[< Gallery Home | Latest Images | Top 100 | Submit Picture >]
259587 Pictures
|
<< Previous Picture | Next Picture >>
Description
The Ohio Historical Center is a rare example of Brutalism whose clients still proudly embrace the label... give it up for historians! Granted, this is a hybrid entry. While we do have a nearly windowless box hoisted up in the air, with a forty-foot cantilever supported by frankly revealed concrete beams, there are burgeoning attempts to acknowledge "context" in a loosely-defined sense. Not the context of the immediately site, mind you, which is a vast and featureless tract of leftover land stuck between the highway and the Highway Patrol (see Google Maps)... but some loose idea of "Ohio history," indicative of Byron Ireland's training at Harvard (M.Arch 1958) and in Saarinen's office (1959-61), when both were entertaining loose incorporations of context in surface and form (the "New Formalism" strikes again!) but not, irritatingly, in urbanism or site relationships.
The references given are definitely the kind of things that would get an architectural imagination going in an age of dramatic form-giving - it's a cross-breed of the frontier blockhouse typology, with some idea of a Hopewell Indian Mound. Given that the blockhouses were fortifications built as part of the long-term campaign against America's native population, this is a kind of weird, loaded fusion, but there it is. The cladding, by the way, is tile, intended to evoke historic grain silos - not the abstracted, Egyptoid concrete silos of the Industrial Revolution, which had already inspired so much modernism, but the humble silo of the small-time farmer. That part, at least, works for me, although the double-coding is probably lost on those who don't take the museum tour. (It was arbitrarily closed the day I biked over - never got around to going back for the interior visit, although it looks passably cool.) Most people probably experience this building chiefly as a presence along I-71, where it does stand out strikingly. In the Ohio Historical Society's informative video (see link above), a local sums it up well: "It's certainly... observable." For all that it's a big, lumpy dud sitting in a field, I am, predictably, drawn to this thing. I've seen worse.
Image copyright: Doctor Casino (Addison Godel), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API.
The references given are definitely the kind of things that would get an architectural imagination going in an age of dramatic form-giving - it's a cross-breed of the frontier blockhouse typology, with some idea of a Hopewell Indian Mound. Given that the blockhouses were fortifications built as part of the long-term campaign against America's native population, this is a kind of weird, loaded fusion, but there it is. The cladding, by the way, is tile, intended to evoke historic grain silos - not the abstracted, Egyptoid concrete silos of the Industrial Revolution, which had already inspired so much modernism, but the humble silo of the small-time farmer. That part, at least, works for me, although the double-coding is probably lost on those who don't take the museum tour. (It was arbitrarily closed the day I biked over - never got around to going back for the interior visit, although it looks passably cool.) Most people probably experience this building chiefly as a presence along I-71, where it does stand out strikingly. In the Ohio Historical Society's informative video (see link above), a local sums it up well: "It's certainly... observable." For all that it's a big, lumpy dud sitting in a field, I am, predictably, drawn to this thing. I've seen worse.
Image copyright: Doctor Casino (Addison Godel), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API.
No comments. Why don't you go ahead and post one!
To post comments first you must Register!