & Practice of Making Complete Streets (J. Wiley & Sons, 2013).

I'm a Board Member of the Congress for New Urbanism, the former Chair of CNU New York and a former Director of the Institute of Classical Art & Architecture and Federated Conservationists of Westchester County.

A co-founder of the New Urban and Traditional Architecture Councils.I was also a co-founder of the pro-urb list, a forum on the internet for an advanced discussion of New Urbanism. And in this blog you will find some postings from that list, along with other writings and clippings on architecture, urbanism, Classicism, Tradition, metaphysics and culture.


Favorite Posts From the Archives

Photo Albums

Blogs

Categories

Archives

Syndicate this site (XML)
Add me to your TypePad People list
About Me


Copyright © 2004 – 2006 John Massengale

Powered by TypePad
Member since 12/2003


John Massengale's Facebook profile

ip-location


« The Morning After: Exxon-Mobil's The GOP's Pledge to America | Main | Place Matters - and it looks like New Urbanists have been right all these years. »

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Autonomous Architecture Idea No. 3: Twist the Building

TwistedBuilding

A FEW YEARS AGO, I wrote, "Buildings that lean! What will they think of next?" I didn't realize at the time that it was one of the primary principles of Autonomous Architecture: Tilt the Building, Slice the Building, Raise the Corner of the Building, and, of course, Twist the Building.

It's cute, but novelty has its limitations (see posts below).

BTW, the base is a landmarked building.

V&V: 1st Annual Slouching Towards Alphaville Award
V&V: Something Leaning, Something Blue, Something Bulging, Something NEW!
V&V: Just when you think you're out, they pull you back in!
V&V: Live from New York - Starchitecture at Lincoln Center
Curbed NY: Steely Damn! High Line's Newest Neighbor Unveiled to Critics

November 3, 2010 in Architecture, Culture, History, New York, Urbanism | Permalink

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

I like your blog more than my blog

Posted by: duo at Nov 3, 2010 2:00:01 PM

Many years ago I overheard two of my tutors critiquing another students design for a railway station. He had designed a very solid, calm looking structure of parallel arcades. Their main criticism was that transport buildings should be about energy and motion, all I could think was "But the station isn't going anywhere!"

Posted by: Austen Redman at Nov 4, 2010 5:31:03 PM

Because technology allows such buildings to be built I guess we should expect more of them. But one has to wonder the value of such things. Humans generally sit and stand 'straight' and there are good reasons for NOT living and working in such a thing. Smack! goes your head on a curving door where you don't expect it to be. The added expense of curving everything must be considerable. But as a pedestrian and unlikely future employee in such a structure, I have to the thing looks pretty cool. The High Line area is an appropriate location for the sort of experiments–but I would prefer such things weren't built on/inside of a landmarked structures. Seems academic now that it's likely been killed. The principle of not letting developers mess with landmarked buildings is a good one. There must be some vacant lots around the city in need of a torqued building.

Posted by: Troy Torrison at Nov 17, 2010 10:27:55 AM

Post a comment