Tag Archives: Rem Koolhaas

OMA’s Milstein Hall at Cornell University

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Milstein Hall at Cornell University. Image from dezeen.com. Photography is by Philippe Ruault

Last week, on my way down to New York City, I stopped at Cornell University to see their new Architecture, Art and Planning building, Milstein Hall. The OMA-designed facility looks like a Mies van der Rohe-style box propped up on a concrete ant hill, floating not incongruously between the kind of Victorian and Georgian structures one imagines at an Ivy League school. Some of the design is quite subtle — part of the exterior is clad in elegantly stripped Turkish marble — while some of it is showy and loud — a giant, 50-foot cantilever reaches over University Ave., almost-but-not-quite touching the 150-year-old Foundry Building across the road. I wasn’t sure if this latter gesture was an act of aggression — like a bully announcing its presence to a meek, helpless victim — or one of kindness, like an outstretched hand between a young spunky kid and an old, fair lady. This ambivalence basically describes my reaction.

What I liked: The building is porous. As people walk or bike by, there are interesting opportunities to look into spaces that are normally much more cloistered in a school: a lecture hall that has windows on three sides, or a submerged auditorium/crit space with large clerestories.  Continue reading →

New York To-Do List

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Over the Victoria Day long weekend, my boyfriend and I are driving down to New York City. We’ve gone every year for the last four, and each time we visit we discover new reasons to love the city. In 2011, for example, we rented road bikes and toured around Manhattan, then crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge, checked out Prospect Park and went down to Coney Island. It took us a whole day and we were exhausted by the time we hit the Atlantic, but it was great. We were both impressed by the miles of dedicated bike lanes that made cycling feel so much safer than in our home town of Toronto.

We might bike around again, but I think this trip is going to be more arts and culture focused. Here’s what we’re thinking of seeing.

Milstein Hall at Cornell University

Milstein Hall by OMA

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Beijing, My Invisible City

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Beijing's Water Cube, photo by Wilson Loo

At the end of May, I’m going to Beijing for two weeks. I’ve never been to China before. I’m going to be visiting a friend of mine from University. It’s interesting because unlike other global cities such as New York, London, Paris—places that long before I ever saw them in person, I had seen them repeatedly in film and on TV and in magazines and newspapers—I have almost no real imagination of what Beijing is like. I can’t picture how the streets feel or what the everyday architecture (houses, schools, offices) might be like. Of course, I know some of the iconic buildings from the 2008 summer Olympics (the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube), as well as the Imperial Palaces of the Forbidden City and the uncanny, Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV building. But those are all otherworldly oddities (I’m assuming) in the city, and not what you would see walking down your average street (whereas in New York, I was familiar with brownstone walk-ups from the age I started watched Sesame Street). So when I picture Beijing, I draw a blank. But I also feel that visiting Beijing right now is in someway visiting the centre of the earth—the new control centre for the global economy (sorry Washington, Manhattan and elsewhere). So I can imagine that whichever part of the city I go to there will be rumble of construction underfoot, and everything changing all around me almost as fast as I try to register how it is.