Showing posts from category: architects
One of my passions in life (besides design) is motorcycle riding. It’s my muse, my creative spark. When I tell people I ride you usually get one of the following replies:
“You must be crazy”
“I know someone who was killed in a motorcycle accident”
They don’t get it; don’t understand how something perceived to be dangerous could be so enjoyable.
When I tell people I’m an architect I usually get one of the following responses:
“You build buildings”
“You must be good at math”
Sometimes someone will say you “design buildings”. But very few non-architects get it, understanding that, at our core, we’re creative forces with the ability to see the invisible, connect dots no one else sees, to “create” something from nothing.
And the creative process that’s fuels our work more often than not sets the tone for the way we live our life. Searching, questioning, dreaming.
How lucky are we?
I received a call a while ago from a prospective client we did some preliminary design work for a concierge assisted living facility years ago.
It did not go well as a lot of these fliers we take in pursuit of work go often do. We have experience in this building type and tried, in vain, to educate our potential client not only about what we do but about the subtleties of the building type. The client would have none of it, coming from a family of contractors and developers imbibed with the “we know more than you about building gene”. Forget about “architecture”, they clearly weren’t interested.
Fast forward four years. The phone rings and it’s the client. “How are you? Do you remember me? For the past four years we’ve gone ’round and ’round with our property. We can’t find a buyer so we’re going to try to resurrect the ALF. We we’re looking at the concepts you did for us and we were shocked. They were very good! We should have listened to you back then!
My interest is piqued, but my radar is up because this is most likely not a good client. And then they drop the hammer.
“We did some sketches over your drawings and we’d like to send them to you to see what you think. Maybe you can give us a price for “doing” the architecture.”
Zombie clients.
Some things should remain forever dead.
Robert Vecchione is an architect/designer and principal of the multidisciplinary firm Cobrooke Ideas-Architecture-Design (www.cobrooke.com)
May I ask why?
Aah architecture. The grand old profession of Wright, Sullivan, Mies and Kahn. The ability to shape cities with one’s own hands, to change lives and alter the course of history. To be Howard Roark of the Fountainhead, dreaming of blowing up your own creation because the client, a necessary evil of the profession, doesn’t share your noble vision.
So very romantic.
And so very wrong.
In the last five years the profession has shed about 60,000 jobs. They’re not coming back. Firms lucky enough to have a backlog of work make up the manpower shortage through technology. Profit margins, traditionally minute in the best of times are non-existent. Consolidation of mid-large size firms is rampant and sole-practitioners are an endangered species. The construction industry is not far away from engulfing architects in the construction process because architects use building information and drawing technologies like CAD, Revit and BIM. We’ve been commoditizing the profession for the last 20 years. That tide is not turning.
Our colleges and universities still eschew teaching the business of architecture, and graduates are ill prepared to deal with the realities of a profession in decline. And don’t dare ask them to draw. A pencil? What’s that?
Then of course there are the clients. The noble benefactors who embrace the architect for his vision, his ability turn their dreams into reality! More likely they’ve shopped around, solicited ten proposals then negotiated two or three firms down to the coveted 3-4% of construction cost fee that fits so well into their bottom line. And the architects fight tooth and nail to see who’ll reach the bottom first. Work is work.
Here’s my advice. Architecture, in its most pure form, is an art that few can understand, enjoy and appreciate. It is exhilarating.
It is not nor should it ever be a job!
It shouldn’t be bought and sold. Be passionate about all design. Architects are inherently creative. Pursue creative collaboration with other design professions. Cross pollinate. Design objects, think creatively at all times and tell everyone you meet that design matters. But practice “architecture” for yourself. Design spaces for yourself. Live in them, work in them, and dream in them. Don’t sell your ideas, your soul, your heart, to anyone. Be selfish because they don’t get it.
If you have to find another way to support yourself.
I’m sure Starbucks is hiring.
