Get Me Rewrite: A New Monument to Press Freedom: How many mediocre buildings can one city absorb? And what if these buildings are meant to affirm our highest values? Those questions come to mind as I ponder the Newseum, the latest reason to lament the state of contemporary architecture in this city. Rising on a prominent site along Pennsylvania Avenue, it joins a spate of new memorials and museums that have been reshaping the historic center of Washington during the current Bush administration. [NYT]
In design, the temporary is so contemporary: Architecture has entered another of its periodic bouts of fascination with impermanence. Maybe it’s the anxiety produced by doomsday predictions about the state of the environment and, lately, the economy. Maybe it’s the quicksilver quality of digital culture, closer in character to sand or water than bricks and mortar. Whatever the source, architects are playing up the idea of temporariness, and even finding solace in it, to a degree not seen since the 1960s and ’70s, when several experimental design teams explored what Peter Cook, a member of London’s Archigram, called “expendability” and “throwaway architecture.” [LA Times]
Sydney Opera House serenades architect: He has never actually laid eyes on the finished product, but the creator of the Sydney Opera House has been serenaded in Australia on his 90th birthday. Danish architect Jorn Utzon started work on the Opera House in 1957 but quit the project in 1966 because of budget blow-outs and bitter disputes with the New South Wales government over his artistic vision. [Telegraph]
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