Today’s News - Thursday, March 5, 2020

EDITOR'S NOTE: To (most of) our readers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico: Don't forget to spring your clocks ahead one hour Saturday night (an extra hour of daylight - yay!). Also note that tomorrow and Monday will be no-newsletter days. We'll be back Tuesday, March 10.

●  Bernstein pays tribute to the "courtly architect" Henry Cobb, "I.M. Pei's unsung partner for nearly four decades but was responsible for a celebrated body of work in his own right."

●  Just days after announcing the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale would go forward with May 23 opening, the "coronavirus travel restrictions force it to postpone opening until August 29."

●  Rosenbaum raises the alarm about the Trump Administration seeking to cut "wasteful & unnecessary" spending, calling "to ax support for the arts and humanities - NEA and NEH are allotted what the Administration deems to be sufficient funding for orderly termination of all operations in 2021" (yikes! Contact your Congressional representatives!).

●  Brussat again considers the "Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" draft executive order, and wonders "why so many of classicism's leading lights oppose the E.O. There is no plausible reason" (take that, ICAA).

●  Kamin compares plans for a 10-story, metal-clad, windowless Amazon fulfillment center in a Chicago suburb to the rich architectural legacy of the city's industrial buildings - will the Amazon warehouse deliver the same? "Don't bet on it."

●  Moreno reports on Giovanni Vaccarini Architetti's (stunning!) Powerbarn facility in Ravenna, Italy, "expected to produce renewable energy for an estimated 84,000 families while also 'renaturalizing' the industrially damaged" site.

●  Johnston's Q&A with Eleanor Peres re: "her latest research, the role of architecture in a time of climate breakdown and mass biodiversity loss," and why she uses the word "ecology" instead of "sustainability": "I am witnessing a transition in the field from object to system."

●  Gamolina's Q&A with Odile Decq re: "starting out as a young architect in France and advising those just starting their careers to take risks and not follow the status quo": " There is nothing wrong with taking risks - you will fail, but that's OK - just keep going - don't look back."

●  Saval offers a great profile of Sou Fujimoto, "the architect making conceptual art out of buildings" with "his own definition for what design should be" - and why he was "unwilling to brave the gauntlet of auditioning for Toyo Ito and SANAA."

Weekend diversions:

●  Blander on Koolhaas's "Countryside, the Future" at the Guggenheim: "The medium doesn't fit the message - if there is one - it's doomed by an excess of unorganized, sentimentalist content" that "resorts to worn urban/rural dichotomies" with "a kitchen sink of adapted book chapters, recycled conference papers, expanded blog posts" (ouch!).

●  Hagberg, on the other hand, is a bit kinder: "Countryside, The Future" is "vintage Rem, almost a greatest hits collection. It's a bit cheeky, it has its intellectual moments."

●  Wainwright cheers a "bold little show" at RIBA London - Space Popular's "energetic, colorful, poppy history lesson - peppily" titled "Freestyle: Architectural Adventures in Mass Media."

●  Moore catches up with Studio Formafantasma, "the Italian designers who have a way with wood," to talk about "Formafantasma: Cambio" at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery: They "don't claim to save the world" but "'it can have an influence.' Which, with wit and grace, is what their designs do."

●  The University of Oklahoma pays tribute to the educational legacy of Goff, Herb Greene, Mendel Glickman, Elizabeth Bauer Mock, and others who "developed a curriculum that taught students to look beyond the accepted canon of Western architecture" with "Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture."

Page-turners:

●  Lam lauds "Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women" by Assemble Studio's Jane Hall: This book answers the question: "What are women architects building? Most impactfully, it dispels the notion that projects by women have a particular aesthetic - the only commonality is the quality of the work."

●  Stamp brings us "7 examples of centuries-old design that combat climate change" from Julia Watson's "Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism" that "looks at technologies used by 20 indigenous populations, from Iraq to Tanzania."

●  A great excerpt from Justus Nieland's "Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era": "Eamesian happiness, circulating through both images and objects, linked the "goodness" of the American good life to the "goodness" of so-called good design."

●  Marcus Field considers Hendrickson's "Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright": It "will not be everybody's cup of tea. The writing is baroque. But the contradictory Wright who emerges, both hateful and human, is probably the truest portrait of the man we have yet."

