Eva Hagberg

Dreamland Review (LOFT)

Published Spring 2009 in LOFT

Although architecture is not generally a numbers game, there is a very high probability of any given architect having read Delirious New York.

First published in 1978 and written by the now seminally- ahead-of-the-trend Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, this book was introduced as “A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.”

In his relatively short and surprisingly easy-to-read tract, written long before he co-founded Volume Magazine with the theoretician Mark Wigley, long before he wrote that other great book SMLXL and introduced shopping as a critical and architectural idea, and long before he started breaking ground in then-mysterious China with his loopily geometric CCTV Tower, Koolhaas outlined the way in which cities – Manhattan specifically – developed, changed, and grew.

Delirious New York became a textbook for the next generation – always generally, often literally, and it put this young Dutch architect on the critical and practical world map. Over the next thirty years, Koolhaas’s Rotterdam-based firm OMA became a touchstone for young architects, any employment there a stamp of approval not only of their creative capacity but also of their infinite patience for endless hours in the model shop and serious hardcore work ethic. And, over the next thirty years, Delirious New York, particularly its dreamy, dark renderings by the early-century illustrator Hugh Ferriss, became canon.

It is only fitting, then, that it is a speculative project of Koolhaas’s – the watercolor Plan of Dreamland, created the year before Delirious was published – that sparked this small and wonderful exhibition up until March 2, 2009 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. 

Carbon Footprint (Metropolis)

Published September 2008 (link)

It is probably a bad idea to drive a Hummer to a Scandic Hotel. It is probably a bad idea to leave it idling while you run in looking for a single-packed toiletry item (which you won’t find) and an equally bad idea to ask the staff to change your sheets every night. It is definitely a bad idea to ask for your own hermetically sealed packet of jam at breakfast (you won’t get it) or not to separate your trash from your recycling (because it means the hotel has to do it for you).

It might seem like a lot to ask of guests, but taking a hard line on some choices, and a gentler, encouraging touch with others, is all part of the Swedish chain’s program to reduce its carbon emissions to zero. The company is giving itself a little bit of time to get there—“By 2025, we shall not contribute to the carbon emissions at all with our operations,” says Jan Peter Bergkvist, the vice president for sustainable business—but Scandic is trying. And so far, its efforts are working. 

Click on Scandic’s Sustainability Live Report on its Web site (www.scandichotels.com) to see a delightfully graphic tally of “the environmental savings we have made since 1996.” For now, the company shows the numbers for four target systems—measuring consumption levels for energy, water, unsorted waste, and fossil carbon dioxide—a framework created by the Natural Step, an international NGO dedicated to improving corporate sustainability. For now, you can calculate the environmental gains from your Scandic sojourn (achieved by drinking the tap water, sharing the jam, and staying in a place heated and lit by alternative energy sources) by clicking on how many nights you’d like to stay and seeing just how many lightbulbs pop up. That number is compared to a benchmark released by the International Tourism Partnership, a hotel-industry NGO set up by the Prince of Wales Trust. They’re not exact, but they’re close enough that Scandic can tell that it’s making a difference. 

Suburbs (Architectural Record)

Published September 2008

Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000, by John Archer. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 496 pages, $27.50

Sprawling Places, by David Kolb. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2008, 267 pages, $22.95.

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, by Fritz Haeg. New York, Metropolis Books, 2008, 128 pages, $24.95

Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, edited by Andrew Blauvelt,  Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 2008, 336 pages, $34.95

A brilliant scene in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian finds a crowd chanting, in complete unison, “We are all individuals! We are all individuals!” One man, standing slightly aside, says, as if perplexed, “I’m not.”

Scholars, writers, artists, architects, urbanists, and now, a subset of thinkers we could just as well call suburbanists, seem to be in the same situation. Entranced by the idea that citizens – suburban, rural, and urban alike -- are all convinced that the suburbs are all the same, they shout, together, “The suburbs are all individuals!”

Four recent books – two by academics, two not – address that individuality of sameness of the suburb: how it came to be, what it can be, what it could be, and how we can (and should) look at it. Three of them address the suburbs as fact, and seem to say: “History happened, we’re here, now let’s play with it.” But what is that history? 

Read John Archer's book Architecture and Suburbia to find out. Really. Read it. Ignore the standard-sounding title, its bland cover, its academic origins, the fact that it has footnotes. It is quietly fascinating, engagingly thorough, and completely riveting.

