All for small

I salute you for inaugurating your new serial feature on small projects [“Bantam Weight Champions,” February 2007, page 74]. My first project, a small restaurant with an $11,000 construction budget, was published in Architectural Record in 1979 and launched my career. Over the past 30 years, we have designed large and small projects and find joy in doing both.

James Oleg Kruhly, FAIA
Philadelphia

Stop the show

I was most irritated by the propagandist positivism of the news item “In Beirut, the show pauses, then goes on” [December 2006, page 24]. In the article, I heard echoes of real estate developer Solidere’s own publications. I expected the piece to have at least some critical comment on the work being realized in the city by the “design-luminaries.” Actually, what I really wanted to read about was how the work is being packaged, interpreted, and built, not to mention all the controversy surrounding Solidere’s competitions and commissions. But what irritated me the most was the repetition of empty clichés that befit a politician on a reelection campaign rather than a critical commentary on the challenges of construction in Beirut.

Nadim Bayeh
Beirut

Brooklyn challenge

Mr. Gehry’s recent work gives me pause [Record News, “Green light for Gehry in Brooklyn,” February 2007, page 30]. His approach to his projects in the past decade or so has been characterized by loosely wrapping a programmatic massing with a composition of complex curved planar surfaces. Some of this work, such as the Bilbao museum, prevails convincingly despite its nature as appliqué. But when imposed on the recent IAC/InterActiveCorp headquarters in Manhattan, at least as seen from the site limits, the warped surfaces—which now must achieve closure and deal with a grid of planar glazing—simply appearforced. “Forced” is an adjective that also seems apropos to “Fred and Ginger” and the work at MIT, and leads one to fear that the starchitect is out of his depth given the massive scale and urbanistic issues at play in Brooklyn.

Kenneth M. Moffett, AIA
Knoxville, Tenn.

The tie that binds

The review of the Skin + Bones exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, “Dressing up Fashion Dressing Down Architecture” [January 2007, page 47] was one of the most upsetting articles I have read lately. It was upsetting not only because I thought the exhibition was absolutely amazing, inspiring, and well presented, but because the writer, Russell Fortmeyer, brings the opinion of “many good consumers” who think that if you put architecture next to product design, furniture design, and fashion, it is actually degrading the profession. The arrogance of thinking that architecture is better off standing by itself in order to “strike a serious tone” shows how little Fortmeyer understands design. Good design is open to other disciplines. More than that, good design is influenced by its surroundings, including our culture, thereby enabling people to relate to and appreciate it. The terms “shelter,” “geometry,” and “creative process,” which Fortmeyer thinks to be so generic are the basic terms in both professions that were so beautifully used as threads to sew architecture and fashion together.

Maya Bavineau
Los Angeles

Big on mini

When I saw the cover line “Residential Section: Mini Houses” on the January 2007 issue, I was excited to read on. I was disappointed, however, to discover that the section was not about real houses, but rather play houses. One of the buildings was not even a house, but a pool pavilion. There is a vast, unmet need for well-designed modest homes in America. Are there architects facing this daunting challenge? Certainly. Now let’s see architectural record pick up the torch and devote more of its pages to highlighting their inspiring work.

Ross Chapin, AIA
Langley, Wash.

Titillation is not enough

The distributed nervous system and actuators that architect Michael Fox devised for his installation [Record News, “Space invaders: Los Angeles installation inflates, titillates,” February 2007, page 25] can be understood as a piece of electronic art, but the implications are larger and more relevant to architects than your reporting lets on. An increasing number of architects are working with those embedded control technologies, aiming at collaborations in the new field of actively responsive architecture. Please investigate and report on those ramifications, rather than leaving us with the titillation.

A prescient and valuable connection to be made in that same issue of Architectural Record would have involved questioning Diller Scofidio + Renfro about their long record of working with similar technologies [“Rain Screen Facades Are More Than Skin Deep,” February 2007, page 139]. Did they consider pressing that technology into service in the building technologies of their new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston? Have their engineers for the building, Simpson, Gumpertz & Hager, ever incorporated similar technologies? Could a rain shield facade system with compartmentalized cavities benefit from the intelligent pneumatic technologies being pioneered by Michael Fox?

As a magazine with an otherwise probing and ethical approach to the responsibilities architecture has to develop, I expect Architectural Record, with its Continuing Education articles, to turn my attention toward important future technologies.

Anders Nereim
Chicago

Project U.F.O.

The cover of Record’s January 2007 issue claims that “Libeskind Lands in Downtown Denver.” At least a hundred U.S. cities should be wary of a similar airborne invasion. Given our present state of declining resources, it is surprising that such willful and wasteful architecture continues to receive favorable review.

James A. Gresham, FAIA
Tucson

Where were they?

The comment “where was the Paul Rudolph Foundation when it mattered?” [Record News online, January 2007] is right on the money. Where were they? Will the Micheals House become the Penn Station of suburban Connecticut? Will this ultimately save all those houses by Breuer, Noyes, Johansson, et al?

Peter Forbes, FAIA
Florence, Italy

Please send letters via e-mail to editor-in-chief Robert Ivy at
rivy@mcgraw-hill.com. Letters may be edited for style and format.