May 16, 2008
Ada Louise Huxtable on architectural follies
In Thursday's Wall Street Journal, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable discusses Frank Gehry's proposal for this summer's Serpentine Gallery pavilion and Jørn Utzon's Sydney Opera House, which is to be refurbished, as two types of architectural folly. In between the discussion she inserts these two paragraphs:
I am constantly asked if architecture is an art, and the desire seems to be less for enlightenment than for denial. The idea has never been popular with anyone but the architects themselves, who are always seeking to extend their aesthetic boundaries. The virtue of a folly is that it provides the freedom to explore without rules. Mr. Gehry's sensibilities are as sculptural as they are structural, and although some find the union disturbing in the way it transcends accepted definitions, he makes legitimate, brilliant architecture of the alliance. And yes, it is art, and there is no great architecture without it.
Clueless value engineers who define design as dollars (they will all get their due in some bean-counters' hell) do their best to remove the art from architecture, but you can't take the artist out of the architect. Le Corbusier painted. Richard Meier makes sculpture. Michael Graves is a fine colorist and collagist. Steven Holl designs in delicate watercolors. Frank Lloyd Wright called architecture the mother of the arts. All art is the product of an innate, visceral sense of balance, proportion, form and line, a feeling for surface, texture, color and contrast, an understanding of materials and their expressive potential that cannot be taught. The architect alone has the ability to visualize space multidimensionally and in scale; only the architect has mastered the complexity of its uses and interactions. But this is an art that must serve and satisfy real programs, costs and needs; it must engage with the real world. In the lovely, useless folly, art trumps reality for a moment of pure delight.
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Architecture & Design, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 2, 2008
Visual Interlude: House in Sendai-Kasumi by Kiyonobu Nakagame
A house designed by Kiyonobu Nakagame, located on a hill above Sendai, Japan. Photograph by K. Torimura. More information, and many more photographs, at the design blog Dezeen.
Posted in Architecture & Design. Found always via this permanent link.
September 21, 2007
Weekend eye candy: Tama Art University Library by Toyo Ito
Here is an exterior view of the new Tama Art University Library in the suburbs of Tokyo, designed by architect Toyo Ito. For eleven more views of this spectacular-looking building, check out this September 11 post on the design blog Dezeen.
(NB: Photo by Ishiguro Photographic Institute.)