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EMBT Designs Zhang Da Qian Museum in Neijiang

Architectural Record — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:45:34 +0000

By David Cohn

Image courtesy EMBT

EMBT Designs Zhang Da Qian Museum in Sichuan Province. Click to view more images.

Construction will start this year on a museum dedicated to the work of artist Zhang Da Qian. Located in Neijiang, in Sichuan Province, the project was designed by Benedetta Tagliabue, head of the Barcelona studio Miralles Tagliabue EMBT.

Zhang Da Qian was born in Nejiang in 1899. Although he left China in 1948, never to return, he is avidly collected in China, and is one of several artists credited with bringing traditional Chinese painting into the 20th century. He was the world’s top-selling artist at auction houses last year with over $500 million in sales, unseating Picasso for the first time in 14 years, according to the magazine Artinfo.

The museum is a gift to Neijiang by another native son, Li Xioping, president of Excellence Group, a real estate developer. He contacted EMBT after seeing the firm’s much-admired Spanish Pavilion at the 2010 Expo in Shanghai.

Like the Expo project—a basket-like structure of woven bamboo—the museum combines elements from traditional Chinese culture with contemporary strategies such as collage and the transformation of found material. On a wooded mountain peak overlooking the city—a setting evocative of Chinese landscape painting, and a favorite lookout for Neijiang’s 1.2 million residents—EMBT grouped five pavilions around an existing teahouse, in a setting of gardens, terraces and walks. The Spanish firm, which has a Shanghai office, is developing the project in collaboration with architects from Tongji University in Shanghai, its local partners on the Expo building.

The five pavilions at the Zhang Da Qian Museum will be connected by floating walkways reminiscent of those in traditional Chinese gardens, according to Daniel Rosselló, EMBT’s director of projects. Each pavilion is an irregular ovoid formed by bamboo-covered steel fins and solid or transparent infill panels. At the top of the pavilion, a skylight fills the space inside a tension ring connecting the fins. The steel profiles “work as structure and support for exhibits, and provide shade,” Rosselló explains.

The museum does not own any work by Zhang, so its program was originally dedicated simply to presenting his life story, illustrated with reproductions. But worldwide interest in the project has opened the door to loans of actual works from private collectors, and the architects have redesigned two of the pavilions to meet international standards for art conservation, eliminating glass and introducing sophisticated climate control systems. Other pavilions will be dedicated to a bookshop, a workshop on bonsais (one of the artist’s interests), and a studio that is part of a grant program for young artists. In these pavilions, faceted planes of glass between some of the fins will draw in northern light. The project includes a small auditorium, media library, café and VIP area.

Curiously, Picasso plays an important role in the design concept. Zhang and Picasso had a famous encounter in France in the 1950s, when they exchanged drawings as the reputed living masters of Eastern and Western art. Deepening this connection, Neijiang has established a sister-city relation with Málaga, Spain, Picasso’s birthplace. EMBT used drawings the two artists exchanged as templates for the design, developing what Rosselló calls “the geometry of a friendship.”

For the plan, Picasso’s portrait of Zhang, his face surrounded by dashing blots of ink for hair and beard, inspired the layout for the pavilions’ rings of structural fins. Zhang’s traditional rendering of a grove of bamboo provided the concept for the pavilion’s vertical development. The fins’ irregular profiles, designed using folded and cut paper, derive from this drawing and other sources, including a photograph of the artist and his paintings of a woman and a mountain landscape. It also refers to a large boulder from his garden in Taiwan, which he brought from California, and under which he is buried.

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Old Factories Get New Wrapping in Shanghai

Architectural Record — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:45:06 +0000

By Clare Jacobson

Image courtesy dEEP Architects

Beijing-based dEEP Architects has transformed a pair of old factories into an office building for Material ConneXion.

Beijing-based dEEP Architects has transformed a pair of old factories into an office building for Material ConneXion, a company that provides information on building materials. The architects renovated and connected the abandoned factory buildings in the Jiading district of Shanghai, wrapping them with a new aluminum envelope.“We kept intact the historical presence of the architecture,” says principal Li Dao de, “and infused new surface treatments as a way to say, ‘Here’s 1950. Welcome to 2012.’”

