ProjectEnd
Superstar
Yes Spire, a truly inspiring post there but I think you've missed the point (well, I know you've missed the point but hey, let's talk). I argue on behalf of quality, regardless of the firm involved. There's no foisting but if you feel that I push too hard in one direction, then foist back. I recently had a similar discussion with The_Starchitect in the Couture thread about the fact that there are two sides to the creation of any building - the design phase and the construction phase. Even if you dislike the way that a certain firm conceptualizes their buildings (a subjective judgement which you are free to make but it seems the firm you condemn is most-represented in your signature-cum-burglarized-Koolhaas-flag), there is a certain objectivity to the way that one can see and evaluate them in the real world. In the end, I feel that said firm is able to put together a product of higher quality than any other in this city at this point. For example, if you can look at a project like Aura or Couture and tell me that it has been designed (if you really are a student of the building arts then you'll know to look past the plastic forms a building assumes and to the details when evaluating how deft an architect's hand is) and is being assembled with the same care as something like the Four Seasons or even Casa for that matter (much lower price point) then I'd either say you're lying or you just haven't had the proper training.
For example, the next time you pass Casa (a building you've professed not to like the podium of), take half an hour and get really close to it. Take in the attention to detail, particularly in the connections and note how everything has been reduced to its essence. This allows the materiality of the elements which make up the building, the dark brick for example, to play the starring role rather than the boxy form it assumes. Examine how the brick meets and connects with the glass panels which form the primary facade and remember that hours went into that one simple detail. Another good example is the Peter Street Condos podium which some have claimed as a 'miss,' but which went through at least twenty different iterations before a final design was settled upon. Why bother? Because there's a care to the way that a studio works as opposed to a factory, where each piece is painstakingly agonized over before an appropriate solution is found. I get particularly irked when some say 'a four-year old could have designed that,' since it smacks of the same sort of blind philistinism of someone who would examine a Rothko and claim that 'they could do that 'cause it's just a bunch of blurry lines.' Wrong again Bob.
Now waltz down the street and have a look at Aura where everything has an air of hurried, 'I wanna get out of here 'cause it's Friday' compromise. It's over-engineered (it's faster to over engineer than to design everything individually, but you knew that) and nothing really seems to fit. Look at the massive bulkheads (on the ground floor nonetheless?), the relatively small portions of clear glass set into hugely oversized opaque frames and the way the whole thing is being swathed in nothing but that dull glass. It's then you might come to appreciate materiality that 'others' found so essential to their building on Charles and which you seem to have hitherto overlooked. It's an obese, soulless nod to capitalism and the extruded floor-plate condo which has come to dominate the oeuvre of some developers, particularly when one of two much larger firms are brought on for the job. What's particularly gob smacking about a project like Aura (and someone else has rightly noted this before) is how such a bunch of talentless hacks were allowed to design such a significant building in the first place. But hey, its epppppiccccccc right (more spandrel!)?
So if you don't know what you're looking at, or for that matter are looking for, how can you derisively claim that it's you who is triumphing over the 'narrow minded' and daring to ask for 'more?' I won't bring the ol' Mies' baggage about the perils of 'more' into this, but I will remind you that he sure didn't advise that: 'God is in the fizzbang shapes and spandrel panels.'
I'd also avoid telling others publicly that such-and-such a prof would 'totally skewwwl u' without knowing who that person is or what they do 'cause in the end its you that looks like the uninformed undergrad drowning in a graduate level seminar (adma's excellent phrase, not mine).
