For those wondering about the Centre Pompidou in Paris. mentioned derisively in the First Symphony story "The Rose That Blooms In The City Of Light"', please see the last image in this tory in the New York Times Magazine:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/05/t-magazine/architects-libeskind-zaha-hadid-selldorf-norman-foster.html

IT REALLY IS THAT UGLY.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

Are we sure it's really modernist architecture, and they didn't just, I dunno, forget to draw the outside of the building before construction started, and then BS their way out of it?

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

>Are we sure it's really modernist architecture, and they didn't just,
>I dunno, forget to draw the outside of the building before
>construction started, and then BS their way out of it?

It looks like somebody took the main process portion of a chemical plant (or refinery, sans the fractionating column) and plopped it down in a city. All that's missing is the tank farm. On second thought, with the way it is painted, it more resembles the 3D models of a process plant, where various components are color-coded during the CAD work, rather than being shown photo-realistic.

I love the factoid from that article about a resident of Paris attacking one of the architects when she discovered he was one of those responsible for it.

LAST EDITED ON Jun-11-15 AT 07:18 PM (EDT)
 
>I love the factoid from that article about a resident of Paris
>attacking one of the architects when she discovered he was one of
>those responsible for it.

It's worth noting, perhaps, that Parisians are not historically adept at gauging these things: the Eiffel Tower was roundly hated when it was new, with many of the leading literary figures of Paris bleating that they would have to eat at its restaurant because you couldn't see the building from there.

That said, my beef with the Pompidou isn't necessarily that it's ugly as that it's precious about it. It's ugly on purpose, as if the architects actually went out of their way to taunt the people who were concerned that it wouldn't fit in with the context in which it was being constructed. "You better believe it won't! Filthy plebs. You don't understand my art!"

Also on the subjects raised in that article, I find I rather like the BT Tower, although less so now that it has no actual use. But I'm rather fond of those "antenna" buildings in general (the Space Needle, the CN Tower, the Kuwait Liberation Tower, those other ones in Kuwait City with the giant disco balls). I can't see being down on the Tempelhof terminal building either. That's what a major airport's public face should look like, not those godawful shopping mall things we have nowadays. Major travel hubs should be like Grand Central Terminal or the old Penn Station, regardless of mode of transport involved. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.]

HA HA MODERNISM IS SILLY UGLY RUBBISH ARCHITECTURE STOPPED HAVING ANY MERIT AT ALL AFTER ABOUT EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-SIX HA HA HA fuck that noise.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

>IT REALLY IS THAT UGLY.

No....no, it isn't. It is, in fact, EVEN UGLIER!

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

I've been there. Yes, yes it is.

One other comment caught my eye on that page, about the two cereal box/space heater skyscrapers in Albany:

>The New York Times called it ‘‘a grandiose, utter folly’’ whose ‘‘powerful sense
>of place . . . appears to be more the planet Krypton than the capital of the
>state of New York.’’

<snrk>

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

LAST EDITED ON Jun-11-15 AT 07:23 PM (EDT)
 
>One other comment caught my eye on that page, about the two cereal
>box/space heater skyscrapers in Albany:
>
>>The New York Times called it ‘‘a grandiose, utter folly’’ whose ‘‘powerful sense
>>of place . . . appears to be more the planet Krypton than the capital of the
>>state of New York.’’
>
><snrk>

Thought experiment: play this clip, pan slowly over a large photograph of Empire State Plaza.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I've been there. Yes, yes it is.
>
>One other comment caught my eye on that page, about the two cereal
>box/space heater skyscrapers in Albany:
>
>>The New York Times called it ‘‘a grandiose, utter folly’’ whose ‘‘powerful sense
>>of place . . . appears to be more the planet Krypton than the capital of the
>>state of New York.’’
>
><snrk>

My thought was that those buildings must cause some big wind tunnel effect between them

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com 1st Courier of the Heavenly Prophets for Tianxia "Never give up, never surrender!"

>IT REALLY IS THAT UGLY.

Personally, I don't think it's all that ugly -- just very horribly situated. It does clash violently with its surroundings, and probably would have been better suited to an area with somewhat more modern design. Then again, I'm sure that it was someone's idea of a "statement".

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

Speaking of godawful modernist architecture, check out what this guy wants the cities of the future to look like.

It's an interesting concept, but holy shit, that would be some bleak-ass futurescape.

