Word: architect
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Wabi-sabi is a catchall term for a 16th century Japanese discipline that combines the notions of wabi (things that are simple or humble) and sabi (things that gain beauty from age). Artist and architect Leonard Koren introduced the term to Americans a decade ago with his extended essay Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. But only recently have people begun to apply the term and philosophy to interior decorating. Several new books are leading the charge. Andrew Juniper's Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence and Taro Gold's Living Wabi Sabi: The True Beauty...
...morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Adrian D. Smith, a well-known architect in the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, was in a meeting with Donald Trump. The hyperbolic New York City developer was in Chicago to go over the design of a proposed Trump residential tower in that city that he had decided should be--what else?--the tallest building in the world, around 2,000 ft. In the midst of their meeting, the two men got word of the first plane that hit the World Trade Center. "When the second plane hit, we all rushed to the television...
Libeskind pauses before one large image near the center that says it all. It shows the three towers as they will appear at completion. On the left is a dashing, torqued configuration by Zaha Hadid, the London-based architect who was this year's winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award. On the right is Japanese architect Arata Isozaki's furrowed wafer of glass and steel, buttressed by diagonal struts that seem almost too slender for their supporting role. And between them is Libeskind's contribution, a supreme bit of architectural legerdemain. It's a curving tower...
...matter what the exterior looks like, the skyscraper can be a problematic building--isolated, aloof from its neighbors and boring inside, a pancake stack of identical floor plates with a lobby at the bottom and maybe a restaurant at the top. For years now, Rem Koolhaas, the oracular Dutch architect and urban theorist, has conducted an unrelenting rhetorical campaign against the skyscraper. "The promise it once held," he wrote recently, "has been negated by repetitive banality [and] carefully spaced isolation...
...tower is a spiritual quest," says Libeskind. "Whether it's San Gimignano or the Freedom Tower, it's about the ancient poetic desire to reach the sky." And even sometimes to reach it by pretzeled means. Twelve years ago, the very visionary architect Peter Eisenman was commissioned to design a showcase building for the recently unified Berlin, a combination of offices and hotel and retail space to be called the Max Reinhardt Haus, after the also very visionary German theater producer. For inspiration, Eisenman turned to nothing less than the Möbius strip, the 3-D geometric form produced...