#lecture 25

[godsavetheanimalz]

absolutely fucking insane!!!

[grrlmusic]

My New Band Believe - Lecture 25 (Official Video)

[ha213-section5-blog]

Robert Taylor Homes were completed in 1962 and named for Robert Rochon Taylor, an African American activist and Chicago Housing Authority member (CHA)At one time, it was the largest public housing development in the country, and it was intended to offer decent affordable housing. It was composed of 28 high-rise buildings with 16 stories each, with a total of 4,415 units. Robert Taylor Homes faced many of the same problems that doomed Pruitt Igo. These problems included dugs, violence and povrety. Planned for 11,000 inhabitants, the Robert Taylor Homes housed up to a peak of 27,000 people. At one point 95 percent of the housing development's 27,000 residents were unemployed and listed public as their only income source, and 40 percent of the households were single-parent, female-headed households earning less than $5,000 per year. The city's neglect was evident in littered streets and poorly enforced building codes. Police were rarely present and gangs and subsequent drug wars ensued.Its landlord has estimated that $45,000 in drug deals took place daily. Ultimately the Robert Taylor homes were torn down as a lack of maintenance, crime and lack of payments doomed the homes from the very beginning. 

[ha213-section3-blog]

Looking back on the topics we learned throughout the class, I tried to find a building or place that reflected a few of the topics. New York City was one of the places that came to mind. NYC incorporates some of the major topics:

1. skyscrapers- it has a countless amount of these tall office buildings that create the amazing unique skyline that you could recognize instantly

2. Metropolis- not only is it a metropolitan area, it is the LARGEST metropolitan area in the United States

3. Functionalism- NYC is functional especially on the macro-scale, meaning the layout of the city itself

[ha213-section3-blog]

Since so much of this class centered around the city of Chicago, to wrap things up I thought I would talk about one of the best new works of architecture in Chicago--the Modern Wing of the Chicago Institute of Art. It was designed by the architect Renzo Piano and completed in 2009. This building incorporates a lot of the themes we have covered in this class such as perceptional montage. You can see Chicago's skyline reflected off its glass facade. It also incorporates the idea of transparency that we talked about in class and how its modern glass and steel frame allows for that transparency.

Another interesting thing about this building is that it holds exhibits of the original drawings of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright.

[ha213-section5-blog]

This building is an addition to the Jewish Museum in Berlin and is connected to the original museum building by an underground passage. I find it to be quite an interesting building because of its unique shape and its "broken" facade. It is a post-modern building with its sharp features and symbolic design. The shape of the building is supposed to represent a warped Star of David, with a floor to ceiling void slicing through the whole building. Next to the building there are the Garden of Exile and the Holocaust Tower. These three parts are meant to symbolize the continuity with German history, emigration from Germany, and the Holocaust. In a sense, then, this building could be considered a monumental building for the Jewish population.

[ha213-section5-blog]

Archigram's David Greene, Mosque Project

David Greene's project for a Mosque in Baghdad serves as an exploration of form more than a structure dictated by functionality. Because the Mosque has so few functional requirements it allows the architect a good deal of leeway on spatial arrangements and practical considerations. As a result Greene's design is very conceptual; the project is primarily concerned with relationships between shape, surface and structure rather than with the Mosque as a place of worship. 

[ha213-section5-blog]

Techno-Utopia, the idea that advancements in science and technology will create a utopian, or ideal society, led many architectural groups to design some incredibly far-fetched ideas. One such group, Archigram, came up with the design of a plug-in city, where small housing modules would be lofted on a more permanent frame, and could be removed and replaced as needed. 

Similar ideas have been showing up in modern day designs. The Pocket of Active Resistance (above) is a similar design where modules are attached to a larger infrastructure, and are connected via long catwalks and scaffolding. According to Stephane Malka, the housing complex was built to "Unite the forsaken, the marginalized, refugees, demonstrators, dissenters, hippies, utopians, and the stateless of all kinds."