An Appreciative Look At Toyo Ito

http://www.latime.com/travel/style/la-ig-toyo-ito-architecture-20150322-column.html#pages=1

Toyo Ito
arcspace.com

Hello Everyone:

It is a Monday, post-everyone's holiday, time to get back to the blogosphere full speed ahead.

Today we are going to look at Christopher Hawthorne's long-standing fascination with Pritzker Prize winning (2013) Japanese contemporary architect Toyo Ito.  Mr. Hawthorne writes about his fascination with Mr. Ito's work in his article, "Toyo Ito's architecture beckons a critic to Asia."  The Los Angeles Times architecture critic found himself in Japan a few years ago, madly plotting the most expedient route to the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture on the southern island of Omishima.  (http://www.tima-imabari.jp/en/) Mr. Hawthorne indulges his readers in a fantasy Ito Tour of Asia which takes us to Japan and Taiwan.  It is an appreciative tour of the Japanese architect's work and look at what great architecture can be.  In blogger's own experience of talking to civilians about Japanese architecture, yours truly has been dismayed to discover that most peoples's conceptions Japanese architecture is largely confined to temples and teahouses.  To do that would mean dismissing a large and fascinating body of architecture that gave form to its connection to the culture.

Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture
Toyo Ito
Imabari, Japan
latimes.com

Christopher Hawthorne writes,

Since the economic crisis of 2008, there's been a substantial backlash against the idea that critics should write exclusively, or even mostly, about stand-alone buildings by prominent architects. We've found broader and more complex ways to explore the relationship between architecture and society.

The cudgel of the word mash up "starchitecture" has lost its strength.  However, Mr. Hawthorne asks us to make an exception for Mr. Ito's work.  What makes Toyo Ito's work so compelling that it would induce our intrepid critic to fly half way around the world, scroll furiously through online ferry schedules at three in the morning (fighting jet lag), just to experience one building?  Mr. Hawthorne offers this reply, "In large part, his work appeals to even the most jaded observers of contemporary architecture because of its rich variety.  Unlike Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster or Daniel Libeskind, whose buildings are stamped with a recognizable signature, there is an elusiveness to Ito's output."  Toyo Ito has designed "...small houses, aerodynamic glass towers and low-slung, geometrically complex museum buildings."  In his book Tarzans in the Media Forest and Other Essays, architecture critic Thomas Daniell devotes an essay to Mr. Ito, titled "The Fugitive." (Daniell, 15, 2010)

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (2002)
Toyo Ito with Cecil Balmond and ARUP
Kensington Gardens, London England
archdaily.com

Toyo Ito has incorporated technology and innovative construction methods into his work without making them an obsession, which prevents his buildings from looking dated or mannered.  A project from the eighties still looks fresh today as it when it first opened. While other architects have made their reputations on their grand manifesto or eye-popping computer renderings, Mr. Ito has stake his reputation strictly on architectural terms. Simply stated, he knows how to build, to forms space "...in a way that respects traditional craftsmanship and seems utterly contemporary."  Even though Mr. Hawthorne recalled seeing other buildings by the architect in Tokyo and other cities, he tells his readers, "but there are a number of important ones I've yet to visit."  Most of Mr. Ito's buildings are in Japan, however, in 2008 was commissioned to design the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, his first building in the United States.  That project was sadly derailed by the financial crisis.  Mr. Hawthorne pines for Ito tour of Asia, stopping at all of the architect's key projects.

White U
Demolished 1997
Toyo Ito
©Koji Taki
archdaily.com

Christopher Hawthorne laments, "I wish the first stop could have been the famed U-House that Ito designed in 1976 for his sister, recently widowed, and her two daughters in Tokyo."  The house was unfortunately demolished in 1997 but remains important to the architect's career.  The house was built at time when architects were beginning to experiment with historic architectural references that would become part of postmodernism.  Mr. Ito "...designed a house that was abstract and somber, even monolithic, with the legs of the U wrapping around a courtyard and the roof sloping down to lower interior walls."  The house's untimely demise only enhanced its legend, because Mr. Ito, who designed it partly as place for his sister to mourn her husband, did not protest its demolition.  His sister left the house when she was ready to move on with her life.

Although the house no longer exists, architectural experimentation is alive and well in Tokyo, making the Japanese capital a great place to be for anyone interested in contemporary design.  Like Los Angeles, much of the innovative architecture is hidden away in the private realm.  Mr. Hawthorne writes, "Houses by the Tokyo-based architects Sou Fujimoto and Go Hasegawa and the duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, heir to the U-House in their layered, sophisticated minimalism, are worth seeking even if you ca only see them only from the outside.

