Porches and a Courtyard at Kokrobitey Institute

Renée Neblett, founder of the Kokrobitey Institute in Ghana, has asked me to come and lead some furniture design and architecture seminars.  It’s as stimulating a prospect as I can imagine anything could be.

When she was planning the Institute with the help of architect Alero Olympio, according to Ruti Talmor, Renée realized “in the most fundamental way, that building the site was not just about the nuts and bolts – it was as spiritual as it was physical.”  She said that she wanted the buildings, and the school that they housed, “to look like they belong to Africa”.  She had discovered that one of the most important aspects of a building is its character, its potential to vivify the meaning of a place.

The most important meaning of the Institute’s place may be that colonialism – not only in Africa – wrongly taught that a single, imported point of view is superior.  People acquired a taste for European styles, and discounted their own traditional ways.  Kokrobitey is out to debunk that attitude, fully and finally.

A Kokrobitey House

Renée and I have talked about the importance of helping students realize that the primary rule of design is that “you do what you can with what you’ve got”.  At first take, that sounds like advising people to settle for the circumstances that life has handed them.  But it’s not.  On the contrary.  It’s an invitation to all thinkers to celebrate and broadcast their own heritage and assets.  A designer who pays close attention to functionality, durability and ergonomics, and uses the materials and techniques that are locally available, produces valuable, marketable products.  Always.  Sometimes magical ones.  And that, my friends, enhances the well-being of both producers and consumers.  All of them.  Everywhere.

                          

A Morning Moon at The View Hotel

John Ford made Monument Valley a star.  He filmed classics like Stagecoach, Fort Apache and The Searchers here, and he defined enduring images of the American West.  The marketing has since never relented.  It’s been globally saturating.  On a visit last week I heard 6 or 8 different languages.  There may have been almost as many international visitors as there were Americans.  And it was off-season!  Most such heavily-touristed places wind up feeling like kitschy theme parks and are studiously avoided by discerning travelers.  Not Monument Valley.  Incredibly, and thankfully, the immense landscape manages to hold on to its overarching stillness and serenity.

Nearby lodgings haven’t always been so lucky.  Nearly a half-million tourists a year trek to this remote place hundreds of miles from the nearest significant airport.  They never had any options about where to sleep.  Built in 1953, Goulding’s motel had always been it, period.  It was that or drive at least 20 miles to a banal chain hotel.  There was no way to avoid over-priced tourist traps.

The View's Guest Rooms

So about 16 months ago, when Armanda Ortega opened her View Hotel at Monument Valley, hopes were high.  She garnered international media attention.  Bonnie Tsui reported in The NY Times that a local flute player performed at dinner.  Mark Vanhoenacker, in the LA Times, called it “hip”.

Indeed, the architecture, by Albuquerque’s Desert Sky Designs, is promising.  The hotel’s rooms form a wing that’s a bit monolithic but appealingly sculpted.  The interiors boast Navajo art and furniture, in not only the lobby, but the rooms, too.

Lobby Fireplace

But don’t be misled, The View is not a luxurious resort hotel.  The place, necessarily I guess, caters to tour buses.  The dining room’s menu is very limited and tends to such things as “John Wayne Chicken Fried Steak”.  The decor’s collections and furnishings are not artfully or tastefully arranged, nor even carefully edited.  The lobby’s fireplace, for instance – itself a great beauty – is festooned with giant dolls that look uncomfortably like sacred Hopi kachina, but, I’m told, were made by Navajo artisans, and are pure kitsch.

Monument Valley deserves your visit.  The View is the best place to stay when you go.  But don’t expect an AmanResort.

                          

The Restored Facade

It’s owners asked me to propose a restoration or revival of the facade, which had been badly marred by a 60s-vintage remodel.  I’ve pointed out that, because the house takes up an unusually wide lot, it’s street front could be distinguished by a design that emphasized horizontality.  Still, my proposal is in essence a restoration and not an adventurous reinvention.  My primary guiding criterion has been that the house once more become a happy contributor to the streetscape of its lovely tree-shaded block.

Proposed New Conservatory

They also asked for a suggestion about how a new covered passageway in the rear garden might relieve interior circulation and help disguise an inappropriate béton brut addition, which looks like it must also have been done in the sixties, at the same time the original facade was destroyed.  A new glass roof over an existing interior courtyard would cover the house’s main pedestrian circulation path, which is now exposed to the city’s frequent rain showers.  The new conservatory would remain open on one side, focusing the inn on its large garden of Australian plants, unusual in the inner city.  Establishing a strong connection to the lush subtropical outdoors would lend the house a character in keeping with Sydney’s sophisticated but beach-casual style.

