"one million square feet of offices, shops, meeting halls and pedestrian streets ...; One-half the size of New York's Pan Am Building and housing 4,000 government workers, the complex covers one-half of its six-acre site ..." (Jaquelin T. Robertson, arec_80.10)
*** more ...
"a critical and unique example in Australia of late 20th century structuralism." (RAIA, architecture.com.au_06.08.08)
"one of the most important and least publicized buildings of the last decade" (Robertson_80.10)
*** more ...
g r u m p y o l d . . .
The CBS Headquarters, New York NY 1964 - Eero Sarinen
Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., (now the Chase bank branch at 510 Fifth Ave. at 43rd Street), New York NY 1954 - Gordon Bunshaft/SOM
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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art -- through 10-Mar98; tel (415) 357-4000
e x h i b i t i o n s
MoMA 11 W. 53rd St, Manhattan, New York, through 19-May98
MoMA, 11 W. 53rd St, Manhattan, New York, through 28-Apr98
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus Ohio, through 12-Apr98 tel 292-0330
$350 mil, a 26-acre tract of the Harlem River Rail Yards former industrial area
Urban Center/Municipal Art Society, 457 Madison Ave, near 50th St, through 6-Feb98.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis -- through Jan98
Coliseum Lobby, New York - Jan97
Municipal Art Society Urban Center, New York -- Feb97
egregious sycophancy
l a t e
Libeskind defense
moot defense
conspiracy theory
"... Ever since I started building, I have never found any
technical problems with my designs. I was talking to Rem
Koolhaas about it. He agreed. It was a conspiracy, saying that
our stuff could not be built."
(Peter Cook, talking to Martin Pawley, in "Making paper architecture
concrete," blp88_Jun92)
***
d e - b a i t
"Much of the media attention focused on Gehry's architecture is uncritical, some egregiously sycophantic. Herbert Muschamp's essay in the New York Times a few weeks ago is a case in point." (Lewis RK, wp_97.11.01)
"We work in one room without a secretary and without computers. We
produce all working drawings by hand - ink and pencil on Mylar. ... It
means that we are slow workers. Construction drawings for a house take a
minimum of six to eight months; CDs for a larger project take nine months
to a year. This allow us to focus on developing details while pursuing
the larger vision of a coherent whole. It is important for us to have the
drawings (finished or unfinished) sitting physically on a desk so we can
move forward by referring backward. Changes that are done efficiently on
a computer are tedious in our office, requiring electric erasers, erasing
shield and spit. But the slowness means that we must consider out ideas
before we commit them to ink and that we come to understand the full
ramification of changes as, page after page, we rub our lines. ... "
(Tod Williams/Billie Tsien, "Slowness,"Newsline Fall
1996)
"... a theorist who has never built anything ... must therefore rely on
forms of representation ... Libeskind would perhaps make no distinction between creating a building, a drawing or a piece of music."
(Mark Dudek, Letter to the Editor, arev1144_Jun92)
w : For a long time, you didn't believe that building was the
necessary outcome of designing, and in fact you've built only about 20
projects so far.
rk : S,M,L,XL is deliberately seamless about this, trying to
present an absolute equivalence between unbuilt and built, because in a
way I think it's a moot point. ..."
(Katrina Heron, "From Bauhaus to Koolhaas," wired_Jul96)
"... all the people at the AA in the 1980s who were dismissed as
wankers end up doing work all over the world. ... All these
people weren't 'paper architects' as everybody said. They were
real architects."
can do
lrc: "This particular project [Vitra Fire Station] has been built under your full control. Has it achieved what you had in mind when you designed it?"
zh: " ... I think it shows two things: one, it is not so difficult to achieve your goals ... you can do whatever you want ..." (Zaha Hadid, talking to Luis Rojo de Castro 1995 - ecq73)
b l u r b
b u s t e r
"S,M,L,XL has sold 30,000 copies. And it's about to have a second printing,
another 30,000 copies." (metr_96.06.00)
*** book
jacket blurbs
r
e_c y c l e
f o r t h c o m i n g