Talking about the project, Li explains the contrast between old and new, noting the simple, rectilinear components of the factories compared to the angular forms of the addition. “While the old factories are composed of vertical and horizontal planes, our surface has a multitude of juxtaposed angles. The old buildings followed industrial standards of the time and used simple construction. Our building offered the district a chance to showcase what it means to be a designer—throwing away the old standards and looking to interdisciplinary sources such as art, music, and nature,” states Li.

“Throwing away the old standards” began with 21st-century 3D modeling tools, instead of 1950s sketches. dEEP then adjusted its model to the site. Because the factory buildings could not support any new weight, the addition needed to be almost freestanding, resting only on itself and the new connector—a steel bridge with an open stairway—between the factories. The architects also adjusted their design to position the aluminum panels comprising the new building’s skin to catch daylight. “When the sun moves, the building changes color,” says Li.Apertures of various sizes puncture the skin’s triangular metal panes. “The patterning of the building’s skin comes from looking at nature and how it creates gradients of articulation,” explains the architect.

Before opening his office in Beijing in 2008, Li spent time in London, studying at the Architectural Association and then working for Norman Foster. dEEP’s previous work includes the Beijing offices for Eegoo Cultural Industry Investment Co., which is Material ConneXion’s strategic partner in China. The cell-shaped rooms and plastic, curvilinear forms of the Beijing offices contrast with the sharp angles of the Shanghai building.

The Shanghai building houses exhibition space, a café, offices, and a 500-materials library for Material ConneXion. It also serves as the cornerstone of a creative park for Eegoo, which includes an art center, showroom, cinema, and a few small office buildings.

Material ConneXion plans to open eight more locations in China by 2015. According to George M. Beylerian, the company’s founder, “The future of innovation relies on Chinese resources and potential.”

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Landscape Will Connect New Business District in Suzhou in Suzhou

Architectural Record — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:43:15 +0000

By Laura Raskin

Image courtesy of SWA

SWA has designed the public open spaces for Suzhou Center. Click to view more images.

International landscape architecture firm SWA has been working in the city of Suzhou since 2003, providing landscape design and planning services for a number of projects, including the Gao Xin District and all 45 acres of Suzhou Industrial Park Times Square.

Having proven its ability to weave contemporary, pedestrian-friendly design into a city with a rich 2,500-year history of canals, gardens, and bridges, SWA won an invited competition in September to design the public open spaces for Suzhou Center, a 65-acre area in the developing central business district. “We are very fortunate. It’s a big project for us, very high profile,” says John Wong, an SWA principal in the firm’s Sausalito, California, office.

The business district extends along a grand, urban corridor that flows from Suzhou’s historic core to the Jinji Lake waterfront, and encompasses hotels, residential buildings, retail developments, and offices in various stages of design and construction. An 88-story arched tower called “Gate to the East” (designed by RMJM) topped out this winter and will serve as the district’s landmark. “Our firm will be the one to pull all the various pieces together and create a strong public realm that is pedestrian-oriented and accessible,” says Wong. The designers at SWA organized their scheme around five concentric “C”-shaped rings: two to the west of the tower and three to the east between the tower and the waterfront. Each ring represents a different theme and has its own terrain and program, ranging from a densely wooded area to a heavily trafficked boulevard. The architects employ footbridges, roof gardens, a walkway out onto the lake, outdoor cafes, and tree-lined sky parks to animate and connect the buildings and landscapes.

Development and architecture typically drive design in China, says Wong. “It’s very rare for projects to focus on the public side. In this case, the public open space was key.”

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Gehry Modifies Design for Eisenhower Memorial

Architectural Record — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:39:11 +0000

By Ben Adler

Image courtesy EMC

Gehry has made several changes to the original design: A statue of Eisenhower as a seated barefoot boy has been moved from the center to the back and will now show him as a standing young man; Two free-standing sculptures, rather than bas reliefs in stone walls, will depict Eisenhower as a general and president; The walls will contain quotes from Eisenhower speeches.

On Tuesday morning, the 11-member Eisenhower Memorial Commission (EMC) met in a Senate office building to review changes made by Gehry Partners for its design of a President Dwight Eisenhower memorial in Washington, D.C. The proposed scheme has drawn fire from Eisenhower family members and fans of architectural classicism. The most prominent complaint is that it diminishes Eisenhower by emphasizing his humble roots rather than his professional achievements.

