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LARA SWIMMER / ESTO |
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S E A T T L E P U B L I C L I B R A R Y
S e a t t l e
In the city where the Internet rules, here's a building that takes books—remember those?—into the 21st century. Folded like origami and covered with a diamond-shape latticework of structural steel, the new library is an exercise in dynamic thinking by the oracular Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, working closely here closely with Joshua Ramus, a partner in the Koolhaas firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Essentially it's an off-kilter pile of five boxes, one each for book stacks, administrative offices, meeting rooms, below-ground parking, etc. Those boxes alternate with vividly conceived open floors, one holding the vast atrium of the lobby, another, called "the mixing chamber," that offers the information desk and computer banks, plus an upper-level reading room with views of city and sky that the angled glass walls frame in unexpected ways. Step outside and it all amounts to something like a cubist sculpture that occupies an entire city block. |
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3 0 S T . M A R Y A X E
L o n d o n
For the 46-story London headquarters of the Swiss Reinsurance Company, the mightily productive British architect Norman Foster reimagined the office tower as a vertical torpedo, a steel and glass tumescence that Londoners have taken to calling "the gherkin" when they aren't calling it naughtier things. Its environmental virtues are no joke; on each of its circular floorplates there are six triangular light wells that help flood the workplace with natural light and allow one floor to look into the next, reducing the sense of isolation produced by self-contained office floors. The light wells also conduct air up through the building, reducing the need for air conditioning. |
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M I L L E N N I U M P A R K
C h i c a g o
Daniel Burnham, who brought forth Chicago's bold city plan at the end of the 19th century, envisioned its lakeshore parks as great outdoor stages for the spectacle of public life. But for decades the northwest corner of Grant Park was just an open pit of railway tracks with an adjacent parking lot. Now it's all been artfully re-arranged into the 24.5-acre Millennium Park, a civic phantasmagoria like Antonio Gaudi's Park Güell in Barcelona, with the difference that this one is the product of an ensemble of creative spirits. Look one way and there's "Cloud Gate" by the London-based artist Anish Kapoor, an irregularly shaped metallic blob that reflects back the city and its people in funhouse mirror distortions. Look another way and there's the "Crown Fountain" by the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa—a pair of 50-ft. glass block towers on which the giant faces of hundreds of individual Chicagoans appear in sequence. Before any one of them makes way for the next, it appears to spit a jet of real water that lands in a reflecting pool between the towers. Kids love it; inner children are pretty fond of it too.
The jewel in this crown is a whirling dervish of a bandshell by Frank Gehry. It reaches toward the audience by means of an inspired forcefield, a trellis of overhead cables that emanate outward from the bandshell and hold suspended audio speakers like bunches of grapes, extending sound another 600 ft. from the stage into the crowd. Intended to accommodate 4,000 visitors in fixed seats and 7,000 more on the surrounding lawn, Gehry's bandshell makes its segment of the park an outdoor living room that's truly alive. |
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T H E S T A T A C E N T E R
B o s t o n
Gehry again. His 700,000 sq. ft. computer science complex at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a whimsical update on the academic village. It combines about a dozen 120 ft. towers with a variety of smaller elements in an ensemble of dancing forms and careening lines that reads in places like a cartoon town, but with no hint of mere whimsy or kitsch, just pure, even stately imagination. What better setting for techno-types hoping to find inspiration as they ponder biomechatronics? |
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T H E N A T I O N A L M U S E U M O F T H E
A M E R I C A N I N D I A N
W a s h i n g t o n , D . C .
A superior addition to the National Mall. The bulges and flexes of this building's honey-colored limestone walls evoke wind-sheared Western mesas. Inside and out there are passages good enough to bear comparison to the suavely rippling walls of Alvar Aalto, the great Finnish apostle of forms derived from nature. For the most part this is the work of Douglas Cardinal, architect of the lyrical swells of the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa. It was Cardinal, a Blackfoot Indian, who won the original commission in 1993 to design the museum in affiliation with other architects. Because of a dispute with the museum's directors over deadlines, a team of outside architects was later brought in to finish the project. Cardinal has dissed the details of the completed building, but the broad outlines are unmistakably his. And the broad outlines are quite something. |
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T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T
N e w Y o r k C i ty
After two and a half years of construction, the greatly enlarged museum reopened last month as an ensemble of restrained, nuanced and highly crafted compartments by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In age of cumulonimbus architectural spectacle, of swooping expressionism and angular deconstruction, the new MOMA opted for the subdued forms of classic right-angled Modernism. There are some problematic spaces. The tall atrium that greets visitors on the second floor gives the interior an early dose of literally high drama, but what work of art can compete with its altitudes? Monet's "Water Lilies" becomes a forlorn blue-green slot in an immense white wall. But elsewhere, again and again, Taniguchi reintroduces us to the fine filaments of the Modernist vocabulary. His light canopies, the suave transitions of a staircase, the complicated re-knitting of the old MOMA with the new—the more you look, the more you see. |
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T H E W O R L D W A R I I M E M O R I A L
W a s h i n g t o n , D . C .
An all-important project; a mediocre outcome. The decisive episode of the 20th century is now commemorated by an inert plaza flanked by rows of banal columns, all decked out in an off-the-shelf regalia of wreaths and stars. It's good to have a space of any kind committed to the memory of that war and the men and women who fought it. It would have been better to have one that offered just a touch of power and glory. |
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