When local architects started emailing me about preliminary plans to demolish several Modernist-style buildings on the University of Kentucky campus, my first reaction was to roll my eyes. Like many people, I have always struggled to appreciate, much less like, a lot of mid-20th century architecture. It seems so plain, boxy, cold and, in the hands of some architects, just plain ugly.

To try to understand why so many professionals consider these buildings important and worth saving, I decided to take a closer look and learn more about them. Nearly 30 percent of UK's structures date from the 1950s and 1960s, and many academic buildings and residence halls have been neglected for years. To his credit, UK President Eli Capilouto is trying to catch up, initiating construction and renovation projects all over campus. Initial plans included demolishing as many as seven of the 13 campus buildings designed between the 1930s and 1950s by noted Lexington architect Ernst V. Johnson: Jewell (1938), Holmes (1956) and Donovan (1955) residence halls, the Engineering Quadrangle (1938), the Wenner-Gren Aeronautical Research Laboratory (1941), the Funkhouser Biological Science Building (1942) and the Mineral Industries Building (1951).

The wrecking ball may also be aimed at the Kirwan-Blanding residential complex (1967), designed by Edward Durrell Stone. He was one of America's best-known and most prolific Modernist architects, and his work has always been widely loved — and hated.

"It's easy to see why most people don't turn on to it," said Graham Pohl, a Lexington architect with Pohl Rosa Pohl. Modernism was the first architectural style in centuries that didn't reference the past. Modernism began in Europe nearly a century ago, but didn't catch on in this country until after World War II. Then it was everywhere.

"People felt free to be expressive and experiment with forms and new materials that felt right to them," Pohl said. "It was a product of economic growth and national optimism about the future."But Pohl acknowledges that the style was widely abused. When so-called Urban Renewal reshaped America's cities into concrete jungles built around the automobile, it included a lot of slap-dash architecture that was called "modern."

"One of the reasons people don't like Modernism is that it has been used as an excuse to do shoddy work," Pohl said. "It's more difficult to do good Modernism than good traditional work."Pohl said most of the buildings UK has considered tearing down are anything but shoddy. As an example, he cited Holmes Hall, an International-style building with an elegant stone and concrete stair-step canopy and interesting brick work.

Johnson's buildings all have elegant brick work, perhaps because he was the son of a Swedish mason and worked his way through Yale as a union bricklayer. "It's more than decorative," Pohl said of Johnson's brick patterns on Holmes Hall. "It speaks to aspects of the building and the relationship between walls and openings. There's a lot about that building that suggests someone thought deeply about it."

Pohl also likes Stone's Kirwan-Blanding complex, with its 23-story towers surrounded by smaller buildings arranged in a park-like setting. He likes the relationship of the vertical towers to the "incredibly elegant" horizontal canopies that connect the buildings.

"A lot of people see those forms as being part of their parents' generation and they intentionally don't want to relate to them," said Pohl, adding that these buildings have much more architectural merit than anything that is likely to replace them in this era of budget-cutting austerity. I grew up around the corner from Holmes Hall, on the block where UK is now building a massive dormitory complex. I have always admired Holmes Hall's stair- step canopy, if not the rest of the building.

But I never liked Kirwan-Blanding — until, that is, I went to photograph it for this column on a beautiful evening last week. The moon was rising between the towers, which were bathed in the glow of the setting sun. Students were all around the buildings, studying among the trees and flowers or throwing Frisbees and footballs. I appreciated those buildings for the first time.

Architecture, like art, is often subjective, said Sarah Tate, an architect and founder of the Lexington firm Tate Hill Jacobs. She greatly admires Johnson's work, for example, yet has never liked Stone's. But that is not the point, she emphasized. "Architecture is a reflection of history and culture, and that campus is a little museum of modern architecture," Tate said. "Johnson's buildings give us an architectural handbook of the influences that got us from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. I don't think (UK officials) know what they have here.

"These mid-century buildings are part of our DNA," she added. "You don't want to take them all away. They are important links in our history and culture."Sasaki Associates, the Boston planning firm that UK hired to develop a new campus master plan, recently recommended as its first scenario renovating and reusing these historic Modernist buildings. UK officials should take that advice.

Source: kentucky

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The modern black kitchen designer try to put original design idea on whole appearance by combining color, available element and design harmony into a union to built amazing modern black kitchen. Personally as house architecture design lover, I enjoy the whole design of the modern black italian kitchen for 2013 design guide arrangement.