Although the Eisenhower family has not taken up Frank Gehry’s offer to meet and discuss their concerns, his firm has made several changes to the design in response to some of their public criticisms. Most significantly, a life-sized statue that would have presented Eisenhower as a seated barefoot boy in Kansas has been moved from the center to the back of the memorial, and it will now show him as a standing young man. “Disparate voices have helped us fully understand [Eisenhower’s] character,” said Meaghan Lloyd, a colleague of Gehry, who read a letter he wrote to the EMC and spoke on his behalf.

Another major change: Two free-standing sculptures, rather than bas reliefs in limestone walls, will depict Eisenhower as a general and president. One sculpture will show Eisenhower meeting with soldiers from the 101st Airborne division before their arrival in Normandy; the other will show a distinguished Eisenhower with his hand on a globe (an image derived from a 1966 photo titled “The Elder Statesman”). The limestone walls will feature quotes from Eisenhower’s speeches, although the specific quotes are yet to be determined.

Of the roughly half dozen commission members who spoke, all expressed support for the changes and the design in general. Alfred Geduldig, a commissioner from New York, called it “the realization of what we’ve been dreaming” since the EMC was formed in 1999. Sanford Bishop, a Congressman from Georgia (eight of the EMC members serve in Congress), said he “appreciates Gehry being flexible,” adding, “we have arrived at almost a consensus to go forward.” William Thornberry, a Congressman from Texas, added: “Over time it’s gotten better. We’re grateful for Gehry and his team’s willingness to listen and adjust.”

The memorial is to be constructed on an empty lot between the Department of Education and the National Air and Space Museum, just south of the National Mall. It’s unclear when the EMC will vote on the updated design. On July 12, the design will be presented to the National Capital Planning Commission for its approval.

The Eisenhower family was conspicuously absent from today’s hearing. Representatives from the National Civic Art Society, another critic of the design, were present—and they remain unimpressed. “It’s rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Justin Shubow, the group’s chairman. Shubow says the metal tapestry ringing the site will be too large and the sculpture now depicting Eisenhower as a young man is too small. Also, the addition of off-center lintels on the limestone blocks disturbs Shubow. “That represents disorder and danger,” said Shubow. “That’s Gehry.”

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On the Boards: OMA’s Marina Abramović Institute

Architectural Record — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:46:36 +0000

The firm unveils its design for a performance art training camp in upstate New York.

By William Hanley

Image courtesy OMA

Click the image above to view renderings and drawings for OMA’s Marina Abramović Institute.

Marina Abramović goaded a man to insert his head into the base of an architectural model at an event to unveil the design for the artist’s new institute for performance art. After some hesitation, he obliged, and a group of photographers gathered to snap photos of the illuminated mock-up now capping his suddenly prone body.

Abramović shows off a model for the project.

The teaching moment was a fitting introduction to the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art. Designed by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, the plan for the facility combines elements of a museum and a theater with a laboratory and a boot camp. “It was very important for me to find a way to create a school for the public,” Abramović says.

The artist conceived the institute as a training ground for the variety of demanding, durational, and often grueling performance work that she has pioneered throughout her four-decade career. She acquired a former theater and onetime indoor tennis center in Hudson, New York (near her home and about two hours north of New York City) to house it, and hired OMA to convert the neglected building into a 20,000 square-foot, three-story series of spaces that resolutely confounds distinctions between performer and audience.

OMA’s plan replaces a former tennis court with what lead designer Shohei Shigematsu calls a “monastic box,” a versatile full-height space designed to accommodate performance art, as well as dance, film, music, opera, theater, and video. Enclosed on four sides, it receives natural light from a central oculus overhead. The firm wrapped the box in a three-level series of rooms dedicated to a permanent version of the artist’s work The Abramović Method, currently on view in Milan.

When they arrive at the institute, visitors will be asked to sign a contract with the artist in which they promise to remain at the institute for at least two and a half hours—performances in the main space will often last for more than six. They will then surrender their phones, iPods, and other electronics, don white lab coats, and undergo a training regimen that ranges from breathing exercises to standing under magnets for long periods of time. Those who complete the course will get a certificate. “In 40 years of my career, I realized that only long durational works of art have serious potential to change not only the viewer looking at it, but also the performer doing it,” says Abramović.

OMA organized facilities for each training segment—including “crystal” and “levitation” rooms—as well as a library and a cafe in a circuit around the main space, giving each sightlines to both the central performance and to each other. The design also calls for a mezzanine where a “second audience” of people not participating in the regimen can use binoculars to survey those who are.

