New York's Dueling Chelsea Buildings - Gehry and Nouvel

The last day before we left New York, we headed to 18th Street and 11th Avenue to photograph two dueling buildings in New York's Chelsea Neighborhood - Frank Gehry's IAC Headquarters and Jean Nouvel's Design for Living Building at 100 11th Ave.

Early in this project, Frank Gehry taught me about the importance of CONTEXT in designing an iconic structure, and how design is all but impossible independent of the building's context.  He is excited about the possibility of a waterfront site for Trinity Spire, using as an example the way that water and bridge were so important to the design of the Bilbao Guggenheim.  I can't wait to see that work in a few weeks.

These two buildings are a great example of context, because they serve as architectural context for each other.  More on that in a moment.

Jean Nouvel's Design for Living

Nouvel's Building is a great example of the power of repetition and variety.  With a design of repeating rectangles and squares of various shapes and sizes and glass of various colors, the building is a cacophony of shape and color.  In many ways, the structure reminds me of the art of Paul Klee, or the pioneering architecture of one of my college heroes, Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome inspired so many architects and thinkers to come.





A Klee painting and a Fuller dome: 

Flora by Paul Klee and Bucky's Domes

Frank Gehry's IAC Building occupies the same part of Chelsea, and stands right next to the newer Nouvel Building.

The IAC building is a great example of Gehry's work, with a pattern of white dots of various densities creating the illusion of frosted glass, and the sail-like waves in the front of the building creating the illusion of billowing canvas sails filled with wind:

The two make quite a pair:

 

 This may be my favorite shot reinforcing the lesson of context - in it, Nouvel's building is reflected in the face of Gehry's, creating a unique in the world effect of Nouvel By Gehry.  Wow.

"Nouvel by Gehry"  :)

We can only aspire to have the context of Trinity Spire work so magically.

New York by Gehry

Architect Frank Gehry has designed and built many buildings in New York, but 8 Spruce Street in Lower/Mid Manhattan is one of the best. The 11th tallest building in New York is a great example of an organic flowing feeling applied to a tall structure. The outer structure of the building flows like waves on the surface of water, or silk blowing in the wind. The effect is playful, evocative, and delightful to the senses. Very inspiring example of Frank Gehry at his most innovative.   And a great example of creating a feeling of wind and motion out of materials which integrate with the structure, and are strong and long lasting.

The Rising Freedom Towers

This photo struck me as capturing an important mission for Trinity Spire.  While our 250th anniversary as a county will be about celebrating our history, it will also be about thinking anew about who we are and who we want to be for the next 250 years.  While the tower in the background is all about rising from the ashes, the child in the foreground is all about beginning anew with laughter, joy, optimism, and an unbridled sense of what is possible.  We must celebrate our history, but bear its burdens lightly as we move towards the future, lest they weigh us down, like the beautiful child giggling joyfully at the future in a place filled with the memories of the past.

This couple of recent immigrants watches the Freedom Towers rise out of the ashes of a damaged monument recovered from the Trade Center Plaza now displayed in nearby Battery Park City, as if the Towers themselves are being reborn from a damaged shell.

Love this shot of Freedom and Liberty - two bulwarks of the American story.

Here, maritime life of commerce and joy goes on in the shadow of renewal.

I believe that the right architectural lessons from the Freedom Towers and what they represent for the 250th anniversary of the US and for Trinity Spire are two lessons:

1) We must provide space for REFLECTION on our history because our common experience gives us common purpose

2) Yet we must approach the future unburdened by the past, with a sense of RENEWAL, optimism, and the belief in our young country that anything is possible.

Reflection and Renewal

Today was a day of reflection, spent at the site of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. As we approached the site - which is still surrounded by temporary walls covered with barbed wire - we were first struck by how bustling the Lower Manhattan neighborhood was on a sunny Friday. We had visited the site as a family several weeks after the 9/11 attacks, and Lower Manhattan was a ghost town, deserted and covered in a fine powder. Now, the streets teemed again with life.

The pools commemorating the hallowed ground where the towers once stood are somber and sad, and the water in each pool flows into what appears to be an infinite abyss below the ground.  The feeling of tears in the water, and the flow of the water into a great gash in the earth are very sobering.

Above the waterfalls and reflecting pools, the new towers are rising from the ground, creating a feeling of hope and renewal.  The feelings of renewal are palpable, but so are the feelings of sadness which surround the site.  One place contains both the fear and sadness of our recent history, and the possibility of what is to come.

I took a photograph of a lovely young child sitting on the edge of the reflecting pool with the Freedom Tower rising behind her.  If her father emails permission, I will post it soon.  In that picture, I feel a message from the reflective World Trade Center site to those who will create America's future.

In anything we build, we must honor our history and those who sacrificed to make it possible, but we also must look forward to a time when joy is unbridled by sadness, when the innocence of youth and invention and creativity are not burdened by history, but standing proudly on the shoulders of those who came before. 