If you are hunting for modern black kitchen collection reference, I think this modern black italian kitchen for 2013 design guide is a good choice for your modern black kitchen design idea. When view at the modern black italian kitchen for 2013 design guide image slowly, may be you will catch some new inspiration. This modern black kitchen design I think effectively mixing smart modern black kitchen design, fashionable appearance, element gaming composition, dominant characteristic ornament and design theme harmony.

Source: finalarchitecture

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The James S. McDonnell Planetarium in St. Louis is located at the Science Center in Forest Park.  It is a shining example of mid-century modern architecture in St. Louis.  The Planetarium celebrated its 50th anniversary in April, 2013.  Architect: Gyo Obata.

Constructed for less than $1 million in 1963, the planetarium stands on a dozen pillars. With the exception of the top and bottom portions, the thin concrete shell is no more than 3 ½ inches thick. Architect Gyo Obata, co-founder of HOK, says the hyperbolic paraboloid shape was the result of form following function.  Form follows function is a famous dictum that Frank Lloyd Wright has been quoted saying.  I believe he picked up the phrase from his first real boss, Louis Sullivan.  It means that the result of the design should derive directly from its purpose.  Unnecessary details are left out and simplicity is the theme.  Clean lines and a visual expression of structure via horizontal and vertical lines is apparent in architectural modernism.  I once heard someone describe mid-century modern (MCM) architecture as “clean lines and open spaces”.  I think that sums it up pretty well.

Gyo Obata (born February 28, 1923) is an American architect, the son of painter Chiura Obata and his wife, Haruko Obata, a floral designer. In 1955, he co-founded global architectural firm HOK (formerly Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum). He has designed several notable buildings, including the McDonnell Planetarium at the Saint Louis Science Center, and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Since the James S. McDonnell Planetarium’s doors opened on April 16, 1963, more than 18.5 million people have experienced a connection with astronomy, space exploration and aviation through a visit to this iconic structure. Though visitors first experienced the Planetarium in April of 1963, city leaders had discussed the possibility of a Planetarium since at least the 1930s. In 1955, St. Louis voters approved $1 million toward the cost of building a planetarium in Forest Park. During construction, James S. McDonnell, the chief executive of McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, made a gift to cover additional costs.

When it opened in 1963, the James S. McDonnell Planetarium was one of only 11 large Planetariums in the United States. The space race was in full swing with President John F. Kennedy making the bold statement in 1962 that the United States would reach the Moon before the end of the decade. One month before the Planetarium opened, astronaut Gordon Cooper made history by becoming the first American to spend more than a day in space. He circled Earth 22 times in a Mercury spacecraft, Faith 7, which was built by workers in St. Louis at McDonnell Aircraft.

Source: timlayton

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In Australian artist Paul Davies’ paintings, mid-century homes dominate the landscape with their linear styling, large windows and near ubiquitous swimming pools. His dreamy paintings feature washes of color that bring them into a later era, one filled with drug experimentation taking place after the seemingly idyllic 50s and 60s. Here the swimming pools are often empty and unused, the symbols of a bygone optimism and strict perfectionism now forgotten.

Davies’ pieces are painted with a process Andy Warhol would be proud of – stencils. In this way he can replicate the shapes of his images many times, while changing elements or colors to his liking. This repetition – far from reducing his creativity – allows Davies’ to re-imagine each image with differing hued moods. While some of his paintings are somber, like his houses in the white snowy winter; others pop with vibrant details like a pink 60s flower dress.

Source: visualnews

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In the coming months, cultural institutions in and around Los Angeles will present a wealth of exhibitions devoted to the area’s modern architecture, through the Getty Trust’s initiative “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.,” which celebrates the buildings that shaped the metropolis in the postwar period. The Getty’s own offering, “Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future 1940-1990,” opens tomorrow at the Getty Museum. The sprawling survey, organized by Wim deWit, Christopher James Alexander, and Rani Singh of the Getty Research Institute’s department of Architecture and Contemporary Art, is the first major museum exhibition to examine L.A.’s distinctive built environment and its evolution into one of the world’s most populous and influential cities.