The design allows visitors to participate in other activities while still keeping an eye on the central performances. OMA looked to existing typologies of durational spectating while developing the visual relationships between the spaces. “Baseball was an interesting case,” says Shigematsu. “It’s quite long and sometimes very boring—no offense—but it’s so long that you can actually watch the event while you’re doing something else.”

The plan leaves the exterior of the building mostly intact, but it opens windows in the former theater’s facades and moves the entry to one side of a street-facing colonnade, replacing it with a sidewalk-to-cornice glass wall that reveals the institute’s primary circulation. Behind it, ramps carry visitors through the sequence of training rooms. They can choose to walk or—depending on their state—be pushed by an attendant while reclining in one of the combination wheelchair and massage chairs designed to move sleeping trainees.

Abramović describes the project as her legacy, and it creates a permanent home for a method of preserving performance art that she introduced at her 2010 retrospective Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For that show, the artist had performers recreate her work in the galleries. At the institute, Abramović hopes that training fresh groups of performers under her aegis will create a living archive of her work and ideas. “I gave it my name because I feel like I’ve become a brand, like Coca-Cola or jeans,” she says. “You say, ‘Marina Abramović,’ and you know it’s not about painting, it’s about performance art—and a kind of hardcore performance art.”

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Straying from Convention

Architectural Record — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:48:07 +0000

Despite declining attendance and revenue, many cities are expanding convention centers or building new ones.

By Fred A. Bernstein

Photo courtesy Events DC

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C. Click to view more images.

After decades of being dissed, New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is finally getting some respect: A $463 million renovation, designed by the Manhattan firm FXFOWLE, will play to the building’s strengths (preserving its once-revolutionary space frame) while bringing massive aesthetic, organizational, and environmental improvements. And with a subway line being extended to its front door—dramatically improving access to the Far West Side location—the 25-year-old facility by James Ingo Freed (of the firm now known as Pei Cobb Freed Partners) may finally live up to its potential.

Unless it is torn down. In January, New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced that because the 600,000-square-foot Javits Center is too small for the biggest conventions, he wants to replace it with a 3 million-plus square-foot facility at Aqueduct Racetrack, in southeastern Queens. Genting, the vast Malaysian company that already runs a gambling operation at the Queens site, has reportedly offered to underwrite the new facility, at a cost of $3 billion or more. The Javits property would then be sold for residential or commercial development.

Spending $463 million to renovate a building slated to be torn down? In the world of convention centers, stranger things have happened. In the last decade, the number of national conventions—as well as attendance at those conventions—has declined, in some cases precipitously, according to Heywood Sanders, a public policy professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. (One example is the AIA convention; its registration has dropped from 23,916 in 2008 to 13,369 in 2011.)

At the same time, dozens of cities have been building new centers or enlarging old ones. In the last year alone, Indianapolis and Philadelphia have opened sprawling new centers, while plans for such facilities are being floated in Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston. Miami Beach recently solicited proposals for a mixed-use development of up to 6 million square feet on the site of its existing, 640,000-square-foot convention center. In San Diego, hoteliers are being asked to accept a new hotel tax to cover the $520 million cost of a convention center expansion, with a rooftop park, by Fentress Architects of Denver. It’s much the same in smaller cities: Spokane’s convention center, enlarged only six years ago, is being readied for a new, $60 million expansion.

The good news for architects: The money is being spent not just on bigger centers, but also better ones. According to Rob Svedberg, an associate principal at Atlanta-based Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback Associates (TVSA), the last few years have seen a pronounced shift from convention centers
as giant, hangarlike buildings—“box with docks,” as they are known—to buildings with finishes comparable to those of concert halls and hotel lobbies. His firm is building a convention center in Nashville with so much woodwork, “you’ll feel like you’re inside a Stradivarius violin,” he says. People who travel to attend conventions, he says, “are looking for authentic experiences. They want to be in a real building.”

