and now for something very superficial

waaawaoooo as borat would say (dead joke, anyone?) i am so nervous. tomorrow is columbia's admitted students open house and boy i feel like it's my first day of 6th gradee! i am posting 5,000 posts a day to the archinect thread about the open house. everyone wants to meet for drinks after it ends - oh my god! am i cool enough? what should i wear? should i play the cool card and not be myself, or be myself and run the risk of being mocked???

when in reality, judging from the prospective open house in the fall, i know that 65% of the people in that room tomorrow are going to be wearing literally the same exact outfit i am, no matter what i put on. and 100% of the people in that room will be wearing some variation on this ensemble:

as a sidenote, i almost chose the following picture for this joke:

but upon closer inspection it made me feel... funny. isnt it really weirdly, subtly sexual??

anyways, i'm excited to see what this open house is like tomorrow. not excited about going to the city, but hey, i get to miss pre calc! (read: braces, social studies)

the cops rush in. everyone's screaming

so, i got into columbia...uh oh! this makes the situation next yr infinitely more complex. more on this later.
for now, i want to post my pictures from my time in dallas last week, more specifically, my pictures of the site of norman foster and rem koolhaas' new buildings for the dallas center for performing arts. i posted on these buildings a few weeks ago, and my dad randomly got some tickets to the symphony from their provost the night before i left, so we went. the dallas symphony sits directly adjacent to the construction site, so i was able to run over there before the music started to take some pictures on the rapidly progressing projects!!! well actually, the foster was rapid, the koolhaas was hard to tell. i know they're laying the foundation for the parking garage, though.
this first picture is walking towards the symphony from the nasher sculpture center, where we went for this reception and dinner before the music. it's actually a very nice little promenade, though part of it is next to a parking lot. you can see a few of the 4-5 cranes on the site in the background.



moving towards the symphony, you can see that the construction site is wedged right up next to the building.



here's a picture, standing on the edge of the symphony's site, of the norman foster building coming up. you can tell by the distinctive (and when i say distinctive, i mean that in a slightly ironic way) spherical shape of what will become the theatre (which i included a picture of after this one, and which i think is a blatent rip off of henning larsen's copenhagen opera house).




here's a shot of how the foster project is placed right up against the symphony's side - it seems a little unruly to me, but then again, having them so close together might foster (so to speak) a sense of connectivity and shared experience between the two institutions.

during intermission, i snapped this picture of the foster site viewed from the interior of the symphony. at first, to me, they seemed weirdly placed in relationship to each other - but when i walked around to these windows, the relationship began to make more sense. it will be interesting to see if the foster dwarfs the symphony, especially when you think about the color and materials of the surrounding blocks - right now, it's a lot of sandstone, desert tones, and sea glass. the foster building purports to be so LOUD and laquerbox red.



honestly the foster building could end up being the most beautiful thing ever and i would still have it in for it. there's something snide about it. we'll see. in other news, my parents and annicka, and anne and jim, all went up to the ghost bar in the W (right in this same area) and said it was hilariously awesome.

i'm not sure i could turn columbia down, simply on the basis of how many guest lecturers they have - there's at least one lecture by a practicing architect every evening. i don't know what i'll do. maybe i'll make a decision simply on a financial basis. though they're pretty much neck and neck there, too. my mom is thinking about flying up to NY to drive me to ithaca for the open house on april 10 - that would be so good. i really hope she does. i miss my parents and annicka so much right now. ny just seems so dirty and mean. why hasn't ut austin written me back?

so i got this letter from my old high school in the mail, with the letterhead and everything - very nice, to see that stuffy old logo again. it was for a "reception" cocktail hr ("ssa: celebrating the past, framing the future") in the city hosted by the founders of this award annicka and i got our senior yr, and the president/headmaster. why will they all be in ny? how did they get my address? i won't be able to go - it's a few days after i go home for spring break. but it made me happy, to know that somewhere out there someone at the switchboard is searching a database and printing out my name on that nice ivory stationary. i also wish i could have gone, just because i'd like to see the looks on their faces - that look that silently screams"we know you go here but jesus who let you in, that hair is barely passing for a 'natural shade'" after coming to slc i really haven't played that roll for years. i'm more on the other side of the mirror here - i have to say it's less anxious place to be, if less exciting.

i've really been on a koolhaas kick for the past day or so, if you haven't noticed. but now i may be passing into the far more tempting 'joshua prince ramus' realm which most of the world also seems to be enraptured with right now. koolhaas' protege, broken off from OMA to form REX architects. "prince josh," "so dreamy!" "so young!" "you try qualifying for the olympics in the middle of grad school!" geez. but then again, if you watch his TED talk from last month (here), he does sort of come off as awesome, especially in the second half of the presentation.
the two:

interestingly, ive heard rumors that he was able to rise so quickly through the OMA ranks because he provided some kind of monetary investment in it. sad and also logical? but just as likely, the envious mutterings of those moving more slowly upwards.

