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Today I headed down to the Solar Decathlon on the National Mall. While there I was able to tour 15 of the 20 homes. I was happy to see that the Mall was crowded with people braving the wet and cold to visit these houses, even if that meant that the lines for some of the more award winning homes (like Germany and California) were so long that I chose to see 8 other houses instead of trying to get into them.

These houses all had innovative design solutions to create energy efficient and responsible homes. Interestingly enough, most of the homes used off the rack products, but just assembled them in innovative ways. Where I found the homes to be lacking was that most of them did not fully address their sites. Many of the homes did not interact with the portions of their lots that faced away from the main walk-way (those on the North were predominantly South focused, and those on the south were mainly North focused). Now I know a lot of this had to do with strategic window placement, but for homes which were little more than 15′x50′ rectangles it felt like opportunities to fully engage the site were lost. The teams DID engage the sites, they created decks, plantings and water features, but the houses often did not interact with these features.

One of the things that I found the most informative about the whole competition was not something anyone did, but rather what they were prohibited form doing. Most of the teams had integrated some form of waste water reduction technology through the filtration and re-use of gray and rain water systems. Unfortunately, they were not allowed to use these systems, because in DC it is a violation of plumbing code to use rain or gray water from anything domestic; it can only be used for landscaping needs. Apparently this is standard in many jurisdictions throughout the country. For a city that is trying to be more LEED friendly and at the same time develop its urban neighborhoods, this is a travesty. The student representatives at many of the buildings made it a point to highlight the water savings features and their inability to use them and encouraged visitors to contact their representatives to change this piece of legislation.

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I’ve been harboring a secret for the past few weeks and been dying to post about it but had to wait until it went live. I am now a weekly feature writer for the DC architecture and property blogDC Metrocentric. Its one of the reasons O haven’t posted on here very much, that and just plain laziness. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to develop a writing identity for that site. I will be analyzing and criticizing local architecture within the beltway. If anyone has any suggestions I would welcome the input.

You can find my first post, a criticial analysis of the architecture of the Metro system, live on the site now. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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[Image via IMP Awards.]

Friday the 6th of February I took the opportunity to see the newest adaption of a Neil Gaiman story into a movie, Coraline. This movie, while shown in 3D and marketed towards children, is not a children’s movie.  It is very dark and frankly, at times it can be scary, but that isn’t to say that the lessons of the movie are not lessons children should learn.  The essence of the movie (plot and psychological concepts) not withstanding, I think this movie (and obviously the novel it was based on) can illustrate a lot about the role of architectural discourse and place in surreal post-modern fiction. Now, I won’t pretend to have references or anything as researched as that, but I wanted to share my take on the movie and how both concepts of the home and domesticity and the architecture of place are used to illustrate the lessons of the film.

First, the use of visual iconography in relation to the overall appearance of the Pink Palace helps convey the mood of the story.  In the real world it is weather-beaten and badly in need of cosmetic repairs; the shutters are falling, the paint is peeling and the external attic stairs are precarious at best.  This gloom spreads to the garden as well, where the plants all appear dead.  At first, in the other world, it is a perfect victorian cottage.  The colors are bright and cheery, the shutters and trim are well maintained and delicate, and the stairway to the attic appears sturdy and stable.  In the other garden, the plants spring to life and are filled with a neon electricity at the presence of Coraline.  When the world starts to unravel all of these elements are turned around.  First the garden turns dark and vicious, then the external stairs come loose form the house, and lastly the colors start to fade from the entire world and with them the details of the house’s exterior.  The same parallels exist in the interiors as well, what was is really in need of some love and attention in the real world is at first shiny and perfect and then decays in the other world.  This treatment of the visual language of architectural elements help to portray Coraline’s opinions of both worlds: her world seems banal and lacking compared to the life she left, while the other world is exciting and fun, until its trap-like nature starts to become visible, which in effect helps further the movie’s message that nothing is perfect and to beware that which is too good to be true.  In the end, Coraline and all of the houses inhabitants appear to have taken the chore of its maintenance and care into their own hands.  Further showing that the world is what we make of it.