Stylistically, both the restored facade and the new conservatory would bridge the gap between urban Australia’s  intensely Victorian colonial past and its cosmopolitan, international present-day chic.  The house would both regain what it once was and become more clearly what it actually is today.

                          

Obelisk Beach

One day in early March I hitched a ride with some friends across the Harbour Bridge to tiny Obelisk Beach on the Lower North Shore.  It’s my favorite beach in Sydney, but a bit hard to get to without a car, I always thought.

On this fine day, after a couple of hours of snoozing on the sand, I became restless.  My friends weren’t ready to go, so I decided to walk back to the city center.  Given that it had taken no less than forty-five minutes to drive to the beach, and that there’s a major body of water between the here and the there, my mates were, to say the least, skeptical.

But I had looked at the maps and had a plan.  I’d bushwalk along the harbour foreshore track in Sydney Harbour National Park to the Taronga Zoo Wharf then ride a Sydney Ferry to Circular Quay.  From there it’s only a ten or fifteen minute bus ride along Oxford Street to Surry Hills and the Governors.

Submariner Miners' Depot @ Chowder Bay

My route led along Chowder Bay Road, past the remains of the old George’s Head forts, to Ripples Cafe, in the historic Submariners’ Miners’ Depot, built about 1891 by the Royal Australian Navy, which needed to lay mines to protect the harbour.

Athol Hall

From there it’s only a few steps to the Clifton Gardens Beach.  At the far end of the beach the track climbs into a eucalyptus forest and winds its way around Taylor’s Bay.

He's Two Feet Long!

Once around that bay the track climbs onto Bradley’s Head  and past Athol Hall, built to house entertainments for the sailors.

A few final strides led to the fantastical main gate to the zoo and then down to the ferry wharf.  The ride across the harbour reeled off a spectacular series of world-class views.  We sailed past both the Harbour Bridge and the Opera house.

Tom Hatfield's View from the Zoo

The journey turned out to be a very happy-making rapid trip from remote forest to beehive city center.  The study in contrasts was both stimulating and reassuring – that Sydney can manage to preserve such lands so close to its center and in the face of intense development pressure carries a lesson for urbanites everywhere.

                          

It’s amazing how fast Sydney moves on.  Only 30 years after the First Fleet, convict architect Francis Greenway had built St. James Church in King Street.  A mere fifty years after that Town Hall would have been widely recognized on the street in Britain.  Then, in the 1930s, the Harbour Bridge was completed, and became famous world-wide.  Finally, even though it was conceived in 1956, the Opera House wasn’t finished until 1973.  There seems to be a fifty-year cycle.

So it might seem that Sydney is due for a new icon, now that the Opera House has had its fifty-year run.  But I don’t think so.

None of its predecessors was unique.  There were similar buildings elsewhere in the world.  Australia had not yet escaped colonialism.  Not so the Opera House.  There’s still nothing else like it, Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava and Zaha Hadid notwithstanding – their buildings’ singularity has been undermined by sustained careers and multiple iterations.  Utzon did it once, on a site that has no room for competitors.

The Opera house came along well into the age of TV.  There was very public and noisy controversy about its design.  The Queen made a special trip from London to open it.  Its fresh and different architectural language matched the brash global reputation of the Aussie spirit.  It’s as though it were all a drama made for television!  The new icon, and the city which spawned it, were instantly famous everywhere.  The imprint on Earth’s collective imagination was indelible.  The symbol continues to stand perfectly for the world’s romantic version of Australian reality.

Some brands just refuse to go away.  And thank god.  Witness the Eiffel Tower.  Which remains the Opera House’s only real competitor.  Hmmmm.  Paris and Sydney.  Not bad company, my dears, for either of you.

                          

Canyon's Edge Veranda at Lilianfels

My buddy Jerry and I drove a couple of hours west from Sydney up to Lilianfels at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains.  A bit toasty after an intense Mardi Gras weekend in the city, we wandered out to a veranda overlooking a lawn beside the dramatic Jamison Valley.  The Valley is in fact one of the Coxs River canyons, draped by a heavy eucalypt forest.  Just a few meters from where we sat the lawn fell hundreds of meters over the edge of a vertigo-inducing sandstone cliff.

A waiter brought wine and cheese.  The ambiance couldn’t have been more Victorian nor more Australian.  Yet Lilianfels is peopled with cosmopolitan international travelers.  It’s all very 2010.

