* Architecture: Campbell Sports Center of Columbia University by Steven Holl Architects – Review – ‘A Sports Complex Shows Its Brains and Brawn’ by Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times

Architecture: Campbell Sports Center of Columbia University by Steven Holl Architects – Review – ‘A Sports Complex Shows Its Brains and Brawn’ by Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times: “..The center, designed by Steven Holl and Chris McVoy, of Steven Holl Architects, the New York firm, is a trifle beside Mr. Holl’s mega office and residential projects in China and elsewhere. And it’s not a beauty. But it is a tough, sophisticated and imaginative work of architecture for a devilish site..Mr. Holl took on something vaguely similar a few years ago for the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, inserting an addition to its architecture school into a tricky, dissonant space connecting two 19th-century buildings. In this case the challenge is a neglected hilly corner..its facade a mix of irregular blocks and voids, quasi-Cubist, crisscrossed by exterior stairways. All sorts of cuts, setbacks, overhangs and terraces animate the design..”

See some of our posts on other work by Steven Holl Architects:

•  Residential Architecture: Video: Daeyang Gallery and House by Steven Holl Architects
• Architecture: Maggie’s Barts by Steven Holl Architects
• Residential Architecture: Daeyang Gallery and House by Steven Holl Architects
• Architecture: Institute for Contemporary Art by Steven Holl Architects
• Architecture: Knut Hamsun Centre by Steven Holl Architects
• Residential Architecture: Sun Slice House by Steven Holl Architects
• Architecture: Hangzhou Music Museum by Steven Holl Architects
• Architecture: Museum of Ocean and Surf by Steven Holl Architects in collaboration with Solange Fabiao
• Architecture: Cornell Reveals the Architects Competing to Design the First NYC Tech Campus Building
• Architecture: In China: Linked Hybrid by Steven Holl Architects
• Architecture: In China: Sliced Porosity Block by Steven Holl Architects
• Architecture: Sustainable Architecture: Vanke Center by Steven Holl Architects
• Architecture: In China: Horizontal Skyscraper by Steven Holl
• Architecture & Civic Engagement – Steven Holl & Chris McVoy
• Architecture in China – Linked Hybrid to the Bug Dome – Design Observer

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image: Richard Perry/The New York Times; article: Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times

* Architecture: ‘The Artistic and the Beautiful’: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wide-Ranging Views (audio interview)

Architecture: ‘The Artistic and the Beautiful’: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wide-Ranging Views (audio interview): “..In 1957, two years before his death, Frank Lloyd Wright sat down with WNYC (ndlr: radio) to discuss his design philosophy, exhibiting his trademark eloquence and blistering opinions. The year of this interview marks an explosion of commissions for Wright, who by then had been practicing architecture for 70 years..

Wright mainly designed homes until 1957-58, when he took on 90 new projects, many for public buildings. Over all, Wright’s last decade was his most prolific, accounting for nearly one-third of his oeuvre. This interview was recorded in his Plaza Hotel apartment where he’d moved two years earlier in order to oversee construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, on which he had been working for 14 years. Here, Wright neatly dismisses the project’s many critics, promising “…a new point of view…it’s going to be so enlivening and refreshing that it will make some of these painters quite ashamed of the protest that they issued against it.”

In this interview, Wright also expresses distaste for the nascent designs of Sydney Opera House, as well as the U.S. Air Force Academy structure, whose designers he lambasts as “Poetry Crushers with a capital P.” The Academy’s use of an advisory committee of architects prompts Wright to remark that “an architect is either an inspiration or…he’s merely a committee-mind…a liability.”

Asked whether he’s acquainted with New York’s planned Lincoln Center complex, Wright remarks, “I think it wouldn’t do me any good to become acquainted with it. I suggest the other way around: they become…acquainted with the ones that I’m doing.”

