Bioscleave House: Built to Defeat Mortality

Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) was designed by Arakawa, a 71 year old artist, with his wife, Madeline Gins, 66. Ms. Gins, 66, extolls the health benefits of the house, claiming that its architecture makes people use their bodies in unexpected ways to maintain equilibrium, which stimulates their immune systems. The concrete floor of the house rises and falls like the surface of a vast, bumpy chocolate chip cookie, an undulating floor that tends to throw people off balance.

In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 different colors; multiple levels meant to create the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy.

Like the undulating floor, Arakawa and Gins, as they are known professionally, tend to throw people off balance. In 45 years of working together as artists, poets and architects, they have developed a cryptic philosophy of life and art, a theory they call reversible destiny. Essentially, they have made it their mission, in paintings, books and now architectural projects like this one, to outlaw aging and its consequences, to reverse the downhill course of human life. “It’s immoral that people have to die,” Ms. Gins explained.

The house in East Hampton cost more than $2 million to build. It’s their first completed architectural work in the United States and, as they see it, a turning point in their campaign to defeat mortality. The house, which is still unoccupied, was commissioned in the late 1990s by a friend who sold the property to an anonymous group of investors after the project dragged on and costs mounted. But it is ready, Arakawa and Ms. Gins say, to begin rejuvenating whoever moves in now.

The Destiny Houses, Japan

In 1998 they won a competition, sponsored by the city of Tokyo, to build a vast housing project on 75 acres of landfill. The project was never realized, but a group of supporters in Tokyo arranged to build nine loft-style units, in Mitaka, Japan, which in many ways resemble the house in East Hampton.

The Lifespan Expanding Villa: Built to Defeat Mortality

Interested readers will find more about The Lifespan Expanding Villa in The New York Times here.

Technorati: Bioscleave House, The Lifespan Expanding Villa, Destiny House, East Hampton, Long Island, New York City, New York, Japan, Tokyo, Arakawa, Madeline Gins, art, architecture, homes, houses, photographs, photography, video, entertainment, multimedia, humor, culture, cultural, social, social life, society, news, world news, world

Please Bookmark This:

The New Bush Presidential Library: Bunkers, Crosses and Outhouses

The New George W. Bush Presidential Library

Now that the George W. Bush presidency is almost over, the world needs a place to archive the legacy of the 43rd president. That place will be at Southern Methodist University, in a building that will be designed by Robert A.M. Stern of Yale University. That new building will probably cost $500-million dollars. The agreement to house Bush’s Presidential Library at SMU has been met with much dismay by some of the university’s faculty and by disapproval from the United Methodist Church.

To some faculty members at Southern Methodist, the most troubling element of the project is a conservative policy institute that will be affiliated with the library and museum. Unlike similar think tanks and academic units connected to the presidential libraries of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, the institute created by George W. Bush will not be governed by Southern Methodist. Instead, the institute’s personnel will report only to the Bush foundation.

The Chronicle of Higher Education invited its readers to send in their own ideas about how that building should be designed, and invited people to send in their designs on the backs of envelopes. About 120 people sent in sketches that were good, bad, serious, humorous, abstract or really angry. Their designs took the form of toilets, bunkers, crosses, and W’s, some crudely drawn and some very elegant.

A sampling of those designs is displayed in The Chronicle on these pages.

The New Bush Library: Bunkers, Crosses and Outhouses

Technorati: George W. Bush, President Bush, Bush, George W. Bush Presidential Library, Bush Presidential Library, Presidential Library, Southern Methodist University, SMU, Texas, higher education, picture, art, architecture, humor, comedy, multimedia, video, culture, cultural, politics, political, social, society, news, political news, world news, world

Please Bookmark This:

A Skyspace for Contemplation: Dividing the Light

A skyspace offers its visitors a place to sit and contemplate the sky through an opening in the ceiling, called an oculus, through which the only sky is visible. Buildings, trees, cell-phone towers, billboards, and traffic lights are hidden from the viewer’s sight, along with everything else that clutters the horizon and blurs the boundary between earth and the vastness beyond. The sky appears not as a vast and distant dome but as a bright, flat oval fitted smoothly into the plane of the structure’s ceiling. Dawn and sunset are often said to be the best times to visit.

Skyspaces have proven to be popular with museums and other institutions. The latest has just been completed at Pomona College in California. Pomona’s new architectural installation, was designed by the artist James Turrell. The structure was installed in a courtyard within a group of buildings that houses Pamona’s psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics and cognitive-science programs. A square oculus is in the middle of a stainless-steel canopy erected in the courtyard; a stone pool beneath it reflects the sky’s bright blue during the day and its inky darkness at night. The beautiful new skyspace installation is entitled Dividing the Light.

The Pomona College Skyspace: Dividing the Light

Interested readers will find a more detailed account of James Turrell’s work in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription) here.

Technorati: Skyspace, Dividing the Light, , Pomona College, California, art, architecture, technology, architect, James Turrell, photograph, video, WordPress video, culture, cultural, social, social life, society, news, world news, world
Please Bookmark This:

The Old Gray Lady Has Moved: She’s Still a Victorian Dowager

The grand old 18-story Neo-Gothic structure on 43rd Street, home to The New York Times for nearly a century, had many sentimental charms. Its complex warren of reporters’ desks and piles of old, yellowing newspapers were reminiscent of a hallowed tradition, but it also had become increasingly tawdry, down-at-the-heels and conspicuously old-fashioned. The new 52-story Times building between 40th and 41st Streets, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, is a towering modern composition of glass and steel all gussied up in a veil of ceramic rods.

