Witold

Singapore West

Most cities have a vertical business district surrounded by lower residential neighborhoods. Not Vancouver, British Columbia, which has relatively few office buildings but scores of densely packed, extremely slim high-rise apartments. It creates the appearance of an Asian city, not North American at all. In part, this is because so many of the apartment dwellers—or at least owners—are from Hong Kong and mainland China, and are accustomed to vertical living. (It has been estimated that as many as sixty percent of new apartments are owned by non-resident investors.) Windows look out at each other, twenty feet apart.

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Big Blue

The expected but still untimely passing of Steve Jobs has led to many observations about his national influence on design. But Apple was not the first American high-tech corporation to emphasize design. That distinction properly belongs to IBM. In 1956, Thomas J. Watson, the company’s founder, hired Eliot Noyes, an architect, to oversee IBM’s design initiatives. Thanks to Noyes, designers such as Charles Eames and Paul Rand (who was responsible for the IBM logo) came on board, and architects such as Marcel Breuer and Eero Saarinen were commissioned to design IBM buildings (Jobs commissioned Peter Bohlin to design the distinctive line of Apple stores as well as a headquarters for Pixar,

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SoCal Modernism

In a post on Michael Kimmelman’s first architecture review in the New York Times, the New York Observer opined that the architects of the housing project in the South Bronx that Kimmelman referred to are “notable but far from famous architects.” Nicholas Grimshaw not famous? Well, perhaps not in New York City. Grimshaw—Sir Nicholas—has built in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and Australia as well as his native Britain. He is part of a generation that includes Michael Hopkins, Ian Ritchie, Eva Jiřičná, Richard Horden, and the late Jan Kaplický who followed in the footsteps of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster (Jiřičná worked for Rogers;

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When Firms Falter

The work of Pei Cobb Freed was never that exciting, at least not after Pei retired, but the firm produced serious, well-executed modernist designs. Nothing to sneer at. So what is one to make of its latest project, 1045 Avenue of the Americas, a 28-story office building overlooking Bryant Park? A “modern hourglass-shaped structure” is how the New York Times described it. A “tepid Frank Gehry wannabe” would be another way of putting it. With the Beekman Tower, Gehry raised the bar, or perhaps moved the hurdle, and so we get this. It reminds me of a building on the University of Pennsylvania campus,

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The Bilbao Anomaly

After the phenomenal success of the Bilbao Guggenheim, the conventional wisdom had it that signature buildings were the way for museums to build attendance. Never mind the collection, the so-called Bilbao Effect would ensure that the public would come. In an age obsessed with marketing, a pithy phrase is all, and nobody bothered to check if eye-catching museum architecture really had this effect. It doesn’t, as the Experience Music Project in Seattle and the Denver Museum of Art showed. It doesn’t even work if you are in Manhattan on busy West 53rd Street, next door to the Museum of Modern Art.

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PR

I regularly get announcements from architects’ publicists announcing new buildings. Sometimes the proposed design is part of the announcement, sometimes it is merely the appointment of the architect that is considered “news.” But is it? If (insert your favorite architect here) has won a commission, well, good for them, but most of us are really only interested when a building is actually built, not in the pretty pictures. Robert Hughes once wrote that slides are to real art as phone sex is to real sex. Computer-generated drawings are like that, too. Having said that, it is true that some unbuilt projects have been influential in the history of architecture.

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On the Hot Plate

We’re having some work done on the kitchen, and since we will have to eat on the porch for a week or more, we’ve been shopping for a hot plate. I thought it would be an easy business, but there is a surprising variety of products, coiled element to induction, plain Jane to designy, anything from $14.99 to more than $1000. But what is more interesting—as usual—are the experiences that people recount in the product reviews, more specifically, the range of uses that hot plates are put to. I expected the occupants of motels, rooming houses, and small apartments would use them.

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Aspen

I spent three days in Aspen at the Ideas Festival. A curious experience. It’s been called Washington D.C.’s summer camp, and it’s full of policy wonks, pundits, and politicians, both active and retired. The politicos get to network, and the affluent audience gets to rub shoulders and point their I-phones at the politicos, so everyone’s happy. And everyone is happy, the atmosphere is relentlessly upbeat. Of course, none of the public figures really lets their hair down. Robert Rubin gave the same speech I heard him deliver two years ago. The British ambassador was hopeful about Libya—but what else could he say?

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