I think it is time to upload some photos to flickr again.
we love taking pictures out of planes. this one, right after take-off in copenhagen, shows the desolate position of BIGhouse by bjarke ingels group, at the edge of a new neighbourhood not yet there.
had the credit crunch happened just one year later, many of the neighbouring projects would have passed the point of no return and been built. instead, everything remains on hold and the architectural themepark of expensive apartments that this area intended to become - including T-shaped, cantilevered luxury housing by steven holl - will most likely never be.
it has become, to borrow from reyner banham, an urban future of the recent past.
everyone who cares about copenhagen must wonder what will happen instead. will the long break in construction work allow the municipality to reconsider the awful planning and the enormous and inhuman houses it dictates, or will the greed these building behemoths express so well prevail...
other BIG projects.
Tags: ørestad copenhagen københavn denmark BIG bjarke ingels group bighouse 8-tallet ottetallet modern architecture planning seier+seier creative commons CC
london stansted airport, stansted, england 1981-1991.
architects: foster and partners, norman foster, b. 1935.
arriving by driverless train to the terminal at stansted still holds much of the magic felt when the airport - one of foster's best projects - was new in the early nineties, even if its true qualities have little to do with its original high-tech label.
by london airport standards, things like daylight, breathable air, and knowing where to go - all characteristics of stansted - remain magical. as in unobtainable. inexplicable. what must be two of the world's worst airports, gatwick and heathrow seem purpose-built to ruin foreigners' first impression of england. or, in our case, last impressions as we left from gatwick.
at gatwick, the entire staff appeared stunned by the fact that passengers had shown up again after how they had been treated the day before. very little happened very slowly. for what felt like hours, we were led through a maze of dark, smelly rooms unfit for their purpose by people unfit to lead, and the only thought going through my mind was that if the people responsible for flying ever mixed with the people running the terminal, planes would start crashing all over britain.
but gatwick couldn't ruin our improvised tour of southern england of which stansted had only been the first treat of many. they failed at that too.
Tags: foster and patners norman foster architect ove arup peter rice stansted airport london essex england UK modern modernism high-tech steel architecture arquitectura architektur building arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC
cambridge university history faculty building, 1964-1967.
architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.
our first stop was cambridge. we came for the monuments but fell for the town.
for sheer compositional exuberance, the history faculty building was a great sight. it is surprisingly small - all those clever moves in so little space - but that only adds to the intensity and charm of it.
I have seen this sold as new brutalism as well as early high tech but the fact is that stirling's three red masterpieces don't fit categories comfortably.
a sense that the history faculty is composed mainly from the outside, and a certain lack of tactile qualities - the hard red tile and pink concrete are not all that generous - relate the building more closely to stirling's final, postmodern works than I had expected. few buildings from the sixties appear so self-aware and so aware of what came before and how the modernist heritage could be rearranged. proto-pomo, maybe. maybe not.
pathetic moment of the trip was being thrown out of the building by a historian who could barely lift her own two arms. I think we left out of pity, puzzled by both historians and their architect.
(panoramic stitch of several photos)
this photo was uploaded with a CC license and may be used free of charge and in any way you see fit.
if possible, please name photographer "SEIER+SEIER". if not, don't.
the stirling set so far.
Tags: james stirling james stirling architect cambridge university history faculty building england UK modern modernism constructivism red tile glass architecture arquitectura architektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura panorama seier+seier creative commons CC
cambridge university history faculty building, 1964-1967.
architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.
here is another stitched panorama, this time showing the glazed reading room.
stirling's history faculty building is a glass house but far from the sleek, miesian concept of one. as has often been noted, stirling offers a strange and very personal combination of industrial modern and victorian greenhouse. you can find something similar in the work of foster and rogers - say, the atrium of rogers' lloyds building - but perhaps too much has been made of the two meeting stirling in the U.S. while still students: there is a social consciousness in the work of rogers and a servility in foster, neither of which you'll find here.
rather, stirling's buildings are like highly formal games - and very exciting games at that. their articulated volumes are based closely on the program, less so on the site. the fact that all his early, "heroic" projects share the same materials more than suggests his disregard for the site specific. they were built to be monuments, even when just student housing as we'll see later in oxford.
this particular part of cambridge suffers from the attitude and stirling is not the sole culprit as the edges of our panoramas show: every modern building here is an island with little urban fabric to tie things together except the concrete pavement.
the stirling set so far.
Tags: james stirling james stirling architect cambridge university history faculty building england UK modern modernism constructivism red tile glass architecture arquitectura architektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC
cambridge university history faculty building, 1964-1967.
architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.
the patterns of circulation in a stirling building are rich and engaging right from his earliest works. if you are in doubt as to what that means, just add children to your modernist house and see how they respond...
in the most successful phase of his career, his cultural projects in germany, stirling extended these architectural promenades to urban scale. cities need rich and engaging circulation and the german cities, recovering equally from allied bombing raids and post-war reconstruction, needed it badly.
and so stirling became, for a while at least, a great urbanist. you wouldn't have thought so, looking at the history faculty. considering his early brush with team X, I like to think that his german works were designed according to van eyck's famous dictum, that a house is a tiny city, a city a huge house, with the added interest that the city could now be a huge stirling house.
the stirling set so far.
Tags: james stirling james stirling architect cambridge university history faculty building england UK modern modernism constructivism red tile ramp pink concrete architecture arquitectura architektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC