Hadid Director 'Rants'

When he gets a chance to think about it, Patrik Schumacher might become less enthused that his Facebook became headlines on Deezine. His remarks are illuminating on several historical levels, what did he let out of the bag?
He assured us that architects are about form making and that they are not responsible for content. In the short term this justifies the Hadid practise in it's global aspirations and it sounds reasonable enough if you are happy to work for various more or less despotic regimes with more or less savoury conditions of labour and produce buildings that more or less correspond to users needs in the name of that form-making.
Overall this is a less than cautious thing to claim, since those oppositions form/content; idealism/practicality; science/art seem endemic to the business of architecture. Fall for one at the expense of the other and each time you might seem to lose the very essence of the subject. I suspect most students of architecture find it interesting because it is both form and content, both idealism and practicality and both art and science that they find interesting about it. If you junked that central problematic, you would certainly shorten architectural courses to semesters rather than years, but you would probably throw the baby out with the bath water.
But in the short term, students may have been puzzled by his additional comment that those who don't share his view (that form is free of content) are at best 'pollitically correct' or at worst 'conservative'. It's true that back in the eighties his view was popular as radical, it was intended as a sort of 'up yours' to an establishment that seemed to have run it's term, be otherwise lost for ideas, and ripe for take over. What Schumacher seems to have missed is any notion of ongoing revolution, where revolutionary ideas change once the context has changed, which it has, and dramatically.
To hold his view so stalwartly now, to broker the point that architects are not inherently interested in the world of their clients and the users of their buildings not only puts him squarely in the camp of neoliberalism, but in the historical mid term, his attitude might suddenly be compared to that of Philip Johnson, and in the long term (seventy years ago) to one of Johnson's fans, Albert Speer.

Gravity

When I eventually got home this morning I realised that I hadn't walked anywhere for five days. I'd moved, but I hadn't walked. Usually when I come home from the USA it's straight to bed, but this time I was amazed to feel compelled to 'walk down a street' and even 'make my own sandwich'. Certainly watching 'Gravity' on the way over there in that 777 was appropriate (above) meanwhile an overdose of special effects and product placement in 'Skyfall' anticipated my time in Houston to a tee, since it was was an overdose of special effects and product placement. When I bought a loaf of bread this lunchtime and the girl behind the counter said 'have a nice nice day' I genuinely snarled. When I heard my street wise companions remarking 'fuck this' and 'fuck that' I rejoiced!

The lady who ran the funeral service I attended over there was so convincing I had to ask how she knew my uncle Jean Claude, the answer was that she didn't, never had, but it was her job to make it real and she'd done her research. Shades of 'The Loved One' there alright, but somehow amped up. In the five days I was there, CNN ran NOTHING but non stop paranoia on the Malaysian 777 disappearance, nothing. I was both stupefied and fascinated. Every single TV drama I tapped in to (NCIS etc) involved hacking, strange powers, and global threats. Man, I was glad to get out of there and 'walk down the street' and encounter a singular loony at the bus stop, rather than a whole civilization in such a state.

Hyatt Regency Houston: John Portman

The Hyatt Regency in Downtown Houston, a building I have hardly stepped out of on purpose other than for funeral related business, is a very interesting building. I've posted plenty of images on Facebook and will illustrate these blogs later, but for now:

When I first arrived I asked the cab driver 'is that the entrance?' When I got to the check in desk I asked 'Err...where are the lifts?' I hadn't thought to look directly above my head, where they very clearly whizz up and down the atrium. So, an entrance that doesn't look like a entrance, and navigation that demands a change of perception. OK. The atrium, that is surrounded by things that don't look like entrances, and include 'cool tunnels' (literally and metaphorically I assume) is the buzz of the place and thirty storeys high, indeed this building was the highest downtown for some time, so they put a revolving restaurant on top of it called 'the Spindletop' so we can probably date it to the seventies. The other very odd thing about this thirty storey high lump is that it is clad (presumably, but it looks solidly) in brick, about a zillion bricks, and those bricks are detailed at peculiar angles that run those thirty storeys up.
Meanwhile the plan makes poor conventional sense for a hotel, because the atrium is hugged by single loaded corridors. I keep hearing business men from New York in the lift, they think that space should be filled in of course. They probably want to fit condos, but in hotel terms single loaded corridors are not thought the best for maid service, since it makes the job slower.
So despite or perhaps that this building has the wrong plan, is made of the wrong material, and doesn't do anything conventional, and that if it were submitted for a diploma the jury would laugh out loud, especially at the revolving restaurant (in gold, of course) I think it's a classic. I suppose it would qualify as a classic 'duck' in Venturi terms, but good, wry, case study in the type. Stay here while you can if you're in Houston, nothing lasts long here, even if made to look like a fortress.
PS: Yes, it is by John Portman.