“The title refers to the extraordinary pace, global impact and periodic setbacks resulting from L.A.’s impressive growth,” says deWit. “It is a city that continues to grow and foster architectural exploration.” “Overdrive” debunks the myth that Los Angeles grew in a chaotic, accidental way, by revealing that the city has long been a laboratory for cutting-edge innovation and planning in architecture and design. The exhibition’s photographs, architectural drawings and models, films, digital displays and contemporary art demonstrate the ways in which L.A. used architecture to bolster its identity as a modern city. The show devotes as much attention to the quotidian structures — strip malls, freeways, gas stations and coffee shops — that are an integral part of the city’s urban fabric as it does to iconic residential designs. It also celebrates L.A.’s many “firsts”: the complex freeway system (completed in just four years); LAX, considered the first airport of the jet age; and CBS Television City, the world’s first TV studio, built in 1952.

Source: tmagazine.blogs.nytimes

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Christopher K. Travis, the Managing Partner of Sentient Architecture LLC, a Texas based full architecture Services Company reminds me of George Bernard Shaw’s tailor.  George Bernard Shaw said that “the only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor. He takes measurements anew, each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”

Christopher K. Travis is certainly not your ordinary architect. He subjects his clients like George Bernard Shaw’s to a series of meticulous questions teach time he sees them to ascertain their real intent with regard  to the design of their planned residence.

Why you might ask?
For starters, Travis believes that traditional architecture is based on the wrong assumption that people are rational when asked the simple question, “What do you want in a design for your new home”. For him they are not.

For Travis, a good architectural design practice is supposed to focus like its professional counterparts in the highly competitive consumer electronics design profession on “the conversation with human behavioural factors” in order to relate to and understand “how much you’re able to get inside the heads of your clients and predict what portion of the things people tell you about themselves is accurate relative to the space you’re designing”

Does Christopher Travis’ views raise eyebrows? You bet they do. But maybe they are intended as he says that he wants to “disrupt the way in which people think about architecture”.

He recently caused another storm by publicly expressing his fear in a lecture at the Texas A&M University College of Architecture that “the architectural profession was teetering on the brink of irrelevance” and bemoaned the fact that architects do not have the same role as the designers of the iPhone have, because for him “the iPhone is about design, not based on something cool, but about how people use something in a way that is effective.”

The meagre consolation one can offer Travis is that he is in good company as other notable architecture icons share the same “existential angst”. Rem Koolhaas, the reputed Dutch Architect at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Netherlands recently shared with the audience at this year’s Davos World Economic Forum “that the power of architects who used to make things for mankind has declined in recent years as commercial considerations have come to dominate the field, even as architecture continue to capture the public’s imagination.” He admitted at the occasion with self deprecating humour how embarrassing it was for him to endure being introduced by the moderator as “the designer of the new Prada store in Soho, New York”. The moderator thought that it was a compliment to mention that Koolhaas was associated with a Prada store – little did he know that nothing could be more humiliating and embarrassing to a “great and visionary architect”.

Whatever we may think of Christopher K Travis’ personal views the world is in need of bold, courageous architects restoring the relevance of architecture and architects as translators of the social concerns of our times which are aptly described by Dr. Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute as follows: “We have reached a point in the deteriorating relationship between us and the earth’s natural systems where we all have to become political activists. Every day counts. We all have a stake in civilization’s survival.”

We need activist architects who use the tools of their trade to re-affirm the relevancy of the architectural profession rather than confirming its irrelevance through grotesque space age architecture projects like the BMW World Building which have nothing to do with their immediate environment.

What we need is bold, courageous new holistic wellness living spaces in our homes, flats, neighbourhoods and cities which are in symmetry with the environment and universal wholeness rather than the constraining dictates of commercial considerations.

Source: articlesbase

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Researchers from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) challenged the common belief that network is your bottleneck in Big Data. They have developed a novel database architecture where the most relevant data flows continuously through a ring network composed out of many machines.

This experimental Data Cyclotron architecture is faster and gives better throughput than systems that read and write data from a traditional disk subsystem. CWI researcher Rómulo Gonçalves defends his thesis on Data Cyclotron on Friday 22 March 2013 at the University of Amsterdam. In modern hardware, sending data through a network is much quicker than reading it from a disk. The researchers exploit this trend to build a fast and efficient database architecture. The memory limitations of a single machine are compensated by combining the memories of all computers connected in a ring and use this as a fast storage device. The most relevant data is not stored anymore in one central location, but continuously flows through the network ring. Given the rule of thumb for database systems that 80% of all queries can be handled with only 20% of all available data, the relevant data is now available from a much faster store. Furthermore, all computers in the network of the Data Cyclotron architecture benefit from this high data stream.

To determine the most used data, the system keeps score of the number of request per data fragment. The technique is based on a data flow dynamically composed of the data fragments with highest scores. The size of the set depends on the demand for the data in the network, so that the network’s capacity is used in the most optimal way.

The Data Cyclotron is especially suited for Business Analytics, data mining and web-log analysis. The Data Cyclotron architecture is developed on the SciLens(http://www.scilens.org/)-machine, a large-scale experimental database platform at CWI since 2011. Big Data research is part of CWI's research theme Information. This line of research is aimed at developing methods and technologies to extract meaningful information from large amounts of data.

Source: cwi

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While many world capitals feed off the energy of modernity, Paris is loved because it represents an escape from it. So when most people visit the city, their agenda involves visiting monuments like the Louvre, the Hôtel de Ville and Notre Dame. The baby of the group is the Eiffel Tower, built in 1887.

But for lovers of contemporary architecture, Paris can be a surprisingly rich place. The latest crop of French architects is producing some of the best new work the city has seen. They are an eclectic group comfortable taking large risks while still melding the work into an august context. The buildings are a far cry from past examples of modern Paris design, like the clunky Tour Montparnasse, the badly dated Opéra Bastille and the cold skyscrapers of La Défense, the Modernist business district to the city’s west. These architects are producing treasures sprinkled amid the dense historic fabric. Often the contrast between old and new makes these buildings all the more striking. They are sleek diamonds in an aging rough.

Ministry of Culture
If you walk out of the Louvre and travel less than five minutes north, you can find a gem hidden in plain sight: the architect Francis Soler’s Ministry of Culture and Communication, which he completed about eight years ago. To unify a 19th-century classical building with a contemporary addition, he put a latticelike metallic screen (an abstraction of a Renaissance painting) over both. On a gray day, the covering disappears into the sky. On a bright day, it glows. The only public interior space is the ultramodern lobby, with lacy filaments hanging from the ceiling. It’s worth a visit, as the ministry offers free information about its cultural events here.

The Louvre
Some modern monuments are right under most tourists’ noses, in the city’s historic center. One of the newest is the Louvre’s Islamic Art Wing, which opened last September. The exhibition space, designed by the French architect Rudy Ricciotti and the Italian architect Mario Bellini, sits under an undulating golden canopy in the middle of the museum’s neo-Classical Visconti Courtyard.

The canopy’s surface is a grid of tensile metallic mesh resembling a flying carpet, a Bedouin tent, a Middle Eastern souk or waves of water, depending on your perspective. History is still everywhere around you (catch a glimpse of the courtyard to assure you of that), but the overall sensation is quite energetic.

A dramatic cut in the floor at the far end takes you down to another level of treasures. The black surfaces fade into the background, bringing to the fore remarkable and previously unexhibited items: jewels, flasks, vases, tablets, lamps, plates, even entire tile floors.

Citroën
This is one of the most daring new pieces. Manuelle Gautrand (one of the few female architects in the bunch) designed this showroom, called C42, for the automaker Citroën, which bursts from the street wall of the Champs-Élysées. Unveiled in 2007, it has a glass-and-steel facade that climbs aggressively and is formed from abstracted chevrons, Citroën’s symbol. Inside, a stack of revolving turntables showcases the cars. You can circle your way up, stopping to hop into a car or to catch the views.

Docks of Paris
Perhaps the most adventurous of these new modern monuments is the Docks of Paris. Redesigned by the architects Jakob + MacFarlane, the complex was once a turn-of-the-last-century depot for goods hauled by boats on the Seine. Now it’s home to the Cité de la Mode et du Design, which includes a fashion school, a few hip shops and, on the roof, restaurants and bars.

When you see the Cité from the nearby Pont d’Austerlitz, its lime-green glass-and-steel armature, which winds and warps its way up and down the length of the old docks, resembles a giant bug perched atop the Left Bank. Climbing the stairs at the riverside edge of the building is exhilarating and disorienting, but it rewards with fantastic views, and with restaurants and bars whose walls and roofs are made of sloping berms of earth. The docks were mostly deserted when I visited them in the winter, but the roof is said to be boisterous come summer, when crowds of students and curious residents make their way onto the structure.

