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Architorture
millennium club
Joined: 31 Jul 2004
Posts: 1376
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 Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:23 am Post subject: Robert AM Stern PSU Business Building |
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the new business building here at PSU designed by bobby stern...
we went on a tour of the facilities for our technical systems integration course
this shot actually isn't the "front" but instead the "back" the glass is a 4 story tall atrium space
this is the actual "front" of the building which has a large space in which the 'mock trading floor' will exist so that people will know that business is whats going on inside this building
this is what it looks like inside the hallway that connects the 'front' enterance to the 4 story atrium area right now... its actually pretty cool to walk through |
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Architorture
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Joined: 31 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:25 am Post subject: |
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this is the atrium space as is today
offices and conference rooms facing into the atrium
this is looking down to where the previous picture was taken from |
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Architorture
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Joined: 31 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:30 am Post subject: |
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another shot of the staircase in the atrium space...it will be entirely enclosed in glass as the top portion is
classroom space
disconcerting office window...walk up to the edge and look 3 stories down... |
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Architorture
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Joined: 31 Jul 2004
Posts: 1376
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| Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:34 am Post subject: |
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stack bond....mmmmm wobble wobble
just me or is there way too many materials on this facade?
the forestry building next door that will complete the half circle created by the facade of stern's building...
i thought this looked pretty need with the scaffolding and plastic |
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SDR
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Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1716
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2005 7:57 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for the cool pics -- the difference between good and great is sometimes a little extra restraint -- if you can sell it to a client afflicted with "grandomania" (Wright's term). But, a lot better than Bob's pseudo-contextual Gap headquarters on San Francisco's Embarcadero. . .
SDR |
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abidghayyoor
Joined: 13 Feb 2005
Posts: 9
Location: Toronto
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| Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2005 12:27 pm Post subject: Last picture is the best |
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In my opinion the last picture is the best and could easily become a landmark,  |
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Architorture
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Joined: 31 Jul 2004
Posts: 1376
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| Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2005 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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| SDR wrote: | Thanks for the cool pics -- the difference between good and great is sometimes a little extra restraint -- if you can sell it to a client afflicted with "grandomania" (Wright's term). But, a lot better than Bob's pseudo-contextual Gap headquarters on San Francisco's Embarcadero. . .
SDR |
its funny, b/c we pretty much call the materials the "penn state pallet"
it used to only be red brick and limestone.... then once vinoly designed the IST building here he included the brushed metal which has now appeared on 3 other buildings including this one... but it is just a little too much to have them all colliding in one place...
i blame it mostly on the fact that the building was 'fast-tracked' which probably killed some of the detailing that could have gone into it... |
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Wendy H.
Joined: 22 Mar 2005
Posts: 6
Location: Mill Valley, CA
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| Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2005 4:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Architorture wrote: |
just me or is there way too many materials on this facade? |
It's just you ;->
Especially if the different materials correspond to different functions on the interior, as it appears they may, I think it's great, but I like it either way. It's the same set of materials as are on the front facade, just in different proportions. It looks even better in the first photo, which shows the whole facade. Remove any of them, and you'd lose the whole interlocking effect and vertical/horizontal interplay.
What would you have done differently?
Wendy |
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jump
Joined: 19 Mar 2005
Posts: 36
Location: tokyo, japan
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| Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2005 5:58 pm Post subject: |
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i agree with wendy. if there are too many materials here what do you think of koolhaas' new IIT building or the Seattle Library?
It is a competent job, but the real problem is that the design is incredibly banal and corporate, not that the materials don't work. I mean, the detailing suggests the architect isn't really a deep thinker anyway. It looks like he left it up to the contractor to work things out. The scaffolding with plastic is without a doubt the better architecture; but I shudder to think what lays beneath;) |
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SDR
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Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1716
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2005 6:58 pm Post subject: |
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Right. But isn't the exterior of the Seattle Library almost a textbook example of "mono-material" (well, if metal-framed glazing qualifies as "one material")?
