architecture

These photos are part of the Los Altos Hills Photoset I just posted, but I'm posting them separately because they are of my favorite house in Los Altos (Hills). I had to bike up a steep hill on weak legs to take these, so they deserve their own entry. Sadly, I did not chose my time-of-day well, but I don't think I'm going to redo these anytime soon.

Part of the reason I like this house is that it doesn't try to stick out. Most of the house is not visible from the road:

More photos in the photoset.

The Torres de Calatrava look pretty cool (gallery 1, gallery 2). Not having seen Calatrava-style skyscrapers before, I wonder what Calatrava's New York City might have looked like, in comparison to the imagined NYC's of Norman Foster, Gaudi, and Spielberg.

There were a bunch of historical links this week. In light of current dollar/yen investment issues, let us harken back to the day of the One Yen bill, facilitated by this nice overlay of Tokyo in 1948 and 1992. For those of you who prefer historical comparisons via sequential art, this tour of Batman logos over the years shows some of the 20th century's best and worst graphic design, but which one did the caped crusader battle under when he made his greatest boner?

Staying in the 1940s, we can look at these World War 2 color photos. They could add even more photos to the collection using this really interesting colorization technique for black and white photos/video that only requires some scribbled color hints (I wonder if the technique would work on these 1910 Paris flood photos).

d and I managed to sneak into an Ando talk at Berkeley, tiptoeing in through the sidedoor and sitting on the floor when the lights went out because all seats were gone over an hour before the talk started. I am thankful for the location of the Men's Room at Dwinelle Hall; I might not have noticed the unguarded entrance otherwise (easy to spot, given that ten-or-so people were already waiting there to sneak in).

photo: Ando's Aomori Contemporary Art Center. Photo by kwc

I really enjoy Tadao Ando's work. I'm not a fan of his most noted signature element -- concrete -- but I love the simplicity of his forms and the ways in which his buildings play with light. This talk gave a fuller survey of some of his works over the past decades, and also gave a lot of insight into his amusingly persistent mentality that guides his projects.

My notes are in the extended entry. There are a lot of large photos of his works that I've culled of the Internet to go with some of the talk notes, so the notes may load very slowly. It took a little longer than normal to put these notes together, but it was worth it, as I now have my own mini-Ando book to browse through and reflect upon.

Thom Mayne Wins Pritzker Prize

I only learned about Caltrans District 7 building recently, but that building and the under-construction SF federal building that Mayne also designed are on my short list for buildings to visit.

I had a good weekend with d down in LA, where we toted our twin Canon Digital Rebels around and snapped photos of everything vaguely building-like. From my previous entry, you can tell that I spent some time at the beach. We also spent part of the weekend watching a table 20 LA'ers go ga-ga over the new PSP, eating dinner with my Aunt and Uncle, and discovering that, contrary to common sense, other Yale women have dated MIT men (Friendster collision!).

Most of our weekend, though, had more of an architectural theme as we saw Gehry's home in Santa Monica and the Getty on Saturday. It was my first visit to Gehry's home, d's second; d's first visit to the Getty, my second. On Sunday we went to the Renzo Piano exhibit at LACMA, which should be there awhile considering how much money they raised to build Piano's future extension to the museum.

I just upgraded to a Flickr Pro account, which means I should have plenty of storage space to blog aplenty about Gehry's home and the Getty (no photos of the Piano exhibit allowed), but for now, the beach entry will have to do as I must find a way to sleep off my Red Bull and coffee.

Over the weekend we swung by Frank Gehry's house in Santa Monica. The location suprised me, as I expected someone like Gehry to live in an ultra-exclusive, gated community with huge walls and attack dogs keeping people away. Instead, his house is relatively modest on an open public street in Santa Monica.

His house isn't in his blobular, twisted metal style. Rather, it has more in common with his earlier works like Edgemar that emphasize simple rectilinear forms. The materials are also fairly modest, making use of both wood and corrugated steel, as well as copious amounts of plants to provide some sense of privacy. Although you can see a large portion of the house in this photo, the actual front of the house is well-protected by dense foliage. Driving down the street it is a home that you notice, but it does not overwhelm the neighborhood that it is in.

I felt rather bad when I noticed his dogs come out onto the patio, as architectural appreciation shifted into the realization that I was point a camera at someone's private home, and it's understandable that he's building a new house (so I hear). Even with his windows set relatively high, it must be disconcerting to regularly have cameras pointed at your home.

Gehry House Photo Album

I took far too many photos at the Getty. To reparaphrase a familar quote: "I have deleted more photos of the Getty than you have ever taken." To deal with this overwhelming glut of photos, I've have winnowed the photos down to two sets: 'skyline' photos and 'sun' photos. The 'skyline' photos are better described as photos taken with the camera pointing upwards, as I focused on the various corners and edges that Richard Meier used in his design. The 'sun' photos take advantage of the fact that I've been to the Getty twice at different times of day, so I have some comparisons of how the building captures and displays light.

The 'sun' photo series is still being put together, but here is a sampling of the 'skylines' series (~70 photos total). I would have whittled my photos down more, but this is also a test of my new Flickr Pro account and how easily Flickr handles large numbers of photos.

Getty Skylines Photoset