No comments about Jujol: Jujol's Universe.

1 comments about Design City Melbourne (Interior Angles).

1. Design City Melbourne
   
   Leon Van Schaik
   Photography by John Gollings
   
   Wiley Academy, 2006
   ISBN-13 978 470 01640 4 (HB)
   
   
   With a light touch `Design City Melbourne' tells the wonderful story of Melbourne's late 20th century architectural renaissance as an incubator of local design culture. And who better to tell that story than Leon van Schaik AO, Professor of Architecture (Innovation Chair) at RMIT where for 20 years he has been a passionate teacher, curator, administrator and advocate of innovation across the arts. And who better to photograph that story than John Gollings.
   
   The development of Melbourne as a Design City - a city Van Schaik defines as one which is temporarily "hot" with a catalytic mix of curators and creators - has been held in orbit by RMIT during his tenure and dominated by its vociferous architecture programs. Most of the book is taken up with brief biographies of the established and incipient Melbourne architectural glitterati, nearly all of whom are tethered to RMIT in some capacity. Most have been part of its graduate design school, a forum where the theory-practice nexus that Van Schaik insists upon, has been crystallized as nowhere else in this country and for that matter in only a few places around the world.
   
   Descriptions of these people and their practices are framed by a main essay regarding the curatorial methods and agendas Van Schaik developed since his arrival in Melbourne in 1986. Other shorter essays map the links between architecture and the academy, between architecture and other disciplines, and most importantly, between architecture and the city itself.
   
   In short, the story of Melbourne becoming a Design City in the course of the last 20 years is one of how, through this network of interconnections that Van Schaik in no small part engineered, a generation of designers has converted the crippling cringe that generally affects settler societies, in to the source of their liberation. As opposed to recoiling from the global so as to romanticize and essentialise the local, Van Schiak the immigrant, saw the cringe from all sides and exposed Melbourne to a consistent stream of international influences, trusting the locals to make their own, local sense of it.
   
   They were steeled for this by Peter Corrigian and his partner Maggie Edmond who had already pioneered a gritty Melbournian brand of critical regionalism in several small suburban riots. But it was their high risk gymnastics across the front of RMIT's Building 8, a building Van Schaik championed, that came to headline Swanston Street as a new axis of innovation cutting across establishment lines. With this project the conversations inside both RMIT and the local journal `Transition' (RIP), literally started spilling out onto the streets and muscled their way in to the otherwise dull Melbourne grid.
   
   Of course, many bright Melbourne architects, not least of all Howard Raggatt who nailed his own thesis on the cringe to RMIT's door in 1990 would have found their voices in the wilderness, and Van Schaik is not claiming credit for all, rather, as this book attests, the Design City is one of multiple synergies.
   
   From Edmond and Corrigan the baton was handed to Ashton Raggatt McDougall whose Storey Hall next door to Building 8 was thought so radical that they kept a bag over its head until opening day. Completely misunderstanding its brilliance, many wanted the bag put back on - Ralph Neale, the former editor of this journal included. ARM have since reinforced their importance in Melbourne's inner city renaissance by digging in to the Shrine at one end of Swanston and opening Pandora's box with the Melbourne Central Shopping Centre at the other. Federation Square by LAB architects replete with Paul Carter's footnotes to an-other history of colonization and the new QV complex by Lyons, Kerstin Thompson, John Wardle and Rob McBride all consolidate Van Schaik's thesis of a Design City. The temporal and spatial linkages between these works and Van Schaik's role in the cultural life of Melbourne are no coincidence, although a finer grained history of these breakthroughs would reveal more.
   
   As a somewhat overt homage to Libeskind, Federation Square is however more difficult to package as radically and originally local. Nonetheless, Van Schaik recoups it as a part of geometric arguments being waged in Melbourne, arguments between the platonic and the fractal to which he errs on the side of the latter. Whilst at this level he takes sides, this book makes clear that he never set out to form one school of thought and certainly not a style: quite the opposite. Just as it is the crucial factor in the biological world, diversity is the key to the cultural. But this is not to say that anything goes; the curator has to tie it all together and find commonalities without compromising the differences.
   
   Although it provides a poetic, political and geographic structure, there is much more in this book than an appreciation of Swantson Street's well known trophies. The whole kaleidoscope of designers who have inspired or helped Van Schaik in his quest to create a Design City are all showcased. Risking the perils of writing his own story through theirs, Van Schaik's tone is humble and indeed humbled by the creative work of his colleagues. He played his role and they played theirs, both fulfilling the Design City contract.
   
   Although he connects the dots from the efflorescence of his time back into Melbourne's deeper architectural history, this book is not about dispassionate historical analysis; rather it is about recognizing that there is a latent ecology of creative intelligence in any city and that if you nourish it, things happen. Neither does Van Schaik tell us what to think about this outpouring of work and nor, as he so easily could have done, does he admonish other Australian cities for doing so little in the time that Melbourne has done so much. And although this book seems designed for a broad audience and is to an extent promotional for all included, Van Schaik doesn't tell us why the Design City is good nor amass data about its benefits - those arguments have been won and now the work speaks for itself. Those who define themselves by their distance from RMIT would be hard pressed to deny the remarkable achievement of this group of people.
   
   By announcing what has been, however, books like this tend to also announce that which is about to pass and whilst Van Schaik worries for a future that could so easily acquiesce back into stylistic echoes, this is an uplifting book for anyone involved in the daily struggle to create serious cultural production.
   
   Given the theme of innovation, the design of this book is surprisingly conventional and some essays are too short and too cool for such a hot topic. The conclusion, a proposal to erect a copper sheath over the Arts Centre seems unnecessarily heroic. As opposed to vertical triumphs over the inner city symbolic order, perhaps the future of this Design City, like most in the 21st century has to be about horizontality, about landscape.
   
   In this book, Landscape architecture as a discipline and a profession, despite being there throughout it all, gets very short shrift. Van Schaik doffs his hat to VicRoads and RMIT landscape graduates, Cath Stutterheim, Patrick Franklyn and Leanne O'Shea are noted. Their works suggest that some of the rich conversations held in RMIT's landscape program are starting to find form but perhaps landscape is yet to be curated in the manner that Van Schaik has done for architecture. If that is so, then, the creators need to rise to the occasion and give the curator something inspirational to work with.
   
   RW

2 comments about The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great.

1. Reading or browsing "The Empress and Architect" is a thrilling experience. Along with the great reproductions of Cameron's works, the Author of the book offers insightful and precise vision of syncretic relations between Russian and British culture. Unfortunately for Russia, the momentum of these cultural relatiions was abruptly ended after Bolshevik revolution of 1917. "The Empress and Architect" is truly one of the best books on Russian Classical Architecture published in English.



2. The text is sometimes a little dull and difficult to follow but the scope of the information presented is wide ranging and concise enough to keep you going. It was very enjoyable to learn about stuctures that you don't often see mentioned in other works. This is a very good addition to a library. I think that sometimes the text drifts from its intended purpose but the drifts are all pleasant.

No comments about Architecture in the Netherlands: Yearbook 2001-2002.

No comments about Heinz Tesar: Christus, Hoffnung der Welt, Donau City, Wien: Opus 42 Series.

No comments about Renaissance Paris: Architecture and Growth, 1475-1600.

1 comments about Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room.

