The Bedford Quarry House, by architect Steven Harris:
(If that’s blurry, it’s probably because it’s a screen capture.)
Overall — and I know this is very much a science fiction reader’s observation — the house reminds me of the one in City, by Clifford Simak. On the edge of a quarry that’s been allowed to start filling with water, benevolent noise provided by a waterfall.
Here’s a video with an interview featuring Mr. Harris
“You know what they say: ‘A kitchen divided against itself… that dog won’t hunt.’” — Ben Napier, Home Town
This is a nighttime photograph, by Nancy Matoba, of the soon-to-open Little Tokyo subway station in LA. It’s of the above-ground plaza used by the station at 1st & Alameda, the approximate location of where the Atomic Cafe was, and shows the very large mural commemorating it on a stainless steel building that has a staircase and an elevator. (Compare the mural to the elevator doors for size.) The image of the Cafe at night used for the top two-thirds of the mural was made by me; the bottom third is explanatory text. You won’t even need to go underground to the rest of the station to see it. I’m proud to join the landscape of LA, and humbled to pay tribute to the place and the Matoba family this way.
(All praise and thanks to Nancy’s daughter, Zen Sekizawa, for finding my photo online in the first place, and her tireless efforts seeing this project through with Metro. Zen first mentioned this idea to me in March, 2018, showing how the wheels of government grind slowly, and exceedingly fine.)
And the original image, from my photo portfolio site:
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Hocus Pocus
* From an interview in Der Spiegel, called “Evil Can Also Be Beautiful”:
SPIEGEL: Some people say that if architects had to live in their own buildings, cities would be more attractive today.
Koolhaas: Oh, come on now, that’s really trivial.
SPIEGEL: Where do you live?
Koolhaas: That’s unimportant. It’s less a question of architecture than of finances.
SPIEGEL: You’re avoiding the question. Where do you live?
Koolhaas: OK, I live in a Victorian apartment building in London.
{hat tip to John Massengale}
A while back, I read this piece in the New Yorker by Tom Vanderbilt, “What Makes a Work of Art Seem Dated?”
This paragraph stood out for me:
“Sometimes, of course, things are genuinely ahead of their time. In “The Architecture of Happiness,” Alain de Botton reprints a 1927 advertisement for Mercedes-Benz that depicts a woman, wearing gloves and a cloche (that iconic headwear of the twenties), one foot astride the running board. The woman and the car are posed in front of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Double House, built for the Weissenhof housing project in Stuttgart. The photo reads like a children’s game: Which of these things is not like the others? The car and the woman are Jazz Age relics; the house looks like it could be have been built in Malibu last week. The irony is that the advertisement wants to depict all three as the quintessence of “modern,” but only the house, so stylistically out in front, kept on being “modern.”
Here’s the picture in question:
The fashion looks dated because fashion moved on.
The car looks dated because industrial design moved on.
The architecture doesn’t look dated because architecture hasn’t moved on.
It isn’t that this building is “genuinely ahead of (its) time.” It is absolutely, rigidly, painfully of its time. It’s that in the 86 years since, architecture hasn’t moved one millimeter. So when you design a building that looks like Corbu’s, remember you’re making one just as full of pastiche as designing clothes or a car in the retro style of the ad.
I was mulling over the way architecture has hit creative vapor lock, but rhetorically insists that recently designed buildings are somehow more current than classically designed buildings, which are dismissed as “mere pastiche.” I’ve talked about this before, in response to seeing the TV program Architecture School.
To give an idea of the stasis I see, I’ve come up with what I call the Expo 67 Test:
If this building had been built or proposed as a national pavilion at Expo 67, would it have caused any aesthetic controversy at all?
(It’s the “or proposed” that’s the real key — as any student of 20th century architecture knows, there are an awful lot of unbuilt but influential projects out there.)
This article at TheAtlanticCities about yet another proposal by Zaha Hadid that fails the Expo 67 Test was the immediate spark. That ceiling, from inside the stadium, looks like nothing so much as the Olympic Stadium in Munich for the 1972 games, and that in turn was clearly based on the BRD (West German) Pavilion at Expo 67.
Jobshenge is another building that utterly fails the Expo 67 Test. It keeps being described as “futuristic,” and I suppose it is, but only with those ironic scare quotes — it would look completely at ease in a 1960s Kubrick SF movie.
The interesting thing is how the Expo 67 Test can be expanded to other arts as well:
* Would this painting look out of place in a gallery show at Expo 67?
* Would this piece of music have sounded out of place as “new music” in a concert at Expo 67?
Etc., etc., et bloody cetera.
