THE QUIRKINESS OF TARGET FIELD. About two thirds of the way into the 2010 season, it looks as if Target Field is quirky. I googled “Target Field quirkiness” and got 97,600 hits. I did the search after reading this article in USA Today Sports Weekly by Paul White with the headline “Twins are trying to adapt to Target Field’s quirkiness” (of course, the headline may have led to a lot of the hits.) The article deals with the difficulty that the Twins are having dealing with the quirks of the new ballpark even after over 50 home games. The article features the difficulties of playing a fly ball near the right field wall. There is an overhang which. If the ball misses the overhang, the fielder can catch the ball. If it hits it, it can’t. The extent of the overhang depends on where the ball hits, varying from two feet at the foul line to eight feet in center field. If the ball hits the wall, it will bounce in different directions, depending on where it hits because there are different surfaces. A ball may bounce off the limestone overhang, a concrete portion of the wall, a wood portion or padding. Mike Cuddyer, the Twins right fielder, says: “It’s definitely quirky. You have to deal with four different surfaces, and the ball bounces differently off each one.” Of course, it would take several years for a right fielder for an opposing team to have the experience with the wall that Cuddyer has at this point in the season. It’s a small sample, but the Twins have a home field advantage at this point that is about 120 points, which is greater than the 100 point advantage that they had last year.
Archive for the ‘Architecture’ Category
THE QUIRKINESS OF TARGET FIELD.
Monday, August 16th, 2010DESIGNING A QUIRKY STADIUM.
Sunday, August 15th, 2010DESIGNING A QUIRKY STADIUM. I posted here last fall about the Minnesota Twins moving out of the Metrodome, their old stadium, which was considered to provide the biggest home field advantage in baseball. This Sports Illustrated article by Sky Andrecheck, posted at the beginning of the 2010 season, said that “[M]any are wondering whether Target Field [the new Minnesota Twin stadium] can match the advantage that the Metrodome provided the Twins.” Andrecheck pointed out that there is always a home-field advantage in baseball and estimated that it on average an 80 point wing; that is, a .500 team ( a team that wins half its games) will win at a .540 rate at home and a .460 rate on the road. The Twins had a 100 point advantage over the 28-year history of the Metrodome, equal to an estimated additional 1.6 wins a year. Not that big a difference, but Andrecheck points out that it suggests that, except for the Metrodome, the Tigers rather than the Twins would have won the Central Division in 2009. Andrecheck’s research shows that three factors that enter into a park providing a home team advantage are having a dome, being a good doubles park, and being “quirky.” The Metrodome was “quirky” with spongy turf, the unusual “baggy” right field wall, and the white dome ceiling which made it hard to follow fly balls. Quirkiness helps the home team because as Andrecheck says, “The Metrodome’s unusual features helped the Twins at home because Minnesota’s players acclimated to the difficult roof conditions and bouncy turf.” What would the new Target stadium be like? Writing in April, Andrecheck thought that the stadium followed the “same formulaic pattern” of other modern stadiums and praised the Twins for not building “another odd park with bizarre features to give the home team a slight advantage.”
PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS AND ARCHITECTS IN CONFLICT.
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS AND ARCHITECTS IN CONFLICT. The Vanity Fair article quotes Frank Gehry as saying: “And then the artists got competitive and said, No, you’re still an architect, because you’re putting toilets in your buildings, in your art. Richard Serra dismissed me as a plumber.” (Richard Serra is a sculptor.) It is sometimes claimed that there is a long history of animosity between artists and architects, in part on a theory that the buildings are at war with the art inside. Friends of mine who were architects told me that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York was Wright’s vengeance on painters. In the Vanity Fair article, Renzo Piano is quoted defending Gehry’s Bilbao museum against charges that “Bilbao upstages the art.”
THE BEAUTY OF PYLONS.
Monday, July 5th, 2010THE BEAUTY OF PYLONS. I was pleased to see that one of the structures that was singled out in the Vanity Fair article was the Millau Viaduct in France, which is classified here as a “highway bridge and viaduct.” The Millau Viaduct was designed by Norman Foster, whose buildings include the Gherkin in London. Foster also designed (with the “involvement of a feng shui geomancer”) the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters in Hong Kong, which came in fourth in the Vanity Fair voting.
I was happy to see the respect for a “highway bridge and viaduct” because I have just posted on Alain de Botton’s observation that our society doesn’t appreciate the beauty of pylons and other industrial structures. It’s good to see an architect of Norman Foster’s stature designing structures like this.
THE BEST ARCHITECTURE OF THE LAST 30 YEARS.
