Beauty, extracted

In a comment on yesterday's post, I was asked to "lay off the SCI-Arc bashing."

The request came from VOITURE12, who is evidently associated in some way with that Downtown hothouse of design speculation and self-gratification, and who reminds me that "some of us are actually decent human beings and [adding his or her intended emphasis] architects!"

In all fairness to VOITURE12, I went back to the SCI-Arc website and took an extended look at all the images posted there under "Faculty Work." I was sure I could find something charming, delightful, amusing, pleasing to the eye, historically attuned, beautiful or even—could it be?—sublime to post here, and make myself look less a curmudgeon.

Of the 23 listed faculty members (of which one seems to be a collaborative and several seem to be visual artists rather than architects), only a small handful elected to submit photographs of finished work, either because their snazzy computer-aided renderings and swoopy scale models are so much more engaging than their finished buildings . . . or, as I rather strongly suspect, there are no finished buildings to photograph.

Of the finished structures I did manage to find photographs of, here's the cream of the crop (obviusly, the copyrights belong to whomever they belong):

But surely the prize find was this study in SCI-Arc's triumphant poetics of negation:

VOITURE12, I don't doubt that SCI-Arc students and faculty are decent human beings. In fact, I'll have a beer with you any time (majorhancock@gmail.com). But the work, alas, speaks for itself.