no ideas but in things

A collection of images from the recently closed competition for the United States Embassy in London:

Richard Meier’s (New York) entry above.

The design from Morphosis (Santa Monica).

The Pei Cobb Freed entry (New York).

Sadly, the image above is from the winning entry from Kieran Timberlake (Philadelphia).

Selected reading regarding the competition:

ArchDaily

A/N Blog

The New York Times

The Guardian.co.uk (in which Sir Richard Rogers decrees that the winning entry is “unfit to represent the US in Britain.”)

This blog should have been started years ago as a repository for ideas and sketches, but for whatever many reasons, I’m just getting to it now. I recently graduated from the Yale School of Architecture, and while there, I founded and ran an Architecture and Film Society.

The idea of doing such came from my experience at the GSD’s Career Discovery, when my instructor Philipp, an M.Des with a thesis in “Architectural Atmosphere” did the same. I still remember the first movie he screened, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, and the case he made for the way certain directors can control and emphasize space and time in an architectural way, with urban implications.

At Yale, I screened a movie every week or so, and distributed a page of film notes to accompany each one. That exercise, as much as anything else during school, was a place where I could quickly sketch down some ideas and explore some relationships, mostly between the intersection between media and architecture. In the high-pressure, high-stress, academically strenuous environment of grad school, it was a place where I could develop some thoughts outside of the proscribed curriculum.

At the wonderful Paul Rudolph designed A&A building, now called Rudolph Hall, I simply posted the film notes in the elevators (which served as the school’s bulletin board, social condenser, and transporter all rolled into one), showed the dvds in Hastings (our large lecture hall), and called it a week. But in my third year, our school spent moved to a temporary location, a depressingly underthought-out building by Kieran Timberlake, while the A&A underwent renovations. There, it became clear that the medium for a discussion about the intersection between media and architecture was ironically underserved by the old-school method of posting up pieces of paper around the school. Instead, it should have been disseminated electronically.

So I hope you forgive me while I back-track a bit, and for my first blog posts, post my old Film Society notes from the previous three years.