We’ve waxed rhapsodically lyrical slash bloggily nonsensical about the experience of growing up in Edmonton, Alberta—home to the northernmost franchise in the National Hockey League, site of a mall that has more submarines than the Canadian Navy, place that is freakishly, egregiously cold—but we haven’t yet looked at any new architecture to come out of that beloved river-saturated grid.

Today, AIArchitect (not to be confused with Architect) delves into the mysteries of the new Art Gallery of Alberta, which isn’t exactly an addition but does reuse 37,000 square feet of the original brutalist Edmonton Art Gallery. Which we remember spending some time in. Vaguely. In between visits to the Edmonton Public Library, the Hotel Macdonald, and the central parking garage. Zach Mortice gets close to describing the urban experience—“a hyper-rational grid system with nary a twist or a curve”—and is right in comparing it to the craziness of the Saskatchewan River and the way the city just bends to its sluggish will. We would, however, like to take issue with the “nary,” and point out that Groat Road, as anyone who has been picked up late-night after orchestra practice and driven home by someone whose evenings may or may not have involved more than one martini can attest, is terrifyingly twisty.

The reason for all this acceptance?

“I started to think that maybe unlike Americans, Canadians are comfortable with this kind of dichotomy,” Stout says.

and

This forces those who see it to remember that cultural and artistic traditions only seem to become torn from the creative humanist continuum. How many times has Modernism died and been reborn? When does Neo-Postmodernism arrive? Neo-Deconstructivism? Stout’s work with the AGA acknowledges that revisionism of all kinds will bring scholars and artists back to the same canvas, book, or particle collider as their ancestor.

It’s an argument against the kind of narratively-focused all-the-world’s-a-story we like to tend to believe, but it’s also very exciting to have a Gehry-like (Stout used to work for him, something approximately one thousand percent obvious in the building’s freeform ribbon of a structural decoration) building under construction in this very cold, very Canadian city. It’s also the first time in rendering history we’ve seen an image look remotely accurate. Those piles of snowdrifts and a few lonely people? That’s Edmonton. Learn to love it. In these economic times, we might have to.

Randall Stout’s Art Gallery of Alberta Loops Together the Arts, Nature, and Time Itself [AIArchitect]

Billie Tsien of Tod Williams Billie Tsien is giving the 2009 Eleanore Pettersen Lecture tonight at Cooper Union. The talk is called Women’s Work Is Never Done, and we encourage attendance. Tsien is one of the most thoughtful, charismatic, and just plain good architects working today, and the chance to hear her on her own—nothing against Edifave husband/partner Tod Williams, of course—should be taken.

6:30, The Great Hall of the Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street.

Image Lara Kappler.

The news that HOK Sport Venue Event has—quite possibly—turned itself into Populous has opened the mental floodgates over here at HQ, turning off the faucet of reason and on the tap of insanity. And so, herewith, the Top Ten Ludicrous Names Given to an Architecture Firm.

1. Studio Gang

Because as much as we know it’s Jeanne’s last name, there’s just something about it that tickles our receptors, and we’re not talking in an architecture way. Because we’re talking, to be frank, in a Bunny Lebowski way.

2. Atelier Bow Wow

Because Ruff!

3. MTR, MTM, RCR, ON-A, XSPRL, EMBT, NO.MAD (tie)

Because it isn’t a Spanish architecture firm unless it’s an easily mix-up-able acronym, and because they take the cake for style over substance.

4. Coop Himmelb(l)au

Because firm names should be firm names, not titles to a junior-year intro to media theory term paper. (That means no parentheses.)

5. R&Sie(n)

Because not only does this name have a post-critical paranthetical, it sounds, when pronounced in French—AIR-ay-see-EH—like “heresy.”

The American Institute of Architects is one of the greatest architecturally-focused organizations there is, and we’re thrilled to be able to support them in their latest venture. Tonight, they welcome Joel Sanders, architect and landscape architect, as he gives a talk, 6pm tonight at the Center for Architecture, entitled “Interface: Overlapping Interior and Exterior, a lecture by Joel Sanders.” According to the informative link, Sanders will “explore how sustainable principles can be used to generate an integrated landscape/architecture vocabulary that links interior and exterior, natural and synthetic.”