Noir

As I sit here staring out of the window periodically and finally getting down to thinking about some work, I realise I am presently perfectly contextualised for the discussion of Sullivan/Wright/Lautner that I'll be delivering this Friday back in the sheltered confines of the Keyworth Building, because what stands, no towers, around me is so NOT what they were about. For one it couldn't be more brazenly inorganic, and on the other hand couldn't be truer to the real ethos of the American Way, or at least that way as it turned out, without a trace of inspiration from Walt Whitman. What they stood for was the dream that never happened, could never happen, but was therefore absolutely necessary as the foundation for something that was the complete opposite.
Competition, avarice, technology, paranoia, I'm drowning in it here, every pixel on the TV shoves it in to my head. No wonder 'noir' is such an authentic American literature, that's the only space left to write, from dead beat on the streets, that is the literal base line, and the only way is up, if you're lucky.
So of course the idealist Sullivan had to end his days in a flop house next to a bar, of course Wright had to secure his future through celebrity and of course Lautner built those hideaways for James Bond villains, it's just that those villains weren't actually agents for SMERSH, but exactly the opposite as well.
If I were looking for a discourse on the actual architecture of the American city, I should be lecturing this Friday on Philip Johnson, but that would be too too close to the bone, too real, too black, see what I mean? However it's worth thinking about, who needs that organic millstone anyway?

Punctum

Houston is a city raised on money, nothing much else. Money is what matters, it makes the downtown skyline look like a mountain, it makes the River Oaks suburb populated by miniature but huge versions of Versailles, or Mexican adobe, or FLW Guggenheim, just take your pick. It is also money without quite the fun of enjoying it, and with plenty of the snobbery of having it, so in that way it is very unlike Las Vegas (for instance). Nothing stays long in Houston but reputation. But my aunt and uncle lived here all my life, and today I had to go to their home and sniff the musty air and see the leaves collected on the Mercedes, survey the vacant scene, peer in their drinks cabinet, hover over the old books, suddenly museum like, and standing there I didn't know what to say at all. That was a life, my aunts room like a shrine, my uncle's world latterly a clutter of old age belligerence. But guess what, their cat, Ella, was still there, still singing, a little more mangy than I remember, getting a bit belligerent herself. Poor Ella, that's it, and just heaps and heaps of stuff that suddenly becomes crap, unless you can summon up some sense yourself, and in that limited moment make some kind of evaluation not based on money, and it will be a photograph, a book, his wine cup, something like that, which is really left.

That's What I'm Thinking

"Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."

That's what I'm thinking, stuck half a mile up in a Houston hotel room watching the Arsenal game eyeing up the Ardbeg.

Houston we have a Problem 2

Of course you don't have problems in Houston. You forget your toothpaste, you phone down for some, it arrives in seconds and then the phone rings to check you got it. Last night the waiter asked  me if I minded him taking a photo of my steak as I cut in to it to check it was cooked just right. My god, there he was photographing my meal as it posed for the camera. Too weird. I guess this is what technology does, it makes us more indulgent, and makes your cooking suspect.
The Americans here are most concerned that a 777 cannot be found but nobody has mentioned 'Thunderball' yet. They are also very agitated over Crimea like it was their back yard. I suppose it is their back yard, the world is American, it's just the rest of us haven't got this far.
But where is it going? You can't help thinking you have no idea, they have no idea, but they have something totally perplexing as a generator; the right to happiness. On the one hand it seems so obvious, so correct, it's just the English, being used to misery, carping. But happiness, what a strange thing to drive a civilisation, since in itself, happiness is a bit unstable.