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Gorilla Salad posted:Don't bother him with details - he's an idea man! New York Times posted:As for Valencia’s cost overruns, the politician Mr. Blanco said in a recent interview that one contributing issue might be that Mr. Calatrava’s designs appear to include few details. “Other architects, they know exactly the door handles they want, and where to buy and at what cost,” Mr. Blanco said. “But Calatrava is the opposite. His projects do not have this degree of precision. If you look at the files on the aquarium, which was built by someone else, they are fat. But there are just a couple of pages on the Calatrava projects.” Literally too important to bother with details. Being an engineer on one of his buildings must be soul-destroying.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:05
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brutalism owns
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Jul 10, 2015 18:15
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Phanatic posted:Wow. I dunno, I still think this is one of the biggest "oops" in modern Architecture history, though I'm guessing this may have been covered earlier. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/17/the_citicorp_tower_design_flaw_that_could_have_wiped_out_the_skyscraper.html Still, having a function that far removed from form is just mind-boggling, as well as people continuing to hire him.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:17
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It's particularly glaring after reading the comments on the NYT article. Apparently he did graduate courses in civil engineering. I guess he considers himself to be above that now.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:18
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stillvisions posted:I dunno, I still think this is one of the biggest "oops" in modern Architecture history, though I'm guessing this may have been covered earlier. The 20 year old New Yorker article is much better: http://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm It talks about the other half of the issue--the builder changed from welded joints to bolted joints (with the firm's consent, but not the architect's knowledge). No one really thought much of it, because the welded joints would have been overkill in normal conditions. Only in combination with the unforeseen issue of quartering winds did this become a problem.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:54
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Munin posted:Of course when you are talking about people who have the capital to own their own flats then they probably also have the money and clout required to make sure the building they have invested in is maintained rather than the poor saps who are wholly at the mercy of their landlords. I'd say that has probably more to do with their relative success than any "sense of ownership". Not to mention that you have quite a few examples of strong communities arising in public housing blocks to make the best of a bad situation for people and families who want to have a reasonably normal existence. 82% of Singaporeans live in public housing projects, and it's not the top 82% either. They were specifically designed to replace existing slums and are heavily subsided so almost anyone can get one if they have any kind of steady income. The government decided to subsidize the purchase cost and mortgages so people would buy them and feel ownership rather than subsidizing the rent, which as we've seen doesn't work. You really need to do even the slightest bit of research into what you're talking about before going on a knee-jerk rant about capital.
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Jul 10, 2015 21:34
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thekeeshman posted:rather than subsidizing the rent, which as we've seen doesn't work. Nah, rent can work fine. You just need government commitment to funding maintenance and competent staff. BC Housing has a bunch of clean, pleasant public housing units built back in the 70s. A big one in Victoria BC is Blanshard Courts (renamed Evergreen Terrace a few years ago). 183 units, a mix of 1 and 2 bedroom apartments in 4 story apartment buildings (no elevators), and 2 story townhouses with 2 or 3 bedrooms. The townhouses get tiny individual fenced in backyards The middle areas have lots of green space, some tables and play areas. No mixed use, but the lot is long and narrow along a busy street, with strip malls across the way. https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Bl...af5f8d765f2e9c6 <- you can use streetview to look around a bit. It's the huge swath of green buildings.  I found some winter rainy day pictures of a few developments in Victoria. http://www.herwayhome.ca/content/index.html They don't look quite so drab on sunny days. They are all 40 year old buildings and look it, but well maintained. It's not as vibrant and lively as the mixed use pictures we saw of Singapore, but it's also not a horrifying distopian hellscape like some of the american examples either. Renting can work, but it relies on the governing authority having the ability to maintain the housing stock.
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Jul 10, 2015 23:05
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wanna see the property values for unit 742 E. Oh there probably isn't one. shameful
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Jul 11, 2015 00:34
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Angela Christine posted:good stuff about maintenance being essential. I was going to write a post reiterating the fact that maintenance is essential and how the lack of it is what often wrecks housing projects but this one dis it better than I could. lovely housing stock, decades of deferred maintenance will turn anything into a hellhole. Topping off with an underemployed disenfranchised populace is only the sauce on the poo poo pudding. Heck, years of deferred maintenance eve with a fully employed populace is what is turning the accommodation for a lot of the UK armed forces into a national disgrace. If you want an example of an undoubted architectural failure in the housing project field then I would point to Ronan Point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Point A gas explosion caused an entire corner of the tower block to collapse on itself. Munin fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 11, 2015 02:14
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Chinatown posted:brutalism owns Yet another correct Chinatown post.
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Jul 11, 2015 06:21
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Dr. Garbanzo posted:My high school was an odd mix of Australian brutalism of the 60's and also the 80's. I attended KHS in the 70's We were told not to sit on the central heating vents on the window ledges as it would sterilise us. You would get really drowsy in the south block due to the poor ventilation and unflued gas heating. I can still walkthrough that place in my mind. That's also a nice view of South Katoomba I've never seen before, Very precarious perch over the Jameson Valley
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Jul 11, 2015 07:28
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Phanatic posted:The sole function of a footbridge is for people to walk across it. This guy designed a footbridge that people can't walk across. That's as utterly failed as architecture can get, that's right up there a house that falls down when you open the front door. quantumavenger posted:Literally too important to bother with details. Being an engineer on one of his buildings must be soul-destroying.
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Jul 11, 2015 09:14
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I'm sure Calatrava doesn't
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Jul 11, 2015 15:11
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quantumavenger posted:Literally too important to bother with details. Being an engineer on one of his buildings must be soul-destroying. what's ridiculous is that calatrava is also trained as an engineer. he studied at the ETH Zurich
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Jul 11, 2015 16:07
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anchoress posted:what's ridiculous is that calatrava is also trained as an engineer. he studied at the ETH Zurich Well that's a kind of recipe for disaster, someone who knows what's just within the realm of possible, but doesn't actually bother with it himself.
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Jul 11, 2015 22:21
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tardwrangler posted:I attended KHS in the 70's By the time I went there all of the central heating had been replaced by unflued gas which has now changed to something else safer. Where the vents used to be they placed stainless steel plates that lead to fun games of who can hold their hand on it the longest in the afternoons
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Jul 12, 2015 02:52
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Going back to the superstar achitect discussion some pages back, Zaha Hadid has apparently designed a huge olympic stadion in Tokyo that won't be built - the Guardian has some coverage: Japan scraps Zaha Hadid's Tokyo Olympic stadium design. The troubled history of Zaha Hadid's Tokyo Olympic stadium project
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Jul 17, 2015 14:53
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Hadid is a garbage architect and a garbage human.
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Jul 17, 2015 14:59
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An interesting case, my high school. This was the original building, built in the early 70s.  Generally pretty ugly, boxy, but functional. They tore it down in 2008, and built a brand new building.  Except they learned the lesson of "don't skimp on surveying, material AND labour." The entire left side, with the brown bricks, is the PE halls. And they are all subsiding like gently caress, to the point that there's apparently, in the corridor leading to the halls, a massive 2-3 inch wide crack around the entire corridor where half the building is coming away and sinking. And because they spent a bunch of money on poo poo they didn't need (including, hilariously, expanding said PE halls), they don't have the budget to fix it. So the building is eventually going to break in half like a Kit-Kat and there's nothing they can do.
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Jul 17, 2015 19:59
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Hah, my old university started planning its next accommodation halls, and the Earth Sciences department helpfully pointed out that the ground wasn't great to build on. So of course they built anyway. And M block promptly had to be torn down due to subsidence. What exactly is the point of paying geologists to exist on the same campus as you if you don't actually listen to their geological advice?
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Jul 17, 2015 20:52
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Freudian posted:Hah, my old university started planning its next accommodation halls, and the Earth Sciences department helpfully pointed out that the ground wasn't great to build on. So of course they built anyway. And M block promptly had to be torn down due to subsidence. What exactly is the point of paying geologists to exist on the same campus as you if you don't actually listen to their geological advice? Listen here you peon, you spent how many years in school? And you make how much? Well I make yooj amounts of money with my BA in Finance. Shut up, I'm right; I'm paying you, aren't I? The customer is always right after all. I have 4 houses, I know a thing or four about buildings.
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Jul 17, 2015 23:34
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Cultural Imperial posted:Hadid is a garbage architect and a garbage human.
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Jul 18, 2015 00:03
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Freudian posted:Hah, my old university started planning its next accommodation halls, and the Earth Sciences department helpfully pointed out that the ground wasn't great to build on. So of course they built anyway. And M block promptly had to be torn down due to subsidence. What exactly is the point of paying geologists to exist on the same campus as you if you don't actually listen to their geological advice? "The external consultants we hired said it was fine." At least that's how it goes in the corporate world.
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Jul 18, 2015 04:25
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Urban_Renewal.jpg In 1909:  In 2012: Google Street View (Spoiler: Two drive-thru banks and a garish finance outfit)
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Jul 25, 2015 02:14
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 Boston City Hall is probably the worst looking City Hall in the United States. It and City Hall Plaza, ranked as the worst public space in the United States, replaced a vibrant mixed-use district called Scollay Square. People want to tear it down because it is so, so ugly and falling apart. However, some people want to preserve it. Others want to put some lipstick on this pig. 
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Jul 25, 2015 02:26
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Worth keeping for the cultural significance imo: Also pretty sure we established in this thread that brutalist architecture owns.
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Jul 25, 2015 05:05
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Jehde posted:Worth keeping for the cultural significance imo: owns
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Jul 25, 2015 06:18
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Sagan owns, brutalism's poo poo
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Jul 25, 2015 08:06
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If the typical urban legends say that brutalist buildings at schools were originally designed to be part of a prison, then one can only presume that Boston City Hall was originally intended to function as a fortification in defending Boston against a potential Soviet invasion of the east coast.   
