Category: architecture

Meowhaus

February 20, 2012 • 1:54 pm

According to Architizer Blog, a Seattle firm called Modernist Cat has designed a series of multi-purpose cat dens for stylish ailurophiles.

The description from the Modernist Cat website:

Modernist Cat is a pet furniture design studio based in Seattle, Washington. Our work brings the Mid-Century Modern aesthetic into the realm of litter box covers and dual-purpose pet furniture.

All of our pieces can function as a litter box cover, beautiful hideaway, play area, or den. Handcrafted from EuroPly with a hardwood veneer, each item is made to order and built to last.

Modernist Cat is committed to using eco-friendly materials in order to build products that minimize our environmental impact. For example, our plywood is FSC certified and made with formaldehyde free glue. It is finished using a UV curing process that eliminates all volatile organic compounds (VOC’s). We ship using recycled packing materials whenever possible.

Modernist Cat is the hard work of Seattle artist Crystal Gregory with modest help from her husband, their two Canadian Hairless cats, Jackson & Elliott, and their two Italian Greyhounds, Lusi & Linus.

Here’s one; be prepared to fork out $500-$900 to have your cat living in the “less is moar” style:


Cat doesn’t look too happy; would prefer San Francisco Victorian.

h/t: John Danley

de Botton backs off the atheist temple, and a flashback to his freakout

February 4, 2012 • 9:08 am

Remember, Alain de Botton’s grandiose plans to build an Atheist Temple in London?  Well, according to Richard Wiseman’s website, Botton claims he was “misinterpreted”.  Basically, Botton now claims that he was merely asking architects to build on the achievements of the past. In an emailed “correction” to Wiseman, Botton said this:

Evidently the term ‘temple for atheists’ has set up uncomfortable associations. People have imagined I might be interested in worshipping an absent deity, or perhaps setting up a cult. Nothing as dramatic or as insane is on the cards. I’m simply arguing that contemporary architecture analyse the high points of religious architecture throughout history – and that we should allow a new generation of architects to tread in the footsteps of great secular creatives indebted to the ecclesiastical, people like Kahn, Ando and Zumthor.”

Yes, yes, but who’s preventing architects from doing that? But frankly, there’s a lot of great modern architecture—much of it here in Chicago—that doesn’t have a lot of resonance with ecclesiastical buildings.  Take the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or even the Sydney Opera House: both could be considered monuments to secularism.  We don’t always have to ape Notre Dame to create beautiful buildings in which wonderful things can be seen or heard.

Botton’s long mea culpa represents a failure of accommodationism: atheists don’t need the trappings of religion to have a fulfulling life.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain: one of my favorite modern buildings

Oh, and an alert reader reminded me of something I had forgotten, but speaks to de Botton’s self-styled comity.  In 2009 Caleb Crain gave a pretty negative review to de Botton’s book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and then posted about it on his (Crain’s) website.  de Botton went ballistic (many of you might remember this):

Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon – so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that’s two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as ‘nice’ in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It’s only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

St. Petersburg: architecture

August 14, 2011 • 6:10 am

My brain hurts from reading theology, and I’m also engaged in another brain-using activity, so I’ll delay any substantive posting for a day or so. In the meantime, I’ll continue my series on St. Petersburg. (I have a lot more to show!).  Today I’ll put up some of the architecture, leaving the Hermitage and its wonderful art for later this week.

But here is the State Hermitage Museum, occupying several palaces in the main square of St. Petersburg. (The tsars would often build palaces for their favorite nobles and sycophants).  The museum dates from 1764 and holds collections originating with Catherine the Great, who used it to store her enormous collection of art. This collection was eventually shown to the public when the building opened as a museum a century later.  It is the largest art museum in the world if one considers the number of its holdings, and I’ve never seen a better art museum. (I”ll show some of the paintings and interiors this week).

The Hermitage occupies six buildings that adjoin; four of them, including the Winter Palace, are open to the public.  The picture above is of the Winter Palace, which was the residence of the tsars from 1728 until 1917, when the last Romanovs were deposed during the revolution and, a year later, murdered by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg.  The building was occupied by several of the governments that ensued after the October revolution.

