Willoughby Council Development Control Plan
Part D2.5 F
This is a diagram in an actual planning document.
- Monolithic. Late notice, I know, but I will be in Brisbane tomorrow night talking at the University of Queensland Architecture School’s 2010 Public Lecture Series. UQ St Lucia Campus, Tuesday March 30 6pm.
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- Proposition 2065: AR is launching its next in the postcode monikered design competitions, this time concentrating on a mixed-use site in St Leonards, Sydney. There will be briefings in Sydney (1st April), Melbourne (7th), and Brisbane (16th).
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- Bad British Architecture. Performs as advertised.
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- Nancy Levison writing for Design Observer on the state of architectural criticism.
You can see the point. Cheap and easy access to a virtually limitless catalogue of artworks is no guarantee of great arts criticism — but it makes possible the sustained engagement and encyclopaedic learning that inspire it. (I am convinced that the incomparable David Thomson has seen every movie ever made.) How can architecture criticism compete? How can the individual critic amass the disciplinary equivalent? To write with in-the-bones insight about the output of any one of our era’s peripatetic architectural stars, let alone the collective production of the whole constellation, would take endless international travel and an unlimited expense account — and those are just the logistics. To claim with conviction that this artwork or that artist is at the top of the game is only convincing if you’ve paid keen attention to the rest of the field.
I think this helps explain why Nicolai Ouroussoff’s criticism is so unsatisfying. It’s the unexpected trap of inhabiting the tower of the Times. You’ve got the editorial charge to be national and international, like the rest of the paper, and you’ve got the budget to roam. So you rack up the datelines: Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Moscow, Stuttgart, Basel, etc. etc. But the view from the tower is broad not sharp, panoramic but not particular. The inevitable result is that you are writing at the thin edge of scant knowledge: you are critiquing places you know only as a tourist, and buildings you know only from brief and usually tightly programmed visits, often in the company of the watchful designer. This is no way to gain meaningful experience or serious knowledge of a building or landscape or how it fits within its local setting and larger environs.
Via Mammoth.#
- Joy Street. The Dutch pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
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Crazy
Monday, 15th March 2010 Tweet
Butterpaper directs us to a nutty piece in the Sydney Morning Herald where film maker Phillippe Mora takes two thousand words to accuse Utzon of plagiarism for not providing written acknowledgement of having been aware of a building that has overlapping shell form. Mora it seems saw a model of the Sternkirche by Otto Bartning—a project that was never built—in a museum in Germany and because the project had overlapping shell forms, assumed that Utzon must have copied this in Sydney.
Whether or not Utzon was aware of this project is beside the point, of course Utzon like any responsible architect drew on many historic sources for the design of the Sydney Opera House many of which are well documented. To expect every artist to acknowledge every single influence on a work is an absurd and naive expectation. When discussing his 1999 film ‘Mercenary II:Thick and Thin’ does Mora include an acknowledgment of every single film he has watched that bares any similarity whatsoever to this work?
Mora interviews a number of architects and historians, all of whom dismiss the claims of plagiarism as absurd, but still draws his own conclusion at the end that yes, he thinks that Utzon copied Bartning’s Sternkirche.
The best part however, is the section towards the end of the piece where Mora inexplicably embarks on a tangent describing in detail Alvar Aalto’s links with the early Nazi movement, and making the leap that as Utzon and Aalto had a close relationship and because Albert Speer and Utzon saw value in ruins, that Utzon was coached by Eero Saarinen not to mention these secrets in parochial Sydney. WTF? “My research revealed some darker elements to this unfolding mystery” Mora states ominously, stopping short of directly calling out Utzon as a Nazi sympathiser, before going back to his plagiarism rant.
To cap it off, the Sydney Morning Herald then republished their own story as ‘news’ the same day giving this rubbish undeserved credibility.
- Simon Knott on the RRR radio show, The Architects, talking about the failings of Melbourne’s Docklands, articulating my primary fears for Barangaroo in Sydney:
“If you look at the Melbourne city grid and the land parcels in the 1830s they were small parcels of land, they were small titles so it allows hundreds of different owners, so you might get a hundred different owners around a block and they would all have diff businesses there, and if they want to build a big building they’ll aggregate them, together. Docklands gave acres of land to one developer and said you developer the whole lot, so there is no diversity. And theres no fine grain, nothing happens on a smaller level, its all this picture developer stuff an what that creates is this monoculture that is there, therese no ability for smaller uses, theres no social housing there, theres no affordable housing, its all one demographic right the way through.”
While the debate around Barangaroo continues to centre on Keating’s Disneyheadland and the Sydney Morning Herald’s campaign against the hotel—that may well prove an ambit claim—the more crucial non-design related questions remain to be answered. Primarily, the details of the financial deal between the government and the developer. Yes, this will be a matter of public record in time; a moot point given that the contracts have already been signed. + John de Manincor and Adam Russell assess the situation at Australian Design Review with a level head providing a good overview of the current circumstance.#
- Harmony—a nifty web based sketching app. It works on the iPhone too, for algorithmic touchscreen drawing fun on the bus.
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- Orhan Ayyüce writing on Twin Buildings for Archinect:
As you can see from the diagram above, a developer can build two buildings with twin concept. He can save a lot of cash from the architectural billing and contract time, from the material purchases and double discounts, and, from the ease of proven installation and erection, all of which translate into large sums of monetary gain whose importance in American urbanism is paramount. Next time you drive by a twin concept building, take a look at them and say, “Thanks Orhan, I see what you mean.”
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- Open Agenda: A new competition run by UTS for recent architecture graduates.
Open Agenda will award seed funding to three exceptional design research proposals that explore new positions in architecture for critical consideration. We are looking for text and graphic based proposals that seek to develop research through architectural design. Proposals will be evaluated on the strength of their research topic, their innovative approach to design as research, design quality and their potential for development as a public exhibition, lecture and publication. Proposals that explore new forms of media and communication in this context are welcome.
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