- Tod and Rachel, September 21, 2012

Robots, Architecture, and Inspiration

Tonight my daughter Rachel and I begin our 43 day around the world trip to review extraordinary ancient and modern architecture to draw design inspiration for the Trinity Spire monument to American ingenuity we are designing for the 250th anniversary of the United States. What a fitting place to launch our trip - tonight we went to a large renovated pier in South Boston to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Roomba robotic vacuum, and the 1500th bomb disposal robot sold by iRobot, both beacons of the kind of ingenuity which makes our country so extraordinary. My friend Amanda Oakleaf (whose wonderful husband Tyler began me on my journey of learning blues guitar a few years back) created the captivating robot cakes you see here using extraordinary cake fondant - Tyler did the engineering to make the robot cakes actually move like robots. I found it such a privilege to serve as a President at iRobot for several years recently, and to help create and launch the Ava telepresence robot for healthcare. Version 2 of Ava was there as well, getting ready to launch full bore into the hospitsl world. It is a beautiful bot, all grown up and ready for market. Kudos Tom, Clement, and the rest of the team! Our trip starts in the morning on the following 43 day itinerary: New York, London, Amsterdam and Hoofddorp, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Tenerife (Canary Islands - Spanish Territory off Morocco), Bilbao, Elciego, Valencia, Barcelona, Prague, Istanbul, Dubai, Beijing, Shanghai, Siem Reap (Cambodia), Kuala Lampur, Singapore, Tokyo, New York, Boston. The purpose of the trip is to generate design ideas for Trinity Spire, by studying the great modern and ancient architectural wonders of the world. We will see work by ancients, and by modern architects Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Cesar Pelli, Adrian Smith, Moshe Safdie, Ned Kahn, and Tadao Ando. We are already collaborating with several of these architects and artists on the project. We will also spend half a week studying the extraordinary architecture of Antoni Gaudi in and around Barcelona. Our aspiration is to build the defining structure of the twenty-first century for America's 250th anniversary in 2026, a structure which will make a statement about America's hopes, audacity, and leadership for our next 250 years. We start in Lower Manhattan this weekend, where we begin our trip looking at American renewal - the site of the greatest attack on US shores in our history, which occurred in our nation's 225th year, midway between our bicentennial and the year we plan to celebrate by opening Trinity Spire. Near the end of our trip, we spend time in Angkor Wat, a city block sized structure built at the peak of Cambodian civilization in 1100AD, and now overgrown by jungle. As we ponder Americas renewal, and how we can best extend our little experiment in democracy for another two and a half centuries, we expect to reflect at the sight of the jungle overgrown temples of Cambodian civilization and reflect on the distance Cambodian civilization had fallen by the time of our own bicentennial (1976), a time when the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 25% of the Cambodian population, including nearly all educated people. Renewal, rebirth, and decline... these are big themes. A little scary but inspirational as we search for new ways to inspire the next generation, much as iRobot does through its work. Off and away...

An American Century Ends... What Will the Next Century Bring?

In my experience, America is the most inventive country on Earth. From the cotton gin to Google self-driving cars, this country thrives on unexpected disruptive innovation. Most historians describe the twentieth century as The American Century, and with good reason. American optimism and industrial might turned the tide of two world wars. Our economy and military were unchallenged for much of the century, and were the dominant economic and political forces of the century. We engaged relentlessly in exporting democracy and faced, by the end of the century, a world shaped largely in our image. As our technology and unbridled national optimism forged a world based on our own grand experiment in representative democracy, we entered a century which suddenly and startlingly felt very different. While most historians consider the twentieth century the American Century, many now look East. Most historians today believe that the twenty-first century will be The Asian Century, or perhaps more specifically The Chinese Century. The cranes which once clustered in New York in the Roaring Twenties, defining an exuberant Art Deco architecture which today still defines the skyline of America's most prominent city, now gather in Dubai and Shanghai, not New York and San Francisco. The greatest art and architecture in the world - the bold, the audacious, the unexpected, now more often happens away from our shores. I was struck recently when flying back from an international destination into Los Angeles airport (LAX), that the architecture of that airport - and indeed too much of that city and this country - looks like the 1950s version of what we thought the future would look like, complete with Jetsons style and visions of jetpacks. Was the twentieth century The American Century, never to return? Will our 250th anniversary - coming up in 2026 - be an occasion largely for nostalgia about our former glory? I believe that the answer must be NO. It is important on the occasion of our 250th anniversary as a country that we make a clean and unequivocal statement to the world - YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET. I believe that our 250th anniversary must not be an occasion simply for looking back with pride, but an occasion for looking forward with vision, audacity, and an eye for inspiration for the next 250 years. Others share this vision. Today, we are a small band of a few dozen collaborators. But we are just begininning.