Here’s the complex of buildings that include the Winter Palace; this shot is taken from across the Neva river:

The Winter Palace and other buildings stand in a monumental square, the Dvortsvoaya Place, or Palace square; it’s the heart of historic St. Petersburg. The first shot is of the Winter Palace from across the square; the second of the square itself from the third floor of the Winter Palace:


Here’s one of the Hermitage gates, showing the double-headed eagle that was the symbol of the Romanov dynasty:

Here is another palace, the famous Marble Palace built between 1768 and 1785 by architect Antonio Rinaldi. It’s said to use 36 different kinds of marble, all integrated into a harmonious structure.  It was a gift to a nobleman, Grigory Orlov, from Catherine the Great, and now houses a branch of the Russian State Museum. The statue of Alexander III has been the butt of jokes for its corpulent horse and rider.  When asked about it, sculptor Paolo Trubetskoy said, “I don’t care about politics. I simply depicted one animal on another.”  (As with all pictures, click to enlarge, and click this one twice to see how unconventional the statue is.)

The Peterhof is Peter the Great’s summer palace, residing on the Gulf of Finland 45 minutes by hydrofoil from St. Petersburg.  Begun in 1714 (the grounds include several buildings), it’s an amazing place, more to be seen from the outside, which includes its incredible gravity-fed fountains, than from the inside, which is only partly renovated:

The view from the Peterhof down to the water is splendid and imposing; visitors were obviously meant to be impressed:

The fountains are amazing. They’re turned on promptly at 11 a.m., accompanied by loud patriotic music. This is the famous “cascade”:

Russian churches, with their onion-shaped domes, are justly famous.  One of the best is the gruesomely named Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg. It was built between 1883 and 1907, and modelled in part on the famous St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square. It is so named because it was built to commemorate the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, who was killed by terrorists on the spot in 1881. Inside the church is a jasper canopy above the spot where the tsar died.

It’s very elaborate inside. It was originally meant only as a private venue for mourning, but was opened to the people by the Bolsheviks. It underwent an elaborate restoration from 1970-1997:

Finally, two other buildings. One of my favorites is the Art Nouveau Singer Building, built in 1904 by, yes, the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which had a branch in the city.  It also housed the American consulate before the First World War, and is now a bookstore:

St. Petersburg is occasionally marred by dreadful examples of Soviet-era architecture, severe and fascistic. The Finland Station is one of these; here’s another:


To me St. Petersburg resembles a cross between Amsterdam and Venice, situated as it is on islands and dissected by canals.  A typical view from the historic area:

And wandering around, one constantly gets a frisson of pleasure from details like this:

Do go if you get a chance; it’s one of the loveliest cities I’ve ever seen.

Sweet home Chicago

June 21, 2011 • 10:33 pm

by Greg Mayer

Jerry will be returning later today (note– the time stamp on these posts is Pacific time, so it’s already Wednesday here in the vicinity of Chicago) to resume full WEIT duties, and I’m sure he will regale us with paeans to, and pictures of, the plethora of pleasures of the palate of which he partook on the plains. But till then, I want to show you what he was missing.

My wife and I recently went on a walking tour of the culinary hotspots of the Gold Coast,  Old Town, and Lincoln Park neighborhoods organized by Chicago Food Planet. Our guide was a moonlighting graduate student, and teaching undergraduates is probably good preparation for handling hungry tourists. We began at Ashkenaz, a Jewish (but not Kosher) deli in the Gold Coast, where we had patsrami reubens, garnished with Ashkenaz’s own store-made dressing.

Our next stop was Tea Gschwendner, a shop we already frequented, which sells loose teas and brewing accessories. The ground up tea-dust that goes into bag tea was compared (unfavorably) to loose tea, while we sampled an unsweetened, fresh-brewed, iced tea.

We moved on to the Spice House, with a huge selection of spices and herbs, especially pre-made mixtures. The dozens (?hundreds) of varieties on the shelves were accompanied by taster-shakers– we could shake a sample on to our hands, and then taste it. You had to lick especially hard between varieties, to cleanse the palate (or hand).