As we sorted ourselves after our journey, conversation slowed and we became quiet.  Immediately the sound off thousands of tinkling bells echoed up from the canyon at our feet.  The waiter, observing our mystified amazement, filled us in with a big, friendly grin, “It’s bellbirds, mates.”  Birds?!  Belteshazzar105 http://www.youtube.com/user/Belteshazzar105 has recorded them for us.  Have a  listen.  You’ll be enchanted too:  Bellbirds in the Jamison Valley below Lilianfels

Lilianfels' Swimming Pool

Lilianfels at Cliff's Edge

http://www.lilianfels.com.au/web/okat/okat_a2a_home.html

                          

From Just Inside the Queen's Gate

Seen from the Rocks Foreshore

In 1956 Premier Joe Cahill’s New South Wales government called for entries in a design competition for a new performing arts center.  The competition brief specified only that there be two performance halls, one for opera and one for symphony concerts.  Jørn Utzon’s winning entry generated tremendous world-wide excitement, but the government’s decision to commission Utzon as the sole architect was nevertheless gutsy and unexpected.

To actually get built, Utzon’s visionary design for the building required an intense collaborative effort.  Engineer Ove Arup worked with the architect – before the age of readily available computing power – to devise a structural scheme that, with the tools of the day, could be reliably calculated and drawn.  Only regular geometries could be mathematically delineated, but the character of the design was anything but.  Eventually a single sphere was imagined, cut up into wedges that could then be reassembled to form the vaults of the halls.  Each wedge is composed of pre-cast reinforced-concrete rib segments radiating from a poured foundation, then rising to a huge curved ridge pole.  The shells are clad with glazed off-white tiles.

Looking toward Circular Quay

The Forecourt Stairs

Reactionary populism brought a change of government in 1966.  The new political bosses fired Utzon to placate their narrow-minded constituency, who cared nothing for the arts or Australia’s stature in the world order.  Government architect Ted Farmer, along with politically astute Peter Hall, completed the glass walls and interiors.  Their client, the government, had no apparent appreciation of the original design nor respect for its integrity.  Their work shows it.

The project was further confused by changes to its intended uses, announced only after construction had begun.  The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) decided that the larger opera hall should be changed into a concert hall because symphony concerts – managed by the ABC – drew larger audiences than did opera.  The smaller hall, a proscenium arch lyric theatre with an orchestra pit, became the Opera Theatre.  The larger hall was reconfigured to seat more people, its stage now surrounded by the audience – unsuitable for opera – and became the Concert Hall.  Three previously unplanned venues were shoehorned in underneath the Concert Hall.

The Concert Hall Interior

Politicians and bureaucrats don’t have a very good track record as designers.  They didn’t improve their score here.  With interiors that don’t fit the shells that contain them, poor circulation, and inferior acoustics, the Opera House finally opened in 1973, 17 years after Utzon won the competition.  The Sydney Opera House remains perhaps the world’s most widely known building – an immeasurably valuable asset for Australia – in spite of the best efforts of a mediocre bunch of second-guessers.

In 1999, Jørn Utzon was re-engaged as Sydney Opera House architect.  He wrote down principles which could guide all future changes to the building.  The principles reflect his original vision and might, if the building’s owners follow them, help restore the building’s brilliant and unique architectural integrity.

                          

Seen from the Cahill Expressway

Renzo Piano, I’d bet, gave his clients exactly what they asked for, a strong corporate symbol.  This is architecture as billboard, and, seen from the Cahill Expressway at its feet, it is advertising at its most seductive.  The building’s presence on the Central Business District skyline is more engaging than that of any of its competitors, by far.

From the Botanic Garden

Coastal New South Wales lies under a dangerous hole in the ozone layer.  A sun-breaker skin, appropriate in any subtropical climate, is even more welcome here.  Piano’s does double duty.  It embraces Aurora Place with a glassy ceramic sheen of leaning, curving shields that protect the building from harsh UV radiation and unduly high heat gain.   Plus, the shining and handsome shields disguise the rectilinear blocks of the actual structure and save them from mediocrity.  Truly, the brise soleil is highly effective signage, beautiful and easily readable, but responsibly green, too, as well befits affluent Australian international corporate leaders.

Orange Glazed Tile

At street level, within the CBD’s forest of tall buildings, Aurora Place disappoints.  Escaping the camouflage of the sleek and graceful ceramic glass sun-shields, the routinely blocky buildings underneath show themselves.  In an apparent attempt to mitigate the coolness of their metallic-looking shields, the buildings are clad with orange-glazed brick.  It’s a perfectly logical decision.  But it doesn’t work.  The result is not warming but garish.