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Gryphon, I'm sorry to disagree with you, but... no, actually, no I'm not. Your assessment is just plain wrong. This isn't just designed for aesthetic purposes - it's designed for disaster relief, giving people shelter after, say, an earthquake hits. While it almost certainly won't just be used for that, because it's a very convenient, easily-constructed model for densely-populated places like China's urban areas or Japan's Japan, this is an enormous, safe building that can be constructed very, very quickly. Instant non-tent refugee camp, just add running water and power. I'm in favour of that, if it means less people are without shelter when natural disasters hit.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

>Gryphon, I'm sorry to disagree with you, but... no, actually, no I'm
>not. Your assessment is just plain wrong. This isn't just designed for
>aesthetic purposes - it's designed for disaster relief, giving
>people shelter after, say, an earthquake hits.

It was inspired by/for disaster relief, which is laudable, but the rest of the article pretty clearly indicates to me that the guy's ambition has since run away with him, and he's now taking the view, "We should just build everything like this! "

You don't build a 30-story skyscraper, much less plan the world's tallest building, as a showcase for disaster relief shelter technology. You do that if you're drunk on your new idea's potential and have no conception of how miserable it would be to actually live in the cities that result from your Vision.

(Also, I personally would not much care to live in, or within being-fallen-on distance of, a multi-story structure some dudes built in a couple days. Call me conservative. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Okay then, since you've invited me to, yes, I do think you're being conservative. I think your entire universe is marked by a certain aesthetic conservatism, which I get was your intention from the get-go (UF is basically Star Trek crossed with a John Hughes movie, after all), and I think you're too eager to dismiss stuff if it doesn't fit into a very traditional idea of beauty or aesthetic value. This is amazing. Someone built a safe, sturdy building that rises up high into the sky scant weeks after breaking ground. This is brilliant for disaster relief and while we had a failed experiment with brutalist architecture in the Sixties, I think you can turn this idea into fleets of temporary accommodation as an alternative to places like the camps at Sangatte. And by the way, I happen to think that with a more ecologically harmonious approach - climbing plants, say, or those new vertical garden things - it could be made to look rather pleasant. Almost like a skyscraper designed by hobbits.

Now, I freely admit this is me being pretentious, and I don't care. I'm not as conservative in my tastes as you are, and that's fine. I just don't particularly like it when people decide that everything that happened in a medium after the year Dot has no value and must be purged. It happens with art, it happens with architecture, and it happens with every other artistic medium (cf. all the nerd rage about "artsy" games that are, y'know, not brown shooters where you shoot various forrn people). But I respect your right to say so, and I hope you respect mine to disagree with you.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between aesthetic conservatism, which is a matter of taste and therefore not proper grounds for dismissal or distain, and engineering conservatism, which is just plain good sense. A building thrown up in two weeks as disaster relief should be thrown out in a few years, because an engineer errs on the side of pessimism, and the durability of a structure is usually directly related to the care and time spent putting it together. That thing is gonna come down sooner or later; better to demolish it safely than to have it collapse on the residents and neighbours.

>I think a distinction needs to be drawn between aesthetic
>conservatism, which is a matter of taste and therefore not proper
>grounds for dismissal or distain, and engineering
>conservatism, which is just plain good sense.

Yes - although to be perfectly fair, in this case I will willingly hold up my hand to both. I have grave reservations about the engineering value of the building method in question and I think the results are a splinter in the eye of the world. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>I think a distinction needs to be drawn between aesthetic
>>conservatism, which is a matter of taste and therefore not proper
>>grounds for dismissal or distain, and engineering
>>conservatism, which is just plain good sense.
>
>Yes - although to be perfectly fair, in this case I will willingly
>hold up my hand to both. I have grave reservations about the
>engineering value of the building method in question and I
>think the results are a splinter in the eye of the world. :)
>
Well. I usually don't say this in so many words, but I -do- consider myself mostly conservative--libertarian, actually.

And that has almost nothing to do with why I think this architect is barking up the wrong tree.

Okay, yes, I happen to think climate change is a scam and this guy's reasons for doing this are hilarious. But disasters of all stripes do happen and disaster relief is certainly a laudable goal. If he can sell people on structures that are designed to resist disasters, well, he's got a market and more power to him.

The problem is, that's not what he's doing.

