occasionally, rem rules.

So occasionally, I see a building that I knew about, had studied in class, was completely aware of it’s raison d’etre, yet when I visit, I’m completely blown away. For me, this was true for Rem’s IIT student center. So so so cool. Everything was textured, layered, colored, refined, smooth, and industrial all at the same time. Lots of pictures on flickr. We only spent a few minutes wandering, but I could have stayed all day. It was complex, without being over bearing; layered without being messy; and incorporated graphics in a way that didn’t distract from the rest of the structure. Its nice to see something every once in a while that reminds you that good design can support the functionality of a space without retracting into its own little vortex.

 

a star studded afternoon

I’m definately on a vacation, but still worried about school starting up soon, as I have been for a while. How do you prepare for re-entry into grad school? Read a few Arch Records? Flip through a monograph or two? Starting working up my caffeine tolerance?

I guess one approach was the one I took this afternoon – touring another school’s architecture building and star-architecture campus. The University of Cincinnati has buildings by Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Frank Ghery, Morphosis, Charles Gwathmey, Bernard Tschumi, Charles Moore, and I.M. Pei. I’ve got most of the photos posted up on my flickr account (see the sidebar).

Morphosis (left), Gwathmey (center), Moore (right).

Morphosis (left), Tschumi (center), above sunken stadium.

Designing architecture into a campus setting is different from designing it for a pre-existing city. The users are different, the context, the environment, the culture. I don’t know where else eight ‘brand name’ architects exist within several hundred feet of eachother. Each building is vying for recognition, in competition with its surroundings, instead of the easy win granted to other, more isolated works of star power. Does this type of building work better when contrasted within a constant and more mellow city fabric?