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February 9, 2008
Knowing the landscape: how Miralles outpaced Gehry
Atlantic Yards Report looks at the differences between Gehry and another 'wavy' builder, Enrique Miralles, as seen by critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen in the Feb. 13 issue of The New Republic...
Goldhagen suggests the issue is not so much sculpture but landscape:
When these projects take off into curves, it is because Miralles and company decided that curves are what a particular architectural challenge evoked. There is no aggressive monumentality here, no cookie-cutter high-end product dumped wherever the money exists to pay for it. There is, instead, sensitivity and study. Miralles and his colleagues receptively investigated the landscape and the site. They considered when and how the people who were to use the structure or the landscape might live in, move through, and prospect space; how they might touch, and imagine touching, surfaces. Sure, they made use of computers to actualize their ideas. But their architecture neither starts nor stops with skin, or with what digital technology offers. Steeped in architecture's history, Miralles used architectural precedents when they offered reasonable solutions to problems that, in the words of Viennese modernist Adolf Loos, had already been solved. Steeped in art, nature, and local traditions, Miralles playfully engaged architecture's metaphorical possibilities.
Posted by amy at February 9, 2008 10:04 AM