Svedberg’s firm also designed the Walter E. Washington Convention Center (2003), site of this year’s AIA convention. If any center deserves to be a financial success, it is this one: an attractive building that seems to invite people in (unlike so many older convention centers), at the heart of the bustling Penn Quarter neighborhood, in a city that is already popular with conventioneers. And yet the center lost $18 million in 2011. Chinyere J. Hubbard, vice president of communications and marketing for the building’s owner, Events DC, says most convention centers show losses and deserve to be judged by how much economic activity they bring to the community. But, she adds, “we have increased our business development effort.” (The goal, she explains, is to land more conventions that make use of food and beverage, audiovisual, and other revenue-producing services.) Events DC has also arranged more than $200 million in city financing for the developer of a Marriott Marquis hotel, now under construction across the street from the convention center.

Washington is following the lead of many other cities in using new hotels to prime the convention-center pump. In Austin, Gensler has designed a 1,000-plus-room, 47-story hotel—the Grand Hotel Austin at Waller Creek—attached to the convention center by an “open-air garden bridge.” Todd Runkle, the managing director of Gensler’s Austin office, says that, in his experience, “the adjacency of a large hotel, usually with meeting space of its own, makes a big difference” to the success of a convention center. Gensler has also designed a master plan for the area around Houston’s convention center, which would be anchored by three new hotels at the center’s corners.

Runkle, who has been involved in numerous convention center projects, says of the enlarged buildings, “The revenue they generate when they are full makes up for the time they sit empty.” And Loren G. Edelstein, editor of Meetings and Conventions magazine, says that “while a convention center itself might not be making money,” it may be paying for itself with revenue the facility brings to the city in other ways.

But such claims are difficult to prove. Critics like Professor Sanders believe the convention center boosters are making a buyer’s market—in which supply now far outstrips demand—even more unbalanced. Though the decline in attendance began before 2008, he says, “the recession worsened an already bad situation.”

Back in New York, Robert Yaro, of the nonprofit Regional Plan Association, favors the Queens convention center plan, which will free up land on the West Side of Manhattan for development and (if all goes well) revitalize an outer-borough neighborhood. But meeting planners, according to the New York Times, are skeptical; people looking for a New York experience, they say, will not be lured to a facility an hour from Midtown.

One thing is clear: The governor’s big plan for Queens has cast a pall over the Javits Center renovation. While the first phase of the project is proceeding, what would have been important parts of the next phase—including a complete revamping of the plaza in front of the building—are on hold. “We’re not allowed to dream,” says Bruce Fowle, founding principal of FXFOWLE.

But Fowle hopes that the completion of phase one, some of it by the end of this year, will help demonstrate that the Javits Center is far from a white elephant. “It’s still going to be a major transformation,” Fowle says. “When the scaffolding comes down, people will be very surprised.”

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Forecast 2012: High—Rise Construction

Architectural Record — Tue, 01 May 2012 21:10:20 +0000

According to construction-economics data from McGraw-Hill Dodge, U.S. tall-building construction is down significantly from its 2006 peak. However, a handful of high-profile projects continue to move forward.

Data from McGraw-Hill Dodge Analytics

Source: McGraw-Hill Dodge Analytics

Click the image above to view a full presentation of these stats [PDF].

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Meier Tapped for Office Project in Trendy Rio Neighborhood

Architectural Record — Tue, 01 May 2012 21:05:31 +0000

By C. J. Hughes

Image courtesy Richard Meier Partners

New Headquarters of Vinci Partners, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Click to view more images.

Continuing a recent push into Latin America, Richard Meier has brought his taut and planar aesthetic to Brazil, where the New York architect has been hired to design a seven-story office in Rio de Janeiro.

The boxy, 50,000-square-foot building, which is to be located one block from the beach in the trendy Leblon neighborhood, will become the new headquarters of Vinci Partners, a global investment firm. Site excavation is under way, with the building scheduled to open in 2014.

Meier says he’s excited to contribute to a city that is rapidly undergoing redevelopment and seems to embrace the kind of Modernism he’s promoted for decades. “I had been down there traveling and seeing things, and I was fascinated by all that was going on,” Meier told RECORD. “It’s a very lively and an amazing place.”

The project, whose development cost has not been disclosed, will feature seven stories.
Each floor will likely have an open floor plan, with the front wall featuring floor-to-ceiling windows. To mitigate solar heat gain, Meier added louvers to the glass façade, which will also mute street noise and help qualify the building for LEED Silver status, he says. RAF Arquitetura, a local firm, will handle the interior design of the offices.

Because the site is mid-block, on a deep lot, the designers were concerned that the back of the building would not receive enough natural light. So they added a courtyard, whose walls will be covered in plants.

