The next few weeks are going to be a bit crazy for me. As you can see by the new banner ad on the main page, the community theatre show I am producing opens in three weeks, so a lot of my time will be spent on that (if you are going to be in the DC area come and see it!). In addition, the holidays will throw a wrench in my writing time, especially because there are some applications i need to get filed by the beginning of January. Add to all of this, I just got my ARE test prep materials, so I may need to take a break from posting regularly for the next few weeks. I will still be twittering, and If i find something interesting while wasting time online or reading an architecture journal i may post it. (if not sooner) Whatever you are or are not celebrating, have a happy holidays, see you next year!
Tulane School of Architecture is hosting a one day symposium at the end of January focusing on Preservation. The keynote speaker will be Robert Ivy, FAIA and one of my favorite professors, Eugene Cizek, FAIA, will be providing commentary. This symposium is free and open to the public. If I was able to be in New Orleans, I would love to attend.
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Today starts DesCours, New Orleans’s second annual AIA sponsored public art installation festival. For the next five days the public spaces all over the French Quarter and Central Business District (CBD) will be transformed into interactive design installations. Not only is this a cool chance to inhabit spaces by up and coming artists and designers, but local fixtures such as Rebirth Brass Band and the Trème Brass Band will be filling the spaces with sounds that are distinctly New Orleanian. This “Architects Week” on an urban scale is free and open to the public.
Frank O. Gehry, there is no other practicing architect who has as much name recognition amongst laymen and who can cause such distress amongst architects. With his two recent projects (the Princeton Lewis Science Library and an addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario) open to the public there has been much talk about the stylistic dichotomy between them. Phillip Kennicott, in an article examining Gehry’s body of work, wrote in this past Sunday’s Washington Post: as observers attempt to sum up his career and project his legacy, there is a growing sense that his most acclaimed work, buildings made in the style of Bilbao, have turned out to be dead ends. Rather than open up new possibilities for the architect, they seem to have left him in a rut. And as his most recent projects suggest, Gehry’s best work today may be his least “Gehryesque.” Yet, I have to wonder if the critique’s that have been written about these two buildings and their relationship to his work as a whole have missed the forest through the trees. The problem with analyzing Gehry’s work is that too often critics fall into the trap of comparing his buildings as individual works [...]