DAVID EISEN

Master builders

DAVID EISEN — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:46:05 GMT

Books on, and by, architects
A good architectural monograph is more than just a big colorful book with too-good-to-be-true photos; it’s a window into the heart and mind of the architect it profiles.

HIGH TECH: Terminal 4 at Madrid’s Barajas Airport typifies Paul Rogers’s skeletal style.

A good architectural monograph is more than just a big colorful book with too-good-to-be-true photos; it’s a window into the heart and mind of the architect it profiles. Four new monographs reveal four architects’ personalities and four different ways of looking at — and even transforming — the world.

Richard Meier is, it’s clear, in love with order. HOUSES AND APARTMENTS (Rizzoli; 296 pages; $85) illustrates 35 years’ worth of his well-oiled machines for living. The book’s generous proportions (12-1/2 x 12-1/2), spare but elegant graphics, and nearly wordless spreads are of a piece with his pristine modernist monumentality.

Meier’s gleaming white country houses and perfectly sculpted urban apartment buildings are as cleanly designed as an iPod and as seductive as softcore porn. He composes his curving walls, serpentine stairs, and glass-wrapped galleries to provide the choreography for an idealized vision of domesticity. The result retreats into a glorious but icy perfection that is remote from life as most of us live it.

Steven Holl is more open to the impositions of an unruly world, taking the quirky character of a place and a client and giving them a poetic interpretation. ARCHITECTURE SPOKEN (Rizzoli; 304 pages; $75) talks and walks us through his work, which includes projects as diverse as the Simmons Hall Dormitory at MIT, the glowing glass Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, and the long, thin metal-paneled tube that contains a sewage treatment plant in Hamden, Connecticut. Holl’s buildings, and the book, are organized around ideas like “porosity” and “compression” that allow his strange and often contorted buildings to tell a story. Excerpts from his lectures articulate the intellectual and experiential qualities he wants his projects to embody. Unlike Meier, Holl doesn’t have a signature style. His childlike sketches show the origins of his fractured forms in emotional responses to landscapes and programs, rather than in a desire to reorder the universe.

Kenneth Powell’s RICHARD ROGERS: COMPLETE WORKS (Phaidon) documents the life work of a prodigious tinkerer. Rogers creates mechanistic structures, like the Centre Pompidou in Paris (a collaboration with Renzo Piano), that are suffused with a humanistic spirit. Most of his buildings use imposing steel skeletons to order urban environments, and smaller-scale elements of wood and masonry to maintain an ever-changing sense of vitality. This three-volume ($175) boxed set is stuffed with photos, sketches, autobiographical notes, and explanations illustrating his use of high-tech engineering to implement a social vision.

Everyday use

DAVID EISEN — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:25:04 GMT

Rethinking design at the ICA, and City Hall at Pinkcomma Gallery
Two new exhibits take design — the familiar background of our daily lives — and give it immediacy in a gallery setting.

CHANGING WITH THE TIMES? Höweler + Yoon proposes wrapping City Hall to create new public
spaces that will connect it to the plaza below.

Two new exhibits take design — the familiar background of our daily lives — and give it immediacy in a gallery setting. Hovering above the waterfront at the ICA, “Design Life Now” is a polished production that overviews the new and flashy. “ReThinking Boston City Hall,” at the subterranean Pinkcomma Gallery, offers some insight into the renewal of the old and unfashionable.

“Design Life Now” originated at the Smithsonian-Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York last winter, the third in the museum’s triennial series, following “Design Culture Now” in 2000 and “Inside Design Now” in 2003. The shows have always been a bit of grab bag, but against the backdrop of the Cooper Hewitt’s intimately scaled interiors and 19th-century ornamentation, the up-to-the-moment works have cohered as a statement about modern sensibilities. This one is the first to make its way out of New York (it travels to Houston in January), and it’s been redesigned for the ICA’s white-box galleries. Architect and Harvard Design School professor Michael Meredith has built out the space with a series of thick parallel plaster walls inspired both by the rows of industrial shelving at big-box discounters and by the streets, alleys, doorways, and windows of traditional urban centers. Openings channel movement through the exhibition and past individual objects framed by recesses carved into the plaster.

At its best, the exhibit re-examines the unity of form and function that’s the hallmark of great design. The more familiar objects on display include everything from Nike sneakers and the iPod Nano to Thom Browne’s men’s suits. In the realm of domestic design, ReadyMade magazine upends ideas of fine furnishing. Recycled soda crates become drawers in a storage unit whose shell is made of cut-out plywood; a chandelier is made from chopped-off water bottles stuffed with electric lightbulbs. Chip Kidd’s book covers compress literary narratives into visual images — the jacket for Jay McInerney’s The Good Life shows plates, forks, and spoons covered with what we recognize as World Trade Center dust. Even the most familiar objects reach out and grab you with their takes on the tried and true. The humble prescription pill bottle of Deborah Adler and Klaus Rosburg is color-coded and shaped for easy reading in such an intuitively obvious way, you want to kick yourself for not inventing it first.

Best buildings

DAVID EISEN — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:48:25 GMT

Traveling with architecture
Most travel guides are little more than lists of colorless places in which to waste your money and sanitized tourist traps in which to waste your time.

ICONS: Charles Jencks lavishes anecdotes and criticism on modern architecture that travel books usually reserve for the Tower of London or the Eiffel Tower.

Most travel guides are little more than lists of colorless places in which to waste your hard-earned money and sanitized tourist traps in which to waste your valuable time. So how do you find those stunning vistas, those gorgeous squares, the breathtaking contemporary architecture, and the up-and-coming neighborhoods that aren’t clogged with all the other out-of-towners? You can start with this collection of books, focusing on the best in architecture and design rather than the most familiar.

VENICE by Alberto Bertolazzi and photographer Marcello Bertinetti and SICILY by Maria Cristina Castellucci and photographer Antonio Attini (both 223 pages, $24.95), the first two volumes in White Star’s “Italy from Above” series, present the lush countryside and dense cities of the region in glorious aerial photographs. Although the books do include well-known sites (St. Mark’s, the Rialto Bridge, San Giorgio), they aren’t shot as isolated sno-globe monuments but as extraordinary constructions that grow organically out of an urban fabric, a culture, and a timeless landscape.

Tiny towns that are nothing more than dots on the Michelin maps are shown clinging precariously to the sides of mountains; out-of-the-way neighborhoods most tourists miss are revealed as intimate slices of paradise sheltered beneath red-tile roofs. Seen from above, the azure seas and bustling markets become a seamless tapestry of Mediterranean life. The text is minimal; just enough to put each view into context, identify its location, and point out its important features. Future volumes, Rome and The Villages of Italy, are due out later this year.

As great as Italy looks from the clouds down, an immersion in Italian life from the ground up — as envisioned by a great architect — can be just as rewarding. CARLO SCARPA, edited by Guido Beltramini and Italo Zannier (Rizzoli, 320 pages, $65.00) provides an overview of the architectural work of a mid-20th-century master who combined a sensitivity to traditional materials and craftsmanship with an abstract sensibility. Scarpa’s work in Venice, Verona, and surrounding towns uses an evocative layering of walls, spaces, geometric ornamentation, and finely crafted stone and metal to evoke an image of modernity where the human hand is aided rather than replaced by the machine. Some of his buildings, like the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, are prominent local landmarks. Others, like the Brion memorial complex near Verona, are far from the beaten path. All offer a brilliant vision of cultural transformation that is worth seeking out as a complement, or antidote, to the usual trek from ancient monument to ancient monument. Rizzoli’s fine series of architectural monographs offers similar portraits of Antonio Gaudí, Santiago Calatrava, and a host of other architects rooted in their place and time.

Walk the talk

DAVID EISEN — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:13:31 GMT

Despite Boston’s pedestrian-friendly reputation, there’s plenty of room for improvement
Boston is billed as America’s premier pedestrian city, but is it really true?

A KICKIN’ BIKE STAND: Architect Keith Moskow’s bike-stand design would free up clogged city sidewalks.

Boston is billed as America’s premier pedestrian city, but is it really true? Yes, Beacon Hill’s colonial townhouses and narrow streets are lovely and put tourists and locals alike in a pleasant mood. Back Bay’s wide, leafy boulevards and Victorian-era eccentricities enfold the urban stroller in lush Olmstead-style greenery. And the more recently developed South End entices strollers with its outdoor cafes, lovingly restored storefronts, small parks, and intimate gardens.

