Building America is, in a way, the Building Museum’s permanent collection, on the web. It’s an effort—a laudable and substantially accomplished effort—to put the history of American construction out in cyberspace, where the general public can get a better idea of its environment.
The architecture of Daniel Libeskind follows two distinct threads--the geometry employed in his Holocaust Memorials, and the geometry of those buildings whose purpose is life and regeneration. But is there a difference between the two types? And if not, does Libeskind's architecture make sense for the former site of the World Trade Center?
With works such as the Alamillo Bridge in Seville, Spain and the footbridge over the River Nervión in Bilbao, Santiago Calatrava has established himself as the most innovative and influential bridge designer of our time.
Deep in the catacomb-like foundations of the Chrysler Building, a zombie creature emerges from the murky soil; a five car demolition derby ensues in the luminous Art Deco lobby of the building; and its 180-foot needle spire, transformed into a colossal maypole, crowns man's ambitious if not vain attempts to reach the heavens.
A man who had been mulling over a sound-modulating bench with his companion used verbal shorthand to explain the depth of this next exhibit, representing a design for the "Hotel Pro Forma," a conceptual project for Denmark. "It's WYSIWYG," he said.
"I'm not familiar with them," his companion replied.
When splashed across newspapers, television screens and Web sites worldwide on December 18, the nine proposals for the World Trade Center site may have looked like a brave new skyscraper world—to paraphrase the headline of December 19th’s New York Daily News—or an exhibition of architectural ego as Lisa Rochon put it in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
One of the two main points of my essay on Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Langauge and The Phenomenon of Life is that Alexander’s thinking has been wrongly neglected by thoughtful academics and practitioners in the last 20 years.