Thirty years ago, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers designed the Pompidou Center in Paris, which announced a new wave of high-tech architecture and culminated a decade later in Norman Foster’s Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. Since then, Foster has moved away from high-tech, as is displayed in his sleek Hearst Building, just up Eighth Avenue from The New York Times building.

Piano has moved away from high-tech architectural design also, and his 2006 addition to the Morgan Library in New York City characterizes his current low-key approach. However, in the New York Times Building, Piano has returned to his Pompidou Center roots; not exposed pipes and ducts, which were always clearly impractical, but rather with dramatic structural details that boldly proclaim, “This is how I am made.”

Building the Times

Photography by: Annie Leibovitz

Piano’s Times Building: An Architectural Review

The Historic Times Building: Views of the Past

The New York Times: Old and New

Technorati: The Gray Lady, Times Square, The New York Times, New York Times new building, New York Times building, New York Times tower, New York City, Manhattan, NYC, Renzo Piano, Piano, art, modernism, architecture, images, pictures, photos, photographs, gallery, photo-gallery, slideshow, entertainment, video, WordPress video, culture, cultural, social, social life, society, newspapers, news, world news, world

Please Be Social:

Marion Mahony: A Pioneering Woman Architect

The Pioneering Marion Mahony:

Women make up only a small proportion of the architecture profession today. A century ago they were hardly represented at all. Which makes Marion Mahony, the first woman to obtain an architecture license in Illinois, seem all the more remarkable. Marion Mahony was the second woman ever to graduate from the architectural program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduation in 1894, she immediately began working with her cousin, architect Dwight Perkins in Chicago. The first woman to take an architectural license in Illinois, and one of the first, if not the first, to receive her license in the United States, she has played an important historical role in American Architecture, although one that has been unjustifiably neglected. Mahony came to work in Oak Park early in her career, at the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright. An important collaborator on some of the most renowned buildings designed during Wright’s Prairie School period, she was also responsible for some of the finest decorative designs, art glass and furniture coming from Wright’s studio, and the Prairie School at large. Most of the beautiful, now-famous, architectural presentation drawings and water colors that helped Wright promote his practice, his building designs and his career, were drawn or painted by Mahony.

Biographic Notes:

Marion Lucy Mahony was born in Chicago in 1871 and grew up in nearby Winnetka, where her family had moved after the great Chicago fire. She became fascinated by landscape as the area around her family’s home was being carved up into suburbs. She received her architecture training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After returning to Chicago, she went to work for her cousin Dwight Perkins in a studio designed by Perkins and shared by several architects, including Wright. In 1895 Mahony became Wright’s first employee. Barry Byrne, who came to work in the studio in 1902, reminisced in several articles after Wright’s death about the informal design competitions among that architect’s employees. He recalled that Mahony won most of them and that Wright filed away her drawings for future use, chastising anyone who referred to them as “Miss Mahony’s designs.” In 1909 Wright left his wife for a client’s wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, with whom he fled to Europe. The scandal caused an uproar. Wright’s Oak Park studio closed its doors, leaving his draftsmen and his clients in limbo. Before his departure, Wright had searched for someone to finish his outstanding commissions, but none of his former employees were willing. Wright finally convinced an associate from Steinway Hall, Herman Von Holst to take the job. Von Holst realized that he needed someone with a better understanding of Wright’s design concepts to please Wright’s clients. So he promptly hired Marion Mahony to finish the designs. Mahony worked with several other Wright employees to complete the firm’s commissions. In her later years, Mahoney took on few commissions and did virtually nothing to enhance her reputation. In the United States a few works attributed solely to Mahony survive, including a mural in the George B. Armstrong elementary school in Chicago, and several private homes in Decatur, Ill. (The Decatur houses are the subject of a new book, Marion Mahony and Millikin Place: Creating a Prairie School Masterpiece, published by the Walter Burley Griffin Society of America as part of its continuing effort to assess her contribution.)

Marion Mahony: A Pioneering Architect:

By 1908, Mahoney had been working for Frank Lloyd Wright for a decade. She had developed a smooth, free flowing style of rendering derived partly from Japanese woodblock prints, with lush vegetation flowing in and around floor plans and elevations. Her masterly compositions also made the buildings appear irresistibly romantic.

Mahony’s drawings, retraced in ink, formed much of what came to be known as The Wasmuth Portfolio, a compendium of Wright’s designs published in Germany in 1910. The portfolio established him as America’s reigning architectural genius, and it also influenced European Modernists like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

Some have said that the specifics of Marion’s life fell victim to the primary scholarly effort to establish and fix the canon of “great men” whose genius-personalities, buildings and texts would become central to the story of architecture.

That Mahony spent her most productive years in Australia, where she and her husband designed a plan for the new city of Canberra in 1911, has also lowered her profile in the United States. But the Australians take Mahony as seriously as we take Frank Lloyd Wright.

One of those Australians, Christopher Vernon of the University of Western Australia, has written extensively of Mahony’s talent as a designer. Mr. Van Zanten goes so far as to say that Mahony, after Wright and Louis Sullivan, was “the third great progressive designer of turn-of-the-century Chicago.”

Wright, who more than most architects cultivated the image of the lone genius, never acknowledged Mahony’s contributions. Still, it is generally accepted that the rendering style through which Frank Lloyd Wright became known was Marion Mahony’s.

Marion Mahony: The Works of a Pioneering Woman Architect

Technorati: Marion Mahony, architect, architecture, Chicago, Australia, Frank Lloyd Wright, art, celebrities, personalities, images, pictures, photos, photographs, photography, gallery, photo-gallery, slideshow, culture, cultural, social, social ideas, society, world
Please Be Social: