from: https://placesjournal.org/article/hong-kong-grounded/

Hong Kong is relentlessly vertical, a city of towers and skyways, elevators and ladder streets, built on a mountainside — a city without ground, according to the architects Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong. In their guidebook to the three-dimensional circulatory networks of downtown Hong Kong, they draw a city that has radically abrogated its relationship with the ground plane. ¹

It’s a beautiful, insightful book, but its sense of gravity is all wrong. For no matter how deeply you lose yourself in the aerial labyrinth, how many escalators you ascend from sea level, how many building portals you pass through, inevitably the mountainous terrain of Hong Kong Island rises up at a faster rate. The levitating pedestrian bumps into the hillside and is brought back to earth. In Hong Kong, the ground is everywhere.

The photographs in this slideshow examine zones of contact between the multilevel metropolis and the mountain. Rocks and soils that in other cities would be buried or obscured are here integral to the setting. The terrain that weaves between streets, through public spaces, and beneath buildings reminds observers of the tenuous relation between the city and its geology. To guard against landslides, the most precipitous grades are stabilized by engineers and classified within a government database that contains 60,000 registered slopes. This is a serious enterprise, with official plates identifying the geotechnical compliance of each slope. Engineering solutions vary from simple block retaining walls to more elaborate structures with anchors, scaffoldings, high tensile wires, and ferro-cement. They constitute a topographic image of the island.

These slopes are frequently put to civic use. Usable land is so scarce that community functions are shoehorned into the engineered hillsides: miniature pocket parks, vertical gardens, seating nooks, bus stops, even ultra-compact municipal storage depots. For flatlanders who are accustomed to cities built on floodplains, this is a novel arrangement. When analyzed in the traditional plan view, Hong Kong’s pocket spaces do not fit conventional templates for good urban legibility, accessibility, repetition, structure, or form. Often, you cannot see from one element to the next, nestled above or below. And yet, the assemblage works. It meets the higher goals of urban design: distinctiveness, variation, and responsiveness to place.

With infrastructure now stretched in urbanist discourse to refer to benches, cell towers, and almost anything multiplied across the city, the term has lost some of its potency. We ought to consider the root of the word — infra meaning below — and look carefully at the structures of the city that are underfoot. Hong Kong’s system of 60,000 registered slopes is a genuine landscape infrastructure that underlies the city, and that grounds the social and physical experiences we have there.

From: http://spacing.ca/national/2017/07/18/book-review-los-angeles-boulevard-eight-x-rays-body-public/

Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public

As an urban design instructor, practitioner and bibliophile, it is a rare pleasure to discover lesser known, critical and insightful books on urban structure. More so on Los Angeles, a city well endowed with iconic texts—from Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies to Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. This being the case, one can only imagine my delight when I stumbled upon Doug Suisman’s Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public.

Originally published in 1989 as a ‘pamphlet’—interestingly, just a year prior to City of Quartz—this most recent 2014 edition was produced in celebration of its 25-year-anniversary. As one would expect, the original introduction and eight “x-rays”—chapters—are included. Additionally, however, it comes in a new beautifully-designed hardcover frame with refreshed graphics, opening with an excellent new foreword by L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, who describes the significance of the work in the wake of his incredible year-long series Reading LA. Most significantly, an entire new section—Twenty Five Years Later: Boulevards in Practice—is included: effectively doubling the size of the original pamphlet to a charmingly compact 144 pages, and covering 10 interesting projects done by Suisman’s firm, after the initial publication.

The eight “x-rays” themselves—idiosyncratically named, peppered with beautiful diagrams and maps, and roughly ten pages each—are concise, intelligent, analytical pieces that ultimately argue against treating boulevards of Los Angeles as mere embodiments of technical specifications and economic considerations. Instead, to use the eloquent words of Christopher Hawthorne, they are  “a great reservoir of public space waiting to be redefined and activated.” Such sentiments fall on deaf ears even today—a fact that makes the book all the more relevant now—so one can imagine that, in the late 80s, Suisman was talking to a brick wall.

