So my friend Andrea messaged me on Facebook wanting my thoughts on a building project in Louisville I hadn’t ever heard of. I ended up kinda going on at length and I thought that my quickie analysis might be amusing. She mentioned Stonehenge as a descriptor in her initial take on the design.

—

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=127240
– bunch of renderings, better context and diff viewing angles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H-qhbIIMyk
– pitch film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisville_Museum_Plaza

At first blush I was reminded of some of the Ground Zero proposals, as I recall there were a couple of linked two-tower ideas. The pitch film seems to give the most context, visually.

I did not find info linking the design of the building to the Ground Zero proposals. BUT:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Prince-Ramus
– “partner-in-charge of the Seattle Central Library”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/arts/design/14pogr.html
– “Joshua Prince-Ramus Leaving Koolhaas’s O.M.A. to Start New Architecture Firm…”

The film clearly links the building to the Library; giant rooms with dedicated uses piled onto one another in ways that presumably reflect and express the use structurally – or so reads the promo literature, anyway.

I like the giant video screen thing as an idea because of Blade Runner, but in real life I HATE video in my field of view when I am driving, even other driver’s little DVD screens distract the shit out of me.

Take my increasingly skeptical opinion of the new Seattle Library:

  • it’s confusing to navigate even when you know it’s confusing;
  • it’s noisy pretty much no matter where you are because of the lack of interior sound baffling and the open insides of the building;
  • it’s hard to understand visually because of the solid intensity of the color schemes of all the interior spaces except for the top-floor reading desks and study carrels and the ground floor.

Looking at that list, the overriding quality underlying each of these critiques is a building that actually emphasizes noise, meaning sensory overload, at the expense of usability. The big video screen on the Louisville building actually takes that problem and expands it into the city itself. I rather doubt that interior of the building would be any more conducive to clear and rational thought.

Oh, look, Prince-Ramus worked on a Guggenheim museum project based in Las Vegas. The aesthetic line I am seeing looks at Vegas’ lines of blinking distraction and robbery machines and casts that as a good and desirable thing. I see it as a mechanism to increase the concentration of power and wealth by making it that much harder for Joe Average to think clearly about his life and role in the economy, something that actually threatens participatory democracy itself.

So, Stonehenge? If Stonehenge is a place of religious spectacle and intoxication, maybe so. I think, however, it’s currently thought to be a sort of astronomical observatory, right? That sort of constructed artifact celebrates the cyclical, the predictable, the knowable, and the real.

These buildings I looked at this morning don’t seem interested in that set of values.

Ha, it’s fun to just come up with stuff like this on the fly!