Archer's narrative takes social history and renders it architectural, explaining how a seventeenth-century interest in notions of selfhood turns into an eighteenth-century obsession with privies, and then transforms, centuries later, into that developed same-same suburb. Ideas we take for granted -- the family that eats dinner together stays together, separate bathrooms save a marriage -- are traced back here, not only philosophically and historically, but visually as the book is full of plans and sections and illustrations that show exactly how Enlightenment philosophy translated into a room for the resident male, or how General Electric's need to sell more stoves turned into the American obsession with "the dream house."

Architecture and Suburbia is not only about architecture and suburbia. It is about how we think, how we live, and how we want to live. It is about how architecture -- even when it might not look like much -- is the outward articulation of our deepest questions, a physical sign of our search for answers, and, in the end, a symbol of it all.

The philosopher David Kolb is entranced by the symbol. Suburbs are not monolithic," he writes in his new book Sprawling Places. This tract-tome (it was right there!) sure is.

Boundary Issues (New York Times T: Style Magazine)

Published September 28, 2008 (link)

Architecture is, by definition, site-specific. In some buildings, however, the idea of site transcends the physicality of landscape to engage with the environment on multiple levels — emotional, spiritual, conceptual. For example, the guesthouse that the architect Brad Cloepfil designed for a couple of art collectors in upstate New York doesn’t just sit nicely next to a bubbling brook, in its bucolic, sun-dappled setting. With its articulated steel frame and sleek wood paneling, the 1,200-square-foot house plays off its densely wooded hillside setting, flipping back and forth between shelter and openness, protection and enclosure, inside and out.

‘‘We spent a lot of time just reading the landscape,’’ says Cloepfil, who was commissioned to design not just the guesthouse but also the main house and an art barn. The architect walked around all 350 acres of this hilly, winding property, siting the main house (which is still under construction) first and situating the guesthouse just down the road but completely out of view. The land itself was a big inspiration. ‘‘The meadows look almost like they’re carved out of the forest,’’ Cloepfil says, describing the trees as a ‘‘field of black lines against the foliage.’’

Rising in the West (Wallpaper)

Published Wallpaper October 2008

Ben van Berkel wants to talk about space-time. At 9am, it seems a little early to be talking time-warp continuums, the potentials of looped narratives, the applicability of the tri-fold diagram. It also seems a little out of context, as we’re in the breakfast lounge of the Gramercy Park Hotel, Ian Schrager’s pre-40 Bond practice run at an extra-louche (“Schnabel was here”) darkly nostalgic Manhattan joint, but when van Berkel’s on a roll, he’s on a roll.

Let’s start at the beginning. Twenty years ago Ben van Berkel and his wife Caroline Bos founded van Berkel + Bos. Van Berkel was the architect and Bos, an art historian and former journalist, was the critic-in-residence, composing everything from essays to project descriptions – roles they continued once their practice transformed into its current incarnation, UN Studio, in 1998.

Van Berkel & Bos was behind the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, a single-pylon engineering marvel, and the Moebius House in Het Gooi, a fluid space inspired by the continuous one-sided Moebius Loop (most often see as the recycling logo). It was this house, completed in 1998, that ignited the architectural duo’s interest in space and time, the idea of folding dimensions and architecturally, and inspired their desire to re-evaluate the way they look at shape.

The same year, van Berkel, unhappy with the way the studio was mono-focused on architecture and its articulation, and inspired by the fact that he wanted to work on many different scales, formed the looser collective of UN Studio. It went on to design everything from bridges and houses to museums and masterplans and even a 55m table, “The World’s Longest Table for all Cultures.” But the collective was in Europe. The old world. And very much part of the Dutch group of architect such as Winka Dubbeldam and West 8 and MVRDV, firms that were as good at engineering pig farms as they were at folding a façade, as interested in books as they were in buildings. Now, UN Studio is breaking free.

Strategy: Getting Booked (Architect)

Published Architect, July 2008 (link)

Some monographs are published as intellectual exercises, to engage the curious would-be architect. Others grace coffee tables and can help while away an empty afternoon. Many aid architects in getting more work. And for all the ways that a reader can look at a monograph, there are just as many ways for an architect to get one published.