Under the Dirty Glass

Worse, the building’s bases stand in poorly resolved collision.  They crash to the ground around a glass-roofed interior piazza that Piano must have thought would provide a busy urban gathering place.  That, too, fails.  Even on the summer day when I visited, the place was nearly empty.  It was lunch time, but the tables of a cafe were mostly empty, sad and forsaken.  And the gorgeously conceived roof?  A lesson in the repulsiveness of filthy glass.

At the end of the day, despite Piano’s huge talent and great expertise, I have to say that Aurora Place struck me as yet another skyscraper whose head and shoulders look absolutely terrific in photos and renderings, but which fails to humanise the urban streetscape where we actually experience the city.

                          

Original Traveling Cranes Preserved

Built in 1915 by the Sydney Harbour Trust, Cowper Wharf, often called Finger Wharf by locals, was recycled in 1991 into a hip chic hotel, run by India’s Taj Hotel group as The Blue.  Even after almost twenty years, the hotel’s Water Bar remains a draw for media glamorati.

The Blue is now an on-going triumph of historic preservation and successful building re-cycling, but at the end of its 70+ years as a freight dock, it fell into disrepair and was slated for removal.  Outraged Sydneysiders physically blocked the path of  demolition workers, and unions prohibited their members from participating in the destruction.  As the largest timbered-piled building in the world, the structure is now protected by Australian and international landmark designations.

Present-Day Water Bar

A beautiful interior retrofit keeps Finger Wharf popular and financially viable and further insures its continued survival.  There are two keys to the beauty and vitality of The Blue’s interior.

First, the long, tall space of the old interior “street” is kept aglow by original clerestory windows that run the length of the building all the way up in the eaves, while the guest rooms remain oriented to the spectacular surrounding bay and marina.

Secondly, the Modernist interior fittings contrast dramatically with the preserved timber and iron of the old building.  By acting as foils for each other, the new and the old are both vividly emphasized.  The hand-wrought, rough-hewn, battle-scarred character of the gigantic room warms the edgy chill of the shiny, sometimes over-designed furniture .  The energetic precision and shine of the Modern fixtures save the grandly funky and massive old shed from dowdy preservationist stuffiness.

World's Largest Wooden-Pile Building

Its a near-perfect illustration of the principle of using eclecticism to achieve both excitement and comfort at once.

The Blue's Lobby Lounge

http://www.maju.com.au/wharf_history.cfm

http://www.tajhotels.com/sydney/

                          

Aqua Hides in a Forest of Towers

This is a building in drag, a skyscraper in a dress.

With Aqua, Architect Jeanne Gang has rendered an inherently masculine form feminine.  Almost.  I can’t think of a skyscraper that’s less phallic.  It’s an elegant, beautiful, altogether seductive effect.  But what’s underneath is not altered.  This is make-up artistry, not sex-change surgery.

The Aqua tower is draped in a very glamorous fabric, cut with a clever, artful pattern, but it remains a glass box.  The fabric’s folds create a bas-relief sculpture that covers only part of the building’s glass skin.  They are applied decoration, a disguise, designed to be useful as well as pretty, but they do not go so far as to become an integral part of the building itself.  Ironically, they actually make me more aware of the glass, and the box, than I would have been in their absence.  All good dresses do that for the bodies that carry them.  Does clothing make the person?  Or do muscle and bones?

The apartments in this building don’t gain a lot of functional outdoor space from these balconies.  Many have none at all and others get only an inches-wide ledge.  Operable doors leading to a visibly accessible area outside, in plain air, do generate breathability, even if the outdoor space can’t actually be much used.  I’m pretty sure that this building’s signature wavy balconies do enhance its livability.  But that wasn’t the designers’ main goal.

Architect's Rendering of Aqua

It’s that signature that was, had to be, all important to the developer, and thus, inevitably and appropriately, to his architect.   The building would have failed if its apartments couldn’t be sold.  Successful marketing was necessarily essential to Aqua’s concept.   The real value of the rippling balconies lies in their iconography.  They are a hugely successful logo.  I don’t think I’ve ever met a more cost-effective advertising device.  No building at this cost per square foot has ever gotten more attention.

Aqua’s exterior decoration provides a devilishly cheap way to reduce wind loads.  It makes the apartments nicer places to live.  It lends Chicago a pinch of much needed softening.  It does all that and sells the building, too?  That’s an amazing feat!  I hope you have one helluva a grateful client, Ms. Gang.

There remains, however, that pesky old question:  where’s the boundary between decoration and architecture?

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/skyline/2010/02/01/100201crsk_skyline_goldberger

http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/913/Aqua.php

http://edwardlifson.blogspot.com/2009/07/inside-studio-gang.html