Today's archidose #682

Here are some photos of the "Amazing Flow" installation by Toyo Ito and Akihisa Hirata, as part of Lexus Design Amazing 2013 in Milan, photographed by SomniaArchitectura.













A video from Lexus on "Amazing Flow":


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What a Difference 3 Years Makes

Below are a couple photos I snapped three years apart of the Lower Manhattan skyline. The top one is from a showroom near Madison Square Park and the bottom one is from the roof above Resolution: 4 Architecture on West 28th Street near Sixth Avenue. The foregrounds may be different, but the buildings on the skyline have similar positions, making the changes that have happened in a pretty short amount of time easy to grasp. I've highlighted the major ones, which include the completion of 8 Spruce Street and two buildings rising at the World Trade Center site.

Today's archidose #681

Here are some photos of the Landscape Laboratory (2012) in Guimarães, Portugal, by Cannatà & Fernandes Arquitectos, photographed by José Carlos Melo Dias.









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Four Futures for MSG and Penn Station

This morning I attended the Municipal Art Society's Design Challenge for Penn Station presentation at the TimesCenter, in which four architects proposed future scenarios for Madison Square Garden and Penn Station. With their Alliance for a New Penn Station, MAS and RPA are pushing for a major overhaul of the sports and transportation facilities, and this design exercise is one way to drum up interest in the site's potential.

I won't go into any detail on why MSG and Penn Station should change, or why it's getting so much attention now, but I'd recommend Michael Kimmelman's articles on the subject from the Times, one from last February and one from just last week.



Below are some photos I took (pardon the rough quality and odd angle) followed by brief descriptions from the architects, courtesy MAS. They are in the same order as this morning's presentations.

H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture:

In pursuit of making rail the “mode of choice”, H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture asserts that several inextricably linked interventions must be made to improve the City’s essential systems and better express its culture: Public Space, Entertainment, and the Environment; Transportation; Education; and Economic Development. A relocation of Madison Square Garden to a 16-acre site on the west side waterfront provides an enhanced venue with a singular new identity and expanded tourist, hospitality, and entertainment opportunities. The New Penn Station, including an eight-track high-speed rail expansion to the south, accommodates increased capacity and integrates community and traveler amenities, including a new three-acre public park, retail complex, and two-acre roof garden. Redevelopment of the Farley Post Office creates a centrally located Center for Education. And, perhaps most importantly, 24 million square feet of private development around Penn Station and up Seventh Avenue serves as an economic engine for improvements and a revived world-class commercial district.

SOM:

SOM proposes to grow the footprint of Penn Station by two additional blocks to accommodate high speed rail lines for the Northeast Corridor, expanded commuter rail service for all of the tri-state area, and direct rail connections to JFK, LGA, and EWR. This last connection would allow one to go straight from the curb of 7th Avenue , through security at Penn, onto a train, and directly to one’s gate. The station itself is open and intuitive. A central, transparent Ticketing Hall is placed at the center of the site, with dedicated vehicular drop-off and radial, pedestrian connections to the city surrounding it. Below this are two concourses running North-South, seamlessly enabling passengers to move from ground level to below grade. Retail lines these circulation spaces, integrating the station into the surrounding streetscape. Finally, at the lowest levels are the expanded platforms, where visitors arriving from an overnight flight from Hong Kong rub elbows with a commuter on her way to Morristown . With all of these networks intersecting at Penn Station, its central hall would become the iconic gateway for nearly every visitor around the world. Around the Station, Midtown West will continue to grow. Private development adjacent to a major transportation node is perfectly sensible – even desirable. That includes MSG, whose natural location would be adjacent to, but not on top of, a transit hub.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro:

Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Josh Sirefman offers Penn Station 3.0, which will be a city within a city, a porous and light-filled civic structure filled with diverse new programs that reflect the hybridity of contemporary urban life. Not just a gateway to New York , the station will be a destination in itself with fast, transit-oriented programs layered with slower destinations in a gradient of decelerating speeds from tracks to roof. The building will host transient and resident populations including commuters, office workers, fabricators, shoppers, foodies, culture seekers and urban explorers. In this plan, MSG will be located to the west end of the Farley building on Ninth Avenue , with access to Eighth Avenue.

SHoP Architects:

SHoP Architects’ plan imagines an expanded main hall of Penn Station as a bright, airy and easily navigable space that defines a center of a new destination district, Gotham Gateway. In addition to striking public architecture, the project proposes significant security and rail capacity improvements that address major needs at the existing station. The team proposes new development, as well as new parks and amenities, around the station to help defray the required public investment, including an extension of the High Line that connects the new station to a glorious and financeable new Madison Square Garden.

