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a brief rant (it's not like I live there)
Feb. 13th, 2006 12:02 amwherein ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
annathepiper's home town of Louisville, Kentucky is getting a major new building, and I don't like it; I tried to post this to the Courier Journal article discussion page, but they demand registration and it's not like I'm going back any time soon, so screw that. i'm vaguely worried this is too cranky, but, well, ah don' like it, and ahm'a gonna say so
Trite. Dull. Pointless. Two reasonable views, 358 terrible ones. (Okay, fine, stick to major compass points; six terrible ones.) The kind of wanna-be pseudo-radicalism that I've come to expect from the Koolhaas school. It's a pedestrian assemblage posing as postmodernist sculpture, repeating many of the mistakes of high modernist skyscraper construction with the added "benefits" of destructive shading onto itself and dark, oppressive, connection areas. (Notice how all the model lighting is late in the day? There are reasons for that.) The diagonal elevator tower is, quite frankly, just sad; it genuinely looks like someone knocked over a building block and decided it was part of the design. Guys: taking a city block and shaking it in a plastic bag until you dump out something that stands up is not creativity. An elevator shaft sticking up out of the ground is not a street interface. Sticking in a diagonal line is not a magical striking departure from the regularity of rectangular forms. Bad massing is not interestingly transgressive of architectural rules; it's just bad massing.
The best view that I've seen comes from I-64, which tells you how they were really designing the thing: as a desperate attempt to anchor memory of the location into the brains of people driving through on their way to somewhere else. The building package concept, as they pitched it, struck me as strangely familiar, and then I remembered where I'd heard it before: the 1973 disaster flick The Towering Inferno, about a building whose wallpaper alone earned it a death sentence, but which also incorporated every bad idea about architecture from 1945 through the filming of the movie, and invented a couple more all on its own1. And I say this as someone who loves mixed-use construction - I think mixing commercial and residential and other uses is an active force for good - but as far as I can tell, they've managed to get it wrong in almost every important way.
I wanted to like this building. I really did. When I heard about it, I wanted Louisville to have something genuinely cool. Unfortunately, this really isn't it. I can't wait to see the final street level interfacing; what I see in the video is better than the NYC Freedom Tower "bunker" base, but not by all that much: I see yet another empty, windy, uninviting modernist plaza waiting to be used by no one.
You want to break some rules? Fine, let's break some rules. That stupid cube on the top half? The one that's too big, but not too big enough to be interesting? Make it a sphere. I dare you. If you want to play building blocks, play building blocks, dammit; this half-hearted bullshit doesn't do anyone any good. Also, make it bigger. The spindly elevator connection? Make it fan-shaped. No, wait, better: make several of them, fanning up from a single groundpoint, slashing across the front of the lower half from that side connecting at a row of points across the plaza level, adding some depth and texture and making it look like you actually thought the damn thing out. And get it off the corner edge of the rear tower; that just looks like an accident. The gallery level, the wedge? Make it a wedge, not a slab; slope the underside up from the ground, lowest towards the north, highest towards the south, so you get some desperately-needed winter light reflected down into the misshapen dark wind tunnel between the lower towers that you've insisted upon creating. Oh, and make it thinner, and if you can afford it, slope the roof down towards the south as well. You're playing with forms - great! Play with them. Don't just stack the same old crap up in a different order and pretend it's a revolution.
And particularly, don't stick some animated light-projection visual noise on the side of the museum level and pretend it makes up for a building's design shortcomings, like you did in the presentation video. It's a building. Not a television.
