Skyscrapers and Surrealism

This drawing by Madelon Vriesendorp, artist and co-founder of OMA, is trying to catch different associations with Norman Foster's Gherkin. It has been published lately in Charles Jencks's book The Story of Post-Modernism.

Madelon Vriesendorp's great animated film, Caught in the Act (Flagrant Délit) from 1979, presents a surrealistic vision of the life of skyscrapers, showing Chrysler and Empire State Building having sex, the naked Statue of Liberty and more great scences. Madelon Vriesendorp is famous for her paintings that have been used as illustrations for Rem Koolhaas's book Delirious New York. For more information about her work, read this interview.

Žižek on Ideology of Form

Slavoj Žižek, enfant terrible of contemporary philosophy, speaks about hidden ideodology in architecture, especially in functional forms and objects. Therefore he compares the mechanics of three different bowl shapes of flush toilets in a very entertainig way.

  

Watch the full lecture held at the Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad, Madrid, June 10, 2010, here. The essay Architectural Parallax by Žižek deals with similar topics.

Frank Gehry’s Throwaway Joke

A classic: Frank Gehry as guest star in The Seven-Beer Snitch, the fourteenth episode of The Simpsons' sixteenth season. Now he regrets his appearance in the Simpsons ...

RhinoVAULT Workshop in Innsbruck

Invited by Günther H. Filz and Rupert W. Maleczek, the Block Research Group will give a workshop at koge, University of Innsbruck, Austria, as part of the Ringvorlesung 2012. Prof. Philippe Block, Matthias Rippmann and myself will lead a design workshop using RhinoVAULT, a plug-in for Rhino, that allows for the intuitive design of compression-only shapes, offering a maximum control of the geometry.

Building the Bubble - Architecture and Financial Crisis

Since a few days a report by Barclays Capital that points out correlation between skyscraper boom and economic crisis is topic of international news, e.g. BBC and BI. Economist Andrew Lawrence suggested in 1999 the Skyscraper Index, as predictor of economic crisis.



The relation between skyscraper building and finance has earlier been discussed earlier in the great book Form Follows Finance by Caroll Willis.



Furthermore, I found an interesting figure related to this topic on page 94 in Alex Lehnerer’s Book Grand Urban Rules, showing the relation between industrial production and building height limitations in Chicago.

Cooperation: The Engineer and the Architect

This book, edited by Aita Flury, describes recent developments in the relation between architect and engineer in the design process, with focus on Switzerland and Germany. With contributions by Markus Peter, Adolf Krischanitz, Jürg Conzett, Mike Schlaich, Jospeh Schwartz and many others.

"This book provides a thorough description of just how varied and complex, how stressful and yet inspiring the cooperation between architect and engineer can be, and which projects become possible only through a cooperation of these two professions. [..] As such, it provides architects and students with the tools for future cooperation" (Birkhäuser.ch)


A snapshot of the realted panel discussion at the DAZ, on page 212/213.

Watch lectures by Fritz Neumeyer, Stefan Polónyi, Yves Weinand, Joseph Schwartz, and others, from the related symposium at the ETH Zurich online here.

Watch Prof. Block’s Lecture Online

Prof. Block, founder of the BLOCK Research Group, has been invited on October 31, 2011 for his first departmental lecture at the College of Design, University of Minnesota, USA. Invited for the lecture series “Global Practices in Architecture”, he talked about “New Masonry Vaults: Learning from the old master builders to design a better future”.