Architecture's New Motto: Design Till You Drop Architecture's New Motto: Design Till You Drop
By FRED BERNSTEIN

ASK Daniel Herman who designed the plaid shirt he's wearing to lunch in a TriBeCa restaurant, and he turns a little red. "I don't know," said Mr. Herman, a 31-year-old architect based in Los Angeles. "There's some designer's name on it."

Mr. Herman, who got the shirt from his mother for Christmas, doesn't like shopping, and he's not alone. In the seven chapters he wrote for the improbably named "Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping" (Taschen, $60) — an 800-page book edited by Rem Koolhaas and others, which is to be published tomorrow — Mr. Herman contends that most of the 20th century's best-known architects had "nothing but contempt for shopping."

Even after it became clear that shopping was a driving force behind postwar development ("Suburbs," Mr. Herman said, "begin with malls."), such pre-eminent architects as Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Mies van der Rohe turned their noses up at store and mall commissions. As a result, they lost a chance to shape retail design, and the world ended up with the formless mall interiors that Mr. Koolhaas derides as "junkspace."

Mr. Herman's interest in shopping (as a subject) arose while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1997. Mr. Koolhaas was conducting a seminar on shopping with students whose research would eventually become the "Guide to Shopping" (photocopies of which have been circulating in architecture schools for several years now). To research his seven chapters, Mr. Herman drove across the country with his wife, the architect Linda Chung, and visited more than 100 malls, including the Galleria in Houston (among the first designed with links to hotels and office buildings) and the vast Mall of America in Minnesota.

While inspecting no fewer than five shopping centers in Paramus, N.J., Mr. Herman said, he came to understand that malls aren't meant to last. "We throw them away and move on," he said. "It's survival of the biggest." Mr. Herman emerged with critical data; his wife "emerged with shoes."

While in New York last week for a publication party, Mr. Herman toured the new Prada store in SoHo designed by Mr. Koolhaas, and the TriBeCa Issey Miyake boutique by Frank Gehry, which, along with the new Gaultier store by Philippe Starck, may signal a resurgence of interest by name designers in shopping.

On the morning after the party, Mr. Herman answered questions from House & Home.

Q. Why is it so rare for serious architects to design stores?

A. Architects want to do houses, museums and schools; those are considered serious pursuits. Stores and malls are way down on the bottom of the list. One reason is the taint of commerce. Another reason is impermanence. The one thing you can say for sure about a store is that it isn't likely to be around in 10 years.

Q. Are there exceptions?

A. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1948 V. C. Morris boutique, in San Francisco, was designed as a jewelry store. Now it's a gallery, but it's entirely intact. It's a kind of study for the Guggenheim, with a circular ramp. Wright really organized the space, which is rare in shopping design; most stores and malls are just boxes.

Q. What about the other great modern architects of the 20th century?

A. Le Corbusier did a scheme for a shoe store that was never built. Louis Kahn did a couple of small shops. Alvar Aalto never did a store. Mies did a shopping concourse for the Toronto-Dominion Center, but you never hear it called a mall.

Q. Is it possible to design stores and still be taken seriously?

A. Well, Jon Jerde is the pre-eminent shopping architect of our time. I give him a lot of credit for trying to do something new: shopping/entertainment complexes which through sheer density and complexity have helped revive dilapidated city centers. Yet Jerde's reputation among serious architects is very poor.

Q. So even architects like Frank Gehry stayed away from shopping altogether?

A. Actually, early in his career, Gehry was one of the few "high architects" who saw shopping as a legitimate pursuit. Back then, he did a lot of malls for the Rouse Company. But then, around 1982, he kind of reinvented himself. Now, in his monograph, there's 18 pages on the Guggenheim Bilbao, and half a page on Centerpoint Mall, in Oxnard, Calif.

Q. But he did do a store for Issey Miyake.

A. It's beautiful, but he really just applied design motifs to the space. He isn't really engaging the subject of shopping.

Q. Outside of high-end boutiques, do name architects get to do many stores?

A. Rarely. Stanley Marcus [of Neiman Marcus], who died last month, wanted to do interesting buildings, so he hired Philip Johnson, Kevin Roche, Edward Larrabee Barnes and Gyo Obata. But he said these architects really had no interest in shopping per se, and most of the projects were failures.

Q. How so?

A. Barnes designed a Neiman-anchored mall, but he had it stepping up a hill, and that was bad for pedestrian traffic. And, according to Marcus, the stores "died on the vine." Marcus later said that Barnes had never been in a store; his wife did all the shopping. And Philip Johnson did a Neiman's in San Francisco; on the inside you would never know that a major architectural figure was involved. It is indistinguishable from any other department store. The attitude seems to be: leave the inside to the store experts; we don't want to get our hands dirty with retail.

