Bauzeitgeist

Boring Buildings, Secondary Skylines. Also: www.twitter.com/Bauzeitgeist

[bauzeitgeist]

Firefighters work in the wreckage of a residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine after a drone attack. Photo October 17, 2022 Roman Hrytsyna, Associated Press. 

[bauzeitgeist]

Paul Rudolph’s Burroughs Wellcome under demolition. Photos December 2020 Bauzeitgeist. I wrote about the loss of the building here on Substack. 

[bauzeitgeist]

Genuinely a bit sad that the Trump Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City were demolished. They don’t make them with these sloping curtain walls and slanted helmet elevator penthouses anymore. 

Photos via the Associated Press

[bauzeitgeist]

The Mammoth Coal Processing Plant in London, West Virginia, via this New York Times article. Photo credit Ross Mantle for The New York Times

[bauzeitgeist]

British Airways B747 banking over the rooftops of Kowloon to land at Kai Tak, Hong Kong, 1990. Photo via this Bloomberg essay. 

[bauzeitgeist]

The seaside Mosque of the Divinity in Ngor, Dakar, Senegal. Photo by Omar Victor Diop, via the New York Times. 

[bauzeitgeist]

Olympic Village, Montreal, Quebec. Photo: ©December 2010 Bauzeitgeist. 

[bauzeitgeist]

Celebrating the 10 year anniversary of this photo, which I think is by far my most reposted photograph on Tumblr. What’s remarkable to me about this photo is that I was in the passenger seat of a car driving east out of Montreal and just sticking the camera out the window, snapping away, and this was a random result. No framing, no aperaturing, no f-stopping, no tripod. Nothing but the camera on auto. 

[bauzeitgeist]

Aerial view of a suburban low-cost housing development, Mexico. Jorge Taboada, from his series Alta Densidad.

[bauzeitgeist]

Canary Wharf. Photo November 2020 by Alexander Ingram for the New York Times, from this article. 

[bauzeitgeist]

“The sloping sides of Palika Kendra appear as though emerging from the ground, like tectonic plates forced from the earth’s mantle by tremendous force. Within the building sits the New Delhi Municipal Council, which originated from the Imperial Delhi Committee – formed to oversee the construction of Delhi as the new capital of India. The Palika Kendra Building is an expression of power, will, and strength, representing the urgency of Prime Minister Nehru’s desire to challenge received wisdom and entrenched design practice in order to forge a new vision of India.”

Completed in 1984 and designed by Kuldip Singh, who sadly passed away earlier this month due to COVID. 

[bauzeitgeist]

National Cooperative Development Corporation, Dehli. Nicknamed the “Pajama Building” due to its bi-winged structure, parting like a pair of wide-legged trousers. Designed by Kuldip Singh, 1978-80, who sadly passed away earlier this month due to COVID. 

[bauzeitgeist]

The most famous detail of Paul Rudolph’s Boston Government Service Center: the Lindemann Center’s enigmatic frog face. Arguably the single most surprising and joyful element of the complex, a massive toad-like skullform juts out from the Merrimac Street façade with laconic, big-eyed judgement. Accentuated with arrays of formwork ridges on the undersides of the paired upper barrels, like the eyelashes of drunken pupils, the larger cylinder emphasizes its cantilever with an underbite mouth ajar in a judging frown; its matching sun-ray of supporting grids making for a grille of teeth; a lazy snarl. Taken altogether, the detail is alluringly readable as the head of some huge, amphibious creature; like a giant, vigilant bust—an altar icon of anurous deity of a lost bufotoxic cult. This tripartite assemblage of drum volumes, so startlingly interrupting the dominant horizontal of the elevation, contains an interior meeting room whose dimensions were extruded away from the façade wall. While its logographic affinities were unintentional—Rudolph hardly ever engaged in the symbolic and, when asked, amusingly denied any determined representation or shape-making —the tightly clustered, protruding arrangement so strikingly registers as a pareidolic phenomenon, adding a moment that is whimsical but also, to a certain eye, foreboding. This is especially the case in the context of such a starkly monumental and epically lithic presentation—truly archaeological, nearly mythological. Lindemann Center at the Boston Government Services Center. Paul Rudolph for Desmond & Lord, 1962-71. Photos May 2017 and May & October 2020 @bauzeitgeist.

[bauzeitgeist]

The wonderful, twisting-serpent staircases which slither out from underneath the upper floors, flowing from the raised inner courtyard through the gate-like portal of Paul Rudolph’s Government Service Center. Lindemann Center at the Boston Government Services Center. Paul Rudolph for Desmond & Lord, 1962-71. Photos May & October 2020 Bauzeitgeist.

[bauzeitgeist]

The curved end balconies stretching tautly across the wide, blank corner walls of Henry Cobb’s Harbor Towers, built 1964-71. A nautical reference for a waterfront building.  Photos June 2020 Bauzeitgeist, link here. 

[bauzeitgeist]

3340 Mall Loop Drive, Joliet, Illinois: the former Carson Pirie Scott department store at the Joliet Mall, currently vacant and up for foreclosure auction. Built 1978, architect unbekännt. Photos via this website. 

[bauzeitgeist]

Burroughs Wellcome Headquarters, Triangle Research Park, North Carolina. Paul Rudolph, architect, 1969-72. Photo by Joseph W. Molitor/© Columbia University, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library/courtesy the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

[bauzeitgeist]

Burroughs Wellcome Headquarters, Triangle Research Park, North Carolina. Paul Rudolph, architect, 1969-72. Photo by Joseph W. Molitor/© Columbia University, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library/courtesy the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation