Female Architects and their Curves - Injecting femininity into the built environment.
Here’s an insight: Architecture, a profession long-dominated by the hard, angular, even blind rigidity of the male ego (see Daniel Libskind’s pompous Crystal), seems to have entered a welcome era of female influence. Contemporary architecture’s angles are being softened into curves that mimic the female form; cold details warmed, rigid, unwelcoming spaces now invite the public to engage with the architecture not feel weakened by it.
Consider these three architects who have acted, perhaps subconsciously, with powerful and wonderful female influence to enrich the public realm, not splice it.
1 - Marianne McKenna - KPMB Architects, Toronto
Project: Koerner Hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto
Koerner Hall opened September twenty-fifth (McKenna’s birthday) to great architectural and cultural acclaim. McKenna’s feminine touch can be felt in her contemporary addition “touching lightly” upon the existing early twentieth century RCM structure. Surely the more effete feature however, are Koerner Hall’s “strings”, which (when viewed from below) have been described as vaginal. One Globe & Mail art critic used precision in selecting an appropriate epithet for the undulating oak panels thats serve both an acoustic and aesthetic function in McKenna’s ‘shoe-box’ hall. “Labial” was the critic’s word choice. But rather than let your mind plummet to the dark recesses of the proverbial gutter, pull out your Funk and Wagnal’s and realize that labial simply means “of or relating to the lips.” The strings give the architecture a peculiar emotional character; their visually embracing form adds an almost motherly warmth to the hall.
See Tom Arban’s beautiful b&w photos of the installation of the “strings” here:
2 - Zaha Hadid - Zaha Hadid Architects, New York
Project: National Museum of XXI Century Art (or MAXXI), Rome
Inspired by simple beauty in objects as seemingly inane (but as obviously architecturally-unconventional) as the potato chip, Hadid’s philosophy of form fuses the natural with the manufactured. Massive scale in Hadid’s buildings is tempered with calm forms, which fit her architecture somewhere between the realms of modest and vulgar. You can decide where that is for you, for me, it’s a place where a massive break from convention leaves me feeling refreshed, but unsure that she’s got it right. Check out her curves!
John Seabrook wrote an excellent piece on Hadid for the New Yorker (abstract here, photo essay here) before christmas in which he characterized Hadid’s rule-breaking approach to contemporary architecture.
Images of the MAXXI by architectural photographer phenom, Iwan Baan:
3 - Jeanne Gang - Studio Gang Architects
Project: Aqua Tower, Chicago
Whitney wrote a great article on this project for us a few weeks ago - here. The theme continues as Gang’s sky-scraper breaks the repetition of right-angled buildings that punctuate Chicago’s downtown core. Interestingly, the Gang and McKenna’s mantra seem to be: touch lightly, but touch with meaning. Hadid chooses to inflict her architecture, where Gang and McKenna share a sensitivity for context and a culturally responsive architecture that place buildings conventional buildings that so often boast their scale, budget, or brand, in sharp relief as, well, pathetic.
Anecdotally: This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few weeks, during which time I sent an anonymous email to Paul Goldberger, architectural critic for the New Yorker, alerting him to the fact that I thought Marianne McKenna, who is on a recent architectural tear, should be on his journalistic radar. On Thursday, I returned home to the New Yorker and to the shock that I had been burned by a pro - Goldberger had published an article featuring Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower and McKenna’s Koerner Hall… leaving me in the dust. Touché, PG. Check it out here.
posted by cam.
