Oh really

I can’t remember if I’ve already talked about this Dubai-style luxury twisted tower that Vancouver is getting; apologies if I have. The tower, designed by architect Bjarke Ingels, is now rising in Vancouver but the reason I’m writing about it now is that I just read a critique in Artforum of this year’s Venice Biennale for Architecture which contained a chilling portrait of Ingels.

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The largest clear-span wooden building in the world was built as a U.S. military air station hangar in 1942 to house six blimps. It is now the Tillamook Air Museum in Oregon.

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Vancouver, is that your motto?

Out with the old, in with the new?

Meanwhile, this questionable object will replace The Ridge Theatre, one of Vancouver’s few historic repertory cinemas:

Apparently this passed a City of Vancouver design panel.

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There is a particular type of contemporary design that I deeply despise but for which there is no terminology. About six years ago, out of frustration, I started calling it “contempo.” It is a deliberately cheesy term for a cheesy aesthetic, an aesthetic of dumbed-down, cutesy faux-modernism.

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The cabin is probably the true vernacular architecture of British Columbia’s West Coast and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver must once have had some of these buildings, thought rampant demolition and ugly development are doing their best to eradicate any trace of this architectural past.

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Photography is only minimally allowed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter house in Arizona, Taliesin West, so most of these photographs are only exterior shots. I confess I’ve always been less impressed by FLW’s work that most are, so this post is not in praise of FLW or Taliesin West.

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These were listed among the world’s ugliest buildings, aggregated from various rankings in Forbes, Virtual Tourist and Oddee.com. Quite apart from blithely ignoring the complexity of the question “what is beautiful,” which philosophy has attempted to deal with for centuries and has only made more unanswerable, this list is pretty odd.

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If you’re in Vancouver on July 28, and are interested in the vernacular modernist architecture of our region, buy a ticket for this event. Ouno is hosting this fundraiser to benefit the completion of the film Coast Modern by my filmmaker friends Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard.

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The Kastrup sea bath is by White architektur, Denmark. Via archdaily. Photographs: Ole Haupt, White Arkitekter, Erco Lighting, Åke E:son Lindman

The idea behind this swimming platform and pier is that in the not overly warm Danish summer it shields swimmers from the wind and contains the sun.

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There are views of two different churches here. San Francisco de Assissi just south of Taos, New Mexico, along with an old settlement there. The church with the white banding around the wall is part of a church in Taos Pueblo itself.

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