Sounds really interesting! The play between inside and outside and public and private is something that has in no way been discussed enough, particularly critically and engagingly, and it’s wonderful that Sanders is taking on this little-examined topic. It is also particularly relevant in light of recent moves in the sustainable world, a universe that is equally entrancing. We look forward to hearing what Sanders has to say, and to engaging with him in a critical discourse on landscape/architecture. It would be amazing if he could generate an integrated vocabulary. That’s exactly the kind of semantically full language we need more of.

2009 Oberfield Memorial Lecture [AIANY]

Last night, we put aside the fact that we don’t like parties nor, particularly, interacting with anyone outside of an online format, and attended the University of Michigan Fellows Reunion, hosted by the Architectural League of New York. We were there to celebrate the 61 “energetic practitioners and scholars” who have found themselves in residence at the University’s Taubman College.

As the invitation stated, “their presence has provided many opportunities for intellectual cross-pollination.”

Famous cross-pollinators included ARO’s Adam Yarinsky, Pablo Garcia (formerly of Diller Scofidio & Renfro, now of Pablo Garcia Design), Michael Meredith, Lise Anne Couture, Nataly Gattegno, and Lisa Iwamoto.

Cross-pollination is, we believe, highly relevant to the furthering of architectural discourse across the discipline. It is crucial that, in this economic climate, we understand the necessity for breaking down historicist boundaries and creating new and invigorating ways of addressing the architectural industry. This celebration of sixty-one architects, practitioners, scholars, and thinkers, proved a way of moving forward towards a dialectic that will only improve with more critical engagement. We hope to see a lively dialogue ahead.

Plans for a Frank Gehry Park in Miami Beach are Scrapped for Parking Garage [Miami Herald]
Beekman Tower to Have 50% Less Frank Gehry? [Curbed]

Back in the day, flush with the selection of six teams who’d been shortlisted to design Washington, DC’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, we speculated as to what kind of proposals might come from the mouths of the babes at DiScoFro (teamed with KlingStubbins) or Pei Cobb Freed & Partners (& Devrouax & Purnell) or Safdie (and Sultan Campbell Brit & Associates) or David Adjaye (with Davis Brody Bond and the Freelon Group) or Moody Nolan and Antoine Predock or Lord Norm and URS. We found highlights in each of them, mostly to do with prior track records and/or hilarity of names. Today, we can actually look at their designs.

Highlights from each of the contestants’ entries:

From the Pei team, with points for emotional heartstrings: “It would have a roof garden with landscaping inspired by a pattern on one of the architects’ grandmother’s quilt.”

From DiScoFro & Co, in keeping with their Lincoln Center-style shenanigans:“a table-shaped building wrapped in glass.”

From Adjaye, etc: “a museum with two of the above-ground stories shaped like wide baskets.”

From Norm’s (architecture) Dorm: “At the top of the four stories, visitors enter an area of “celebration” and face a huge window, looking out at the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.”

From Mad Eye Moody (Nolan + Predock): “Its glass roof features etchings echoing Yoruba ancestral arts.”

From Moshe: “a section called “Freedom Bridge,” on the top level, would include exhibits on music and sports.”

Let’s give it up for literalism. We’ll see you a Jewish Museum and raise you one Yad Vashem.

Architectural Firms Compete to Design African American History Museum [Washington Post, via Unbeige]
There Is No “I” in Team: Finalists for NMAAHC Announced [Edificial]

Something’s in the air today, and it isn’t just the sound of birdsong and the rays of sunshine. It’s the final beginnings of the return of craft, the handmade, the tactile. To be fair, we have nothing remotely approaching critical distance from this particular theme, but as our parental unit likes to say, just because we’re biased doesn’t mean we’re wrong. Jonathan Glancey bemoans the loss of craft and suggests we get back to tinkering about with mechanical toys and clay animals, lesser versions of craft-paramount buildings from people like Alvaro Siza, David Chipperfield, 6A, and architect’s architect Peter Zumthor. Glancey’s well aware of this complaint’s status of a luxury problem, but he’s got the rebuttal covered:

Such thoughts might seem a luxury when the global economy is in recession. Yet one of the reasons why the global economy is in recession and that architects are hard-pressed is that we have shaped a world that has been increasingly the stuff of make-believe, PFI, PPP, clever-clogs jargon and digital la-di-dah rather than substance, craft and joy.

