Archive for June 2009
Familiarity Breeds Contempt
Yet another horrendous piece of graphic design plops through the mat of the poor benighted inhabitants of London’s Olympics boroughs and yet again they as one recoil at the hideosness of the logo. (A hideousness which I want to explain but not reproduce, largely because it makes any page or any screen that it sits on look skewed or cranked.) At the time it was launched, the consensus of course was that the logo was bad because it tried to be youthful, as the comments to this Guardian story at the time make clear. This is certainly the case. The colour palette is bright and vibrant, the pink and yellow is particularly redolent of eighties children’s TV graphics. To continue in a more generous vein, the shadow effect is pure 80s retro which recalls some of the work in Dazed from around the beginning of the decade.
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‘A glowing tribute, Mr. Kidd’
I’m watching the screen. James Bond, his linen jacket hooked over his shoulder on his finger, walks towards us through a sunken courtyard and then a set of glass doors. It’s Diamonds are Forever and he’s about to have a tustle with the female assassin/acrobat team Bambi and Thumper. Except he’s not. The subtitle Elrod House, Palm Springs, California appears on the screen and we realise that this isn’t about James Bond but about the building he is in. Just at the moment when Sean Connery is about to get into a scrap with two semi-clad would-be assassins we cut to Connery as he is today; balder, still a star. He’s holding the remote control which, we suppose has just curtailed our enjoyment of the fight. This is a documentary about architecture but Hollywood is in contol.
Got That Ring of Confidence
This is the plan for the recently completed terminal at Indianopolis Aiport. It’s built in the “midfield” area of the present airport, between the two main runways. The heart of the terminal building is a a central gathering point whose circular shape is deliberately intended to recall the shape of the City’s central public space, Monument Circle. It’s even grandiosely called the civic plaza and is even supposed to provide public event space and enable visitors to sample the character of Indianapolis and the region. It’s topped off with a 61m diameter skylight. The total area of the new terminal is 111,000 square metres. It’s got 40 gates, 10,000 light fixtures and its building from 11,000 tons of stell. It’s got 10 moving walk ways, 23 Elevators and 10 Esclators and 40 departure/arrival gates. The Indianapolis Airport is designed by Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, Inc. otherwise and better known as HOK, the company that used to own HOK Sport which designed the Emirates Stadium and has just changed its name to the frankly daft Populous. Indianopolis cost $1.1 billion to build.
Photographer Nick Hedges at Bilston in 1976
Tapping the Furnace
Steelworks, Bilston.
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Unfamiliar Playing Ground
Some people find the future boring. But in Seattle, the future looks pretty exciting. Not because of the backdrop of sci-fi speculation symbolised by the Space Needle, but because set within that backdrop is the Seattle Public Library; a building which affirms ones faith in the future. To some people architecture is a straightforward case of aesthetics, a code to signify certain social moments, or political movements which for better or worse are long gone. If you take that approach you could imagine a new public project in the city riffing on this post-war futurism in a cack-handed postmodernist kind of way.
How does it do that? Rem Koolhaas has said that he writes architectural scenarios. This may seem apposite but if we look at how his early work is represented in film, then we can get an idea of why this later public building works so well. In Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine’s film Koolhaas Houselife we see an apparently critical view of The House in Bordeaux, a seminal project by OMA completed in 1998 seen through the eyes of Guadalupe Acedo, caretaker and cleaner of as she fulfils her daily chores.
These Boys Take Some Beating
They could’ve just said, ‘we pay engineers well in Norway and value their contribution to society’ but they didn’t. This instead is how they advertise for young engineers on the other side of the North Sea. Hydro is a global, integrated aluminium and hydroelectric power company which is as old as the Norwegian state itself. In the early twentieth century when the company was founded Norway was one of the poorest nations in Europe. Now thanks largely to the way it has managed its power resources, distributed its wealth and invested in light and heavy technology, it is one of the richest. Our wealth from the North Sea was used to fill in for the decrease in taxation revenue and increase in our tax burden prompted by the decision to let heavy industry go to the wall and de-regulate our financial markets ; the very system which has just reared up and bit us in the knackers.
Mind you, they can’t get enough of our football on their TV so I suppose these things even out…
