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Wednesday, 11 December 2024

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Mike:
You are at your very finest with articles like this!!

Excellent, insightful and thought-provoking comments.
Thank you.

You wrote: “early log cabins are believed to have been sturdily and expertly constructed, but that's not true, because only the tiny fraction of them that survived were made like that—all the rest fell down!” This is a great example of “survivorship bias”. Another great example of this was a study of WWII bomber damage to determine how to better armor them against attack. The initial inclination to fortify the areas that showed the most damage from returned bombers was incorrect, because the fact these bombers had returned proved these areas were not critical for survival. The areas where the study showed little damage were then deduced to be the vulnerable areas, as the bombers hit in these locations did not successfully return. For more, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I'm happy to live about a mile from the famous Bell Labs building by Saarinen, now called "Bell Works" (https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/).
After Bell Labs "left" there were several years when it seemed likely that the building would be destroyed. Luckily someone invested in it and now it's a thriving business location, with some retail and maybe a restaurant.
The campus is planned and beautiful although there has been apartment and home development in the outer ring. That made very little difference. The famous transistor (or flying saucer) water tower and all of the original features (with additions) are still there. This one worked.
The design is a simple box. It can't be used for anything but offices - the water service only ran though certain areas, and everyone walked to the bathrooms. It took a few years, but now these are desirable and full offices.
I live around a lot of monuments, and we have fishing shacks from the 1700s, so we get serious about history in NJ. Just gotta find the money...

Our friends at Google Maps have supplied some recent views (December 2022) of the building ...

https://maps.app.goo.gl/hsrLiHhpyhqk7gvH9
https://maps.app.goo.gl/s4vWw91FGVhSJWUW6

The building is better suited perhaps as a place for gun emplacements to protect the harbor from attack by the Lake Express ferry from Muskegon, MI.

Mike—In the opening sentence of my earlier comment of today, where I mention “old DC7” aircraft, I should have said Lockheed's L-1049 Constellation instead. So, please delete “old DC7”, substitute Lockheed L-1049 Constellation. (At the close of the trans-continental prop plane era, TWA flew the famed Lockheed L-1049 Super Connies non-stop coast-to-coast. Their competition, American and Pan Am, flew Douglas DC6Bs and DC7s. By FAA edict, United Airlines was not authorized to carry passengers non-stop CA to NY. The eventual impact of airline deregulation later changed everything.)

With a view of a brutal sport!

Brutalism
One of the premises of brutalism is that the materials appear as what they are, concrete looks like concrete, not trying to imitate stone, etc. Painting the concrete of a brutalist building is an absolute anathema. Although I've seen it done (Technology Square in Cambridge). Painting concrete is also foolhardy because the paint will eventually peel.
There was a fad of building brutalist college and university libraries in the 1960's.
The Washington DC subway is a famous example of brutalism, with concrete, bronze, quarry tile, and granite being the primary exposed materials. However, it is graceful.
One quirk of brutalist buildings is that many of them have "arrow slits," tall skinny openings in the concrete wall that an archer could stand behind. The Barbican has these. All of Eduardo Catalano's brutalist buildings at MIT have arrow slits, the Student Center having the most noticeable ones.

Saarinen
Eero Saarinen designed two wonderful non-brutalist buildings at MIT: Kresge Auditorium and the Chapel.
Kresge is a dome of thin-shell reinforced concrete, one-eighth of a sphere supported only by the three corners. The three open sides have glass curtain walls. The roof was originally Orastone, a white plastic with embedded marble chips, but it only lasted a few years, as it expanded and contracted in the sun and shade and cracked. That was followed by sheet lead, and finally a standing seam copper roof, which has been stable. But the original white roof was very dramatic.
The Chapel is a brick cylinder surrounded by a moat, with light that comes in through downward facing narrow windows over the moat.

following your updated comments, I tried using Google street view to find that same location as the original photo. I suspect that your exact photo location is probably on the roof of the ramp down into the basement.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y5eLeQ4TVkwejMUG7


Talk of brutal! It seems that your beautiful hill has been dug over into a parking lot to address the eastern extension with a big basement. I wouldn't even call the extension Brutalism - most of it is just bland. However, there does seem to be traces of the original hilltop building in the architecture of the newer parts, with the use of cantilevered floating elements.

On the subject, I do have one of my photos on the wall of my office that no one will be able to shoot again because of building extensions.

It's interesting to read about your take on color photographs and the color being "off." In my most recent re-engagement with film over the last 2-3 years, it has been that unique "offness" of each color film that has drawn me to shoot color film. (When I initially starting shooting film again I intended to shoot almost all bw.)