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Jul 25, 2015 08:34
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Accretionist posted:Palette Cleanser: The Cathedral of Learning is that grass or water in the first picture. either way, yeah i love this building and have for a while and do you know if any more similar exist
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Jul 25, 2015 08:38
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Wasn't this designed intentionally to look like fists?
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Jul 25, 2015 08:39
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Pittsburgh's got some really pretty buildings period
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Jul 25, 2015 08:42
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MikeJF posted:It's like... deco gothic. this actually exists and it loving owns 
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Jul 25, 2015 08:52
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Frostwerks posted:is that grass or water in the first picture. either way, yeah i love this building and have for a while and do you know if any more similar exist I'm not sure about other buildings, and that's frosted over grass. You can see it more easily in the big version:  Should highway placement be considered an architectural failure, too?  Downtown Pittsburgh, cordoned off from the waterfront on three sides.
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Jul 25, 2015 09:08
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A great documentary on Soviet architecture, cross-posted from the Novorossiya thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtoAvSlWxNE You can also see the influence on that god-awful Romanian government palace.
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Jul 25, 2015 15:25
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Accretionist posted:I'm not sure about other buildings, and that's frosted over grass. I think now it should be, but nobody really cared in the 1950s, and before that being close to the water was considered a bad thing (probably with good reason).
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Jul 25, 2015 15:38
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Frostwerks posted:this actually exists and it loving owns Reminds me a little (although that one's much blingier) of the Manchester Unity building here.  I always wondered what the tower rooms were like. 360 degree glass octagon, should be pretty cool. Accretionist posted:I'm not sure about other buildings, and that's frosted over grass. But man if it were water wouldn't it be amazing. Just the Cathedral of Learning rising sheer out of water.
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Jul 25, 2015 15:49
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Accretionist posted:Should highway placement be considered an architectural failure, too? There's no reason to put buildings that close to the rivers that overflow all the time, but in any case we still have the North Shore. Plus, there would have been nowhere else to put the highways due to the crazy topography.
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Jul 25, 2015 18:27
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Proposition Joe posted:replaced a vibrant mixed-use district called Scollay Square. lol that's an interesting way of describing it.
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Jul 25, 2015 18:59
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Accretionist posted:Should highway placement be considered an architectural failure, too?  In the beginning, the Charing Cross area of Glasgow looked much like the rest of the city did at the time - cobblestone streets lined with sandstone tenements. Take a note of the building in the foreground on the right of the picture as we'll be using it as a point of reference.  Here's the same area shown from above. The building on the right in the previous picture is on the right-of-centre in this one, at the corner.  Suddenly the sixties happened, and everyone went mad for motorways! In Glasgow's case this meant a swathe being cut through Charing Cross and the nearby community of Anderston, in order to build a motorway link across the river Clyde in the form of the Kingston Bridge. Here's the motorway under construction in the late sixties, with our reference building looking a bit out of place in the distance.  Cut to the present day and it looks.. well, you be the judge. This photograph is taken facing in the opposite direction, so the reference building is out of shot a few degrees to the left.   I mentioned the Kingston Bridge earlier - this was built as part of the motorway, and was the first high-capacity road to cross the River Clyde. However forty years after its construction this bridge is now itself carrying far more traffic than it was designed to, and required extensive remedial work spanning a decade to prolong its lifespan.  An excellent illustration of just how much of Glasgow was demolished during the construction of the motorway and the bridge can be seen here, where a map of the inner city at the beginning of the 20th century is presented alongside a present-day one. Entire city blocks have been obliterated and old streets bisected, the most egregious example of which is Argyle Street - once a contiguous road running east to west through the city, it has now been split in the middle leaving its two sides disconnected. The motorway and bridge have their roots in a Glasgow Corporation-commissioned report from the post-war era, which investigated how to deal with the overcrowded housing and inadequate infrastructure in the inner city. The report's recommendations were never implemented in full, arguably for the better. If it had been, buildings like the Kelvingrove Museum, School of Art and the Royal Infirmary would have all been demolished and replaced with buildings of an unashamedly brutalist nature such as the Anderston Centre.  (this really is the best image I can find of it, sorry  )The Anderston Centre itself is worth a mention for being one of the many well-intentioned and aspirational construction projects of the post-war period, which sought to build a residential and commercial hub with an integrated bus station. Instead decades of neglect, underfunding and the centre's poor location (it lies a few hundred metres west of Glasgow's city centre) turned it into a hive of crime and prostitution, and the notoriously inclement Scottish weather turned the already-dingy concrete into an algae-covered mess. In recent years it's been slowly chipped away at by demolition crews as its dilapidated units are vacated, and the remainder has underwent some careful restoration.
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Jul 25, 2015 19:37
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