The second topic that I think bears exploration is the movie’s exploration of smooth and striated spaces.  In Coraline’s traveling through the hole in the wall she journeys through a smooth space – a space where there is no relative measure of comparative movement.  This journey of considerable distance appears to put her exactly where she left, except this is another version.  The audience can interpret this either as she has not moved at all, and is in essence in a world within her house, or she has travelled a great distance to find herself in a parallel (albeit created) world.  This is held in comparison to when Coraline tries to run from the other mother to the well.  She is obviously moving through striated spaces – spaces where this is a means of relative comparison of movement, yet she effectively winds up exactly where she started.  She did not “run around the world” as the cat states, instead she has been effectively transported back to her origin, but facing the other direction.  This counterintuitive interpretation of striated spaces helps to emphasis the cat’s warning about the other world, that it is not what it seems.

A third architectural reading from this move can be taken from the treatment of the hearth.  In semiotics, the hearth is a symbol of not only warmth, but also of family, comfort, creation, and the concept of the home.  In the other world, the hearth is none of these things.  The hearth is located in the other mother’s room, and in essence is an element of destruction and separation from family.  The other mother imprison’s Coraline’s family in a snowglobe on her hearth, thus removing her from her family, she burns the gazing stone in the hearth removing a method of Coraline finding her way home.  In addition, the other mother’s hearth spreads an eerie glow across the room and generally emanates a feeling of discomfort.  This contrast is not ideal though.  In Coraline’s real world, the hearth is a relatively sterile item.  Family life does not revolve around it, and it does not play a large role in early parts of the movie.  Its main function here is housing the accoutrements of family, the snow globes and other collectibles that have accumulated throughout the years.  This is the closest the hearth comes to playing a traditional role in Coraline’s world.  Yet this is important to illustrate that her world is not perfect, but it is still her; world.

One of the last things that I find intriguing from a space planning point of view is the little door in the wall.  Coraline’s mother suggests that it may have once linked to one of the other apartments in the Pink Palace.  This is an odd statement.  From the way space is shown in this movie, the house is divided into three apartments: the Basement, the main floor and upstairs, and the attic.  If this door ever connected to any other space it would have had to be a means of vertical connection, a la a dumb waiter.  Yet those are mounted mid wall at grasping height, not along the floor.  In addition, the rest of the house (save the hearth) appears to be a standard wood American Victorian house, if that was the case, what would be the explanation for brick to be present behind the wall.  If this was a flat in England than the presence of brick would be more plausible.  All told, this seems to be an architectural way of making the audience (or at least those that are architecturally inclined) aware that something is not quite right with this door.

Bearing all of these things in mind, I would love to watch this movie again and look for further means in which spatial coding and architecture are used to tell the story and influence the audience.

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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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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 against the sum total of his previous work. The problem with this is two fold: first, many of his buildings are being built out of order, i.e. they were designed long before the financing, permits, and land deals came through; second too often critics are distracted by the finishes and forms of his buildings an do not look at the concept behind the skin. These issues can be mitigated if the some total of his work to date was explored not as a collective of past explorations, but rather as one large art exhibition with a common theme.

At first this idea must seem outlandish; what relationship can there be between the offices for Chiat-Day, the Gehry House, Bilbao, the Lewis Library and the Art Gallery of Ontario? The answer is volumes and skins. In everyone of these buildings (and dare i postulate, all of his buildings) Gehry has been experimenting with ways to create and mask volumes through the application or removal of a skin. The Chiat-Day office building is an exploration of volume, two large mostly rectangular prisms are separated and obscured through a binocular shaped volume (an ode to Po-Mo if there ever was one). The skin of this building was classical in nature and snug to the volumes, but still a skin; it was allowed to create non habitable spaces in an attempt to both create sculptural forms and indicate its non-structural nature; it is punctuated by punched openings which allowed views into and out from the interior volumes.

Where Chiat-Day is about volume, the Gehry house is all about skin. The house is a pretty standard house volume, but the skin has been removed in places and reconfigured in others. The drywall has been removed form the stud walls to create views of the wall structure, and a chain link fence which normally serves as a landscape skin of sorts is repurposed to skin the roof terraces.

Bilbao (and the Disney Concert hall) take this skin and volume dynamic to the next stage. The volume is wrapped in and obscured by an opaque artificial metal skin, which has been peeled back and removed in some areas to provide light and occupant access into the spaces. In the case of the Disney Concert Hall, the skin has been held back from the building in some areas to provide views of the structure, much like the Gehry house, but instead of revealing residential construction, here the armature of the metal skin and the steel support columns of the interior volumes are revealed.

