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architecture for hertzian space | varnelis.net

Fascinating essay by Kazys Varnelis, which takes as its jumping off point the potential discrepancy between designing for "hard" stuff (whether factories, industrial production, or ...architecture/buildings) vs. designing for networked stuff and software and mobile technologies. After this initial set-up, Varnelis then quickly goes into describing some very specific site- and urban-intervention type projects that subvert the "hard" aspects of planning & building via software/ new technologies. The former points are not that difficult to address, using predictable interventions and affordances (see my notes/ annotations), but the latter are mind-blowing and difficult to contain within predictability.

Tags: varnelis.net, futurismo, architecture, urban_design, portals on 2008-07-17 -All Annotations (10) -About

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Krushchev promised to outdo the industrial production of the United States within two decades. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had achieved that goal, producing more steel, more cement, more oil, more fertilizer and more pig iron than its Cold War rival. At the same time, however, the USSR utterly missed the revolution in information technologies.
the PC revolution simply never came in a country tied to a paradigm of information centralized under government control.
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- "information centralized under government control" could be corollary to this article's later description of the Windows on the World project, which subverts "information centralized under city planning departments"...?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:37:38
Today, however with the boom on the wane, we ask what does this pursuit of the material have to do with the increasing dominance of immaterial forces in everyday life? Is architecture—much like the Soviet Union in the early 1980s—pursuing the wrong path utterly?
Coinciding with the twin cultural ruptures of the dot.com crash and 9/11, Apple turned toward a studied minimalism, to designs that harkened back more to the Ulm School minimalism of Dieter Rams instead of conjuring a vision of the future. Dispensing with the notion that design is primarily a question of unprecedented form, these devices simply get out of the way so that individuals could use them.
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- "...get out of the way so that individuals could use them" is key, and in good urban buildings this might be matched by buildings that do a good job in how they "meet the street," creating / designing spaces or interactions that are good for people to use, so that it's not about the building as such, but about the user (pedestrian, urban dweller).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:41:44
The iPhone
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- - note that this, like so many other devices crucial to our networked world, is a *handheld* device. See comments/ highlights further down...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:43:09
Compare this to how today’s top architects think of computation in design, using advanced software to make ever-more-complex forms. The only debate seems to be whether these forms should be produced by scripts or whether they should be tweaked by hand to achieve a desired effect. This pursuit becomes an architectural equivalent of Moore’s law as each avant-garde designer tries to outdo the competition with a project previously impossible to build or model. Ultimately such a condition is unsustainable, producing research that has little day-to-day application and misses the point of a radically changed urban condition as much as the Soviet Union missed the PC revolution.
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- Immediately at the end of this highlight, Varnelis gets into Hertzian space, but I want to add the following before we leave the concrete world of city streets...
  Remember that iPhones/ iPods, etc. are all about the human hand: these are HANDheld devices. But then, for purposes of design, consider that the human hand is but synecdoche for the human being: these devices, manipulated by our hands, recreate our whole (virtual) being, from here to there. So, while they're designed for my hand, and I use only my hand to interact with them, they transmit, however, all of me (human being), albeit altered digitally, and conveyed in bits and pieces (or bytes and postings).
  
  Architecture might take that aspect of good handheld design: it can design for humans (whole body); it can focus on the street / pedestrian interaction, on how people enter and exit the building, and how people use the building once they're inside; and it can focus on how people perceive the building from the outside (by using biophilic design principles and evolutionary psychology).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:49:37
For beyond corporeal space, we increasingly also live in Hertzian space, a cloud of electromagnetic radiation that bathes us in information.
What might an architecture that actively engaged Hertzian space look like?
Two examples tentatively suggest ways in which urbanism might take into account our radically changed environment. The first of these forces us to confront the invisible forces in our environment. The second proposes to warp the very fabric of the city.
In Osman and Omar Khan’s project “SEEN-Fruits of Our Labor,” the designers crafted an 8’ tall, 4’ wide black acrylic screen, reminiscent of the 2001 monolith or perhaps a massive iPhone (the iPhone was actually released a year after the first installation) and installed it in front of the San Jose Museum of Art.
As the mysterious object incited viewers into photographing it, viewers saw a message that otherwise existed only in Hertzian space, invisible to the eye, on their camera screens. Repeated photographs yielded new messages and, as viewers stood in front of the monument with their cameras, the experience spread virally.
By hiding the messages in plain view, however, the designers subtly expose our own complicit relationship to conditions that we prefer to keep invisible. The project does not so much make visible the invisible as force us to engage in it. We can’t help but ask what mysterious forces—Hertzian or economic—permeate the city?
Robert Sumrell and I produced the second piece, “Windows on the World” at AUDC, an architectural and urban research think-tank in 2005.
We were captivated by an earlier work done in November 1980 entitled “Hole in Space” by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. A “Public Communication Sculpture,” Hole in Space turned two walls, one at Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and another at New York’s Lincoln Center, into two-way portals. Video cameras transmitted images from each site to the other where they were beamed, full size onto walls. Microphones and speakers facilitated audio transmissions.

Hole in Space lasted three nights. During the first night, encounters were casual and accidental. Many of the first visitors did not believe it was live or thought that the ghostly black and white spectres on the wall were actors on a nearby set. Disbelief soon gave way to the creation of a new social space, to the invention of games and the telling of jokes. As word spread, separated friends and family made arrangements to meet through the portals on the second evening. On the third night, after Hole in Space was featured on television news, so many people attempted to participate in this shared human experience that traffic ground to a halt and the experiment was forced to end by the authorities. Incredibly, Galloway and Rabinowitz's project is all but forgotten today.
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- The Kit Galloway/ Sherrie Rabinowitz project, "Hole in Space," could well be an example of something that was too early, too ahead of its time...? Although, what's really interesting is that it was so popular: there was a hunger for it, but at some level the technological infrastructure wasn't there, or was too cumbersome / clunky to allow it to manifest in such a way that people gridlock didn't cause shutdown?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:54:16
AUDC suggested that more than ever we need to radically reconsider the already existing. We accept the scale, setting, and privatization of telematic communication too easily and have ignored the fact that these conditions limit the ways by which we communicate.
Windows on the World proposes to site multiple portals in multiple cities to create a true world planetary network, based not on capital and planning but on chance encounters. Remixing Hole in Space and Guy Debord’s map of the “Naked City,” we propose a telematic dérive, with each portal becoming what the Situationists called a plaque tournante, a center, a place of exchange, a site where ambiance dominates and the power of planners to control our lives can be disrupted.

Windows on the World operates outside of commerce and planning. There is no advertisement. The project is at its strongest when it is by chance. Some portals are temporary, even hidden. Others are improbable or difficult to access. In a back alley in Prague is a portal to a zoo in Sao Paolo. From a dangerous street in the Bronx, a door opens onto the Champs-Elysees. Another portal, in Zurich, looks out onto a busy railroad yard in Rotterdam.

Expenses are relatively small: each portal needs only a video projector, amplifier, speakers, microphone, webcam, computer, and a wireless link. Portals will be operated by groups following the model of, and in conjunction with the free wireless community networks that have sprung up worldwide. Connections can be easily made with free software and public servers.
Eventually portals would be everywhere. The result would be a new city, a psychogeographic remapping of the Earth according to our desires

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Architecture of Change - Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment (PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”)

Ping Magazine interview with Berlin-based Kristin and Lukas Feireiss on their book, _Architecture of Change - sustainability and humanity in the built environment_, regarding the "conscious contradiction in the title — changing and sustaining. But how can I change and sustain at the same time? This challenge is what we try to put across." QUOTE: There’s more to architecture than its simple purpose of shelter or protection, a cast to architecture. However they are creating social environments, urban spaces and the public spaces where people actually interact. So they are the catalyst for social interaction, for society to work in. This is a big topic and we can go from dictatorial architecture to that of social engagement. (...) This book gives a broad overview of what’s possible in sustainable building practices or social practices in architecture. So it ranges from economically speaking very simple, modernistic architecture to very free-flowing, avant-garde forms; from small, private houses to school buildings to skyscrapers, to federal buildings. It’s not restricted at all to one certain section. And secondly it comprises all these ideas that are in a state of research or initiative. UNQUOTE Bonus: gorgeous pictures/ illustrations. Wouldn't mind having a copy of this book!

