Veritas et Venustas

Quote of the Day - In which it is revealed that faces and posture can reveal much

I was reminded that Mr. Foster is also responsible for the canopied enclosure of the inner court at the British Museum, a pompous waste of public space that inserts a shopping gallery into the heart of a sublime cultural institution.

- Michael Kimmelman, In Renderings for a Library Landmark, Stacks of Questions, Still

That's a good sign. Most critics reflexively rave about the British museum, because it was designed by Sir Norman Foster.* It reminded me of something I wrote after a trip to England:

Watch the faces of people walking around Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and you'll see happiness and contentment. Watch the faces of people walking around Renzo Piano's Morgan Library addition (or Sir Norman Foster's British Museum courtyard), and you'll see people who look bored, at best, or who have the pained expression of someone who's just been forced to swallow something that's supposed to be good for them, like Castor Oil.

* a nice guy, by the way

Quote of the Day

"Until [the 20th] century, the public and the profession [of architecture] shared a known vocabulary; the divide between them was simply a matter of the degree to which traditional forms were mutually understood. Like so much else in the arts, architecture has taken new forms and developed a new and often arcane vocabulary. The alienation that started with the distrust and dislike of the unfamiliar in modern architecture has been exacerbated by the increasingly abstract and esoteric nature of current philosophy and practice."

- Ada Louise Huxtable, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (1997)

Yorkville Promenade

IN our upcoming street design book, we've catalogued a variety of street types that will be useful for repairing the damage the Functional Classification system has done to our towns and cities. One of these is the Promenade type; so we've renamed our Yorkville Rambla the Yorkville Promendade. Here's a downloadable PDF of the competition entry from 2011:  Download Yorkville Promenade

Plus, two similar schemes by Massengale & Co LLC, Dover, Kohl & Partners and H. Zeke Mermell: Winslow Homer Walk and Jane Jacobs Square.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (December 21st is coming)

"Architecture is invention. All the rest is repetition and of no interest." - Oscar Niemeyer

“I like provoking people. It’s what you’re supposed to do.” - Thom Mayne

"Like other kinds of art, great buildings contradict everything else. They make us think. They start conversations, so people talk about what it means to fit in, what it means to have courage. It’s okay for some buildings not to work." - Gregg Pasquarelli

"Maybe that’s what a city is: confrontation and complication. In New York, the name of the game is to have one’s own envelope." - Bernard Tschumi, responding to Pasquarelli

V&V: Architects Say The Darndest Things!

Bonus quote after the jump - 

“The street wears us out. It is altogether disgusting. Why, then, does it still exist?” - Le Corbusier

This one's been forgotten about:

"If you know it is useful, and feel it is beautiful, repeat it." - Adolf Loos

Fun

The opening is very serious, but they look like they're having fun.

Treme & Two Kinds of Music

"There are two kinds of music," Duke Ellington once said, "Good music, and the other kind." You see the same thing in the HBO show about post-Katrina New Orleans, Treme. Hip hop, be bop, bluegrass, traditional New Orleans jazz, the latest New York jazz and the latest pop - it's all good in New Orleans.

Architects could learn from musicians.

I ♥ New York

iPhone 11/11/12 @ 3 pm