Sao Paolo, Brazil

A few years ago (truthfully, more than a “few”) I had formed an idea of Sao Paulo, based on a visit to a project by Lina Bo Bardi, the late Brazilian modernist architect. I was a student of architecture at the time and had made a point of visiting work that caught my attention in the magazines. Bo Bardi’s SESC-POMPEIA complex was one of these. That early architectural pilgrimage (among the first that became a life-long habit) left me with two distinct impressions: how incredibly talented and original Lina was, and how disorienting Sao Paulo was. Coming from Rio, where between Sugar Loaf and the Christ statue above the harbor, and the ocean helped you orient yourself, there were no such landmarks in Sao Paulo. As the bus meandered through the vertically-charged blocks, I was completely lost in that bland labyrinth. Ever since then this  vast placelessness has been my main memory of this megalopolis.

Last week, the SESC-POMPEIA again fulfilled its role as the city’s “ambassador”, but this time it left quite a different impression.  Immediately after landing at Guarulhos International Airport I was driven to the Bo Bardi designed culture/entertainement/sports complex SESC-POMPEIA to attend the launch of an art project that will take place in another iconic project of hers, the CASA DE VIDRO (Glass House) in September 2012. This art project will bring an international group of artists and designers together to create art work for an exhibit in the house. Introduced by the curator of the project, Hans Ulrich Obrist, two of the future exhibit participants, Rem Koolhaas and Petra Balise, were there to talk about what they are planning.

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The Seattle Central Library works so well because of something obvious: its architects carefully considered the role of a public library during its projected lifetime and designed it accordingly.

When Rem Koolhaas, Joshua Prince-Ramus of OMA/LMN, and their teams set to work they went into a detailed analysis of what it would take to enrich citizens’ lives and how the job of the building would evolve with the institution it housed. They assessed how technologies and the social and cultural roles of the library would change, for example, at a time when libraries need to house new media, rather than just paper technology.

Opened in 2004, the library’s functionality has been constantly given positive reviews for the past 7 years. Read more…

Photo: Benoit Pailley, courtesy the New Museum.

Rem Koolhaas has a knack for coining words, a skill evident in the name of his and his architecture firm OMA’s current show at New York City’s New Museum:  “Cronocaos”. Catchy and primitive at once, the title drops the “h” from “chronos” and “chaos” respectively.  It’s a classic Koolhaasian move, visually and viscerally dramatizing the notion of a world confused about the relation of past to present and what this means for architecture—particularly for preservation.  “Architects—we who change the world—have been oblivious or hostile to the manifestations of preservation,” Koolhaas writes.  The result, he argues, is that an already large and ever-increasing part of the globe displays the same bad sort of preservation:  commoditized, sanitized, and individualized.  In turn, buildings and the life they sustain suffer, even as “preservation does not quite know what to do with its new empire.” 

Enter Koolhaas, who purports to stand outside this empire.  He takes aim at the preservation industry and its use of history, leading us on a tour of ideas that ultimately promotes the work of OMA instead.  Preservation done right is thus what Koolhaas claims to offer, and a “‘unified field’ theory” is where he says preservation should begin.  But as viewers wend their way through “Cronocaos” they are apt to find a manner of gallery prospectus that raises as many questions as it answers.  Whether Koolhaas operates apart from preservation’s “new empire” remains open to debate. Read more…

For me, the best thing about Rem Koolhaas’s much-hyped design of Prada’s New York “epicenter,” in the early oughties, was not the 180-foot zebrawood half-pipe so much as the wallpaper—a rotating selection of  slyly subversive graphic themes (with titles like Guilt and Vomit) by the New York design studio 2x4. Now even those of us who can’t afford to shop at Prada can have a little of 2x4’s visual savvy in our daily lives: The wall-graphic company Blik—which sells giant, removable stickers as a decorative alternative to wallpaper and painting—announced today that it is carrying four decal sets by the 2x4 team (including “Modular Icons,” above). The prices range from $25 to $55 per set; check out more photos of the new line after the jump. Read more…

The architecture world’s eyes are trained this morning on Beijing, where a hotel tower in Rem Koolhaas’s massive Central China Television (CCTV) complex went up in flames, the New York Times reports. The 40-story Mandarin Oriental Hotel, scheduled for completion this year, might have caught fire during the citywide fireworks displays celebrating the lunar new year. Videos from bystanders are already being posted on YouTube (like the one shown here), but there’s no word yet on injuries or the full extent of the damage. Early reports suggest that the main building, China Central Television’s monumental headquarters, unveiled last summer as an Olympics showpiece, is so far unscathed.