His buildings are instantly recognizable design icons. From the “twisted pretzel” CCTV headquarters in Beijing to the “melting iceberg” Casa da Música theatre in Porto, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is synonymous with his out of the box buildings around the world.
But this man stands out differently in the streets of a city.
Tung Walsh | SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
His architecture is complex. His fashion is simple. His designs are asymmetrical. His self-styling is typical. His buildings are unconventional in shape and form. His clothing is uniform and austere.
A long-sleeve round-collared shirt and dress pants — only available in monochromatic black, gray, white, green or blue. Accessorize with jet black leather shoes and a classic white-faced watch with black straps. There you have it: the formula to dress up any lanky bald man as avant-garde Koolhaas.
It’s a shockingly basic fashion construction — a way for one of the world’s most famous architect to deflect attention? Koolhaas once lamented that celebrity architects like him are taken less seriously, and journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes he wears.
While it’s unclear if he ever revealed his footwear choice, they are certainly not just any pair. This former journalist is not anti-fashion. He has designed runways and showrooms for high-end fashion brands including Prada and Coach. A typical Koolhaas architecture is derived from rethinking how a building is used, and that includes its function as a symbol too.
The twist and turns of his CCTV headquarters not only aid television production for the Chinese state broadcaster, they also defy the stereotypical skyscraper. While it was groundbreaking to restructure the Seattle Central Library after the Dewey Decimal System, which is used to organize books, it was equally radical to shrink-wrap this public institution with the gloss of a commercial building.
CCTV Headquarters and Seattle Central Library
Koolhaas is keenly aware of how architecture has turned into a spectacle in today’s market-driven society. At the same time, he has also astutely observed how globalization has led to generic cities around the world.
Such contradictions abound in the Koolhaas universe. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly plain dressing of this man who once told Spiegel magazine, “I like fashion, whether or not it’s overpriced, because it creates a sense of the sublime with relatively few means.”
The effortless and minimalism of Koolhaas’ fashion is a foil to inspire awe too. Think of the creative uniforms — black, bland, and brand — of other modern design monks such as Steve Jobs and Massimo Vignelli. Like them, Koolhaas wears his body of clothes less as form but as a frame for his intellect, that white Zen-like genius of a head that sits above it all.
When all dressed up, Koolhaas evokes a mash-up between Auguste Rodin’s nude “Thinking Man” and Captain Jean-Luc Picard in his Star Trek uniform. His attire is at once nothing and the futuristic everything. In true Koolhaas’ fashion, the architect becomes a contradiction of the generic and spectacle all rolled into one.
———– Written for Andrea Codrington Lippke’s Criticism Lab at D-Crit on the fashion construction of a designer.
Exhibition Review: Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital
Untitled #05 (2008) by Richard Dupont
Who would have thought the day would come when your printer could produce a real live gun.
Three-dimensional printers are becoming a staple of many homes, allowing people to print anything from jewelry they can wear to edible ravioli. And as this technology becomes more affordable — some models are already going for under $1,300 — it is only a matter of time before a 3-D printer joins the computer and microwave as just another home appliance.
Now the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City is taking a look at how 3-D printing and other digital fabrication technologies are changing the way artists and designers make. The exhibition, “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital,” features over 120 works by contemporary artists, architects and designers that were either designed or fabricated using computer-assisted production.
Given the hype that has accompanied such technologies, the collection of objects from 2005 to the present makes the “postdigital” era seem far from groundbreaking, and even familiar. Works such as a white nebulous-looking lamp by Bathsheba Grossman and a red ribbon-shaped rocking chair by Ron Arad will not look out of place at a design retail store. Both were created almost a decade ago and have been available for sale for several years now. It is a reminder that digitally fabricated objects have been in our midst for some time now, and the technology is not so new after all.
Most of the objects assembled across almost three floors of the museum show how the technology has freed artists and designers from the constraints of traditional production techniques. This is playfully suggested in Richard Dupont’s sculpture of himself, whose mirage-like form would take forever to sculpt by hand. The work aptly fronts the exhibition’s publicity materials as an icon of how digital fabrication is re-shaping human life. Another work by Michael Hanseyer demonstrates how intricate digital fabrication can get with a column made from a stack of 2,700 sheets of laser-cut one-millimeter board. However, the work like several others sees the creator give up creative control to the novelty of what digital fabrication offers instead. Rather than create new forms and ways of making, many of the exhibition’s works simply show off how they can outdo current methods of making.
Doudou Necklace by Boucheron (2009). Design by Marc Newson
A similar wide-eyed fascination with the effects of digital production can also be said of the works in the show that curator Ron Labaco regards to have been inspired by nature and geometrical forms. Marc Newson created a necklace resembling a galaxy of stars that if one did not know its digital origins would simply be seen as an elaborate piece of jewelry design. Similarly, German designers Wertel Oberfell and Matthias Bär simply visualize the mathematical concept of fractals in the form of a broccoli-like chair with a honeycomb top, a design pattern that will look regardless if you create bigger or smaller versions of it. In both these works, and many others in the exhibition, an aesthetic formula for digital fabrication emerges: a complex mosaic of basic geometric units. Considering the different starting points of the works, the lack of diverse forms reflects both the limitations of current digital fabrication technology and how practitioners are using it.
To be sure, some objects produced by 3-D printers may seem ordinary because we’ve already grown used to them. As the wall text explains, “the amazing digital achievements of the last few decades are now taken for granted.” To judge the works only by their aesthetics is to overlook the time and material savings of making in this way. Compared to using the hand or traditional production, digital fabrication techniques are precise and easily controlled via a computer. But this process is not evident as each work is only tagged with the digital production method they are made in. Visitors unfamiliar with them or the history of production will have no sense of how these techniques democratize the process of making.
A small set of more experimental works, however, offers a more tantalizing glimpse of the potential of the digital process. In objects by Anish Kapoor and Jan Habraken, one begins to see how new technologies offer more than just new aesthetics. Kapoor’s set of sculptures resembling real coral rocks blurs the distinction between the creation of nature and something digitally-made, and one is left to wonder what cannot be designed by man anymore? Habraken uses digital fabrication as a kind of biological womb to “breed” the ideal chair out of existing ones. Digital technology allowed him to single out unique elements of chair designs, which he then easily mixed, matched and modified to create something entirely new. This is similar to the desktop publishing revolution over two decades ago when computers allowed people to design and print whatever graphics they wanted.
This freedom to make things will be the lasting impact of digital fabrication and was evident in the exhibition’s works that people spent the most time with. While some got their hands “dirty” sculpting on a virtual pottery wheel by Unfold and Tim Knapen, others made noises or whistled into François Brument’s installation that digitally generated vases whose shape and size varied depending on the kinds of audio input. These works demonstrated how technology was changing the act of making, but the visitors’ creations — pots and vases that simply differed in shapes and sizes — suggest a lot more work is needed in thinking about the possibilities of making with digital fabrication.
The technology is clearly fascinating people given how the most popular feature of the exhibition is a booth sponsored by Shapeways, a 3-D printing company. Visitors can design their own objects on computers provided, and even line up to get scanned and printed for a miniature 3-D self-portrait. This is an apt ending for one of the first exhibitions on a set of technologies that is becoming increasing common in our everyday lives. What better way to introduce it to the masses than by letting them take home their first digitally fabricated product: an image of themselves?
———– Written for Robin Pogrebin’s Reporting Tools workshop at D-Crit.
At just 22-stories tall, nondescript, and boxy, 445 Park Avenue is easily passed over when talking about architecture along its avenue. It neither has the intricate classical ornamentation of its next door Ritz Tower or the spectacular transparency of the glass-walled 450 Park Avenue across it. And built right up to the street, this office building offers pedestrians nothing more than a shadow of its presence.
But it would be wrong to equate 445 Park Avenue’s lack of distinction to a building that writer Ada Louise Huxtable might regard as “economically styled” rather than “architecturally designed” . Far from a result of “accident, expediency, economics and the inevitable march of industrial advance”, this building designed by Kahn & Jacobs for developer Paul Tishman is a highly functional product that demonstrated how modern office buildings could work in Park Avenue.
As one of its architects Ely Jacques Kahn once said, a building must first and foremost work for its inhabitants. “The architect’s first objective should be the study of the use of materials and the designing of a building that works — something that works from the inside out. What we should do is to consider function and let style follow as a corollary,” he said. Similarly, 445 Park Avenue has an interior substance deserving of more attention than what its undistinguished exterior presents.
That this office could be built so soon after the second World War — it was the first such development — and was completely filled in just over a year , is in a part, due to Kahn & Jacobs’ design. Their modernist approach of using standardized modules allowed for faster and easier construction compared to traditional methods, and would have helped convince the government to approve its building in 1946, even though construction was then heavily regulated as New York City transited to a peace-time economy after the war . The building design was also attractive to businesses because of its large spaces that could be easily partitioned, a feature made possible by the elimination of heavy columns on the exterior of its design. In addition, the standardized windows were of a ratio convenient for office layouts , and its horizontal system of arrangement lit up the building’s interiors such that workers did not feel trapped like in pre-war buildings with heavy masonry . Such a highly functional interior was enhanced by being fully air-conditioned, a first in New York City, and the combination was then regarded by architecture critic Lewis Mumford as “the best answer to the year-round problem of lighting and heating” . It is no wonder Tishman regarded his building as the office space of tomorrow, and 445 Park Avenue played a significant role in ushering the modern offices that followed after it.
But instead of taking the building’s modernist interior to its logical conclusion, as in the entirely glass International Style buildings that followed after 445 Park Avenue, Kahn & Jacobs designed an architecture sensible to its context. It is harder to appreciate now, but the building’s alternating masonry bands, would have fit into a street lined with ornamented masonry-clad buildings then. Its ziggurat top — Kahn’s signature response to the setback requirements of the 1916 Zoning Resolution — also echoed an evolution, rather than a disruption of the avenue’s architecture. These features gave 445 Park Avenue a sense of place, or what Kahn once called a “New York Style” of architecture. By “localizing” the International Style, 445 Park Avenue was unique to the city, familiar to the public, yet still took half a step towards the impending modernist future.
Perhaps, it is also this conservative stance that prevented 445 Park Avenue from looking beyond itself. While the pragmatic building achieves the maximum function for its developer and inhabitants, and fits into its urban context, it does not go beyond, unlike the nearby Lever House and Seagram buildings which sacrificed functional space to build public plazas. Even so, it should not diminish too much from 445 Park Avenue’s commitment as an office building that simply functions, which was much more vital during the period of economic and political uncertainty when it was built. Instead of grand public gestures and seeking an iconic exterior, Kahn and Jacobs created a building that became a backdrop for life in the city . Given how architecture today has become so much about the surface rather than function, 445 Park Avenue is a a reminder of why we build architecture: as a space that works “inside out” rather than “outside in”.
Bibliography
“Architects’ Rows ‘Silly,’ Kahn Says.” New York Times, 23 February 1932.
“Big Tishman Building on Park Ave. Filled.” New York Times, 8 Dec 1947, 45.
Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Park Avenue School of Architecture.” New York Times, 15 December 1957.
Mumford, Lewis. “The Sky Line.” The New Yorker, 13 December 1947, 85-92.
Stern, Jewel, and John A. Stuart. Ely Jacques Kahn, Architect: Beaux-Arts to Modernism in New York. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
“Tishman Building Gets CPA Sanction.” New York Times, 17 July 1946, 37.
———– Written for Karrie Jacobs’ Urban Curation class at D-Crit on a building in Park Avenue.
