Do we live in a world of ideas or a world of things?

Maybe Mr. Anderson is saying that some ideas should just remain ideas.

There is an inital test for ideas: Does a proposed idea create misery or reduce misery?

a functional building is by definition spiritually uplifting.

Anything you perceive as stultifying can be considered a design flaw.

Yes a building can be both beautiful and useful to human beings. Thats good design.

mofo, I’m pro good design but i’m not completely anti-whimsy. I think whimsy is valid in it’s right to exist.

Also if you go back to teh thread, an architect raises several valid points that I felt bad about playing devils advocate against.

it’s all good :-)

Squid.. Worse by several multiples than the Courtyard by Marriot even?

hmmm. you must be one of those insane people I keep reading about.

also yeah Seattle Public Library is kinda cool in the fun-house kind of way.

Just needs the wavy mirrors and we’d be golden.

I’ve been rejected from architecture school because I expressed the opinion that Frank Gehry is an idiot. Apparently, criticizing a starchitect is a capital offense.

I’ve never been in the EMP, but I have visited the library once or twice before. I’ve found it to be very disorienting. It’s very difficult to locate materials and the entrances and exits are not arranged very well. I would not want to be in that building if there were a fire or earthquake.

To their credit, though, many people would instantly recognize the buildings as being in Seattle, whether they are familiar with Seattle or not. Like the Space Needle, they are icons of the city. There are very few buildings in Tacoma that are unique enough that someone from Atlanta would instantly recognize it as being from Tacoma.

How and why did Seattle build that hideous new public library? J.H. Kunstler explains in S MP3 Download

from the podcast description…

James Howard Kunstler tells us how cities get hoodwinked into a status fashion contest to have a museum or library built by one of the celebrity architects of the day. Rem Koolhass, Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman and others are deliberately designing these disastrous, anxiety-inducing mothership UFOs in order to mystify people into thinking they’re supernaturally brilliant. And then we’re stuck with these Gillette Blue Blade-clad fun houses for decades.

to be fair precast we’re mostly making fun of terrible design. furthermore
frank Gehry sucks a fat one

One last comment from me, while I would join those who generally dislike Gehry and EMP’s exterior, I have to say that I love the exhibits and the internal lay-out. I go at least a couple times a year and enjoy myself every time.

ha! actually beerboy I prefer buildings that look like giant reproductive organs.

TAM building has all the appeal and warmth of an exacto-blade. My favorite thing about it is the failed moss-garden solar oven in the center of it. This building works as a museum though having good sized gallery space. I hate that you have to cross a busy street to get to it though. And the fact it is hanging over a cliff ads nothing to the surrounding area.

I like how the TAM is bigger inside than it appears from the outside… (contrasted against the MOG which is smaller inside than it appears from the outside).

I know that I am not a trained architect so from an architects perspective I have no valid opinion on anything architectural, yet I am a cartoonist so I have intimate knowledge of absurdity and hyper-exaggerated forms crafted by the hands of men, thus and so more or less fitted to have opinions relevant to schools of architecture.

Your mother wears combat boots.

heck we could be brothers! :)

Interesting how so many how so many spaces that one enters into (by definition yonnic) have had phallic structures appended to them. From a Lacanian standpoint with a feminist view it is clear that the dominant aesthetic of Eurocentric architecture serves the hegemonic patriarchal structure.

The revulsion one feels from Gehry is due to the disorientation caused by his plagiarization of primarily yonnic forms from Gaudi fabricated with the hard, metalic, rigid body armor of stainless steel favored by militaristic masculine cults.

MoFo, did you go to R.R.‘s link @ 17 with the handy-dandy roll-overs that label the anatomical references?

And, just in case anyone was taking me seriously – theoryspeak is a wonderful method of b.s.

Back in grad school, one of my thesis committee members, while not able to find any fault with the logic in the paragraph I wrote that demonstrated that Freud’s logic was flawed and completely errant about my topic, insisted that I tone it down with an endnote disclaimer that essentially stated “Freud is god, I am nothing, don’t pay attention to what I said”.

Critical Cultural theory provides interesting lenses to view the world with but, when one is used as your primary paradigm it prevents you from seeing anything else.

My first masters program was run by political lesbians. I, being a large, confident (if not cocky), heterosexual white man was immediately held in contempt. My first class assignment was a spoken word piece I titled “I am the Oppressor”. Have to say it didn’t earn me many fans.

Lipstick lesbians on the other hand need neither sympathy or reeducation. Then again, LL’s are in all likelihood an urban myth. No reliable siting has ever been documented.

Finesse is a former stripper at the old Esmeralda’s on Pacific. Sadly she retired today and probably living in the Winthrop.

RR @28, I’m the big brother you never had. When it comes to women, I want you to remember one thing: Women don’t like wussies.

The man leads. The woman follows. If that order is reversed, that is, if you give up your power then you may never get it back…I pity that fool. Sometimes those kind of guys become architects and then their inner torment and confusion later becomes manifest in distorted construction projects.

speaking of ladies. I was savagely defeated by one last Friday… I had the golden chalk championship crown yanked viciously from my skull—No Mercy style.

crenshaw,

It started with simple blackboard white chalk.

Next they brought colored chalk.

Perhaps in the future they will bring glitter to lay atop their colored chalk.

Yet if things go in that direction, our artists MUST not back down.

and the spirit of Larry Frost lives on; contained in the fire of every chalk champion’s heart.