We are in a different era now and I think the reasons for shooting film have changed. If you want the flexibility to have perfectly accurate colors or to make your color exactly the way you wish, you will use digital.

For me, this is THE reason to shoot film. To frontload the decisions that will bake in a certain look...and live with it with little to no editing. And the biggest part of baking in a particular look is the unique characteristics of any given film.

I can hardly stand walking around central London now as there are so many buildings put up seemingly without any thought about the look of the city as a whole. Its a series of monuments to individualism, no one cares about the collection and how each building might affect views of the others. Smaller and older buildings are cast in to perpetual darkness. Some of the buildings are interesting and aesthetically pleasing, many are not. But taken as a whole its monstrous. Luckily I live in Edinburgh where we have much less of this, and the 'new town' still stands pretty much as it was designed and built in the 18th Century, not by individuals trying to outdo each other with bigger and bigger buildings, but planned as a whole, with space and light considered.

Why is there a cruise ship with a yacht stuck on top of it protruding from the War Memorial?

All good architects design to the environment, which includes the landscape, yet environments change, sometimes quickly and drastically, especially in and near population centers. Wright, famous for going further than most in not just designing to the environment but integrating his buildings with them, has had a number of his works relocated in order to save them from development or shifting land. (At least one was razed, that I know of.) We are lucky that the structures are preserved, but I can't help wondering how much of the architect's vision and intention survived relocation. I'm sure it's a mixed bag.

I worked for a few years in an architecturally significant Brutalist building. Sure, it was ugly as sin, but at least it was the single most miserable place to work that I've occupied. The American Press Institute's Marcel Breuer raw concrete building was so ugly that locals called it The Bomb Shelter. And this was in Reston Virginia, where you'd expect people to like such things.
But as ugly as it was outside, going inside was worse. It leaked like a sieve if the sky so much as drizzled. Ventilation was terrible, so the windows were always fogging up. Not that there were a lot of windows; it looked like a bomb shelter from inside, too.
But the worse part was that it was apparently designed to test and torture humans. Take, for example, the grand fan of stairs as you entered the building and descended to the lobby.
We called them the Stairs of Death. Because while they were a not-generous but at least manageable 12-inches wide to the right as you entered, maintaining that perfect fan shape meant they narrowed down to roughly SIX INCHES to the left. Despite constant warnings and the occasional roping off of the left side, every single API event began with a woman in high heels venturing too far left and face planting down the stairs.
It was torn down in 2016 to make room for condos. Brutalist fans protested; apparently they never had to work there.
Some pictures here: https://brutalistdc.com/marcel-breuers-reston-api-building-under-threat/

The "museum on a grassy hill" reminds me of the Page museum at the La Brea tar pits:
https://tarpits.org/experience-tar-pits

Or the California Academy of the sciences which is built *in* a grassy hill.
https://www.calacademy.org/

As I understand it - brutalism was sold in the UK as strength, advenuressness, and power as we came out of The Second World War.

It helped that a lot of London was in ruins. I think one building in six was damaged beyond repair.

It doesn't quite explain how brutalism became the thing to build, But maybe this on another not so unrelated topic, I read that before minimalist architecture, the powers that be pushed it as 'Scandinavian' and they produced and sold furniture in the same mould - so that when minimalist architecture appeared - -people had already been moulded to like it.

Why couldn't they have chosen Georgian architecture?

By the way, we saw the Dorothea Lange exhibition at the Barbican.

The only constant is change. Be grateful for your memories.

The War Memorial Center looks like it could have been used as a location for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. I should know; while I've never been to Milwaukee I often went to one of Kubrick's locations, the 1960s Brutalist Friars Square shopping Precinct in Aylesbury, England.

It was in Friars Square I bought my first SLR, a Zenit B, at Dollonds Photographic, one of the shops around the edge of the square. I can't visit the precinct now because it was replaced by the Friars Square Shopping Centre in 1993.

But the Brutalist County Council's office tower block that looms in the background of some shots is still there; I worked in its basement for a few years.

If you've seen the film you won't remember seeing Friars Square as that sequence was cut from the film. But the photos are still an interesting glimpse into England's recent past.

http://betweenchannels.blogspot.com/2011/06/friars-square-shopping-precinct.html?spref=pi

Condominium for dogs, with outside toilet.

Three may have been a cabin in what is now your yard but it wasn't for the Pony Express. The Pony Express ran between St. Joseph, MO, and Sacramento, CA.