We’re breaking out the plasticine as we type. And Jonathan? You, us, Galactica, and a touch of papier mache. Meet up at the Standard in exactly thirteen days.

Whatever happened to craft? [Building Design]
Commie-Style Hotel Has Cool Terrace, Views, $195 Rooms [Bloomberg]

We were so caught up in lingering our gaze over Frank Gehrys Milan-ready lounge for Emeco that we plumb forgot to acknowledge his recent birthday. Happy eightieth, Frank. The Architect’s Newspaper, our brother-from-another-mother, didn’t forget. Nor did they restrain from asking author and historian and ballparker John Pastier to get together with Big G and ask him a few questions, some of which elicited responses like this—

I’m actually unconscious of it because psychically I don’t feel any different from where I’ve always been—I’m always nervous, insecure, etc.

—which is a bit like the endless “I was suuuch a dork in high school” we get from A-listers et al, and others, like this—

I do lots of drawings, too. They are exciting to people because they’re so scribbly and free, but the important thing is to deliver that feeling to the final building.

—which we wish he’d said when Dan Fogelson played a Pecha Kucha slide of his Emeco sketch.

Also some jazz about fish.

Q&A: Gehry at 80 [Architect’s Newspaper]

We were, as “a leader like you,” invited to Michael Arad’s partner Gary Handel’s Tenement Museum Gala, where the project architect for Ben van Berkel’s New Amsterdam Plein and Pavilion and Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond will be honored—along with Official Edifical mascot Enrique Norten and Not-Pitt Brad Perkins—for his “impact on the organization.” We were, as a set of persons in today’s economy, unwilling to shell out the undisclosed (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it) amount required for tickets to the Capitale event.

And then we were, this very morning, admonished by Mr. Handel himself, who took it upon his casually-clad shoulders to inform us, via the subject line, that he would be “taking attendance,” news-you-can-use led off with this benitoite of a Bob Hope quote: “If you haven’t got any kind of charity in your heart, you’ve got the worst kind of heart trouble.”

Dear Friends,

Supporting a worthwhile cultural institution is very rewarding.
But having an opportunity to brag about supporting a worthwhile cultural institution is pretty great, too.

If you reserve a table at the Tenement Museum Gala by Friday, March 27, your name will appear in the Gala Journal. So reserve a big table today. If money is tight, or you can’t think of nine people you want to eat dinner with, individual tickets are also available.

The Tenement Museum Gala will be held on Tuesday, April 21 at Capitale.
Contact Leslie Milton, Director of Major Gifts, LES Tenement Museum at 212.431.0233 x228 or
lmilton@tenement.org to reserve your table today.
I hope to see you there, among the empty purses and healthy hearts.

Sincerely,
Gary Handel

Nothing like the combination of bullying and Bob to get us ship-shape down to the Penny Arcade.

Getting a Handel on the LES [Edificial]
Benny van Berkel Comes to New York, Again, For the First Time [Edificial]
Lower East Side Tenement Museum Honors Architecture Notables Gary Handel, Brad Perkins, Enrique Norten [Building Design and Construction]

Many days ago, before our movable type love affair began anew, we walked with future overlord David Lat and claimed that we could recognize every single New York architect, on sight. At which moment Enrique Norten—louchely disheveled tequila slammer and charmer-about-town, TEN Arquitectos founder and, now, official Edificial mascot—walked by.

And so, in honor of this fortuitous bit of egomania-run-proven, today we inaugurate Sited, a regular feature in which we bring you word of architects doing typically normal and non-architect-y things. Like drinking tea or hanging out, with nary a mayline in sight. Or site. Har.

Spotted today, at The Adore, David “not Paul” Lewis, Parsons faculty member and Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis principal. Looking awfully sharp, if we may say so ourselves.

What do you get when you mix a little crewcut, a lot of brutalism, and a whole bunch-a-crunch ‘o architectural insanity? A see-through chair—on wheels!—that’s half liberated IV drip, half exercise-in-formalisms, and all fuzzy wuzzy comfort. And it can be yours, all for the lift of a New Jersey paddle.