But it’s not enough to rely on the achievements of the past; we need streets that work for us today. Stand back and take in the city from the pedestrian’s point of view: too many streets are not all they are cracked up to be. Overflowing trash cans and asphalt perennially under repair belie those adoring urban portraits found in college view books and tourist brochures. The delights of the city should be endless, yet they’re too often marred by rundown sidewalks, uninspired design, and a loss of civility and respect.

Perhaps we’ve lost sight of the sensuality of public places now that the Internet and cell phones provide the connective tissue that holds society together. Too many of us — whether bankers, college kids, or cooks — armor ourselves against the environment in our rolling cocoons of glass and steel. All that technology may be convenient, but it sucks the life out of our streets. A sense of civic pride and our city’s collective memory can only be achieved by re-energizing urban thoroughfares traversed by foot.

In Boston, a number of advocates are committed to making our streets accessible to the diverse city constituencies that share these narrow slices of real estate by making them as great they can be. Some are urban designers, some are nonprofits, and others are city officials, but they all want to give a better form to the pulsing energy of urban life today.

TRASHED TREASURE: Boston’s sidewalks are riddled with garbage and cracks — not exactly a pedestrian’s paradise.

Hoofers’ lament
“Walking is for everyone” says Wendy Landman of the nonprofit WalkBoston. “It brings people together on the city streets that belong equally to every one of us. Advocating for walkers is a social-justice issue, a health issue, and an environmental issue.” The answer to our epidemic of obesity and diabetes? Walking. The solution to pollution? Walking. And how do we get rid of the asphalt all over town and replace it with grass? By leaving the car home and walking — taking back the streets, as it were.

With a staff of five and a flotilla of volunteers, WalkBoston’s approach is both top down — pushing to make pedestrian issues a priority for government and business, and bottom up — raising expectations for the quality of the urban environment. Both are woven around a vision of a city in which a wonderful network of interconnected streets, efficient and accessible mass transit, and citizens personally invested in the character of the city, make walking a constant pleasure and an effective way to get around. The organization’s well-researched maps laying out the best ways to get from here to there and back are distributed at hospitals, schools, and workplaces all over Boston, touting lifestyles that are better for everyone. Walking, Landman says, is not only good for people, it “makes the city itself vibrant and alive.”

How to save City Hall

DAVID EISEN — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:27:23 GMT

Fight or blight?
All too many Bostonians dismiss City Hall as a windswept monstrosity.

DEMOCRATIC FORM: City Hall is part Picasso, De Kooning, and Arbus, part classicism

All too many Bostonians dismiss City Hall as a windswept monstrosity. They’re the same ones, undoubtedly, who hunger for a Norman Rockwell portrait of life in the Hub. But the heart of contemporary culture is more Picasso, De Kooning, and Arbus; and City Hall, with its warts-and-all facade, captures the complex and contradictory nature of our city as filtered through the equally brilliant minds of architects Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell.

Now comes Mayor Tom Menino’s proposal — his second in eight years — to build a new city hall on the South Boston waterfront and sell off the current building to developers, presumably for demolition. Beyond the questionable cost-benefit scenarios and concerns about public transportation, Menino’s attack on the building raises a larger question: what form should we give to our democratic institutions?

For better and for worse, the current City Hall is as honest and powerful a portrait of the modern metropolis and its government as we are ever likely to get. That familiar red brick out of which half of Boston is built warps upward to form a new and more aggressive foundation for the city. Towering concrete columns impose order on the sloping plaza, the Parthenon reinterpreted for the age of anxiety. The mayor’s office and Boston City Council chambers poke out in twisted compositions of opaque concrete and transparent glass — doing contorted dances that suggest the nature of democracy in America. And floating above it all are the endless windows of the bureaucrats we rely on to make the city hum. It is a powerful evocation of who we are, not a paint-by-number image of what we would like to be.

There is real beauty in those sculptural forms and majestic spaces, and over the decades friendly critics have proposed a variety of therapeutic solutions for its worst features — its dysfunctional plaza and cold interior — which could unleash Government Center’s potential.

Bold steps

DAVID EISEN — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:24:21 GMT

The new ICA sets the agenda for Fan Pier
The new Institute of Contemporary Art is a gleaming jewel on the desolate South Boston waterfront, but it has the potential to be the catalyst for a new Seaport District. Slideshow: Architectural images from the new ICA The artists’ view: What we talk about when we talk about the new ICA. By Greg Cook.

