Sunday, June 26, 2011

If It Was Me #2, Dutch Colonialism

The other day I made this diagnosis to a problem about a house, whose style ID was in question. The new owner was asking if this house was Queen Anne style in a public forum.
I replied,
"Dutch Colonial is harassed by QA's little brother..;.)" 
And, went on to post a photoshoped image of what I would do with it, by saying,
"do it like this as if you were in a west coast design magazine..." 
Here is the said house with my design suggestion overlay.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Review Season 2011

L-R; Thom Mayne, Karen Lohrmann, .., Albert Pope, Orhan Ayyuce, Frances Anderton, Christophe Cornubert, Jeffrey Inaba, Alan Berger.

I have been in many year end reviews in in few architecture schools in California and Arizona. Besides my own studio's presentations at Cal Poly Pomona, this year's highlight was the suprastudio jury in UCLA. I have been following this research studio directed by Thom Mayne and Karen Lohrmann and the work was really good in terms vaiable solutions and research results trying to incubate a change via culture in selected American cities with population one million or less. In addition to studio instructors, the jury consisted of Nicola Twilley, Orhan Ayyuce, Albert Pope, John Enright Francis Anderton, Christophe Cornubert, Jeffrey Inaba, Alan Berger and others. There were few partial appearences by all interesting but heavily resisted persona of Jeffrey Kipnis. This was the most focused group of students working on the possibility of city scale change. The proposals and solutions were presented but it was not clear architecture's role was redefined. I stressed my commentary on the limitations of physical aspects of architecture and its ability to change the city without the economical conditions of just income distribution is achieved first. In short, summarizing the urgency of capitalist evolution first, which Zizek calls the new and improved communism. Otherwise the building style fashion and all the luxurious public architecture remains as a self serving ode to the dying profession of architecture as we know of. As of now architecture represents a conservatism of holding its nineteenth century curriculum and manual. In a sense, solving the citiy's problem with geometry does seem old school.