Posts Tagged United States
John McCracken obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 19, 2011
Minimalist artist whose bold, shiny creations reflected their surroundings
It is sometimes said that Stanley Kubrick derived the mysterious monolith in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey from the steles – upright stones, slabs or columns – in the art of the American west coast minimalist John McCracken, who has died aged 76. The leitmotif of the 1968 film was the portentous theme of Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra; of McCracken's work, the hip music of the Beach Boys would be about right. The colour of the monolith in 2001 was louring black; McCracken did black too, but glowing with good health in the same spirit as his bubblegum pinks.
McCracken said that surfboards were in the back of his mind while he worked pigment on to what he called his planks (which they frequently were) until he attained the high-gloss finish of an automobile. His aim was the polar opposite of Frank Lloyd Wright and the American arts and crafts movement: instead of humanising mass production, he laboured as a craftsman to reproduce the finish of mass-produced articles.
"What you see is what you get," although an early maxim of advanced design software, was often heard from the mouths of minimalists as well. The solemn breed of critic who gravitates towards minimal art argues that by standing on the floor, but leaning against the wall, the planks bridge the gap between sculpture and painting, an observation that everyone else recognises as piffle.
The planks do something, but the something is intrinsic to the qualities McCracken invests them with, beautiful colour and a high shine. What happens next is a happy conjunction with the space they are placed in, and they are at their best when the space combines clean lines, white walls, pale grey floors and top lighting – such as David Zwirner's gallery in Manhattan, where McCracken had the last of a series of shows in September 2010 and where the highly buffed shine picked up the geometry of floor and wall, as much in the candy colours as in the mirrored steel and the glowing blacks.
The reflections on the steles and poles and cubes standing in series or leaning against the wall always make the work seem transparent, a disconcerting quality that is a street's distance from the severe sequences of boxes by Donald Judd or the inert bricks of Carl Andre.
You would imagine that there are easier ways of making a living than all this drudgery, but perhaps McCracken picked up this gene from his father who, when he was not a cattle rancher, was an engineer in Berkeley, California, where John was born.
He grew up in northern California, where he graduated from high school before serving for four years with the US navy. He then studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. There, he married his first wife, with whom he had two sons, David and Patrick.
It was the 1950s, so the obligatory style was abstract expressionism, but McCracken worked his way backwards to the example of Stuart Davis, the American modernist whose most famous painting was Lucky Strike (1921), a precursor of Claes Oldenburg's pop art. Pop was the area where McCracken made his next raid, not for the content but for an abstraction from it, the bold configuration and the comic-book colours; an abstraction that he finally adapted to work in relief.
When he had a highly popular exhibition at the Edinburgh festival in 2009, McCracken was asked to describe his show in five words. He replied: "Minimal, maximal, 3D, colour, space." Four of those categories are common to a lot of post-second world war art; maximal referred to the paintings that McCracken made intermittently – surfaces of intricate devices based, he said, on Hindu mandalas (circular designs symbolising the universe).
McCracken was lean and good-looking, with a touch of Clint Eastwood about him, and his gait was like a film star's playing a cowboy. Maybe that came from his father. As he became successful on both the west and east coasts (not to mention London, where the Lisson Gallery has spaces as sympathetic to McCracken's art as Zwirner's in Manhattan), he lived alternately in New York and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He is survived by his second wife, Gail Barringer, who is also an artist; his sons, David and Patrick; a stepdaughter, Suzanne; his sisters, Margaret and Pamela; and three step-grandchildren.
• John Harvey McCracken, artist, born 9 December 1934; died 8 April 2011
Scottish architects RMJM sued by US staff
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 12, 2011
• Holyrood designer accused of withholding $664,000 in bonuses
• Lawsuit follows merger with US firm Hillier
RMJM, the architecture firm that, in partnership with EMBT, was responsible for the Scottish parliament, is being sued by employees in the United States over claims that it owes them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Scottish firm – which gave Sir Fred Goodwin his first job since his departure from RBS – is at the centre of a bruising row with its US staff in which it is also accused of siphoning off cash from an American company it merged with in 2007.
According to a lawsuit lodged last month in New Jersey and detailed in Building Design magazine, RMJM director Sir Fraser Morrison and his chief executive son, Peter, have reneged on the $24m (£15.5m) deal that saw the firm merge with US-based Hillier.
RMJM denied yesterday that it had siphoned off cash from Hillier but said it expected to pay staff the $664,000 they were owed "in the near future".
According to the legal papers – filed on behalf of a number of US-based principals by former Hillier owner and shareholder representative Bob Hillier – the company still owes $664,000 of a $1.5m cash bonus pool promised to staff for 2009 under the terms of the merger agreement.
The lawsuit, which seeks to recover the money plus interest and costs, also accuses RMJM of:
• Asset-stripping and "siphoning off corporate funds" worth up to $8m from Hillier, now known as RMJM Inc.
• Planning to cease "most or all" of its operations in Princeton this month following the closure of its Philadelphia operations in June.
• Trying to disguise the fact that Sir Fraser and Peter Morrison are the "alter egos" of RMJM and should thus be held liable for the cash.