ive gotten into this habit of sitting in bed and watching 4-6 episodes of aqua teen hunger force before i go to bed. weirdly, i havent had any bad dreams since beginning this practice. which doesnt make any sense, considering that the last image i remember seeing last night before i fell asleep with the computer was of gigantic crabs that carl let loose when he tried to 'enlarge' himself using frylock's shrink machine. but i wont question it - it works.

louisville

we're in claudia's maya class right now, and she brought in the big daily news article on the rem koolhaas jersey city development. so then i wanted to show her the wyly theatre i just posted about, and then justin showed us all this video, a proposal video of the new louisville, kentucky. its kind of awesome, and it kind of looks like an mtv commercial. par for the course.

rem in dallas, foster ripping off larsen

since i'm going home in less than two weeks now, i'm getting excited to see the progress on the victory plaza/dallas center for the performing arts development about a mile from our house in dallas. basically, we're getting a rem koolhaas! call me a corny, chinzy plebian, but, i love rem. i'm an addict. it's everything that i want in architecture as well as everything i know is cheesy about it. his design for the wyly theatre basically adheres to his "cake-pan architecture" (or whatever its name was) concept published in content a few years ago: you take a cake pan, and you take many different articles (rooms, functions, etc.etc) and you just throw them in there and let the pan form them in its image.
the theatre is going to be eleven stories, and here's a facade rendering from the website.

paradoxically, this design is very dallas. something about the granite and the wide, open walkway. it definitely has a relationship to renzo piano's nearby Nasher Center , but it's also sort of following in the blandly colored new W building, also nearby. i feel that 'starchitects' who come to dallas to build end up bein boxed in by the 'beige,' or 'desert stone' aesthetic of many of the buildings, but conversely, i like a lot of these places and feel proud that there is some semblance of a 'local' architecture, even if it is controlled and created solely by oil billionaires. after coming to dallas i feel new respect for these oil magnates, since they all have given the most insane, extravagant gifts to the arts. it's strange - the place, and people, that most of liberal america villainizes, is actually one of the friendliest and most artistically-well-endowed places i've ever been.
the entranceway:
YEAH!!! this is why i love rem. this is exactly what he's good at. metallic textures, low-ceiling entranceways, de stijl lighting that make you feel like you're in the netherlands even if you're in texas.
moving on to the less render-genic shots, here's the 'lounge,' i.e. cafe:
yeuugh. this is exactly like his cafe for his rottedram kunsthal, minus the good parts. a big grey box, and what's with the weird viewing-room on the right? is that where the oil magnates get to look out over the crowd, reigning over their domain? it's like a scientist's one-way mirror wall. actually, this also reminds me of DIE ZOLLVEREIN, in germany, which is an old abandonded industrial site that koolhaas re-planned and is now a design center. it has all these big, empty concrete mixing chambers (right) you can walk around in, and this looks exactly like them. except that this one probably cost a thousand times what the german ones cost.
here's a rendering of a theatre:

yikes! this looks like russel crowe should be onstage wearing a blade runner costume. no one wants to see this. looks like a robot's lower intestine.

this is where i predict dallasites are going to begin to get pissed. they all expect a pretty luxurious show for their money, i feel, and by luxurious i mean good lighting, light wood if it's modern, lots of white laminate -- this seriously actually looks like a gladiator's ring from the future. brutal.

rem is a good fit for dallas in the sense that his showy-ness always produces great looking, glossy facades that you can really feel impressed by, even if you are a little weary of the starriness of it all. but these interiors, unless he really spices them up with some weird plastic laminates that are back lit with some crazy colors, or with some bruce mau graphics running along the ceiling or something...i fear he might start to loose the dallas crowd. then again, maybe i'm playing the eastern seabord stuffy closed minded asshole, and dallasites appreciate much more than i give them credit for.

another building in the complex, the norman foster opera house, is a BLATENT rip off of henning larsen's new copenhagen opera house. so much so that it actually kind of pisses me off. he took everything that was good about the opera house and made it plasticy and cheap looking.
take a look:

henning larsen, 2004.

sir norman foster, under construction 2007.
a cantilevered roof over a glass curtain wall and an spherical interior theatre shaped like an egg? with floating stairs and walkways into the egg? really? really norman foster? gee, i think ive seen this somewhere before!
(all images via google image)
"larsen inspired?"
oh, right. copenhagen. plus a bunch of tacky red plastic and minus the beautiful organic massing.