dayaal

May 6, 2012
by Sammy J
0 comments

OCGC to Stay

Robbie Whelan, WSJ

Well it looks like Paul Rudolph’s brutalist Orange County Government Centre has been given a stay of execution. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Orange County Legislature voted against the demolition. But the numbers are telling – 11 to 10. Not an overwhelming amount of support. It’s a divisive building, one which will remain highly unpopular I’m sure. I managed to attract a bit of criticism on this blog for my suggestion that this is a notable building worthy of saving, and perhaps rightly so. Who am I as someone on the other side of the world to comment on the value of a building that I have nothing to do with? In doing so, I’ve reduced it to merely a sculptural object. A building must have it’s users, it must contribute positively to it’s community, and it’s value must be more than just the name of its architect.

I still like it, and I’m still glad that it isn’t being demolished. I just hope that in choosing to save it that Orange County can make it a useful and positive space for it’s community.

April 24, 2012
by Sammy J
1 Comment

The Architecture of The Hunger Games

I haven’t yet seen The Hunger games, but I do intend to. Mostly because of my fascination with popular culture. But also, now, because of this quote from the film’s director, Gary Ross:

Yeah, I mean any time you’re doing a design based movie, I mean a lot of your first iterations you just cringe at. That happened all the way through. Then you begin to refine it and you begin to come up with… I will say that Phil Messina, my production designer, has such wonderful tastes that he and I wisely began with a lot of reference and we looked at a lot and we wandered into this area of architecture that I talked to you yesterday about, called “Brutalism,” which uses, like, massive concrete form. It’s very imposing. It’s very stark. It’s very authoritarian. That was tremendously helpful. So we began from a place of reference, but I mean if I showed you early hovercrafts… They were like bad FLASH GORDON and also early Cornucopias until we sort of settled on this.

Yeah, on this kind of abstraction, this deconstructed cornucopia, which may or may not resemble the work of a famous architect.

Guess which word caught my eye…

Any architects out there who’ve seen the film and care to comment on the use of architecture to create this fantasy world?

April 24, 2012
by Sammy J
0 comments

Brutumblr

If, like me, you’re a fan of brutalism, or at least have a bit of a fascination with it, here are a few things you might want to have a look at. Tumblr seems to be the blogging platform du jour, and there an increasing number of these devoted to architecture, modernism, and, specifically, brutalism. If you’re on tumblr you can follow them via your dashboard. If not, then RSS works. Or you can simply check in an have a look from time to time. Tumblr does tend to be about images rather than text or exegesis, but we all enjoy looking at stuff.

Fuck Yeah Brutalism

Modernism in Metro-Land

If you know of any others, please let me know in the comments below. And if you’re on tumblr yourself, let me know where to find you. You can check out my rather random tumblr (the latest posts to which appear on the right of this page) at dayaal.tumblr.com

March 30, 2012
by Sammy J
0 comments

A few choice comments

People have been posting some really nice comments on this blog of late, and I thought I’d share a few of them here for your entertainment:

you know how to take the attention of the readers with such good ideas.

“Good post! This is the kind of information that should be distributed on the online community. I would like to read more of this.”
“your work is very appreciated for me, i always read your posts”
“Let’s even think there shall become a vital minimize in rates of interest to the time currently being debt consolidation”
“unlike additional blogs i have read which are really not good. i also found your posts very interesting.”
“it contains truly information. your website is very useful. thanks for sharing.”

Aw shucks, thanks everyone. Unfortunately my spam filter stopped your comments from being approved, but I appreciate the time it took for you to programme your bot to spam me. May your penis never be short nor flaccid, and long may you earn billions of dollars from the comfort of your own home.

March 27, 2012
by Sammy J
0 comments

More brutality against Brutalism

photo by John Levett

Maybe i haven’t been paying close enough attention. I know there’s been a bunch of brutalist building under threat of demolition over the last few years, but I guess it hits home when one I’m reading about is slated for destruction. In fact my next post on the topic [spoiler alert] is going to be about the Smithsons.

From BDOnline

Tower Hamlets council has approved plans to demolish Robin Hood Gardens in east London.

The Smithson-designed estate will be razed to the ground to make way for up to 1,575 new homes on a wider 7.7ha site as part of the £500 million Blackwall Reach regeneration scheme.

According to the masterplan drawn up by Horden Cherry Lee, working with Swan Housing and Countryside Properties and architect Aedas, this will include two towers, 40 and 35 storeys high.

Wow. I’ve never been a particularly passionate architectural conservationist, but I find this pretty tragic. Especially when one considers the planned replacement (as with the Paul Rudolph building I mentioned a little while ago) is not that impressive. In this case it’s not as horrible, but is it that much of an improvement over the exisiting? I guess I’m not really in a position to comment on that.

There’s 2 things in particular in this situation and in the many other related to the demolition of modernist buildings that I consider to be, at least in part, failures on the part of architects the world over.

The first is that we haven’t communicated (or perhaps even cared about) the environmental impact of demolition and replacement of exisiting buildings. Carbon outputs and other impacts are simply not mentioned in discussions on this topic. We don’t seem to have let enough people know what the impacts are.

The second is not a new issue. We haven’t given people an understanding of modernism that allows them to see for themselves the value of this work. I have no idea about how we might do this, but in any conversation I’ve had with people who aren’t formally trained in architecture, modernism is either hated, or valued only for its aesthetic appeal.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the notion of the Starchitect is in part to blame. If you ask the average layperson to name an architect, you’re bound to hear the names Wright, Zaha, Gehry, Foster, Mies, Le Corbusier and so on. (It’s Mies’ birthday today, and anyone with an iota of curiosity wo goes onto Google will discover who he is thanks to their Google Doodle for the day.) If you ask an architecture student, they’ll probably mention a few more, including Koolhaas, Liebeskind, and various Pritzker winners. But if you were to ask people to name artists, more often than not they’ll have a long list, ranging from the Renaissance (or even earlier) to at least the 20th century. But people won’t know who the Smithsons are. Which I find a little sad.

With that in mind, I’ll get on with my next post, devoted to them, as soon as I can.

photo by John Levett