Snapshots From Beyond: Part I

These artifacts from a 2008 trip to Western Europe are a convincingly successful Dutch marketing ploy. At the very least, I have been inspired to return to Amsterdam. After all, who wouldn't want to see an entire city at 1:25 scale for a 1,50 Euro discount!? They remind me of curious advertisements collected along American Interstate Rest Areas - shouting and screaming at tired travellers to drive hours out of their way to view spectacles that would otherwise be unknown. Snapshots From Beyond: Part II coming soon...

The World's Best Buildings

Earlier this month, Travel + Leisure (T+L) released what they consider to be the 15 "Ugliest Buildings in the World." Today, we would like to release a list of our choices for "Most Beautiful Buildings in the World." The two lists are included below:

Travel + Leisure's Ugliest Buildings in the World:

1. The Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang, North Korea

2. Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Building, London

3. Harold Washington Library, Chicago, Illinois, USA

4. The Obelisk, Puerto Maldonado, Peru

5. Longaberger Home Office, Newark, Ohio, USA

6. Portland Building, Portland, Oregon, USA

7. The Fang Yuan Building, Shenyang, China

8. Bolwoningen Houses, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands

9. National Library, Minsk, Belarus

10. The UFO House, Sanjhih, Taiwan

11. The Ideal Palace, Hauterives, France

12. Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool, England

13. The Experience Music Project, Seattle

Mockitecture's Most Beautiful Buildings in the World:

1. The Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang, North Korea

2. Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Building, London

3. Harold Washington Library, Chicago, Illinois, USA

4. The Obelisk, Puerto Maldonado, Peru

5. Longaberger Home Office, Newark, Ohio, USA

6. Portland Building, Portland, Oregon, USA

7. The Fang Yuan Building, Shenyang, China

8. Bolwoningen Houses, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands

9. National Library, Minsk, Belarus

10. The UFO House, Sanjhih, Taiwan

11. The Ideal Palace, Hauterives, France

12. Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool, England

13. The Experience Music Project, Seattle

Upon further consideration, you will notice that T+L's list tends to be an assault on (overly-hated) postmodernism. What good does it do to reinforce a grudge that has lasted nearly twenty years!? Nothing like kicking someone when they're down.

T+L's "Worst" list has treaded into the dangerous category of architectural taste and may not come out alive! Comments left by angry readers of the article include titles such as "Author needs to travel more," "Is this a joke?" and "World's Dumbest Author." Contradictorily, the Mockitecture WebLog team fully pardons the author because of his/her name, which happens to be Bunny Wong!

Why are so many people offended with Wong's accusation that these PM buildings are ugly? Perhaps pop architecture - which became too popular to be cool in the 1980's-1990's - has become cool again? ...Or at least enough time has passed for everyone to realize that a select number of buildings on T+L's list are actually stunning examples of innovation, creativity, and ambition.

Take the Longaberger Home Office Building in midwestern America. This classic example of a duck building puts the Longaberger basket company on the map with an iconic headquarters that defines & advertises the company while attracting costumers and providing a memorable sense of place (not to mention an award-winning construction method). If it were not for this building, none of us would know about the Longaberger basket.

Also featured is the Fang Yuan Building in China which successfully merges the eastern and western world with a capitalist/corporate office tower in the distinctive shape of an ancient Chinese coin (another Duck building, for those of you keeping count).

All in all, it turns out the World's Ugliest Buildings are actually rare examples of iconic architecture that dares onlookers to see beyond a hard-to-digest facade of gaudy blue glazing and stylized classical elements. If you indeed succeed at that, you will discover architecture at it's most authentic and aspirational state. I, for one, am looking forward to discovering more "bad" architecture in the near future. By the way, who wants to design a 10-story sofa for Crate & Barrel's headquarters? (Thanks for the tip, Wong).

N_O_R_T_O_N

Power Rankings

The Mockitecture WebLog team loves partaking in trendy things, and since the trend among our fellow colleague-bloggers seems to be linking to articles worth reading, here's our contribution. This is the first of what I hope to be a weekly installment of commentry that catches our eye here at the Mockitecture WebLog.

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10.) The Sesquipedalist is desperately contemplating the act of tweeting. Why do we do it? Highlights from the Sesquipedalist's rant (I'm using "rant" in an approving manner):

• “Perhaps it's the interminable loneliness of the long-distance PhD-er who cries out into the wilderness ‘is anybody out there?’ only to receive the reply of ‘Eating a battenburg slice, listening to Fat Freddie's Drop’.”
• “Twitter has attracted an architectural contingent of which, I think, I am on the margins. I tend to follow this architectural Twitterati (neither of my real friends who I really meet have a Twitter account) as it weaves its eclectic narrative, casting judgment and consensualising taste. The people I follow are mainly linked to this group, forming a new high-tech version of a closed circle.”
• “The amazing thing is how often people update. Don't they have real things to do? Don't I? Yes. But I don't smoke, so can consider this my fag break without having to go outside. Maybe every loo will soon be fitted with a Twitter interface to guarantee being regular.”
• “This twitter character I've constructed is stranger than the blog one and not very like the real me. If people met me in vivo, I'm sure they'd wonder where the in silico version went because in reality I'm quite a shy, quiet person lacking in confidence, whereas in twitter format, it's only possible for me to be a man of words whose 140 characters are the same height as everyone else's.”

9.) The Canadian Centre for Architecture’s new website taught us you can enjoy motion sickness from the comfort of your own home. Here's how: go to their website, maximize your internet browser window, sit really close to your monitor.

8.) Clayton Miller shows us the future (in 8.5 minutes).

7.) Life Without Buildings would like you to rage against the machine with this rousing discussion about the Situationists & Guy Debord. Venturi would be proud of Lw/oB for this rather innovative method for documenting architecture in the modern age.

6.) Fantastic Journal promises to tell us in the eWorld why suburbia isn’t funny anymore – a topic that the Mockitecture WebLog team is already enthusiastically denying. Sir Charles also includes some kind words for this WebLog in his “last post for awhile” post.

5.) VisuaLignual shows what happens when artists and architects collaborate together: "...illustrations that situated Ford cars against fantastic backdrops, combining gorgeous natural scenery with outlandish architecture."

4.) Eikonographia has a rather enjoyable musing on the implications of designing a W-shaped building, as BIG has done in Prague: “The case of the ‘W’ building designed by BIG is however more complicated. We might not know the word the ‘W’ refers to, but we do know it’s a ‘W’. That is something. This building is a ‘W’. There are few letters in the alphabet as cool as a ‘W’. It is not at all like soft ‘J’ or a hard ‘K’. A ‘W’ is far more relaxed. Double-U. Its symmetrical figure is thorough and strong. It is nothing, but something.”

3.) Pruned speculates over the possibility of an Urban Winter Olympics for all of those Chicagoans still depressed about their recent losing bid on the summer games. Man-made mountains and the conversion of Soldier Field for ski jumping? What more could you ask for!?

2.) The Infrastructurist shares thoughts on some of the "world's ugliest buildings" as determined by Travel + Leisure. Upon closer inspection, the list appears to be nothing more than another jab at overly hated post modern architecture. Not to worry, as Mockitecture is planning a reactionary post to this topic as well.

1.) Strange Harvest discovers London's "Best New Building": “An assemblage of totally ordinary elements (billboard, hoarding, fencing) and totally ordinary programmes (newsagent, advertising site, mini cab office). But the relationship between these elements makes it something amazing. [...] One part becomes the structural support for another, something else becomes a revenue stream generated from a perimeter enclosure. Together, they develop highly pragmatic response to a left over piece of urbanism, maximising the potentials of use.”
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YouTube As Cultural Vault

It is not often that the Mockitecture Weblog gets to debut a project or artist. Or at least one that anyone else would like to debut.

As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close (yikes), YouTube has established a prominent role in pop culture. Started as a hosting site, it has quickly become much more. The role of the site has changed dramatically, including a transformation of its use, battles over its use, and the emergence of its meta-use. Within YouTube exists a survey of the current human condition. Reality TV, DIY movies, post-MTV music videos, etc. mesh with rapidly expanding social media. YouTube is not just a media, its is a medium. Many videos on youtube are in response to other videos, and a whole culture has developed within and around it.
YTDJ420_69 has encapsulated the idea of an international cultural vault in his live performances. From the artist's website...

