The Architecture Thread

[mordecai]

i've been asking my SO to steal Pattern Language from her dayjob but she keeps forgetting to. That Tectonic Architecture book looks great too. also, sort of hoped they would have this one. seems like the kind of place that would. a seller on amazon has it, but $350

 

[mordecai]

Oh, and before I forget, I think you would love The Past Is A Foreign Country if you haven't read it already. Probably the best book on ruins that I've ever read. Implies a lot about the building (and buildings

) of state myth, but requires a bit of mental participation on the part of the reader. Out of print, but pretty easy to find.

 

[pruppert]

Some nice recommendations. Just finished this, interesting read. To the point, not too in depth, but thought provoking.

You never know what books will go out of print, and all the sudden be worth something. Bought this for a case study out of necessity, and now amazon has it at 1,100 new, 700+ used. As if.

 

[gomestar]

thanks for listing these three days before Christmas

 

[mordecai]

Originally Posted by gomestar

thanks for listing these three days before Christmas

you got her another anchor, huh?

Originally Posted by pruppert

Bought this for a case study out of necessity, and now amazon has it at 1,100 new, 700+ used. As if.

I've had great luck with records and art monographs, but daaaaaaamn

 

[StephenHero]

Originally Posted by mharwitt

i've been asking my SO to steal Pattern Language from her dayjob but she keeps forgetting to.

It's in my top 5 all time architecture books. It uses bolded sentences as it was designed to be skimmed.

A Pattern Language
The Eyes of the Skin
Thinking Architecture
Questions of Perception
Delirious New York

 

[mordecai]

will check all of those out. no really. should we have a separate thread for landscape design?

 

[StephenHero]

Yes. I need a place to put sculpted hedges.

 

[softy]

I just discovered this thread and the book recommendations are blowing my mind.

Thank you.

 

[LabelKing]

New book on the late Palast der Republik: http://editionpanorama.com/buecher/e...-der-republik/

 

[StephenHero]

This is pleasant.

 

[LabelKing]

So is this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesi...wer-conversion

 

[StephenHero]

 

[A Y]

Plans for the Broad art museum in LA are revealed. You had better like white, webby things.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,1113952.story

The landscape architecture is predictably bare.

--Andre

 

[StephenHero]

New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro have unveiled their design for a new Los Angeles museum for The Broad Art Foundation. Called The Broad, the three-storey museum will incorporate gallery space, a 200-seat lecture theatre multimedia gallery, public lobby and museum shop, plus archive, study and art storage space. The building will be wrapped in a honeycomb facade that will be visible from the sky-lit top floor gallery. Designed by world-renowned architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the three-story museum features a unique porous honeycomb “veil” that wraps the building and is visible through an expansive, top floor sky-lit gallery that will be home to great works of contemporary art drawn from the 2,000-piece Broad Collections. The Broads also announced a 12-member board of governors and the inaugural programming for the contemporary art museum, to be called “The Broad.” “Today, we celebrate another important milestone – the creation of a new museum 40 years in the making,” said Eli Broad, who was flanked by more than 200 city and county officials and community leaders as he revealed the designs for The Broad at a press conference at Walt Disney Concert Hall. “Grand Avenue is the cultural district for this great region of 15 million people. No other city in the world has such a concentration of visual and performing arts institutions and iconic architecture in a three-block radius. Edye and I can think of no better home for the public art collections we have assembled over the past 40 years.” Located across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Broad will also serve as the headquarters for the foundation’s worldwide art lending library. In addition to paying for the building, the Broads are funding the museum with a $200 million endowment – larger than the combined endowments of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MOCA. Joanne Heyler, the director/chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation, will also serve as director of the museum. Featuring almost an acre of column-free gallery space, a lecture hall for up to 200 people, a ground floor multimedia gallery and a public lobby with display space and a museum shop, the 120,000-square-foot project will also include state-of-the-art archive, study and art storage space that will be available to scholars and curators who want to research works in the collection and borrow artworks for their institutions through The Broad Art Foundation. Dubbed “the veil and the vault,” the museum’s design merges the two key components of the building: public exhibition space and the archive/storage that will support The Broad Art Foundation’s lending activities. Rather than relegate the archive/storage to secondary status, the “vault,” plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit. Its heavy opaque mass is always in view, hovering midway in the building. Its carved underside shapes the lobby below, while its top surface is the floor of the exhibition space. The vault is enveloped on all sides by the “veil,” an airy, cellular exoskeleton structure that spans across the block-long gallery and provides filtered natural daylight. The public entry to the museum will be on Grand Avenue and will complement the landscaped plaza to the south that is part of the Grand Avenue Project’s master plan. The museum’s “veil” lifts at the corners, welcoming visitors into an active lobby with a bookshop and espresso bar. Visitors will then journey upwards via an escalator, tunneling through the archive, arriving onto 40,000 square feet of column-free exhibition space bathed in diffuse light. This 24-foot-high space is fully flexible to be shaped into galleries, according to the curatorial needs of each installation or exhibition. Visitors exit the exhibition space and descend back to the lobby through a winding stair through the vault that offers behind-the-scenes glimpses, through viewing windows, into the vast holdings of the Broad Collections and the foundation’s lending library operations. “Our goal for the museum is to hold its ground next to Gehry’s much larger and very exuberant Walt Disney Concert Hall through contrast,” Diller said. “As opposed to Disney Hall’s smooth and shiny exterior that reflects light, The Broad will be porous and absorptive, channeling light into its public spaces and galleries. The veil will play a role in the urbanization of Grand Avenue by activating two-way views that connect the museum and the street”.

I like the expansive gallery. That will be great. The facade is a bit loud for me, but I guess when I spend a couple hundred million on my own art gallery I'll get a say. I think they've obviously got large scale interior installations in mind to make up for the collection's modest size.