The building will also contain 26,000 square feet of below-grade parking, spread among three levels and reached by a pair of car elevators, as well as a single ground-floor retail space that could be occupied by a boutique or café.

The designers intend to use poured-in-place concrete, whose gray hue will harmonize with a largely monochromatic color scheme, says Bernhard Karpf, the project’s design partner. “The client wasn’t excited at first because [concrete] can be considered a poor man’s material down there,” Karpf said, “but once they saw the mock-ups, they realized it will be really nice.”

Though Meier designed two projects last year in Mexico, both of which were to feature W hotels, their construction has been delayed; the Rio project should be his first completed building in Latin America.

Journeying to Brazil gave Meier an opportunity to meet one of his role models, the 104-year-old Oscar Niemeyer, and visit his works. Although Brasilia, the capital city that Niemeyer designed, was overwhelming—“Some of the buildings are good, but the scale of the place is mind-boggling. It lacks a human quality,” Meier says—he was honored to meet Niemeyer in person. He hopes the Brazilian architect has the opportunity to visit the Vinci Partners project once it’s completed. “I can’t wait until he sees it,” he says.

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Newsmaker: Michael Kimmelman

Architectural Record — Tue, 01 May 2012 21:05:14 +0000

RECORD sits down with the new architecture critic of the new york times to discuss his plans for covering the designs of buildings, new york, and the wider world.

Last fall, Michael Kimmelman, the longtime chief art critic of the New York Times, became the architecture critic at the paper and immediately set a new agenda. Rather than write about the latest starchitect building, he began with a piece on a mixed-income housing project in the Bronx by Grimshaw Architects and Dattner Architects called Via Verde, and followed up with articles that focused largely on social architecture and the public realm. Trained as a pianist, he grew up in New York’s Greenwich Village and studied for a doctorate in art history at Harvard before pursuing journalism. Previously he’d written occasionally about architecture for the New York Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books. He talked to Record’s editor in chief Cathleen McGuigan about his ideas from what is the most visible perch in architectural criticism.

Cathleen McGuigan: Before you came back to New York to write about architecture, you spent several years writing from Europe.

Michael Kimmelman: I went abroad for the Times because I thought there really was a way to reconnect culture—and here I mean culture with a big C —to the way we live, to social, political and economic affairs, to use culture as a prism through which to see different social issues, to see how the world worked. At heart, that is what this job I do now is about.

CM: So you see your job as not so much writing about individual works of architecture?

MK: I am always struck that there should be any question about a focus on urbanism, equity, social justice, or infrastructural affairs or whatever that is not specifically about a building in isolation. It seems the great defining virtue of this field is that it’s inextricable from the world around it. And the thing that architects and urban planners and everyone related to these fields do, fundamentally, is to try to figure out how to make the world a better place for people to live in.

CM: Still, will you write about a major new building when it opens? Will you write about what’s in the air?

MK: Will I pay attention to what’s newsworthy? Sure. But you asked when I would write about a building, and this is an interesting question. I went to Paris to look at a retrofitting of a housing project from the ’60s, by a French firm called Vassal and Lacaton, working with Frédéric Druot. The building had been in the show at MoMA, “Small Scale/Big Change,” and it reopened last fall. So now was a good time to see if it actually works, what it actually cost, what the tenants think of these changes.

Part of the beauty of architecture and urban planning is that there is an unpredictability, a way that things take on a life of their own. So looking into a building after it’s been open, to see if the promises are related to the reality, is a natural part of my job.

It’s not so much whether I’m writing about a building, it’s a question of how—whether it’s embedded within other issues or whether it’s about the craft, the formal qualities, how it fits in relation to other buildings being made now, and within the career of the architect or architects who designed it. I believe all of those are extremely important issues. I spent 20 years as an art critic writing about sculpture and artists—I get it. And to talk about a building as if it were a sculpture is a legitimate way of seeing it but is also an impoverishment of the various things that have gone into thinking about that building and to the life of the building and the people who use it. I think it is a disservice to readers. Talking about buildings is a multifaceted thing, and I know it is for the architects who design them.

CM: Our contemporary culture is showing a far greater interest in the issues you happen to be addressing. Your timing is perfect.

