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postedbyben
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Only a few days left to catch the Lebbeus Woods exhibit at SFMoMA!
Above, spreads from Lebbeus Woods’s Pamphlet Architecture 15: War and Architecture (1993), Radical Reconstruction (1997), and The Storm and The Fall (2004).
Lebbeus Woods, Architect
exhibition through June 2nd
SFMOMA, tickets here
This facade treatment on the Brandhorst Museum, comprised of thousands of colorful ceramic rods, will be featured in the upcoming Materials for Design 2. The newly expanded and revised edition adds Masonry to the original five chapters: Glass, Concrete, Wood, Metals, and Plastics. Featuring all new case studies, MFD2 will make a beautiful and useful companion to your Materials for Design (2006).
Happy Birthday to Dr. Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid and man of many other talents, born on this day in 1909. You know he was Steve Jobs v1.0, right?
In the age of Instagram, “Pictures in a minute!” makes you think you’ve got a bad internet connection. But in the 1950s, that slogan fueled a technological revolution that continues to develop today.
Read more about the influence Land had—and still has—in Instant, available here from PAPress.
Gary Comer Youth Center | Chicago | 2006
“On the exterior, the programs wrapping the main spaces are legible as four interlaced bars, clad in metal and fiber-cement panels that are colored in a seemingly random pattern that speaks to the center’s youthful orientation. A mesh tower surmounted by an LED sign announces programs and events and serves as a landmark for the newly revived neighborhood.”
Congratulations to Toyo Ito on being awarded the 2013 Pritzker Prize. “I’ve been thinking that Modernism has already reached to the limit or a dead end…. I didn’t expect this surprising news, and I’m very happy about it.” Above: a model and sketch of the Sendai Mediatheque in Japan, which withstood the catastrophic Tohoku earthquake—something it was designed to do from the very beginning.
Read more on the architect and his efforts to rebuild from the disaster in Toyo Ito: Forces of Nature, edited by Jesse Turnbull, book design by Omnivore. See more work by Toyo Ito here.
Trees have long been one of mankind’s most utilized natural resources. In addition to their many practical uses, trees function as objects of beauty and provide the structure for designed landscapes. Gina Crandell’s Tree Gardens is the first book to examine what she calls the world’s “largest living architectural structures.” Case studies cover fifteen sites in eight countries, ranging from 16th-century plantings in Europe to the recently opened 9/11 Memorial forest in New York City.
The success of these gardens is due in part to their aesthetic design—their scale, context, selection and spacing of tree species—but also to their ongoing management. Crandell celebrates these dynamic architectural structures and the active management techniques that will help them flourish in the coming decades and centuries.
From Tree Gardens: Architecture and the Forest, available now.
The New Wing of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center
by David Chipperfield
From Expanded View by Julie Decker
Jan Tschichold wrote ”Clay in the Potter’s Hand” in late 1948 for The Penrose Annual. It has been reprinted in various other forms in the years since and is included in The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design. This pamphlet version was printed on letterpress in 1992 by Engdahl Typography in Vineburg, California. I bought this lovely copy from RIT Press. It is difficult to excerpt such a short essay, but I can’t help imagining what the typesetter thought as he composed Tschichold’s last lines:
“The knowledge that he is rendering an anonymous service to valuable works, and to a small number of optically sensitive people, is as a rule the only reward for the typographer’s long and never-ending apprenticeship.”
Arriving in the U.S. next month, Autonomy collects the covers of all 118 issues of Anarchy, a journal published in London in the 1960s. Anarchy had many and diverse contributors, but its main author, Colin Ward, used the journal to propel ideas of mutual aid and autonomous organization outside the centralized state. The covers were designed mostly by Rufus Segar, and they illustrate a sample of the history of graphic design in Britain during those years.
Autonomy: the cover designs of Anarchy 1961–1970 is edited by Daniel Poyner and published by Hyphen Press, London. Distributed in the U.S. by Princeton Architectural Press.
From Brodsky and Utkin: The Complete Works by Lois Nesbitt
Buildings by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012)
From When Brazil Was Modern by Lauro Cavalcanti
Gary Comer Youth Center | Chicago | 2006
“On the exterior, the programs wrapping the main spaces are legible as four interlaced bars, clad in metal and fiber-cement panels that are colored in a seemingly random pattern that speaks to the center’s youthful orientation. A mesh tower surmounted by an LED sign announces programs and events and serves as a landmark for the newly revived neighborhood.”
National Art Schools | Havana, Cuba
In Cuba, the National Art Schools once inhabited a sprawling campus designed by the architects Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti. Now sadly unfinished, abandoned and overgrown, the buildings were intended to epitomize “the utopian aspirations of the revolution,” when Fidel Castro commissioned them in 1961.
That is, until a world-renowned Cuban dancer returned to his native Havana with an idea to breathe new life into the dilapidated institution.
Photographs from John A. Loomis’ Revolution of Forms
Convention Hall, Chicago, 1953–54
Preliminary version: interior perspective
Rendering by Mies van der Rohe
“I went through a lot of different possible types of building. There are only a few left. I would like to do the Convention Hall in Chicago. This is an enormous building, 722 by 620 feet. I would like to see it myself. I know the drawings. I know the idea behind it. But, in fact, there is a certain size that is a reality. Take the pyramids in Egypt and make them only 15 feet high. It is nothing. There is just this enormous size that makes all the difference.”
Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis | Arthouse apertures
“…A new form of aperture, based on accumulation and density, was developed to unify the building and create a logical yet unconventional facade appropriate for an experimental art venue. The southern and eastern elevations are perforated by 177 glass blocks, which are lodged in the existing masonry.”
Read more about Arthouse at the Jones Center in LTL’s Intensities, available November 2012.