Kimmelman and representatives from the four architects in conversation after the presentations:


This is a topic that will be getting plenty of press today and in the coming weeks, leading up to the June 19 City Council meeting that will decide how long MSG's permit for operating above Penn Station will be renewed for; MAS is recommending 10 years. Stay tuned for more on the above designs and on the unfolding story of Penn Station's future.

Update 05.30: Businessweek publishes a statement from Madison Square Garden Co.'s spokesperson Kimberly Kerns:

“It’s curious to see that there are so many ideas on how to tear down a privately owned building that is a thriving New York icon, supports thousands of jobs, and is currently completing a $1 billion transformation. These pie-in-the-sky drawings completely ignore the fact that no viable plans or funding to rebuild Penn Station and relocate MSG actually exist. Not that long ago, MSG spent millions of dollars and three years exploring a move to the Farley building as part of the new vision for Moynihan Station. That plan collapsed for a number of reasons that did not involve MSG, but did involve many of the same people now pressuring MSG to move, including the Municipal Art Society, which created enormous obstacles to achieving the relocation. The restoration of Moynihan Station has been a 20-year discussion that has led to very little progress or funding. The fact that this exercise does not include anyone who actually has detailed knowledge of this issue or understands the realities of this complex project exposes this exercise for exactly what it is.”

Broken Silo

If you've ever visited the contact page for architectural photographer Timothy Hursley, you've probably wondered about that warped structure that is represented in four photos at different angles.


[Screenshot of timothyhursley.com]

Some insight comes in the form of "The Beauty of a Broken Silo," a seven-minute film from Oxford American that is definitely worth watching:


(Thanks to Keith Z. for the heads up via Facebook.)

Update 05.31: Timothy Hursley pointed out to me that there are even hats with the "twisted silo" on it!

Monday, Monday

A Weekly Dose of Architecture Updates:

This week's dose features the Tunnel Monitoring Complex in Hausmannstaetten, Austria, by Dietger Wissounig Architekten:


The featured past dose is the "Free Play" Kindergarten in Guntramsdorf, Austria, by g.o.y.a.:


This week's book review is From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara edited by Manuel Herz (L):

(R): The featured past book review is MetroBasel Comic by ETH Zurich.

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American-Architects Building of the Week:

Claire T. Carney Library in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, by designLAB Architects:

Today's archidose #680

Here is a photo of the Triumph Pavilion 2013: AZC Peace Pavilion (on display May 16 - June 16, 2013) at Museum Gardens in London by Atelier Zündel Cristea, photographed by James Attree/JZA Photography.



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The Odd POPS at 33 Maiden Lane

About five days a week I walk on John Street past the Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) at 33 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan, never venturing inside. The "two-level open-air covered pedestrian space," as Jerold Kayden calls it, is frankly an oddity, a fairly large space that is always dark and empty. Further, its dramatic barrel vault does not extend to John Street; instead a small rectangular portal gives a glimpse and access to both the pedestrian space and subway below.


[All photographs by John Hill, unless noted otherwise.]

But where else do the stairs and escalators beyond lead, besides the subway? And what's with the postmodern design? On Friday I decided to trek through the POPS and do a little research on it to finally get the story behind this oddity.



Before heading into the space, lets walk around to the Maiden Lane side from the above views from John Street on the north. Below are two portals that provide access from Nassau Street on the west. The large column, rounded brick piers, and arched openings all fit into the theme of the building's design.



Those three elements can also be found on the Maiden Lane side (below), which faces the Federal Reserve Bank. Actually, the 1924 building is the driving force for Philip Johnson and John Burgee's design of 33 Maiden Lane (aka 2 Federal Reserve Plaza), completed 60 years later. That inspiration can be seen in the arches, barrel vaults, rounded corners, and brick color, as well as the turrets that top the tower's corners and piers. That the Federal Reserve leased space in 33 Maiden Lane and then purchased the building outright last year cements the connection between the two structures.



The design for the POPS can be seen as an inexpensive version of the ideas Johnson put into practice during his postmodern phase, especially the lobby of the AT&T (now Sony) Building and the lobby of 190 South LaSalle in Chicago, both completed around the same time as 33 Maiden Lane. Compared to other POPS in the city—be it covered pedestrian spaces, plazas, or some other type of space—the design is decent, if dated. But if the rhythm, texture, and scale of the space has merit, it disappears when amenities are considered; outside of connecting to the subway, making for a covered shortcut from Maiden to Nassau, and providing one newsstand, there's nothing going on here, hence it always being pretty empty.



The end of the passageway near John Street (below) is the most boggling part of the design. Escalators from the south and steps from John Street on the north provide access to the Fulton Street Subway Station, but also to a checkerboard-tiled space flanked by doors on two sides.



This space (below) looks like it serves a purpose, and it fact it did. As Jerold Kayden explains, "Years ago, this level also housed a satellite branch of uptown’s Whitney Museum of American Art." The Downtown Branch was designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and was completed in 1987; a few years later they exhibited their "Domestic Arrangements" installation in a gallery of their own making.



Entrance to the Whitney was through double doors (in the screenshot below, and just out of frame-right in the above photo) and down more steps to the gallery two levels below grade. The subterranean location was hardly ideal for the branch of an institution as respectable as the Whitney, but Williams and Tsien overcame this by adding a 20-foot-high pylon near the base of the escalator that was visible even from the vantage of the photo at the top of this post.


[Screenshot from Billie Tsien lecture at SCI-Arc (44:17), November 15, 1989]

Even in the lo-fi photo of this space above, it's clear that for a short time (until the 1992 closing of the Whitney, at least) the POPS provided an amenity, a destination on the lower level. Now (photo below) this level is barren, even more so than the space above.



It's worth discussing a couple adjacent open spaces. If one ventures farther east on John Street, a very narrow—and equally boggling—space with astroturf at its rear can be glimpsed:


The sign on the left in the above photo reads: "Open to the public dawn to dusk" and is accompanied by a tree logo that looks just like the official POPS logo. But this narrow space is not documented in Jerold Kayden's book or website, nor on the city's list of POPS, so what is it?



The space belongs to the John Street United Methodist Church (left in photo above, right in photo below), the oldest Methodist congregation in North America (dating to 1766) and the third church on the site.



The church is hemmed in by much taller buildings on three sides. Looking skyward in the below photo, we can see the church, 33 Maiden Lane, and the back of 59 Maiden Lane. This fact makes the narrow open spaces on both the east and west sides of the church particularly uninviting; the blank walls facing the spaces don't help either.



Below are a couple photos of the space on the east side, about the same scale as the one on the west, but in place of the astroturf are some steps leading to a statue and seating area. It's clear from the paving, wall painting, light stanchions, and plantings that this space is more important to the church than the other. Nevertheless it's only marginally more inviting than the space next to 33 Maiden Lane.



The spaces described above are three of four semi-public spaces on the block bounded by John Street, Nassau Street, Maiden Lane, and William Street. The fourth is at 59 Maiden Lane, which Kayden describes in his POPS book as "originally a barren plaza" that was "voluntarily upgraded by its owner in the late 1980s...the result is a substantial improvement." So there is some hope for the other three spaces on the block, given the right attention.

Today's archidose #679

Here are some construction photos of the 2013 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (opening June 8 until October 20) in London by Sou Fujimoto Architects, photographed by Laurence Mackman. See more photos at Mackman's London Architecture Blog.







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Oculus Rising

Earlier today I happened to be near the east edge of the World Trade Center site, and I noticed the first bits of steel rising above-grade for the Oculus of the Santiago Calatrava-designed WTC Transportation Hub.

Unfortunately the only camera on me was the one on my "dumbphone," so pardon the quality:

[Top: Photo by John Hill | Bottom: Screenshot from EarthCam (click "Oculus" at bottom)]

Below my snap is an aerial view of the construction site from a webcam, captured today at 11:56am. The arrow shows where the steel in the street-level photo can be found in the overall plan, what is the eastern end of the Oculus near Church Street. It's not much steel, but it should be interesting to see this thing rise in the coming weeks, when I'll make sure to bring along my camera.

Book Talk and Review: Lincoln Center Inside Out

Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account by Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Damiani, 2012
Hardcover, 311 pages

On May 10, I attended a panel discussion at the Center for Architecture that followed the publication of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's account of the design and realization of Lincoln Center's transformation. This post is both a recap of that event and a review of the book celebrated that evening.



The panel consisted of five people: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio of DS+R; Anthony Vidler, Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union; Dana Polan, Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University; and moderator Edward Dimendberg, Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California. Dimendberg's presence allowed discussion of another book, his ten-years-in-the-making historical analysis of the firm, Architecture After Images, a book I enjoyed greatly.

Diller began the evening with a brief history of gaining the commission and of the book itself. In the case of the former she particularly praised Rebecca Robertson, former Executive Director of the Lincoln Center Development Project, for putting DS+R on the list after seeing their "Soft Sell" installation in Times Square. Bridging the project and the book was her statement that "buildings are one manifestation of architecture, books are another." With Lincoln Center, the book had to follow the project, because they were too busy during the process to work on the book, which they wrote, laid out, and even commissioned photos for, most by Iwan Baan. As we'll see, the defining characteristic of the book is how full-bleed photo-spreads alternate with gatefolds, or as Diller put it: "It's architectural porno (photos) mixed with a diary."


[L-R: Polan, Vidler, Scofidio, Dimendberg, and Diller.]

