SANAA at the Toledo Museum of Glass

I just stumbled on a great blog post at FastCompany.com. It’s long been known to Mapos (and other aficionados alike) that there is a lot going on in Ohio, architecturally speaking.

Down on the Ohio River, Cincinnati may lead the pack with Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Art Museum. The University of Cincinnati is single-handedly transforming into a Who’s Who of American architecture (Gehry, Eisenman, Morphosis, Gwathmey Seigel, etc.)

Up North, Cleveland made headlines with I.M. Pei’s rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Frank Gehry again at Case Western, and now Vinoly at the Museum of Art.

Toledo (SANAA, Gehry), Wooster (LTL), Bowling Green (Snohetta) and Akron (Coop Himmelb(l)au, Polshek) even got in on the action.

But what about the capital? This Columbian credits Eisenmann’s Wexner Center as instrumental in his own early impressions on architecture. His convention center is worth a look and don’t miss Scogin Elam’s architecture school at The Ohio State University.

Ohio, it turns out, is not Iowa.

A GAGNER – 3 TEE-SHIRTS DATA

Comme je suis généreux et que les périodes de fin d’année arrivent à grand pas, je vous propose de gagner 3 T-shirts DatA avec Konbini.com. Pour jouer, rien de plus facile : on laisse un commentaire avec un email valide et ce jusqu’au mecredi 16 décembre 2009. Un tirage au sort sera effectué à l’échéance pour connaitre les 3 gagnants.

DatA

Support Me – DatA. Konbini.com a suivi pendant 1an le jeune artiste datA, tête montante de la scène électronique française, avec pour concept de nous montrer la vie d’un artiste hors scène. Ce concept se déroule en plusieurs épisodes, avec quelques bonus à la clé bien sur, dans lesquels on y retrouve des interviews, des lives, et autres scènes inédites. Voici un petit aperçu avec le teaser du concept et bien évidemment le reste est à voir sur Konbini.com.

DatA est un jeune artiste qui a fait ses preuves dans le milieu de l’electro français. A l’heure actuelle, il a déjà un album à son actif, Skywriter, et bosse sur un EP intitulé Electric Fever qui sortira le 7 Décembre chez Ekler’o’shock. Je vous propose pour cette occasion d’écouter 2 morceaux issus de son album Skywriter.

DatA – One in a Million

DatA – Morphosis

]]> http://lookingaround.blogs.time.com/2009/11/10/a-talk-with-thom-mayne/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:10:53 +0000 Richard Lacayo http://lookingaround.blogs.time.com/2009/11/10/a-talk-with-thom-mayne/ http://sidexsidexday.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/437-new-york-city_/ Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:18:48 +0000 sidexsidexday http://sidexsidexday.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/437-new-york-city_/

Passed by the new Cooper Union building by Morphosis today during my walk through the rain in the lower east side. Cool.

(images by: vivien chin)

Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation has unveiled a $150,000 house that might give Ninth Ward residents something to come home to in case it floods once more. However, its maker cautions, it is not meant for residents to ride out any storm.

Architect Thom Mayne, whose firm Morphosis is based in Santa Monica, Calif., has come up with the most radical reconciliation of the need for height and the need for neighborliness so far.

He designed a house that sits just a few steps off the ground, until – heaven forbid – the flood waters start to sweep across the lowlands again. If that happens, the house is meant to float, rising gently on a pair of steel poles mounted at either end. Not 5 feet, not 8; Mayne’s house would float up to 12 feet above the waters.

“As long as we’re doing this, we might as well make it a really huge safety factor,” Mayne said.

The Associated Press says the foundation is “a high-performance chassis made from polystyrene foam coated in glass fiber-reinforced concrete. It houses the essential equipment to supply power, water and fresh air.” The house is designed to minimize catastrophic damage (and insurance claims) and to preserve the homeowner’s investment and property value. Its viability will allow residents to return to their homes within days after a hurricane or flooding with little water damage to furnishings, clothing and more importantly, generational keepsakes like photographs and paintings, birth certificates and deeds.

[Mayne] said he would eventually like to see assembly lines churning out floating chassis for future houses in flood-threatened coastal regions around the world. The solar-electric power system, storage batteries, and green appliances in Mayne’s storm-resistant design are so efficient that he believes the home will prove to be entirely energy self-sufficient. Entirely. A generator is on hand for emergency off-the-grid power. Such features would be of special significance to the residents of the Make It Right development, since each suffered the loss of a conventional home in the 2005 cataclysmic flood.

You just have to been a resident of the Ninth Ward whose home was destroyed by the levee breaks to qualify. Oh, and you have to have the dinero, too.

I can imagine such homes not only in New Orleans, but in rural areas of Wisconsin that have people and communities living in flood plains and are always having to rebuild.

Yes, it looks a bit ugly and a bit PoMo, but it is based on the design of a shotgun house. It has a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms. If these are being custom-made, I wouldn’t be surprised if they offered additional bedrooms.

Interested? Here are a couple of articles that further explain the whole idea.

Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation

Mother Nature Network

Green Muze

From our friends at ArchitectureNews.com

Thom Mayne has revealed his dramatic design for the new $185 million Perot Museum of Nature and Science at Victory Park in Dallas with groundbreaking due this Autumn. Described as a “living educational tool featuring architecture inspired by nature and science,” the new facility designed by his firm, Morphosis, will provide 180,000 sq ft of display and archive space on a 4.7 acre site just north of downtown Dallas.

“Museums, armatures for collective societal experience and cultural expression, present new ways of interpreting the world,” said Mayne. “They contain knowledge, preserve information and transmit ideas; they stimulate curiousity, raise awareness and create opportunities for exchange. As instruments of education and social change, museums have the potential to shape our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live.

“The new Perot Museum of Nature & Science in Victory Park will create a distinct identity for the Museum, enhance the institution’s prominence in Dallas and enrich the city’s evolving cultural fabric.”

At 170 ft and 14 stories high the structure presents itself as a cube structure atop a plinth. Working to a theme of ‘nature in an urban fabric’ its roof alone offers one acre of rolling native landscape featuring all the native flora and fauna of Texas and including a large urban plaza for events. Surrounding the building too landscape design, created in conjunction with Dallas-based Talley Associates, brings together science and technology with nature acting as an extension of the building design. The two are so integrated that, to mention one example, the parking lot is used to generate energy to power water features (post-rain).

80% of the building will be open to the public (an unusually high percentage) and facilities will include 10 exhibition galleries, including a children’s museum and outdoor playspace/courtyard; an expansive glass-enclosed lobby and adjacent outdoor terrace with a downtown view; state of the art exhibition gallery designated to host world-class travelling exhibitions; an education wing; large-format, multi-media digital cinema with seating for 300; flexible-space auditorium; public café; retail store; visible exhibit workshops; and offices.

A signature design feature within the museum is a 54-foot continuous-flow escalator contained in a 150-foot tube-like structure that dramatically extends outside the building. It will take visitors from the light-filled lobby atrium to the museum’s top floor. Patrons will arrive at a fully glazed balcony high above the city, with a bird’s-eye view of downtown Dallas.

“We believe the new Museum will provide an unforgettable experience for our visitors and help them better understand and appreciate the world we share,” said Nicole Small, President and CEO at the Museum of Nature & Science, “And our hope is that it will inspire young people – and those of any age – to pursue careers in math, science and technology.”

We like to see new shapes and new forms popping up all over the New York landscape. The best design pushes our eye with new silhouettes. We like to think Rapsel does this kind of work with our products. New York Magazine’s Justin Davidson highlights the architecture he’s excited about this fall, and all of them are progressive and new in some way. He asks interesting questions about these designs as well. About the new Cooper Union building at 41 Cooper square, designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, he asks “how smoothly will the building make the instant but sometimes treacherous transition from pristine sculpture to usable architecture?” We know, at Rapsel, that design can be both sculptural and functional. We believe that design should, in fact, be as thoughtfully and beautifully designed as it is utilitarian. We’re frankly excited to see students milling about a building as provocative as the new Cooper Union building.