Tags: pingmag, ping_mag, architecture, sustainability, design on 2008-06-28 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Transmaterial 2: To Redefine Our Physical Environment - PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”

PingMag interview with Blaine Brownell, architect and sustainable materials researcher, whose focus is on green building. "From repurposed materials that act as surrogates, to recombinant ones that fuse several materials into a hybrid, making them stronger and more effective — Blaine points us to products that might shape our physical environment in the future." Materials discussed include self-healing polymers inspired by biological systems, which can automatically heal cracks in buildings, for example. The article includes many other photographs / examples with descriptions of weird and wonderful bioneered and sustainable building materials.

Tags: pingmag, transmaterial, bioneering, biomimicry, architecture, technology, blaine_brownell, sustainable_materials on 2008-05-23 -All Annotations (2) -About

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I studied architecture and practised in the field for over a decade, and I believe this experience has been essential because of my exposure to the exploding number of innovative building materials. During my early years of practice, I had a chance to research materials for a prominent project and was impressed by the challenges as well as opportunities associated with this task. I immediately saw a need to share this — which typically gets archived when a project is completed — with a larger audience of architects, designers, contractors, etc. I began an electronic journal and database, which quickly became popular with a growing audience of material enthusiasts who have given generous feedback. Over time, I have been able to appreciate the critical trajectories of material development as a result.
Although Europe and Japan are largely ahead of the curve, the United States has struggled with the development of sustainable building practices since the softening of the 1970s oil crisis that initiated much of the initial interest in green architecture in this country. I think the primary challenge to sustainable design is the fact that it has been viewed primarily as a long-term intellectual proposition without immediate economic benefit, and the relatively cheap cost of petroleum has made it nearly impossible to convince industries to consider other alternatives.
Very true! Alex Steffen speaks in his Worldchanging — A User’s Guide to the 21st Century of the world’s natural resources as our ecological capital, saying that the ultimate bankruptcy will not land us in a state-run old people’s home ― it’ll land us in a world of deserts, hunger and freaky weather. Can the employment of sustainable materials and energy conservation methods save us from such a harsh reality?

I believe Alex’s prediction is correct at certain scales.
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- - useful qualification: "at certain scales."
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-23 21:45:33
we have to face the discouraging truth about accelerating environmental degradation and act quickly to prevent it. Since buildings comprise roughly half of the problem in terms of energy use and emissions, vastly improved materials, construction methods and energy use should help significantly.
The title is a conflation of the words transformational materiality, and the book is the second volume of materials that have significant potential in shaping the physical environment through design innovation.
Ultraperforming materials attempt to push conventional performance boundaries; multidimensional materials enhance structural depth in order to maximise resources; repurposed materials are surrogates for more precious, conventional resources; recombinant materials are hybrids in which the sum exhibits superior characteristics to individual components; intelligent materials employ creative structural and formal ideas for enhanced environments; transformational materials undergo change based on environmental stimuli; and interfacial materials explore digital processes and fabrication.
The term often used is disruptive technologies — a title that suggests radical departures as opposed to incremental developments. One focus is materials whose behaviour conflicts with our traditional understanding — such as bendable concrete, transparent ceramics, or exfoliated graphite nanoplatelets. Another focus considers materials imbued with biomimetic qualities, like self-healing polymers, strong enviroboard, and active protection system. Another focus considers environmentally remediating materials such as Italcementi, Superabsorber, and Reben. Yet another focus relates to digital fabrication innovations, such as the Ombrae system, intaglio composites, and Erwin Hauer Continua.
You speak of materials and products that have unique phenomenological effects. Explain, please!

What I mean here concerns materials that generate unconventional responses when interacted with — such as the light-bending properties of Sensitile or the colour and pattern-changing qualities of Living Surfaces.

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Home Tweet Home: Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter | Wired Science from Wired.com

Wired Magazine article by Alexis Madrigal on "wired" homes, including http://twitter.com/andy_house, by IBM "master inventor" Andry Stanford-Clark who "rigged up his home to twitter its energy use." See The House That Twitters Its Energy Use by Katie Fehrenbacher (http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/30/the-house-that-twitters-its-energy-use/). Compare to Wired Mag's recent "Peak Water" article, which pointed out that many London households aren't even on water meters, making consumption monitoring impossible. In addition, consider too the New Scientist article, "City road networks grow like biological systems" (4/23/08). All this relates to infrastructure -- and to how we're just beginning to understand it from new angles. (See also Doc Searls' continuing investigation of infrastructure in Linux Journal.)