"Part performance piece, part improv DJ set, and part video art, YTDJ420_69 creates a meta-use collage of youtube videos, incorporating youtube's infinite pool of video, music and historical footage. Uniquely tailored to each circumstance, the live YJing events can be anything from poorly executed DJ set to moving cinematographic masterpiece."

Within the format, many issues arise. The idea of chance, not knowing the next video's exact contents is exciting. When mixing, the overlap is the key relational element. A YJ cannot match beats, nor achieve production slickness, so the relationships of individual pieces are much more arbitrary. Further, the amount of information is doubled in YJing. The addition of visual material makes a fourfold matrix of overlay. Because YJing is performed on the fly, there is no way to know exactly what will happen. Chance takes over.

Also, DJ culture is critiqued. Anyone can be a DJ now. Forget turntables, if you have a computer, you're a DJ. Phil Oakey said about early Human League, "We thought we were the punkiest thing going at the time. We didn't even bother to learn to play guitar. We were using one finger." YJing is a part of the disintegration of internet culture. Uh Oh.

Also, the global experience economy is explicitly expressed by and finessed out of the defining internet application of our time. The limits of YouTube are, well, there are no limits. (In George W Bush voice) It is the virtual vault for all cultural artifacts, as well as a working storehouse of ideas. There are very few things as global as YouTube.

The beauty of the meta-use of YouTube and this technique is that when performed live and projected on a wall or screen, the audience can see everything that the YJ is doing on the screen.

Technology is Scary

Brain Tumor Locator, circa 1964

The Ugly Duckling

Figure 1 Charmingly historic victorian architecture encounters a wildly inappropriate variation on brutalism.

In this scene, we see the latter attempting to blend in with the former: a "painted lady" and a want-to-be painted lady. This sets up what I would consider to be a sort of "transvestite" architecture. This simple sketch arises out of a curiosity for historic districts and their overarching control over architectural style and image. These two Painted Ladies raise some interesting questions. For instance, eclecticism (as exhibited on the right) can be a rather complex and witty endeavor. A purely minimal and honest building decorated with vivid layers of paint would make both modernists AND preservationists sick to their stomach. The result of such a pairing of historicism and modernism is something both curious and radical. I wonder what would happen if this situation were reversed: a victorian home force-fed a steady diet of concrete and modernism? Ultimately, the case of the Ugly Duckling is about buildings attempting to be something they are not. Is honesty and authenticity required in architecture today?

My answer to my question is NO - buildings have been lying to us for quite some time now...and we like it! They falsely tell us we have beautiful wood floors when in fact we have cheap, mass produced laminate laid over God knows what. They scream, "I am a brick building," when in fact they are a wood frame box with brick paneling. If such buildings resembled the children's tale, Pinocchio, the awnings over their entryway would project 50 feet outward...a growing nose for every lie they tell us. Perhaps false front buildings are just that: an exaggerated extrusion of the facade.

We live in uncertain and inauthentic times. Consider botox, viagra, and prescription drugs. Miraculous weight loss pills. A food industry with questionable food production, safety, and cleanliness issues. Also consider our suburban homes - especially McMansions - and their simulation of inflated wealth and success. Now everyone can own a mansion! (...or manor, or estate). Perhaps the ultimate image of inauthenticity in contemporary society is last years housing crash and the bursted bubble of wealth so many Americans were led to believe they had.

The Ugly Duckling - in this case a brutalist building forced to become a historic Victorian home - will undoubtedly be the loner of the neighborhood street. It may be laughed at and bullied by other homes in the neighborhood. It will be considered a poser and perhaps even a "Transvestite" Painted Lady. But ultimately it's eclectic image was simply generated by the context of the site: the desired uniformity of historic districts where Painted Ladies reside. For lack of better terms, the Ugly Duckling is successful because it is complex and contradictory. It's presence among Painted Ladies should be celebrated, not shunned! In the end, maybe historic districts are not so bad after all...

[images courtesy of N_O_R_T_O_N, EW and Laser Kit]