Broadsheet

Undoubtedly GugBilbao simply has a much much greater focal length, that will cause the presidential palace in Madrid to go up in flames on that fateful day when the cod tell their Basque fisherpeople that the hour is nie.

 

Why on earth do people persist in commissioning new and bigger titanium dog turds from Gehry? Do they not know that PoMo died a deserved death in the 80's?

There's a subhead in the CNN article: "University, firm look for fix"... I'll tell you the fix, start building responsible fucking buildings! Hire someone other than Gehry! Although perhaps not Koolhaas...

Have you seen Gehry's atrocities at MIT?

 

jwer, you can tell me (and probably rather effectively) why I'm full of shite, but for what it's worth . . . .

MOST of Gehry's buildings aren't actually titanium, right?; he could rarely afford it after baggin' Bilbao, I thought.

Also, is he really PoMo or MoMo? To me, at least, he's channeling the Russian Constructivists for the Matrix generation, kinda like Calatrava's crossing Italian Futurism with Suisse/Scandy aesthetic ascetic antisepticism (architecture for an aging Aviator).

Sure there's synthesis, but synthesis alone don't make for PoMo, does it?; PoMo is all about ala carte multi-style plug-and-play, glorying in the juxtapos rather than the blend. Franky, in (greater) Hollywood and elsewhere, is still in the blender, albeit in jwer's opinion a blender that's perhaps more like a 5 am tub full o' suicide at a frat party that tastes by then suspiciously urinatious.

PS: changed my mind, L

PPS: I don't have a big dog in the Rem hunt, but I can say that it wouldn't take much to beat Gehry's OR Venturi's "best" in Frasierville. But then, come to think of it, doesn't the Space Needle itself out Calatrava Calatrava?

 

Mark: no, only a couple of the most well known are ACTUALLY titanium, most of them are just stainless steel or whatever...

As for PoMo, I am mostly here talking about this, which reminds me of nothing so much as the old "oh, look, it's falling down, but it's NOT" BEST stores that were the apotheosis of PoMo... I am a bit lazy in my application of that adjective, though.

I do not see him as channeling the constructivists; their building(s) were much more visually coherent, whereas Gehry's look like he has AutoCAD and ADHD. No coherence at all, like the Columbus Center downtown. Also, I don't really see what Gehry is synthesizing, besides "an amorphous pile of metal" and "an amorphous pile of brick". I don't know that it helps his case to say he's still big in LA, either...

I actually like Koolhaas, in theory... there's plenty to like in S, M, L, XL; but if you click "next" a couple of times from the above link, there's also a little too much willful ignorance of why traditional buildings look the way they do.

In closing, at least Venturi was a bit more upfront about being a con artist...

 

Fair enough!

I don't actually know what Gehry's "blending" either; that just seemed like a good counterpoint to the notion of juxtaposition.

You are 100% right about the MIT building, which I hadn't actually seen exterior pix of before. Christ, if his Vltava waterfront bldg is Fred and Ginger, this is the friggin' Playboy Mansion on Sunday morning -- or at lest Sid and Nancy.

I don't actually know a damn thing about Constructivist architecture. As I said in email to L, I was gratuitously channeling art history into arch history. I was setting myself up to get kicked in the Kandinsky.

Er, sorry . . . .

Back to work then. Time for some Pavament, maybe, on the iPod...

'Architecture students are like virgins/with an itch they cannot scratch/Never build a building till you're 50/what kind of life is that?'

 

That Kunstler website is sort of fun... he's a total nutbag, but he does know a crap building when he sees it. Also, his books are very interesting, particularly Geography of Nowhere. MIT has been building some awful buildings recently, in any event.

I think this is pretty much all the Constructivist Architecture there is, and I don't think this was ever even built full-size. Still, cooler than all of Gehry combined.

Mmm, frustrated would-be architects...

 

OK - I gotta weigh in here - I mean, last time I checked, this was my blog. Jwer - you like this?? Not Koolhaas' finest by a long shot. And yes, the Kunstler site is fun.

 

Vladimir Tatlin -- was that his name? Monument to the Somethingth Somewhereinale?

That's ok; there are several Constructivist/High (and I mean High) Modernist pieces of which I'm quite fond in Sandusky:


This and, from
another angle.

Then there's
this.

And finally: this.

 

Later, if you're all nice, I'll show you my favorite woodies!

- Steely Daniel Liebeskind

 

Linda: I believe what I said was: "I actually like Koolhaas, in theory... there's plenty to like in S, M, L, XL; but if you click "next" a couple of times from the above link, there's also a little too much willful ignorance of why traditional buildings look the way they do." That picture you link to is exactly what I DON'T like, which is why I mentioned it. It's an abomination. The Maison a Bordeaux, however, is cool.

Mark: now you're just being silly. Or an engineer, which might be worse.