Eva Hagberg

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.

The Worst Building In The History of Mankind (Esquire)

Published February 1, 2008 (link)

It's the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, where the world's 22nd largest skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that way ... forever.

A picture doesn't lie -- the one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of Cinderella's castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the official government photos of the North Korean capital -- the hotel is such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up, airbrushing it to make it look like it's open -- or Photoshopping or cropping it out of pictures completely.

Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn't the just the worst designed building in the world -- it's the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.

Roman & Williams (Wallpaper)

Published March 2007

‘I want to see a world of flesh and bone,’ Robin Standefer, principal, with husband Stephen Alesch, of New York-based architecture and design firm Roman & Williams says on a Thursday afternoon, sitting at her office's long and thoroughly beaten-up conference table, one she crafted out of recovered wood and un-matched industrial legs. "A world of food, architecture, design, sex."

Five years ago, a little movie called Zoolander came out. Revered among the college set, admired by nearly everyone who saw it, the film was remarkable as much for its set design—skate ramps in the apartment, superfuturistic day spas—as it was for its quotability. Ben Stiller, who played the ‘really, really, ridiculously good-looking’ male model Derek Zoolander, loved what production designers Standefer and Alesch had done, and hired them to work on another movie of his, Duplex. The movie bombed, but it cemented Stiller's relationship with the pair. When the time came to renovate his Hollywood house, he called Robin.

American Beauty (Wallpaper)

Published December 2007

It can be hard to stand out on Martha's Vineyard. Overstatement – exemplified by, for instance, Larry David's 70-acre spread complete with stainless steel outdoor kitchen—is one way to go about making a dent on this most old-school deluxe getaway for the Eastern Seaboard's elite. The other, and better, is to understate, understate, understate.

Architecture Research Office, a Manhattan-based architecture firm, recently completed a sublimely understated house for a retired rabbi and an art and design curator. The couple, who commissioned ARO five years ago, have owned the site, in the town of Chilmark, since the mid-nineteen-seventies. Their previous house, a single water-focused band designed by local architect Richard Henderson, was just fine for the last thirty years but, with a decrease in commitments –the rabbi just retired – the couple found themselves with an increase in interest in, as it's locally known, the Island.   

An Economics Boost (Metropolis)

Published November 21, 2007 (link)

Designers often like to say they work from the ground up; it’s less often that they claim to have worked from the floor up. But that’s exactly what Dutch firm Tjep. did with its whimsical reception area, completed last summer, for the economics department of the vocational training school ROC, in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands.

The designers covered the floor with economics-related symbols and then extruded them into three dimensions to create the necessary furnishings—reception desk, conference table, foosball arena. Inlaid with bright-yellow icons of everything from pencils to gears to airplanes, the shiny beige base is busy and industrious (almost—fancy that!—like the field of economics). In the middle of it all lies a figure with an oversize heart. And that metaphor—focusing on “the heart instead of the wallet”—was at the center of the design approach, says Frank Tjepkema, who founded Tjep. together with Eindhoven classmate Janneke Hooymans.

Bambi versus Godzilla (esquire.com)

Published November 26, 2007 (link)

On New York's Bond Street, two titans -- of architecture, development, and sexy street graffiti -- battle it out to determine whose style will be dominant. This is the tale of the tape.

Everyone knows that architects are always competing. Whose glasses are thicker? Whose haircut more asymmetrical? Whose discussion of intra-matrixed diasporic space-making conditions more incomprehensible?

What everyone doesn't know is that sometimes, if rarely, it's the buildings that compete.

Two new condo developments rose above Manhattan's Bond Street in the last year. One is by Deborah Berke, a minimalist architect loved by her peers and clients, and, increasingly, the public as well. The other is by Ian Schrager and Herzog & de Meuron, Swiss titans who made their name with the Tate Modern. Bond Street may seem like a quiet downtown enclave, but make no mistake, this street has turned into an architectural battleground, where Schrager's luxuriously nostalgic style clashes with Berke's proportioned, rigorous capital-A architecture approach. The fight has far-reaching implications, between the need for faux-vintage nostalgia (or rather, the need to ground something in the here and now to say that we're here, now) and a desire for abstracted shape, for spatial expression, for out-of-context beauty. It's a global battle that happens to have an epicenter on the same block, in two buildings that are practically right next to each other. There's a local favorite, and a proven champion. There's an underdog, and an old-timer. There's Berke's Bambi at 48 Bond, and there's Schrager's Godzilla at 40 Bond. Let's see who wins.

Best of the Midwest: Columbus (Wallpaper)

Published August 2006

On a stretch of road in Columbus, Indiana, sandwiched between a Kohl's megabox hardware store and a Johnny Carino's Italian Country Kitchen, there's one of the most simple—and simply sublime—structures to have been built in the U.S. in recent memory. It might seem an unlikely location for such a picture of high modernism, for a return to what the building's architect, Deborah Berke, calls the "clean, strong, quiet" qualities of modernist architecture, but it's not. In fact, this town is one of the last remaining strongholds of architecture that, while often fabulous, just doesn't quite fit in anywhere else.

New Museum, New York (wallpaper.com)

Published December 3, 2007 (link)

It isn't often that an art museum has anything in common with a trash can. In fact, the new New Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened last Saturday in downtown Manhattan, just might be the only museum to be clad in the same wire mesh as its home city's refuse receptacles. And that, oddly enough, happens to be a great thing.