Category: Uncategorized

The young and impressive

The AIA has chosen their 8 recipients of the 2009 Young Architects Awards.

The AIA has chosen their 8 recipients of the 2009 Young Architects Awards. The winners this year include 3 women and 2 minorities out of the 8 and both of those minority winners are of Asian decent (South and East). Although those numbers seem small, it is definitely a sign of the changing face of Architecture. I have to wonder, were they chosen for their architectural accomplishments, or their place in the social network?

I personally don’t put much stock in awards like this, but I would be lying if i didn’t say that one day I’d love to be in such a prestigious list. This just gives me more reason to study and get my ARE’s done and to get more involved in the NOVA/DC AIA chapters.

Adaptively reused Circuit Cities, here we come!

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.

Kandinsky, Lissitzky and Goncharova, OH MY!

This past Sunday, the Washington Post ran an article about an exhibit of Russian porcelain figurines. From the author’s description I can imagine that when approached with the right mindset, this would be a very interesting exhibit, especially if there was a historiographical entry for each piece explaining the popular and political culture from its time period.

The issue I am righting about this article is not because of the exhibit, but rather the assertion the author makes in the first paragraph; that while Russians may have excelled at the audible arts, they have never been any good at the visual arts. His assertion is that at best they were aping french and at worst they were downright rustic. This thesis is fundamentally flawed.

Pre-modern Russian visual arts were tightly controlled by the Orthodox church and focused on the creation of Iconography. These religious symbols show a mastery of coded expression, much like catholic religious art from the same period. While during the early – mid 19th century it may be true that Russian art followed the french romantic schools, in the late 19th and 20th century everything changed. Russian artists started exploring non-representational art and geometric and cubist art in ways that Western Europeans did not reach for decades. The cylindrical forms of Kasimir Malevich’s Taking in the Harvest evoke early computer art and three dimensional renderings. Natalia Goncharova moved easily from naive through cubism to futurist styles, while the pure forms of Lissitsky’s work from the 1920’s could be confused for 1950’s American artwork and his faux architecture can be confused for the post-industrial towers. The middle work of Kandinsky is often praised for its dichotomy of color and forms with the stark realities they are portraying, while his latter work predates Jackson Pollack by decades but could easily be mistaken for one of his splatter pieces. And this is just three of the avant-garde artists that arose in Russia between 1860 and the rise of the Soviet Union.

While it may be true that Russia does not have the centuries long art culture that France and Italy have, it cannot be overlooked that they were the shinning star of the Modern art world before Communism squelched individual expression. To deny them this period of cultural exploration would be unjust.