The Babble/On Project

Praying for the Angels

2007-01-11T01:36:00.000-05:00

So it looks like Broken Angel will continue to stand. The Times is reporting that the efforts of architecture students and faculty at Pratt, Congresswoman Laetitia James, Dave Chappelle and most importantly, a crafty condo developer have all paid off. The current owners have partnered with a developer to turn most of the building into new condos, though they will retain a living space and studio in the building, presumably near the top. Also, it appears that they're going to have to dismantle the structure on the roof, which was the source of most of the building code violations. Good news, I think.

Why Not Cathedrals?

2007-01-10T22:00:00.000-05:00

I took an unplanned one-month absence during the holidays, due to travel, shopping and socializing, but I should be back regularly now, or at least as regular as I've ever been.

The NY Times ran an article recently about the new downtown transit hub they're building, which I think is a great idea. If you've ever tried to transfer from a 5 train to a J train at Broadway/Fulton/Nassau/Timbuktu, then you probably agree that the place is a mess. The new station will be ambitious and all-inclusive, and will not only clean up the existing connections between the J/M/Z, A/C, 4/5 amd 2/3 lines, but will also connect to the nearby R/W line and the new Calatrava PATH station at the former World Trade Center site. Also, I believe that the Airtrain from JFK will eventually push across the rest of Brookly and the E. River to terminate here. The Times put together a nice interactive graphic of the site, showing how people would make connections in the station. I've pinched a nice elevation from it for you to take a look at.

But of course anything this big is going to cause controversy, especially in downtown Manhattan. The sticking point in this case is the large conical atrium that will extend up above ground level at Broadway and Fulton and will serve as the focal point of the whole complex. The original design called for a big seashell shape made entirely of glass that would allow light to pour down into the station, which just sounds great.

But not everyone agrees. Some people think that the atrium structure was unnecessary and expensive, and should be eliminated in the interest of saving money. As one board member put it, "It's not like we're building cathedrals here."

Well, I agree. I love cathedrals, but you know what? Nobody uses cathedrals anymore. They used to be the focus of public life, but nowadays church attendance is down and we're essentially a secular society, and a more diverse one. Transit hubs come about as close to a universal gathering place as we get these days, and it doesn't seem ridiculous to me that if you're going to drop $700 million on a new transit center, you might as well make sure it looks good.

Aesthetics are certainly secondary to concerns about pure functionality, but a major access point to the city should say something about this city, should present a confident and friendly image to visitors and be a point of pride for residents and commuters. Clothes and the paint on your house are both aesthetic after all, and you wouldn't catch many people in successful positions who think that these should be neglected just to save a few bucks. Image does matter, and affects how people feel about their city and themselves.

I'm reminded of the quote by the architecture critic Vincent Scully about how the new (and current) Penn Station compared to the magnificent Beaux Arts building that was leveled to make Madison Square Garden: "One entered the city like a god, one scuttles in now like a rat."

The destruction of Penn Station is credited with starting the historic preservation movement, which was able to prevent Grand Central from suffering a similar fate. And thanks to several decades of greater awareness, the mistakes made at Penn Station are getting partially rectified, with the plans for the Farley Post Office to be reconstruted to serve as the new Penn Station, restoring a little dignity to many people's first glimpse of Manhattan.

And at the end of the day, both sides reached a compromise over the atrium for the downtown transit hub as well. Instead of an all-glass seashell, it will be a metal cone instead, with a skylight at the top and a system of mirrors for bringing light down into the atrium. Maybe not ideal, but certainly a solution that seems reasonable.

Brokedown Palace

2006-12-08T17:30:00.000-05:00

If you happened to catch Dave Chappelle's excellent Block Party movie, then you probably know about the bizarre little architectural fantasy known as Broken Angel, lying on strange little L-shaped block in the Ft. Greene/Clinton Hill/Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn.

Well, apparently it's been condemned by the City and they're going to hold a hearing to determine whethere to tear down. There's already a small public outcry and a movement to save it, but I'm not sure if there will be time to act.

I think it's an interesting structure with an intersting story, and I would rather have it around than not, but from the way it's been constructed and the fact that they had a fire recently, I'm sort of inclined to believe the City on this one. If it's dangerous, it needs to come down. It's not particularly historic, and I imagine it will take a lot of money to fix, especially considering it was never fully fixed to begin with.

So I'm interested enough to post below the call to arms I received in my inbox yesterday, but not so interested that I think I will personally take a stand. But you know, feel free.

*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*

Dear friends,

Hopefully you are already aware of "Broken Angel" the invaluable, totally unique architectural treasure at 4 Downing St. at Quincy, on the edge of Clinton Hill. Seeing it will put a smile on anyone's face, and it is prominent in the film Dave Chappelle's Block Party, which was made in its cul de sac. Artists Arthur and Cynthia Wood bought the old Brooklyn Trolley building, which was then just a single story shell, in the 1970s and have been transforming it ever since, adding towers and turrets and found art objects and colors. It is a residence unlike any other, although the house on the old The Addams Family TV show or movie is perhaps an approximation. If you have never seen Broken Angel, or have not seen it recently, go there ASAP. Sadly, it may not be there much longer.

There was a small fire of unknown cause in Broken Angel two months ago. Damage was minor and Cynthia and Arthur were not harmed. However, the Department of Buildings came in, declared the structure unsafe and evicted Arthur and Cynthia, making them homeless.

I just returned from a meeting with Arthur and Cynthia in the office of NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL Member Letitia James. I learned that there will be a hearing before Judge Sylvia Hinds-Radix of State Supreme Court at 360 Adams St. in downtown Brooklyn 11:30am Thursday, Dec. 14. It does appear that DOB is seeking legal authorization to demolish Broken Angel, perhaps as soon as possible. While no one is claiming Broken Angel is in full compliance with all NYC building regulations, it has stood safely for three decades and, even after the small, quickly extinguished fire, is not at risk of either collapsing or damaging nearby structures.

I am contacting you to both make you aware of the imminent danger to this irreplaceable treasure and to ask you to think about what you can do to help preserve it. Professor Brent Porter of Pratt Institute: School of Architecture is generously contributing his time, but right now what would be most helpful would be an expert from a firm such as Robert Silman Associates | Structural Engineers or another respected structural engineering firm who might care so much for Brooklyn that they would be willing to get involved. That would be invaluable in obtaining the legal protection to prevent Broken Angel's possible imminent destruction.

If that can be accomplished, then the next step will be creating a plan for Broken Angel's long term survival. Plans will need to be drawn up to bring it into compliance with regulatory codes while maintaining as much as possible of the unique structure and appearance that make it such a treasure. Once such plans are approved, dedicated contractors who appreciate the structure's value will need to do the work.

Obviously, all of this of this will cost money. Hopefully this email will inspire you to go over to 4 Downing St. and take another look at it. And that you will agree with me that the existence of Broken Angel enhances the quality of life of every New Yorker. If enough imaginative people do so, maybe a plan can be crafted to convert it into a resource that could be used, not just seen, by New Yorkers, and public funds could be made available.

Precedent exists. The City plans to allocate a few million dollars in public funds to purchase a building for Dick Zigun's Coney Island Museum.

This is not a fund raising letter. It is an invitation to join me, one private citizen with no official status, in trying to one little piece of what makes Brooklyn so special. Cynthia and Arthur have no financial resources. They could easily sell Broken Angel, their only asset, to a real estate developer, who would be happy to guarantee their financial security by demolishing it and building million dollar residences in the now cool location. But they are prepared to sacrifice that security to preserve their handiwork. Maybe there will be a time to give money. But right now, how about donating a little thought, a little time? Ask yourself if you know architects and structural engineers you can contact. If enough people care enough to make a few phone calls and send a few emails, maybe we the public can save and preserve a piece of Brooklyn that really is priceless.

Please feel free to respond and ask any questions. I will do my best to answer them.

Neil Feldman, Publisher
Not Only Brooklyn Arts & Events Newsletter,
718.789.3782

Ultramagnetic

2006-12-05T17:30:00.000-05:00

While I failed to mention it last post, Gazprom City reminded me of Magnitogorsk (which means Magic Mountain City in Russian), the city that Stalin ordered to be built from scratch during one of his 5 year plans. The idea was to take an area rich in iron ore, build a city full of processing plants and factories right on top of it and *presto!* -- instant marvel of socialism. They even brought in Ernst May to head up a team of foreign architects to design a linear city in which the factories and housing units would run in two parallel strips, with a greensward between them. The idea is that just like Stalin built the factories near the iron, all the workers would be assigned a living space near the place they where they were to work.

Whatever picture you have in your head right now about how this turned out, the reality was much worse. Stalin was in such a hurry that construction began on the city before May really got out there, so he had to really massacre his plans to conform to the situation as he found it. The result was a really contorted city that was a "rationally designed" city that didn't make any sense. And of course all the people brought in to work were just agrarian peasants who knew nothing about manufacturing. Because the city didn't grow naturally, there were all sorts of infrastructure problems that weren't anticipated, like noxious fumes from factories that always blew right into residential areas. The whole debacle is laid out really well in a book by Stephen Kotkin called "Magnetic Mountain."

Wikipedia says that May built 20 cities for Stalin in 3 years, which, even considering the disasters, seems breathtaking when you consider that it's taken 5 years to even begin building the replacement for the World Trade Center. But I guess that's the bright side of totalitarianism.

P.S. The subject line is a reference to the Ultramagnetic MCs (featuring the inimitable Kool Keith, aka Dr. Octagon), who have a reunion record coming out soon. I'm quite excited.

Picking a date for the Gazprom

2006-11-28T17:24:00.000-05:00

Gazprom, a giant Russian natural gas company, has apparently invited a number of big name architects to come up with ideas for a new complex in St. Petersburg called Gazprom City. Despite the fact that they're part of the Russian government and the biggest company in the country and they don't really have to let anyone know anything about what they're doing, they've gamely decided to post the finalists of the design competition on their website and display the conceptual models at an art museum.

The three above are pretty amazing. I think the middle one is Liebeskind, but I'm not entirely sure. While I don't think it's my favorite (the one that looks like a flame on the left is awfully pretty), there's something about it that really captivates me. How strange would it be to work there? When you're in a regular office building, it's easy to imagine how to get to some other office, but here, you'd really have to know what you were doing. I tend to be good with directions and like the feeling of getting lost or exploring, and I prefer the crazy streets in parts of London to the straigtforward grid of midtown Manhattan, so I like the idea of a building that you could get lost in. And I would love to stand underneath it and look up.

But take a look at this one:

I don't know exactly what is going on here, but it seems like there are five buildings that are connected by some kind of open frame structure, with three levels of park terrace stretching between them. That's so sci-fi I'm getting goosebumps. There's something about the whole thing that puts me off, but I love the concept of making streets and parks in the sky. I'm sure it's a very green building, as well.

The Force better be strong in you, Skywalker

2006-11-16T12:41:00.000-05:00

I have a longer post coming about the High Line in Manhattan (a park being built on a derelict elevated rail line), but here's a nice segue from my posts about the Panorama.

These renderings depict the Skywalk at the soon to be completed Grand Canyon West Resort. I assume that this thing has a pretty wicked anchorage, as it seems like they've taken great pains to make it super strong.

It's the shot below that made me think of the Panorama, although the buildings depicted are their actual size, though of course the Skywalk isn't to scale in this rendering.

Thanks to K for bringing this to my attention.

Future Imperfect

2006-11-04T13:17:00.000-05:00

There's a fun little article in the New York Times today about a design competition sponsored by the History Channel, of all people, challenging architecture teams to imagine what NYC will be like 100 years from now. There are a lot of fun ideas, considering they only had a week to put their presentation together. They range from the extremely plausible (a future Manhattan without cars) to the insultingly ridiculous (all of Manhattan built up to 65 stories with the outer boroughs turned completley into parkland.)

Some of the better ideas sound like a lot of fun, though. One imagined a floating city in the sky above Manhattan, which would become a giant park. Another imagined a bunch of modular units floating in the waterways around the city that could dock where they were needed. This is actually about to really happen, when the Neptune Foundation brings their "Floating Pool" to the city next summer.

The winning idea imagined Manhattan swamped by global warming, so their future city was built up over the newly created canals, no doubt using them in a lot of sustainable and green ways.

I love thinking about the future, and I love the idea of this competition. The teams were only given a week to work on their presentations, and I'm impressed with some of the stuff they came up with.

But of course I can't spend all this time on Manhattan without finding something to say about my beloved Brooklyn, so I'll leave you with this shot of Alexis Rockman's mural "Manifest Destiny" which imagines a waterlogged future version of the Better Borough.

Minoru Threat

2006-10-31T18:40:00.000-05:00

Even though our guide had a major grudge against Robert Moses, he also had plenty of venom for another guy responsible for the New York City skyline, architect Minoru Yamasaki. I only knew one thing about him, but it's a doozy -- he designed the World Trade Center. The story our guide painted was intriguing and tragic -- Yamasaki was a Japanese-American whose buildings were both modern and hapless. His buildings were full of design flaws -- a records building without a sprinkler system, a public housing project so poorly designed that it was torn down almost immediately, his magnum opus (the WTC) unloved and unfinished 20 years after he designed -- all perhaps contributing to his suicide in 1986, 3 years before the WTC was finally completed. This was practically Shakespearean.

