November 30, 2012
All images © Nic Tenwiggenhorn
Art can be hard to understand sometimes, as Thomas Schutte’s “Holiday Home for Terrorists” well proves . The German artist, not architect, designed and built this chic, modern house tucked away in the forest of Mosern, Austria on Polish art dealer Rafael Jablonka’s summer home property. Jablonka commissioned the house as a work of art that will never be lived in, visited, or open to the public, ever. Read more.
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September 11, 2012
AIA Architects of Healing: Santiago Calatrava, FAIA via AIANational
This past May at its annual convention, the AIA hosted a special ceremony, titled “The Architects of Healing,” that honored architects involved in post-9/11 memorials and rebuilding efforts. More than 130 architects received AIA presidential citations, with 15 individuals receiving specially commissioned gold medallions to honor their work. The AIA website has videos from the ceremony, including presentations by Santiago Calatrava, Craig Dykers, David Childs, and others—all of whom spoke about their inspiration and response to rebuilding after the tragedy. In the video above, for instance, Calatrava, designer of the WTC Transportation Hub, spoke about “taking the ruins and making something positive.” See more.
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September 11, 2012
One World Trade Center and the National September 11th Memorial, Mark Lennihan / AP
Today marks the 11th anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, 2001. As most readers know, construction of the World Trade Center Complex and the National September 11th Memorial and Museum has been mired in problems. Read more.
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December 13, 2011
‘The Cloud’ by MVRDV. Image: MVRDV
Despite the outrage provoked by MVRDV’s ‘The Cloud,’ which saw the world-renowned architectural firm lambasted with complaints and calls for design revisions, the South Korean developer financing the project will not make any changes to the scheme. According to Australia’s News.com, a spokesman for the Yongsan Development Corporation today stated that ”allegations that it [The Cloud] was inspired by the 9/11 attacks are groundless,” adding that the project will continue unchanged onto construction phases, which are set to begin in January 2013 as scheduled. MVRDV’s inflammatory design features twin luxury residential towers, one 60 stories high and the other 54, bridged by a ‘pixelated cluster of additional amenities’–the formal impression of which greatly recalls images of the imploding World Trade Center (if you don’t see it, Gawker‘s got your back). The architects issued a rather clumsy apology, assuring the offended they meant no harm and citing the dubious claim that not once in the presumably weeks-to-months-long design process had they realized the resemblance between their project and the most iconic architectural statement of the last century. In the span of a week, media attention surrounding The Cloud, which could be branded as this year’s Park 51, has grown to become the biggest architectural news of 2011. Well, aside from Zaha, maybe…
The Cloud will begin construction in January 2013, with an expected completion date of 2016
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December 9, 2011
The Cloud by MVRDV. All images: MVRDV
This week saw the press release of MVRDV‘s newest project “The Cloud” for Seoul, South Korea, a pair of luxury residential highrises joined together halfway up by a pixelated cluster programmed with public and privates spaces for retail, parks, and swimming pools. The architects’ justification for the project’s formal exuberance–namely, that by raising the ground level, or plinth, a forum is created, providing new opportunities for interaction and social connectivity among the complex’s residents–was lost on several design blogs (and their readers), which saw instead a half-baked, even puerile provocation. From the ground level perspective, the towers bear considerable resemblance to the hellish images which broadcast the collapse of the World Trade Center throughout the world. Of course, this was not MVRDV’s intent–if you want to pick a fight, see Peter Eisenman’s theoretical (and ‘critical’) projects for Ground Zero from 2003, which more closely articulate the physical, textural anguish of a fiery structure crashing towards the ground. Their ‘cloud’ carries all the menace of its 32-bit iteration from Super Mario Bros. Still, MVRDV should have been expecting the inevitable backlash, right? Not so, evidently, as Fast Co. points to the firm’s Facebook page where the architects offer an explanation of the design’s formal approach, saying, somewhat incredulously, they never noticed the very apparent similarity:
“The Cloud was designed based on parameters such as sunlight, outside spaces, living quality for inhabitants and the city. It is one of many projects in which MVRDV experiments with a raised city level to reinvent the often solitary typology of the skyscraper. It was not our intention to create an image resembling the attacks nor did we see the resemblance during the design process. We sincerely apologize to anyone whose feelings we have hurt, the design was not meant to provoke this.”
The firm also posted an early conceptual drawing made early in the design process indicating the thematic direction in which the project would take. Click for images of the proposal.
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November 23, 2011
“A hidden world, growing beyond control.” That’s what two senior investigative reporters at the Washington Post call the sprawling network of secretive government organizations and contractors created after the September 11th attacks. Two years ago, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin set out to map that world, and what they found was so staggering, the project has been given its own landing page full of stories, videos, and exhaustive interactive map(s).
The Top Secret America rhizome is made up of 45 organizations, each with hundreds of sub-organizations and programs. The bureaucratic infrastructure is so dense and huge that only a few employees even know of every program. Almost a million people hold top-secret security clearances. One of the “super users” who holds the absolute highest clearance told Priest and Arkin, “I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything.”
Of particular interest is the duo’s reports on the physical infrastructure developed after 9/11. They say that while intelligence offices used to be located along US borders, in the last ten years thousands have been opened in the heart of the country – almost four thousand, in fact.
You can go check out the beautiful, elegant visualization here.
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November 17, 2011
Photo via.
It takes a lot to realize a work of architecture. Not only does one have to reconcile the distance between a theoretical idea and its concrete reality, but, seeing as architecture does not exist in a vacuum and, quite the opposite, has a sweeping radius of intangible effects, to build a building requires a skilled ballet through a political minefield. This could not be more evident than in Handel Architects’ recently unveiled National 9/11 Memorial.
Now that the memorial has been realized and officially opened to the public, the question then becomes: what will it take to get people to visit? As part of the New York Observer’s “Neverending Story” coverage of the construction at the World Trade Center, the journal remarked on how over 30% of people who have reserved tickets to visit the site have failed to show. The good news is that, despite the high percentage of flake-outs, tens of thousands of people are still visiting the site every week, and the territorial breed of downtown New Yorkers can now cool their jets about tourists cramping their ‘hood.
To show up thousands of people and prove that you can hold down an appointment, reserve your visitor’s pass here and visit the National 9/11 Memorial.
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September 28, 2011
The New World Trade Center from Piranha Nyc on Vimeo.
Commissioned by Silverstein properties for visual effects company Piranha NYC, “The New World Trade Center” visualizes the full restoration of Lower Manhattan, when Ground Zero ceases to be a vast construction site, but instead, the active urban corridor it is hoped to become. The film, which was presented a couple of weeks back for the tenth anniversary of 9/11, begins with high-res video capturing the choreography of the on-going construction: workers raise and lower steel beams, pour concrete, and man machines–all set to jittery bleeps and paranoiac strings ostensibly pinched from the soundtrack of a Bourne film. This real footage gives way to a virtual landscape, with acrobatic flybys over the fully planted WTC Memorial Site and park and up the sides of the four WTC towers. The completion of the site unfolds before your eyes with an impressive level of photographic realism and clarity that seamlessly appends the new towers to the existing skyline. Cue the crescendo!
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September 12, 2011
Michael Arad — partner at Handel Architects and originator of the WTC Memorial design — is the story embedded within one of the biggest news stories of the year. The New York Times has a fascinating account of his role in the process of building the memorial that depicts the transformation of Arad from a young architect aggressively (and perhaps ineffectually) promoting his scheme to a calm, politically-deft actor in a city-wide drama.
Handel Architects have released a new series of images from the memorial, which opened to great fanfare yesterday morning. Read on.
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September 8, 2011
Daniel Libeskind, A New World Trade Center
In the months following the 9/11 attacks, an array of competitions, conferences, and initiatives was launched to consider the appropriateness and terms of rebuilding Ground Zero.When, in mid-2002, the Lower Manhattan Development Company (LMDC) released an abysmal set of six initial plans for a new World Trade Center, a reactionary wave of architects entered the fray, each with their own vision to rehabilitate and transform Ground Zero into a thriving urban center once more. Their plans, however loose or conceptual they may have been, promised to offer the city something more than what it would receive a decade later–Daniel Libeskind’s diluted masterplan for a series of equally bland towers (Libeskind’s first ideas for a tower at Ground Zero above). Explore the alternatives to 2011′s Ground Zero.
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