Tags: twitter, infrastructure, data, architecture, housing, consumption, energy, wired_magazine on 2008-05-02 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (2) -About

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In Defense of Townhouses — Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool)

- great article by Eric de Place on why so many new TH developments are so ugly. As his lede says, "How parking laws make housing expensive. And ugly."

Tags: sightline_daily, seattle, urban_design, urbanplanning, cars, parking, architecture on 2008-05-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Some of the new townhouse developments are pretty bland, and many seem divorced from the street. But why are the designs so flawed?
Here's one explanation. Nearly every townhouse in the city is required by law to provide offstreet parking. Since cars don't fly, the practical effect of the minimum parking regulations is that each and every townhouse has a garage on the bottom floor. And these garages are often the prime culprit in walling off the townhouses from the street, and of sending the residents upstairs.
because the garages are small and the driveways are tight, the residents who have cars often end up parking on the street anyway. All this puts city planners in a lose-lose situation.
One obvious solution would be to strip out the parking requirements, which would revolutionize the design possibilities. But so far, the city's modest attempts to remove minimum parking mandates in a few urban areas have been greeted with howls of protest from angry mobs wielding pitchforks and torches.
Contrary to the screeching of some neighborhood activists, the reason that townhouses are sprouting up everywhere is not because developers are part of a notorious cabal dedicated to ruining Seattle's aesthetics. No, the reason is because people want to buy them.
Not only are single-family homes about 25 percent more expensive, on average, but the single-family homes are more often older, requiring expensive fixes and upkeep. (Believe me, I know). Meanwhile the townhouses are sparkling new, very energy efficient, and often within walking distance of services and transit. As a result, the true price differential is much greater than the sale prices suggest.
But now there's a push to subject townhouses to more extensive permitting, increased design scrutiny, and more neighborhood input. And while those may or may not be wise public policy decisions, they are precisely the sort of regulations that -- bit by bit -- increase the price of housing.
Another possibility is simply to downzone neighborhoods, so that it's illegal to build townhouses. But that kind of supply-side restriction -- already common throughout much of Seattle's land-base -- is likely one big contributing factor to unaffordable housing.
minimum parking requirements -- the ones that foul up townhouse design -- they may also make the townhouses more expensive. In fact, it's been estimated that parking requirements can add tens of thousands to the price of a condo, and it's fair to think that a similar price hit happens with townhouses.
And free parking is ugly too.

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New Urbanists Point the Way Forward by Catesby Leigh, City Journal 18 April 2008

"The New Urbanism and suburban sprawl have something in common: they’re uncool. New Urbanism is uncool because it is basically traditional; modernism is still the thing in architecture, notes Andrés Duany, the most influential New Urbanist." For some reason, City Journal is impossible to annotate (neither highlights and consequently "stickies" work), which is too bad. Some good ideas in this article, but I can't mark it up.

Tags: urbanism, new_urbanism, suburbia, sprawl, smartgrowth, density, modernism, architecture, style, city_journal on 2008-04-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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"Bay Street is awash in banality" by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

Christopher Hume goes after banal architecture, specifically the evil banality of non-descript, visually insulting high-rises of certain Toronto areas. (Note: I highlighted the entire article to have as a record, in case the link decays.)

Tags: cities, architecture, christopher_hume, toronto, critique on 2008-04-07 -All Annotations (6) -About

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E
very generation looks back and sees evidence of a time when everything was better. It may not be true, but in this regard we are no exception.
Still, it's hard to wander around this city and not become convinced that the quality of architecture has deteriorated badly in recent decades. That's not to say there aren't spectacular things being built; it's more that the level of design of the non-landmarks, the background buildings, of the urban fabric has never been worse.
Perhaps it's that only the best of the past survives, but by contrast the bulk of work done by architects today is appalling. Let's be honest: Most people dislike contemporary architecture passionately and often for good reason.
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- True, at some point you get sucked into nostalgia -- but there's no denying that the illustration for this article shows "commie block" architecture at its worst, a sort of computer-generated churning out of floor plates, and a totally graceless "meeting the street" kind of interaction. The buildings just scream "fast & cheap" and "fuck you," too.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-07 05:21:02
Bay St. is as good a place as any to see firsthand how this profession has lapsed into banality. Starting at Bay and Queen St., of course, we have two of the most distinguished buildings in Toronto – New and Old City Hall – but by the time we reach Dundas St. a couple of blocks north, the landscape has devolved into one of architectural mediocrity and civic indifference. By the time Bay meets Gerrard St., it has become a contemporary wasteland, the kind of downtown neighbourhood desirable for everything but what it has become.
The template here is the tower sitting on a base with a canopy at grade. Nothing wrong with that, but it's surprising how something so simple and straightforward can be messed up in so many different ways. For the most part, the architecture here is artless and devoid of any spark of imagination. It is clumsy, dull and apparently built by architects and developers who couldn't care less. The materials are cheap, the façades monotonous and the results deadly.
Interestingly, this same culture of indifference applies to corporate, institutional and residential buildings. The last remnant of architectural self-respect comes in the form of a row of two-storey houses that extend west from Bay on the north side of Gerrard. These aren't fancy structures, but they were clearly conceived with something larger in mind, namely the city and the idea it represents, civilization itself.
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- Ah, the resonance of Richard Sennett and Jane Jacobs, clearly. Well, it seems that architects (or the developers that hire them) don't necessarily read.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-07 05:23:09
To a great many contemporary architects, this must seem precious and all rather beside the point. Their job is to deliver their client's bidding as cheaply and painlessly as possible, and to hell with the rest.
And the city, why should they worry about that, it's not their concern?
Condo critic

THE LIBERTIES, 717 BAY ST.: This nasty slab sums up the ethos of a generation of architects that may be well trained, but was certainly poorly educated.
There isn't a single element of this complex here that engages us at any level; more disturbing, there wasn't meant to be.
It comes to us as one of those poor architectural creations unloved by those who gave it birth. Its justification is strictly an economic one.
Indeed, architecture here involves little more than a series of mechanical calculations, the sort of things a machine could do – and probably better.
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- - exactly: this is what I meant by my comment above. (Over?)-reliance on CAD (computer aided design) produces monsters.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-04-07 05:25:08
The miserable green metal columns that support the glass canopy clutter the sidewalk and the building. You just want to get past it as fast as possible.
The frontage on Bay and Gerrard Sts. has been broken up into a series of bays that reach up from a four-storey base.
The bricks are beige and the results aren't pretty.
GRADE: D
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Email us at condocritic@thestar.ca

Videos (and slides) of keynotes available - The Mobile City » Blog Archive »

Michiel de Lange posted keynotes and slides online from the recent Mobile City conference.

Tags: mobile_city, reference, locative_media, video, cities, architecture on 2008-04-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

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"Star Cities: The World's Best-Known Architects are Turning to Planning" by Joan Ockman - Architect Online

"Joan Ockman asks: Is a new form of urbanism emerging?" "THE MID-TO LATE ‘90S saw the realization of several colossal redevelopment projects in which superstar architects were called upon to supply window dressing for the transformation of dysfunctional urban districts into tourist and consumer meccas, from Times Square in Manhattan to Potsdam Square in Berlin. But it was the triumphal opening of Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in late 1997 that appeared, to architects, nothing short of a miracle. Gehry not only delivered a more optimistic, less intellectualized, and visually ravishing vision of architecture's potential and one, moreover, that innovatively integrated but was not entirely determined by new technologies; against all odds, he showed that it was possible to regenerate an entire city with nothing more nor less than a single, singular building." This is an important article that has some specific relevance also for my concerns around the praxis of a local architect here in Victoria who thinks he can "envision" a certain kind of urbanism (low-rise) for this city. Should an architect be an urban planner? Can s/he be good at both? Ockham's article suggests it ain't necessarily so.

Tags: architecture, bilbao_effect, joan_ockman, starchitecture, urbanplanning on 2008-03-30 -All Annotations (6) -About

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The first glimmer of real consciousness among architects concerning the inevitability of a new scale of architectural operations came in the early 1990s, when Rem Koolhaas, caused to rethink his worldview by his commission to design a new city center for Lille, France—an assignment that entailed a massive and apparently traumatic (for him) expansion of his previously modest-sized practice—came to reflect on “the problem of bigness.” Koolhaas shrewdly grasped that the global reorganization, expansion, and consolidation of late 20th century capital implied the emergence of a commensurate form of architecture. He envisaged an architecture of bigness more akin to the complexity and unscriptedness of the city, however, than to Architecture with a capital “A.” Bigness, as Koolhaas theorized in his book S,M,L,XL, required a giving up of “architecture's compulsive need to decide and determine” and a “surrender to technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers; to politics; to others.” However much of a historical symptom, or pragmatic rationalization, this theory was in itself (especially in the case of a personality as controlling as Koolhaas), there is no doubt that it created an irreconcilable contradiction for architects: between design and nondesign; form and formlessness; heroic monumentality and sheer, dumb size.
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- - scalability matters, and has an effect...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-30 05:00:19
“the disconnect between Bilbao the brand and Bilbao the city” remains palpable. Moreover, a surfeit of “icon buildings,” however creative and well-designed, especially in cities that have little else visually to recommend them, runs the risk of engendering architectural cacophony and ennui. In the case of Rotterdam, a Dutch city that has become a veritable architectural theme park with prominent contributions by Foster, Helmut Jahn, Renzo Piano, Wiel Arets, Ben van Berkel, and others, the skyline from certain viewpoints takes on the quality of a surrealist montage. If the icon derives both its logic and its energy from its uniqueness and difference from its surroundings, then its proliferation can only cancel the effect.
In this context, the current trend toward rebranding celebrity architects as planners appears as both an evolution of the Bilbao effect, expanded to a new scale, and also a departure from it.
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- - oh gawd, "rebranding celebrity [sic] architects as planners"... shades of local small-pond "celeb" FdA, who thinks he can pontificate on planning Victoria BC as a lowrise European capital... That's where it must come from! Holy cow, it's the Rem-effect...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-30 05:04:41
Yet perhaps the fundamental question remains what the relationship really is between architecture and urban planning. Are these two disciplines—one traditionally focused on the object and the other on the fabric—part of a continuum, or are they, in fact, opposites? Apart from the different skill sets they require, do they also involve different mindsets? In the last century, most of the acknowledged “masters,” from Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Oscar Niemeyer, Louis Kahn, and Philip Johnson, aspired to wear both hats, although only in a handful of exceptional cases did these architects succeed in realizing their largest schemes, and then not without contradiction. Gehry's dilemma of foreground versus background buildings is not a new problem for the architect, nor can it be dismissed so easily.
The extrapolation of the logic of the circumscribed object-building to the scale of the city has tended to produce the totalizing effect of the “continuous monument”—Niemeyer in Brasilia—while the absorption of the primarily symbolic and representational building into the larger urban order threatened to dilute its impact. As the critic Alan Colquhoun pointed out apropos of the irreconcilable difference between Le Corbusier's architecture and urbanism of the 1920s, the “Corbusian city seems to lack any strategy by which representational buildings could continue to exist”; the “very qualities of discreteness, difference, and lack of continuity that would make it possible for his buildings to fulfill their larger signifying ambitions” are compromised once they are turned into “a fragment of urban tissue.” Similarly, if Mies' Seagram Building and Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House changed the direction of architecture in the 1950s, they are still best appreciated against the backdrop of the more banal buildings on Park Avenue by the developer firm of Emery Roth, which, as Ada Louise Huxtable once observed, was ultimately responsible for changing the face of Manhattan.
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- - think this through to its logical conclusions and you might ...well, conclude, that we're in deep dung...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-30 05:07:26
THE DISCIPLINE OF URBAN DESIGN that emerged in the 1960s was, as already suggested, a reaction to the hubris of modernist master planning, yet the New Urbanism's pedestrian-scaled townscapes punctuated by static civic monuments have hardly been less doctrinaire in their imposition of an overall formal order (notwithstanding the rhetoric of community and pluralism dissembling their basic strategy of standardized diversity). In contrast, the recent urbanism is computer-driven and emphasizes fluid connectivities, organic or self-organizing urban processes, and network thinking. (For a thoughtful overview of the field, see David Grahame Shane's recent book, Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory.) In the hands—or on the screens—of many of the vanguard designers today, the urban aesthetic tends to be characterized by topologically distorted surfaces, giant landforms inspired by 1960s and ‘70s earth art, the literalization of map vectors, and the like. Yet for all the new formal and technological sophistication, the aphasia between architecture and urbanism remains unresolved. In the case of Peter Eisenman's City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, for example, a 173-acre project whose first phase is under construction, it's all or nothing: Rather than the antiformalism of Koolhaas, everything urban has become architecture.
If all these issues raise profound questions for both public policy and the culture of architecture, there is, finally, the matter of the desirability of having a single architect put his or her stamp on such a wide swath of our everyday landscape. Roland Barthes wrote of the Eiffel Tower that the only way to get away from its dominating presence in Paris was to be on top of it looking out. If not just the museum and the office tower but also the corner grocery and the street lamp are designed by Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, will we become true prisoners of architecture?

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Seattle's historic contradictions - Crosscut Seattle -

Sparked in part by the designation of a "googie" (a Denny's diner) as a heritage landmark structure (a designation that the deep-pocketed owner, the Benaroya company, is going to fight in court), Berger reports on subsequent repercussions and discussions among "representatives from the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, Historic Seattle, the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, and others." The comments thread is pretty interesting, too, and there are parallels to what Victoria is facing in its considerations around "landmarking" modern buildings.

Tags: architecture, crosscut, heritage, historic_preservation, knute_berger, seattle on 2008-03-26 -All Annotations (2) -About

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Skolnik argues for a major revamp of historic preservation in Seattle. He is asking the city to appoint a citizen's task force to study the landmark processes and wants a moratorium on all landmark nominations and designations until they report. He believes the process needs to be more open, voluntary, incentive-driven, and re-organized to better represent the interests of property owners and developers. If not, he fears a backlash that could undo decades of preservation work.
Perhaps most infuriating to preservationists, he has said the current process results in property takings, implying Seattle's rules aren't simply misapplied, but illegal. His critique goes to the foundations of a system that has been at work in Seattle for decades. As it is, he says the process is "victimizing property owners." The debate is whether landmarking should be voluntary, or regulatory, like zoning.
Defenders of the current system are equally adamant. Larry Kreisman of Historic Seattle argued that the ordinance was established with "great wisdom" and said that if Seattle only had voluntary landmarking, "the city would have lost some of its most important vestiges of city life," meaning places like the Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. And Historic Seattle's Pete Mills said the landmark law was "One of the few gems that allows us to preserve what's important in the city."
Linda Larson, a former Landmarks Board appointee from the Charles Royer years and a longtime library trustee, emphasized that historic preservation is "a core value of the people of the city." Everyone seemed to agree on that.
Stepping back a bit, both Skolnik and preservationists make thoughtful points. Skolnik worries that the preservation process is out of touch with regular folks. He says that after too many years, the city's preservation office is another entrenched bureaucracy that is running rough-shod over people. He says for a property owner who opposes the landmarking of their building, it may cost as much as $100,000 to fully fight through the appeals process. Most don't have the money to fight a designation and give in. Very few, like the Benaroya Company, have the money to take a further step and sue, which is why their lawsuit over the landmark designation of the Ballard Manning's/Denny's diner is unusual. Skolnik says "I'm a believer that preservation should be a positive process for everyone."
Landmark proponents say the reason there have been so few lawsuits over the years is that the process does work, in part because it is selective. Architect Susan Boyle, one of the busiest preservation consultants in town, told the committee that she has prepared at least 100 landmark nominations and that 60% of them were successful, 40% failed. That, she said, showed the board is very discerning. And Karen Gordon pointed out that in the city's controversial survey of downtown buildings, they looked at 387 that were old enough to be eligible as landmarks (built before 1966), and determined that 45% were clearly not of landmark quality. In other words, those owners are now off the hook. The city only proactively nominated 37 structures and identified scores of others that are maybes.
"'The greenest building is one that's already built.'" Recycling buildings, says Peter Steinbrueck, is the ultimate in sustainability.
The area of conflicting policies poses a bigger problem for the city council and the Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods committee as it looks ahead to possible changes in the city's development rules and comprehensive plan in the year ahead. How do you manage all the moving parts of a complex city yet keep the contradictions to a minimum?
Skolnik is right that landmarking can't do it all, and shouldn't. Steinbrueck is correct that the city we love won't survive if the rules don't have teeth.
mhays
The general population supports preservation of what they consider historic: brick and stone buildings from the 30s or before. They don't support preservation of modern buildings unless they're especially cool in some way, like the Science Center's arches. An office building built in the 50s or 60s? That's just another box.