This being the case, he had to be strategic about how he constructed his narrative, wisely choosing to delve into the rich history, evolution and significance of the boulevards of Los Angeles over time. This journey begins with the Suture x-ray, that describes how the broad structure of the boulevards are a consequence of historical circumstances and boundaries of early settlement patterns, such as the original pueblos and common lands. This is followed by two chapters—Umbilical and Spine—outlining the interesting histories of Sunset and Wilshire Boulevards, respectively.

Girdle and Phosphor dig into effects of early Hollywood and film culture on the city and boulevards. The first focuses on the complex relationship between early introverted movie studios and the major boulevards, while the second drills into their extroverted counter parts—movie theatres—and the resulting transformation of these corridors between day and night.

Things switch gears, literally and figuratively, in Torrent where Suisman focuses on the transformation of the physical structure of the boulevard in response to changes in transportation technologies, from footpath to streetcar to automobile. Building from this, Pathogen, looks at new forms of communication in light of the higher speeds of travel. Speaking to signs and symbols in space, Suisman goes beyond focusing on the increase in size and quantity of advertisements in the typical sense, to speak to the evolution of building types towards acting like billboards in the landscape.

The last of the x-rays, Fuselage, offers the punchline. In keeping with the title of the chapter, it compares the boulevard to the fuselage of an airplane: an element that requires coordination with its surrounding elements in order to work properly. As such, Suisman highlights the importance of boulevards as transitional spaces of arrival and entry for people coming from surrounding areas. In light of this, he calls for an integrated approach to their treatment, moving beyond considerations of its surface rights-of-way to include “all underground development, rear and side elevations, alleys, parking areas, and adjacent neighbourhoods”. A wonderful set of annotated diagrams explicitly outlining boulevard design considerations marks the end of the original pamphlet.

This transitions well into the newly added Twenty Five Years Later: Boulevards in Practice—consisting of 10 chapters outlining 10 projects from around the world, done between 1991 and 2012, that demonstrate how Suisman’s initial research informed his practice. The projects include completed and unbuilt works, and counter to what one may expect, not all proposal focus the design of singular boulevards. Instead, they focus how of a “boulevard frame of mind” was used towards different urban design problems. This makes them all the more instructive, as the selected works show how the ‘x-ray’ method used in Los Angeles Boulevards—one that biased a ‘close reading’ and first hand experience of place—is universally applicable to a diversity of urban design issues.

This being the case, the power of this newly packaged, expanded Los Angeles Boulevards lies in its ability to emphasize that, beyond simply being a critical book on a singular aspect of LA’s urban environment, it offers a valuable way of thinking about and approaching urban design problems, more generally. To my mind, this rightfully places Suisman’s contributions beside the various great minds, such as Banham and Davis, that have dissected Los Angeles towards speaking to broadly relevant issues. I don’t hesitate to say, then, that Los Angeles Boulevards is a must-read for architects, planners, designers and urbanists who not only care about improving the urban landscape, but also want to get a glimpse into how a forcefully analytical mind attacks the problem of the city.

***

For more information on the Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public, visit the ORO Editions website.

**

Erick Villagomez is one of the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver. He is also an educator, independent researcher and designer with personal and professional interests in the urban landscapes. His private practice – Metis Design|Build – is an innovative practice dedicated to a collaborative and ecologically responsible approach to the design and construction of places. You can see more of his artwork on his Visual Thoughts Tumblr and follow him on his instagram account: @e_vill1.

The Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York cordially hosted an event on July 8th, to celebrate the recent publication of: UNFOLDED: How Architecture Saved My Life. This book marvelously captures the extraordinary life and work of Batholomew Voorsanger, and is inclusive of photography and written documentation by acclaimed author, Alastair Gordon.

http://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/12102-unfolded-how-architecture-saved-my-life?v=preview

Fred A. Bernstein

 Bartholomew Voorsanger is best known for museum projects, such as the Asia Society Museum renovation in New York (2001), and a series of sprawling houses from Martha’s Vineyard to Montana. To his credit, the architect expounds on disappointments as well as successes. Describ­ing a competition he lost—for a World War II museum in Poland—he tells Alastair Gordon that he “failed to understand the national culture and the intent of the jury.” He concedes that his rejected entry for the expansion of the Brooklyn Museum didn’t provide an iconic space. But most of Voorsanger’s candor is reserved for his personal life. Born in 1937 in Detroit, he and his twin brother, Neil, spent three years in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York after their seamstress mother gave them up. They were occasionally “chosen” by foster families, and then returned to the facility weeks or months later. Voorsanger remembers the grim orphanage as a series of wards, set enfilade, and has always avoided such linearity in his work. At age 3, the boys were adopted by a prominent San Francisco couple named Voorsanger, known for their interest in the arts. But the damage had been done. Bart was a terror as a child—he once struck a teacher and had to be home-schooled; another time, he vandalized a neighbor’s marble mansion with black shoe polish. His twin, at age 11, blinded himself in one eye by firing a pistol.

