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Give us more
What a pleasure it is to see David Perkes’s important work at the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio (GCCDS) grace the cover of the October issue of RECORD. Equally satisfying is the wealth of smart articles in the same issue that explore the strategies that excellent designers employ to make a real difference.
However, one issue is not enough to make a substantial impact. RECORD’s role will remain marginal until there is regular coverage of public interest practice as well as serious editorial attention to the programs, policies, and professional cultures that shape the built and natural environments. For example, the small but highly effective HUD program that funded the GCCDS start-up and many other excellent design interventions, including several featured in your magazine, has since been eliminated. If the architectural press had paid even the slightest bit of attention, there might be designers and design students on the ground in the epicenters of the foreclosure crisis, just as they were in the aftermath of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.
Kathleen Dorgan
Storrs, Conn.
Towering misunderstanding
Shame on RECORD’s Suzanne Stephens and the other jury members who gave to the 2006 Hearst Building addition the International Highrise Award as recorded in Ms. Kaplan-Seem’s fine article in Record News. Perhaps nothing much should be expected of this new award, which uses the silly redundant term “high-rise” instead of the poetic “skyscraper.” But for Stephens — or any jury member — who knows Manhattan to fall for this particular high-rise that so violates the “fitting into the urban fabric” mentioned as a criteria, is immensely disturbing. Disturbing because there has always been so much to admire about Stephens’s good sense and intelligence, and because it has become so evident that the Foster tower, built on the Joseph Urban base, is the first major recent New York tower that could be built anywhere — Dubai, Singapore, Beijing, fill the blank — but not on my beloved island. Such a towering lack of sympathy for and understanding of Manhattan’s scale and design language would be hard to find, but Lord Foster has managed to supply both, and sadly the jury has blindly given 50,000 euros for his nondiscovery. Among the group mentioned as considered for the award, it is Renzo Piano’s New York Times Building that is deserving. Any jury should have seen how it brilliantly integrates its fine, quieter skyscraper into the city’s urban fabric. Shame!
James Rossant, FAIA
Hudson, N.Y.
[Suzanne Stephens replies]
I must confess I was the lone dissenting member of the jury that awarded Foster + Partners’ Hearst Tower the 2008 International Highrise Award. Once we had narrowed it down to five, I voted for the New York Times Building by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and FXFOWLE. I did so because I considered it a refinement of New York’s skyscraper tradition. While the Hearst Tower is innovative in its use of a diagrid structure, it is too unresolved in its stubby proportions, the way the top meets the sky (flatly), and the way it hamfistedly squashes into Joseph Urban’s Mooresque base. And I agree it doesn’t have much to do with the New York City context and its iconic skyscraper tradition. All that aside, in 50 years, the architectural community will probably adore its clumsy harshness and be trying to save it from demolition, or prevent another, taller tower being extruded from its top.
Fuller appreciation
I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Sorkin’s Critique on Bucky Fuller in the November issue. It showed a deep understanding of Fuller’s historic contribution to architecture and geometry, as well his unique ability to explain how advances in technology fuel humanity’s economic progress.
Pete Chasar
Brookings, Ore.
CEU woes
After reading Louise Miles, AIA’s letter [November 2008, page 31] regarding her problems with the Continuing Education program, I feel the program should be shut down. Personally, I never felt we needed it. By the time they open their office, architects have obtained the necessary expertise and do not need coursework, especially the courses that are offered; the ones I’ve taken were poor and a waste of time. The program has boiled down to architects running around, taking any course that fits into their schedule just to get the required number of learning units so they don’t lose their license. A friend joked that if someone developed a black market in learning units, in no time they’d have more money than Donald Trump. But like all bureaucracies, once they’re in place, it’s almost impossible to get rid of them.
Roy A. Euker
New York City
For the children
I was intrigued by the cover for your annual December Vanguard issue until I discovered the photograph featured is of a house’s children’s sleeping quarters. Those poor dears. After having climbed two flights of unprotected stairs through two equally unprotected holes in the floor, past an exposed bathtub … are they still with us?
Such nonsense. How much could that bleak, black pyramid have cost? We have been wallowing in a period of idiotic, overbudget, Baroque expression for much too long. The pendulum is again swinging toward a rebirth of Classicism.
Ray Krueger
Tucson
I have been receiving Architectural Record for the past 40 years and I have never written a letter to the editor until now. The cover of the December issue that pictures an architect standing in a shaftlike space with a skylight prompted me to write. The title on the cover says “Design Vanguard 2008.” I think it would better if it said, “Design Sansguard 2008.” You wonder what keeps the children from falling into the hole in the floor. You also wonder how one would actually use the stair. I think if you got on hands and knees and went down backwards, you might make it without falling. I have to wonder why you consider this work worthy of a cover photo or an example of good architecture.
Correction
In the article “An Energy-Conserving Technology From Europe Makes Inroads in the U.S.” [November 2008, page 183], the name of one of the quoted sources was misspelled. The correct spelling is Donald Haiges. He is an a senior vice president at WSP Flack+Kurtz in Boston.
Please send letters
via e-mail to editor-in-chief Robert Ivy at
rivy@mcgraw-hill.com.
Letters may be edited for style and format.
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© 2009 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved
© 2009 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved