Lise Anne Couture

I'm not an overly sentimental person, but in recent years I've obtained books that I read in college and remember fondly. While I haven't gone out of my way to get an issue of SITES or a book by Peter Noever or one by Andreas Papadakis, I've have a hard time passing up books like them when I see them at used bookstores or thrift stores. The same goes for the first monograph on Asymptote, the New York firm of Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, which I came across on the dollar shelves at Book Off.

The main attraction of Architecture at the Interval is one project: the Los Angeles West Coast Gateway, aka the "Steel Cloud." Asymptote won the 1988 competition for a monument to immigration from the Pacific Rim with a dynamic, Deconstructivist structure that would have sat above a freeway, that stereotypical symbol of LA sprawl. Documented primarily through models, which illustrate how eminently buildable the project actually was, unfortunately its construction never came to pass. Looking back at it now, it's amazing the project beat out 149 other designs in what was intended as a competition for an actual monument, not just an ideas competition. (Decking the freeway to build a park seems most realistic.) Asymptote's work, like many other architects on the Deconstructivist bandwagon in the late 1980s and early 1990s, would veer to the curvilinear and fluid, but this early project is still my favorite of theirs.… (meer)