Photo by Hannah Whitaker for New York Magazine.

les brutes de l’agence morphosis frappent toujours fort

Four buildings one competition proposal by Morphosis.

Um novo prédio da renomada faculdade The Cooper Union está em sua fase final. Se você estiver por volta da East Village  ou do badalado St. Mark´s Square o prédio fica ali perto na 3rd Avenue com a 8th Street. Projeto de Thom Mayne da firma de Los Angeles Morphosis Architects,  o edifício combina as escolas de arte, arquitetura e engenharia. Que noção nova essa de combinar essas três disciplinas! Já estava na hora de começarmos a trazer um pouco de arte em tecnologia aqui nesse país. Muito diferente do Brasil, os americanos vêem arquitetura como uma disciplina científica e são poucos os que incorporam uma visão mais ampla e artística à profissão.

De acordo com o critico do New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff, a estrutura não é um edifício perfeito, “mas é o tipo de trabalho sério que nós não vemos suficientemente em Nova Iorque: uma declaração arquitetônica arrojada de um autêntico valor cívico.” E ele continua – “esse é um projeto que poderemos nos sentir orgulhosos.”

A frente do edifício é feita de uma malha de alumínio e no meio tem um grande corte vertical, como se a fachada tivesse sido rasgada. Não pude entrar para ver o espaço interior, pois ainda não está aberto ao público, mas os críticos estão dizendo que está muito bem concebido. Para estimular a comunicação entre os alunos, professores e os visitantes, os arquitetos desenharam um elevador que pára em andares alternados forçando o pessoal a andar de escadas. Bom não somente para uma maior interação, mas também para a manter a forma física não? Conceito interessante mas será que funcionará?

A growing group of men dubbed “herbivorous boys” reject traditional masculinity when it comes to romance, jobs and consumption in an apparent reaction to the tougher economy. Crossing the US border with Canada. A very interesting Federal Building in San Francisco designed by Morphosis.

Who else has noticed this building in alot of movies?  Maybe I’m just more aware of it being that I’m from California and have visited this building on a trip to LA, but the Caltrans District 7 building by Morphosis has seriously had a lot of screen appearances in movies and tv.  I just watched “The Island” tonight and saw it pop up on the screen in the background and it reminded me of how often the exterior of this building shows up in things I’ve watched.

Where I’ve seen it:

_Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie)
_The Island (Scarlett Johanssen, Ewan Mcgregor)
_Fun With Dick & Jane (Jim Carrey, Tea Leoni)
_Mission Impossible 3 (Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman)
_Because I Said So (Diane Keaton, Mandy Moore)
_Alias (Jennifer Garner)
_Usher music video
_Maroon 5 music video
_and the many other appearances in movies, tv, & commercial that I’ve never personally seen)

Pabuc!’un ilk başladığı gün de beri sanki Sokak sanatı ve modasına daha fazla ilgi varmış gibi! Tabii bunun bizle hiç bir alakası olmadığını bilsek bile, sizlere hatırlatmak istedik. Her neyse, işte yeni (o kadar yeni sayılmaz çünkü 12 Haziran’dan beri açıkmış zaten) bir sergi: Morphosis! Otuza yakın sokak sanatçıya eski, tozlu, büyük bir binada yer verilince bakınız ne çıkıyor. Bir birinden güzel ver yaratıcı işleri görmek için 12 Temmuz’a kadar zamanınız var! Daha fazla bilgi için Facebook a bakın! En önemlisi tabii ki bedava olması. Sokak çocukların parası mı olur?!