I mean, sure, he's selling a product, and to my surprise the BBC had the integrity to bring up problems people have had with these kinds of designs in the past, though they probably should have interviewed someone who disagrees with his vision. I, for one, wonder how he's going to efficiently heat and cool a preconstructed steel building. I also have a hard time buying the idea that preconstructed steel at that height is going to resist a serious earthquake, no matter what tests he's run. As I look through the article, I see a number of the caveats I had crop up, like the sheer sameness of every single apartment and possible pitfalls of modular construction. (I didn't know about water seepage specifically, but there had to be some reason it wasn't already being used.) Also, none of the exterior windows can open? For a greenie, he seems awfully against fresh air. All the air they have will be processed, and it's not going to look like a very safe building if the air handling system goes down. Also, cost. He insists his buildings are cheap to construct, but the article doesn't make any mention of anyone looking at his books.

What he's really doing, though, is selling a philosophy. He's a crusader, and a very egotistical one at that. I don't see anything in the article other than his own blithe assertions that a bunch of his buildings -would- use resources more efficiently. I mean it can't help but be efficient in land use, sure, but electricity? Gas? Water? He's making a lot of claims, but he comes across as a True Believer, and True Believers make claims like that whether or not they can back them.

As for aesthetics, I don't actually mind the outside of the building. I like the stepped, terraced look and exterior mirror windows. The inside, however, I can't help but imagine would look incredibly soulless and industrial. Houseplants and maybe a landscape mural aren't going to be enough to shake off that sheer sameness that will plague every floor.

We'll see in the future whether he can back up his promises. I admit, however, I am not holding my breath.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

There is a certain delicious irony in a climate change denialist calling someone else a True Believer, but that's not germane to the discussion, now, is it? =]

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Clearly those islands in Panama and the Maldives and so on that sank because of rising sea levels caused by climate change and led to the enforced repatriation of thousands are just fucking hiding.

Kids. Let's not. Just... let's not.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>Yes - although to be perfectly fair, in this case I will willingly
>>hold up my hand to both. I have grave reservations about the
>>engineering value of the building method in question and I
>>think the results are a splinter in the eye of the world. :)
>>
>Well. I usually don't say this in so many words, but I -do- consider
>myself mostly conservative--libertarian, actually.
>
>And that has almost nothing to do with why I think this architect is
>barking up the wrong tree.

For that matter, it has almost nothing to do with the thread, since what we were talking about was a matter of aesthetic and/or technical conservatism, nothing whatever to do with social or political values. Which I'd quite like to keep not discussing on these boards.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>Someone built a safe, sturdy building that rises up high into
>the sky scant weeks after breaking ground.

Maybe it's safe. The guy says it's safe, but then he's selling them, and this is a country where they still routinely paint children's toys with lead paint and put melamine in pet food.

>This is brilliant for
>disaster relief and while we had a failed experiment with brutalist
>architecture in the Sixties, I think you can turn this idea into
>fleets of temporary accommodation as an alternative to places like the
>camps at Sangatte.

Yeah, see, my main concern is that "temporary" things that are horrible often have a habit of ceasing to be temporary, and while one Walled City of Kowloon was kind of a nifty world-feature that it's too bad it's gone, I can easily see this thing mushrooming into hideous, never-dismantled shantytown arcologies, like some kind of Gibsonian vision of a future gone wrong.

>And by the way, I happen to think that with a more
>ecologically harmonious approach - climbing plants, say, or those new
>vertical garden things - it could be made to look rather pleasant.
>Almost like a skyscraper designed by hobbits.

Leaving aside for a moment how unspeakably twee a skyscraper designed by hobbits would be, when was the last time you saw any evidence at all of anyone in the Pacific Rim economic boom zone indulging in ecologically harmonious anything? :)

>I just don't particularly like it when people decide that everything
>that happened in a medium after the year Dot has no value and must be
>purged.

Well, I don't really cotton to it when I say something about one thing and someone goes running off with the assumption that I was talking about everything, either, so I guess we're even. :)

Just for the record, although I am of the old school that thinks government buildings and banks should still look like the Pantheon in Rome, Arts-and-Crafts bungalows are nice, and red-brick Federal is just fine for public schools, I do rather like certain so-called-modern architectural styles - 20th Century Modern housing, for instance. Also various applications of the now-much-maligned '60s "metabolist" concept. Habitat '67 in Montreal, for instance, and the sadly moribund Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. No one can ever actually accuse either of those structures of being attractive, I don't think, but they're interesting, and they aren't an active affront to their surroundings like the Pompidou or Empire State Plaza. Nakagin, in particular, wasn't actually very well-made, which is why most of it no longer works, and that's a shame, but the concept is intriguing and it could have been made to work.