Next up was Old Town Oil, featuring olive oils and balsamic vinegars, all stored in large metal canisters, with tasting cups to allow shoppers to sample the wares. When purchasing, the oil or vinegar is decanted from the canisters into bottles, which are then sealed.

After the savory oils and vinegars, it was a big switch to the sweets at the Fudge Pot.

Here, we got to go back behind the counter, where the candies are actually made.

Delightful Pastries, a European (especially Polish) style bakery, had both sweet and savory items. We sampled the kolaczski. Here are some sweets: eclairs and cannoli.

Finally, we ended up at Bacino’s in Lincoln Park, for stuffed crust pizza. This was very good (though the lower crust served more to hold the filling in than add to the flavor), but, as a New Yorker, it wasn’t pizza.

In addition to bringing us to the various food emporia, our guide provided a lot of interesting city history and architectural details. The information went both ways– I told her, a Lincoln Park resident, about Steve Goodman and the Lincoln Park Pirates. We walked by, and learned the story of the original Playboy Mansion.

We also walked by the side door of the Near North Side home that served as the entrance to the restaurant where, in 1986, Ferris Bueller usurped the luncheon reservation of Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago.

There’s no shopping during the tour (it would slow things down too much), but we did make purchases that same day of tea, oil, vinegar, spices, and knishes at various of the places we visited. All provided discount coupons to tour participants. While on the tour, my favorites were the reuben at Ashkenaz, and the pizza at Bacino’s, but that’s probably because those were the two most lunch-like elements of the middle-of-the-day walk. Jerry has said that, as a real Chicagoan, he’ll let me know what he thinks of the places we went. Chicago Food Planet also does tours of Chinatown and Bucktown/Wicker Park–I think we’ll try these on another trip down.

Our new library

June 5, 2011 • 4:46 am

On May 16, the new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library opened at the University of Chicago, right across the street from my lab.  And about time, too: parking near my building has been scant for the two years of construction.  The library, a Fuller-like glass dome designed by Helmut Jahn, with the stored books extending several floors underground, has been hailed as an architectural marvel.

Most intriguing is how the books are retrieved, described in the video below.  They’re sequestered in big bins, and huge cranes retrieve each book by grabbing its bin and hoisting the whole schmear up to circulation, where the book is plucked out. Presumably the cranes then lower the bin back underground. It does seem like an enormous use of energy to get a single book, but the University simply ran out of onsite space for book storage.  The librarians and University made a decision—a wise one, I think—to keep the books on campus rather than store them at a remote site, which would make them hard to access.

Here’s the dome from the outside:

I visited the place eight days ago.  It was a rainy day and so it was a bit gloomy inside the dome.  The students studying at the tables looked dwarfed and uncomfortable.  It was also a chilly day and quite cold inside. Note to University: get some heat in there!

My own building, a lovely Gothic-style construction, encrusted with spires and gargoyles, can be seen through the window, above the cylindrical fixtures on the right:

Here’s the futuristic circulation and book-retrieval desk:

Finally, a University-made video that shows you how books are retrieved:

It’s a nice-looking minimalist structure, and worth a visit, but I would not study or work in there—it’s too sterile and forbidding.  The older library to which it’s connected (Regenstein) is much more congenial, with cozy nooks and comfy chairs. The Chicago Tribune notes the pluses and minuses:

The design brings a welcome jolt of modernity to a campus that has sometimes seemed afraid to stray from its neo-Gothic roots. Here, architecture and time move forward boldly but respectfully — without the jarring crayon palette of orange, purple, yellow and pink at the adjoining Max Palevsky Residential Commons.

Still, there are faults, including the oversized, billboard-like letters that spell out the library’s name on the concrete beam. Thicker landscaping (perhaps with thorns?) will have to be added so people can’t climb the dome, as some already have done. In addition, a light-filtering ceramic dot pattern on the upper portion of the dome’s glass makes the dome look darker, less transparent and less delicately articulated than Jahn’s renderings suggested. Only at night, when it glows from within, does the library truly become a minimalist bubble.