"Wasteful" design in Canberra, saggy arenas and buildings designed by security guards, in today's news digest...
“You don’t need to look far to find the most extravagantly wasteful design paradigm in contemporary architectural practice: the ecological aesthetic effect. Just like the fad for wings on the bums of suburban peoplemovers, in Canberra the contemporary office building sports flamboyant enhancements just for the sake of appearance.”
Iconophilia
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“The huge skyscraper that, thankfully, no one any longer seems to call the Freedom Tower is rising, to almost no one’s admiration or gratitude. Now named 1 World Trade Center, it is a banal building designed, it would seem, more by security consultants than by its architect, David Childs, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.”
The New Yorker
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“The arena seems to sag deflatedly from certain angles, rather like a basketball needing some air, which can hardly be the kind of architectural symbolism the Nets were hoping for. And despite its improvements, the new scheme clearly falls short of the far more fleshed-out Gehry plan, which was full of unorthodox vitality and related better to its urban context than most observers realized.”
Los Angeles Times
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“In the ‘not worth your time’ category are materials that architects seem to have pulled out of their file drawers and model shops, apparently more interested in marketing themselves than in thinking deeply about the future of the city and region.”
Chicago Tribune
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“If Scottish architects simply want to build the kind of architecture that is realised everywhere else in the world, the argument that there is a rich indigenous culture worthy of defending becomes rather harder to sustain. In such a climate, no one should be too surprised if the big jobs keep going to the big (and foreign) names.”
BD Online
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