So I looked him up that night, and I have to say that our "educator" was a bit misinformed. Yamasaki did not kill himself, but rather died from cancer in 1986. I couldn't find anything on-line about the fire in the records building, but our guide did sort of get it right about the housing project, the Pruitt-Ingoe Houses in St. Louis. It turns out that they were infamously unsuccessful, and were indeed demolished within ten years of going under construction. Apparently, many people point to their demolition as the beginning of post-modern architecture.

And while our guid told us the the WTC wasn't finished by the time Yamasaki died, that's not really true, either. It is true that Tower 7 didn't get finished until 1989, but Yamasaki's original plan was only the two main towers, which were completed in 1977. Still, the WTC really sucked as a pair of buildings, no matter how much a part of the skyline they became or how attached to them New Yorkers became. They were designed along the same modernist lines as the housing projects built by both Yamasaki and Moses -- dense towers with a giant lifeless plaza that nobody used. (It's no surprise that Moses and Yamasaki built this way, as they were both devotees of Grand Puba Modernist, Le Corbusier. The relationship between Corbu and Moses was explored in one of the best plays I've seen, Boozy. See it if you ever get a chance.)

Yamasaki criticized architects who felt they always had to follow the European model of strong, monumental architecture, saying that too many of them "look(ed) with derision upon attempts to build a friendly, more gentle kind of building. ... " Yet Yamasaki did exactly that with the WTC, creating something that seemed almost senselessly enormous and had a hard time attracting occupants even years after it was built.

Unsurprisingly, Yamasaki's story isn't quite the greek tragedy that the QMA guide led us to believe, though it is a very interesting story. He designed a lot of buildings, and while he seems to have had a couple of failures, it's probably unfair to separate him from the crazy modernist times he was living in. And the WTC ended up being one of the most famous buildings in the world while it was around, as much a part of the city fabric as the Empire State Building.

But of course there is a tragedy to this story, even if it isn't Yamasaki's suicide. I've seen bits and pieces about whether flaws in his design contributed to the collapse of the two towers on 9/11, but I haven't seen anything conclusive. It seems unfair to blame him, though, for something that nobody could've imagined happening when he designed it.

Still, it's hard to read Yamasaki's own words about the Twin Towers and not find his (our?) naivete a little hard to take:

"I feel this way about it. World trade means world peace and consequently the World Trade Center buildings in New York ... had a bigger purpose than just to provide room for tenants. The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace ... beyond the compelling need to make this a monument to world peace, the World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find greatness."

— Minoru Yamasaki

Panorama-o-rama

2006-10-28T12:47:00.000-04:00

As you all know (I'm assuming that my 2.3 readers already know me), I like to get out to weird parts of the city on a regular basis. So last weekend I went out with some friends to check out the Korean Harvest Festival at way out in Queens. It wahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifs created out of a swampy dumping ground in the 1930s by Robert Moses, and odds are that even if you're unfamiliar with the park you've seen it on tv more than any other park in NYC, if not the world. That's because inside the park are both Shea Stadium (home of the NY Mets) and the USTA National Tennis Center (home of the US Open). Also, it was the site of the both the 1938 and 1964 World's Fairs. The '38 fair was the reason the park was built, but the one in '64 is the one that left the biggest mark on the park, providing among other things the Unisphere that was featured so prominently in the movie Men In Black.

It's a huge space -- 50% bigger than Central Park -- and is mostly open space used for festivals and athletics. One of my favorite festivals there is the Dragon Boat Festival held every summer, in which people race long dragon-headed boats with a drum-pounding coxswain. There's also chinese food of all sorts, martial arts competitions and lots of Chinese businesses competing for Chinese customers.

Well, the Korean Harvest Festival ended up being pretty fun, and it's alwasy a treat to go to a place in New York and find yourself the only white guy in sight. Still, we blitzed through it pretty quickly and found ourselves at the Unisphere, and decided (at AG's suggestion) to check out the Panorama in the Queens Museum. This ended up being the best idea of the day.

The Panorama is a scale model of the entire city of New York that's about the size of a basketball court. It was built for the '64 Fair and has been updated every ten years or so since then. While we were standing on a balcony admiring it, an educator for the museum asked if we had any questions, and we let him have it. The five of us talked for about an hour about the history and technical details of the panorama, and then about the nature of development in the City.

