Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

i finally got me tiny butt over to the new addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by RPBW (Renzo Piano Building Workshop).  The building has been open since 2012, and i guess i didn't zoom over there due to skepticsm over a lot of Piano's work, of which i've seen more than a few projects that failed to smear my make-up.  i found that many of his projects are beautifully detailed but often spacially boring, especially in the way he choreographs movement through his projects.  This one, however, is an exception, so i had a fairly large salmon flapping on my face the duration of me visit.

The original museum is one of my favorites in Boston.  It was built in the early 20th century by it's namesake, Isabella Stewart Gardner, to house her personal art collection made up of furniture, tapestries, paintings, and furnishings from all over the world.  She tried to re-create a Venetian palace in Boston, using elements taken from Europe, and did so by making a huge glass covered atrium around which were organized rooms (galleries) open to the space.  Much of the lighting comes naturally, from this atrium, and the result is often dim lighting in the galleries that creates an interesting atmosphere, as if walking through an old house rather than a traditional art gallery.

Atrium

Part of the brilliance of Piano's solution came from an understanding of the fundamental chiaroscuro that defined the Gardner experience, where the entry sequence involved moving from a tiny, dark entrance to discover the lush light of the atrium, about which you would move in and out of as you moved through the dark gallery rooms.  The tapestry room is one example:

Tapestry Room

RPBW moved the entrance to the other side of the museum, which might sound like a disaster of sorts, but in reality proved a brilliant move.  Piano understood that though a museum in the middle of a city, the Gardner was set by the Emerald Necklace, a meandering Frederick Law Olmsted garden originally intended to ring Boston, and so was as much a garden itself as you can tell from the pixie of the atrium above.

Piano moved the entrance such that one enters opposite a small park.  He organized his addition by creating a series of bars through which one moves (colored below), until one arrives at a central stair hall, off which one then moves toward the old house through a glass passage surrounded by green.

Site Plan
Entry sequence.  The use of bars as opposed to spaces is a very modern device.

Doing so, one moves from the all glass entrance hall through what you might call a "garden bar" into the darker stair hall, where a huge glass wall re-orients you to the old house, toward which you then move, through an all glass garden corridor.  You then arrive at the old house, into a dark room, but with the light of the atrium showing itself just beyond.  You have the sense of having discovered the atrium, and the surprise of finding this amazing space is really a beautiful thing.  This is a wonderfully choreographed entrance sequence, light to dark to light to dark to light/atrium.  As explained above, this was the perfect place to use such a device to organize the spaces.

Piano's section diagram

New entrance

Entrance "bar", with garden "bar" to the right.

Inside the entrance bar, looking toward greenhouse beyond.

Another view of entrance bar.

A cliche, i know..but here it makes sense.

The central stair hall, with view toward old house.  This picture shows how one moves from dark to light.

View from the north side.

Egress hung off the facade.

View from garden toward new addition.

Beautifully detailed greenhouse

Detail of greenhouse

Piano layers

Garden passage detailing

"Post" midspan of garden passage.

As you can see, the detailing is brilliant, as is habit for Piano's office.  What's less common, but present here, is a beautiful choreography through spaces both new and old, reinforcing what was already so strong in the old Gardner museum, a depiction of art through light as it might have been during the creation of that art, light both dim and brilliant.

House for Trees 4.4

© Hiroyuki Oki

This project from Vo Trong Nghia Architects has just won the House of the Year award from AR (Architectural Review), and i thought i'd highlight it as my last entry of this architect's work, a firm i admire for their thoughtful interpretation of modernism within a regional cultural context.

What i found interesting about this project was the site plan, with the house appearing buried within a dense Ho Chi Minh City residential block.  The house appears to make this voided, residual space it's own, turning on it's head the traditional Vietnamese courtyard which is an ordered gathering space, an outdoor room of sorts accessed by the adjacent rooms, by making the empty space the occupied space, and the fragmented residual space the equal of the planned courtyard, but now undifferentiated from the fragmented outside space.

Traditional Vietnamese house, Hanoi

House for Trees Site Plan
Space is the residual of the surrounding buildings.

Floor Plan
House is accessed from the space on the left.

That the house is composed of individual blocks of rooms scattered about the residual space, with trees planted above each, gives the feeling that the architect was almost embarrassed about occupying this space, though it's done in an ingenious way that also says "we're not really here".  The trees say this isn't really a house, but a garden, a perverse version of paradise where one lives in the garden, but does so in concrete blocks.