Since the arrival of Pabuc! Istanbul has changed a lot. Although this has nothing to do with us, we still like to see some kind of inexplicable correlation between the large interest in street art and fashion, and of course the birth of this blog a year ago! That being said we take a look at an extraordinary exhibition that has even caught the eye of the New York Times: ‘Morphosis’. Around thirty Turkish street artists showcase their skills in the humongous and extremely street-dusty ‘Banker Han’ building in the Galata area. The exhibition has been open since the 12th of June and will continue till the 12th of July. Check out their Facebook Page for more info! And just so you know, it’s FREE!

Thanks to The New York Times’ Yigal Schleifer‘a sağol!

There is always some sort of free lecture or conference going on in the city.  Monday was Fit-City 4, an annual conference open to the public (meant more for NYC-ers, but not necessarily – I mean, I’m from NJ and I was there…) about how design influences public health.  There were a lot of fairly short lectures – some were a bit repetitive, but most were interesting.

By far my favorite speaker was Professor Pucher of Rutgers University.  It was mostly about the benefits of cycling, and ways urban planning should focus on accommodating bikes.  The stats are staggering … and sort of disturbing (obesity rates, etc. – I can’t put it into words; just look at the charts).  A lot of his presentation can be found in this pdf.

Liam recently brought up biking on the blog,  and Matt wrote about Pittsburgh.  Unfortunately, I’m still stuck in suburbia, where sprawl makes it difficult to use cycling and public transportation effectively.  That said, I bike most of my shorter trips, and ride a lot recreationally.  On Sunday, I was hit by a car (I’m fine and my bike is fine, just a little paint on my pedal – the jerk in the SUV has a huge scratch in his car door, though).  And you guys already know about my other experiences with biking.  But I don’t intend to stop riding any time soon, and encourage everyone living ANYWHERE to ditch your car for a while.  As for perception of your city / town, it’s a lot different when you’re not driving.  You have to be a lot more aware of what’s going on when you’re perched on the top of two wheels and cars are flying by you.  Personally, I think driving alongside cyclists needs to become a standard in driver’s ed.  But annnnyway…

Back to the lectures.

Most of the presentations were about urban planning and transportation, but the two case-studies were designed by architects: Cooper Union’s new academic building by Morphosis, and DS+R’s High Line (which just opened Tuesday).

The High Line seems like a no-brainer: it’s all about walking, and stairs (nice dose of cardio there), plus, it has plants, and plants are healthy.  Yay green!

But I didn’t know much about the Morphosis design, so I learned a lot about ways architecture can manipulate circulation and physical movement.  A lot of the presentations were about stairs (making stairs prettier and obvious and tempting – someone suggested putting food at the top of the stairs as incentive; I found this hilarious), but Morphosis is putting in elevators to make people use the stairs.  Seems counterproductive at first (and I’m not sure how well it works in practice), but the skip-stop elevators only go to certain floors, encouraging people to get off and walk the extra flight or two to get to where they actually need to go.  Pretty neat stuff.  Plus, the stairs are gorgeous.  Check out the link I included before for some pictures.

Other interesting things: There was a presentation by…someone (name escapes me) about how different materials can be used to encourage people to go somewhere they might otherwise avoid (i.e. stairs), and act as signs (something mentioned about embedding light tubes in concrete? not sure what exactly he was talking about). Presentation on Governors Island (no cars allowed! walking / biking paradise!).  A lot of bitter audience members (cyclists without a safe place to park their bike, citizens who hate big ugly stores, citizens who love them, architects and designers trying to plug their firms), and some that brought up interesting points (someone asked if there was a way we could design better sidewalks to avoid massive puddles, and someone else asked if there was a better way to design bikes so that we didn’t have to worry so much about parking).

I was glad we went, even though I don’t actually live in NYC.  The range of people in the discussion, from city planners to public health officials to architects to transportation organizations, brought a lot of different approaches to the table and they do seem to be making progress.  As a whole, I think it was a good example of how things do change when people start to work together and actually take action.

On a side note, I was probably the youngest person in that room, and I think they need more students, etc. to get involved to actually implement all these ideas.  See you there next year?