Robert Vecchione is an architect/designer and principal of the multidisciplinary firm Cobrooke Ideas-Architecture-Design (www.cobrooke.com)
In the “old days,” a firm might turn down a project because it didn’t have the necessary staff to handle it properly. Today, firms can maintain a lean staff in lean times and hire freelance consultants when business picks up. In the process they can hire people with the particular skills needed for particular jobs.
Architecture is not the only profession turning more and more to freelance employment. One study finds the number of temporary hires almost doubled in a recent four-year period – over 10 percent of them skilled technicians or professionals.
In fact, a growing number of young architects see freelancing as a fast-track means to getting ahead.
Instead of working on just one type of project or one aspect of design, freelancers acquire varied experience. The goal is to land permanent positions at a higher level more quickly than by remaining on one job for a given period of time.
Assuming that architectural firms will become accustomed to the freelance concept, this type of employment will grow as the demand for new projects returns to pre-recession levels.
architects, architecture jobs, jobs, recession
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architecture, arts, business, David McFadden, design, jobs, recession, technology, unemployed architects
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NYC resident architects – all levels. Please send your resume and work samples to [email protected]. Perm and temp.
Cliff House, Halifax architect Brian MacKay-Lyons’ creation, has won his firm its sixth Governor General’s medal. Since Christmas, the firm has won 14 national and international design awards.
A modest wooden house soaring over a rocky cliff has earned Nova Scotia architect Brian MacKay-Lyons a 2012 Governor General’s Medal in Architecture.
“We’re still the only architects in Atlantic Canada who’ve ever won it since it started in the 1950s so it’s kind of special for sure,” says MacKay-Lyons.
This is the sixth Governor General’s medal that MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects of Halifax and Lunenberg has been awarded by the Canada Council through a peer jury process.
“Your peers are the toughest audience, in that sense it means a lot,” he says, on the phone from Lunenburg.
“If you’re a musician, you want Bruce Springsteen to say you’re good.”
Since Christmas, the firm has won 14 national and international design awards and seen the opening of the Canadian embassy it designed in Bangladesh.
MacKay-Lyons and his family are off to Washington, D.C., this week to pick up the American Institute of Architects Honor Award for the Shobac Campus, a collection of buildings in Upper Kingsburg, Lunenburg County, that serve as a home and satellite office.
Still it frustrates MacKay-Lyons that after 35 years of working in Nova Scotia his company is not designing more public buildings in Atlantic Canada.
“We have this big international reputation and we can’t get any work at home,” says MacKay-Lyons, a Dalhousie University architecture professor for more than 20 years.
“Things are very political here, very parochial. Unless you’re well connected you don’t get a chance.”
The Governor General’s Award was presented for his work on Cliff House. Perched somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, it is a timber-frame minimalist box that juts out from a cliff on stilts anchored by heavy concrete onto the rock below. Its form is inspired by the fishing shacks in Blue Rocks and Peggys Cove, says MacKay-Lyons.
The house has a row of front windows looking out to sea.
“You get a sense of vertigo when you’re standing in it. When you get to the front you are, ‘Oh, my God, I could go flying.’”
However, it’s very safe. “It’s not going anywhere.”
MacKay-Lyons describes Cliff House as “monumentally modest.”
“The way it is in the landscape, it’s very proud and forceful and yet it’s just a simple building. It’s modest and inexpensive.”
It has a light timber frame construction, the type of two-by-four construction that is typical of the way houses are built in North America.
“Small timber is the only renewable building material other than bamboo. Even concrete uses tremendous energy.”
Cliff House has also won a North American Wood Design Honor Award, which pleases MacKay-Lyons because “it’s hard to get architects to appreciate light timber frame,” he says. They prefer “sexier” wooden buildings with large timbers and beams.
“The idea of touching the land lightly is something we’re becoming more and more interested in, disturbing the land the least.
“The buildings tend to be more hovering above the land, kind of cantilevering.”
In their statement, jurors praised Cliff House saying, “Perfectly judged for its setting, it elevates plain vernacular form and ordinary materials into a potent meditation on the relationship between the manmade and nature.”