Section

© Hiroyuki Oki

© Hiroyuki Oki

As you can see in the plan, the rooms of this house are apart from each other; one goes outside to move about the house, it truly knows no bounds except those that others have made for it.

The house also has an interesting subterranean feel to it, with the trees hinting at a ground plane that you live below, but also undecided about where that ground plane is, as the height of the planters varies with the function each box.

© Hiroyuki Oki

Skin no bones

i'm amazed by this woman's work.  So much of it is hard to believe existing as built form, which i suppose qualifies for the amazing word, and for those of us who dwell in coping details and checking specifications for pathetic structures we secretly hope will be soon razed for the goodness of eyeballs everywhere, this is all a breath of air.  That isn't to say i like her work, though, it's just to say i think much of it is amazing.  She makes amazing things..

Unlike Frank Gehry, of whose work i've visited many projects, i've not visited a Hadid project and so, i suppose, should withhold judgement.  But fuck that this is the internet and i've got stuff to say.  i think i mentioned Gehry because he is another on whom everyone has an opinion, mostly negative it seems, though i think his work is brilliant.  Hadid also draws fire, as you know, which comes with the territory if you're going to throw wild shapes out there and have the PR skills/charisma to convince people to build your wild hell darts and land fish.  Being probably the most successful woman architect in the history of the profession might also have something to do with it.

It used to be that you learned about a Hadid project through a painting she would present of her project, and i always thought that was how she thought about her work, and the inspiration for the built form that might come from it, though in those days her paintings were rarely built.  Those days seem long gone now, what with a huge office and lots of little rendering gnomes to do her bidding.  It's odd though that her renderings don't appear to have any of the qualities of her old paintings.

Hafenstrasse Office and Residences

Edifici Torre Espiral

i'm not sure it matters that she doesn't paint anymore, if indeed that is the case, because her buildings are as much built paintings as ever there has been.  The painting above you probably assume to be seeing as if it were on a wall, or a monitor, not on the floor.  You don't imagine standing over this, do you?  Paintings on canvas always have a frame beneath that allows them to be displayed on a wall without flopping down like a hanky not properly left nostril stuffed, though we don't talk about these frames in the art world; they are a given and quite apart from the aspect of painting that we're interested in.  Great painters didn't have to be great stretcher makers.

Note: The Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center has just been named Design of the Year by the Design Museum in London.

The Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) is located in the city of Baku, Azerbaijan, and was built as a center to celebrate the country's cultural heritage through the performing arts and exhibitions.  The city of Baku began as a Persian fortress 700 years prior to the arrival of Islam to defend the northern border of the empire from Mongol attack. The city was much fought over through its history, and after a hundred years of conflict with Russia, the city was finally ceded to Russia in the early 19th century and has been an oil producing center ever since.

ZHA has made much of the Soviet architecture that dominates much of the city, and says that the form of the center was a response to the orthogonal, severe qualities of that legacy.

© Iwan Baan

© Hufton + Crow

There are any number of reasons the architect could use to justify making such a shaped building; Baku has fierce winds that blow off the sea and is one of the lowest cities in the world (elevation below sea level).  It almost looks like a shell one might find on the beach.  The fluidity of the form was justified by Hadid as maintaining an Islamic architectural tradition of covering surfaces in geometric pattern whether floor, wall, or ceiling, and claimed too that the march of columns into "infinite space" was inspiration.  It doesn't really matter what the reason was; she would have done the same thing in Des Moines.  The claim about the continuity and fluidity of space in Persian/Islamic architecture, though, doesn't hold up.  In this climate and in these lands, there has always been a clear definition between inside and outside, just as there has been between life and death, the inside/outside being as much social and civic as spacial.  That she has erased this definition and claimed it to be in their tradition is disingenuous and more likely grounded in an architects ego. That isn't to say that this building is completely divorced from the traditions of the region; on the contrary there is much to look at, and Hadid's Iraqi background should be considered, at least to a degree.

When you look at the pictures of this complex, you can't help but be struck by the scale (scalelessness) of the creature, and in a secret giggle i'm wondering about the ZHA critique of Soviet era housing blocks being big and scaleless.

© Iwan Baan

In the picture above, you can see the use of GFRC (glass fiber reinforced concrete) forming both floor and wall and roof, none of which are defined by traditional edges and blur, as land does to sky in the dry lands outside the city.