"In the last three years … the plaintiff believes that RMJM Inc has transferred to RMJM Group and/or RMJM Ltd cash in the amount of approximately $8m and yet … has refused to meet their obligations," the lawsuit stated. "Upon information and belief, RMJM Group's principals divested RMJM of assets, transferring these assets to themselves and to other entities owned or controlled by these principals, without regard to the obligations."
The papers added that RMJM had cited "cash-flow difficulties" in its correspondence and noted that Fraser Morrison owns about 10m company shares and lives in New York, while Peter owns 400,000 shares and lives in Connecticut.
According to Building Design's 2011 World Architecture 100 survey, RMJM is the eighth-largest architecture firm in the world, dropping down from fifth in 2010.
Referring to the allegations, a spokesman for RMJM said: "We're surprised and disappointed at this move, as it's well-documented that, like virtually every practice, we've had to manage our cash carefully for the past 18 months. However, we fully expect the final $664k payment of the $24m we paid for Hillier to be made in the near future and for the matter to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
"Separately, the allegations of asset-stripping are both outrageous and completely and utterly untrue. In fact, the direct opposite has been the case, as millions of dollars have been injected into the US business since the beginning of the recession."
The news of the lawsuit came amid fresh rumours about Goodwin's status at the firm. Scottish media have suggested that the disgraced former banker had not been seen at RMJM for weeks.
A spokesman for RMJM said: "Sir Fred remains an adviser to the business and we call on his services as required. This encompasses periods when increased input is helpful and others when we require to call on his services less."
Sources close to Goodwin insisted the relationship had not changed and that he was still an ad hoc adviser to RMJM.
• This article was amended on 12 January 2011. The original said that RMJM is the sole company responsible for the Scottish parliament building. This has been corrected.
Why Park51 is much more than the ‘mosque at Ground Zero’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 10, 2010
Rowan Moore talks to Park51's young architect, Michel Abboud, about his controversial project to build a 'Muslim YMCA' near Ground Zero in New York
It's easier to say what the "mosque at Ground Zero" is not, than what it is. It's not a mosque, and it's not at Ground Zero – only nearby. It's not a "clubhouse for terrorists", as some objectors have called it, nor a work of "triumphalist stealth jihad". It does not "loom" over the "hallowed ground" of the 9/11 attacks, which cannot be seen from its site.
As to what it is, the explanation is not at first very enlightening. Park51, to use the project's proper name, is "a friendly and accessible platform" that "enriches lower Manhattan in body and spirit, with ecologically conscious design and operation". However, its architect, Michel Abboud, makes things clearer: it is a Muslim version of the YMCA, or the many Jewish community centres in New York. That is, it will have a swimming pool, basketball court, childcare and exhibition facilities, a library, auditorium, restaurant and catering school. As with the Christian and Jewish versions, you won't have to be a believer to use these facilities.
When built, it will be 16 storeys high, and 10% of its floor area will be a "prayer space". It will be large – big enough for 1,500 people – but there will be no minaret, or room for ablutions, or other essential features of a mosque. Its religious elements would be "a matter of interior design", as Abboud puts it, and faiths and groups other than Muslims will be able to pray there. The project now has planning permission and, subject to fundraising, will be completed, at the earliest, in three years' time.
As Abboud tells it, the year's most controversial building project came about almost by chance, through a sequence of reasonable decisions. It started when the developer Soho Properties bought the former Burlington Coat Factory in Park Avenue, lower Manhattan. It considered potential uses, conducted market research, and found that there was a need for "community facilities" in the area. Sharif El-Gamal, a Muslim American who runs Soho Properties, attended the nearby mosque of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who had been working in the area for 30 years.
Together they decided to create what is now Park51. That the project was close to Ground Zero was due to El-Gamal's and Rauf's long connections with the area. But they were conscious of the significance of the place, and it was not unwelcome to them. Rauf has said that it gave an opportunity to make "the opposite statement" to the destruction of the Twin Towers.
Abboud is a young architect on the rise, who "started building projects before I graduated", and now, at 33, runs Soma Architects, a practice with 30 staff and offices in New York, Mexico and Beirut. Its work so far has consisted mostly of smart restaurants and luxury residential projects – nothing approaching the significance of Park51. He is a walking melting pot, albeit of a somewhat privileged kind, a Catholic of French, Lebanese and Mexican origins.
"The difficulty from day one," he tells me with some understatement, "was to satisfy all the different parties: the developers, the religious institution and the average New Yorker." The building had to promote "integration and unity", and be "porous and open to the city" while "maintaining a landmark quality". He was "not going to fall into stereotypical illusions of what Islamic architecture looks like".
He conceived a "self-supporting exoskeleton", a white lattice that holds the building up, creates shade, and defines the character of the interiors. It is inspired by mashrabiyas, the elaborately patterned sunscreens common in Islamic architecture. He is not, he stresses, the first western architect to have this idea: Jean Nouvel's 1988 Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, for one, did something similar. The designs of Abboud's lattice are based on "ancient historical patterns that have a very long story to them", but "some people imagined there were reversed Stars of David included as a provocation to Jews". It was "only a few people, and very far-fetched", but he is still responding by making the traditional patterns "more blurred".
The design is "still evolving, but I expect the finished building to have a similar concept". Abboud claims that "every time the project is presented properly, without the media swirl, people respond positively".
Indeed, the idea of the project was in the public domain for six months, following its announcement in the New York Times a year ago, before anyone made a fuss. It was approved unanimously by the local Community Board in May. Only after that, with the US midterm elections looming, was a political storm whipped around it. Abboud believes that slow progress on the 9/11 memorial, which is now due to be dedicated at next year's 10th anniversary, did not help. "Whether consciously or unconsciously, people feared the centre could be built before the Ground Zero memorial was built."
It probably also doesn't help that the project is nuanced and ambiguous. As a 16-storey building for a Muslim group, located where it is, it is clearly a statement of something, but it is not completely explicit what this something is. As well as a community facility, it is a demonstration of Muslim presence in New York, and that most Muslims are not terrorists.
This clearly should not cause anyone a problem, yet in the febrile atmosphere of modern America, ambiguity makes space for baroque fears. "Let 'em build it, then bomb it – at the busiest time of day," was one of the less charming reactions. Abboud says: "It is very important to understand the healing power of architecture." There is an awful lot of healing still to do.
Michel Abboud will be speaking at Faith in the City 10-11 November at the Architecture Foundation, London
Park51 drawings prove how far ‘Ground Zero mosque’ claims are from truth
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 5, 2010
Plans for $120m project suggest building will be a multifaith community centre, including gym and playground
Judging by the criticism thrown at the Muslim centre planned for downtown Manhattan, you would think developers intended to build an Islamic citadel right on top of Ground Zero with "sponsored by al-Qaida" written on its front.
In fact, the proposed scheme for the much-slated "Ground Zero mosque" is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero – it is a multifaith community centre with an Islamic prayer area, two blocks north of the site where the twin towers once stood. Now, conceptual drawings of the building have been released, revealing a planned structure that is strikingly modern and in keeping with the spirit of New York's most cutting-edge design.
Park51, named after its location on the site of an old coat factory in Park Place, would be a sleek 15-storey tower sandwiched between older buildings.
The most vivid element of the renderings, drawn by a New York-based design studio, Soma Architects, is the building's white frontage, which is broken up into a lattice of interlocking geometric shapes. At night, it would be lit up like a glistening honeycomb.
The device is a clear allusion to the intricate arabesque motifs found in Islamic architecture, and is reminiscent of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, which shot the architect Jean Nouvel to fame in the 1980s. But it also pays homage to other religions, with the Jewish Star of David being clearly visible among its patterns.
Contrary to the mass of bad publicity that has been heaped on it in recent weeks, the building is designed to be multifaith and also secular.
Sharif el-Gamal, the developer of the $120m (£76m) project, told Associated Press that nearly a quarter of its space would be devoted to a sports and fitness centre, which, it is hoped, would attract New York residents of any faith and ethnicity for a fee of up to $2,700 a year per family. Another floor would be given over to a playground and childcare area.
In addition, there would be a restaurant and exhibition space, and on the 12th floor a memorial and sanctuary remembering the events of 11 September 2001 that would again be multidenominational.
"I don't think that once this thing gets built, anyone will be picketing," Gamal told AP.
The most controversial aspect of the scheme – its Muslim prayer space, which would occupy two floors in the basement – will not be a mosque at all as the construction of the building does not satisfy the stringent requirements for a sanctified mosque.
Seen from the inside, the renderings show the lattice work casting intricate shadows across the white floors, another allusion to arabesque design with its emphasis on naturally lit interiors.
The drawings are only a vision of how the building might go. An official architect for the project has yet to be appointed, and ground breaking on the construction will not begin for at least three years.
By then, the developer and the charity behind the project, the Cordoba Initiative, hope that the furore will have died down.
Gamal said that he regretted the way things had gone. "I would have done things a lot differently during this process if I understood what we were up against. People have been calling this the 'Ground Zero mosque'. It's not at Ground Zero and it's not a mosque. Our identity has been stolen from us. It has been stolen by extremists."
The attack has been led by Christian evangelical and rightwing political groups, who say Park51 is a "victory mosque", revelling in the glory of 9/11. In the most extreme case, this September, Pastor Terry Jones threatened to burn 200 Qur'ans in protest at the centre.
Could a building be less militantly Islamic?
First illustrations of the 15-storey Park51 development planned to house the Islamic centre reveal a decidedly upbeat and glamorous building, more festive than threatening. These preliminary renderings by Soma, however, should be thought of as what might be rather than what definitely will. An architect has yet to be officially appointed.
Even so, the interiors – a honeycomb structure awash with daylight – look as if they could be uplifting and special. But then, you would expect something glamorous and fresh from Soma, a New York firm founded by the Lebanese-born Michel Abboud, who has recently completed the enjoyably hip Tartinery Nolita brasserie in SoHo.
Equally, at least four floors of Park51 are to be given over to a gym and spa, and only two basement floors to a Muslim prayer hall. With a restaurant, artists' studios and a childcare centre, this $140m building clad in an abstract play of Islamic patterns could hardly be less militantly hardcore. As one young man attending the nearby Sufi al-Farah mosque in lower Manhattan told the New York Times: "Because this is a new country, it revolutionises everything. Food, industry, philosophy and even religion." He might have added: "Islamic architecture, too."
