Beauty and the brain

Researchers at San Carlos Clinical hospital in Madrid recently tested 10 men and 10 women , showing them paintings and photos of urban scenes and landscapes, asking them to rate each scene as either "beautiful" or "not beautiful." (To avoid confounding by romantic regions of the brain, close-up images of people were not included.) When the participants were making the decisions, the scientists looked at images of the magnetic fields produced by electrical currents in their brains. The findings are preliminary and only based on a small sample, but interesting nonetheless: men tend to process beauty on the right side of their brains while women tend to use their whole brain.

I don't think that means women appreciate beauty more than men. But it shows us different tendencies. Men's considerations appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms, in other words, x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Women do the same, but they also use regions associated with relative location: above and behind, over and under. "The answer seems to be that when women consider a visual object they link it to language while men concentrate on the spatial aspects of the object," said Camilo J. Cela-Conde, one of the research scientists. Have you ever had the feeling that men are incapable of describing the reason why they think something is beautiful? But take a look at the 800-900 ms image - men are trying to find reasons afterwards. Yes, I admit, men are visual animals that are good at post-rationalization. :)

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Simple vs. pure, optimism, and others

Went to Rem's lecture at Columbia last night. It was packed. My first impression - such a star!! Ironically, he showed an image of himself talking to a huge crowd in the Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin during the Content show, and went on attacking the notion of "starchitects." With an image of Guggenheim Bilbao, he said, "Gehry has become the emblem of Architecture Now." Indeed, if you ask Joe Sixpack which architect he knows, the answer would probably be Frank (either FLW or FOG).

I don't know when it started, but at least Rem was already attacking "starchitects" back in the days of Junkspace. "Laughable emptiness infuses the respectful distance or tentative embrace that starchitects maintain in the presence of the past, authentic or not." There are identifiable examples mentioned in the text: "...quarries reopened to excavate the 'same' stone, indiscreet donor names chiseled prominently in the meekest of typefaces; the courtyard covered by a masterful, structural 'filigree' - emphatically uncompetitive - so that continuity may be established with the 'rest' of Junkspace (abandoned galleries, display slums, Jurassic concepts…)." This is explicit: "Railway stations unfold like iron butterflies, airports glisten like cyclopic dewdrops, bridges span often negligible banks like grotesquely enlarged versions of the harp. To each rivulet its own Calatrava."

I think it's not necessarily the concept of stars that's bad, but it's what they do, or how they can catch our eyes. We don't need more Britney or Paris, but Angelina is not too bad...

Is there a way out? Rem offered two lines of thoughts. One is to be not simple but pure. "It's time to reconsider purity," Rem said. To illustrate what he meant, he showed the Dubai Renaissance project. I found it interesting to think about the difference between being simple and pure. Simple is direct and straightforward. But it implies being not sophisticated or complicated - there are no intellectual challenges. Pure indicates soleness, but this singularity can be organized by extremely complex internal relations. Purity knows exactly what it's doing, although it may be complicated. Purity excludes any interruptions from foreign elements.


The second way - we knew it already - is the extreme engagement in program and urban conditions. He presented Taipei as an example (see my blog entry). I so wished he had more, but that was it. I hope he will think more on this and we'll see some sort of "guide to starchitects behavior"... Did Rem write anything important after Junkspace?

Maybe it's time. He said, when everything goes down in this crisis, the chances for more planning, more thinking, and more feeling go up. It is actually a positive moment for architecture. This surprised me quite a bit given the fact that he claimed multiple times to be a pessimist, especially during his AA years. He was troubled by the dominant optimism of Archigram. When everybody was playing with fancy collages, he went to study the Berlin Wall... But now he seems to think positively. When asked about his "minimal" architectural intervention in the Hermitage project, He said, "Why can't we enjoy things just for their own sake? Architects tend to opt for radical changes..." Does he really become more optimistic and want to re-evaluate the legacy of Archigram?

Finally, one little quote on China: "If you don't understand the ideological ambition of that nation, you are not worth operating in China."

TVCC2 - Architecture must burn?

In Yukio Mishima's novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji), the disturbed acolyte Mizoguchi burnt down the Golden Pavilion at the end. What he destroyed was far more than a physical structure. For Mizoguchi, it's a symbol of beauty, and desire. It embodies all the love, shame, disappointment, and anger in his life.

In the last couple of years several well-known buildings caught on fire, partially or completely damaged. Buildings always mean more to architects, just like parents understand better the value of life... Let's take a moment of silence and mourn the loss of tremendous physical and emotional devotions, the loss of beauty, and the loss of all the wonders they had created.

TVCC, Feb 9, 2009

Berlin Philharmonic, May 20, 2008

TU Delft Architecture Faculty (Bouwkunde), May 13, 2008

Linked Hybrid, May 1, 2008

Villa NM, Feb 6, 2008

TVCC on fire!

Oh boy! Around 9pm Beijing time (8am Eastern time) today, TVCC caught on fire. Preliminary investigation says it's the firework on the last day of celebrations for the Chinese New Year... The fire went on for almost 4 hours. 54 fire trucks came to the site. 30+ people were rescued, and at least 7 people (6 fire fighters + 1 CCTV staff) were hospitalized. (Added 2/10: One firefighter died...) Estimated loss billions of dollars, not counting the endless hours of work on the design...

The entire morning there were floods of messages from different portals: emails, text messages, msn, google talk, skype, facebook chat... I was amazed how fast things travel in the architectural world.

Blink graphics

Emerystudio designed this cool wayfinding system for the carpark of Eureka Tower in Melbourne. The monumental words can be seen perfectly at certain key points. Otherwise they become ambiguous graphic fragments. The manipulation of perspetival distortion successfully addresses the notions of 2D (signage) vs. 3D (space), and staticity vs. mobility. When driving, you have to make decisions in a blink anyways, right?

After-party?

MOS (Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith) won this year's PS1 Young Architects Program. Aware of the global economic crisis, the architects claim, "Today, we are rethinking and resituating architecture - not only its conceptual and formal economies but also its inherent ability to engage and produce visceral intimate environments."

Is it really what the proposal shows? All the news coverages can only describe the project as "a mix of cones, domes, smokestacks, primitive huts, towers or industrial chimneys." Barry Bergdoll said, "Some are tall and chimneylike, heroic cones, others more broad and space-grabbing and evocative of the open ruined vaults of the Roman Forum." Oh, come on! Roman Forum?

What's beyond this bunch of funny shapes? Yes, it does provide shading. But isn't that by definition a function of any type of canopies? A fancy name like "temporary urban shelter" or "passive cooling station" doesn't justify the form. And after all, if this "visceral intimate environment" is the only thing you can come up with when you "rethink and resituate architecture," that's really sad! Barry Bergdoll praised the project as "a return to basics." I really hope the basics of architecture is not just cones, domes, smokestacks, huts, or chimneys.

Well, I am not saying it looks bad - I may like the spaces when it's built. I just have trouble with all the hype. Think about the proposal's name "afterparty." Does that mean to pause and reflect, or to continue? If we were at a party of extravagant iconic forms and narcissistic bullshitting, I certainly hope we are not going to another round of architectural blah-blah-blah. OK OK, I confess. Perhaps I just want to see the inhabitable lumber stack too much... Cheers Jon!

Cardiff + Luxor + Guangzhou = Taipei

Rem is persistent. For the Cardiff Bay Opera House competition in 1994, he came up with this brilliant idea to challenge the typical auditorium-foyer binary of classical opera houses, and instead, to divide the performing arts building according to the separation of production and consumption of the spectacle.

Zaha Hadid won the competition but the building was never built. In a competition in 1996, Rem tried to sell the same idea (and almost the same form) to the Luxor Theater in Rotterdam. But they picked Bolles+Wilson. Then again, slightly altered form but essentially the same concept text was submitted to the 2002 Guangzhou Opera House competition in China. And again, Zaha got the job and she's now building it.

Luxor Theater competition, Rotterdam, 1996

Guangzhou Opera House competition, 2002

Another opportunity came - last year, the city of Taipei was looking for architects to build its new performing arts center that houses three independent theaters. OK, TRIPLE-CARDIFF! The competition result was recently announced - Rem finally nailed it!


I have mixed feelings about this scheme. I like the idea of production/consumption dichotomy since its conception. By joining the three stages and creating a "super factory," the building departs from the standard egg-with-three-yolks type and successfully eliminates the "back side." I understand each theater may want its own identity, but why can that only be achieved by three different shapes and materials? Suddenly two elements become four - it's just messy. The form becomes too obscure to convey the concept. The structure is equally messy - and banal. You see how nice the concept model is without all those columns? I think it would be better if the three auditoriums are just hanging, with a similar formal language, and each of them has a distinct interior ambiance, like the series of rooms in Casa da Musica...

Happy Lunar New Year!

Here comes the Year of the Ox! Ox=Niu=New+Awesome!

Architecture and nature

Went to Toyo Ito's lecture on Tuesday. The projects he showed were beautiful, but his claim on architecture related to nature kinda bothered me... He said, architecture was too imposing before - a grid system interrupts the natural order. Architecture now should be more fluid and dynamic - closer to nature.

I am not anti close-to-nature architecture. I just think architecture can never mimic nature's order. Nature is so complex and almost mythical that human beings had to invent something called science to try to understand it. What we understand as the order of nature is constructed by scientists. Of course this understanding changes over time. The more we find out, the more complex nature "becomes." But scientist tend to summarize their findings as simple and clear formulas and principles. As a design, which by definition is some sort of manipulation, architecture also needs clarity. Architects seek after clarity to clearly clarify their intentions. That's why it's called "straightforward," not "aborescent-forward" or "rhizomatic-forward." (Yes, a curve is already intellectually challenging.) Bottom line is: buildings are man-made. They are called "constructions." They can never be nature. Nobody can deny that. So just admit it.

As in Sendai, how close to nature is a plan with a bunch of circles inside a square? The seaweed columns can never reach the complexity of natural seaweed - even Ito himself calls them "tubes." See how the street trees are made in the model. They are really supposed to represent nature, right?

The distorted grid (as in Serpentine and Tama) is another strategy for Ito to get closer to nature. But a distorted grid is still a grid. Euclid geometry and Platonic shapes are in fact man-made tools to simplify nature. (Otherwise nature is too chaotic for us to understand!)

Geometry can get complicated too. Whether bent and attached at alternating points (Taichung), or curved at intersections (Berkeley), it is still a grid. The architect still needs some control element to feel more comfortable and reasonable, and moreover, to save the client from tremendous confusion...

After all, this discussion of "order" is fundamentally formal. I think a more interesting (and potentially more meaningful) take on nature should be to see how nature works instead of how it looks. Perhaps that's why I think Ito's idea of "learning from trees" makes more sense than the other claims:
1. trees generate order in the process of growing over time;
2. trees generate order by repeating simple rules; (?)
3. trees generate order through relative relationships;
4. trees are open to the environment;
5. trees are fractal systems.
For the last point, he explained, as trees grow, they create more and more surfaces. By that they create spaces that are hard to be defined as inside or outside.

Fresh start of a new day, or, a new era?

On the way to work, outside Penn Station, I saw a guy shaking a can of coins. He goes:
"Barack Obama is asking for change. So am I!"