SDR |
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jump
Joined: 19 Mar 2005
Posts: 36
Location: tokyo, japan
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| Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2005 11:28 pm Post subject: |
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| sorry, i was thinking more of the interior of the seattle library. very intense. so much so that people dissapear in the floor materials. my tastes run to maximalism and i love it, but i can imagine some might not enjoy it as much. |
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Architorture
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Joined: 31 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2005 2:01 am Post subject: |
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there is actually another set of materials missing from the picture that are just around the corner from the first shot... the north facade is the hardest to grasp i guess, but i didn't photograph it, i'll get it sometime this week maybe if i get to that part of campus...
it might not be the numbers of materials so much as it is the way the materials come together... the detailing is very bad in the building, which as jump pointed out is b/c the building was a 'fast-track' building so much of the detailing was done by the contractor...
this of course did become problematic b/c there were communication breakdowns... like when the huge vertical columns showed up in the atrium... stern was all about reinforcing the horizontal in the building, and he really didn't care for the columns being so large... but what else could you do? you need big columns to hold up a 4 story atrium...the horizontal mullions aren't going to do it by themselves...
but mostly i blame it on the 'penn state pallet' of red brick and limestone... and since the vinoli IST building now brushed aluminum as well...
i'll get some pics of the new archtiecture building, it puts the vinoli and stern buildings to shame in level of development and detailing |
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SDR
millennium club
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1716
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2005 9:52 am Post subject: |
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It's too bad, isn't it. . .limestone-trimmed brick has a fine and long tradition in the construction of the more "permanent" building types. Look at the Robie House, Lutyens's memorial to WWI British and French soldiers at Thiepval, and Venturi, Rauch & Scott-Brown's Wu Hall at Princeton*, as three widely-disparate examples. And, today, the addition of "white" metal (SS, aluminum), at least in glazing systems, seems perfectly acceptable as a more or less approporiate "third element." So it's the use of them here that disappoints, no?
SDR
*The latter two are found in Vincent Scully's highly-recommended "Architecture: the Natural and the Manmade" |
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Architorture
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Joined: 31 Jul 2004
Posts: 1376
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| Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2005 12:30 pm Post subject: |
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i know they have long and storied histories.... especially at penn state....
the problem is it gets applied no matter what... even if it doesn't work for the building... you'll understand when i get some of the vinioli IST building shots up... that building should nto have as much brick on it as it does...
it just gets to a point on campus where it looks like you are seeing blobs of brick... you have just huge massings of brick in some areas where various buildings meet and just end up looking like a single monolithic brick thing sitting there....
it would be nice to see a little variety or inventiveness |
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SDR
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Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1716
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2005 2:25 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah -- "respecting" the context by overpowering it with endless repetition of the same materials rapidly becomes insult rather than respect; it can sap the strength of the earlier examples. In addition, today's "stik-a-brik" surfaces so often read as wallpaper. A rare example of handsome and convincing panelized brickwork, here in SF, is Mario Botta's Museum of Modern Art (not a building I am otherwise fond of). Perhaps, as a masonry master, he insisted on a better grade of material than is the norm, or it might be superior detailing -- I'll have to look at it again.
I've been re-reading Paul Goldberger's "On the Rise," a collection of his architectural criticism (for the NY Times, following Ada Louise Huxtable's retirement), written in the late seventies-early eighties, when post-modernism was the new thing. There is a surprisingly sympathetic and thought-provoking piece on an old "traditionalist" (one of the last still practicing, then, in that mode), one Mott B Schmidt. Goldberger describes a half-dozen of his Manhattan or suburban town houses and villas, all in the neoclassical or Georgian mode, which he had been building in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester, without pause, since the early nineteen-twenties. They are apparently distinguished by a deft and appriopriate use of those vocabularies, in a warm and modest way, with the pre-existing historic elements employed in fresh and convincing compositions. This was no postmodernism, but "the real thing."
If one wanted to add buildings to an existing Georgian or neoclassical campus, let us say, one could do worse than to employ an expert like that (now gone, no doubt), assuming he were able to provide perfectly appropriate and functional new construction in that style. I realize this is almost heresy, in 2005 -- yet Goldberger reminds us that the beauty of London is that it is filled with excellent examples of this sort of building, cheek-by-jowl, accomplished over a period of two centuries or more.
SDR |
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