Tod's
Toyo Ito
Tokyo, Japan
busyboo.com

Toyo Ito has also joined some of the leading contemporary architects in building luxury fashion boutiques in Tokyo along or near Omotesando in the upscale Shibuya district of the city.  Mr. Ito's store for Tod's, the Italian luxury leather goods house, is slender glass box clad in white skin resembling tree branches. It is a short distance from the Prada store by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, a Hermès store designed by Renzo Piano, and the Coach flagship store by Rem Koolhaus and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

Following a tour of Tokyo Ito buildings, the next stop on Mr. Hawthorne's fantasy tour is the Mediatheque, which opened in 2001 in Sendai.  The seven-story building, which raised Mr. Ito's international reputation, contains a library, gallery space, and community rooms-a complex set of spaces unified through clever structural means.  The design calls for the mechanical equipment to be wrapped inside thirteen vertical tubes which also compose the tower's structure, leaving each floor completely open, free of columns.

This innovative structural was initially met with suspicions about its stability but proved itself mightily

Sendai Mediathique
Toyo Ito
©Nacasa & Partner
archdaily.com

went it survived the devastating earthquake in 2011 with very little damage.  Mr. Hawthorne writes, "Mediatheque also stands out in Sendai because of its thoroughly unremarkable surroundings,  It rises on an extensively landscaped boulevard line on either side by nondescript if upscale shops, restaurants and apartment buildings."  The international accolades for the Sendai Meditheque helped Mr. Ito secure commissions outside of Japan.

Christopher Hawthorne's next stop on his Ito Tour of Asia would be Kaohsiung, Taiwan where World Games Stadium opened in 2009. Mr. Hawthorne writes, "Stadium design in the United States is an architectural backwater, with firms churning out either bland nostalgia palaces wrapped in red brick (for baseball) or sleek, oversized stacks of luxury boxes (for football)."  He describes the stadium, "...uncoils like a snake across its waterfront

World Games Stadium (2009)
Toyo Ito (also provided the photograph)
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
designboom.com

site, its skin of nearly 9,000 solar panels glinting in the sun, suggests there's life in this building type yet.  Another Taiwanese Ito building worth stopping for is the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, "...that seems to destined to define Ito's late-career work."  The opera house is a "...hulking box of performance space, covered with a spray-on concrete skin..." creating an more anticipatory twitter among architecture critics than in another building.  The opera house is set to open in 2016 and will test whether or not the architect's "personal, patient and idiosyncratic style, which has worked so well for houses and towers with small footprints such as Mediatheque and the Tod's store, can be stretched to fit a full city block."

Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture
Toyo Ito
Imabari, Japan
flickr.com

Christopher Hawthorne's Ito Tour of Asia brings us back to the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture in Imabari, on Omishima Island, about 300 miles southwest of Tokyo.  The island is filled with museums and cultural centers.  TIMA was designed in 2011 to showcase and celebrate the architect's career. The museum is housed in a pair buildings: a silver steel hut modeled on the architect's own 1984 house in Tokyo and a dark-brown steel hut.  Mr. Hawthorne observes,

As architect's monuments to themselves go, this one is modest.  It's also drive by an interest in stripped-down yet muscular geometry that appears almost nowhere in Ito's work.  The brown steel hut is a pile of hard-edge forms, pyramids on top of rhomboids; the silver hut is covered by a seeming mismatched collection of vaults.

This approach to design flows out of a response to the landscape.  The view of the vast ocean and curvaceous coastline is frequently hidden by clouds and rain.  Rather than mimic nature and create something equally curvilinear in a similar manner as his less trusting peers, Mr. Ito tried to give the space what was not there, "not just to avoid repeating the lines that were already there but also to carve out a powerful space for architecture to its own work."

Christopher Hawthorne's long-standing crush on Toyo Ito's work is a reminder why architectural junkies will travel far and wide to admire the work of great masters.  It makes us belief that truly great original work still exists in the world.  Buildings that do not rest on eye-popping computer drawings, grand manifestos, or fetishizing that latest construction technology.  Great work relies on responsiveness to the site, incorporating construction technology innovation into basic building methodology, and just basic good design.  Toyo Ito's work does precisely all this.

Forever Young Cities

http://www.citylab.com/2015/02/is-your-neighborhood-changing-it-might-be-youthifaction-not-gentrification/385193/

Lead large
Flickr/Andreá Portilla
citylab.com

Hello Everyone:

Millennials are being celebrated for moving back to and reinvigorating the cities.  In a recent article for City Lab by Co-founder and Editor at Large Richard Florida titled, "Is Your Neighborhood Changing?  It Might Be Youthification, Not Gentrification" looks at new study by geographer and urban planner Markus Moos of the University of Waterloo how refers to the millennial march to the cities as "youthification."  Mr. Moos defines youthification "as the 'influx of young adult into higher density' cities and neighborhoods." It one respect, it seems that these neighborhoods are sipping from a fountain of youth when new infusions of twenty-somethings continue to take residence as families and children move out in search of more spacious living.

Austin, Texas Guadalupe
planetizen.com

Markus Moos is care to differentiate between "...youthification from the broader process-and less precise construct-of gentrification."  Quoting Mr. Moos, Mr. Florida writes, "The youthification process differs from gentrification-an increase in social status of a neighborhood-in that the former is not as explicitly a class-based process, although the two are not mutually exclusive....Gentrification, when viewed as a series of stages involving ever slightly wealthier but more risk averse in-movers, arguably has set the stage for a broader segment of the population."

The Youthification Process
Markus Moos
citylab.com

The table on the left is Mr. Moos's graphic explanation of the youthification process as takes place in stages.  The process begins when younger people move into places such as the leftover spaces from de-industrialized districts. The process continues with "...newer rental housing and smaller one-bedroom condos are built and amenities flood the neighborhood, drawing greater numbers of young people as living costs rise."  However, which cities are experiencing youthification?

The map below, to the left, is from Mr. Moos's related online project "Generationed City" (http://www.generationedcity.uwaterloo.ca) maps out specific cities and metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada, based on youthification.  defined as the share 25-34 year old inhabitants.  There are a few

Where the "youthified" cities are
Markus Moos
citylab.com

surprises, Salt Lake City, Utah ranks number one on the list of "Cities With The Largest Shares Of Young Adults," beating out Austin, Denver, Washington D.C. and Seattle.  Houston, Texas and Las Vegas round out the list.  North of the border, Calgary and Edmonton (both rapidly growing metropolitan areas in the Alberta Province) beat out Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.  Mr. Florida is not surprised that the American Rustbelt metropolitans of Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester, Cleveland, and Detroit are the least youthified cities.

Percentage of young adults in select North American Metros
Markus Moos
dicasta.com

Youthification is not sui generis to metros, it can also be clearly felt at the neighborhood level. To understand this, Markus Moos mapped out Canada's three largest metropolitans: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.  The darker red areas on the map (see below left) indicate higher concentrations of youthification.  For example, in Toronto, youthification is focused in the urban core, along transit lines.  It also clusters around the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, and the Ontario College of Art and Design; along College and Queen Streets which feature ample bars and restaurants.  Big surprise. Mr. Florida writes, "There are also significant blocks of young people at the ends of metro lines, where they can access more affordable housing

Toronto Youthification Clustering
Markus Moos
dicasta.com

The youthification map of Vancouver (below left) takes on a more bloc-like pattern, primarily centered on and moving out from the Burrand inlet waterfront.  Younger Vancouver residents, like their Toronto counterparts, cluster around public transit lines and commercial districts like Main Street and Commercial Drive.  By contrast, young Montreal inhabitants are more dispersed, albeit along transit lines.

Finally, we come to the big question, "What lies behind youthification?"  To answer this question, Mr. Moos did a statistical analysis of the factors that could be associated with youthful migration: household income, household size, the share of possible gentrifiers and immigrants in Canada's three largest metropolitan areas between 1981 and 2011.

Markus Moos found several determinants, including: household income, household size, and immigration-associated with higher density.  Citing Mr. Moos's conclusion, Mr. Florida reports, "the connection between density and age of residents has increased substantially over time.  This is true of all three metros.  In Montreal, the correlation between young people (aged 25 to 34) and density from .22 in 1981 to .66 by 2011; in Toronto, it went from .36 to ,62; and in Vancouver it increased from .49 to .68."

Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York
elegran.com

Conversely, the link between density and older age groups (44-54 and 55-64) typically moved in the opposite direction, indicating that people falling into these age groups gravitate toward lower-density suburbs.  In Toronto and Montreal, the data presents a negative correlation between residents 65 and older and density.  This indicates a geographic segregation of age groups within the city. However, in Vancouver, Markus Moos suggests that this gap is attributed to "generational bifurcation," i.e. older and young people live in the inner core while middle aged Vancouverites reside in the less dense suburb areas.

What accounts for this phenomena and what does it signify?  Mr. Moos implies that these changes are an outgrowth of a various socio-economic shifts.  The millennials in the United States and Canada are experiencing job insecurity, more holes in the social safety net, higher housing costs, delayed childbirth, and a greater enthusiasm for city living. Richard Florida writes, "For these reasons, renting closer to the city center-where increasing stocks of divided row housing and condos are readily available-becomes a more attractive option."  Naturally, it remains to be seen if this is a continuing trend.  The remaining questions are "Will those who move to city center in their 20s and 30s remain there to raise their children?  Or will they pack it up and move to less dense places, leaving cities to become 'forever young' zones that serve resting stops for the transient?"

If we really stop and think about everything thus far, the conclusions reached by Markus Moos appear to support one very basic fact of cities and metropolitan areas, their populations are organic. Organic meaning, as one demographic group moves in, the other moves on.  This happens gradually, over time.  Cities and metropolitan areas youthify over time, the millennials that populate the urban centers did not all decide, one day, to pack up and move to the places profiled in the "Generationed City" study.  They were initially attracted by low housing costs and proximity to transit lines and work opportunities.  Thus, the youthification process occurred over time and will continue to take place as one generation moves in and the other moves out.  This part of the nature of cities.

New Urbanism In Stages

http://bettercities.net/article/four-phases-new-urbanism-21485

Shopfront homes in Kentlands, Maryland
bettercities.net

Hello Everyone:

Yours truly is back after an exhausting, yet reasonably successful day of helping dear mama entertain family. Now it is back to the blogosphere with an article by Robert Steuteville for Better Cities titled, "The four phases of New Urbanism."

New Urbanism began about twenty-thirty or so years ago "...as a large-project greenfield movement.  Some new urbanists concentrated on infill...but their efforts attracted less media attention and investment."  From an intellectual perspective, New Urbanism aspired to reinvigorate whole regions, particularly historic cities and towns, which were the inspirations for a revival of walkable places.  Nevertheless, thirty years cities were serious trouble-nearly every developer focused on the suburbs.  New urbanists saw this as their clarion call to right the damage done by sprawl.

ArtsQuest Fine Arts Festival
Seaside, Florida
waltonoutdoors.com

This is what Mr. Steuteville calls "the first phase of New Urbanism, in which traditional neighborhoods developments (TNDs), inspired by historic neighborhoods, were built as alternatives to conventional master planned communities." Typical TNDs such as Seaside, Florida and Kentlands, Maryland signify this era very we; representing incubators of ideas.  These TNDs were private-sector endeavors that carved out pockets of urban areas by overcoming the legal and administrative obstacles in the way of compact development.  This phase continued until the home mortgage industry collapse of 2008.  Developers proved that if you build mixed-use neighborhoods with main streets, people will come and live there.  Long ignored building types were brought back into the light of American markets such as: shopfront houses, small apartment buildings, granny flats, courtyard housing. assorted mixed-use buildings, and small-lot houses with usable porches and garages in the back.

Paseo Verde Apartments
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
paseoverdeapts.com

Walkable street intended for slow-moving traffic were argued for and built.  The walkable streets types included narrow residential streets, main streets, boulevards, and avenues. These types of streets continue to run through historic neighborhoods, few proposed reviving them prior to New Urbanism.  Mr. Steuteville writes, "The urban-rural Transect was conceived and explained, and new land-use codes-form-based codes-were created as alternatives to conventional zoning."  He continues, explaining, "The difference between a neighborhood built around a five-minute walk and conventional suburban development was explained over and over to public officials, professionals in fields dealing with land use, and citizens."  Quoting Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia from the soon to be released book Tactical Urbanism, Mr. Steuteville, writes, "The early victory of the New Urbanism was in shifting the academic and professional conversation away from mass suburbanization as the only available model for human habitat."  Now we move onto Phase Two.

Orenco Station
Portland, Oregon
planetizen.com

Like the movement of time, the phases of New Urbanism overlap each other.  To recap, new urbanism began as an infill movement.  The HOPE VI public housing redevelopment, enacted during the Clinton Administration, was hailed as a victory for cities and the movement. Strangely enough, redevelopment came to the forefront after the housing collapse.  Robert Steuteville cites two reasons for why it took about ten years for redevelopment to occur: "First, the market for building in cities had steadily grown as crime dropped throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.  Second, the Great Recession stopped greenfield growth in its tracks and dried up financing for large projects. Suddenly redevelopment looked very appealing.

The neglected behemoth infrastructure of historic cities and towns could built upon once again.  The existing street layout provided the skeleton for mixed-use communities favored by new urbanists.  In a score for historic preservationists, mixed-use centers and historic building could be rehabilitated or could be bracketed by new construction.  Even as new urbanists travel through Phase 2, a scaled down version of Phase 1 marches on as older TNDs move toward completion and news are set to launch.

New Town at St. Charles
Near St. Louis, Missouri
southernliving.com

Phase 2 comes with fantastic advantages-previous builders were better at putting new construction in urban places-they left an amazing legacy of historic buildings with great attention to detail and superior transit services. This is why historic cities are located in the some the best locations.  As long as there is a market for an established city or town, there is less of a need to build new.  Phase 2 operates in a broad range of real estate: downtowns and downtown adjacent, streetcar neighborhoods, rehabilitated industrial district, small cities and towns, and transit-orient properties.

Phase 2 builds on the phase 1 lessons.  Mr. Steuteville writes, "Form-based codes work particularly well in older places that are undermined by conventional suburban codes." New urbanist street grids help fix city streets damaged by auto-oriented traffic engineering. Also useful are building type and market studies generated for TNDs.  Mr. Steuteville continues, "Phase 2 breaks new ground in many areas, including finance reform for mixed-use buildings, parking policy, Tactical Urbanism and Lean Urbanism, and transit-oriented development.  The architecture produced in Phase 2 is more varied and robust."

Habersham
Beaufort, South Carolina
habershamsc.com

Robert Steuteville predicts that Phase 2 will go one for decades but suggests that it may cause some problems that will require New Urbanism to further evolve.  The big issue is the dreaded g-word: gentrification.  Blogger, like Mr. Steuteville, support community and neighborhood revitalization, but the inventory of nineteenth and twentieth century street grids is not infinite.  This limited stock can result in higher prices (in housing, perhaps, Mr. Steuteville does not specify) in economically viable cites with "good bones."