People are the incidental occupiers of this creature.  The shape, the organization, the scale all do their own thing, regardless of the people creatures that enter to see others wiggle and prance.  It's all amazing and otherworldly and as an architect, completely admire the ability of this firm to have it's shapes built, for better or worse.

© Hufton + Crow

© Iwan Baan

© Hufton + Crow

The role of gravity is interesting.  Does it exist or doesn't it?  The whole complex is in a state of denial about the need to be supported, yet, as is custom for her projects, complex and very sophisticated structural work was done, but as is also customary in her work, remains invisible and subject to belief in magic.

© Hufton + Crow

The use of panelized GFRC to create the surface has an interesting corollary with the use of tile to do the same in Islamic architecture, where the edges surrender emphasis to the infiniteness and nobility of mathematical pattern, under the guise of truth and holiness.  In Hadid's work, however, there is no reference to an ultimate structure or truth; hers is a profane, secular one that asks only that you believe, and as is clear from her work, that belief is in a Rhino or similar beast.

Tile in Isfahan

© Hufton + Crow

Tile in Baku.
©Hufton + Crow

As you might imagine from the image below, the approach is one that seems to remove the city and urban life from the approach experience and substitutes a juxtaposition of blue sky and white monument:

The approach
©Hufton + Crow

Water falling from the sky.
© Iwan Baan

This building is an amazing thing, appearing to effortlessly defy much of what architects struggle with day to day, things like structure, scale, detail, railings, flashing, ADA ramps, HVAC, fire protection, on and on.  So much so, that i'm not so sure how much of a building it is, appearing foreign to occupation with no apparent doors or entrance, windows only as voids of the effortless folds, and sitting as if dropped softly onto the earth.  

In the end, she has built a painting, in a curious inverse of her earlier career when she proposed paintings and built buildings (occasionally), now proposing buildings and building paintings.  The rule of soft surface without any evidence of structure, the scalelessness and lack of reference to any human activity, and the appropriation of effortless form leads one to believe that she has opened a new chapter in architecture with her unique painterly vision; as to whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen; a lot of her work appears contrived and form for form's sake, but it's fun to look at.  

ouch

What are you feeling?

You don't have to tell me.  You don't have to tell anyone; after all, what could be more personal?  What i'm wondering is whether you're feeling anything.  Do you remember being in pain, and thinking about what it must be like to not have that pain?  i often do this.  When i'm sick, i imagine what it must be like to not be sick, but really what i'm imagining is what it must be like to not feel anything.  Lately, i've had a bit of pain, and so have spent some time imaging what it must be like to not have that pain.  But i've come to realize that it makes no sense to do so.  After all, i don't have pain everywhere, and i don't celebrate those areas that have no pain, and i think the reason is because i really don't feel them, they exist in a neutrality of sorts, like that eraser sitting in your 1st grade teachers blackboard tray that Bill Becker would get to pound the chalk out of at recess.  We spend the day in day out experiencing many things, but not feeling so much.  And that's to be celebrated.  You don't really want to be feeling, because those feelings are signals to the brain that something needs your attention, that there is news to report.  It's not necessary to imagine what it must be like to not feel pain, because you can't feel not feeling, and this is the normal state of things.  Or it should be.

David Strang gave Bill a snuggy while he was pounding the erasers..

Stacking Green 3.4

Modernism seems obsessed with expressing the continuity between indoors and out, but in the tropical region of Vietnam, this was not a new concept, as traditional urban houses are often open to the street, such that the business interests of the occupants often offers a view into their living room; the division between public and private is a blurry one, as is that between indoors and out.

In this house by Vo Trong in Ho Chi Minh City, one finds the expected blurring between interior and exterior, but also an unexpected blurring between built and unbuilt, new and ancient, and a blurring of the line between ruin and occupied.

Facade

Ancient Cham ruin
Photo © G.

The facade isn't really a facade.  It's ambiguous as to whether the thing is built or planted, as the planted takes up an equal amount of space, and the built doesn't seem to connect to other built, it exists as bands of material equal in prominence to the green, planted beds.  Vietnamese cities are devoid, for the most part, of greenery, and the houses lack yards, though one can often see plantings hanging from balconies or windows.  Vo Trong's planted facade offers an interesting take on this dilemma of urban Vietnam.

Stairwell, back of house

Views of the light well 

Bathroom

All photos © Hiroyuki Oki

Plan level 2