Monday, July 5th, 2010THE BEST ARCHITECTURE OF THE LAST 30 YEARS. Vanity Fair in its recent issue reports on a vote by leading architects on the best architecture of the last 30 years. There was a clear winner: Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Matt Tyrnhauer, the author of the article, expresses surprise that the rest of the votes were scattered over 120 buildings. I think it’s heartening that that there were so many candidates. Many of the featured buildings are in places that are hard to get to. I’m lucky to have gotten to see Gehry’s work in Millennium Park in Chicago.
A CHANGING MANHATTAN—AFTER 1968.
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010A CHANGING MANHATTAN—AFTER 1968. I think that when I came to New York I assumed that Manhattan and Greenwich Village had been unchanged from the thirties. For example, I was able to eat at Horn & Hardart Automats and Schrafft’s restaurants. There were few new buildings in the Village, but I was aware of some important changes in other parts of the city. I bought a book by Ada Louise Huxtable about classic New York architecture, published in 1964, and went around looking for the buildings. Most of them had been torn down for skyscrapers in the intervening 5 years. One evening, I walked home to the Village from Wall Street through what was to become Soho. Nobody seemed to live in the area. Benjamin Schwartz says that it was the rapid decline of small industries in New York that was occurring in those years that made it possible for artists to find Soho lofts to live in. Architects were just beginning to take on the challenges of converting large commercial spaces for residential use. When we got married in 1973, a large cast iron department store near Tenth and Broadway was in the process of being one of the first conversions. I suggested that that should be our first apartment. In the event, it was not ready until six months or so after our wedding, but Mary Jane has always said it would have been impossible anyway because she was not going to make 16 foot long draperies for the windows.
WERE THE LEGOS STOLEN (COMMENT)?
Monday, March 22nd, 2010WERE THE LEGOS STOLEN (COMMENT)? Mary Jane in her comment on yesterday’s post takes the position that the Legos at 32nd Street and Seventh Avenue must have been stolen. It is ironic, given the discussion of the impermanence of Legos, that out of some 25 lines of Legos that once filled the damaged block, only about five or six remain. And Mary Jane is right that filling the space completely is an important part of the aesthetic appeal of the project. As for whether the Legos were removed, it should be remembered that, as I posted on here, New York is a city where an entire landmark building was once stolen and sold for scrap.
THE IMPERMANENCE OF LEGOS (COMMENT)
Sunday, March 21st, 2010THE IMPERMANENCE OF LEGOS (COMMENT). More on the use of Legos in conceptual art. Elmer commented here that “plastic is less erodible than stone, but … Legos seem less permanent because they are less massive, seemingly poorer at load-bearing, more toy-like.” I would add that Legos also seem less permanent because they are usually used in temporary structures. Lego constructions are torn down and the Legos are reused. I was in New York City a couple days ago, and I went to the intersection of 32nd Street and Seventh Avenue to look at the Lego patch to the building that is shown in the third to fifth photographs here. Sadly, most of the Legos had disappeared. In any event, the scale effect would be more dramatic than in the photographs even if all the Legos remained. The building seems enormous, and the Legos that are used are small Legos. Passersby paid the Legos no attention with the exception that Mary Jane noted that a crowd had started to gather while I was on my knees studying the Legos.
THE AQUA BUILDING.
Sunday, March 14th, 2010THE AQUA BUILDING. The Aqua Building is a new Chicago skyscraper, designed by Jeanne Gang, which has won a number of awards. I think its beauty is shown in the photographs here. Each floor of the building has a different plan. The overall effect has been compared to sculpture, and the waves of the balconies are thought fitting for a city on Lake Michigan. Nevertheless, as this New Yorker article by Paul Goldberger, points out, the design solves a couple practical problems. The balcony overhangs shield the balconies below from the sun. More importantly, there is no clear path for the wind so that the effects of wind are dissipated. Unlike other skyscrapers, the building does not need a giant damper at the top to stabilize it against sway created by wind. And because there is less wind, balconies can be used all the way up to the top of the building. Goldberger says: “Chicago is where architects like Louis Sullivan, John Wellborn Root, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill elevated pragmatic solutions to structural problems to the level of art. And that is precisely what Gang has done.”
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/skyline/2010/02/01/100201crsk_skyline_goldberger#ixzz0i6qH8zx4
THE HANCOCK BUILDING.
Saturday, March 13th, 2010THE HANCOCK BUILDING. Bruce Graham’s John Hancock Center is located, as this wikipedia article notes, “on the site of Cap Streeter’s 19th century steamboat shanty. The area is called Streeterville after him, and consists of landfill reclaimed from the lake. (I posted on Streeterville here.) His obituary quotes Graham: “Ask any Americans in Chicago what building they like most in the city. The Hancock Building.” Unfortunately, this site, which I posted on here, is devoted to America’s 150 favorite pieces of architecture, and the Hancock Center didn’t make the list. However, Graham’s Sears Tower comes in #42 on the list, behind two other buildings in Chicago, Wrigley Field (#31) and the Tribune Tower (#38).
