THE CRAFTED CITY ARCHIVES

COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce

PURIFICATION OF DESIGN

The design of things, the design of cities, are all required to go through their requisite 'purification'. But instead of a distillery's chromium piping, a city has code-enforced banality. The act of codifying what is 'good', as practiced in our administered system, renders our cities into something not awful. Yet something that is without character.

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PROCESS, COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce PROCESS, COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce

THE WRONG DECISION

The Architect's Newspaper:

"Details are sparse during the period of Zaha Hadid replacing Assemblage. First, over the two year span, Assemblage was never officially notified that they had lost the bid. Although, in private they knew they were frozen out of conversation. Second, leading Iraqi architectural critic Ihsan Fethi said there has been a veil of secrecy as he has tried several times to see the plan for the parliamentary building. Finally, the Iraqi Council of Representatives never had a chance to choose the winner selected by the RIBA judges."

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COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce

NOT JUST BLING

I would imagine that there must be pressure from the other side, too. The great ones will get dissed by their own contingent to avoid giving folks the wrong idea that they are paying too much attention to context, and not enough to the art and theory of their work. Yet by accident or design, the work of the elite actually does contribute to improving a city. It's nice when it happens.

Here in Pasadena, Morphosis has pulled this off, on California Boulevard, on the CalTech campus.

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PROCESS, COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce PROCESS, COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce

KEEP OR TEAR DOWN

Witness the ongoing saga at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With the acquisition of the American Folk Art Museum on West 53rd Street, came a crafted building praised by many critics. After some wavering on the issue, it was announced that this building would be torn down to make way for a new MoMA addition, throwing MoMA headlong into a classic preservation debate. Keep or Tear Down. Keep the quirky structure by the architects Tod Williams + Billie Tsein, with all of its accompanying issues mis-matched floor elevations and the like, or scrape it clean and start over.

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COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2013-2016 Douglas Joyce

APPROACHING THE DISNEY

Everything about moving up through the building helps to build the excitement. We'll start with the long and deep red space that houses the linear assent up from the parking garage. The zig and zag through the main lobby spaces, a sequence of unexpected volumes, all lined with the beautiful fir paneling, foretelling the concert hall inside. Working up to more intimate spaces that lead to the part of the hall you are headed towards. Free flowing and refined, adventurous and in good taste, with a sense of movement the whole time. Finally, the concert goer moves through a discreet portal and into the great concert space, the musical instrument in which you will experience the concert. Wonderful experience in site and sound. The very culmination of why the procession is so important in architecture. It places you in the right frame of mind to experience great art.

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COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2012 Douglas Joyce COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2012 Douglas Joyce

LINKS IN THE CRAFTED CITY

"Guenther Demnig is the artist and sculptor behind the stumbling stones (shown in the photo in the link). Here, he installs new bricks in Berlin. He says formal memorials are too abstract. Not so with the stumbling stones. 'Suddenly they are there, right outside your front door, at your feet, in front of you,' he says."

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COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2011 Douglas Joyce COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2011 Douglas Joyce

GRAFFITI

I've certainly been disappointed and dismayed by crude and fresh spray paint on newly constructed walls or at scratched glass on a great old building. There is nothing redeeming about acts like those, and it's hard not to loose all sympathy for the back story that induced that behavior.

And the mostly young men who are in the middle of that culture? Of course they look at things differently. Graffiti is one of the few ways that they can express themselves besides physical violence that will be noticed by the outside world.

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COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2010 Douglas Joyce COMMENTARY, ARCHIVES 2010 Douglas Joyce

ART VERSUS CRAFT

Art, in the common reasoning, is superior to craft, set apart for a higher purpose. Contrary to common reasoning, I believe that they are the same thing in ultimate effect. Only art is stripped of the practical constraints integral to craft, becoming a subset requirement of well considered craft.

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