frank does facebook

 

Facebook has commissioned Frank Gehry to design a company headquarters in Silicon Valley. This makes me chuckle. There is a loose correlation between enthusiastic investments in brand-name architecture and eventual economic collapse. It's like a construction worker going on a hell of a bender the day before he gets laid off. Might as well spend it when you have it, I guess.

Facebook is engaged in what is know as signalling. They want people to believe that they are capable of making serious investments in the future and that their creative vision is above and beyond anyone else. We'll see how that works out. I wish I was investing money in a company that makes cardboard.

apple v samsung

And this too shall pass. As far as I know, I don't own products from either company at the moment, but I am worried that Apple's victory in their patent suit against Samsung will have a chilling effect on creative product development. Towers of Ilium cares little for patents and copyrights. A creative endeavor will ultimately become public domain, and the sooner the better. An entrepreneur or inventor, with some prudent planning, can reap large rewards from an original idea, but I do not think that these rewards should be transferable or subject to a nearly unlimited lifespan. Current efforts to apply personhood copyrights to dead celebrities is the most sickening example of this trend. When you die, your water belongs to the tribe. So say we all.

all the world's a game

A rendering of the MGM casino complex proposal for Springfield, MA. Hooray, now we can put our feet up and cheer because this will save the city and everyone will be rich and happy and all puppies and kittens will have a home and nothing will ever go wrong again....

It seems to be a well-thought out proposal. It takes advantage of an existing city that is close to major highways (which means it will poach Conn. gamblers) and it attempts to weave the casino into an urban space. This rendering shows the casino as lifestyle center approach. (For those who don't know, a "lifestyle center" is really just an outdoor mall with slightly better design than a strip mall). It conceals the fact that revenues from casinos depend on adults who sit at one-armed bandits losing money, usually while smoking. They are isolated from the outdoors and from other realities of survival. This rendering tries to conceal that harsh fact by depicting families with children wandering about a cartoon dreamland that has nice-looking streetlamps and what appears to be a huge television screen.

a good thing

On most occasions, the most dramatic spaces of houses and buildings are the stairwells. It's remarkably easy to achieve an emotional moment--delight, awe, etc...by designing the path of travel up and down a stair. Commercial building codes have often relegated egress stairs to functional, sterile and miserable shafts devoid of style. At worst, they are intimidating spaces that discourage their use. Residential designers can make a staircase architecturally ineffective by making the transitional spaces at the top or bottom too small or too dark. The detailing--type of railing, colors, flooring, is less important than the sculptural effects and proportions of the transition areas.

healthcare design

I know almost nothing about healthcare design, which is unfortunate, because it is one of the most important areas of architectural service. This space was designed by a firm called Lomanco and Pitts in association with the Boston firm of Ellenzweig. It is part of the Worcester Recovery Center, which will provide care for people with mental disorders. The buildings are designed to convey a sense of shelter, and create a transitional environment for patients. From what I can tell, they're pulling it off pretty well. Hospital and healthcare architecture seems to resist terminal design conditions. Spaces get worn out quickly and technology gets changed every decade or so.

corbusier polemic

Towers of Ilium does not regard Corbusier favorably. His architecture is sculptural, often abstract, devoid of warmth, and hard to renovate. I'm wondering how influential he still is, and if there is anything positive than can be distilled from his writing or his design. His status as a revolutionary pales in comparison to Mies, and his reputation as a designer in popular culture has been on the wane for decades. He is trotted out in design school because he is historically significant as a figure of modernism, but no architecture student attempts to reproduce him stylistically.

The most dangerous thing about Corbu is that for too long he reinforced the false image of architect as world-maker--as a heroic Howard Roarkian figure (he was one of the models for Ayn Rand's idiotic hero, I believe) who existed to refashion and reform humanity through bold gestures. He promised a destruction of history, and its replacement with a bombastic and ludicrous approximation of the future--all rendered in concrete and steel windows that would rust shut after a few years.

livable cities without property bubbles

Huffpost had a brief article (snagged from the Economist) about the most livable cities in the world. They noted that Damascus had dropped considerably in the rankings since the last survey. Most of the top ten cities are in Australia or Canada, which is interesting since both countries seem to be on a roller coaster incline of massive residential real estate bubbles. Vienna, which has the lovely building pictured above, was also on the list. No American cities were in the top ten. I guess because our property bubbles have burst, we aren't livable anymore.

In other news, rents in the greater Boston area have climbed 7% from last year (Boston Globe). This implies that we have a shortage of rental units, which would suggest a rather simple economic remedy--build more apartments. Such a simple solution runs into the arduous and lengthy permitting process that plagues the city.