So who gets a monograph? Sometimes the path to publication is surprising—and that's exactly the point. Many architects aim for a boutique publisher like Monacelli Press, a New York City imprint that was started 14 years ago in a SoHo basement and currently has offices overlooking Norman Foster's Hearst Tower (in case the staff ever forget about the sweeping power of architecture in their day-to-day bookmaking). Now owned by Random House, Monacelli was the publisher that issued Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau's S,M,L,XL , the seminal 1997 monograph that, editorial director Andrea Monfried says, “everyone wants to do the new version of.” That's a tough call, but she points out that what S,M,L,XL's creators did is crucial: They thought holistically about the relation of the book to what it describes.

“There are so many different ways of organizing the book—from the structure to the table of contents—that for every architect, there has to be some relation to the way they practice,” Monfried says. Monacelli's 2000 Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects monograph, named for the fluid relationship the two principals see betweenWork/Life , is a perfect example. “The trick,” Monfried says, “is to get your personality to come through.”

Home McMakin (Wallpaper*)

Published Wallpaper*, August 2008 (full version)

It’s Thursday in Seattle and it’s gray. It’s been gray since Tuesday night, and it will be gray again on Friday. This particular Thursday morning, it’s gray outside but busy inside at William and Ruth True’s house. It’s a typical morning: Ruth steaming milk for her and Bill’s nine-year-old daughter Sophie, Bill checking out an emerging artist’s website, Sophie avoiding her homework. And there are the dogs, Butter and Honey. Butter’s bigger than Honey, a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog where she’s a (of course) honey-colored Labradoodle. The dogs are both excited, jumping around, up and down and over, and Honey jumps up on the sofa and knocks into Sophie, holding the cup of warm steamed milk fresh from Ruth’s gleaming espresso maker, and the milk spills.

It spills onto art.

There’s a lot of art in the True house. There’s a sculpture of a guy crouching down under the stairs, and two photographs by Malerie Marder over the other stairs. There’s a Kiki Smith piece on the side table in the formal living room, and there’s a Brian Jungen on top of the cabinets in the informal kitchen. Even downstairs, in a desolate hallway that leads to the guest bedroom (itself a commissioned work of art), there’s a Claude Zervas and then, even right next to the laundry room, there’s another piece, The Quiet Ticking of Dreams, by New York-based sound artist Ben Rubin of the beloved Listening Post –“We tried to buy it but there was just no way,” Bill True says – project that sat in the basement of the old pre-Piano New York Times building.

Continue reading "Home McMakin (Wallpaper*)" »

Published May 16, 2008 (link)

 

At the very end of last year, the American Institute of Architects awarded Chicago-based architect Stanley Tigerman the Topaz Medallion, which “honors an individual who has made outstanding contributions to architecture education for at least 10 years.” Technically, Tigerman practices with his wife, Margaret McCurry, as Tigerman McCurry Architects , and directs, along with Eva Maddox, his hometown’s Archeworks school, which provides a one-year post-professional education grounded in social causes. Some of his well-known projects include a playfully wonky (some might dare call it postmodernist) Children’s Advocacy Center, and the Pacific Garden Mission, a center for Chicago’s homeless. Practically, Tigerman thinks, disregards, considers, blames, hopes, and criticizes. He is judgmental, thoughtful, optimistic, and politically incorrect. No one is immune: his peers, his friends, his professors, his interviewer. Eva Hagberg takes a walk on his educational wild side. 

Good morning Stanley.
You’re right on time. Actually you’re a little late. 

In 1987 philanthropists Mike and Penny Winton decided that they needed a guesthouse to complement their Philip Johnson-designed home in Orono, Minnesota. In 2007 owner-developer Kirt Woodhouse decided that the University of St. Thomas needed that same guesthouse for its Daniel C. Gainey Conference Center campus in Owatonna, Minnesota. In the 20 years since the Wintons hired an up-and-coming Santa Monica-based architect sho seemed to be onto something with his use of vernacular materials and mishmash approach to buildings, the name Frank Gehry has gone beyond household, and the guesthouse has become more than just a place to sleep.

The Winton Guest House comprises a 2,300-square-foot collection of discrete shapes that form one building (one can see in its separate cohesion a precursor for Mississippi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum). It is clad in brick, plywood, and black and galvanized sheet metal—the same types of materials Gehry used on his own Santa Monica home, the design that launched the Frank O. Gehry Associates frenzy.

Published April 16, 2008 (link)

“We like to think of ourselves as the most open-minded clients we’re going to have,” said Greg Bradshaw, principal of the downtown architecture/interiors/fashion/book/concept/ethos/lifestyle/design firm AvroKO, which he heads along with Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, and a very tired—that evening, at least—William Harris. The four of them were sitting at the end of the bar at PUBLIC, their first venture as their own clients, and were talking about everything from the just-completed transformation of the restaurant Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring (on which Harris has been working non-stop), to their plans for a new restaurant on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, to joking about what exactly O’Neal’s SAT scores were, and what exactly they mean.