Musée du Quai Branly
Just a couple of blocks from the Eiffel Tower is a museum that is literally overshadowed by Gustave Eiffel’s masterwork. Jean Nouvel’s Musée du Quai Branly, opened in 2006 as a repository of indigenous work from around the world, is an eclectic, nervy composition of bright colors and jutting fragments. Its riverside facade is covered with a planted wall by the French botanist Patrick Blanc. Another wall contains glass covered with forest imagery and large display boxes protruding from the building’s edge like children’s blocks. The offices are inside a much cooler glass cube.

The main exhibition space is raised on columns, allowing for the entire ground level to be taken up by a modern park. Inside, the traditional museum experience is replaced by a snaking path lined with leather walls that twists you here and there through exhibitions of native artwork, masks, jewelry, clothing, weapons, totems, living spaces and much more. Another interior highlight: a giant narrow window framing the entire Eiffel Tower.

A Host of Other Gems
There are many more contemporary treasures if you’re willing to travel even farther out, toward the edge of the city, where history has a much lighter grip. Essentials include the wow-inducing buildings of the aptly named Paris firm Périphériques: in the 17th Arrondissement, to the city’s northeast, is Cardinet Quintessence, a residential building clad in a mesmerizing prismatic aluminum skin, and just outside the city is Banlieues Bleues, a factory complex turned music center in Pantin, a suburb.

Also in the 17th Arrondissement is Édouard François’s Flower Tower, a residential building enshrouded in potted plants along its balconies. And just a few blocks south of the Boulevard Périphérique is the architect Renzo Piano’s EMI Music France headquarters, a villagelike collection of buildings inspired by the area’s sawtooth-roofed factories. The list goes on and on.

Source: travel.nytimes

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“Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is elegant and astringent, like Labrouste’s work. The name may not ring a bell, but don’t let that stop you from seeing the show. It is gorgeous. Labrouste died in 1875, at 74, having left behind two of the great buildings of the 19th century, the Bibliothèque Ste.-Geneviève and the Bibliothèque Nationale, miracles of stone, iron and glass construction. I found it instructive to hear a historian, in a video accompanying the show, recall growing up like most French intellectuals during the 1950s and ’60s and lumping Labrouste in with all the other unfashionable detritus of 19th-century bourgeois culture. “Good” architectural taste skipped over the 1800s.

Fresh eyes were clearly required. Fortunately a generation of young Americans, among them the Harvard professor Neil Levine, who more than anyone else wrote Labrouste back into architectural history, had landed in Paris by the late ’60s. These Americans recognized Labrouste as a provocateur and poet with a pen and pencil whose influence reverberated across the centuries.

The exhibition’s arrival seems almost uncanny in the midst of the debate over the renovation of Carrère and Hastings’ New York Public Library building at 42nd Street, whose iron book stacks derive from Labrouste’s. Library officials have proposed removing those historic stacks, which support the main reading room, and replacing them with a circulating branch to be designed by Norman Foster. The stacks, they say, are too dilapidated and unsuited to be modernized.

But Labrouste’s even-older stacks at the Bibliothèque Nationale have recently been outfitted with modern climate controls and fireproofing and will be opened to the reading public. The exhibition’s last room greets visitors with a large photomural of that space — a pointed rebuke to those New York library officials who haven’t adequately justified their scheme and might now want to investigate more closely what Paris is doing.

The MoMA show is organized, with obvious love, by Barry Bergdoll, the museum’s chief curator of architecture, along with Corinne Bélier of the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine and Marc Le Coeur of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where the exhibition started. For Mr. Bergdoll, a scholar of 19th-century architecture, it renews the Modern’s commitment, dating back at least to its groundbreaking Beaux-Arts survey nearly 40 years ago, to explore the roots of Modernism.

There are wonderful touches. Mr. Bergdoll has commissioned drafting tables, fashioned after Labrouste’s furniture designs at Ste.-Geneviève, on which drawings are displayed. They’re ideal for studying works on paper. The architectural models constructed for the show could be a little more instructive, but it’s hard to picture a finer selection of drawings. Those in the opening gallery, from Labrouste’s time in Italy, are a reminder of what great draftsmanship used to look like.

I’m sorry we don’t see more in the way of buildings aside from the libraries. Labrouste designed private residences in various traditional styles. The implication of their absence — that, forced to earn a living, he took on conventional commissions — would belie his reputation for intransigence. A sober and proud man, he bowed to nobody. “He had absolute integrity and devotion to his art,” is how Mr. Levine phrased it in a recent conversation. “He never did a thing he didn’t want to do.”