Two notable influences on the young Wright were his itinerant childhood (his father was a traveling minister), and years spent on his uncle’s Wisconsin farm where he “learned…the region in every line and feature…the modeling of the hills, the weaving and fabric that clings to them, the look of it all in tender green or covered with snow or in full glow of summer.” His mother, a school teacher, enhanced his understanding of structure by giving him a set of newly invented blocks developed by revolutionary German educator Friedrich Fröbel whose theories laid the foundations for modern education.

Beyond architecture, Wright is also noted as a singularly influential and innovative urban planner, interior designer, architectural writer, and educator. He is noted for his often prescient, sometimes embattled philosophical and social views, a range well displayed in this broadcast, when in the middle of describing his new designs for homes with children’s playrooms, he can’t help but point out that “the American family should be three, not four…and above that, heavily taxed, more and more as they increase in number.” (Wright fathered seven children.)..

Recognized by the American Institute of Architects as “the greatest American architect of all time,” Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wis., and went on to design 1,141 structures — including houses, offices, churches, clinics, schools, libraries, bridges, and museums — 532 of which were built. Today, 409 are still standing, nearly one-third of them listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Wright died in 1959, six months before the Guggenheim opened.

Asked what architects could do to help build “a better society and civilization,” Wright slips into an uncharacteristically heartfelt tone, suggesting they “study nature, seriously, intelligently, and with feeling, and appreciation.” He also warns that if New York City doesn’t acquire more green space immediately, it will be “uninhabitable.”

At least four of Wright’s descendants became architects, one of whom, his son John Lloyd Wright, invented Lincoln Logs. Other descendants include an architecture professor, two interior designers, a master woodworker, and the actress Anne Baxter, who is Wright’s granddaughter..”  Fascinating…

image: © 2009 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA; article: Charis Conn, WNYC, NEH

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* Architecture: Oscar Niemeyer, Architect Who Gave Brasília Its Flair, Dies at 104

GRANDEUR IN ISOLATION Brasília’s Esplanade of Ministries features some of Oscar Niemeyer’s best-known works, including the Metropolitan Cathedral, the airy crownlike structure.

Architecture: Oscar Niemeyer, Architect Who Gave Brasília Its Flair, Dies at 104: An excellent article, by the renowned architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff..”..Oscar Niemeyer, the celebrated Brazilian architect whose flowing designs infused Modernism with a new sensuality and captured the imaginations of generations of architects around the world..”

The article includes a slideshow, here.

See two of our posts on work by Niemeyer:

• Brasilia in Photos – 50 Buildings for 50 Years – 50 Wonderful Images
• Brasilia, Oscar Niemeyer, and Others, 50 Years Later

image: Eraldo Peres/Associated Press; article: Nicolai Ouroussoff, The New York Times

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* Architecture + Design: Dignifying Design

Architecture + Design: Dignifying Design: “..(A) new breed of public-interest designers proceeds from a belief that everybody deserves good design, whether in a prescription bottle label that people can more easily read and understand, a beautiful pocket park to help a city breathe or a less stressful intake experience at the emergency room. Dignity may be to the burgeoning field of public-interest design as justice is to the more established public-interest law..” Excellent, inspirational, motivational article on public-interest design and architecture in The New York Times..

The article includes a 9-image slideshow, here.

See some of other posts with photos by the excellent architectural photographer Iwan Baan:

• Residential Architecture: Tsai Residence by HHF Architects + Ai Weiwei
• Residential Architecture: Guesthouse by HHF architects + Ai Weiwei
• Architecture: Wang Shu, 2012 Pritzker Prize Winner – An Architect’s Vision: Bare Elegance in China
• Residential Architecture: The FLOAT House – Make it Right by Morphosis Architects
• Residential Architecture: Observatory House by Gabriel Orozco and Tatiana Bilbao
• Residential Architecture: Video: Daeyang Gallery and House by Steven Holl Architects

image: Iwan Baan; article: John Cary and Courtney E. Martin, The New York Times

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