This Rudolph chair is part of interior designer Juan Montoya’s collection, going up on the block for the crying of Lots 1 through 85 on April 25/6 at the Rago Modern auction. That’s a big collection for an Interior Design Hall of Fame Honoree to be trying to get rid of all at once, so we have to wonder, of course, if this is all part of In Today’s Economic Climate. But still. It’s Rudolph, rendered relatively accessible. If our local Penny Arcade weren’t out of service, we’d be there, honorary buzz-cut on head, formal obsession in hand.

Not so many years ago, while we were deciding whether to take Peter Eisenman’s Friday morning seminar, we contemplated its value vis a vis the lateness of our Thursday nights. Thursday nights were party nights, after all, nights where frat parties took over and keg stands were done, nights joints led to bong rips and beers led to shots. And more, and worse, and more of the worst. We made the call, though, one Thursday evening. “It’s Peter Fucking Eisenman,” we said to our compatriot. “We’ll wake up for that.”

And we did. Every single Friday morning for a semester, we woke up, shook off the fog of the night before, and stumbled in to hear the teachings of this great architect. We loved—still do—House X, were entranced by Checkpoint Charlie, wondered and marveled at the way he talked and wrote about architecture: so seethingly straightforward, so banally complicated. We thought that just by being in his presence that we would learn more about architecture than we’d ever thought possible. We thought we’d get one-on-one time to discuss the split-apart master bedroom, have long hallway strolls in which we picked apart the Denkmal, pound the studio table for the inanity of Chora L Works.

And we didn’t.

Because we believe in nothing but the strongest structural redundancies, we have not just the brilliant Stephen Zacks on the Ian-replacing (aw, we jest, there’s no replacing our other brain) lineup today, but also softballer extraordinaire and all-around all-rounder Michael Silverberg. Who has a little something to say about Paris, planning, and porpoises. On y va, Michael!

Much like our love for kittens and hot cocoa, our appreciation of crazy floating buildings knows no bounds. But MVRDV, one of ten firms that just unveiled radical plans for reshaping Paris by 2030, has simply gone too far with its proposed hovering Brutalist blue mass. If the rendering is to be believed, this insane blocky windowless panopticon would float over the Seine, just north of the Eiffel Tower, menacing all those who would dare …

(Wait, what’s that? It’s just a graphical representation of the city’s resources? So does that mean the other image doesn’t show a crazed two-headed porpoise lurking outside the city walls. OK, fine.)

Less interesting than our Friday-afternoon flights of fancy but more, you know, accurate, MVRDV wants to increase Paris’s density by adding new highways and Metro lines. Meanwhile, the nine other teams (which include Richard Rogers and Christophe de Portzamparc but, weirdly, not Jean Nouvel, whose high-profile buildings in his hometown have already done much reshaping of their own) presented their plans to President Sarkozy yesterday.

Portzamparc would turn Paris into four archipelagos, Rogers wants to reattach the city to its restive suburbs with patches of parkland, and Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò, the Telegraph reports, “have proposed enlarging the city and laying it out as a ‘porous sponge,’ where waterways are given pride of place.” A sponge, eh? After the floating blue block, I guess everything else is a little underwhelming.

Grand Paris: Architects reveal plans to transform French capital [The Telegraph]

One of the hilarious things about doing what we do is that we spend a lot of time around incredibly insane luxury. We have lurked in multi-million-dollar houses, taken hard-hat tours of multi-zillion-dollar developments, and been the happy recipients of tote bags advertising everything from the New Museum to, today, Dellis Cay. We’ve always stepped back a bit from it, realized that we’re there simply to observe and not to participate, accepted that we’re welcomed not for our charms (alone) but rather our momentary affiliation. We’ve tried to remain as removed as we can while forming those relationships so necessary to getting the writing-about-architecture done, and we’ve always tried to keep at least one eyebrow raised. This isn’t to say that we come in all judgey and jazz. Just that we try to be, you know, aware.

Which is why we have been continually intrigued by the now-solid relationship between Storefront for Art & Architecture, the counter-culture downtown pizza-slice of a gallery and obvious Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven, and the Dellis Cay development. To be fair, Dellis Cay—a private island being developed by the equally mysterious Dr. Cem Kinay (who we could well imagine having a PhD in Awesome) is off the charts insane full of good architecture. Or, it will be, once the buildings by Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Piero Lissoni, Kengo Kuma, Carl Ettensperger, and today’s star Shigeru Ban, are built.

RV and DSB talk the LH’s move from NJ to NY, tonight at 7 at S 4 A&A.