Dimendberg followed Diller, talking about what he discovered in the making of his book. He described both the book and the career of DS+R as narrative, something that grows from film. While Diller and Scofidio were architects on the margins when they began in the 1970s, four decades later (with partner Charles Renfro) they find themselves as architects able to maintain their integrity and be accepted as architects. This narrative arc continues post-Lincoln Center with projects in Los Angeles and Brazil moving forward.

Polan's contribution was fairly surprising and very interesting; he focused on "the theater of dining." He looked at the earlier Brasserie in the Seagram Building and the recent Lincoln Ristorante under the Illumination Lawn at Lincoln Center. Having written a book on Julia Child, and noticing how her set incorporated a dining room (a first) to link preparation and consumption/pleasure, Polan looked at each restaurant in terms of staging and visuality. For him, the Brasserie "puts objects into quotation," such as the blurring of wine bottles behind the bar. On the other hand, Lincoln Ristorante is luminous but varied, with three distinct zones and respective moods that arise from what can be seen, be it the kitchen, the bar, or the pool to the north.

Vidler analyzed the work of DS+R as a combination of two theoretical strands: program, based on John Summerson's 1957 article ("The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture") on the architectural program as something based on science, technology, use, and nature; and image, based on Reyner Banham's writings, such as his contemporaneous take on "The New Brutalism." Like Dimendberg, Vidler finds narrative to be an important part of DS+R's work; for him, program and image are combined in unique ways through their use of narrative, of "remaking the story."



So with these thoughts from the panel discussion in mind, Lincoln Center Inside Out clearly tells a story. It is the penultimate narrative of the physical transformation of Lincoln Center, told by the architects but incorporating the myriad players into the story. (The last spread in the book is actually DS+R's "Chart of Accountability," which puts them in the middle but acknowledges the roles of every entity involved in the project.) In the most direct sense, the book tells one story in two ways (a mini-Rashomon): one through the photos and one through the gatefolds. The former is like a cursory glance at the place, akin to scanning a publication or website, while the latter is much more immersive and informative, due to the great amounts of text, drawings, and other images that lie within.

Appropriately these gatefolds remind me of DS+R's earlier book Scanning, in which many images are hidden but can be partly glimpsed through cuts in the perforated end pages. Readers can see the images in their entirety, but revealing them means defacing the book by tearing along the perforations (I've yet to do that to my copy). Lincoln Center Inside Out is not as much of a tease, but it does reconsider what a book can be through its gatefold structure. This unique approach results in an extremely rewarding book but one that made for difficulties in bookmaking; the first printing actually "did not hold," according to Diller in her talk.



The book's arrangement happens to be both geographical and (reverse) chronological, a condition that happens due to the lack of a master plan with the project, and therefore the construction of one piece after another. As Diller described it, the "project evolved in a very organic way," where smaller ideas were executed with a shared language. In my Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture, I describe that shared language as "peeling," but Diller defined it as a "double function" found in all parts of the project: the roof of the restaurant is also a bucolic lawn, the third-floor extension of Julliard is also a ground-floor public space, and so forth.

After some oral histories covering Lincoln Center's inception and campus plan, the book moves onto a chapter on the bigger picture of transforming Lincoln Center, highlighted by a slideshow recounting DS+R's interview process. The chapters that follow focus on the Columbus Avenue Entrance, the North Plaza, the Street of the Arts, Julliard School, Alice Tully Hall, and the School of American Ballet, in that order.

The best parts of the book are definitely the gatefolds, as most of them are self-contained narrative details about the project. As Dimendberg noted, reading one gatefold each night before bed is a good way of taking in the book. The contents of each gatefold are unique, but in general they describe how some aspect of the project came into being and then document it in fine detail. For example, the gatefold devoted to the LED steps at Columbus Avenue addresses the oft-heard question of "How do I get to Lincoln Center?" (even as people were standing across the street from it, per the text), then delves into how the risers are detailed and how the lighting runs work. The most gatefolds are devoted to Alice Tully Hall, what Diller described as a project in its own right.

Not every piece of architecture deserves such a thorough and elaborate treatment, but it is definitely appropriate for Lincoln Center, given the scale and complexity of the undertaking, the modernist canvas on which the changes took place, and DS+R's creativity in making the place inviting to the public. Of course, it would not be enough for DS+R to publish just another book on a project, hence the innovative gatefold structure. In revealing what was hidden inside the guise of a coffee table book, Lincoln Center Inside Out parallels the project's double function, making it a joy to discover the changes that have take place over the last decade.

US: CA: UK:

Today's archidose #678

Here are some photos of the Tchoban Foundation - Museum for Architectural Drawing (opening June 4, 2013) in Berlin, Germany, by SPEECH Tchoban&Kuznetsov; photographed by bcmng.











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