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To subscribe to the free daily newsletter click here Obituary by Fred A. Bernstein: Henry Cobb, Courtly Architect of Hancock Tower, 93: He was I.M. Pei’s unsung partner for nearly four decades but was responsible for a celebrated body of work in his own right: [He] did not have the high profile of contemporaries like Frank Gehry or Pei. He called them “formgivers” and himself “a problem-solver.” Yet he was “an architect of immense creativity,” Paul Goldberger wrote...The Pei-Cobb partnership was tested by the Hancock Tower crisis...People often attributed Cobb’s buildings to Pei. “When you’re working with a superstar...it goes with the territory.” -- Pei Cobb Freed & Partners- New York Times Coronavirus travel restrictions force 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale to postpone opening until August 29: The biennial's 17th edition will now only run for three months rather than six: A short-term postponement would be ineffective, considering the “complexity of the organisational machine”, it adds. The move is the latest drastic measure taken by Italian authorities following 80 deaths linked to Covid-19...Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan has moved from April to June. -- Hashim Sarkis- The Art Newspaper (UK) Lee Rosenbaum: “Wasteful & Unnecessary” Spending: Trump Dumps Arts & Humanities...(again): ...proposed federal budget for Fiscal 2021, has again called for the elimination of federal funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...NEA and NEH are allotted what the Administration deems to be sufficient funding for orderly termination of all operations in 2021...Perhaps obsessing over cultural support is frivolous, when there are more serious proposed budgetary cuts to agonize over...Don’t be lulled into false complacency, art-lings, on the theory that Congress will again resist the President’s call to ax support for NEA, NEH, IMLS and CPB/PBS. Contact your Congressional representatives to advocate for continued (and, preferably, increased) arts-and-humanities support.- ArtsJournal / CultureGrrl David Brussat: EO: The two paths ahead: The draft executive order...is forcing classicists...to choose...Curiously, some classicists and traditionalists have taken up cudgels against their own liberation from modernism’s hegemony...Perhaps the most extreme example is the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art [ICAA]...If the E.O. dies, so will hope that classicism can expand upon the slow but steady growth it has seen over the past two or three decades...what sort of possibilities will arise over the next decades to stoke the dreams of Americans who want their country to be beautiful again? Hope springs eternal...why do so many of classicism’s leading lights oppose the E.O.? There is no plausible reason.- Architecture Here and There Blair Kamin: Can an Amazon warehouse deliver the architectural beauty of Chicago’s old warehouses and factories? Don’t bet on it: ...wants to build...[a] "fulfillment center"...[in] suburban Bolingbrook...town’s mayor, who is normally pro-growth...wants nothing to do with...a 10-story building...metal exterior walls and...no windows. “A prison has more architecture than that"...In Chicago especially, warehouses, factories and other industrial buildings...had a profound influence on the city’s architecture...It’s not that the new warehouses don’t have architects - they do...It’s also not true that new industrial buildings can’t be inspiring - they can...architectural beauty? That’s one thing Amazon’s fulfillment centers don’t deliver. -- H.H. Richardson/Henry Hobson Richardson; Dankmar Adler/Louis Sullivan/Adler & Sullivan; Daniel Burnham; Schmidt, Garden & Martin- Chicago Tribune Shonquis Moreno: Giovanni Vaccarini Architetti’s Powerbarn Treads Lightly - While Making a Big Impact: The facility produces ecomass-fueled energy while mitigating a former industrial site near Ravenna, Italy: ...structures and landscaping are defined by...strong formality and its demonstration that industry, agriculture and community can co-exist harmoniously...produces electricity from livestock bio-gas, supply-chain scrap wood chips...[and] a photovoltaic array...expected to produce renewable energy for an estimated 84,000 families...while also...“renaturalizing” industrially damaged areas...Threaded with walking and bicycling paths that invite the community in, they become a membrane between the factory, the land, and their neighbors.- Metropolis Magazine Poppy Johnston: There’s more to green architecture than greenery: The manmade world tends to dominate the natural one but it’s possible for architecture and ecology to coexist in harmony...it urgently has to, as...Eleanor Peres discovered: Q&A re: her latest research [and] the role of architecture in a time of climate breakdown and mass biodiversity loss: "I set out to understand what role urban architecture played in the imbalance of human growth and ecological erasure...greening of a place on scale of human pleasure and leisure is less beneficial...than the design of large-scale infrastructures for the management of energy and waste...I am witnessing a transition in the field from object to system." -- Hayball- The Fifth Estate (Australia) Julia Gamolina: Built to be Determined: Odile Decq on Opening Possibilities and Taking Risks: Q&A re: starting out as a young architect in France and choosing how she presents to the world, advising those just starting their careers to take risks and not follow the status quo: "Don’t hesitate to take risks. There is nothing wrong with taking risks - you will fail, but that’s OK...just keep going...don’t look back. And don’t think that you won’t achieve what you want - you will, you just have to be a little patient [laughs]. It’s a long road."- Madame Architect Nikil Saval: The Architect Making Conceptual Art Out of Buildings: In exploring the contradictions between private and public, interior and exterior, constructed and natural, Sou Fujimoto has offered his own definition for what design should be: The most important thing [he] did as a young architect was to not produce any architecture...He was...intensely shy, unwilling to brave the gauntlet of auditioning for Toyo Ito and SANAA...His self-imposed exile...proved generative. Today, he is at the top of his profession...[his] is the conceptual art of contemporary architecture...There are few architects of [his] stature who are so doggedly committed to continuous experimentation...- New York Times T Magazine Akiva Blander: At Rem Koolhaas’s "Countryside, the Future," the Medium Doesn’t Fit the Message - If There is One: The memelike exhibition will please crowds of most stripes, but it’s doomed by an excess of unorganized, sentimentalist content: ...[show] resorts to worn urban/rural dichotomies that do little to educate, let alone intrigue...One doesn’t really get a better or more rich idea of the “countryside” than what they came in with...a glut of unorganized content...a kitchen sink of adapted book chapters, recycled conference papers, expanded blog posts...what emerges is a fairly uncritical look at sweeping but not-entirely-relevant spatial and cultural categories. -- OMA; Samir Bantal/AMO- Metropolis Magazine Eva Hagberg: Rem Koolhaas contemplates the countryside at the Guggenheim: "Countryside, The Future" is a temporally and spatially massive show, the kind of focus on architecture that most practitioners and historians only dream of....[it] is vintage Rem, almost a greatest hits collection...much of the show is inherently alarming...[His] argument...is that the countryside...being overlooked has caused it to be transformed from a bucolic land of peace and pleasure...into a sort of weird and un-designed back office/storage room for the world’s cities...It’s a bit cheeky, it has its intellectual moments...What the public - or the politicians...does with this attention remains to be seen. -- OMA; Irma Boom- Wallpaper* Oliver Wainwright: Know what an ogee is? Architecture translated for the TikTok age: Can an eye-searingly colourful carpet, a massive model mash-up and a load of VR headsets decode the architectural lexicon? ...Space Popular’s energetic RIBA show: ...a colourful, poppy history lesson...Peppily titled "Freestyle: Architectural Adventures in Mass Media"...bold little show...Before historians write in to complain of taxonomic sacrilege, the architects have written their own disclaimer: “The choppy waters of style are treacherous, yet we have navigated them lightly, as one would a ball pit rather than a daunting ocean.” It makes for a refreshing dip, dissolving the preciousness of architectural history... thru May 16 -- Lara Lesmes; Fredrik Hellberg; Shumi Bose- Guardian Cities Rowan Moore: Meet the Italian designers who have a way with wood: Studio Formafantasma are revolutionising the use of timber in a way that will make you see this age-old material in a new light: "Formafantasma: Cambio" at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery...They have chosen to make the show about trees...nothing but timber...understanding of their materials is biochemical, technical, social, cultural, aesthetic, ecological, economic and geographic...show will, if it works, make it impossible for you ever to see a timber-derived object...in the same way again...they don’t claim to save the world..."it can have an influence”. Which, with wit and grace, is what their designs do. thru May 17 -- Hans Ulrich Obrist; Simone Farresin; Andrea Trimarchi- Observer (UK) Radical architecture: OU pays tribute to innovative educational legacy of Bruce Goff with "Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture" exhibits: ...designed to guide visitors through the educational legacy of Goff (1904-82)...Greene, Mendel Glickman (1895-1967), Elizabeth Bauer Mock (1911-98) and other OU faculty members developed a curriculum that taught students to look beyond the accepted canon of Western architecture and find inspiration in the natural landscape, everyday objects...[show] includes a section devoted to "Lost Works of the American School Period"... University of Oklahoma Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, OK, thru April 5 -- Michael Hoffner; Herb Greene; Luca Guido- The Oklahoman Elsa Lam: "Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women" by Jane Hall: A few years ago, the conversation about gender equity in architecture centered on the question: where are the women architects? New aspects...are beginning to come to light, including the question: what are women architects building? This volume answers that question with a stunning selection of over 200 projects involving women architects...An insightful introductory essay acknowledges the book’s shortcomings...more work needs to be done to identify leading women architects in Africa, Central Asia and Southeast Asia...most impactfully, [it] dispels the notion that projects by women have a particular aesthetic...the only commonality is the quality of the work. -- Audrey Thomas-Hayes/Assemble Studio- Canadian Architect magazine Elizabeth Stamp: 7 Examples of Centuries-Old Design That Combat Climate Change: "Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism" studies the methods of 20 indigenous populations, from Iraq to Tanzania, that best show how humans can live in harmony with nature: ...architects and designers often look to high-tech innovations for solutions. But what if the answers aren’t new but centuries old?...lecturer and landscape designer Julia Watson looks at technologies used by indigenous populations...traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)...Read on to discover some of the technologies.- Architectural Digest Justus Nieland: Happy Furniture: On the Media Environments of the Eames Chair: Eamesian happiness, circulating through both images and objects, linked the “goodness” of the American good life to the “goodness” of so-called good design...[their]’ films taught spectators about the postwar arts of living...Photography, filmmaking, and furniture design were understood as related species of communication, expressing the Eameses’ flexible, curious, and...quintessentially American lifestyle...the couple’s varied terrain of happy making. [excerpt from "Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era"] -- Eliot F. Noyes; Lewis Mumford; Marcel Breuer; George Nelson- Places Journal Marcus Field: "Plagued by Fire" by Paul Hendrickson: Seeking the foundations of humanity that underpinned a monstrous genius: ...new biographical study, a whopper at nearly 600 pages, is a brave attempt to do something different... but we’re in safe hands... What he really wants to challenge is the legend of the “strutting, self-seeking, self-centred charmer...Was there a capacity for regret, sadness and shame beneath that monstrous ego? This book will not be everybody’s cup of tea. The writing is baroque...But the contradictory Wright who emerges, both hateful and human, is probably the truest portrait of the man we have yet.- Evening Standard (UK)

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