Jonathan Glancey
New York officials sue Christie’s to regain British architect’s drawings
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 12, 2010
City takes out legal action over ownership of Jacob Wrey Mould's landmark designs found in a skip 50 years ago
At some point in the 1950s a craftsman called Buckley was working on a site in lower Manhattan when he came across a stash of papers dumped in a skip. They were a set of architectural drawings in watercolours of plans for city parks including details of fountains, clocks, terraces and other structures.
What probably caught Buckley's eye was the stately nature of the designs and their elaborate colouring. Recognising their innate value, he took a pile of more than 100 of the drawings home and filed them away for safe keeping.
More than 50 years later they have become the subject of a $1m (£640,000) lawsuit lodged at the New York supreme court. The legal action was brought by the city's authorities against the late craftsman's son, Sam Buckley, and Christie's, the auctioneers through whom he tried to sell the drawings.
They were the work of Jacob Wrey Mould, a British architect who came to New York in 1853 to design a Unitarian church in Fourth Avenue and 20th Street. Though the building has long been pulled down, in its day it was quite a sensation with its striped facade of red and cream stone earning it the nickname Church of the Holy Zebra.
Mould, an irascible man who was not much liked but greatly admired, went on to collaborate with Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park. Together they planned the original buildings of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Mould also had a large hand in Belvedere Castle and the carvings of the Bethesda Terrace, both in Central Park. Later, he was seminal in the creation of other quintessential New York features such as Morningside and Riverside Parks.
Most of the drawings were signed by Mould. They display his love of vibrant colours as a student of the designer and polychrome theorist Owen Jones with whom he designed a room in Buckingham Palace. They include plans for structures that were built, such as Bethesda Fountain, as well as ones that were not – a set of street lamps for Park Avenue, for instance.
Every one was stamped with the badge of the New York Parks Department, for whom Mould worked from 1857 to shortly before his death in 1886.
When Christie's was commissioned by the younger Buckley to sell 86 of the 127 drawings in his late father's possession, the auction house contacted the city authorities for help with valuing the works and to ask whether New York wanted the first chance to buy them.
But the city saw an invaluable historic collection that should never have left its public ownership.
"They are the kind of thing we would never throw away, but for whatever reason they were erroneously discarded or lost," said Gerald Singleton, the lawyer representing the city. "Once we looked at them we realised that the city remains the owner of these drawings."
It has persuaded the New York court to put a preliminary restraining order that prevents Buckley or Christie's from selling any of the drawings.
In return, the city has promised to back off from its legal threats and to attempt to reach a settlement.
"We're confident this will end amicably," Singleton said.
If New York regains the drawings, it has pledged to use them when renovating historic parts of the city.
Lucille Gordon, Mould's biographer, said the documents were also hugely important in the understanding of the architect himself. "He is a piece of our history – his work is scattered all over New York state. Yet so few papers of any kind have been left behind, and any scrap that Mould touched has a value."
Jacob Wrey Mould
Born 1825 in Bloomsbury in London, and educated at King's College School.
Studied under Owen Jones, the so-called master of polychromy, travelling to the Alhambra in Spain.
Took part in the building of Dorchester House on Park Lane and in the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, moving to New York soon afterwards.
Started work with the city's park department in 1857, rising by 1870 to be its architect-in-chief.
Apart from a five-year stint in Lima in Peru from 1874, he spent most of his later life working for the New York parks.
Also renowned as a distinguished pianist and organist.
Iran seeks more urbane image with sleek new London embassy
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 1, 2010
Tehran looks to escape association with SAS and 1980 siege by building contemporary structure with emphasis on culture
Iran is attempting to reinvent its reputation in the UK by building an embassy building in central London featuring a contemporary art gallery and cultural centre.
The Iranian foreign ministry has submitted a planning application for the six-storey building on a South Kensington street corner, featuring a dramatic cantilevered arch, acutely-angled walls and irregularly punched-out windows, a recent architectural vogue. Its architect believes the building, which will cost at least £100m and is sited in a sensitive area of historic buildings, will embody "Iran's public image in London".
The site, which is just a short walk from the Natural History museum and the Royal Albert Hall, marks a radical departure from the Iranian's ambassador's current headquarters in a converted town house on nearby Prince's Gate, scene of the infamous 1980 terrorist siege that was ended dramatically by the SAS.
"The cube-shaped building at the corner could be accessed freely by the public and feature exhibits such as contemporary artworks made by young Iranian artists," said Armin Daneshgar, the Vienna-based Iranian architect who is working with a leading UK environmental engineer, Battle McCarthy, to make the building sustainable.
"We believe Iran's rich cultures, especially contemporary movements, are still largely unknown to the west."
The plans for the new embassy building invite comparison with plans by Tehran's great enemy, the US government, which is spending more than £1bn on a new UK outpost on a vacant site in Wandsworth, well away from the traditional London embassy districts.
When designs were unveiled earlier this year, showing a tall glass and steel cube with a lake on one side and a ha-ha on the other, the state department's architect, James Timberlake of the firm Kieran Timberlake, said it would be "a beacon of democracy – light-filled and light-emitting". Critics said it was a modern "fortress", more like the Tower of London.
