Commentary & Criticism

RSS

Beyond the ephemeral glitter of a world's fair, the 2008 Zaragoza Expo, which runs through September 14th in the northern Spanish city, is architecturally memorable for only two or three innovative buildings. The compact 60-acre site along the Ebro River is designed to become a future urban district. Pavilions for participating countries (missing are Britain, Canada and the USA) and Spain's regions recede into the background with organic forms discretely designed by the Spanish firm ACXT. A landmark Water Tower structure by Enrique de Teresa, though organized as a double spiral of ramps around its central void, looks like an

“I do like the grandiose.” I had been to China frequently, but somehow, until a few months ago, never to Beijing. Like many cities in China, it’s intimidatingly vast and growing like Topsy. Unlike other cities, though, it is laid out with an orthogonal monumentality, with vast boulevards, widely spaced buildings, and a thick aura of imperium. Photos © Clifford Pearson Walls, courtyards, and lanes of different sizes define both the residential areas of the Forbidden City (top) and the common hutong (above). The prototype for the city as a whole is the famous Forbidden City, described by Marco Polo

The Chinese have a longstanding genius for domestic architecture, and a visit to the hutong of Beijing—the fast-disappearing neighborhoods of courtyard houses, laced with small lanes and commerce, sanctuaries of both intimacy and variety in the midst of a city too rapidly doing away with the best of its public character—affirms the singularity and brilliance of their historic accomplishment. Such places offer an alternative vision to the Modernist constructs that shape the city today and provide an irreplaceable element in the urban repertoire that demands not simply to be conserved but extended. Photo © Clifford Pearson Hutong are places of

The cherry blossoms were at their peak on a Thursday in late March when I went for a stroll in Ueno Park in Tokyo. A nimbus of white glowing pink with dramatic dark branches etched through it floated above the crowds strolling, photographing, and picnicking on blue tarps spread beneath the trees. What could be more Japanese than such civic reverence for this short-lived phenomenon in all its tender aesthetic frailty? Of course, everyone’s behavior was exemplary, not a scrap of litter and no one disrespecting the pedestrian flow. Photo © Christian Richters (top); Jimmy Cohrssen (above) Herzog & de

Checking out the goodies Okay. Enough of this self-righteous rant. What about the architecture? There is some marvelous work. Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada is striking at the scale of the cityscape, jutting appealingly just above its roofline context. The diamond-gridded structural wall, with its mix of bubbled and flush glass panels, is a lovely thing, and the interior is luminous and dramatic. Circulation is suave, carpet is white, clerks are impeccable in gray. At Tod’s down the row, Ito claims inspiration from the angularity of the branches of the trees out front and creates a facade of big, irregular

A few random field notes on Renzo Piano’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). I assumed RECORD would already have an article on the Broad in the works, but I’m told that no, because Piano is designing so many museums and has also just won the AIA Gold Medal, the magazine is going to hold off for a while. Photo © 2008 Museum Associates/LACMA Renzo Piano’s new Broad building at LACMA features a sawtooth roof of skylights (top) that bounce northern light into the top-floor galleries (above). I suppose the goal

City of dreams While in Los Angeles, I had a chance to revisit a very different museum, the Getty Villa—not the Richard Meier–designed white monastery on a hilltop, but the original Getty that was built in 1979 to hold the oilman’s art collection, and which then was greatly enlarged in 2006 by Boston architects Machado and Silvetti. Photo © Richard Ross (top); Bradley Johnson/Machado and Silvetti (above). At the Getty in Malibu, Machado and Silvetti built an amphitheater next to the villa (top) and treated the site as an archaeological dig where visitors descend through time (above). It’s often said

The noun want used to mean need. Want was life or death stuff, as in “the baby wants feeding.” Now, want has flipped 180 degrees to imply an arbitrary and even whimsical desire, unfettered by need, significance, or logic. At the same time, and perhaps even because our wanting has become so willful, human beings have grown insatiable. The more we get, it seems, the more we want, as though desire itself is the thing we cannot forgo. As though, even cocooned by layers of brimming superfluity, we must want or perish. Welcome to Blubberland. Photo © Alex S. Maclean

Now, however, Gaia, the Greek earth goddess, is offering us a chance. Gaia has brought us to the brink of crisis. Climate change, and all of its moving parts—from litter to light bulbs to deforestation—is more than a crisis of survival. It’s a crisis of significance, where we must grasp the essential connectedness of everything and reinvest in our source of meaning, or die. Photos © Alex S. Maclean Cul-de-sac housing under construction in Houston, 1999 (aerial photo, top). Leveling hills for a new housing development, Castro Valley, California, 1997 (aerial photo, above). In the past 40 years—since the baby