sejima wears comme

Sejima wears a comme des garcons piece made for her by Rei, attending the Pritzker Prize ceremony, along with Ryue Nishisawa, at Ellis Island in New York last Monday. Long known to be an avid Comme fan and personal friend of Rei,the choice is no surprise, if not expected. Though the pair had collaborated on the Comme des Garcons exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo last year, I eagerly await the eventuality of these two visionary minds putting their hands together to create a more permanent Comme space in the future.

bras basah station : woha

10 years in the making, the brand new Bras Basah station of the Circle line designed by Woha opened last week. Rising from the platform, one arrives at the bottom of a monumental void bathed in fluttering light refracted through the thin sheet of water hovering above the opening on top. The sky beyond this sheet of water is slightly obscured but signs of the outside world is reassuringly present. Ascending from the bottom of the void, the angles of the various elements play off each other, the retaining walls, light wells, thresholds,escalators, light and darkness, suspended in a tense composition of geometric forms. Cylindrical structural beams fly across the void, punching through the retaining walls, clad in a field of pale staggered rectangular panels. The bold angular geometry is reminiscent of 60s brutalist architecture, in its matter-of-factly straightforwardness, its muscularity and monumentality. There is a quiet restraint in the use of materials and patterns, yet one can still find within the spaces of the station a palette rich in nuances and subtle textures.

1111 lincoln road : HdeM

Who says carparks do not deserve to be architecture? Parking spaces, the most used but least occupied part of a building, are usually relegated to a banal and unabashedly functional appendage to the building or place which they serve, and if they are incorporated as part of a building, they are masked and obscured from view, as if attempting to pretend that they are not there, like an ostrich with its head in the sand. With such blatant aesthetic neglect and perfunctory treatment, architects are ashamed of carparks, urbanistic deserts met with scorn by urbanists.

At 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami, this conception of parking structures is rendered a stereotype. Designed by Herzog and de Meuron for the developer, Robert Wennett, the carpark is conceived as an extension of the urban fabric in which the whole development is situated, with a mix programme thrown in, a car park with a cultural and urbanistic dimension. Attached to the adjacent residential block, the parking structure is a stack of brute concrete planes, placed at different heights from each other, some extravagantly high, held up by an array of irregular trapezoidal columns. The edges of the concrete planes are lined with railings made of thin cables, virtually invisible. It is like a skeletal counterpart to the more solid volume which it is attached to. There is an abstract and subime quality not commonly associated with parking structures, raw and unadorned, spare and muscular. It is a refreshing change from the more exuberant and baroque fare that the architects have been serving up in the last few years. The whole structure is open and airy, cars are displayed in full view without shame. Retail shops line the ground level, with an island of retail space situated on level 5. (For those who are nearby, a Taschen bookshop will open there soon and at the level 5 retail space, there will be a shop called Alchemist stocking Rick Owens and Margiela among other labels.) The space on level 2 and 5 are available for use as event spaces, art installations, weddings and whatever you can think of.

The structure evokes a constriction site, the superstructure of a yet to be completed building waiting to be wrapped up and for potential programmatic content to be injected. It is this unspecificity that makes the intent of such a bare and open structure so painfully obvious. Easy adaptability makes the structure usable for a wide range of functions and limitless possibilities for retrofitting. There may come a time when the automobile no longer will play such a vital role in the running of our society, and something else will take precedence. And it will be this time when the architecture of this structure can express it's true potential. It is a building designed to change with an elastic programming that is built into it from the very start. The quest for one offs and specificity becomes at best a foolish ideal; the dictum form follows function superseded by form accommodating functions.

"Christine Binswanger, the partner at Herzog & de Meuron in charge of 1111 Lincoln Road, tells of a nervous phone call from Wennett the day after it opened for business. "Most people don't know what it is," he said. "Those who know what it is think it's unfinished. Those who know it's finished don't know how to get in." When I visited, it wasn't yet humming quite in the way it is supposed to."
the observer 28.3.10

rolex learning centre / sanaa

derelict orchard

A gaping hole within the grove of malls and hotels lining the 2 sides of Orchard road, devoid of activity. The remnants of what once stood there lay behind a clean hoarding, sterile and unmarked, and unseen by the passers-by. There will be action on site in due time, but the doctor has yet to decide what to do, the carcass of the mostly demolished building lays silently waiting for a new body to be grafted on, and the bolt of lightning to bring it back to life. The adjacent buildings bear scars from the forceful removal their neighbour, a relationship as close as siamese twins, but as cold as runners running next to each other in a 100m race. More haunting is the imprint of what once stood there even before the now demolished building had existed. A phantasmagoric spectre hangs over the apathetic city dweller. What once stood there was deemed to have no value. Neither does it have a price.

yohji yamamoto gansevoort : junya ishigami

We bid farewell to the Yohji Yamamoto Gansevoortstore as the company, plagued with financial troubles, begin to wind down its North American operations, ceasing all distribution on the continent.

The short lived Gansevoort store which opened with great fanfare in 2008 is designed by Junya Ishigami, a protege of Kazuyo Sejima. It is a remodeled wedge shape single storey building at the corner of a street junction. The exisitng brickwork was exposed giving the facade of the building a raw tactile quality. The brickwork is also rendered with a certain lightness, looking as if it is a thin skin folded with precision, forming razor sharp corners and soft subtle curves. The brickwork, punctuated with generous openings of clear frameless glass, provides a clear vista into and through the interior space.

The building volume is spliced into two portions with an oblique cut in the centre. The triangular volume housed the retail space while the other volume contained the stockroom and private areas. The urbanistic quality of this move is undeniable, it also gives the store it's quirk. which is the need for sales staff to go out of the building and go into the other wing to have access to stock and sizes not displayed on the sales floor.

According to ny.racked.com, the store closed last Tuesday with a flash 90% sale before the shutters went down for good. And apparently, Yohji's fanancial troubles are in great part caused by the recent spurt of lavish store openings, which besides the Gansevoort store, includes the Rue Cambon store in Paris and Antwerp store in the MOMU building. And as the mens fashion weeks begin for the fall winter 2010 season with Yohji Yamamoto Pour Homme missing on the schedule for the second season, we hear murmurs that the company is planning to close down the Antwerp and Rue Cambon stores. The company is now going through a great structural change, that will have a lasting impact on its future as a viable label. We can only hope that Yohji's creative integrity will not be further compromised.

paisajes emergentes : scenography

Stumbled upon these wonderfully seductive sectional perspectives rendered in grayscale presented as part of the proposal for the Museum of Polish History in Warsaw by the studio Paisajes Emergentes. Like little pieces of scenography, each is a vignette of a different period of polish history, framed within the gallery box. The actors on stage are miniscule beside the overscaled set, made to illustrate events bigger than life. The visitors are the unsolicited actors, walking unwittingly into history by chance, or by fate, becoming part of the cast performing to an audience unseen beyond the virtual proscenium.



pictures from here.

Paisajes Emergentes is a studio collective based in Medellin and Bogota, Colombia.

holl in herning

Lying on the flat landscape of Herning, is the recently completed Herning Center of the Arts designed by Steven Holl. Resembling a pile of white shirt sleeves, it forms a counterpoint to the old Angli shirt factory sitting across the street., which is shaped like a dark grey shirt collar. The "sleeves" are interwined and forms the roof of the building, draping over the spaces within, forming a convex underbelly that is reminiscent of Jørn Utzon's Bagsværd Church and the Kuwait National Assembly.

However, the most in triguing part of the building, for me, is the wrinkled concrete surface found on the exterior of the building. Created by inserting fabric tarps into the formwork in which the fresh concrete is poured - allowing the concrete to take the shape of the creases and folds created by the tarp, the wall yields a kind of softness that is hard to create using conventional casting techniques.The quality is fabric like and visually soft, uncharacteristic for concrete; the tactile nature of the wall begs the visitor to touch it, to verify its materiality. There is an element of chance involved in its creation; neither the builders nor the architects have total control of exactly what the surface would eventually look like till the formwork of the concrete has been removed. They can only set the condition in which the surface is formed, almost like playing a surrealist game.

More about the building here and here.