james_nicoll: Nakagin Capsule Tower: hideous, squalid and historically interesting

james_nicoll (

james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2009-07-08 09:53:00

Nakagin Capsule Tower: hideous, squalid and historically interesting
Will the 20th century be remembered as the nadir of architecture?

The Metabolists: dedicated to making Brutalism look good by comparison.

Habitat 67 is a related structure in long-suffering Montreal.

Here's a (big, so I will put it behind a cut) picture:

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	jwgh 2009-07-08 02:06 pm UTC (link)
	This reminds me that I had planned to put together a quick photoessay of Brown University's ugliest buildings. Let's see ... (Reply to this)

	le_trombone 2009-07-08 02:10 pm UTC (link)
	Huh. Beat me to it. I'm of a similar opinion. Interesting failures are not required to be preserved just because they're interesting. Wouldn't it be enough to just preserve, say, ten or twenty capsules and tear the rest of the wretched thing down? I'm sure one could get a few museums to display the individual units. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	brewsternorth 2009-07-08 07:35 pm UTC (link)
	Eh, quite. Considering that the capsule-condo was an intriguing idea that totally sucked in the execution, an art-gallery is more or less where it belongs. The Montreal Habitat, being much less jerry-built, seems to have stood the test of time, even if it does look wacky. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	ailsaek 2009-07-08 02:13 pm UTC (link)
	Well, Metabolism was an interesting idea. (Reply to this) (Thread)

austin_dern
2009-07-09 11:04 am UTC (link)

Now I'm picturing a story in which the poor inhabitants of Last Generation's O'Neill Colony Design are trying with halfhearted success to carry on despite the many little aggravations of living in something that's an architectural monstrosity by the current definition and that hasn't quite worked or been maintained quite like the glossy brochures promised.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	radargrrl 2009-07-08 02:13 pm UTC (link)
	Apparently these things are hot property in Montreal. Far from being the 'everyman's urban living space' that they were intended, they now cater to the uber-rich of Canada's second largest city, with a waiting list a mile long. (Reply to this)

	sinboy 2009-07-08 02:19 pm UTC (link)
	World architecture peaked with Art Deco. Everything after that has been a slow slide into ugly crap. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	derekl1963 2009-07-08 02:36 pm UTC (link)
	Architecture, like so much else in design, went to crap when it started being more about 'making a statement' rather than building/creating a functional object/item. Look at the endless maintenance issues Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings have for example. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	sinboy 2009-07-08 02:50 pm UTC (link)
	Most modern buildings can be quite functional - take the new Bank Of America building in midtown NYC. Super energy efficient, "green" water cachement, great lighting, and so on. But it's not attractive to look at. It's yet another giant wall of glass and steel. No individuality and beauty whatsoever. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

ckd
2009-07-08 03:08 pm UTC (link)

30 St Mary Axe is IMO attractive, individual (indeed!), and is reportedly very energy-efficient as well. (It's also had only one pane of glass fall, unlike Boston's Hancock Tower.) Foster is probably the only modern architect whose work I generally like as architecture, though the GLA building doesn't really work for me aesthetically. (I find Calatrava a very interesting civil engineer/sculptor, but not so much of an architect; Pei has his moments.)

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	sinboy 2009-07-08 03:33 pm UTC (link)
	Not really my taste, but it's at least what a good number of people with taste find attractive. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	realinterrobang 2009-07-08 05:02 pm UTC (link)
	Well, let's not get too far into the other extreme. If I could shoot Mondrian for what he did to architecture (the "faceless brick boxes" school of thought), I would. Then again, someone who did that many nearly identical pictures of trees wants shootin' just on general principles. (Reply to this) (Parent)

zibblsnrt
2009-07-08 08:32 pm UTC (link)

A few years back I was browsing the Concept Art forums, and a bunch of the artists there were playing around with architectural styles. One of the ones I remember, and I really wish I could find the thing again, was some guy who decided to play around with taking Art Deco and classical Islamic architecture, and extrapolating both to the scale of modern cities. The result was really impressive.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	anton_p_nym 2009-07-08 02:38 pm UTC (link)
	It boggles my mind that the NY Times reporter thinks the reason people aren't flocking to save the Capsule Tower is commercial or financial... instead of the reasons I see, that it's an expensive, fuggly boondoggle. -- Steve wonders at architecture critics... sometimes it's like they're living on an entirely different planet. (Reply to this)

	joenotcharles 2009-07-08 02:47 pm UTC (link)
	If the author really wanted to be taken seriously when saying how beautiful the building is, they shouldn't have included a picture... (Reply to this)

tekalynn
2009-07-08 03:05 pm UTC (link)

"Part of the design’s appeal is voyeuristic. The portholes evoke gigantic peepholes. Their enormous size, coupled with the small scale of the rooms, exposes the entire apartment to the city outside. Many of the midlevel units look directly onto an elevated freeway, so you are almost face to face with people in passing cars. (On my first visit there, a tenant told me that during rush hour, drivers stuck in traffic often point or wave at residents.)"

In Japan, where most urban homes have walls around them so passersby *can't* look in? Oh, the residents must just love that.

Tear the sucker down, I say.

(Reply to this)

	elynne 2009-07-08 03:28 pm UTC (link)
	Whining about how historically important a building is when the people who live in it hate it is... missing the point pretty badly. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	james_nicoll 2009-07-08 03:56 pm UTC (link)
	That the people are not up to the glorious standards of the rest of the building? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	elynne 2009-07-08 06:21 pm UTC (link)
	Exactly! Clearly, we need to design people more suited to this noble and ideal habitat! (Reply to this) (Parent)

brett_dunbar
2009-07-08 06:59 pm UTC (link)

Do they hate living there because it's poorly designed or because it hasn't been maintained? It is fairly clear from the article that it is in a very poor state of repair, it sounds similar to the problem that prefab housing has, it's got a design lifespan has reached the end of it and is prohibitively expensive to repair. As a concept it is fairly interesting (prefab apartments which can be quickly assembled in a variety of configurations) and I rather like the quirky eccentric look. Or at least I would if it weren't showing so many signs of decay.

http://www.geograph.org.uk/photos/00/16/001675_b91c9402.jpg
Shire Hall in Mold, now that is an ugly building, those windows are horrible. It is the headquarters of Flintshire county council and was before April 1996 the headquarters of Clwyd county council.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	brewsternorth 2009-07-08 07:39 pm UTC (link)
	Yikes, that does look like it belongs in Life on Mars. Mind you, it also reminds me of the bizarre-looking brutalist block at the Walton St end of Somerville College, Oxford. The more bizarre because it's actually listed. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	brett_dunbar 2009-07-08 08:12 pm UTC (link)
	There are proposals to list Shire Hall as well. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't in such a prominent position, as it is it dominates one of the main roads into Mold. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	roseembolism 2009-07-08 03:44 pm UTC (link)
	Never mind whatever philosophical excuses they come up with; I think this is really a product of the first generation of architects to play with Leggos. (Reply to this)

	tanac 2009-07-08 06:29 pm UTC (link)
	I like habitat 67. always have. would love to live there. (Reply to this)

montrealais
2009-07-08 06:41 pm UTC (link)

Hey, Habitat 67 is cool. So are the brutalist metro stations (the extensions built between 1976 and 1981), especially, say, Radisson, Lionel-Groulx, and Georges-Vanier.

Granted, it's not hard to find truly, marvellously awful brutalist buildings in Mtl *cough*mcgill*concordia*cough*. One such building, the Institut du tourisme et d'hôtellerie du Québec, was so hideous they finally ended up completely changing its façade a few years ago, at ruinous expense that everyone conceded was worth it.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	brewsternorth 2009-07-08 07:37 pm UTC (link)
	Oo. Those really do knock into a cocked hat their contemporaries in the DC metro. Mainly because, brutalist though they are, they do seem to be designed with an eye to people. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	mmcirvin 2009-07-09 01:01 pm UTC (link)
	I'm actually kind of fond of the standard downtown DC Metro station design--but the problem with it is that it is a standard and most of the stations look the same. The Boston Red Line extension from the Eighties went for similar aesthetics to DC at some of the stops, but the stations are all different from one another. (Reply to this) (Parent)

kpreid
2009-07-08 09:38 pm UTC (link)

Er, if you're going to embed a giant ("slow-loading") image, at least make it a link to itself so that we can actually see the details...

Like this: <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Habitat_panorama.jpg"><img width="50%" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Habitat_panorama.jpg"></a>

Better yet, save bandwidth by embedding the smaller-yet-useful image MediaWiki generates, and provide credit by linking to the original:

<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Habitat_panorama.jpg"><img width="50%" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/Habitat_panorama.jpg/800px-Habitat_panorama.jpg"></a>
Live:

(Reply to this)

	sanskritabelt 2009-07-08 11:56 pm UTC (link)
	Man I love that building and wish there were a lot more like it. (Reply to this)

	oh6 2009-07-09 03:45 am UTC (link)
	I wonder what this would look like if the units were individually painted instead of all gray concrete. Somewhere in volume 1 of The Cartoon History of the Universe Larry Gonick mentions that ancient Greek buildings were painted, including the statuary. I wonder if they did that in ancient Rome as well. Possibly it gets to be too much work to maintain, depending on the climate. (Reply to this)

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