Lieb House: Change of Address [Storefrontnews.org]
Image [Source]

Let’s play word association. Approximately a thousand years ago, we stood with Staten Island Ferry Terminal architect Fred Schwartz on the pier of Pier 40, taking a break from the WorkAC-designed Van Alen show, The Good Life, which was curated by Official Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven Zoë Ryan, who is currently at the Art Institute of Chicago, which just got a Modern Wing designed by Renzo Piano, who also did The Morgan, and is also the best museum architect in the world. End of line.

Schwartz introduced us to Jim Venturi, filmmaker and son of accidental Godfather of Postmodernism Robert Venturi and his architect wife Denise Scott Brown, authors of Learning from Las Vegas, which is where Dave Hickey lives, and designers of buildings ranging from Princeton’s Gordon Wu Hall, which is right next door to ARO’s new-ish School of Architecture addition, to the Lieb House. End of line.

Storefront for Art and Architecture, where we used to intern, is hosting a three-day event, which they’re calling a micro-exposition, as part of their ongoing EXYZY Situation Room exhibition, which will celebrate the Lieb House’s move from New Jersey to Long Island. The event starts tonight with a talk by Fred Schwartz and Jim Venturi. End of line.

Tomorrow, Bob and Denise talk “bold little ugly banal box.” End of line.

Friday morning, a house-holding barge sails up the East River. End of line.

End of lines.

Lieb House: Change of Address [Storefront for Art and Architecture]

“Have you any wool…” This musical moment courtesy of a tipster (tips[at]edificial[dot]com), who tells us that Atelier Bow Wow, those scamps from across the Pacific, are bringing a slice of Japan New Yorkward for the exhibition “Krazy!: The Delirious World of Anime + Manga + Video Games”, opening Friday at the Japan Society. Their cozy “manga pod”, at left, is a reading nook for the comic book-inclined. Bow Wow’s been getting some good exposure lately: last month we digitally smacked Kurt Andersen for failing to show due deference in a radio interview with principal Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, and the month before they were up in Artforum. The manga pod is not new Bow Wow; it debuted at the Gwanju Biennial in 2006, and it’s already a staple at the ABC design bookstore in Tokyo’s Roppongi district. But we can’t wait to settle into it and catch up on our favorite telepathic ghost-hunting anatomically improbable schoolgirls.

Knock us over with an alliterative alligator. It’s Della Valle Bernheimer and ARO’s R House, winner of the Innovative Green Homes competition, and it’s a delicate doozy of design. Slated to be slapped up in Syracuse, the R House is all about size, super-insulation, and sensibility, which leads to a 71% savings in energy output. Which means that the house requires the same amount of energy for heating as a hair-dryer. Which… means that a hair-dryer is equivalent to 29% of a standard Syracuse’s house’s use?

We’ve never been more grateful for our opt-out.

Update. Our brother-from-another-mother over at the Architect’s Newspaper asks us if we’ve ever heard of google. OK. So it’s not quite revealed. So much as looked with a new pair of glasses. We’ll always have zaniness on you guys. Always!

R House by ARO [Wallpaper.com]
Green Goes the Neighborhood [Architect’s Newspaper]

In today’s edition of confusing corporate language—it’s not quite a LingoWatch but not every day can be spectacular day—the DesignIntelligence Compensation and Benefits survey reports that architects’ salaries have actually been, gasp, rising. In that they are higher this year than they were last. You know, despite the fact that far fewer architects even have jobs now. Or buildings to build. Or construction sites to finish. But their headline says that the “compensation of designers and architects remains healthy.” That’s a big argument to slip in there—that the compensation remains healthy—when everyone knows compensation is completely disproportionate to the amount of work it takes to actually invent and then see through the construction of a not-necessarily see-through building (something our beloved Josh Prince-Ramus vociferously argued against at a recent Rockwell talk), and it’s a nice try at a little sugar-coating. Sort of like we were all screwed before, and we’re all still screwed, but at least some of us, spread out over a scant 460 firms, are okay, for now, or were, last year.

It’s the kind of data that doesn’t lend itself well to the kind of keen statistical analysis rampant assumptions we like to make around here, but it’s good to take a $69.99 bite out of the middle and see what you get. For us, it’s sort of like a mustard-and-jelly sandwich. Yeah. You feel that. Right?