But architecture, says Voorsanger, gave him an outlet. At 13, he saw Bernard Maybeck’s First Church of Christ, Scientist (1901) in Berkeley. Overwhelmed by its beauty, he decided to become an architect. After studying at Princeton and Harvard, Voorsanger worked for the urban planner Vincent Ponte in Montreal, then spent 10 years with I. M. Pei in New York before forming a partnership with Ed Mills in 1978.

His devotion to his work, he says, led to the breakup of his first marriage, to Lisa Livingston, with whom he had adopted a daughter and a son. He endured tragedies: his second wife, curator Catherine Hoover, died of cancer. His daughter was murdered, and her son was killed in a snowmobile accident. (Voorsanger is now married to the museum executive Peggy Loar.) Voorsanger & Mills won a number of important commissions including the Hostos Community College Allied Health Complex in the Bronx (1991), and a “garden court” joining sections of the Morgan Library on Madison Avenue (1992). But the partnership with Mills ended in 1989. “It was like being in another bad marriage,” Voorsanger recalls. And in a setback not mentioned in the book, the Morgan Library demolished the 10-year-old garden court to accommodate Renzo Piano’s 2006 expansion.

His firm, now called Voorsanger Architects, has completed such projects as the multiphased National World War II Museum in New Orleans (2009–2019), offices for the designer Elie Tahari (2003), and a number of houses distinguished by expansive roofs. Gordon sees the roofs, which often unfold like interlocking planes, as representing the shelter Voorsanger has been seeking since his childhood. He’s come a long way from the orphanage.

http://www.commarts.com/

http://www.csla-aapc.ca/landscapes-paysages/landscapes-paysages

from: http://land8.com/profiles/blogs/la-takes-on-landscape-identity-in-their-...

LA+, published by ORO Editions, started out in the spring of 2015 as a unique, landscape-focused journal that deviated from the pack by not only bringing designers, but philosophers, artists, geographers, ecologists, planners, scientists, and others to the table for their take on a core theme in each issue. Since then, the folks over at the UPenn School of Design have covered the themes of Wild, Pleasure, Tyranny, and Simulation. Along with the individual theme, each issue ends up with its own unique tone and perspective. This season’s issue is Identity.

The concept of identity shapes the very core of what we do as landscape architects. “Place-making” is often the seminal charge of clients and the means they use to create, reinforce, or change the identity of a place. This process pulls from every aspect of our skill set. LA+’s Spring Edition explores how the ideas of place have evolved and how “sense of place as the the manifestation of cultural identity has been landscape architecture’s raison d'être and its main aesthetic contribution to the cultural landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.”

Not easing in, the editors start by literally comparing the landscapes of Nazi Germany to those “mass produced by today's so-called 'placemakers.'” Shots fired. The creative backlash against organizations like Project for Public Places is real and mentioned more and more often. What are we to make of manufactured identities? Is a 21st century programmed place any less authentic than one developed in centuries past?

The initial brushes of the Identity issue wax romantic on the notions of self and personal identity. It surmises that only through the lens of yourself, can you truly take the next logical step and consider a symbiotic relationship with your convenient planet of reference. This symbiotically connects the life and health of the planet directly to you and your actions. However, though these philosophical ruminations are clear and convincing, are they really arguments that need to be made to the intended audience? A philosophical understanding of our entire industry notwithstanding, the invocations of meaning are thoughtfully pondered, but for this reader, mostly end up in the same place they started.

A more interesting evolution of the symbiotic premise is then applied to the idea of colonizing other planets. If humans are currently in a thoroughly vetted, interdependent relationship with Earth, then how do humans sync up with worlds of different origins and inhospitable environments? Are we hopelessly confined to being but guests and never capable of the sort of congruence we have with our current home?