1.Ada – Fizzman (Dee Pulse remix) (Kompakt)
2.Morphosis – You don’t care (Styrax)
3.Terence Dixon – Below Radar (Children of tomorrow)
4.Seldom Felt 5 – A1 (Seldom Felt)
5.Casinoboy – Jobsagoodun (Jisco music)
6.Glasser – Learn (John Talabot Post Merdian reconstruction) (True Panther Sounds)
7.Tony Lionni – The Feeling (Freerange records)
8.Florence & The Machine – Dog Days (An Optimo (Espacio) remix) (White)
9.Ame – Setsa (Innervisions)

So I finally wrote some (crappy) program notes for Morphosis. Next I have to write some for Chimerical Creatures, but you know. One step at a time. Anyway yeah. Here it is:

A morphosis is the manner of change in something or any of its parts. In this piece written for solo violin and piano, the listener gets to hear the violin part change from something very suspenseful to something deliberate and even more expressive: This is mostly accomplished not just through what the violinist plays, but also how the violin part relates to the piano part. Each section of this piece is a little more structured and less free-flowing than the last. Not to say that there is any section that lacks drama, but instead, each section gives its own “interpretation” of what it means to be dramatic. In the opening unaccompanied “cadenza”-like section, the violinist is given leeway to be as expressive and liberal as he or she would like to be in anticipation of a very metric and rhythmic ending section. As the piano becomes a larger and larger part of the piece, the violin begins to play very long and fluid lines over an increasingly fragmented and staccato piano part. All these details work together to create a piece that is not only emotional, but also entertaining and impressive.

Back in the days of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and all the other composers who we are forced to imitate in Music Theory II, the chord progression of I-vi-I (or i-VI-i) did not really exist. If there was such an instance where a composer was feeling particularly zealous and used this strange progression, it probably would be used just one time before resuming the normal circle of fifths progressions that they were used to.

However, during my research for the extra-credit music theory scavenger hunt, I noticed that a great deal of popular music uses this very progression. For example, the beginning of Fall Out Boy’s “W.A.M.S.” (possibly my favorite popular music song right now) starts off this way.

Why should you care? Well you don’t have to. I do though. The other day I was listening to my piece, “Morphosis”, and I couldn’t help but notice that the climax of the song shortly after the modulation to f minor could sound REALLY cool with an epic electric guitar solo. And at first, I didn’t know why I felt that way. But after analyzing the chords, I realized that the primary harmonic language of that part is just, VI-i-VI-V. This would probably be a good time to mention that it’s not so much VI-i-VI-V chords as it is something more like: Expansion of VI, followed by an expansion of i, followed by an expansion of VI, followed by an expansion of V. And I think, that because it is such a common thing in popular rock music, it naturally made me think a guitar solo would fit.

No guitar solo is being written into the piece at the present time.

Regardless, I found myself then wondering, if it is such a strange progression, why is it used so freely, and why does it not sound… weird? I figure it’s nothing horribly revolutionary, but simply that a circle of fifths progression might sound weird in a rock song just as a i-VI-i progression would sound strange in a Mass or Requiem. Because i and VI whether it’s in a major key or a minor one are always opposite in their composition (when one is major, the other is minor) it creates a good deal of variety and keeps the music interesting. And, of all the chords, vi and iii are the only ones that function this way in relation to “I”, and going from I to iii just seems weird. It also helps that vi is the foundation chord of the relative minor in a major key: It makes the expansions sound more natural. And of course W.A.M.S. is just one example. Like I said, I found many just on MY iPod.

So anyways, this is my first spiel on what kinds of things influence my music without me even knowing that they’re doing so. Of course I have more “normal” influences like Barber and Bartok and Ravel, etc. But I can only talk about one thing per blog otherwise I’d run out of stuff to talk about.

Btw, the picture is of the lead singer from Fall Out Boy, Patrick Stump. I think the power and range of his voice is amazing. I love their music in general, but his voice is really what I love most.