In the Lewis Library (and in many cases the Stata Center) there is both an artificial skin present which is held off of the volumes as well as a very classical skin which is allowed to fit snug to the volumes. But here, the volumes are neither rectilinear Cartesian Spaces like Chiat Day nor programmatic blobs like Disney and Bilbao, instead they are deconstructed trapezoidal prisms which are not informed by the shape of the program they contain . In this way the volume skin dynamic is becoming a Russian nesting doll. The skin wraps the volume (and in some areas is broken by the volume) which in turn wraps the program elements but all are done in such a way as to reveal that the moves are deliberate and non derivative from function, i.e. these building are the antithesis of the Modernist creed – form only casually follows function.

Lastly, in the Art Gallery of Ontario, we see a more restrained skin being applied to a volume – here it is a glass wall instead of an aluminum panel. In this exploration, Gehry has taken the opportunity to create a skin which reveals the volume and structure inside through its very nature. No longer does the skin act as a barrier to the public eye, creating structured views and concepts of the building, instead it is additive to the building, opening the space and structure up for observation.

Phillip Kennicott states that he believes that “[w]hat Frank Gehry needs now is a new chapter, a last act, a purifying of his life’s work into something final and thoughtful.” I have to disagree; when viewed as i have demonstrated Gehry’s work is already thoughtful and quite pure. While it may not be the kind of legacy that stays alive with Joe Public, I feel architectural academics already have plenty to discuss. I have no doubt that future work of his will further explore ways in which volumes can interact with artificial skins, and in doing so inform the occupant and observer about the structural nature of the building. While not the culmination of his work, when viewed as part of a logical and deliberate exploration of volumes and skin you can see how this building is very “Gehryesque.”

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In the past century we have seen the rise of polytechnic architecture, a method of building which divorces the architect from the world of art and creativity, and instead treats buildings as solutions to engineering problems and casts architects in the role of project managers, facade coordinators and space planners.  Working and living within this modern paradigm it can be easy to forget that our profession is not just about ensuring the health, safety and welfare as our licenses require, but also about creating spaces that inspire and capture the imagination.

The New York Times has an interesting article describing a new exhibit of sketches by Frank Gehry at the Princeton University Art Museum which help to remind us that architecture is more than creating big boxes for commercial and residential means. While I am not a huge fan of Gehry, and feel that he is more popular for the “cool” factor of his buildings than for the real reason he should be popular – that if you consider the sum total of his works as one examination in form, it is a very interesting exercise in mass and volume and the delamination of these masses and volumes, I am glad that someone has started a discourse about the art form that architecture once was, and could still be. The real issue here is not that too few architects sketch, but rather too few architects are given the freedom to explore and create works of art. Instead they are directed to design to meet a specific style (and sometimes meet public approval) and then produce a building within (or under) budget while creating drawings that assume that the construction team will have no knowledge of how to build a building so as to limit their legal exposure. This creates buildings that have a watered down aesthetic and take few risks.

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Tomorrow is Black Friday, which means that the Holidays are right around the corner and with them comes the chore of finding the perfect gifts for those you are about.  If you are searching for that modernist (or anti-modernist) in your life, you might think that the new biography of Le Corbusier by Nicholas Fox Weber would be the perfect gift.  Hold back though,  if Phillip Kennicott’s review in this past Sunday’s Washington Post Book Revue section, has any bearing, <a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/20/AR2008112002773.html?sub=AR”>this new biography of one of the most famous and central figures in the modernist movement, Le Corbusier</a>, might not be for you.

Of course, in this biography the author, Nicholas Fox Weber, spends much of the book focusing on the swiss architect’s poor behavior and fundamental dichotomies between his architectural vision and personal opinions.  Kennicott’s review skewers the author complaining that the book is poorly written and almost unedited.  In addition, it is his belief that while there deserves to be more written about Le Corbusier, this book focuses too much on the man and his accomplishments, and not enough on the resistance to his revolutionary ideas.

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With the recent closing of many of the area’s Circuit City stores and the bleak financial forecast, this Sunday’s Washington Post article about what to do with big box stores after they close down, seemed to be fortuitously timed to impact the local planning discourse. For this article, the Post assembled a collection of local architects and artists, such as Darrel Rippeteau, Roger K. Lewis, Esocoff & Associates, et al., and asked them how they would reuse a big-box store.

The graphics in this article are intriguing and open an sub/urban planning discussion on what to do with the trappings of early twenty-first century American development once this business model has changed. The proposals include luxury housing, gardens, vineyards, and other adaptive reuse measures. This is all green and good, but I have to question the safety and cost of reusing these big box stores. Like fast food franchises, big box stores are not built to last. They are not constructed with any concept of their permanence, instead they are meant to go up quick and cheap and come down the same way when the new mega-ultra-super mart opens around the corner. The advantage of reusing old warehouses and factories is that theses large masonry structures were built to last and much of these structure can be re-purposed for less a strenuous program. This advantage would not be present in the Circuit Cities which will soon find themselves lacking a purpose.

There was one proposal that stood out to me, instead of re-imagining the big box store, it adapted the parking lot to a more urban context. The design called for two “linear buildings” surround a “parking module.” This strategy is closely related to one of the common forms for multifamily construction – the Texas Donut. In this strategy the parking garage is surrounded by the program, hiding it from view and creating a “safe” place for parking. This is a strategy that has become quite common in urban fringe development and could be beneficial in creating density within the big box context. The other reason this strategy caught my eye is that in my Thesis project for architecture school, I repurposed the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in New Orleans to create a public plaza and a municipal library. Part of the goal of my project was to acknowledge the big box stores as the modern equivalent of the urban market and to reintegrate them into the civic context.

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[Image via Inhabitat.]

So it looks like Dubai is approaching its Po-Mo phase, Philip Johnson beware!

In an almost deferential move, there is a new building slated for construction that looks like a Turbine (see this post at Inhabitat). Instead of going the Masdar route and building a building that generates its power, this building just refers to the shape of turbines as a way of co-opting the green building trend and making it a design statement. In place of power generation, the “turbine” will generate spectacular views of the desert mirage that is Dubai for the dinners in its floating restaurant.
It is interesting to note that the design firm that built this project Atkins Design is responsible for many other projects in Dubai and the arab world including the Burj Al Alrab and the Jumeirah Beach Hotel. One of their projects which I have wrote about in the past is the Bahrain World Trade Center, which has three actual turbines that generate power for the building.

[Image © rieteree all rights reserved.]

The reason I bring up Po-Mo and Johnson is that this project in Dubai seems such a blatant progeny of his AT&T building (now Sony building) in NYC. This building was meant to evoke the prestige and Americana patriotism of a Chippendale Highboy in the treatment of its roof line. Much like the Vana Venturi house brought post modernism to the home and hearth, Johnson’s AT&T building brought the language of Post Modernism to commercial construction. No longer were smooth glass boxes a la mode, instead references to historic forms were used to tie companies to abstract ideas and emotions.

It will be interesting to see if this new tower in Dubai will change the architectural discourse further. Instead of just buildings referring natural elements such as flames and water droplets (Champana’s Dubai Towers and The Shanghai Cruise Ship Terminal) this new building takes it a step further and refers to power that these natural elements can generate without actually generating it. This contradiction seems to say “Hey look at me, I’m cool, I’m a green product, but not really – I’m so hip I don’t need to be green.” Taking this to its natural conclusion, might we start seeing buildings decked out with “faux-to-voltaic” panels and AstroTurf green roofs? If Dubai is the new New York and considered a barometer of the commercial architectural zeitgeist, we just might.

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Since moving to the DC area it has been easy to feel lost in the neoclassical and federalist architecture that pervades the area. Many of the firms here still work within those vernaculars. Those who differ seem to err on the side of bland post modern boxes. I decided that there had to be firms in the area who had a more avant-garde/metropolitan sense in their design aesthetic and so I searched through the websites of man over 400 firms listed in the Washington, DC / Northern Virginia (NOVA) / Maryland region.

I only looked at architecture firms whose only office is in the DC metro area, and selected those that I felt had a more contemporary/avant-garde design sensibility. I feel that I have achieved my goal of proving that there are small to medium firms in the DC metroplex that focus on creating buildings/spaces that further the architectural dialogue and do not just rehash old building styles for the sake of building.

The following firms are in no particular order.

While, in my opinion, the firms below are not in the same caliber of design as the previous list, they are worthy of Honorable Mention.

• Jon Hensley Architects
• Susan Woodward Notkins Architects, P.C.
• Martinez + Johnson Architecutre
• Rippeteau Architects
• NOA
• OTJ Architects
• Ossolinski Architects PLLC

I welcome your opinions, please register and create a user name to leave your comments.

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