August 13, 2007
Brad Cloepfil Is Designing Some Amazing Stuff!!
From Metropolis Magazine (the best mag in the whole wide world):
Cloepfil is an elementalist in an architecture culture in which image is king. With the opening of the Seattle Art Museum in May; the Museum of Arts & Design, on Columbus Circle in New York, next year; and ambitious projects in Michigan, Denver, Dallas, and Glendale, California, coming down the pike, Cloepfil is emerging as a leading American architect of a new type: not a showman or a theorist, not a regionalist or a corporate architect at the helm of a large firm, but a sort of high-art boutique practitioner (meaning he chooses projects carefully) with a burgeoning reputation for powerful, if subtle, buildings.
Sometimes very subtle. Now that the term starchitecture has settled in (as both compliment and swipe) to describe a certain ambition, it remains to be seen whether clients and critics have the stomach for showpiece buildings that don’t fully show up in photographs—for Cloepfil’s kind of buildings. But he doesn’t pretend to care. His inventiveness is never about reinvention. Instead, he draws on a deeper font. “One of the things architecture does is communicate in an iconic way,” he explained, back at his studio. “That’s where architecture begins. It just picks up the conversation that’s been going on forever. And that gives me strength because I don’t have to make the new icon. All I’ve got to do is serve architecture.”
Fellas, you gotta go here and see the stuff this guy is designing. Impressive.
Posted by anthony at August 13, 2007 07:06 AM | TrackBack