MK: I would have written about the same things 10 years ago. I don’t think I’m pointing out anything new. I think I’m probably talking about things in a forum that reaches a lot of people—the impact of the New York Times. The reception, such as I can judge it, has been overwhelmingly welcoming because there are so many people who want to be included in this conversation beyond just the people who seem to have been at the center of the conversation for so many years. And the whole point about going into this field is to act in the real world and try to bring about some things which change people’s lives.

CM: You’ve written a lot about New York City, about Piano’s project at Ronchamp, and a park in Madrid; you also recently visited Bogotá and Medellín. Are you going to go out in the U.S.?

MK: Yes, but I need some time. First of all, it was a pleasure to rediscover New York and to have an excuse to see all five boroughs, to embrace the city in its true amazing complexity and during an administration that has been focused on urban affairs. And to establish a base of operations, to use New York as a constant ground note for exploring other issues. That said, I have no limit on what I can cover. So of course I look forward to traveling around the country.

CM: There’s a long shadow cast on your job by Ada Louise Huxtable, the Times’s first full-time architecture critic. That’s a very high bar. How does that affect you?

MK: Thank you for asking this question. Look, my conception of this job was created by Ada Louise. When I was young, she was the critic, and she established this not as an extension of the art world but as a position of buildings in the context of public policy and urban affairs. That was, for me, the touchstone. It’s exactly how I would like to see this job. I think Ada Louise also chose her subjects very carefully and didn’t write about buildings as detached from the world.

It’s very interesting to me that you have two women—I mean, I was a little boy, but still—who were such powerful figures in shaping what remains, half a century later, this conversation: Jane Jacobs in the neighborhood where I grew up, and Ada Louise, who is still writing so wonderfully [in the Wall Street Journal]. You know, without thinking this consciously, they both have had such a profound effect on my idea of what it means to be really engaged in these issues.

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A New Work of Architecture for Denver’s Golden Triangle

Architectural Record — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:27:20 +0000

The History Colorado Center, designed by native David Tryba, opens this Saturday.

By David Hill

Denver’s Golden Triangle neighborhood, just south of stately Civic Center Park, has become something of an architectural showcase, with an eclectic assortment of works by Gio Ponti (the 1971 Denver Art Museum), Michael Graves (a 1995 addition to the Denver Public Library), Daniel Libeskind (a 2006 art museum expansion), and Brad Cloepfil (the 2011 Clyfford Still Museum). The area’s newest architectural attraction is the History Colorado Center, which opens April 28. And unlike its neighbors, the building was designed by someone actually born and raised in the state: Denver architect David Tryba.

Although not well-known outside of Colorado, Tryba has for years been quietly making a mark on his native state through some high-profile civic commissions, including Denver’s Wellington Webb Municipal Building, an addition to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and a new visitor center and parking structure at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Tryba, who founded his practice in 1988, works in a contextual style he calls “modern urbanism.” “We do contemporary buildings based on historically modern values,” he says., works in a contextual style he calls “modern urbanism.” “We do contemporary buildings based on historically modern values,” he says.

For the $110 million History Colorado Center, which replaces a much smaller building, Tryba clad the surface of the concrete-frame structure with horizontal panels of Indiana limestone, a nod to Denver Public Library’s original 1955 building, located a block away. Extensive windows allow passersby to see inside, particularly at night. During the day, light streams into the building’s most prominent feature: a four-story atrium, which doubles as a gathering space for public events. (In the old building, the main exhibition space was a windowless basement.) “I wanted the museum to be open and welcoming,” Tryba says. “Museums shouldn’t be the stuffy old places we experienced in our childhood.”

Inside, Tryba used local materials, including squared-off Douglas-fir logs (for benches), sandstone (for admission counters), and recycled beer-bottle glass (which adds sparkle to the terrazzo floors). Exhibition space accounts for about half of the 200,000-square-foot structure. The building also contains classrooms, a library, and storage areas, along with event space that will bring in much-needed revenue from rentals. Officials say the history center is a “reinvention” of the old museum, which was demolished to make way for a judicial complex.

At the new museum, says chief operating officer Kathryn Hill, the focus is on stories, not objects, with lots of hands-on displays and more technology. “We’re building this against a backdrop of diminishing attendance to history museums,” Hill says. “They’re perceived as static, and history is perceived as boring. Our idea was to build a building that turns the idea of what a history museum is supposed to be on its head.”

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