So what we get at MoMA is pretty much the Labrouste whom the critic Sigfried Giedion identified the better part of a century ago as a proto-modernist engineer-architect, a pioneer of iron construction. While that resonates Labrouste seems at least as interesting today for the complexity of his thinking. In our era of starchitects he makes an instructive case for his unwillingness to compromise, his dedication to function, his decorative originality and his unorthodox hybrid aesthetic, which married industry to classicism.

Dominique Perrault, the designer of France’s new, little-loved national library in eastern Paris, calls him a “conceptual” architect, “furiously contemporary.” With the Ste.-Geneviève library, he notes, Labrouste hewed to a strategy “of outside and inside, of roof, and of light” that redefined essential parts of a building. In the strict separation between the library’s severe stone facade and its airy, light-filled reading room, Mr. Perrault sees an “absolutely radical” mentality.

It’s a compelling thought. The gravity of Ste.-Geneviève’s exterior, as Mr. Levine has pointed out, comes from the minimalism of its design: unbroken ledges run the length of the long facade at the cornice and between the two floors, with simple stone garlands seemingly strung from the lower ledge over iron roundels, or knobs. Unadorned arched windows make the only breaks in the wall along the ground floor, save for the front door.

The facade’s upper story, predicting the architecture of the reading room that it encloses, presents a shallow arcade of arches containing a grid of plaques inscribed with the names of 810 writers. They are listed in rows beneath the large lunette windows, the reading room’s clerestories. Like those among the garlands below, the roundels in the spandrels between the windows are bolts and tie rods for the floor trusses and the vaults of the iron structure inside. Labrouste, in effect, makes the structural skeleton of the building its decorative motif, inside and out.

You could say the library facade acts as a billboard whose embellishments announce the building’s content and material construction: a “decorated shed,” as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown defined those sign-covered casinos along the strip in Las Vegas, which flipped the bird at conventional high taste.

At the same time Labrouste was reinventing civic space as a citizens’ palace where people could read and meet. He spent a dozen years, from 1838 to 1850, cooking up the language. In lieu of the frescoes and biblical scenes fashioned in stained glass or carved into statues and column capitals that dominated public architecture he used books and iron as decorative instruments.

Achille Hermant, a young French architect, spoke for many others when he found the results cold. “The character of a building is not measured only by the use for which it is intended,” he wrote. “Everything that is true is not necessarily beautiful.”

That is true. But the place is beautiful. Its long double bay — divided by a central row of slender iron columns that sprout from stone pillars, with bookshelves all around — feels austere and mysterious. The approach involves a procession, from the square outside through the downstairs vestibule, its ceiling painted sky blue, faux Pompeiian landscapes on the walls and a grid of square stone piers supporting iron arches that anticipate what’s above. Then comes the reading room, as exalted and democratic as the city’s then-new train stations, but reticent, hushed.

After Ste.-Geneviève, Labrouste labored for the last 21 years of his life on the Bibliothèque Nationale, its square reading room a light-bathed hive of nine domes hovering atop a forest of 33-foot-high thin iron columns. Where windows don’t pierce the upper walls, painted landscapes elaborate on the pastoral theme, with the iron vault of the book stacks, also skylighted, visible to readers through a tall glass wall and separated by a monumental archway.

Labrouste dedicated most of his working life, on a government wage, to works of public architecture. He transcended materials to arrive at functional buildings of an ethereal delicacy. Nothing was too small for his attention. After 12 years Ste.-Geneviève came in under budget. Labrouste told the minister in charge the news and won permission to switch out the cast-iron front door for a bronze one. A perfectionist to the last.

Source: nytimes

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Situated some 150km apart, Lop Buri and Bangkok share at least one architectural lineage, a set of "Modern style" buildings that are the legacy of the People's Party that brought drastic political change to the country in 1932. Most Modern buildings, known for their rectangular shapes and unfussy, blocky decor, were constructed in the era of Field Marshal Plaek Phibulsonggram, a key figure of the People's Party (or Khana Ratsadorn) who was prime minister from 1938-44, and again from 1948-57. But while buildings of this style in Bangkok are sadly overlooked and at risk of being torn down, like the controversial case of the Supreme Court building on Sanam Luang, most of the structures in Lop Buri, especially those located in military zone, are well maintained.

