Here’s a book from last year that slipped under our radar: Extreme Architecture: Building for Challenging Environments.  It’s a compilation of contemporary structures that were designed in response to extraordinary environmental conditions (heat, cold, water, altitude, and outer space) and less directly in response to aesthetics.
     Some of the projects, such as a ski jump by Zaha Hadid and a spa by Mario Botta, are self-consciously avant-garde and others, such as snow sheds and desert schools, are fundamentally utilitarian. Yet all, as they turn to meet the challenges of the environment, unsettle expectations of what a building should look like. They don’t simply fall into fashion.
     Rather than sit upright on the ground, as conventional buildings do, those in hot and windswept climates tend to burrow beneath it, and those in wet and high climates tend to leap away from it.  The buildings are similarly polarized in appearance, evoking either prehistoric or futuristic styles. A hotel in Patagonia, finished in roughly hewn wood and sunk into the earth, resembles a neolithic ruin. A giant drum-shaped workstation in Antarctica, hovering on squat steel legs, looks like a science fiction stage set. Many of the structures have an animated quality, as if they’re creatures who’ve undergone evolutionary mutations and adaptations. A cultural center in British Columbia, Canada lies camouflaged within the scrubby landscape. A ski jump in the Alps lifts its head above adjacent peaks like a brontosaurus. 

Peter Bialobrzeski’s photographs of houses in the informal community of Baseco, Manila, might be especially relevant right now. The small, tilting, wood-framed homes in these pictures, sealed with scraps of fabric, plastic tarps, and posters, are vivid expressions of vulnerability and determination. They remind one of the emergency conditions in Haiti, where thousands of people are currently living in similarly constructed makeshift shelters and, because of cyclical poverty and challenges in rebuilding, could remain indefinitely.
     The collection’s title, “Case Study Homes”, refers ironically to the Los Angeles Case Study Houses of the 1950s, a series of modernist prototypes documented in coolly glamorous photographs by Julius Schulman. Bialobrzeski’s photographs don’t have that gloss, of course, but they possess a stately formal beauty that confers dignity on the houses. A diffuse tropical light mutes vivid colors and shadows to give the images a silvery, etched appearance, like Walker Evans’ Depression-era photos. While Evans looked straight into his subject’s faces, however, Bialobrzeski only examines the outside of their homes, a strategy that steers clear of sentimentality. These photographs give straightforward testimony.

Our image of modern architecture is black and white, quite literally. It’s an image of black ribbon windows in white stucco walls, of slender steel columns behind clear panes of glass. James Welling’s contemporary photographs of architect Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House, on display now unitl March 6 at Regen Projects, richly confuse this image.
     Welling has captured the house, a landmark of American modernism, with a digital camera and handheld lenses in a series of layered, intensely colored photographs. The prints in the show offer a view of the building that’s tactile, textured, and surprisingly tender.
     Most canonical photographs of the house look on it orthogonally, so that its glass skin seems to disappear and its entire structure to dissolve into its manicured surroundings. Welling shoots slightly eccentric perspectives that take in more of the glass and the landscape, and complicates these views by layering them with fields of strong color. This treatment brings out the stubborn physicality of the building. Immense red and green sunspots mottle a glass wall. An orange-colored spill of light reveals the rough surface of an interior carpet.

The new building at Brunnenstraße 9 in Berlin’s Mitte district was recently hailed by Artforum Magazine as “a retroactive manifesto of ’90s-era hypercontextualism” and, more simply, “gorgeous”. What their praise didn’t recognize, however, is that this mixed-use space is not just something to look at but a building to listen to; passers-by can plug their headphones into the inconspicuous silver jack embedded in the building’s concrete and literally hear the otherworldly orchestrations of the structure itself.
     For the permanent sound installation, titled BUG, American artist Mark Bain embedded seismological sensors at various points of the building. Using a force-feedback system, he then converts the micro-vibrations the sensors pick up into audible sound that can be heard by anyone, at any time of day or night — provided they bring their own headphones. External elements such as wind or rain, as well as the mechanical sounds of the elevator, heating system, and underground metro — in addition to footsteps and muffled voices — are all picked upand mixed into an impromptu, experimental composition. Upon hearing the sound, some listeners dance; others have claimed that it gives them goosebumps.

The home is where a culture begins, and the members of the Alfredo Santa Cruz family are re-defining our culture/environment relationship by building homes from unlikely materials. The Casa De Botellas was created by the Santa Cruz family in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, as a tool for promoting ecological and social responsibility. Although they are not architects or engineers, the Alfredo Santa Cruz family successfully designed their portable structures to be accessible, simple, and creative down to the last detail.
     The structures of the house and every piece of furniture inside are constructed entirely from used plastic. PET remains intact for 300 years, which is longer than cement, and more durable. This is an ingenious re-use that turns the hazard of slow decomposition into an asset.
     The walls are made from 1,200 PET plastic bottles, which support a 1,300-piece Tetra Pack roof holding 140-piece CD jewel-case doors and windows that surround plastic-bottle couches and beds. A self-invented casting technology keeps the bottles fused together without obstructing the visual symmetry.
     Creating environmental solutions from the ground up, the Cruz family provides free home building courses to address both trash and housing scarcity in Latin American countries, “realities that nobody can hide”.