The four, who met when they were eighteen, each have different approaches, personalities, and skills, but together they make up a coherent and collaborative whole. Initially, however, they operated as two firms, Avro Design (Bradshaw and Farmerie) and KO Media Studios (O’Neal and Harris). After many years of collaborating, the two firms merged while working on PUBLIC. Their ethos is research-driven as much as it is fantastical, interpretive as much as creative, and conceptual as much as style-conscious. The firm has become known mostly for its historically referential restaurant design, clear in everything from the Lower East Side’s Stanton Social, which adopted the neighborhood’s long history of tailoring with a herringbone-riffing wine wall, to PUBLIC—the restaurant they own and above which they work—where they took the discarded fixtures of municipal buildings from the 1930s and recast them, so that an old library card catalog is used to store old menus.

Tigerman Sees Red (And Topaz) (Metropolismag.com)

Published May 16, 2008 (link)

 

At the very end of last year, the American Institute of Architects awarded Chicago-based architect Stanley Tigerman the Topaz Medallion, which “honors an individual who has made outstanding contributions to architecture education for at least 10 years.” Technically, Tigerman practices with his wife, Margaret McCurry, as Tigerman McCurry Architects , and directs, along with Eva Maddox, his hometown’s Archeworks school, which provides a one-year post-professional education grounded in social causes. Some of his well-known projects include a playfully wonky (some might dare call it postmodernist) Children’s Advocacy Center, and the Pacific Garden Mission, a center for Chicago’s homeless. Practically, Tigerman thinks, disregards, considers, blames, hopes, and criticizes. He is judgmental, thoughtful, optimistic, and politically incorrect. No one is immune: his peers, his friends, his professors, his interviewer. Eva Hagberg takes a walk on his educational wild side. 

Good morning Stanley.
You’re right on time. Actually you’re a little late. 

Mobile Home? (Metropolis)

In 1987 philanthropists Mike and Penny Winton decided that they needed a guesthouse to complement their Philip Johnson-designed home in Orono, Minnesota. In 2007 owner-developer Kirt Woodhouse decided that the University of St. Thomas needed that same guesthouse for its Daniel C. Gainey Conference Center campus in Owatonna, Minnesota. In the 20 years since the Wintons hired an up-and-coming Santa Monica-based architect sho seemed to be onto something with his use of vernacular materials and mishmash approach to buildings, the name Frank Gehry has gone beyond household, and the guesthouse has become more than just a place to sleep.

The Winton Guest House comprises a 2,300-square-foot collection of discrete shapes that form one building (one can see in its separate cohesion a precursor for Mississippi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum). It is clad in brick, plywood, and black and galvanized sheet metal—the same types of materials Gehry used on his own Santa Monica home, the design that launched the Frank O. Gehry Associates frenzy.

The Storytellers (Architect's Newspaper)

Published April 16, 2008 (link)

“We like to think of ourselves as the most open-minded clients we’re going to have,” said Greg Bradshaw, principal of the downtown architecture/interiors/fashion/book/concept/ethos/lifestyle/design firm AvroKO, which he heads along with Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, and a very tired—that evening, at least—William Harris. The four of them were sitting at the end of the bar at PUBLIC, their first venture as their own clients, and were talking about everything from the just-completed transformation of the restaurant Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring (on which Harris has been working non-stop), to their plans for a new restaurant on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, to joking about what exactly O’Neal’s SAT scores were, and what exactly they mean.

The four, who met when they were eighteen, each have different approaches, personalities, and skills, but together they make up a coherent and collaborative whole. Initially, however, they operated as two firms, Avro Design (Bradshaw and Farmerie) and KO Media Studios (O’Neal and Harris). After many years of collaborating, the two firms merged while working on PUBLIC. Their ethos is research-driven as much as it is fantastical, interpretive as much as creative, and conceptual as much as style-conscious. The firm has become known mostly for its historically referential restaurant design, clear in everything from the Lower East Side’s Stanton Social, which adopted the neighborhood’s long history of tailoring with a herringbone-riffing wine wall, to PUBLIC—the restaurant they own and above which they work—where they took the discarded fixtures of municipal buildings from the 1930s and recast them, so that an old library card catalog is used to store old menus.