A brief and fascinating passage by Dirk Sijmons asserts that identity is, in fact, a verb, or more specifically, a process. He asserts that though in the past century, designers have clung to the idea that landscape form is just a creative output of the project constraints and an application of art, we forget to consider the massive importance of macro processes that shape space. In his example, the massive dam and weirs projects in Holland attest to human's ability to shape and augment space to fit basic needs. Modern designers have used remnants and echoes of these forms to derive designs that supposedly echo the “genus of place.” Their assertion, however, under weighs the agricultural, industrial, and defensive motivations for the augmentation in the first place. The changing needs of inhabitants over centuries and their willingness to take on massive scale revolutions in the landscape are the true basis of identity. Consider the canals of Egypt, the rapidly spreading swaths of suburban China, the Hoover Dam of Nevada, or the artificial islands of Dubai where Sijmons asks if processes of civilization are the generators of identity, rather than social or colloquial elements landscape architects often use to derive form.

Further considering manufactured uniqueness, Andrew Graan and Aleksander Takovski mine Macedonia's "Skopje 2014 for lessons in identity." Skopje 2014 is an extraordinary architectural makeover project in the namesake capital city of Macedonia that seeks to clear asunder the remnants of Ottoman and Socialist markers that unfortunately results in a "sense that one has stumbled into a fantastic landscape that desperately wants to be noticed." Skopje's array of massive statues of Alexander the Great and others seeks to create a "political economy of architectural spectacle." While the statues and buildings are derived from historical references and hit all the notes of place-derived focuses, the product borders on infatuation and excess. How are we to consider the identity of these places years, and even decades, from now? Will Skopje be viewed as an exercise in abject nationalism, or will it meld into the fabric of Macedonia's identity causing future designers to derive their forms from it?

Finally, one of the most interesting reads from this issue is Branding Landscape by Nicole Porter. She asserts that 'place' itself has obvious intrinsic economic value and the strategic practice of 'place branding' seeks to exploit that value. Two case studies, Singapore's Gardens by the Bay and Norway's national park branding, outline her argument that these branded landscapes have been reduced to "functioning as commodified objects functioning as brands." In both instances, the government harnesses the most cost effective way to impress and, consequently, express the commitment and efficiency of said government. She laments that "the irony is that producing place identities according to market-friendly typologies can destroy their true uniqueness and inherent value at the same time." Her worry is that a capitalist ideology injected into the human-nature relationship is a slippery slope that forces everyone to be consumers.

LA+ Identity is another excellent entry into an already thoughtful collection of varied perspectives on the work that landscape architects do. While some of the more existential explorations of philosophy are valuable and necessary, the critique of pervasive ideologies and popular landscapes is even more essential.

--Benjamin Boyd is a landscape architect practicing at Mahan Rykiel Associates in Baltimore, Maryland. Check out his profile on Goodreads to see what he has been reading. Ben often tweets about landscape at @_benboyd.

http://www.kearch.com/the-doctor-is-in-julie-eizenberg-honored-by-univer...

Julie received an honorary doctorate from the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning on December 12, 2016. The award honors her leadership in design innovation across various building types; extensive history of research, teaching, and lecturing; and her writing, including 2006 firm monograph Architecture isn’t just for special occasions and forthcoming publication Urban Hallucinations.

Julie also delivered a commencement address, structured around five questions: “Why did they show us this movie?” asked in reference to a screening of Luis Brunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel” at her own University of Melbourne orientation; the “Why did you leave Australia?”; “What will you be doing in five years?” with a disclaimer for parents to “be careful about asking this question and empower your graduate to steer their own path;” “Will someone find me out?” (“clearly, not yet”); and a question posed by the University itself, “What will you make possible?”

From: http://spacing.ca/national/2017/05/16/book-review-merrick-house/

Edited by Anthony Robins, ORO Editions (2017)

UBC SALA West Coast Modern House Series

Nestled on a wooded hillside, the house is truly contextual, yet eccentric and outrageous at the same time. It is not a house anyone would contemplate designing, or indeed be allowed to build, in the 21st century. With formidable skill, Merrick juxtaposed just three simple materials and managed to create a 17-level edifice with spatial gymnastics, a 40-foot high stone fireplace, an extraordinary sense of materiality mixed with powerful structural tectonics, and a striking relationship with nature.

