… a few riled Cornellians aren’t such a big deal.
The hot Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, fond of mid-rise buildings with holes in them, designed the CCTV Tower annex (headquarters of Chinese tv) in Beijing,
and now that it’s up, hundreds of millions of Chinese think that if you really look at the primary tower and the nearby annex, it’s obvious that together they “were meant to look like a penis, next to a bent-over woman.”
Here are a couple of
efforts to make the case.
Koolhaas has had to give an interview denying it all, etc.
Meanwhile, his design for new architecture workspace at Cornell has annoyed many faculty there, who think it’s too expensive, and insufficiently environmentally minded. A government professor writes to the campus newspaper:
This $55-60 million building project comes at a time of deep cuts to core academic programs in many other departments… It is not fancy buildings that attract people to a university. It is faculty, research funding, graduate stipends, library collections. And ideals … like a genuine commitment to sustainability… The architect Rem Koolhaas has made no secret of his contempt for sustainability… He belongs to that old fraternity of starchitects who brook no human or natural interference with their artistic ‘vision.’ So we will get an absurd set of glass boxes projecting forward and backward (because the projecting glass box is this architect’s signature), instead of a future-oriented building of the sort other Ivy universities are building, at LEED platinum standards, beautiful to look at and work in, and concordant with the movement to fight climate change.
[SOS says: Lose the contemptuous quotes around vision. You’re attacking Koolhaas for being contemptuous; you shouldn’t be contemptuous in return.]
Having looked at all sorts of images of Milstein Hall [click on the images for a slide show], UD would have to agree that it ain’t pretty. To her eye, it looks like an awkward over-sized fill-in (the task was to connect established buildings and close a gap).
UD‘s got nothing against its break from the historical context of the buildings around it. Rather, it’s the severely flat-topped, too-big feel of the thing she dislikes.
As for the overhang – UD‘s spent decades driving under (being driven under) the Kennedy Center overhang, and it’s just deadly. Dark, loud, creepy. Why do it if you don’t have to?
August 30th, 2009 at 7:43AM
Isn’t this the same argument that people made about Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings (and countless other works by other artists)? While there is no denying that her paintings certainly appear hyper-sexual (and beautiful) she spent a good deal of time arguing that she just loved the shapes, colors and images from the southwest.
The Milstein Hall project certainly lacks imagination though, considering RK’s reputation.