Witold

Corridors

Jon Gertner writes an interesting article in the February 25 New York Times on technological innovation. It is illustrated by a 1966 photograph of researchers standing outside their offices in the Bell Lab building in Murray Hill, N.J. An endless, featureless, rather wide corridor with a strip of fluorescent lighting straight down the center of an acoustic tile ceiling. A model of dreary, unimaginative, bureaucratic design, right? Wrong. As Gertner writes, the building was conceived by Mervin Kelly (who later became Bell Labs’ chairman of the board) in 1941, and the long corridor,

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Kitchen Confidential

Last fall we renovated our kitchen. It was a piecemeal project that started with long-needed repairs to a cracked wall and improvements to lighting, and finished with a total gutting of the space. The work was done by Jay Haon and his assistant Sarah Finestone. The design was a three-way collaboration between Jay, my wife Shirley, and myself. My only advantage in the process was not my years of professional training and experience but the simple fact that I was the only one who knew how to draw. The result brings together Jay’s craftsmanship, my architect’s eye, and Shirley’s desire that the kitchen should be a workplace rather than a showpiece.

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Dress Code

I finally had a chance to see the modifications that Diller Scofidio + Renfro have made to Lincoln Center. These changes were much ballyhooed by the New York press, but they strike me as self-conscious one-liners, calculated to draw attention to themselves. Like a Hollywood star who dresses for the Oscars in a tuxedo and colorful sneakers. The, perhaps unintended, and surprising consequence at Lincoln Center is that the 1960s buildings actually look like coherent works of architecture by comparison with what come across as art installations.

 

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Northern Magus

Last week Michelangelo Sabatino gave an interesting talk at Penn on Arthur Erickson. Not a name to conjure with today, Erickson (1924-2009) was the first Canadian architect to establish a global practice—and reputation—with projects in the United States, England, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria,  Malaysia, Japan, and China. I worked on Habitat at Montreal’s Expo 67, and the big names in the exposition were Moshe Safdie, Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller. Erickson designed a pavilion at that fair, but it garnered less attention. The chief attribute of his architecture was, well, beauty. Beauty was not something that architects talked a lot about in 1965—still don’t.

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The Last Classicist

The dome of the U.S. Capitol and the portico of the White House may be more iconic, but almost every evening the Federal Reserve Building is featured on the evening news, making it one of the most familiar architectural images on television. It was designed by Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), an unsung giant among American architects. Born in Lyon, an ancien élève of the École des Beaux-Arts, he made his career in the U.S., but he stands apart from his contemporaries. Unlike John Russell Pope, for example, he was not a far-ranging eclectic, nor did he romanticize the past. Cret was interested in developing what he called a “new classicism,” and he did so in a series of great public buildings—he designed few private houses—such as the Folger Shakespeare Library,

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Corbu in Chelsea

524 West 19th Street in New York’s Chelsea District is a small residential building designed by Shigeru Ban, with Dean Maltz. The 11-story block contains only 8 units which the developer calls “houses,” since they are two-story duplexes that extend through the building, front-to-back, recalling the units in Le Corbusier’s unité d’habitation in Marseilles. The Chelsea houses have two-story living rooms, too, and shallow loggias. There the resemblance ends, since these are expensive ($3.6 – $11.25 million) condominiums with Corian kitchen islands and Miele cook tops. Press a button and the entire motorized 20-foot glass wall,

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Hotel Rooms

I have stayed in some memorable hotels—Brown’s in London, and Cipriani’s in Asolo—but for some reason the hotel rooms I remember best are the ones that were, let us say, sub par. My most memorable hotel experience was in a small town whose name I forget, on the shore of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. I was visiting a rural development project  in a nearby village. It was the late 1970s, some years before the military coup that devastated this small nation, and while the city was awash in young soldiers, the countryside was quiet. My wife and I checked into a hotel that was like something out of a B.

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Remembering Ken Kern

Ken Kern was an architect who published a series of books in the 1970s starting with the classic The Owner-Built Home, and followed by The Owner-Built Homestead, The Owner-Builder and the Code, and The Work Book. The last, written with his sister Evelyn Turner, a psychologist, is a case study of people who built their own homes and the effect it had on their lives. Stewart Brand reviewed it in The Whole Earth Catalog. “About 80 percent of the couples I know who have built a house or a boat,

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