A Theory of Architecture?

The New York Times Style Magazine of June 2019 has an article "Anxiety of  Influence" on Modernist architecture in Japan and some anxiety about the influence of the man called Le Corbusier but nowhere does the article acknowledge Harold Bloom's influence on its title.

What an irony!

But on a lighter note . . .

Lollipop House

Moon Hoon

New York Times

Liza Foreman, writing "In South Korea, Houses With a Sense of Whimsy" for the NYT (September 20, 2012), tells of whimsical architecture by Seoul's Moon Hoon:

Kim Dae Sung, a 36-year-old computer programmer, his wife, Lee Ji Sun, 34, and their 4-year-old daughter, Kim Soo Min, look like a conventional family of three: a father who leaves for the office early each morning, a stay-at-home mother and a young daughter with cute pigtails.

But this family lives in an unconventional home, made all the more unusual by its striking contrast to the ranks of monotonous high rises that fill the Korean capital and spill out to the suburbs, including their town of Yong In.

Simply by living in a house rather than a high-rise apartment, the family is already unconventional, but there's more defiance of convention here, as you can see from the photograph above.

The Lollipop House is a wood-frame structure covered in a swirl of red-and-white steel plates, designed to resemble the candy -- though local children call it the Snail for its rounded silhouette. But regardless of the name, the seven-level house glows at night, yellow light pouring through its large glass windows.

There ought to be a photograph of that! Incidentally, my wife looked at the photo above and questioned the statement that it's a "seven-level" house. I share my wife's skepticism, and I wonder if the reporter jotted down "2-level" a bit unclearly and later read it as "7-level." I suppose I could try to contact Ms. Foreman . . . [Update: It really is seven levels! Go here and scroll a bit.]

The two-bedroom, two-bathroom home, designed by the Korean architect Moon Hoon, is unusual in other ways, too.

It was completed in February after just three months’ construction and cost a total of 170 million won, or $152,000.

And, perhaps most important, the Lollipop is part of a trend inspired by a 2011 book whose title in English is "Two Men's Journal of Building Their Homes," a story by Lee Hyun Wook and Goo Bon Joon about wooden construction that has intrigued homeowners here.

"Before, individual houses were for rich guys. It would cost you $100,000 for the architect alone plus $1 million for the house," said Mr. Moon, 44, who has a master's degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Then came the book, which explained how to build in wood, which is much cheaper."

His 11-year-old firm, moon_bal_sso, is based in Seoul and most of his projects, including several homes and a school, are in the capital region.

"Apartments used to be an investment, which is why people tolerated living in a concrete box, but now they aren't going up anymore," he said. Seoul's real estate market has never recovered from the 2008 global downturn, and prices fell 2.14 percent in the first six months of the year from a year earlier, according to Doctor Apt., an online real estate site in Korea.

That global downturn merely burst a housing bubble that would have popped anyway, but I'm surprised that people didn't recognize the bubble and kept buying up apartments as investments.

Still, Mr. Moon's designs are not for the faint of heart. One of his recent homes, a quirky holiday house perched on the edge of a hill in Jeongseon, in the northernmost part of the country, features large gold horns on the roof.

"My professors would hate me for putting horns on a building," he said. "The client wanted something representative of a bullfight. Before and after the horns, it is a totally different building."

It certainly is, but you'll need to go to the article to see that one. I showed the photo to my wife, who told me she already knew about it. Here are more images, from Google Images.

I now think I'd enjoy living in a snail house, or even a horned house. Like a snail house, I'm slow, and like a horned house, I'm . . . well, never mind.

Basel: A Quarter-Century Past

I lived over a year in Switzerland back in the latter 1980s, about four months of that time in Basel, where I first had and then didn't have a Swiss girlfriend named Monika whom I'd originally met in Fribourg in 1986, a breakup that worked out for the best in the long run, though I had my doubts about its beneficial consequences during the summer of 1988. I spent a lot of time in Basel that summer at Andreasplatz drinking coffee in the Café zum Teufel -- though I think it had already been renamed Café Zum Roten Engel -- and writing in my journal (when I wasn't working on my Coptic), depicting in lead of pencils the vicissitudes of a once golden relationship.

Café Zum Roten Engel

Google Images

I've never had an overwhelming desire to revisit that lovely city, though I did go again in the Fall of 1989, for I was -- courtesy of a Fulbright Grant -- living in Tübingen, not so far from Basel, and I took that opportunity to walk the city's streets and seek out old haunts. I never looked up my old girlfriend, despite strolling by the place where she probably lived, for too little time had passed to enable me to deal with that unpleasantness. Besides, as she saw me off at the train in late summer of '88, I had left her with the words, "Leb wohl," and though she found that amusing -- a marginally appropriate response -- I kept my promise implicit in the words of that farewell.

Despite my reluctance about ever again returning to Basel, I actually liked the city, and still wish the best for it. It appears to be doing well, as I see from the art and architecture pages of the International Herald Tribune in an article reprinted in the New York Times as "Basel's New Center for Design" (June 1, 2012 ), by Ratha Tep, who informs us:

On a brisk Saturday morning in April, a group of young architecture students from Bologna, Italy, walked down a white granite promenade in the St. Johann neighborhood in Basel, Switzerland, to take in 14 "starchitect"-designed buildings that have sprung up in recent years. An opaque glass structure by Yoshio Taniguchi resembled a floating box. A soaring Frank Gehry design of contorted cubes stood just beyond. And over near the large Richard Serra sculptures, a Tadao Ando building converged into a razor-sharp triangular edge.

That a group of art and design geeks would be visiting this corner of northern Basel, which hugs the Rhine River, would have been unimaginable just a decade ago, when it was a gloomy stretch dotted with nondescript office buildings and chemical factories. But the new buildings, part of an ambitious 2.2 billion Swiss franc plan by the pharmaceutical giant Novartis to turn its production facility into a gleaming corporate campus, has drawn curious onlookers to the 50-acre site, where a project by the hometown firm of Herzog and de Meuron is still on its way.

Sounds impressive. Unfortunately, the article offers only one photo, but I Googled the company Novartis and found all the necessary photos to accompany Tep's descriptions. Here's Yoshio Taniguchi's opaque glass structure like a floating box:

Here's Frank Gehry's soaring design of contorted cubes (which Tep does provide):

Here's Tadao Ando's building converging into a razor-sharp triangular edge (or so says Tep):

There are twelve other photos of architecture to look at, each of them small, unfortunately, but they will give you an impression of what you'd see if you visit the area . . . which I suppose I never again will.

"Leb wohl," Basel.

UPDATE: Go to the Novartis site and click on the camera icon under each of the tiny photos for a larger image.

Peter Zumthor: Architect

Oculus

Peter Zumthor

Photo by Julian Faulhaber

(Image from The New York Times)

I like to read articles on things that I know nothing of to see if they spark ideas on things that I know something about, and I came upon an interesting statement by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor quoted by Michael Kimmelman in "The Ascension of Peter Zumthor" for The New York Times Magazine (March 11, 2011):

"I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly," Zumthor has said in describing his philosophy. "Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers. If you do what you should, then at the end there is something, which you can't explain maybe, but if you are lucky, it has to do with life."

I'm not entirely sure what to make of Zumthor's statement, but I find an elusive beauty in the images of his works within the Times article, so he must know what he's talking about even if I don't know for certain. I suspect he means that beauty cannot be readily grasped at in the abstract by the artist, but is better found through working within the constraints of deep experience, which informs the beauty that "has to do with life."

I know nothing of architecture, but I have a bit of experience with poetry, and I find some sense there to what Zumthor says. My most effective poems stem not from an attempt to write poetry, but from a need to express myself, within the framework offered by experience, upon the desire for something greater than what life ordinarily offers, given through what life has to offer.

Perhaps I'm not alone. What, for instance, is John Milton's Paradise Lost, if not an expression of that imperiled desire, an oculus of, and for, the blind?