Contemporary architecture-- why so blah?

[Terrifel]

@Askance

Let’s say you’re a slightly down-at-heel Victorian city, in Victoria, looking for a way to commemorate your nation’s independence - which was achieved in 1901, the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign. Have I used the word “Victoria” enough yet?

Ladies and Gents, I give you Melbourne’s Federation Square.

It sounds like a great plan. What’s it going to look like, once they remove that condemned shopping mall and build it?

[Baldwin]

There are some good old and new buildings in Atlanta. I used to work in this one. Always wanted to get up on the roof to take a closer look at those two Belvederes.

[GorillaMan]

@Askance

Let’s say you’re a slightly down-at-heel Victorian city, in Victoria, looking for a way to commemorate your nation’s independence - which was achieved in 1901, the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign. Have I used the word “Victoria” enough yet?

So it’s a forward-looking place, then?

[Sleel]

I actually really like Calatrava’s designs. He uses a lot of curves, arches, spires, and it’s obvious that he derives the basis for many of his ideas from nature. He reminds me just a bit of Gaudí. But where most of Gaudí’s work (with the obvious exception of La Sagrada Família) is warmer and relatively small in scale, Calatrava’s style is much more suited to large sweeping structures.

Take a look at a gallery of Calatrava’s work linked from the article cited earlier in this thread. Those are some damn cool buildings. The natural shapes are quite beautiful and flowing, needing no ornamentation to look good. I haven’t been inside any of them, but I imagine that they feel pretty good too, besides being pleasing to the eye. While I don’t know how well designed they are from a practical point of view, he may give more thought to practicality than some of the designers mentioned in this thread, considering that he apparently thinks about wind conditions (per the Wiki article on the Chicago spire) and came up with good solutions to plumbing and wiring challenges posed by the Malmö design.

I think there are some connections to Googie, but Calatrava has access to design tools and materials that those designers could only dream of. Most of the Googie designs have aged well in that they aren’t at all offensive to modern eyes, even two or three generations later. That, to me, is a sign that they hit on some of the universal ideals of beauty. I think that Calatrava’s designs may have similar longevity.

I don’t understand the comments about how the spire is a big “screw you” to Chicago. It’s a very cool design (looks like a narwhale tooth to me) it’s probably more practical from an engineering standpoint than a rectangular building in windy conditions, and it’s going to incorporate systems that will reduce the environmental impact. He’s done his part by designing it. If the other people and organizations involved in the project can’t get their act together to finalize funding and start getting the thing built, how is that his fault? If I were him, I’d be moving on to other things until they told me that they were done screwing around and ready to get to work.

[BrainGlutton]

James Howard Kunstler’s “Clusterfuck Nation” column for 10/22/07 has some relevance here.

The big Peak Oil conference of the year took place in Houston last week – but before we get to the substance of that, a few words about where we were. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying urban construct than this anti-city in the malarial swamps just off the Gulf of Mexico. And it is hard to conceive of a more desolate and depressing urban district, even of such an anti-city, than the utter wasteland around Houston’s convention center.
Luckily, we didn’t have to enter the convention center itself across the street – a baleful megastructure the size of three aircraft carriers, adorned with massive air-conditioning ducts to counter Houston’s gym-sock-like climate. And when I say “street” you understand we are talking about four or six-laners, with no curbside parking, which is the norm for this town. The effect is that every street behaves like an extension of the freeway at the expense of pedestrians – but pedestrians have been eliminated anyway because in ninety percent of Houston’s so-called downtown of glass towers there are no shops or restaurants at the ground-floor level, only blank walls, air-conditioning vents, parking ramps, and landscaping fantasias. We were informed that in parts of downtown there existed a network of air-conditioned underground corridors with shopping, but that everything in it closed at 7 p.m. when the last office workers straggled home. Anyway, none of it extended as far as the convention center. The rest of district was devoted to surface parking.
It has often been stated that Houston’s ghastly development pattern comes from having no official zoning laws. But all it really proves is that you can achieve the same miserable results of typical American boneheaded zoning with no zoning – as long as you don’t give a shit how people feel in their daily environments.
The convention center itself, though, demonstrated something beyond even that degree of thoughtlessness. Its pharaonic hugeness was a metaphor for the fatal grandiosity at the heart of contemporary life in American today, the utter disregard for a scale of human activity consistent with what the planet has to offer within its ecological limits – and of course the oil issue was at the center of that story.
Oh, one final thing about Houston life per se. Judging by the local items in the daily newspaper, the so-called city enjoys a level of mayhem that makes Baghdad look like a Sussex garden party. Sample headlines: “10 Charged in Burglary Spree,” “Pit Bull Shot Dead After Pony Attack,” “Jury Gives Man Life in Carjacking Death,” “Two Killed in Home Invasion.” One particularly insane story told of a man who shot and stabbed a visiting friend who “dissed” his dog. We didn’t see any of that action around the convention center’s Hilton Americas, where the ASPO conference actually took place, but the news didn’t exactly make you want to venture out beyond the lobby. Anyway, you couldn’t buy a stick of gum within a mile walk of the place, and the thought of traipsing past all those surface parking lots in 90-degree heat was like an invitation to reenact the Bataan Death March.

As does his “Eyesore of the Month” feature, but you have to do a lot of clicking-back to find the really good/bad stuff.

[GorillaMan]

@BrainGlutton

]As does his “Eyesore of the Month” feature, but you have to do a lot of clicking-back to find the really good/bad stuff.

Well, this from June '07, just sounds like a teenage rant: “Nothing but an uptight, shut-in, sightless male box. This hatred for the feminine in current architectural practice has gone unremarked by anyone in the Feminist camp, by the way.”

And none of you understand me, so just SHUT UP. ::slams door::

[MichaelQReilly]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071106/ap_on_re_us/mit_suit_architect

This article seemed pretty relevant to the Gehery discussion further up-thread. Honestly, if your buildings are so strange and unconventional that they can’t handle the normal wear and tear of just a few years, then they are a failure in the most basic requirement of what a building should be.

[MrDibble]

@gotpasswords

I’m afraid I’d get ill if I had to spend any time in the auditorium.

Look, he’s ripped off the lecture hall from Caligari U.!