Reminder

Fellow Chicagoans, tonight the Chicago Architectural Club hosts A Critical Voice: Implications of Media and Architecture in Chicago at 6:30pm at I-Space Gallery, 230 W. Superior, 2nd floor. See ya there!

Monday, Monday

This week's update:





Cognito Films Office in Culver City, California by Randall Stout Architects.



The updated book feature is Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Reader's Guide by Matthew Strecher.



Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

2004 AIA/LA Awards

The annual round-up of award-winning architecture, interiors and "what's next".



Architectural Photography

About.com's companion to Starting Architectural Photography, a guide for those who want to venture into that realm.



An Architecture for Our Time

Another essay from the reactionary network INTBAU, this one by Charles Siegel, director of The Preservation Institute.

Sunday Jaunt

On the way into work this fine Sunday I snapped some photos of recent residential buildings between the train stop and the office.





Small - 7-story residential/retail in River North, architect unknown.





Medium - The Contemporaine by Perkins and Will





Large - The Sterling by Solomon Cordwell Buenz





X-Large - Grand Plaza by OWP&P



These projects indicate that Chicago's residential architecture is improving, but it still has a way to go before it abandons the developer-driven, painted concrete shame and its indelible mark on the skyline.

Fugly? Or Just Plain Bad?

Sometimes critic of architecture Transfer continues his posts of architectural hate, this time with 3 Park Avenue, the Norman Thomas High School for Commercial Education.







Interestingly, according to Transfer, this is the last building by the architecture firm that authored the Empire State Building, Shreve, Lamb & Harmon.





Here's an image from New York Architecture in Images.



It appears that the architects wanted the building to stand out, specifically because the building turns its tower mass 45 degrees from Manhattan's grid. This is a maneuver that is anti-contextual in its urbanism and is coupled by the anti-contextualism of solid brick walls on its lower third.



(via Curbed)

Design Bloggers Unite

Icon Magazine spotlights some of my favorite design blogs in an article on their expediency and value to print media. Not only does the article mention reluct.com, dezain.net, MoCo Loco, Archinect, City of Sound and Design Observer (among others), but many of these site's creators contribute quotes that let us see why these blogs exist and what they hope to accomplish. We see that many people run blogs without any realistic chance of making money off them, most with full-time jobs. So to me these bloggers are doing it because they love the subject they cover (architecture, design, industrial design, a combination of design fields, etc) and are exploring the internet as a tool for strengthening the design community by keeping informed, informing others and creating discussion.

.ekwc

The European Ceramic Work Centre will be starting two new projects in 2005 with the intent of "infusing new life into the relationship between ceramics and architecture." Brick "will focus on 'tangible' results", while Combined Residencies will "demonstrate that cooperation between architects, visual artists and designers at as early a stage as possible, benefits the interactive, creative process." According to .ekwc's site, "Every architect, designer or visual artist with an academic education or an equivalent proven professional experience can send in his/her work plan [for these projects]."







Visit .ekwc for application forms and more information on these unique project opportunities. Deadline for application is January 15.

Shine Vs. SOM

Archinect posts some images comparing a student skyscraper design and SOM's Freedom Tower. From the Associated Press:

A former architectural student sued the designers of the World Trade Center site's planned Freedom Tower on Monday, saying designs for the skyscraper mirror those he created at Yale University...Thomas Shine, of Brookline, Mass., is seeking unspecified damages in federal court in Manhattan for what he said was the theft of his designs...The lawsuit alleged that the Freedom Tower was "strikingly similar" to Shine's designs for a Manhattan building for the proposed 2012 Olympic Games in New York...Childs saw the designs when he served in 1999 on a panel of jurists invited by the Yale School of Architecture to evaluate the students' work.

See for yourself.







Coincidentally I know someone who considered bringing a lawsuit against the same people for the same reason, perhaps an indication that SOM borrows heavily from student work or that high-rise architecture, by necessity, creates repetition in design, even by different parties. Because of the latter (the first may be true but would be difficult to prove) and the limitations of architectural copyright, this case probably won't have a chance. But looking at those images, one hopes SOM acknowledges their fault and provides some retribution, if the charges are well-founded.