Why Foster’s Hearst Tower is no gherkin
Early last year I panned Hearst Tower in a Gridskipper compilation of the ugliest buildings in New York. Many of you disagreed with me (some strongly), so it was refreshing to see Robert Campbell take a stab at critiquing the design's faults. The Boston Globe critic asserts some of the same things I found disturbing about Lord Foster's diagrid tower, namely process over program and context, though he does it at length and more articulately.
Marcella Durand on the Infinite Library
"New York-based poet Marcella Durand on a dream of hers that begins with 18th century French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée, weaves through Borges, and emerges in the unknowable future of the infinite library", where "many books are infinitely preferable to one." One for the bibliophile in me...and you.
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