Dream house

Residencia Tomie Ohtake / Ruy Ohtake from here.

An image of modernity

Today I visited the ICA for the latest in their series of culture now talks, with this instalment being delivered by Hal Foster. His newly published book looks at ways in which contemporary art and architecture have informed each other, something he terms the art-architecture complex, and the implications of this. In his talk he discussed various threads of the book in relation to specific examples of architecture, from architects such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano who he described as being exponents of a 'global style' of design, to Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron, whose stylistic influences drawn from such historical artistic avant-gardes as Russian constructivism he was particularly sceptical of. He noted how these buildings are essentially images first and foremost - glittering beacons of modernity that have no grounding in site or locality (think the ostentatiousness of the Shard).

There was also a trajectory in his line of thought from the minimalism he has discussed at length before in his career and the spatial concerns of contemporary architecture today. Interesting was his disdain for how the buildings discussed aspired to create a sense of 'lightness of being', and how these buildings were aspiring to a sense of modernist 'transparency' - making the materials of the building visible - but in fact were creating an air of mystification and illusion. Rather than an experience being activated by the subject and their relation to the space - as with minimalism - the space itself creates the experience, and this is a negative, Foster posed.

Since it began to rise above its surroundings on the south bank of the Thames I've found the Shard incredibly disconcerting. As Hal Foster noted in his talk, it really does have no connection or awareness of its immediate surroundings in London Bridge and its sheer height really does make it difficult to come to terms with. I've always found its juxtaposition with the brutalist, modernist tower it sits next to a poignant happenstance - as Andrew Marr pointed out in his recent television series on megacities, here is London's glittering beacon of modernity, casting a shadow over the eyesore that once heralded another moment of modernity but that now is a drab, grey, monstrous lump of concrete. And yet it was this concrete and the aforementioned transparency of materials that formed the core of the modernist project, analogous to them with a transparency in all aspects of democratic life. What is so democratic about the Shard, rising high above all around it?

"We need to make a building that doesn't shut people out, one that responds to local as well as city-wide needs. A building of this scale, this ambition, cannot be just for private gain: it becomes a public project privately financed." - Renzo Piano on The Shard

Details from Butterworth Station, Penang

Butterworth Station is in the north of Peninsular Malaysia and is situated next to the ferry terminal which provides access to Pilau Penang. We arrived here after an ovenight train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and a subsequent six hour train journey up the mainland, taking in much of rural Malaysia along the way.

Walking the high line

On the Guardian's homepage today was a story about the opening of the second phase of New York's High Line park. I'd read about this project a couple of months ago in Frieze magazine, in which the New York authorities have turned the disused High Line railway which runs down the west side of Manhattan into a public space, transforming the once overgrown rail tracks into a kind of faux-overgrown leisure space. It's quite interesting how they've created this artificial sense of nature reclaiming an urban space that had become long forgotten, essentially mimicking what the High Line had become - captured in a series of images by Joel Sternfield at the turn of the century - but with nice clean walkways to stroll down.

Who knew?

Today I discovered that one of the local schools back home in Norfolk was designed by Britain's leading Brutalist architects, Peter and Alison Smithson. The first project to bring them wider acclaim, Hunstanton School (now Smithdon High) is made almost entirely of glass and steel, and was highly influenced by the work of Mies van der Rohe. I've often driven past and thought it looked particularly interesting, but never quite realised its historical status!

Architectural forms

The Atlas Group is a really interesting archival project worth checking out. Founded by Walid Raad, it is a fictional collective devoted to researching and documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon. These images form part of a series by the group to document buildings of architectural, political, technological or national significance in Beirut.

Modernism had its moments

Although here in England its reputation is often marred by and associated with that most detested form of architecture, the brutalist tower block, modernism really did come up with some stunning architecture during the course of the last century. Recently Tom Ford's A Single Man reminded us that modernism could be sleek, stylish and sexy, when he chose to use this house as the setting for much of the film.

The Schaffer house, designed by John Lautner for the mother of an employee, is situated in Glendale California, and like much modernist architecture uses glass as a prominent feature to create a spacious and light filled living space. Lautner studied under Frank Lloyd-Wright and was one of the leading modernist architects, designing other such icons of the West Coast as The Chemospere House in the Hollywood Hills:

and the Elrod Residence in Palm Springs, which apparently makes an appearance in the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever:

California, and in particular Los Angeles, is home to much celebrated modernist architecture, helped in a large part to become iconic by the photographer Julius Shulman, who devoted a career to photographing such modernist landmarks as Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 22 in Los Angeles:

As you can see the ethos of the designs was to be bold and daring, following the modernist intent to create something that completely shunned the past and tradition in favour of brash, uncompromising design. Many of the views afforded by these designs were rather incredible, where you would often be overlooking stunning vistas of the urban sprawl that is LA.

This is a house by Frank Neutra, again photographed by Shulman. Neutra was another of the leading figures of the Californian modernist movement. Like Lautner he worked for Frank Lloyd-Wright, and went on to design over three hundred houses in California, including this one, made famous in the film LA Confidential.

I'm always going to dream of the perfect Georgian townhouse or a seventeenth century country farmhouse, but as far as escapism goes these modernist utopias will always have a lasting legacy, there's just something quite special about their angular lines and minimalist chic, even if the reality of living in a glass box would be a little impractical...