Q. So Philip Johnson has never been inside a Wal-Mart. Why does that matter?

A. Shopping is infiltrating every sphere of modern life. But architects stayed on the sidelines. Had Le Corbusier given a department store the kind of attention he gave to the problem of making a city, or a monastery or a church, he would have added to the repository of thinking on the subject. And we would have had a lot less junk space now.

Q. And is the situation changing now?

A. You do see a few architects really engaging in shopping. There's Rem, and [Jacques] Herzog and [Pierre] de Meuron — they were the Pritzker Prize winners in 2001 — they're also doing stores for Prada. And they did a boutique in Zurich. So shopping may be entering its Bilbao phase.

Q. Meaning stores will be buildings everyone wants to see?

A. For a while, after Bilbao, museum buildings became more important than the art inside.

Q. So we'll have stores as stars?

A. The individual stores that are produced may or may not succeed. But they've already succeeded in bringing a level of seriousness to the undertaking of creating shopping space. For the first time, the architecture schools are offering "shopping studios." Rem started that at Harvard, and other schools have followed. So architecture students are no longer being taught that good architects only do housing and museums. The real legacy may be that after Rem, it will be safe for architects who want to be thought of as cool to do designs for shopping.

The great non-building builders. Deyan Sudjic

Archigram was a sweeter, gentler and essentially English version of the futurists. They were six architects who, almost by accident, stumbled into creating the only architectural movement that has meant anything to the outside world that this country has produced in 50 years.

Projects for Prada
by OMA/AMO and Rem Koolhaas and The Prince Street Prada store
by John Menick - 01/28/2002

If it isn't well understood it's at least generally experienced that shopping has become an end in itself. Once, probably fairly recently, if someone needed a pair of shoes, they went out and unceremoniously bought a pair. Shopping was perfunctory, utilitarian, transparent in its function. Over the past half-century, multinational capitalism -- or some Disneyfied version of it -- has turned shopping into a form of entertainment to be enjoyed free from all the fuss of having to actually buy something.

That was my mother...Eleanor Cooney

There's a Japanese word, kawaisoo, which, roughly translated, means 'the pity of things'.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Jonathan Glancey: Cornish coastal towns redevelopment
Cornwall is a county of glorious, wave beaten beaches. Cornwall is also a county of mostly lacklustre and even fishy architecture. Many visitors are disappointed by the rows of dreary huts pasted with satellite dishes sitting along its dramatic coastline. But then Cornwall is not a wealthy place.

Guardian Unlimited | World dispatch | Neither safe nor sound Neither safe nor sound

Rules imposed by China on travel to Tibet on the pretext of 'ensuring safety' have created a corrupt system that fails to protect tourists from danger, writes John Gittings

Are you local?
New Forest council wants to introduce a strict residency test to keep out rich commuters. But will this controversial plan help the county's homes become affordable?

Revolutions in taste in garden design, over 4 centuries

Garden revolutions
The following essay, which has been revised, was first published in Tom Turner's City as landscape: a post-Postmodern view of planning and design (Spons:London, 1996).

Archigram wins RIBA's Royal Gold Medal
The phenomenon that is Archigram (from ARCHItecture and teleGRAM) changed the world of architecture in the sixties and seventies and has influenced many world class, and less famous, architects - and architecture generally - ever since. Indeed the group's ideas have grown even more relevant as time passes. 1991 saw the reissue of the book that they put together in 1972, and the Archigram exhibition has been touring the world since 1994.

New York New Visions

New York New Visions is a coalition of 20 architecture, planning, and design organizations that came together immediately following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

I thought I was a control freak:

Shin Takamatsu

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ArchiNed News:Shin Takamatsu

'Architecture says more than words. I think I should vanish from the site now…'

They cannot be serious. Deyan Sudjic Broadway Malyan, with their plans for a prime London site, are nothing new. They are just the latest architects whose elephantine tread has ruined our cities

Samuel Mockbee, 57, architect to the poor

By JIM DWYER
The New York Times METROPOLITAN DESK | January 6, 2002, Sunday

Samuel Mockbee, an architect and teacher whose commitment to bringing high-quality building design to the most impoverished residents of rural Alabama inspired other architects, died on Dec. 30 in Jackson. He was 57 and lived in Canton.

The cause was complications from leukemia, said his wife, Jacquelyn Johnson Mockbee.