1. No longer a relationship with engineering as in the last two centuries but with electronics: this will be the challenge for architecture in the future. Not surprisingly it is the clever mind of Robert Venturi to state and, more importantly, to clarify this problem in his latest very insightful book, Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture. Venturi is not new to this kind of pioneering reflections: his seminal Learning from Las Vegas very profoundly analyzed another crucial topic, the role of architecture in a motorized society. This time he again manages to focus on a crucial theme going well beyond the mere assertion of the problem. The book is, in fact, a collection of recent essays, and yet it has the strength - but not the monotony - of a special study. The arguments touched are various but they are all contextualized as against a common background: that of the new digital era in architecture. Doing so, Venturi manages to approach the problem from different positions that can open unthinkable perspectives: invention and convention, the relationship between architecture and publicity, the architectural object as a part of the landscape of popular culture are just some of the many topics faced. The theme treated is a very popular one, as we all know: the way architecture, and particularly those procedures involved with its making - which we call "design" - , are affected by the digital revolution. This revolution, as Venturi notes, is causing not only a mere change in terms of tools used to design (files vs. drawings, computers vs. drawing boards etc.) but it is bringing about, more importantly, a cultural change. What has been misunderstood in the far too many writings on this topic is that the digital revolution not only is changing our tools but also our goals. And, as usually happens in these cases, this very attention on the mere instrumental changes overshadows the more important content changes. Fortunately Venturi make architects reflect on this second aspect. The so-called "virtuality" will be more a more a condition to accept, a concept to face. With its ever-increasing presence in our culture it will eventually change the way we think and, particularly, the way we think architecture. One of the most important outcomes of this fact is a difference brought about in the idea of "object", a circumstance of paramount importance for designers. The broken link with materiality has indeed introduced a conception, quite widespread, in which objects are less defined, changeable and ephemeral in a new way. This change - notoriously foreseen by Lyotard - has eventually generated a different idea of the building. The exterior part of the building is the one more involved: in fact in contemporary architecture facades are no longer thought of as fixed elements. All the elements of definition - frame, corners, moulding - have lost their role. Facades, rather than exterior faces of material objects are considered nowadays as surfaces, and particularly mutant surfaces. So writes Venturi: "Here is architecture as iconographic representation emitting electronic imagery from its surfaces day and night." Recent buildings by architects like Herzog & De Meuron, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas are quite symptomatic to this respect. But we cannot forget the pioneering intuitions on "transparency" by Colin Rowe. Not surprisingly Venturi - always sensible to problems of communication performed by buildings and consequently very interested in the theme of the facade - tries to cope with these new conditions. He does so without falling in one of useless categories of pro or anti-virtuality. Instead he is preoccupied of being late in understanding the problem: "Architecture was too late in stylistically acknowledging the industrial revolution ....: let us acknowledge not too late the technology of now - of video electronics over structural engineering: let us recognize the electronic revolution of the Information Age". Venturi's reflections are always the architect's ones. In every phenomenon he is concerned primarily by problems of form and of visual impact. This special approach is particularly clear in his singling out a fundamental topic: the new kind of iconography brought about by electronics. Again Venturi's interest lays on the cultural mutation rather than on the pragmatic one. As we know electronics has introduced a new condition in all graphics - not only in those architectural: digital drawings are constituted by dots rather than by lines as in traditional "analogic" representation. Venturi make us realize that this is not a mere representational problem because this variation eventually introduces conceptual changes to the way architecture is conceived. Representational means are not neutral. Of course this is related to what Venturi theorize on the dissolution of architectural elements and especially of facades. What in the past was a choice - think of Seurat or of Byzantine mosaic - now has become a must. For Venturi the connection between decoration and its physical support - a basic theme in architecture - has to become totally free: "What S.Apollinare Nuovo does inside we can do inside and/or outside". A careful observer of popular culture, Venturi includes in his observation also elements like Light Electronic Displays, which are not a real product of digital production but are one of the most explicit representations of an iconography regulated by dots. This, of course, is not contradictory to his idea of a facade as projection surface. After all an old idea, - think of the inscriptions in S.Maria Novella by Alberti - consistently studied by Venturi and now rethought under the light of dramatically new circumstances.

No comments about Gozar El Arte, Gozar La Arquitectura/enjoying the Art, Enjoying the Architecture.

No comments about Japan: The Informal Contained (A History of Architecture #9).

5 comments about Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape.

1. Don't waste your money on this book- states the obvious in
   an over-inflated language that serves to make the authors appear deeper than they really are. If they actually took the time to look around at the world and stop looking at design magazines they would realize that this topic is a more complex one globally rooted in the vernacular of farms, military architecture and the way people have lived and worked. Again shows the insecurity of landscape architects who feel they have to fabricate theory (and demonstrate their ignorance of the subject) in order to be taken seriously rather than address the realities of their own field.



