Wall, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Comments and faves

1. 

   mindfulgirl (77 months ago | reply)

   This is such a great textural picture.

2. ★

   mindfulgirl added this photo to her favorites. (77 months ago)

3. 

   .Leili (77 months ago | reply)

   thanks, mindfulgirl. You should see the inside - staggered, communal "trays" of workspaces with glass all around. I don't know if the students like it, but it's an exciting space.

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   striatic (77 months ago | reply)

   concrete is very difficult to do 'right' architecturally.

   but when it is, it can be most beautiful.

   especially with appropriate landscaping. green on grey can look just amazing.

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   nesting.emily [deleted] (77 months ago | reply)

   like a great pot.

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   .Leili (77 months ago | reply)

   Striatic, I agree - concrete can be mundane and can be sublime, depending. Louis Kahn's use of concrete (especially his Salk Institute), is a great example of the sublime end, in my opinion. I found a good Salk image here: www.flickr.com/photos/kenmccown/226094633/.

   Also, a dorm designed by Kahn at my alma mater, Erdman, was famous both for being (rather peculiarly) modeled on a Welsh castle, and for its use of concrete slabs and slate. Somehow it managed not to be cold and uninviting.

   And nesting.emily, I'm with you. Years ago, a pottery teacher said, "when you are bitten by the clay bug, everything, including buildings, roads, cars, trees, will look to you like they are made of clay. Or, you will find yourself imagining how to make those things out of clay."

7. 

   nesting.emily [deleted] (77 months ago | reply)

   Thank goodness we are both infected : )

8. 

   .Leili (77 months ago | reply)

   :-)

9. 

   eileansiar - l'arbre qui pleure (77 months ago | reply)

   Once again, Leili, out of the keeness of your photographic eye you have exposed us all. That we tolerate the two-dimensional, cloudy-sky-dull, plywood-imprinted, fortress-Europa-pillbox, ready-for-spraypaint-vandalism, maximally-inorganic, here's-a-home-for-yet-another-bureaucracy nature of concrete as a building material should be for each of us a shameful realization.

   That said, I confess to having taken similar myself; my hope being that if, unrealistically, archaeologists ages hence find my (and your) photos of such surfaces, they may discern something about the nature of our minds, as they now try to understand how Cro-Magnon man thought based on drawings at Lascaux or on the Willendorf 'Venus.'

   My view of photography is that we don't expose film (tells when I started!), we expose ourselves. It's wonderful to me that you, and many others who contribute to this group, want to do that.

10. 

    .Leili (77 months ago | reply)

    again, eileansiar, your comments are most thought-provoking and appreciated.

    we need toastforbrekkie, striatic and gary baldy to weigh in here too, i think!

    i mentioned that i love this building (gund hall at harvard: www.pbase.com/ez_boston/image/58988314) not so much for its exterior, but more for the interior. there are trays of workspaces, all completely open, and flooded from the light of the glass walls. it is an exciting open space that seems to encourage collaboration and interaction.

    maybe the cold 2-dimensionality and minimalism of some modern architecture makes the humans seem more human in contrast? as opposed to say, elaborate french drawing rooms of the 1700s where humans were overpowered by the scale and decoration?

    i have no idea - but i do think it's especially interesting to read your comments in light of the fact that this is one of the leading design schools in the US. i wonder what the students think about it.

    oh, and the architect of gund hall was an australian, john andrews. completed 1972.

11. 

    striatic (77 months ago | reply)

    modernism has been used as an awful excuse for some pretty atrocious architecture over the past 50 years or so, no question. concrete is at fault for much of that.

    for me, it is the execution that matters.

    concrete, for instance, doesn't usually work very well all by itself.

    it does, however, have the unique ability to 'set off' some amazing contrasts. broad expanses of glass set into it or verdant landscaping punctuating it can look very evocative.

    when concrete is formed into unexpected shapes, it can be remarkably elegant.

    although i do dislike beige.

    when it comes to concrete, the grayer the better, says i.

12. 

    eileansiar - l'arbre qui pleure (77 months ago | reply)

    Confession is good for the soul. Here's mine: I love curved surfaces. I love the dome of blue sky far at sea. I love the fur covering the curves of animals, I love the curves of deciduous trees. I love the curvature of the Earth and Moon and Sun.

    Nature is replete with curve, texture, irregularity, randomness, color, surprise, motion, birth and life. We perceive this as beauty. As photographers we attempt, and fail, to capture the essence of this beauty. Each drop of water shaped by surface tension, gravity and air flow is beautiful. If a building were shaped like such a drop, and inside it were more drop shapes of various sizes, textures, colors and luminance, I would want to live or work there.

    What do we offer our people for living and working spaces? Boxes - Little Boxes on the hillside. www.ocap.ca/songs/littlbox.html Or big boxes for institutional use. Plane surfaces, regardless of the material, reek of hierarchy charts, rigidity and lack of imagination.

    Who remembers Art Deco or Jugendstyl now? Who remembers the yurt? Who remembers Drop City? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_City The geodosic dome. The tipi. Times when some yearned for living and working spaces that inspired their dreams of organic wholeness, of freedom from stultifying cultural constraints objectified by boxy homes, offices, skyscrapers, main streets.

    Thank you, striatic, for the link to Saarinen's TWA building - beautiful! Yes, the execution, the unexpected shapes, as you mentioned. Concrete is a plastic material that can be cast into shapes limited only by the imagination. Sailboat hulls have been built of wire mesh reinforced cement, creating graceful and strong hydrodynamic hulls.