Another challenge with focusing on neighborhoods and communities with historic street grids is that it offers little assistance to places already swallowed up by sprawl.  Mr. Steuteville reports, "Up to 90 percent of the land in metropolitan areas has been shaped as conventional suburban development.  These areas will become less accessible as transportation habits change and as fewer people drive."
Thus with have two systems operating simultaneously older more walkable mixed-use neighborhoods situated on historic street grids and larger more conventional suburban developments.  This brings us to Phase 3.

Mashpee Commons
Mashpee, Massachusetts
buildabetterburb.com

 Phase 3 of new urbanism involves a suburban retrofit, meaning "sprawl repair."  Planning books have gone to great lengths describing this burgeoning trend.  Essentially, the new urbanists have been trying to convert "grayfields" into urban place for some time. Mashpee Commons, Massachusetts (left) and Mizner Park are two examples of mixed-use town centers built on the site of former shopping-a metamorphosis that began in the late eighties.  Sprawl is huge-these projects are still far and few in between.  Phase 3 will take center stage when automobile-centric transportation engineering undergoes major reforms.  When this happens, sprawl repair will ease the pressure off historic neighborhoods. The end result is a fresh supply of walkable places will emerge.

The postwar suburbs have the greatest potential for creating affordable places to live.  According to June Williamson, the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia, "Twenty-six million houses were built from 1946 and 1965, most single-family...These early postwar suburbs were built with mostly connecting streets and fading commercial strip lying fallow nearby."  The abandoned parking lots on these properties hold the possibility of holding a plethora of residential units.  Therefore, Phase 3 New Urbanism can reinvigorate languishing inner-circle suburbs, however, Mr. Steuteville cautions, "...first, multilane arterials must be narrowed, redesigned, and made walkable."  He continues, "This outcome still seems hard to imagine, despite the success of the complete streets movements.  Yet the formidable transportation industrial complex, the biggest impediment to Phase 3 New Urbanism, is showing signs that it will yield to pressure."  Change is coming but meanwhile onto Phase 4.

Mizner Park
Boca Raton, Florida
city-data.com

Now we come to Phase 4 when things will come full circle and street grids will return to their state a 100 years.  These street grids are not necessarily rectilinear like the nineteenth century grids-they just have to be connected, both internally and externally.

Robert Steuteville writes, "The normalization of new street grids may grids may be decades away, but extensively connected street networks are the natural way communities, absent the obstruction caused by automobile-oriented transportation engineering and street policies."  Mr. Steuteville is quite adamant about reformation in the transportation field if Phase 4 is to go into effect.  He emphasizes, "This is why the techniques that I associate with Phase 3 must come first.  Expect to see early pioneering efforts in reestablishing new street grids that connect to larger thoroughfare networks."

Do not expect to see the demise of auto-centric suburbs in Phase 4 New Urbanism any more than the end of historic cities and towns in the previous century.  Auto-centric suburbs will continue to exist and grow due to zoning laws and infrastructures that bolsters separate use methods of transportation.

New Urbanism is slowly coming into being in phases.  We are on the way to seeing changes that will emerge over generations.  On this long journey, it helps to have a road map.  At the moment we are deeply immersed in the revitalization of cities and towns, critical components to this trend which includes: architecture, building types, finance, codes.  This is crucial work but not end result; how we design and lay out our streets will ultimately act as the foundation for our communities.  Robert Steuteville writes, "New Urbanism was founded by architects, and we have learned much from them. But transportation planning and street design will set the course for the future."

Delay of Post April 6, 2015

Corfu, Greece
Wonderful World Travel

Hello Everyone:

Yours truly is needed around the manse today for a Passover family get together. This means that Blogger will not be posting a new article today. However, yours truly will be back tomorrow with fresh material. In the meantime,  checkout Blogger's social media pages for great reading. See you tomorrow.

Forget Oscar Niemeyer

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/01/african-modernist-architecture?CMP=share_btn_link

La Foire Internationale de Dakar
Dakar, Sénégal
news.adakar.com

Hello Everyone:

Blogger recently came across an article that piqued Blogger's interest.  It was a story published in the English newspaper The Guardian titled "The forgotten masterpieces of African modernism," written by Oliver Wainwright.  The story looks at efforts by Swiss architect Manuel Herz, who spent the last few years studying the architecture of African Independence with a team at ETH University in Zurich.  What caught Blogger's attention was that modern architecture in African Independence in sixties and seventies is not normally part of the regular discourse of late period modernism.  Thus, yours truly decided to bring out into the light of day.

The first example of African modern design is La Foire Internationale de Dakar.  Oliver Wainwright describes it as "A field of triangular roof..." that rise "...above the horizon on the outskirts of Dakar, like a forest of wigwams that have been baked to stone under the scorching sub-Saharan sun.  They sit on a triangular concrete plinth, from which bigger triangular pavilions protrude, accessed by flights of triangular step..."