1: I am NOT saying the building is unsafe, or going to burn down. To the contrary, I think it's too safe. Regardless, the usage flaws come from the over-segregation of purposes, not from paranoid ideas about construction code. Do not comment talking about building safety. That's completely not the point. The building in Inferno was doomed from the start, but it wasn't just because of bad wiring and a faulty fire control system; it's because its ideas of multi-use design were stupid. Exactly like in this building, they took a bunch of separate single-use buildings and mashed them together; there, into one big stack; here, into six separate buildings glued together via a slab in the middle.
annathepiper's home town of Louisville, Kentucky is getting a major new building, and I don't like it; I tried to post this to the Courier Journal article discussion page, but they demand registration and it's not like I'm going back any time soon, so screw that. i'm vaguely worried this is too cranky, but, well, ah don' like it, and ahm'a gonna say soTrite. Dull. Pointless. Two reasonable views, 358 terrible ones. (Okay, fine, stick to major compass points; six terrible ones.) The kind of wanna-be pseudo-radicalism that I've come to expect from the Koolhaas school. It's a pedestrian assemblage posing as postmodernist sculpture, repeating many of the mistakes of high modernist skyscraper construction with the added "benefits" of destructive shading onto itself and dark, oppressive, connection areas. (Notice how all the model lighting is late in the day? There are reasons for that.) The diagonal elevator tower is, quite frankly, just sad; it genuinely looks like someone knocked over a building block and decided it was part of the design. Guys: taking a city block and shaking it in a plastic bag until you dump out something that stands up is not creativity. An elevator shaft sticking up out of the ground is not a street interface. Sticking in a diagonal line is not a magical striking departure from the regularity of rectangular forms. Bad massing is not interestingly transgressive of architectural rules; it's just bad massing.
The best view that I've seen comes from I-64, which tells you how they were really designing the thing: as a desperate attempt to anchor memory of the location into the brains of people driving through on their way to somewhere else. The building package concept, as they pitched it, struck me as strangely familiar, and then I remembered where I'd heard it before: the 1973 disaster flick The Towering Inferno, about a building whose wallpaper alone earned it a death sentence, but which also incorporated every bad idea about architecture from 1945 through the filming of the movie, and invented a couple more all on its own1. And I say this as someone who loves mixed-use construction - I think mixing commercial and residential and other uses is an active force for good - but as far as I can tell, they've managed to get it wrong in almost every important way.
I wanted to like this building. I really did. When I heard about it, I wanted Louisville to have something genuinely cool. Unfortunately, this really isn't it. I can't wait to see the final street level interfacing; what I see in the video is better than the NYC Freedom Tower "bunker" base, but not by all that much: I see yet another empty, windy, uninviting modernist plaza waiting to be used by no one.
You want to break some rules? Fine, let's break some rules. That stupid cube on the top half? The one that's too big, but not too big enough to be interesting? Make it a sphere. I dare you. If you want to play building blocks, play building blocks, dammit; this half-hearted bullshit doesn't do anyone any good. Also, make it bigger. The spindly elevator connection? Make it fan-shaped. No, wait, better: make several of them, fanning up from a single groundpoint, slashing across the front of the lower half from that side connecting at a row of points across the plaza level, adding some depth and texture and making it look like you actually thought the damn thing out. And get it off the corner edge of the rear tower; that just looks like an accident. The gallery level, the wedge? Make it a wedge, not a slab; slope the underside up from the ground, lowest towards the north, highest towards the south, so you get some desperately-needed winter light reflected down into the misshapen dark wind tunnel between the lower towers that you've insisted upon creating. Oh, and make it thinner, and if you can afford it, slope the roof down towards the south as well. You're playing with forms - great! Play with them. Don't just stack the same old crap up in a different order and pretend it's a revolution.
And particularly, don't stick some animated light-projection visual noise on the side of the museum level and pretend it makes up for a building's design shortcomings, like you did in the presentation video. It's a building. Not a television.
1: I am NOT saying the building is unsafe, or going to burn down. To the contrary, I think it's too safe. Regardless, the usage flaws come from the over-segregation of purposes, not from paranoid ideas about construction code. Do not comment talking about building safety. That's completely not the point. The building in Inferno was doomed from the start, but it wasn't just because of bad wiring and a faulty fire control system; it's because its ideas of multi-use design were stupid. Exactly like in this building, they took a bunch of separate single-use buildings and mashed them together; there, into one big stack; here, into six separate buildings glued together via a slab in the middle.