Diplomatic relations between London and Tehran remain fraught. Last month, there was an international outcry at Iran's intention to stone to death a woman for alleged adultery. The sentence was commuted to hanging last week. European Union countries have also recently toughened sanctions in an effort to block President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial nuclear programme.
Meanwhile, the Iranians' architectural ambitions are already facing problems. Local residents have decried the scheme as "like a spaceship", "an eyesore out of keeping with the rest of the area", "catastrophic" and "hideous".
A group of concerned residents has even asked Prince Charles to object to the designs, which represents the sternest test yet of the prince's willingness to keep out of public planning matters since a high court judge in June described his opposition to a £3bn redevelopment plan for Chelsea barracks as "unwelcome".
John Edward Howes, a resident of 83-85 Queen's Gate, opposite the site, wrote to the prince, saying the design was "out of character" with the surrounding conservation area and appealed to Charles's family heritage by drawing attention to "Prince Albert's grand plan" for the neighbourhood, the Mail on Sunday reported.
A spokesman for Clarence House said the prince has not made any intervention at this point.
Neighbouring homeowners have also accused Tehran and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea of being overly secretive about the designs and complain they have not been allowed sufficient time to comment.
"We have been in touch with the council and they say we have to turn up at the planning office with photo identification to see anything," said Ian Dungavell, director of the Victorian Society, who complained images should have been posted online as is now usual for planning authorities.
"People need to know how tall it is, how it fits in the area and they need to have a reasonable amount of time to respond. If local people feel a fast one is being pulled, they are going to be alienated from the entire process."
The council said it withheld images of the scheme from its planning website at the request of the police's diplomatic protection group, who were concerned about security issues. In response to criticism over the past few days, it has posted a limited number of renderings which show the striking building in context.
Today, Paul Finch, chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the government's design watchdog, praised what he had seen of Iran's design. "The building seems to be a statement that they are a contemporary culture rather than utterly traditionalist and its rather surprising and refreshing in that sense," he said.
"It has been designed to be part of the city rather than a standalone building, such as the US embassy, which can't be part of the city because there is no such urban fabric where it is being planned."
A planning decision on the Iranian embassy is due in early September, a spokesman for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea said. No one from the Iranian embassy was available to comment.
Shusaku Arakawa obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 16, 2010
Japanese architect and artist whose challenging designs tilted at mortality
The Japanese architect and artist Shusaku Arakawa believed that it was immoral for people to have to die. With his wife, Madeline Gins, he designed houses and public spaces that were supposed to help stop us from ageing. His death, at the age of 73, is a flaw in his philosophy of transhumanism, or reversible destiny. "This mortality thing is bad news," Gins said after he died, adding that she would now increase her efforts to prove that "ageing can be outlawed".
For Arakawa and Gins, the ideal form of a house was one that kept residents in a "perpetually tentative relationship with their surroundings". The more our homes challenge us, architecturally, the more likely we are to stay young, grappling with their complexities and, in the case of Arakawa and Gins's flats and houses, their sheer oddity – even perversity.
Their most extreme design, the Bioscleave house (2008), in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, took eight years to build and cost the couple $2m of their own money. Before this colourful and bewildering home was finished, Arakawa and Gins lost the small fortune that they had accumulated since the early 1960s. They had invested money through Bernard Madoff, the American conman they had met at an art exhibition in New York, and the resulting loss led them to close their office in Manhattan.
The Bioscleave house boasted at least three dozen shades of paint. The building features sloping floors in the guise of cartoon-like sand dunes, windows placed where no window is normally placed, level changes aimed at conveying a feeling of being in two places at once, no doors, no privacy, curiously shaped rooms and any number of other surrealist tricks.
The house was designed to keep residents and visitors on their toes – they are hard pushed to even remain vertical. A number of floor-to-ceiling poles were provided, which can be grasped if the inevitable sense of disorientation gets a bit too much.
These curious devices were intended to stimulate us in ways conventional homes do not. A state of comfort, according to Arakawa and Gins, creates anxiety because, although cosseting, it can only ever be finite – and thus shortens rather than prolongs life.
Arakawa rarely used his first name. He was born in Nagoya, studied maths and medicine at the University of Tokyo and attended Musashino art school in Tokyo, where he made surrealist prints. He set off for New York in 1961 with, he claimed, just $14 and the artist Marcel Duchamp's phone number in his pockets. He took a course at Brooklyn Museum art school where, in 1962, he met and married Gins, a fellow student. In 1987 they started the Containers of Mind Foundation together, which later evolved into the Architectural Body Research Foundation. These were the hard-to-place philosophical stepping-stones of their lifelong attempt to create buildings that would enable us to defy death.
They began to paint a series of 83 large paintings on the theme of the mechanism of meaning which were exhibited around the world and, over the years, paid for Arakawa and Gins' architectural experiments. To date, these are a project for a city of reversible destiny on 75 acres of Tokyo wasteland (it never happened); the Bioscleave house; and nine reversible destiny lofts in Mitaka, Tokyo, completed in 2005 at a total cost of around $6m.
The reversible destiny lofts boast colourful rooms in the form of cylinders, cubes and spheres and are known for being interesting and challenging, rather than comfortable, to live in. They are dedicated to the memory of Helen Keller, the American author and political activist who lost her sight and hearing as a child. Keller was a role model for Arakawa and Gins because by relearning how to communicate, she somehow proved that reversible destiny was possible.