• Anthony Robins, from the Introduction

The third book in this important series from UBC SALA, produced by Leslie Van Duzer, Sherry McKay, and Chris Macdonald, Merrick House is an illuminating testament to both the architect and his own residence, built in his early years when the idea of designing and building one own’s home was not yet out of reach for an aspiring Vancouver architect. Leslie and company have also tapped into an archetype beyond just the need to document these West Coast Modern treasures as endangered species – she has also revealed the incarnate relationship between the architect and their residence. The book series being produced by ORO Editions, with photography by Michael Perlmutter and book design by Pablo Mandel, is a literary trope of the artist and their craft, with several upcoming books also to reveal this relationship between the architect and the typology of the modern single family residence.

At the book launch put on at Inform Interiors in late April, Tony Robins was able to sit and chat with Paul Merrick in front of a captivated audience to talk about the house, the architect and the making of the book. In his opening remarks, Tony humourously recounted his enthusiasm to write about the book, producing in excess of 9000 words, and being somewhat brokenhearted when Leslie told him the folio required only one third the word count. The resulting text accompanying the stunning photos of the house is a tightly edited narrative, nonetheless capturing the essence of the larger story that Tony would’ve written. The book launch also offered those attending the opportunity to meet the house’s new owners, who spoke briefly about its upkeep being a labour of love.

In the book’s introduction, Tony talks about the house being controversial for its time, something he himself can certainly understand what with his own work having been in the news just over a year ago for being somewhat conspicuous on a high profile street corner. Had that particular house been surrounded by trees on the side of one of the north shore mountains it most certainly wouldn’t have caused such a fuss, as Paul’s house existed in relative obscurity over the years, mostly as the architect himself did not want to draw too much attention to it while he was living in it. Despite this, the new book does a great service to this wonderful architectural expression, so idiosyncratic and representative of its maker.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the book is the insight it gives to the creative process of the architect, and how this is passed through the generations from one architect to the next. In the case of Paul Merrick this of course is his relationship to his mentor Ron Thom, and Tony includes in his introduction how the impact of seeing a Thom house being built in his neighbourhood when a teenager provided him with the impetus to not only study architecture, but would ultimately lead to his working for Thompson Berwick Pratt, where he would be taken under the wing of Thom.

Such details in the telling of the story of Merrick House are as important as the sketches and photographs the book’s editors have included. An ordinary photograph in the book of the house’s front door takes on a whole new significance when one realizes the door has been made from Ron Thom’s drafting table. And such gems are just the beginning, as a journey through the house takes the visitor to multiple vantage points, comprised of an astonishing 17 levels, with impossible stairs and parts of the building torquing around first growth trees, as Tony pointed out that Paul only removed one mature tree during the house’s construction.

Other wonderful quirks revealed in the book include the house’s cantilevering bed in the original design’s master bedroom, which overhangs from the second floor loft space and provides part of the ceiling for the living and dining room spaces below. Massive panes of single-pane glazing form much of the houses lower walls below its massive A-frame roof, with the undisputed signature piece of the house being the 40-foot high stone fireplace that commands the double-height interior of the house, built by Merrick’s sons as humourously recounted by Tony.

The book launch at Inform, with two more launches planned for the next two books in series, ended with a marvelous Q&A that provided additional perspective to the architect and his house, including a story of how the architect learned his first lesson on sustainability as a youth, telling the story of how he milled the lumber to replace the pieces he used to build a boat. This lesson and many others were certainly there as he sketched this extraordinarily eccentric house design on the margins of his drafting table, standing as counterpoint to the work he did while a young designer at the offices of TBP.

And as Leslie pointed out in her opening comments to the evening, with two more books in the series being released closely on the heels of Merrick House, this SALA series on West Coast Modern Houses is now beginning to take on a much larger presence, certainly on one’s book shelf. With upcoming volumes on houses by B.C. Binning and Arthur Erickson forthcoming, this compelling collection of books are certainly to be treasured and referenced in the library of any architect, student, or teacher.

For more information on Merrick House, visit the ORO Editions website.