The new Institute of Contemporary Art is a gleaming jewel on the desolate South Boston waterfront, but it has the potential to be the catalyst for a new Seaport District. Only time will tell whether this is fertile ground for a thriving urban district or yet another arid wasteland of shrink-wrapped condos and corporate offices. A lonely but inspiring start, the museum throws open its doors Sunday, December 10, after the long-awaited move from the Back Bay to Fan Pier.

DRAMA: The Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater has the harbor for a backdrop; the angled glass at the end of the Mediatheque suggests another world waiting within.

The ICA’s form certainly suggests fecundity, its taut skin struggling to contain powerful forces within. It reflects the ambitions of director Jill Medvedow and architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, both of them dedicated to making art and architecture essential components in the cultural landscape. The building’s powerful profile will, one hopes, allow it to transcend its origins as the small public face of an enormous private development — the land was a gift from Fan Pier’s former owners to ease approvals for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of construction that will soon go up around it.

The ICA’s design has its origins in both the internal logic of its museum requirements and the constraints and opportunities offered by its prominent waterfront site. Its brilliance lies in the way museum and waterfront are tied together by a single strong gesture, the waterfront boardwalk being peeled from the ground to form a curvilinear armature around which the building’s spaces are structured. The mahogany planking climbs upward like an animated magic carpet to form a grandstand looking out to the water, rises up again as the stepped seating of a performance space, and then rolls up and back to form a ceiling that envelops audience, stage, and waterfront. The museum entry and lobby slide in below, opening back to the land while leading out to the harbor through an angular slice in the grandstand. Glass walls are woven into the composition to complete the enclosure while offering views in all directions.

If these spaces seem to grow from the ground up as an extension of the public realm, the galleries are dropped from above to offer places for more private engagements with art. They are contained in a single floating floor sheathed in glass whose cool, calm demeanor belies the audacity of the cantilever that sends it flying into space. From the belly of its vast overhang a panel swings down containing the room known as the Mediatheque, the angled glass at its end suggesting another world waiting within.

Making their mark

DAVID EISEN — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:24:43 GMT

The Phoenix gets out the red pen and grades 10 local campuses’ most daring experiments in modern architecture
Universities need their ivy-covered red-brick towers and classical stone porticoes to remind students of their roots in the past.

Boston University's School of Law, one of our critic's grade A designs

Universities need their ivy-covered red-brick towers and classical stone porticoes to remind students of their roots in the past. Luckily, local campuses are also dotted with more adventurous buildings that try to engage life as it is lived today. Of course, taking chances means, well, taking chances, and these buildings are not all perfect. But at least they make the grade, which can’t be said of all the D’s and F’s that don’t even try.

1. A ramp runs through it
Carpenter Center, Harvard University, 1963. Architect: Le Corbusier. A+
Le Corbusier was the Picasso of architecture — reinventing the language of form and space with an endlessly creative spirit. His sculptural buildings twist and turn, challenging conventional notions of beauty.

Housing Harvard’s visual-arts department, Le Corbusier’s concrete slabs interlock in a rich composition of hovering studios and towering stairs. Curving walls play off of cubic volumes, while strategically located sheets of glass lighten the monolithic masses and create visual connections to the surrounding campus.
The most audacious element is the ramp that rises up from Quincy Street and slices like a scalpel, or perhaps a chain saw, through the heart of the building and lands on the other side of the block. Along the way, artists, artwork, printing presses, and easels are all exposed to view. Rooftop gardens and sheltered terraces connect indoors to out, making trees, sky, and grass feel like they are part of the composition.

2. Too cool
College of Computer Science and Residence Hall, Northeastern University, 2004. Architect: William Rawn & Associates. B+
Universities have tended to follow the worst dictum of modern architectural orthodoxy: that different functions should be housed in different structures rather than combined in mixed-use buildings. Stacking a residential tower over the horizontal sweep of an academic building was a brilliant move for Northeastern and their architect in this thoughtful new complex across from the MFA.

The lower classroom and research levels and upper apartment living rooms are wrapped in glass to articulate the building’s public functions and lighten what could have been an overbearing presence. The back half of the tower is clad in metal panels to give more privacy to the bedrooms inside.
It is all cool and understated, subtle and elegant, a model for the kind of intelligent, contemporary buildings we should be building. A swooping curve at the top of the tower — the only truly dramatic element in the complex — does suggest lost opportunities. A little more exuberance a little closer to the ground could have been a welcome addition to the streetscape.