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Somehow our house in Stanfordville became, for its 15 minutes, the New York Magazine poster child for the un-Hamptons. It’s not exactly in the Catskills (as listed) and the Home Plate (box at side) wouldn’t be on my must-eat list, but we are still delighted. And perplexed just how it happened.
Our cute little house is for rent (we use it less and less) and is in one of the most beautiful, varied and relaxing parts of the world. Call Kim Lane if you are interested!
Metropolis magazine’s spread, with my pick for the best hotel pool (which they altered to ‘spa’), was featured in the April issue. Architects, planners and designers were asked to pick out their favorites from hotels around the world in order to assemble a collaged “Dream Hotel.” To see all of the choices, pick up the April issue or head here to see it online.
The Therme Vals is, incredibly, the town pool for Vals, a small village in eastern Switzerland.
In my home town we had a YMCA.
Peter Zumthor crafted virtually every part of this hillside building from layers of local stone, a beautiful greenish marble/slate sliced in thin layers. The result is a set of spaces that feel at once roughly carved from live rock, and as precise as a slide rule (I know, who even knows what a slide rule is!).
There are pools of different temperatures, each exactly tempered to a specific heat or cold. There are showers in tall stone rooms with enormous quantities of needle sharp, or waterfall or hose directed water. There is a steam rooms that moves progressively toward hell, with the red glow of fire intensifying at each step. There are lockers with black leather curtains. And a pool outside in the frigid Swiss winter reached from the safety of an interior pool.
It is almost Roman in its exploration of the interplay of water and space. And it is almost science in its precision and array of possibilities. Zumthor is the most metaphysical of western architects, and his meditation on water and stone is utterly divine.
More and more we are accustomed to seeing the world from space.
No one I have ever known has actually been to space (though I once did chat with John Glenn at a New Year’s party) but we now consider this view from above as natural as any terrestrial one. We even consider it a natural right to be provided this once rarified view at no charge. Even our iPhones have a native satellite view at eye popping resolution. Resolution so amazing that while I could see someone swimming in my pool (were they there at that moment), I actually can see the chaises on the terrace and the car in my driveway (all available for rent this summer!). This resolution, limited by the Federal Government to 20”, is astonishingly captured from more than 1,000 miles above the earth. That is equivalent to taking a photograph of your grandmother in Boca from your window in New York. And we are still barely impressed.
Our office now designs projects that rely on that diety-like perspective. It started as an fascination with the “plan”, a typical obsession of architects, and progressed until Google Earth achieved ‘satellite ubiquity’. Now everyone is literate in the birds eye view and it is now possible to ‘speak’ to the planet via Google Earth. Target is actually directing ads and logos to the everypresent sky-eyes; if we extrapolate this tendency we will have signage regulations for roofs before long.
Combine Google Earth with Street View and you have the best way to visit nearly any man-made place in the civilized world. We all visit more places virtually than physically and, rather than travel guides or travel novels, we prefer the screen. This is both incredible in its immediacy and frightenly uncurated and completely unauthoritative. We are able to see virtually anything, but understand virtually nothing.
On screen the eerily beautiful transitions from outer space to your own house (Eames ‘Power of Ten’, eat your heart out!) and from plan to oblique to modeled oblique to street view panorama are becoming part of our visual vocabulary. The mirror balls (or are they fisheye lenses?) that once facilitated the transitions from plan to elevation were the portals to another world. A world of unmoving context through which we move effortlessly. Frozen reality: The Fermata, The Matrix and Eadweard Muybridge are now worlds we effortless inhabit.
There is even a timescale on Google Earth that allows us to move backward and forward in time, completing the time/space continuum. We are, of course, all waiting for the ‘real time’ views we see in movies like Syriana and the Gulf War bombing-porn. And it will happen right about the time we are all driving electric cars; soon but not soon enough. When we have real time Street View our total surveillance state will have finally arrived, and it will be one in which we both perform and observe.
Like many projections of the future, Minority Report figures in our view of technology; like transparent touch activated computers (touch yes, transparent and flexible very soon); personalized advertising that follows the target (yes, if you consider online ads powered by your search and email contents); pre-emptive crime prevention (well, there was the war in Iraq…).
Designing for Google Earth is like acknowledging the camera. The camera changed the world it photographed. Its view forever changed the way we see the world and the way the world sees us. I would tell you to get used to it, but we already have.
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Our first Department of Probation Resource Hub in downtown Manhattan was featured in this month’s issue of Metropolis!
Opening Up Opportunities by Steven Zacks
Here’s the presentation I gave at Cornell’s AAP Campus last week. If you couldn’t make it, have some free time, and are interested in the evolution of logos, museums and how they relate to some of our projects, check out the video above or watch it on our website here.
“Identity Crisis”, a talk about identity in architecture, is on for 6:30pm Wednesday, April 4 at 50 West 17 Street, 2nd Floor. RSVP to bm346@cornell.edu
Starting with the proposition that ‘every building is a biography’ the talk develops the case for identity as a seminal force shaping architecture and design in general.
But the question remains, whose identity?
The architect?
The user?
The institution?
And what shapes identity?
Technology?
Market forces?
Individual brand?
All of the above?
Please join us for adult refreshments, a show crowded with images, and a chance to let someone else do the talking!
Hope to see you there.
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