It's a big world, there's room for a lot of screwing around with the way buildings go up and how they look. However, what Zhang is doing looks to me basically like encouraging the world to do its future urban construction in the "enormous heaps of discarded CONEXes" idiom, and, well, no, I'm not down with that - and I have extreme reservations from an engineering standpoint about his blithe claims of the safety of his product. I genuinely do not believe that a very large building can be put up that quickly without massive fuckaroundery that's eventually going to get a lot of people killed. "Good, fast, and cheap, pick two" is a cliché because it's true.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>Yeah, see, my main concern is that "temporary" things that are
>horrible often have a habit of ceasing to be temporary, and while
>one Walled City of Kowloon was kind of a nifty world-feature
>that it's too bad it's gone, I can easily see this thing mushrooming
>into hideous, never-dismantled shantytown arcologies, like some kind
>of Gibsonian vision of a future gone wrong.

Seconded. This happens in all kinds of ways, all the time. In a more benign example, after WWII, the military gave a bunch of huts to the University of British Columbia to help them manage their "temporary" crowding problem. When I went there in the late 80s, most of the huts were still there. According to the annotations on this video documenting the hut move-in some of the huts were still there until a few years ago.

-VR
I don't want to think about how much they must have spent on fire prevention and asbestos mitigation on those "free" buildings. As well as heating and reworking to remove drafts and leaks.
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

>Seconded. This happens in all kinds of ways, all the time. In a more
>benign example, after WWII, the military gave a bunch of huts to the
>University of British Columbia to help them manage their "temporary"
>crowding problem.

Yep, the University of Maine still has a couple of WWII-era ROTC barracks buildings on campus. Nowadays they have no connection to the ROTC (they have their own, newer facilities elsewhere on campus), and the old barracks are used as administrative office space, not housing. So it isn't a particular problem, but one imagines they weren't originally expected to stand for more than a few years either. They seem to be just wood-frame buildings with single-glazing windows, in Maine. Must cost a fortune to heat in the winter.

In a similar vein, I was always told that the Ellsworth and Fuller Apartments at WPI were built as temporary housing for the crews who built Morgan and Daniels Halls. They were supposed to be torn down once the dorms opened, and then someone at Res Life thought, Wait a minute, we could charge upperclassmen to live in those. I don't know if that's actually true (although it's perfectly in character for WPI's administration as I knew it), but they're still there, and they are undeniably flimsy-ass dwellings. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

College of Wooster's Holden Annex was built as temporary housing for the Army WASP pilots training there in 1943.

Still there, still occupied.

I thought on first reading that was "Hidden Annex", and wondered if that was where they were keeping Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. (*There* is an obscure reference.)

>Yeah, see, my main concern is that "temporary" things that are
>horrible often have a habit of ceasing to be temporary,

We've got a good example here, not actually "horrible", but awfully dull and boring-looking; after WW2 a lot of prefab houses were put up "on a temporary basis" all over the UK... there are still hundreds left, and one small row (the last in town, I think) is just ten minutes' walk away. They've been totally refurbished at least twice that I know of, and I sometimes wonder if the only thing holding them up is the decorative brick lining that was put on last time.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

Yeah, Vincent van Duysen's text does not, to me, describe the Centre Pompidou. It is very ostentatiously not woven into its place, and in fact goes to extra effort to distance itself – one could even say alienate itself – from its neighbours. It also fails to be engaging or inviting. It's very obviously a ham-handed attempt to Make A Statement. Quite unlike all the other structures in that article, which are straightforwardly form-following-function (Tour Montparnasse, BT Tower), dogged by circumstance (Vele di Scampia, Tempelhof Airport), or keeping to a particular style in an unapologetic but non-aggressive manner (Orange County Government Center, Empire State Plaza, and again Tour Montparnasse). The Orange County Government Center and Empire State Plaza both pleasantly remind me of the main campus of Simon Fraser University, all concrete and right angles.
(Most of the SFU buildings were intended by the architect to have large quantities of trailing plants overflowing the planters built into the various step-like roof-lines, which would've lent an interesting "lost jungle temple" vibe to the campus, but it's a good thing he designed them to look alright before they grew, because they never got planted. There are a few trees growing in unlikely places, including through the middle of the Student Union building, but nowhere near the originally-intended level of greenery.)

>It's very obviously a ham-handed attempt to Make A Statement.

If that's a statement, then it's speaking in tongues. ;)

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

>>It's very obviously a ham-handed attempt to Make A Statement.
>
>If that's a statement, then it's speaking in tongues. ;)

Hey, let's be charitable. Maybe it's a cry for help. =)

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her