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.

just woke up to gawker's linking to this nyt article on the notion of LEAVING NY here . very timely after all of these discussions we've been having about, "who stays and who goes." i'm counting myself out. i was looking at apartments in austin ysterday and they have beautiful floor to ceilinged window studios for about 400, three steps from the UTA shuttle and in a nice neighborhood. why, why? it's mark of true, unyeilding love that i'd actually consider living in some basement in queens for 1,200 a month just to be near my friends. true love. remember that my friends.

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.

the people vs. frank gehry

i went through a bunch of the curbed posts on gehry's new chelsea building today (right, image via curber). as i read through the comments sections i realized just how ornery new yorkers and people in general are with mr. gehry - these posts have inspired some of the funniest commentary! i was sitting here in the lab just laughing out loud (or screaming OH SNAP!!!). people are so up in arms - most of the comment threads turn into big, flaming verbal wars between people ala livejournal. it's so weird. here are some of my favorites:

15. Someone told me over lunch at Swifty's that Frank G. hires sophomores from C level architectural schools to come up with concepts for new, exciting and unsustainable buildings. But at the same time he hires detailers from the mobile home and trailer industry in Elkart, Indiana to follow the concepts through the construction phase. Is this true?

7. Paging Mr. Gehry, your buildings are giant metallic turds.

6. goddamn, that building is ugly...not homely, but certainly chinsey.

02. It looks like two ugly, gigantic robots somehow managed to get drunk and have sex, then the female ugly gigantic robot got pregnant and had a ugly, gigantic robotic abortion in the middle of Brooklyn, and this is the ugly, gigantic unwanted discarded robot fetus.

6. There's something about those windows that look like ghetto tint jobs or Walgreens Christmas Window spray.

13. what the hell is this crap? it looks like something i saw under construction in Mumbai three years ago. (re: atlantic yards)

23. This is just the architectural equivalent of a logo handbag.

46. So after this is built, what project will you idiots bitch about next? Maybe you can stop the Calatrava transit center from being developed. Or perhaps you can endlessly complain about the Silvercup Studios project. It must be exciting to have so much progress to fight against!

61. shit someone put that thing too close to the radiator and it got all melted.

and one kicker:

14. Obviously, your demented mother dropped you on the floor (head first) when you were born. She was probably scared to death to see what an ugly troll you are and does not remember who's your actual daddy (what a whore).

HAHAHaaaaaa

i spent a lot of my shift today in the lab working on a digital painting for my mom for her birthday. it's of berthoud pass, in colorado, which we drove over this christmas to get to winter park. i thought it was a good memory to make reference to...

i wanted to keep it nice and simple. i need to think of a real thing to get her though, within the next two or three days.

research

oh god, i just had the funniest hour. i was researching the kaisersaal ruins that are part of the sony center in berlin now, because i want to use a similar process in my marshall field design. so i was kind of wikipedia surfing around, and i went to the article about sarah lawrence's campus. now, our campus is this sort of cliche of a cliche, quaint tudor wood adorableness. EXCEPT for the new dorms . the new dorms are a horror to most people on this campus, a concrete and glass box that houses tiny triple rooms for freshman. they stick out like a sore, grey, half-machine thumb, and so of course there are tons of legends about them (see: freshman painting a bullseye on the basement level and jumping from the top of the atrium). many people wonder: how did this shit get built? on every other side of the quad there's a neo-tudor house, except for this box of concrete. so of course there is also a legend to satisfy this bizarre incongruity. so the story goes, the college hired an architect to build a new building for administrative offices. but, they didn't tell him that they'd be used as dorms, so he designed a simple office block. when the buildings were built, and the architect realized what they were using his design for, he refused to be credited with the project because he objected to housing students in such tiny and poorly ventilated rooms. this story conveniently explains the insanity of the design, as well as the lack of any information about HOW this thing was put up. but today, on wikipedia, i saw the words:

Designed by world-renowned architect Phillip Johnson in the sparse modernist style of the time, the "New Dorms" were actually completed in 1960. The architectural style of the buildings is meant to be a modernist reflection of the three older dorms (Gilbert, Titsworth, and Dudley Lawrence) that stand on the opposite side of the North Lawn. The three buildings that comprise the New Dorms are connected by two glass atria in which the buildings' primary stairwells are found. With the exception of the large apartments in Rothschild, these dorms typically house first-year students.

wait, wtf?? philip johnson??? a quick call to justin confirmed my suspicion that this must be a wikipedia mistake. however, philip johnson's washington post obituary writes: "johnson designed buildings on the campuses of harvard, yale, brown, and sarah lawrence." holy shit. could this be true?
i ran upstairs to joe's office and interrupting a conference with one of his donnees, asked "philip johnson designed THE NEW DORMS??" he told me that he had designed them, of course, on a cocktail napkin, and sarah lawrence had accepted the design after it had been rejected by VASSAR. ahhaha, oh, sarah lawrence. joe also told me that when he first came to teach at sarah lawrence someone had SHOWN him the napkin, and that it might still be in the archives. so, of course justin and i are going over there tomorrow to take a look for ourselves. CAN'T WAIT!