A New Kind of Heroic Architecture
The stereotype of the modern architect is as a kind of heroic figure – the architecture who leaves his thumbprint on the skyline, or who changes the way we live, or who reveals the truth about the world, or whatever. And of course there’s a counter-archetype that thinks we know how to live perfectly well, thank-you, and that architecture should just facilitate that. Le Corbusier and Robert Moses on this side and Jane Jacobs and Prince Charles on the other, with, I dunno, Robert Venturi putting on a killer half-time show or something.
But after visiting Rising Currents, a new show at MoMA about rethinking the New York waterfront in response to the expected rise in sea levels accompanying global warming, I feel like there’s a new strain of heroic architecture a-borning – folks with the scope and ambition of the old modernist heroes but sensibilities that derive from the other team. Call it “Big Green.”
Anyway, it’s very worth a visit.
BTW, speaking of Big Green . . .
A cow farts in Brazil and I end up getting to moor my boat in front of my apartment. Sweet!
— Tony Comstock · Jun 30, 05:15 PM · #
You are correct. Though this is by no means universal (see: the continuing fetishization of the starchitect), much of architectural culture recognizes that the stereotype you refer to was, unfortunately, grounded in truth, and has sought to counter that by developing a more humble working methodology, grounded in a recognition of complexity, flux, and uncertainty.
It is also worth noting that this has been accompanied by a growing interest on the part of broader architectural culture in the contributions of landscape architects — like Kate Orff, who led one of the teams in Rising Currents — who are, for various reasons (working with nature which is necessarily less controllable than buildings, being generally less influential on project teams than architects, etc.), well-suited to a more humble methodology.
— rob · Jun 30, 05:21 PM · #
What I’m impressed with is the combination of humility about their ability to shape reality and the vaunting ambition to, in fact, reshape it quite a bit. That’s a very appealing combination, to me.
— Noah Millman · Jun 30, 05:27 PM · #
Click through to rob’s blog; the pictures alone are reason enough!
— Tony Comstock · Jun 30, 05:33 PM · #
Are sea levels rising in New York? I presume we have detailed tidal records for New York City going back to the 19th Century, so I’d want to see some statistical evidence before handing a zillion dollars to a bunch of youngish architects on the make.
— Steve Sailer · Jun 30, 10:12 PM · #
I’d want to see some statistical evidence before handing a zillion dollars to a bunch of youngish architects on the make. I presume we have detailed tidal records for New York City going back to the 19th Century
— Ugg Sandals · Jul 1, 09:49 AM · #
For about a year now we’ve been seeing spamblogs that scrape Amazon customer reviews of our films, running back and forth through translation software, and then post the results as original material; and based on the way the blogs rank, it looks like Google can’t recognize the material as a scrape.
But this Ugg comment spam is a whole new kind of awesome; actually scraping from the adjoining comment and reposting as a quasi-contribution!
AyJay has been doing some big thinking about information production management over at Text Patterns, and I think he’d like to see this. Please dont’ remove until he has a chance!
— Tony Comstock · Jul 1, 01:59 PM · #
I see it — but how do I know that Ugg Sandals isn’t Steve Sailer accidentally posting under his real name?
This really is strange.
— Alan Jacobs · Jul 1, 02:04 PM · #
Information is a virus.
— Tony Comstock · Jul 1, 03:31 PM · #
I am just a metamarketing campaign of Ugg Sandals.
— Steve Sailer · Jul 5, 01:59 AM · #
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