Mockbee so loved the pure act of building that he eventually abandoned fee-paying clients in favor of working at the construction site with a crowd of hammer-bearing students gathered around him. He was a burly man who wore custom-made raw silk shirts and reveled in the art of ribald storytelling. His clients were the poor of Black Warrior River in Hale County, the same depressed region of Alabama recorded by James Agee and Walker Evans in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941). What he offered through his Rural Studio student workshop in Greensboro, Ala., associated with Auburn University, was small-scale architecture that could help lift people out of poverty by providing affordable housing as well as community buildings.

“Sam Mockbee and his Auburn students prove that architecture can still be a fine art and a social service at the same time,” said Robert Campbell, the architecture critic, in a new book on the Rural Studio.

A fifth-generation Mississippian, Mockbee was born on Dec. 23, 1944, in Meridian. The son of a traveling shoe salesman, he prized schooldays when he was home sick, so he could spend time drawing pictures of houses for his mother, his wife said. By the fourth grade, he knew he wanted to be an architect.

Before going to architecture school, he joined the Army in 1967, serving two years as an artillery officer at Fort Benning, Ga. He briefly met his future wife, also born in Meridian, on a blind date in 1968. On a second blind date, two years later, he asked her to marry him.

Mockbee attended Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1974. After practicing on his own, he formed a partnership with Coleman Coker in 1984. The two young architects quickly made a name for themselves with designs that treated regional motifs boldly with a modernist rigor. They were identified, along with Scogin, Elam, Bray of Atlanta and Clark Menefee of Charleston, S.C., as strong new voices of architecture coming from the South. In 1990 their firm, Mockbee Coker, was selected by the Architectural League of New York to participate in the prestigious Emerging Voices series.

But the business of architecture was not for Mockbee, who had also begun to paint in a myth-laden vernacular style; in 1991 he started teaching at Auburn University. In 1993 he founded Rural Studio with the help of D.K. Ruth, then the head of Auburn's architecture department.

The workshop was a hands-on exercise in getting buildings built for those who needed them most. Guided by recommendations from local community groups, Mockbee would sometimes knock on the doors of the most dilapidated shanties in Hale County and offer to build the residents a new home, community center or chapel. Students conducted detailed interviews and did the construction themselves, using tires, hay bales, old license plates and other materials that were donated or scavenged. The designs themselves had a modern sleekness embellished with traditional southern amenities, like porches and dog trots. A new smokehouse, the longtime dream of one elderly homeowner, was trimmed in glass bottle bottoms but also recalled the sculptural form of Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp.

When Mockbee learned in 1998 that he had leukemia, he cut back on an active schedule as a visiting professor at the architecture schools at Harvard, Yale and other universities; a bone marrow transplant enabled him to continue his work with Rural Studio. In 2000 he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his work there.

Mockbee once told his students, defining the purpose of the workshop, that it was “about being decent and trying to provide a decent community for all its citizens,” adding, “It’s about being democratic.”

In addition to his wife, Mockbee is survived by his daughters, Margaret, of Oxford; Sarah Ann, of Canton; Carol, of Auburn, Ala.; and a son, Julius, of Canton.

A very evocative review of the landscape and people of Newfoundland; location for the film adaptation of The Shipping News.

This cruel & empty land

On seaside cliffs, the wind has blown so hard for so long that the trees are no more than chest-high, gnarled into natural bonsai called tuckamore.

Volkswagen's Glaeserne Manufaktur (glass factory), opened by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder as a Christmas present to the city of Dresden last month, is an industrial revelation. A revolution even. A beautiful gathering of ultra-modern buildings, it is as far from the car plants of Dagenham and Longbridge as it is possible to imagine.

Gabion: Thomas Heatherwick and Newcastle’s Blue Carpet. 1/3

“Well,” says Tom Heatherwick, slightly defensively, “I think it’s blue enough.” This is possibly the oddest defence of a work of art since Turner had to explain why all his paintings were so yellow. But when the work in question has been six years in the making, takes the form of a new public square in Newcastle, and has always been described as a “blue carpet”, well, people expect blue. They expect Yves Klein blue, or its close relation, Will Alsop blue. What they get with Heatherwick’s square is grey with a sparkly hint of blue. Some Tynesiders have been muttering that it’s not blue enough. Hence Heatherwick’s defence.

Thank you Blogger & BlogSpot.

This evening I eventually had a spare second to actually sit down and work out that Freeservers no longer allows FTP access. Hence no publishing for months. Sorry. Not that anyone reads this, but it was annoying me. Anyway, BlogSpot to the rescue and a new look aswell. I'm just going to stick with this template and not try anything fancy (except perhaps adding some meta tags and key words so I can register it with the search engines). L&U is dead. Long live L&U.