Architecture is a team sport, says MacKay-Lyons. For Cliff House, he relied on project architect Kevin Reid, who’s worked for the firm for seven years, builder Gordon MacLean and structural engineer Michel Comeau of Campbell Comeau Engineering Ltd.
MacKay-Lyons has worked for 30 years with both MacLean and Comeau. He and Comeau grew up together in Arcadia near Yarmouth.
MacKay-Lyons and his Newfoundland-born partner Talbot Sweetapple are leading proponents internationally of regionalist architecture.
Wherever they build they look to the local material culture.
In this region, their design language is “influenced by the rural industrial building tradition in the Maritimes.”
“When we build in Bangladesh, we build it all of bricks. That’s using the culture.
“Our work is about that, about the idea of regionalism, about the idea of place and looking at the local material culture wherever we are.”
Source
After a competition that included some of the world’s most prominent architects, Thom Mayne of the firm Morphosis has been selected to design the first academic building for Cornell University’s high-tech graduate school campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City.
“The goal here is to develop a one-of-a-kind institution,” Mr. Mayne said in an interview at his New York office. (Morphosis also has an office in Los Angeles.) “It’s got to start from rethinking — innovating — an environment.”
The building will get extra attention as the first part of an engineering and applied-science campus charged by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with spurring New York City’s high-tech sector. It needs to embody the latest in environmental advances and to incorporate the increasingly social nature of learning today by creating ample spaces for people to interact. And to succeed, Mr. Mayne said, it must visually connect to the rest of the city, because its setting is surrounded by water.
Mr. Mayne has grappled with academic buildings before, perhaps most notably one for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in the East Village, completed in 2009, whose concave facade is clad in a perforated metal screen and punctuated by a vertical gash.
Mr. Mayne said the Cornell project presented an opportunity to contemplate what an academic building should look like in the information age. Should it have the bullpen environments of tech start-ups or the more cloistered layout of established universities? How should it use space to foster collaboration while also carving out areas for quiet reflection?
“There is no modern prototype for a campus,” Mr. Mayne said. “You have to have a completely different model which has to do with transparency and exposing social connectivity and breaking down the Balkanization that happens departmentally.”
There are no snazzy architectural images yet, nor can Mr. Mayne speculate about what shape the building will take or what materials he might use. “I haven’t even seen the site plan yet,” he said. The only certainty is that Mr. Mayne will not inaugurate Cornell’s new campus by designing some kind of ivory tower.
“I like being able to tell you that I don’t have any bloody idea what it’s going to look like,” he said.
Daniel P. Huttenlocher, dean of the new campus, to be called CornellNYC Tech, and a Cornell vice provost, said that as a computer scientist, he was “very sympathetic to the form-follows-function view of the world” and that he was “heartened by an architect who doesn’t want to get too caught up in the form too early in the process.”
At the same time, Cornell is in a hurry, having pledged to have classes up and running by September in leased space in Manhattan (location to be announced). The Mayne building is expected to break ground in 2014 and to be completed by the start of the 2017 academic year.
Mr. Mayne’s building is part of a campus that will be developed over two decades. The campus will comprise more than two million square feet of building space at a cost of over $2 billion and will serve more than 2,000 students. It will include three academic buildings; three residential buildings; three buildings for research and development; and a hotel and conference center.
In December Cornell, in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, won the yearlong competition to build the campus, beating teams that included one from Stanford University and City College of New York.
The master plan is being designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which was among the six finalists for the Cornell campus. The others were Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, Steven Holl Architects and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson.
Mr. Mayne’s 150,000-square-foot building is expected to cost about $150 million, Mr. Huttenlocher said, which will be covered by a $350 million gift through an alumnus. The city is providing $100 million in infrastructure improvements, as well as the land on Roosevelt Island, currently occupied by a little-used hospital. The new building will include classrooms, laboratories, offices and meeting space.
Morphosis was chosen partly because of its track record of completing projects on time and at a reasonable cost, Mr. Huttenlocher said. “We can’t afford for the budget to be something that balloons out of control,” he added.
The campus is designed to bring academic and private-sector research and development together to speed the translation of academic work into usable products and services.
Mr. Mayne said he would start by talking with the engineering firm Arup about how to design a building with zero-net energy consumption that will use and produce geothermal and solar power.
While the building’s design should be arresting, Mr. Huttenlocher said it also must satisfy its tech-savvy generation of users, who will adapt the space to their needs if it fails to suit them.
“If the building didn’t function well, I think it would get hacked to pieces,” Mr. Huttenlocher said. He added that Cornell liked Morphosis’s “ability to create iconic structures whose form does not obscure or impede its program.”
Mr. Mayne said he designed spaces that were meant to be personalized and “not in any way pristine.”
Morphosis tries to create spaces that allow work to happen in the most effective way possible, Mr. Mayne said. “After that,” he added, “we should stay out of the way.”
Source: NYT
architects, architecture, architecture critic
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architecture, arts, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Cooper Union, cooper union for the advancement of science and art, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, environment, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Morphosis, Mr. Huttenlocher, Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, research, Roosevelt Island, science, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Steven Holl Architects, Thom Mayne
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Existing Mall
Lakeside gardens, dining rooms hovering over water, grassy new amphitheaters and underground pavilions at the foot of the Washington Monument have emerged as finalists in a design competition to overhaul neglected sites on the National Mall.
Designers and architects are dreaming big for a chance to improve the place sometimes called America’s front yard. One vision calls for a garden “museum without walls” in part of the mall called Constitution Gardens. Another would “peel up” the landscape of the Washington Monument to reveal a theater and visitor amenities below ground.
The Associated Press had an exclusive early look at the results of a competition conducted by the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall. The finalists’ concepts will go on display Monday through Sunday at the Smithsonian Castle and National Museum of American History.
The Stage II Finalists of the National Mall Design Competition
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The Taiwan Tower is a Sustainable Twin Syscraper for the 21st Century The Taiwan Tower is a proposal by Vienna-based architect Steven Ma in Collaboration with San Liu, Xinyu Wan, and Emre Icdem. This highly innovative project consists of a set of super slim twin towers that reach a height of 350 meters where an observatory and sky-park is located. The plinth of the towers is formed by an intrica…te set of museums that will exhibit Taiwan’s past, present, and future. Each of the three museums configures itself around recreational areas that include a water plaza, an outdoor theatre, a green house, and an event plaza. Another interesting feature is the location of four different types of hanging gardens along the towers’ structure with high-end residences and an aviary for endangered bird species. Among the sustainable features, the Taiwan Tower is equipped with water recycling plants, wind turbines, and a beautiful set of photovoltaic cells placed along the sky-garden and on top of the museums’ undulating surfaces.
architects, architecture, buildings, built environment, carbon-neutral office building, Design, eco building, Green Architecture, green buildings, Green Built Environment, modern architecture, modern buildings, new buildings, skyscraper
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Emre Icdem, San Liu, Steven Ma, Taiwan Tower, Xinyu Wan
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What Real Madrid Resort Island will look like. (Getty)
Have you ever dreamed of a place where the warm sun dries Iker Casillas’ tears before they reach his cheek, the Persian Gulf breeze blows through Xabi Alonso’s beard and Pepe stomps someone to death on the beach? Then welcome to Real Madrid Resort Island — a holiday resort on an artificial island in the United Arab Emirates scheduled to open in January 2015.
From Reuters:
A presentation at the Bernabeu on Thursday showed plans for sports facilities, a marina, luxury hotels and villas, an amusement park, a club museum and a 10,000-seat stadium with one side open to the sea.
“It is a decisive and strategic step that will strengthen our institution in the Middle East and Asia,” said Real president Florentino Perez.
[ Related: Photos of Read Madrid Resort Island ]
The 4.6 million-square-foot venture is in partnership with the government of the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah and is expected to attract a million visitors in its first year of operation. But since that’s a whole three years away, Jose Mourinho probably won’t be one of them.
Hopefully Barcelona will build its own island right next to Real Madrid’s, but make it so everything is miniature and inhabited by Ewoks.
Look at the tiny computerized people! I see Ozil! (Getty)
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