[Refresh your browser page, and that bit will magically disappear. --Mike]

Ugh! It's now a parking lot. Check Google Street View. Interesting article -- as always.

Just had to drop into this conversation with my thoughts about the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry. No one ever agrees with me on this but it seemed relevant to your thoughts on architecture.
I love the building as art and sculpture but dislike it intensely as architecture.
Before visiting, I was in love with it. When I got there, I found much of the fabulous exterior, those titanium curves, ate artificial. They are tacked on like billboard hoardings to the structure beneath. those extraordinary curves and reflecting surfaces - are not part of the structure beneath.
So. Is it architecture or sculpture? I feel it is the latter.
The brutalist architects would have seen it as a dishonest structure and scorned it.
Thoughts anyone?

That white thing in the current photo looks like a particularly wonky AI (the only good kind in my opinion, if you want reality there are cameras for that) attempt at a cruise ship docked in front of the museum.

As a counter-example, how about the old Whitney Museum of American Art? I think it still looks pretty wonderful.

In today's LA Times there's an interesting article about a recently-built Brutalist home in a neighborhood just below the Hollywood sign. As is usual for the Times, well photographed. Considering how much time, money and effort was apparently spent to build this house, within two miles of an earthquake fault, the design of the wine cellar is rather inexplicable. The photo shows a narrow room, concrete walls and polished concrete floor. Set in rank into the walls are short brass posts, finely machined, two to support each bottle; one to cradle the neck and the other to support the body. Very clean looking and minimalist, but there is nothing else to hold those bottles in place. It won't take much of a shaker, common here, to turn that room into a lake of blended varietals and glass shards.

In the 1980's I lived within about 100 meters of that same fault. Around dawn one morning, while we were still asleep, we had one of those shakers. Lying in bed my wife and I listened as every piece of glassware in the adjacent kitchen fell from the open shelving one and two at a time and shattered on the tile floor.

Hi Mike,
So “buildings have a lifespan” my comment is: Indeed.

Being originally from Italy, it has been sometime difficult for me to explain to my American family and friends how old some Roman buildings truly are and how complex their histories.

Examples:
The Pantheon, originally build by Emperor Augustus in 27 BC- AD 14. Then rebuild by Emperor Hadrian ca. AD 126 as a Roman temple which then became a Catholic Church and has been used between other things as tomb for the Italian Royal family..

Castel St. Angelo. The little castle connected to St. Peter Basilica by a passage, which started as a mausoleum to the same emperor Hadrian and converted to a castle by Pope Nicholas III in the 14 th century.

St. Peter Basilica originally built on the same site of the older St. Peter, starting in the 15th century and completed over 100 years later, 4 different Popes and many different architects (Bramante, Michelangelo, Maderno and Bernini being the most famous).

Let’ s not forget Ponte Fabrizio, the oldest bridge (over 2,000 years) in the world still in use.

Brutal is what they did to that site. Shameful.

Here is an excellent building by Le Corbusier at Harvard that should be gloriously alone at the top of a hill. However, it was designed for and built in a limited space on a narrow street surrounded closely by other buildings. Don't let this photo deceive you:

https://ccva.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/craft/building/_1800xAUTO_crop_center-center_none/Screenshot-2024-04-17-at-3.23.40-PM.png

More about this building:
https://carpenter.center/building

With your note about featured comments, I visited this blog entry again and must agree that it combines very well so many different aspects like architecture, photography, personal memory, history and feelings, to name just a few...
Very well written and great comments - as always!
One addition from my side on Brutalism in the architecture: we lived the last four years in Prague, Czech Republic, and there you can find a few brutalist buildings which creates a strange contrast to the otherwise very historical city. I found an interesting bit on this here: https://www.new-east-archive.org/features/show/13210/best-brutalist-buildings-in-prague-czech-republic-socialist-modernist-architecture
It also includes some good (IMHO) B&W photographs of the buildings.

Is there any interest in starting a discussion about what makes good architecture?
Fr example, I'd argue that the Bilbao Guggenheim Gallery is magnificent sculpture but poor architecture. That fabulous exterior doesn't reflectthe the spaces it encloses and their usage.
Frank LLoyd Wright's "Falling Waters." It looks stunning. Loved it when I first saw pictures of it. Then I discovered that there are significant problems with the engineering. Does that count in evaluating the architectural significance?

War Memorial Center did come into my mind when I saw this. For some reason the hang on the balance and eye looking out is really helping the message. Anyway it is gone.

BTW, it is very like the windows default screen at one stage.

And ... Any -ism I do not bother to look it all.

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