Which is also fine by me. If innovators weren’t willing to try new things on clients’ dimes we’d never get anything new. Faster horses etc. Frontiers always have both fraud and novel shit people didn’t know they wanted until somebody decided to give it to them,
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alexander's contract stipulated he could unilaterally reorganize the construction budget; indeed a big chunk of the cost of the mary rose museum proposal was an innovative design for piles so the structure could be built on clay for under £10M
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Okay that’s the sort of thing I’d lead with if I were trying to convince people convinced he was trad that he wasn’t…it’s the buried lede
If you turn this thread into an essay, I’d open with that. Took a conversation buried 15 replies deep to get there.
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I mean for people hostile to trad stuff (and I admittedly am fairly hostile) the main thing they’re *friendly* to is novelty and innovation and evidence that someone is willing to break from tradition.
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iirc a lot of his projects involve some kind of in situ invention; regular use of sophisticated materials and techniques (FEM, shotcrete/gunite); his meta-innovation was stipulating that he didn't have to a) invent up front on spec or b) beg permission
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the fact that he likes to use compression structures with pitched roofs is mainly cause they work, and he's not interested in precarious cantilevers or fancy parametric undulating glass/titanium/whatever because that serves little purpose other than to advertise the architect
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Well now. He solved the problem he cared about. Doesn’t mean it’s the only one worth caring about. To dismiss that stuff as mere self-aggrandizement is as bad as you say dismissing CA as a trad is. Customer driven vs product driven.
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so, you're correct in your inference that alexander believes it is Wrong™ to design buildings that focus on the "boldness" of the architecture or whatever; i believe there is a time and place for such artifacts but a world of only "bold" architecture is a dysfunctional one
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and peter eisenman (who got so butthurt over alexander's phd that he went and did his own phd to try to refute alexander's) does billion-dollar structures like this:
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Again… I kinda like it 😆
“The opposite of every great truth is also a great truth” etc
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whether you like it or not is irrelevant; it's a 2x-overrun white elevant boondoggle translate.google.com/translate?hl=&
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er white elephant whatever; anyway that one was *only* half a billion dollars, i got it mixed up with a billion-plus one that looks just like it
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