2. Don't waste your money on this book- states the obvious in
   an over-inflated language that serves to make the authors appear deeper than they really are. If they actually took the time to look around at the world and stop looking at design magazines they would realize that this topic is a more complex one globally rooted in the vernacular of farms, military architecture and the way people have lived and worked. Again shows the insecurity of landscape architects who feel they have to fabricate theory (and demonstrate their ignorance of the subject) in order to be taken seriously rather than address the realities of their own field.



3. Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape (Gloucester, MA: Rockport Publishers, 1999), by Linda Pollak and Anita Berrizbeitia, explores the dance between the environment and buildings in a series of strategic critical operations and is both an analytical and discursive tour of significant modernist and post-modernist projects ranging from Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum (1966-1972) to Villa Dall'Ava (1984-1991) by Rem Koolhaas. The former is discussed under the rubric "Threshold", the latter "Reciprocity". The remaining conceptual operations include "Materiality", "Insertion", and "Infrastructure". These terminologies unveil the manifold stratagems utilized in bringing architecture down to earth.

   In the case of Dan Graham's Two-Way Mirror Cylinder (1991), high atop Manhattan's Dia Center in Chelsea, this involves bringing architecture to the light and to the sky. In the clamor for height in Manhattan, architecture that embraces nature must struggle all the more to find purchase, that archimedian point of exacting leverage (and revenge). Graham's reflective glass pavilion is a lyrical-polemical exercise staged outside the white box of the contemporary art gallery, on the roof with views of the Hudson River, and engages in a clever doublespeak regarding its surroundings. The cylinder is half mocking the water tower nearby and the mirrored glass is certainly an outgrowth of Graham's ascerbic critique of the modernist skyscraper and its pretension to omniscience.

   Pollak and Berrizbeitia's discursus embarks into the nebulous region of the antitheses that have driven architecture mad for the last several generations: the object-subject dialectic of modernist space and the obsfucation of context perpetrated by dogmatists such as Philip Johnson, during his reign at MoMA with Alfred Barr. These latter two protagonists perpetrated a hoax on the public by denaturing the denatured modernist forms - a doubled denaturing - that excised the contingent and immanent factors of modernist architecture in favor of the universal and abstract. Pollak and Berrizbeitia's book seeks to restore this suppressed entelechy. The quest for the Absolute was (and remains) a provisional program to pull human artifice towards the stars while gesturing at the earth with secret hand signals of a cursory sort (Johnson's garden at MoMA or the ubiquitous, appalling inhumane plaza beneath the signature office tower). Johnson famously excised the landscape aspects of Mies van der Rohe's buildings - villas included - as a means of exacting even more profound anomie in his personal campaign to inflict architectural pain. Architecture has been exorcising this demon - this repression - for decades. It is only now that we are finding in Mies an aesthetic benevolence prefigured in his attempts to unveil the tectonic of modern, industrial-strength architectural form in association with landscape [...]

   From "Architecture's Clay Feet" (2001)




4. While I'll not dispute the other reviewers comments, it is worth mentioning that a) most of the structures profiled are commercial buildings and b) virtually everything is very modern architecture.

   What my wife and I hoped to see was something more in tune with the residential, traditional homes most people live in.

   One need only think of courtyards in southwestern architecture, decks and outdoor living areas, living rooms with French doors and transom windows overlooking a woodsy area, and the verandas on southern homes to picture what we were looking for.

   If this is what *you* are looking for, this isn't the book for you.




5. I recently purchased this book in preparation for my thesis. Finally, a collaboration between an Architect and a Landscape Architect has advanced the architectural relationship of Inside vs. outside for the first time in decades. This subject has been long overlooked, and dubbed only pertinent for "Green" architects, yet I, like the authors believe that these are pertinent investigations for any design that is sited in the outdoor environment. Technology has progressed to the point that Architecture no longer needs to dominate the outdoors,.. it no longer needs to be the "machine in the garden", as the book puts it. Architecture can mean more to its environment, and vice/versa. This book is well thought out, well written, and the highlighted projects are exteremely well selected. I only hope that in another 20 years there might be a new volume of this book, filled with new, and even better examples of the "operations" that this book employs.