The pair believed that the ideal residents of their homes should, following the same principle, be blank slates so that their experience of architecture was continually novel. In this way, explained Arakawa, they would forget that they had to die.
Arakawa had exhibitions of his work around the world, including at the Angela Flowers Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also wrote poetry, animated by such thought-provoking sentiments as "when I am away from you, I feel like a watermelon seed", and "he is elegant between his toes".
He published several tantalising books with Gins, notably The Mechanism of Meaning (1971), Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die (1997) and Making Dying Illegal (2006).
Gins survives him.
• Shusaku Arakawa, artist and architect, born 6 July 1936; died 18 May 2010
Michael Tomasky: Friday quiz: the architect’s sketch
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 11, 2010
The quiz returns with 20th-century architecture (okay, modernist architecture, which squeezes in the late 19th). Why architecture? Well, because it's cool. Because I know a little something about it, and we're starting to run out of things I know a little something about. And because, like film, architecture is one of those things that as I was growing up it seemed to me that generally informed people took the time and trouble to learn something about.
For example, when I moved to New York, I noticed that everybody had this book and spent time walking around the city studying the architecture. And New York isn't even America's greatest architecture city (horrors! New York isn't the greatest?). Chicago is, by a mile.
I wonder now if this passion is an American thing, since so much of the exciting architecture of the century past was American. I guess we're about to find out.
1. Daniel Burnham and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are associated with what urban movement, which dates to the unveiling of the "White City" at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and influenced the design of the National Mall in Washington, DC?
a. The neoclassical movement
b. The city beautiful movement
c. The new republican movement
2. This famous architect was killed by a jealous husband on the roof of the second Madison Square Garden in New York, which he had designed. For extra credit, name the wife whom the architect was fooling around with, and the jealous husband.
a. Calvert Vaux
b. Stanford White
c. Othmar Ammann
3. The arts and crafts movement started in England and spread to the US. What American city is especially known for having followed arts and crafts precepts in its planning and civic architecture?
a. Pasadena, California
b. Seattle, Washington
c. Newark, New Jersey
4. This Chicago architect is the father of modern architecture and coiner of the famous phrase "form follows function"; highly filigreed facades, such as on the Chicago Stock Exchange building, were a trademark of his.
a. Paul Goldberger
b. Herbert Mitgang
c. Louis Sullivan
5. Architecture and ideology have been closely linked throughout human history. At the time of the Russian revolution, the architect Vladimir Tatlin presented an audacious design for a Monument to the Third International to celebrate the new workers' state. It was never built; why?
a. It was 55 stories and he refused on principle to put in elevators, which he considered bourgeois
b. Lenin, after initial enthusiasm, decided that the design reflected obscurantist tendencies and had him shot
c. There wasn't enough steel in all of Russia to build it
6. What famous architect headed the Bauhaus?
a. Otto Dix
b. Walter Gropius
c. Viktor Lutze
7. Which of the following did Frank Lloyd Wright not design?
a. The UN headquarters
b. The Guggenheim Museum
c. Fallingwater
8. What movement, from Europe and America, is best known for flat glass or glass-and-steel facades – no setbacks or tiers, no adornment whatsoever?
a. One Worldism
b. International Style
c. Neocubism
9. Deconstructivism is the name for a more recent movement of architects (some of whom don't like the term) who are known for playfully altering buildings' skin and shapes, seeming to defy geometry, making twisting skyscrapers and public buildings whose parts seem to have emanated out from one another as if by spontaneous combustion. Which of these architects is not fairly associated with this movement?
a. Robert A.M. Stern
b. Frank Gehry
c. Rem Koolhaus
10. According to the website greatbuildings.com, what was the most visited building in the world for the week ending June 5, 2010?
a. The Taj Mahal
b. The Statue of Liberty
c. The Roman Colosseum
Nice last question, eh? Thanks. Okay, let's go below the fold.
Answers: 1-b; 2-b; 3-a; 4-c; 5-c; 6-b; 7-a; 8-b; 9-a; 10-c.
I would have known all but the last one, on which, incidentally, the list is here and is really fascinating. Re 2, the cuckolded hubby was Harry K. Thaw, and the red lady was Evelyn Nesbitt. My best fake answers this week were on 5, although some of you may have chuckled at 4 a and b.
Bruce Graham obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 26, 2010
Innovative architect whose skyscrapers marked city skylines around the world
Few architects can legitimately lay claim to having shaped the urban landscape of several cities in their lifetimes, but Bruce Graham, the leading partner of the US design firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), who has died aged 84 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, certainly can. With an iron fist and an all-consuming passion, Graham ruled one of the most influential architectural practices of the late 20th century from Chicago, the city that synthesises the visual energy, technical inventiveness and economic clout of 20th-century modernism in architecture.
Graham's designs for SOM, which at their best possess these special qualities, mark the skylines of Chicago and London, but also Barcelona, Hong Kong and many other US cities. In Chicago, the city of skyscrapers, he authored its two most canonical structures – the delicately stacked volumes of the Sears Tower (for 24 years the world's tallest building, recently renamed the Willis Tower) and the tapering black Hancock Tower, with its distinctive criss-cross bracing disappearing into the Illinois sky.