The AIA did a national survey of the general public a year ago. They asked people to look at a long series of photos and rate the buildings in them. The list was massively skewed toward older buildings. This was an utter shock to many architects. In Architectural Record and elsewhere they came up with all sorts of lame excuses. For example, the older buildings had been around long enough to grow on people...as if a building from the 60s hadn't had ample chance to do the same. They refused to believe that people like older buildings more.
Codifying what a preservation board should use as criteria seems impossible. Americans spend millions every year to visit European cities that have preserved and even rebuilt ancient buildings. They eat in Cafe’s in 500 yr. old buildings. Tourists like old stuff and pay dearly for the privilege.

In attempting to render some judgement as to what a historic building might be leads us to ponder still another abstraction. Should appearance be be a major criteria for deciding what buildings should be preserved and which should be replaced with something new? It seems hard to overlook what the building under consideration was used for. Did things of value to our culture happen there? How did it serve those who occupied the building? Were important decisions made there? Did it serve just a few, or many, over it’s lifetime? Did it in some way symbolize something good about the American culture? Did it open it’s doors to all or just a select few who could afford it? Could it be used again to serve in the same way?

An even greater abstraction that must be considered is what would replace it? Would the replacement be just for profit, just one more new building with unaffordable rents built with sub-prime loans?

In our struggle to assign values to things I’m reminded of a comment made by a friend as we noticed an older little house with with a MUP. board in front. It would be torn down and replaced with 4 new townhouses. The friend commented that this trash house was a tear down. Going through my mind was that it was almost exactly like the converted two car garage I lived in for years with my mother after my dad died. It was warm and dry and it was home to me. They used to call it affordable housing.
Add Sticky Note
- - this speaks to the "embodied energies" within/of "heritage"...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-03-26 04:12:11

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"Saint Brad" by Andrew Blum (Metropolis Magazine)

As I don't follow celebrity news, I had no idea that Brad Pitt is a "design junkie" or a pivotal mover-and-shaker in the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. (I barely know that Pitt and another actress -- Angelina Jolie? -- are linked/married/ or something... d'oh... ) Andrew Blum's article shines a good light (good as in "kind" and "illuminating") on Pitt's efforts, as embodied in the non-profit he started called "Make It Right" (MIR). And it does an excellent job educating me on the bizarre, yet potentially wonderful, nexus of pop culture/ money/ starchitecture momentum that Pitt has engineered. The list of star architects makes my jaw drop; Blum discusses their efforts, and doesn't hesitate to poiint out where some of them go wrong (and others get it right). As Blum puts it, "If Pitt can pull this off, he will have transformed a swath of the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood symbolic of everything rotten in America, into one of the world’s most design-intensive sustainable communities." The article is well-illustrated (Blum's blog doesn't have the illustrations, but this link to Metropolis Magazine does).

Tags: andrew_blum, architecture, brad_pitt, make_it_right_project, metropolis_magazine, new_orleans, rebuilding, urbanplanning on 2008-03-23 -All Annotations (2) -About

more fromwww.metropolismag.com

Pitt’s new nonprofit, Make It Right, wants to help them “get a house” by providing the difference between their assets and the cost of rebuilding. The catch was that they had to choose one of the sustainable designs by 13 different architects—an amazing list that included Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, Shigeru Ban, and Kieran Timberlake.
Are you bringing these architects here, I asked, because you enjoy working with them? “That’s one of the benefits certainly, but it’s not the driving factor.” So why do it? Why bring not just architects here but some of the world’s best? “I’ll tell you why,” Pitt said, leaning forward and rubbing his hands together. “Because these people suffered a horrific event, and truthfully great injustice in the aftermath, and they’re still suffering that injustice.



So what are you going to follow that injustice with? Crap houses with toxic materials and appliances that run up their electricity bills and may lead to a foreclosure? I mean, really. This to me is a social-justice issue. And to create something that’s equitable and fair and has respect and provides dignity for the family within is absolutely essential to rebuilding here.”
Since when do movie stars have a better sense of architecture’s possibility than most architects? Post-Katrina New Orleans—like post-9/11 Ground Zero—was supposed to be a moment when architecture would prove its relevance. Instead, architects and planners came in like the cavalry, full of expert opinions about what New Orleans should look like and where it should (or more to the point, shouldn’t) be rebuilt. The result was that rather than providing houses, they seemed—in the name of good planning—to be taking them away.
Architecture has always had trouble connecting with the masses. There’s that famous, perhaps apocryphal, statistic—architects design two percent of American homes—and the bald fact of the contemporary American landscape, with its big-box stores, chain restaurants, and bland condominiums.