    In Malmo, Sweden, is a large apartment building in a curved, torque structure. Somewhere in the Arctic, Inuit still style domed igloos in the circular footprint aboriginal American peoples considered sacred, indicative of the wholeness, the unity of creation.

    I agree, Leili, light and open space are essential. And quite an interesting speculation that a lack of organic dynamics, complexity, color, texture, opulence - what people strove to develop for thousands of years to the wretched excess of Fontainbleau, somehow makes us feel by contrast more human. On that point I disagree. It smacks of homeopathy, taking a cold shower to enervate the body, or Orwellian doublespeak.

    I think you love Gund Hall because you are someone who is full of life, who can find beauty in flowing water or condensation on glass, not because it is concrete or boxy. You might be content anywhere in any structure.

    You might be even more fulfilled by the Sydney Opera House with its magnificent, improbable curves, suggestive of the sea beyond. Curves are what I want. In animals, in architecture, in art, in clay, in bronze - even in fiberglass plastic cows on Church Street.

    But we have chosen to photograph the world, to take its light, its textures, its colors, its shapes with the hope of suggesting meaning hidden by Maya. Every photo is a lie. Lies are what civilized people are best at. Hence, the plane surfaces, the angles, the Modern Times Chaplinesque nightmare of industrialization, of boxy architecture - masculine, hard and pitiless as a statue of Ramses carved into a cliffside by the Nile.

    Give me curves anytime.Give me humanity. Give me randomness. Here are some in my flickr favorites: www.flickr.com/photos/eileansiar/favorites/

13. 

    toastforbrekkie (76 months ago | reply)

    I'm trying to think about how I can reply to all these intelligent comments without writing an essay. Not because I don't want to flood your photostream with more of my opinion, but because I'm lazy. And see? I'm already using filler. The best way to progress, perhaps, is to take it a bite at a time.

    I like this photo. I like the way you framed it with the brick on the bottom and the seam on the right. I'm puzzled by the depression...is it an outlet? But that's beside the point.

    Here's my confession: I'm an engineer, not an architect. I have a deep and abiding appreciation for architecture...how it marries history and structure, utility and beauty, form and function. But that love was not as strong as the love of air and space. Of the flight of birds, of the limb of the earth as seen from space, of the great grinding orbits of the heavenly spheres. Those same curves and arcs that eileansiar adores, the ones that define the universe from the spinning electron to the spiral arms of our galaxy, and everywhere in between.

    On campus I would walk out of my way to see the Art & Architecture building.

    

    I must admit I loved the way the reinforced concrete supported such wildly cantilevered offices. I loved that the interior stretched from the first to the top floor. The utility of the space is undeniable. The aesthetics, as this discussion and the caption of the above photo prove, are debatable. I think the real reason I loved walking through that building was to feel the energy of all the artists, to see the works on display, to witness the free spirits marching around and gathering friends to storm the campus for no reason at all, Beck blaring from a boombox perched atop a shoulder. It was also nice to see that the architecture students were working just as many late nights as I.

    I think you can love a structure for more than its looks.

    I would walk right across the plaza from the Art & Architecure building to my dorm, Melrose Hall, built after WWII to house all the G.I. Bill students. My grandfather was one. The arches of the breezeway are proof of the comment above that concrete's greatest strength, aesthetically, is its near limitless capacity to be molded.

    

    But I think, perhaps, that the most salient input to this discourse would come from right down the hill, echoing in the halls of the business building. No one has yet mentioned why we live in pillboxes: money.

    Of course, in a perfect world, we could dream a shape and make it reality on a scale larger than clay. But anything that we have to live or work in? Anything larger than a ger, or a tent, a mudhut? Yes of course I'm aware of the great structures throughout time. But what were the circumstances of their completion? Someone always had to pay. The pharoahs, the Romans, the Medicis. And for anything besides a straight line, you pay dearly.

    Nature is good at curves, and we can be too. But the cheapest way, the most direct way, is always a straight line. I'm not justifying all the ugly buildings that surround us. I'm just explaining why they're there: the people who paid for them understood the compromise. Funds are always limited. Most people opt for function. Their reasoning goes something like this: architects are expensive. Let's cut that cost. What, you want arches? The design is harder. The structural engineers are telling us straight lines are better. A curved mold is complex. The tooling, the artisanship, it goes on and on. It's so easy to just throw up a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood for a mold and pour in some concrete. Would I rather have a 10% more beautiful building, or 10% more rentable space? This is what the number crunchers are thinking.

    It's still cheaper to make houses out of wood. So that's what we do. Sure, they may be brick on the outside, but the structure doing the job? Cut down from a forest. On the larger scale, though? Dorms, apartments, offices, schools? Concrete is it, man. It's good at what it does. It's versatile. It's strong. It lasts. And most important, it's dirt cheap.

    It takes vision. It takes unwavering vision to bring a beautiful building into existence. Some will watch the process and call it arrogance. Or extravagant expense. But it's obvious that, for reasons I won't go into because I'm sure you know them and I've already taken up too much of your time, aesthetics are important. I agree with you on the curves. But I understand why the straight lines. And I accept it.

    P.S. I remember Art Deco. I live close to Miami. :)

14. ★

    WorldFlickr added this photo to his favorites. (69 months ago)

15. 

    WorldFlickr (69 months ago | reply)

    Hi, I am an admin for a group called Landmarks around the world, and I discovered this great shot in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. We love to have your photo added to the group.

16. ★

    manningkylie and mallooney added this photo to their favorites.

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