In London, he gave shape to large parts of the 1980s building boom, designing nine buildings and the masterplan for the Broadgate office complex at Liverpool Street station and the Ludgate development near St Paul's Cathedral (for Stuart Lipton's development company, Rosehaugh Stanhope), as well as the initial plans for the Canary Wharf financial district in London's Docklands and the beautifully landscaped Stockley Park, near Heathrow. Outside London, he designed the restrained and elegant headquarters for Wills Tobacco (1971) in Bristol and the Boots Pure Drug Company headquarters, Nottingham (1968), both collaborations between SOM and the British architectural practice YRM.
Quick-witted, curious and always alert, Graham seemed to capture the spirit of the age from the mid-1970s to the 1990s. In a sense, he reinvented the role of the architect, recognising that the job is just as much about city-making and power-broking as it is about pure design talent, which Graham possessed in spades. His London client Lipton is adamant that Graham's understanding of how buildings are put together, how structure and form are integrated, and how any design must respond to its social context, changed the way commercial buildings have been made in the UK from the 1980s on.
Born in La Cumbre, Colombia, to a Peruvian mother and a Scottish banker father, Graham was brought up in Puerto Rico. As a child, he dreamed of building cities. As a teenager, he took pleasure in mapping the local slums, showing an early interest in the social and spatial politics of city life. He was educated in the US as an engineer and an architect and then joined the US navy during the second world war. "I thought I had landed in a dream," he noted in an interview in 1997, when reminiscing about his first impressions of Chicago and the midwest, where he saw his first building more than 10 storeys high. Two decades later, he was responsible for designing the tallest and third tallest buildings in the world.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Graham moved to Chicago and developed a fast-track career within SOM – one of the world's largest architectural practices – becoming a general partner in 1960 and leading the firm during the next two decades. In these early days, he forged links with Mies van der Rohe and other European modernist architects who had fled Nazi Germany, and was hugely influenced by their sparse, minimalist and technologically advanced design ethic.
But Graham never saw his projects at SOM as single pieces. They were part of a continuum of collaboration and experimentation that spanned his whole career, relying on the input from his trusted engineer Fazlur Khan ("the best in the world, who understood mathematics and architecture") and his fellow, equally talented design partners at SOM, such as Gordon Bunshaft and Myron Goldsmith.
From the inspired, minimalist designs for the Inland Steel building (1958) in Chicago (still regarded as one of the finest postwar US buildings) to the exposed structural arches of Exchange House (1990) that effortlessly span 80 metres above the railway tracks leading to Liverpool Street station in London, Graham's buildings reveal a desire to push forward the boundaries of experimentation in construction, technology and architectural expression. His design philosophy reflected a lifelong interest in collaboration – with engineers, artists, landscape designers, developers, clients and other architects – emphasising his belief that buildings do not stand alone, but always belong to a context.
But those of us who worked alongside Graham, as I did as an adviser to SOM and the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism in the late 1980s, recognised a generosity of spirit behind the aggressive "city-builder" who inherited the traditions and methods of Daniel Burnham, the great urban visionary who created the 1901 Plan of Chicago. Graham became chairman of the Chicago Central Area Plan in 1980 and worked closely with Mayor Richard Daley (father of the current incumbent) and Chicago's business community to bring about change at the heart of the city he loved.
Graham was deeply critical of the negative impact of mid-20th-century planning, which devastated urban communities with the construction of freeways, the expansion of the suburbs and the emptying of city centres. His vision with the Chicago Central Area Plan was to reverse this trend, creating new downtown residential neighbourhoods, often bucking the market with radical ideas – such as the construction of the Hancock Tower in a fringe location – which brought investment to neglected areas of the city. Today, Chicago is seen as a US metropolitan success story, with more people moving back into the centre, as Graham had envisaged decades ago.
Graham possessed the raw intellect of a streetfighter, rather than the polished mannerisms of a design professional. He enjoyed spending time with mayors, developers and corporate clients, but was scornful of elitism. He often spoke frankly and harshly. Frank Lloyd Wright, the doyen of American architecture, was, in Graham's mind, "a mean old man". Many architects were simply "stupid". But he was equally generous with those he admired and went out of his way to help them, especially his old friend Frank Gehry.
Behind the hot-headed, hard-speaking facade was a softer, psychologically astute and socially engaged individual who cared passionately about the world. He had strong opinions on politics and delighted at the demise of imperialism, as he saw it. Dedicated to his family, he referred to his Austrian wife Jane, a distinguished interior architect, as his "No 1 critic". Graham's softer personality came out regularly. He often spoke Spanish, hugging a glass of whiskey among colleagues, grimacing or giggling at the stories of common friends and enemies. One of his favourite phrases was the basketball epithet "slam dunk". In many ways, Bruce's life was a slam dunk for urban architecture, and this is how he wished to be remembered.
Jane died in 2004. Bruce is survived by his son, George, and daughters, Lisa and Mara.
• Bruce John Graham, architect, born 1 December 1925; died 6 March 2010
Crystal Cathedral had its day | Harriet Baber
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 5, 2010
When religion is reduced to a collection of gimmicks, there is little to stop it falling victim to changing fashions
On 18 October 2010, Southern California's landmark Crystal Cathedral, the prototype of all late 20th Century American Megachurches, filed for bankruptcy. I drove up the following Sunday to get a look at the place while it was still in operation.
The Crystal Cathedral proper, a spectacular glass structure designed by Philip Johnson and completed in 1980, dominates a landscaped campus that includes the congregation's original church building, designed by Richard Neutra, Richard Meier's "Welcoming Center", and a variety of other buildings, reflecting pools and religiously themed statuary. A German tourist prevailed on me to take a picture of him and his wife posing in a larger-than-life tableau of Jesus as Good Shepherd.
The campus and decor are the culmination of a high-church revival in American Protestantism that began in the 19th century. It was then that evangelical Christians, who had traditionally assembled in meeting houses and preaching halls, constructed faux-Gothic edifices, dressed their preachers in gowns, and "beautified" their services, exchanging tedium for vulgarity. By the mid-20th century, they had appropriated all the "potent symbols of cinema secularism" theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described in his rendition of an evangelical Easter service conducted, as was not uncommon, in a movie theatre:
The service began with the house in darkness and the gradual lighting of the stage, symbolising the Easter dawn. The organist appeared with the spotlight upon him as his console emerged trickily and automatically from its cubicle to full view. The choir was for some obscure reason gowned in a symphony of colours from deep blue on the outside to bright red in the centre… Here was a church service with so little of its own to go on that movie technic could dominate the spirit of it completely.
The walls of the Welcoming Center were covered with words – with optimistic platitudes, rendered in raised metallic lettering, like Arabic calligraphy decorating a mosque. Words were not vehicles for conveying new information. They were icons to be gazed at, sacraments to be consumed – over and over again. Bible verses were talismans, working their magic; slogans were mantras.
The Crystal Cathedral's trademark joy was subdued that Sunday. The church had not been able to raise enough cash through the sale of assets to satisfy its creditors. It was operating on a strictly cash-and-carry basis: a sign at the Welcoming Center bookstore announced that credit cards would no longer be accepted. Worst of all, Rick Warren's nearby Saddleback megachurch had appropriated a 170-acre package of prime real estate in Rancho Capistrano, which the Crystal Cathedral had sold months earlier to help offset its $55m dollar debt.
Of course we don't expect popular entertainments to last. Fashion is arbitrary. There was no particular reason why hip-hop replaced disco or why the 1970s favoured earth tones while the 1990s featured violet and teal. We look in vain for some underlying social circumstance to explain why at a particular time and in a particular place popular culture takes the form it does: fashions change because they are fashions and so have nothing to recommend them but their relative novelty.
Fashion dominates the world of evangelical Christianity and its therapeutic penumbra. The Crystal Cathedral, that glitzy architectural marvel, has become a 1980s nostalgia item. Now Rick Warren is the anointed leader of America's "People of Faith" and, for the time being, Orange county crowds are flocking to Saddleback's dull preaching halls.
But there is nothing new under the sun. Saddleback and the Crystal Cathedral, Willow Creek and all the other evangelical megachurches that have had their time in the sun sell the same product: mind-power through talk-magic, which in secular packaging is just what all the innumerable therapies and self-help programmes on the market promise.
In the US, where school psychologists are almost as common as school nurses, we are obsessed with talk therapies because they are in fact ecumenical and secularised versions of evangelical Christianity, our old time religion. Twelve-step programmes, beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous, appropriated the conversion scenario of revivalism, eliminating references to Jesus in favour of appeals to a generic "higher power". Later self-help programmes and therapies dispensed with supernatural intermediaries altogether. Learning the right tricks and gimmicks, thinking the right thoughts and acquiring the proper attitudes would directly, by a law of nature, make good things happen for you.
Schuller, Warren and other new-style evangelical preachers, who focus on this-worldly improvement rather than otherworldly salvation, have not sold out Christianity in favour of secular self-help. They have simply reappropriated those bits of evangelical Christianity that cycled through the secularisation process and emerged as therapies, having in the process acquired the veneer of science.
So if you wonder why Americans are, anomalously, religious it is because we have evacuated religion of all content. There are of course theological doctrines on the books, which church members tick off, in the way that they agree to accept screenfuls of conditions for installing new software. But most have no serious interest in these theoretical matters. Whether signing on for a new therapy or self-help programme, trying out a new diet or a new church, they are looking for a bag of tricks, a collection of gimmicks and recipes that will get them the material prosperity, perfect health, beautiful bodies, ideal relationships and complete happiness to which they believe they are entitled.
I never understood the appeal of these programmes, whether religious or secular: they claimed to produce plain empirical results but were never empirically confirmed. For all the cheerful platitudes and possibility thinking, the Crystal Cathedral was bankrupt.
Beyond that, as a religious believer I was disheartened. Was this all religion was: Cheerful platitudes and advice for successful living? Recipes for doing well in this world and the next? A pleasant place to pass an hour or two: an uplifting programme, brunch in the Welcoming Center and a stroll through the grounds?
I thought religion was a window into heaven, into another world of power, glory and intensity, to the contemplation of divine beauty. When I got religion, I never imagined this flat, dull evangelicalism.
Architecture, Art and design, Christianity, Comment, guardian.co.uk, Religion, United States, World news
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