Prime among them are Baan Phibulsonggram, located in the Artillery Centre of Fort Phaholyothin, where Plaek resided during his stay in the province, the Special Warfare Centre's head office and the Special Warfare Command Saving and Credit Cooperatives, or Erawan Building, which stands between Thepsatri Rajabhat University and Lop Buri Kindergarten School, a set of well-kept buildings at Pibul Wittaya School, along with some buildings in Anandamahidol hospital.

Silpakorn University Faculty of Architecture lecturer Chatri Prakitnonthakan said the Modern style is a physical manifestation of the ideology of the People's Party leaders who challenged tradition. The interiors and exteriors are, therefore, a deconstruction of traditional architecture, with an emphasis on the rectangular, and without using the gabled roofs seen in most Thai edifices.

"If you couldn't build a flat roof, you needed to build a parapet roof on top to conceal the gable on your rooftop," said Chatri.

The Modern style also showed off the technological advances of that era, especially the ferro-concrete technology, which was rare, expensive and not easy to make during 1930s. Before that, only kings could afford expensive technology, the expert noted, citing the 80-year-old Sala Chalermkrung theatre, one of the very few structures to use the technology. It was built by the command of King Rama VII who wanted it to be the country's largest and most modern theatre of the time.

Buildings from the same era which are scattered in prime areas of Bangkok include Supachalasai Stadium on Rama I Road, the General Post Office headquarters on Charoen Krung Road, commercial buildings along Ratchadamnoen Avenue, and the Physics Building in Chulalongkorn University. These are often at risk of demolition if developers come up with potential projects.

It was this technology which allowed the architects of the time to play with the Modern designs. The use of concrete was a substitute for wood, the conventional construction material, said Chatri.

The technology allowed them to curve buildings and to construct awnings without a supporting pole, he said. The curves help set buildings of that era apart in Lop Buri, particularly in the military areas. "They weren't meant for military purposes in the first place, some delicateness could be featured."

The Erawan Building, the deserted Tuk Patibatkarn Paet (Medical Practice Building) and the curved ceiling of the main building in Anandamahidol Hospital are prominent examples.

Equipped with parapet roof, the Medical Practice Building features a Modern design with one of the exterior walls filled with glass windows. Chatri explained that it was designed in imitation of the Western glass windows of the time, although Thailand didn't have the technology to produce a single piece of glass large enough.

Chatri said the rooftop of the Special Warfare Centre headquarters was worth noting. Kept away from the public in a military compound, the building is a two-storey rectangular box, resembling a matchbox, but what's special is hidden on the flat roof. "It looks so easy, with modern technology, but was very difficult for the architect to achieve in those days."

However, with Plaek being a "bad guy" in Thai history, architecture from his era has also become "a victim" that risks being dismantled. Former prime minister and staunch royalist MR Kukrit Pramoj disapproves of this style of architecture. He referred to it as "cheap art", an imitation of street cafes along the Champs-Elysees in Paris, a reference to Plaek and others in the fractious People's Party who were students in France before the revolution.

But Plaek is still well respected by the military and local people in Lop Buri, said Somkuan Sukda, a retired geography teacher from the Pibul Wittaya School. This helps explain why much of the heritage from his era has been well maintained in the province.

"He's the creator and the giver, to Lop Buri people," said Somkuan, also a conservation activist. Plaek not only turned the central province into a military hub during his administration, but also initiated a land reform scheme in which plots were handed to locals. He also wished to make Lop Buri the new capital city instead of Bangkok.

That's probably the reason he created facilities that could serve a capital, including a hospital, cinemas and a zoo, built in the province.  Anandamahidol Hospital, which opened in 1938, was meant to serve the officers and their families who were stationed to the province. It is said to be one of the best-equipped hospitals in the country.

Somkuan said most people these days do not consider the Modern architecture to have any aesthetic value, "but it certainly has historical value in itself that's worth conserving for the next generation to study".

Although these buildings are well preserved in Lop Buri, Somkuan is still worried about the future of the heritage buildings because of the ageing structures. The ferro-concrete needs specific conservation knowledge.

"Don't talk about the Fine Arts Department: the agency does not have the personnel or budget to handle these buildings, and the current buildings' owners don't seem too keen to find out the right way to renovate."

Source: bangkokpost

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