La Foire Internationale de Dakar, interior
Dakar, Sénégal
news.adakar.com

The reinforced concrete complex, abbreviated to FIDAK and derided by Mr. Wainwright as Toblerone Town, was built in 1975 in the Senegalese capital as an exhibition center for the country's biennial international trade show. FIDAK was designed by a pair of relatively unknown French architects, Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin.  The architects executed the complex with great attention to detail.  Mr. Wainwright writes, "There are facades decorated with coloured pebbles and tiled mosaics, psychedelic sand art murals that evoke the rocky African coastline and azure seas."  Yet, beyond the borders of Sénégal, FIDAK is virtually unknown.

This situation is being remedied by Manuel Herz and his team from Switzerland.  They are looking at this vibrant period in African history that manifested itself in "bold structures and strident new forms."  Oddly enough, when you open a modern architectural history book, there is barely, if at all, any mention of this period.  Mr. Herz told Mr. Wainwright, "There was an intense flowering of experimental and futuristic architecture in the 1960s and 70s, which the young African countries used to express their national identities.  Manuel Herz curated an exhibition featuring over eighty buildings from the sub-Saharan region at Vitra Design Museum, going on until May.  Mr. Herz added, "But we simply don't know about it.  When people think of Africa, they think of poverty, misery and violence, while architects fetishise informality and focus on slum-upgrading.  But we wanted to show this incredible cultural wealth that also exists.

Hotel Ivoire 1962-70
Photography by ©Iwan Baan; © Manuel Herz
Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
domusweb.it

The buildings featured in the exhibition, some of which have been photographed by Dutch photographer Iwan Baan, present a period of soaring confidence and political ambition.  These exuberant forms are largely the product of big state-sponsored building campaigns that saw "heroic parliament buildings and imposing central banks to daring universities and vast stadiums, many the pet projects of Africa's 'big man' leaders, built for propaganda purposes as much as anything else."

One example of a pet project of Africa's "big man" leader is the Kenyatta International Conference Center in Nairobi, Kenya.  The Conference Center was the initiative of the country's first president Jomo Kenyatta and intended as the lavish headquarters of his ruling Kanu party.  The pink cylindrical shaft rises

Kenyatta International Conference Center
Photography by ©Iwan Baan
Nairobi, Kenya
stylepark.com

32 stories above the city and was the tallest building in East Africa until the nineties. During the design process, the World Bank decided to host its 1973 annual meeting in the Kenyan capital and the Conference Center was chosen as the venue, causing the building to grow.  The tower is almost triple in height and the auditorium, which references a traditional Maasai house, was added and mimicked by an open flower form at the top of the tower containing a revolving restaurant.

The Kenyatta International Conference Center was designed by Norwegian architect Karl Henrik Nøstvik who came to Kenya as part of his country's aid program and found favor with the late-Mr. Kenyatta, being from a country without a muddled colonial past.  Oliver Wainwright reports, "Scandinavian architects loom large in the period for this reason, bringing their mastery of expressive concrete and sculpting with light-but mercifully freed, in the tropics, from pesky northern European necessities and insulation.  In Africa, the inside-outside dream could finally be realised-and so European modernist let rip."

University of Zambia
Lusaka, Zambia
Photography by Iwan Baan via The Guardianarchinect.com

 The University of Zambia, in the city of Lusaka, provides us with a great example of this organically flowing landscape with its "cascading concrete terraces and intersecting outdoor walkways."  The university was designed in 1965 and is laid out along an axis and features faculty buildings with exposed staircases and galleries on different levels, small niches, kiosks and built-in seating combining to create an urban village.  The flexible plan, considered quite revolutionary for its time, was intended to accommodate future growth.  Sadly, the project fell victim to the winds of political change.  The university was built by Israeli contractors.  Israel was a natural postcolonial partners for the emerging states and in need of allies on the United Nations council.  This honeymoon period came to a halt in 1973 with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War and the first oil crises that saw African nations changing allegiance to the Arab nations and support the Palestinian cause.  Israeli companies were forced out of Africa, leaving many projects incomplete.  This is evidenced by the bricked up door ways and stairwells that lead to nowhere around the campus.

La Pyramide Market
Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
Photography by Iwan Baan
theguardian.com

Despite its incompleteness, the University of Zambia is still in use.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the equally daring La Pyramide Market in the Côte d'Ivoire capital of Abidjan.  La Pyramide was designed by Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri between 1968 and 1973, currently a testament to its own grand ambitions.  The massive concrete pyramid is anchored to a pair of towers, seemingly ready for launch.  It was a brave effort to reinvent the covered market for an African city.  Rinaldo Olivieri was careful not to duplicate the mistakes of the hermetically sealed glass tower spring up around the city.  Mr. Olivieri hoped to capture the the vibrant free-form spirit of the markets near the city.  The architect designed a "large central hall full of activity, above which offices, studios and restaurants would step back in a big hollow ziggurat-all sacked on top of a gargantuan basement, complete with supermarket, nightclub and parking for 1,800 cars."

If nothing else, it was optimistic but with high maintenance costs and a grossly inefficient proportion of rentable space, it proved to be a huge failure, empty since the eighties economic crash, now partly gutted and squatted.  Its fate remains in the balance.