With the deliberately provocative proposition that New York is “almost all right”, the first Urban Age series of conferences on the future of the world’s cities started off with a bang in 2005. In the five years since, the conferences have taken place in nine “megacities” (defined as a city with a population of over 3 million) around the world. In each, the present state, and future, of a city is debated from all angles by scientists, sociologists, urban planners, geographers, and economists, among others.
      Citing surprising and sobering statistics — more than half the world population currently lives in cities; urban areas contribute 75 percent of human carbon dioxide output into the atmosphere — Urban Age posits that the fate of cities in the 21st century will determine not only the fate of human lives but the future of our planet. Urban Age therefore aims to influence the ideas of city policy-makers and planners to create more socially responsible and environmentally sustainable urban practices — to create, in their words, a “grammar of success for metropolitan areas”.
     The amount of information gathered at each conference is staggering. The issues range from the large-scale (investment and economic development, sustainability and energy consumption) to the particulars (public life and urban space, housing and neighborhoods). It’s all beautifully presented online for urban dwellers to access at urban-age.net.

There’s something naughty about Living Architectures, a series of four short films by Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine on view now at Storefront for Art and Architecture, through February 27. Sitting in the dimly lit gallery on worn theater seats and watching them unfurl in continuous loops on the wall feels a bit like visiting a peep show. While each film documents an iconic building by a well-known contemporary architect (Rem Koolhaas’ House in Bordeaux, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Pomerol Winery), it also skillfully exposes it.
     The movies open with images celebrating the formal beauty of these structures before honing in on less pretty physical realities. Footage shows water leaking from the ceiling, floor, and walls of the Bordeaux house. Bird’s-eye interior views of the Bilbao museum reveal poorly resolved geometries and a redundant steel frame. In highlighting these flaws Beka and Lemoine challenge the cultural authority of high architecture, a challenge which seems justified. The buildings they’ve chosen to examine have been conceived ideally, without a deep consideration for practicalities.
     The filmmakers also take aim at the discrepancy between the cool, lucid images of these buildings and the prosaic life that unfolds inside of them. A housekeeper struggles carrying a vacuum cleaner up the perilous winding staircase of the Bordeaux house.  

In terms of lifespan, architects are the opposite of rock stars. They tend to live long and do great work after their 80th birthday. Philip Johnson was still designing when he died at the age of 98. As you read this, Oscar Niemeyer, now 101, is probably scheming up his next project. Frank Lloyd Wright checked out at 91, six months before his Guggenheim Museum was to open. But Eero Saarinen is an exception. When the Finnish-born architect and furniture designer died at 51 (with nine buildings in progress), he was as famous as an architect could be. He’d designed a slick new landmark for St. Louis (the Gateway Arch) and had been on the cover of Time magazine. Perhaps most indicative of his place in 1950s America, President Eisenhower was scheduled to detonate a celebratory atom bomb at the opening of Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. But that part of the festivities was cancelled.
     Critics have said that Saarinen was too much of a corporate hired gun, designing safe buildings for large companies like CBS and IBM. His office parks, according the New York Times’ Nicolai Ouroussoff, “reinforced the sweeping shifts that reflected the dark side of the postwar era: the racial tensions and white flight, the excesses of the consumer culture, the suburban isolation.” And that may, in part, be true. But he was also behind some undeniably innovative designs. Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, a rich survey of his work at the Museum of the City of New York, succeeds at displaying the man’s range.

You have to wonder if tea tastes better when sipped in the Too-High Teahouse outside Chino City in Nagano, Japan. It’s a small, whimsical building supported by two chestnut tree trunks. The altitude is meant to have a calming effect on guests. The teahouse’s style is what you could call rustic chic. Or woodsy eclecticism. It’s featured in Arcadia: Cross-Country Style, Architecture and Design (Gestalten; $75), a coffee table book about recent buildings and furniture which are surrounded in, and/or inspired by, nature. The book also showcases faux-rustic bowls and utensils, making some sections seem like a housewares catalog for affluent dwarves. (Dutch designer Jo Meesters’s pitchers made of paper pulp and resin are the best of that group.)

China is no stranger to making headlines for environmental issues. Two years ago, toxic toothpaste and lead-laden toys were being exported from the country. Last year, a report issued by a German energy institute claimed that China’s carbon dioxide emissions had reached 6.8 billion tons, an increase of 178% over the country’s 1990 emissions levels. But with increased international attention on carbon emissions and climate change, China is cleaning up its act and making headlines for the right reasons. Beijing’s Central Business District is getting the green treatment, making China the first country in the world to have an entirely green business district.
     Green-minded and eager to play a larger role in our ever-evolving future, 2009 marked a year wherein China vowed to increase its alternative energy production and even hinted at goals to become a key player in eco-friendly car manufacturing. It’s an image (and lifestyle) upgrade the country direly needs. So when internationally renowned architecture/engineering/urban design firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill submitted its green re-design plans for Beijing’s Central Business District (CBD), the Chaoyang District Government and the Beijing CBD Administration Committee took notice. Seven leading firms around the world were invited to participate in the international competition; SOM outdid the other six with their environmentally focused proposal.