This is partly what makes this show at the Vitra Museum and the accompanying book so fascinating. The majority of these buildings may not be around for too long.  One of Manuel Herz's favorite buildings, a UFO-shaped hovering nightclub in Nairobi was demolished last summer.  Mr. Herz said, "We urgently need to make people aware of this fascinating heritage...To put it bluntly, when we think of the futuristic architecture of the 1960s, we think of Oscar Niemeyer first-but a lot of these buildings are so much bette.  When you see FIDAK, you can Niemeyer."

Not Quite There Yet

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/architecture/la-et-cm-new-zumthor-plans-20150323-column.html?fb_fb-action-ids=10153173536433713&fb_action_types...

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Wilshire Boulevard entry
en.wikipedia.org

Hello Everyone:

It is time to revisit a topic that has not gotten a lot of writing lately on this blog, the proposed new campus for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  While the subject of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor's proposed black biomorphic design and the appropriateness of Mr. Zumthor as the architect continues to be the subject of chatter on the social media pages, the building, once ignominiously called "the black blob," has undergone a significant makeover.  This is the latest news that one of our favorite architecture critics, Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times, reports in his article "Peter Zumthor's plan for LACMA undergoes a makeover."  The good news is it no longer resembles the blob that ate The La Brea Tar Pits.  The bad news, it has not been built yet.  Just to refresh your memories, let us quickly review the different incarnations of Mr. Zumthor's designs before looking at the latest version.

Proposed LACMA building version 1.0
Peter Zumthor and Partner
dezeen.com

In the beginning, Peter Zumthor presented a proposed design he called "The Black Flower."  The concept was a singular two-story building, propped up on pilotes, with the different galleries on the top story and glass encased storage space on the ground level.  The site would be more open to pedestrian traffic.  From the air, the building referenced the La Brea Tar Pits. The museum patron would be able to experience the exhibits via a circular path around the upper story. This design prompted outcries of architectural and environmental blasphemy, hence the unflattering nickname, "the black blob."  The preservationists took to condemning the plan to demolish the original William Pereira buildings, though strangely recent comments would suggest that no one would shed a tear if the Anderson Building came down.  Environmentalists warned of potential damage to the historic Tar Pits.  Then came version 2.0

Proposed LACMA building version 2.0
Peter Zumthor and Partner
latimes.com

The revised plan submitted for consideration by the museum and the civic powers that be by passed the Tar Pits, in difference to concerned preservationists and environmentalist, and crossed Wilshire Boulevard landing on an empty lot owned by the museum.  The concept of this design was similar to the Sackler Museum in Washington D.C, and the Louvre in Paris.  Mr. Zumthor's design was intended to celebrate Southern California's car culture, or at least, his impression of it, by having people drive under it.  The problem with this version was that Mr. Zumthor based on the idea of Southern California car culture without really taking the time to fully understand it. The curvilinear form still references the Tar Pits but now it resembled a black dough being stretched across Wilshire Boulevard.  This further prompted questions whether or not Mr. Zumthor was indeed the best choice for the commission, given how little time he actually spent living in Los Angeles during the year he taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.  It seemed that despite repeated visits to the city, Mr. Zumthor still did not quite understand its essence the way one of the many local, well-known, prize winning architects did. It also prompted Mr. Hawthorne's colleague at the paper, art critic Christopher Knight, to suggest that a better choice might be rehabilitating an abandoned warehouse or factory following the Tate Museum in London.  Now we come to version 3.0

Proposed LACMA building version 3.0
Peter Zumthor and Partner
latimes.com

The current conception of the new LACMA campus looks completely different.  It is no longer an organic biomorphic building, once inspired by the Tar Pits and Brazilian architect Oscar Niemayer.  While the building still crosses the road, "...the design has become noticeably more angular and muscular...It now features double-heigh galleries made of white or light-grey concrete and poking about the rooflines of the rest of the museum, a break from what had been a resolutely horizontal black form."  In a phone call to Mr. Hawthorne, Mr. Zumthor seemed to concede, "I cannot do the whole museum in black...It gets to heavy."  Two other key elements from the previous proposals are gone: "a continuous loop of hallway galleries along the perimeter and a collection of six or seven staircases leading directly from ground level to galleries above..."  This update suggests that the architect is "moving away from the expansively curvilinear language of his earliest LACMA sketches and incorporating, the grounded, harder-edged forms of the European buildings that mad his reputation."  While Mr. Hawthorne likens it to a Chinese character or calligraphic gesture, others see it more as mediocre student work.

Proposed LACMA building version 3.1
Peter Zumthor and Partner
latimes.com

Sounding a defensive note, LACMA Director Michael Govan told Christopher Hawthorne, "No one will call it a blob anymore...Peter hasn't given up the curve.  But he's really, really reined it in."  The current proposal plays on the appeal of his museums in Europe: the Kolumba in Cologne, Germany and the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria and are welcome changes.  According to Mr. Hawthorne, "They suggest an architect no longer straining to marry his fanatically precise architectural language, honed in the Swiss Alps, with some hazy notion of libertine, unconstrained culture in sunny, sprawling and horizontal Los Angeles.  Blogger supposes this is some sort gesture to the outcry over the architect's lack of Southern California credentials.

Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion
Renzo Piano
archrecord.construction.com

To be certain, Peter Zumthor is still making adjustments to the plan of the 400,000-square-foot museum, scheduled to break ground in 2018, if Mr. Govan can raise the half-billion dollars needed to open it in 2022 or 2023.  The museum's curators are anxious to get a full sense of how the galleries will be laid out, while more than a few will still have to wait. From a philosophical and practical point of view, "...the so-called veranda galleries is perhaps the most surprising change.  Zumthor had proposed a continuous walkway along the curving perimeter of the museum, with wall holding artwork or benches along the inside an floor-to-ceiling glass offering views of the city along the outside."  The walls would have concealed the mechanical systems and play a structural role.  The glass and the great views are still a key component of the design.  However, the continuous inner wall-where the art work would hang-is gone.  Rather, drivers and pedestrians  will be able to deep into the museum.

Urban Lights
Chris Burden
flickr.com

 Another big change comes from reducing the number of public entrances from seven or eight to two or three.  The point is to ease circulation and make ticketing simpler, the main entrances will be positioned on the southern and northern edges of the campus, closer to the parking lot (yes) and the metro stations.  The stairs on each of those ends will flow into a large, open-air landing under an over-hanging roof.  The legs (or cores) the enormous elevated museum, originally planned as stairwells guiding visitors from the plaza straight away into the galleries, will probably not join with the upper levels.  This may have some practical reason, but Mr. Hawthorne observes, "...it substantially undermines what had been the strength of the Zumthor design: the sense that having a small entry pavilions would help humanize and break down the scale of the new museum and connect it more seamlessly to the ground-level landscape."

Kolumba Museum
Jose Fernando Vazquez
Cologne, Germany
archdaily.com

Also evolving as the process moves along is the design and layout of the galleries.  The galleries will be housed within six separate trapezoidal sections: one just south of Wilshire, another spanning the width of the boulevard, and four on the site proper.  Each of the trapezoids will be made of white or light colored concrete and contain galleries of different heights and sizes.  About a dozen double-height galleries, emanating from the roof, covered in solar panels, will break up the horizontality of the museum form.  The galleries, as currently imagined by the architect, will be similar to the tallest galleries at the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, Germany which bring daylight in through high windows or skylights very effectively.  However, unlike the Resnick Pavilion or the forthcoming Broad Museum by the firm Diller, Scofidio+Renfro, the proposed LACMA building will not include fixed skylights that bring in northern light.  Rather, the artwork will be light from a number of directions including the more intense southern light if appropriate for the artwork.

The Broad Gallery
Diller, Scofidio+Renfro
Los Angeles, California
dezeen.com

The now angular form of the museum reflects an interest in drawing in natural light. Currently, the campus has a long and fairly straight wall along the western edge, facing the Chris Burden installation Urban Lights and the remainder of the property and a similar wall along the eastern edge, facing the Tar Pits. In one sense, the modified design is conceptual design acquiescing to the more practical everyday needs of the museum as well as engineering, security, and local building codes-all indications of how close it is to its groundbreaking.  Peter Zumthor and the museum are working with Swiss engineer Jürg Conzett and have settled upon building the new structure from concrete.

Christopher Hawthorne also points out, "But also visible in the newest version of the design is a reconsideration of its approach to-and reading of-Los Angeles.  Zumthor's proposal is increasingly a negotiation between European and Californian sensibilities, with the European seeming to gain ground by the month."  During the winter, the architect considered the idea of constructing the whole museum in white concrete but ultimately decided on mixing light and dark colored materials instead.  Commenting on the all the snarky "black blob" comments, Michael Govan said, "He heard everybody's reaction to black, and he said, 'Hell, I'll look at the building in white.'" Mr. Govan maintains that "the black portions of the building will not be as dark as some models of the design have suggested.  'It's probably going to be closer to that slate-gray, Cy Twombly, blackboard shade.'"  Whatever.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art c.1965
en.wikipedia.org

Christopher Hawthorne observes that Peter Zumthor's latest proposal, "....reflects his growing sense that in the earlier versions he'd tried perhaps too hard to make the museum a loose-limbed, site-specific tribute to the tar pits and the car culture of Wilshire Boulevard." Mr. Zumthor admitted, "I started out trying to come up with a shape that would work for the whole site and maybe for the whole city...The forms were trying to arrange themselves softly, maybe biomorphically.  And then it had to stretch over the street."  Now, more confidently, Mr, Zumthor said "The shape has developed more character and self-assurance.  I still want it to be friendly to the site-but at the same time have a strength of its own."  Perhaps if the current Los Angeles County Museum of Art proposal reflected more of a Southern California sensibility, it would be site-friendly.  This only comes from an architect who better understands the region and can translate this understanding into good design.