It turns out that our guide had a bit of an axe to grind with Robert Moses (who you may remember as the hero of the first paragraph), who was responsible for a wide-ranging campaign of "modernizing" the city during the height of his power. Moses is somebody that people have a real love/hate relationship, in that everyone loves the parks he built, but reviles him for his experiments in public housing (he basically created the housing project) and his attempts to make New York a car city. Brooklyn has a special hatred for him, as he contributed to both the ruin of Coney Island's amusement parks and the relocation of the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Moses is too big a subject for a blog entry, and his legacy is still being felt (at work, for example, we're spending a giant chunk of money to correct one of his awful decisions), but you should definitely check him out. He built a ton of Parks, destroyed the Bronx, built a ton of bridges and roads, nearly destroyed Greenwich Village until Jane Jacobs brought him down and changed the way we think about the word progress.

I bring him up though, because the housing projects he built in the city were starkly visible on the Panorama in a way that gave me pause. In the picture below of lower Manhattan, the projects are the red brick structures along the East River on the right side.

They're visible all over the city, and they're always an eyesore. And it's not just because poor folks live in them, it's more that they just don't make sense in the context of the city. Too many people living in a tiny area, with these senseless grassy areas that are unsafe and ill-served for either recreation or aesthetics. Plus, they just serve to make the whole complex even more isolated from shops and restaurants, making them drab and uninviting places to live.

Hadid She Ever!

2006-10-06T17:20:00.000-04:00

I only knew a little about Zaha Hadid before I checked out her solo show at the Guggenheim the other day -- born in Baghdad, first woman to win the Pritzker Prize in 2004, not a lot that's been built, etc. -- so I was unprepared for what I saw.

Basically, what I saw was genius. People toss around 'genius' all the time when they just mean that someone is 'highly skilled', 'very intelligent' or even 'not entirely incompetent', and I'm guilty of this, too. But Zaha Hadid is an old school, card-carrying genius. Looking at her show, it struck me that it's true of her in the way it's true of Everest that it's a mountain.

I can see that you're skeptical, so let me try to explain myself.

About half of the show consisted of her paintings, which she doesn't really see as stand-alone works as much as a crucial part of the design process. They're somewhere between design plans and conceptual sketches, although they're way too mind-blowing too work off of and too beautiful to be just sketches.

If you look at this example of a study she did for a new building on Trafalgar Square in London, you'll have a hard time figuring out what's going on.

What you eventually realize is that she's imagined the space from multiple angles and at different times of the day and night, and incorporated all this information into one image. You'd basically have to be a cubist space alien or have a PhD in topology for this to make any sort of sense to you, but it seems to be almost intuitive to her, which I just can't imagine.

But even though they're incredibly complex, almost like theoretical physics, they're also incredibly beautiful. I don't even remember what this one was (and I sure as hell can't tell by looking at it), but it sure is pretty.

Near the top of the Goog they have some really gorgeous models that could be sculpture, and then finally a wall of photographs of her finished work, like the Contemporary Arts Center in Cinncinatti. You can check out some photos on their website, but I wanted to call attention to one detail. She wanted the lobby of the museum to act as a sort of public square, so she has the entrance set back underneath the second floor, pulling you in from the outside. She enhances this effect by continuing the sidewalk into the lobby in what she calles a sort of 'urban carpet' effect. But the real kicker is that the sidewalk just flows across the lobby and then becomes the back wall of the museum, as you can see in the photo below.

Maybe this doesn't seem as awesome to you as it does to me, but it just seems to be even more evidence that she just doesn't have any boundaries in her mind when it comes to thinking about space. I think that she builds a structure in her head, then turns it around, torques it, twists it, moves it through space and time, looking for ways to make it work better or be more interesting, or finding problems with it that you couldn't see otherwise.

I'm a smart guy, and I like to tell myself that there's no subject that I couldn't understand if I studied it for a while, even if I couldn't become an expert. And I think I could become an architect if I wanted to. But what Hadid does just seems like something that my brain wasn't built to do. Maybe that quality, not of being better than others, but of having an ability that nobody else has, is the real meaning of genius.

Corridors of Powerlessness

2005-10-20T23:30:00.000-04:00

Thanks to my friend Dave for calling my attention to this short review of Deyan Sudjic's new book, The Edifice Complex.

Apparently, the book makes the case that most significant architecture is built by the people in power because they're the only ones who can afford to build it. Moreover, they build these buildings with the primary goal of extending their power and scaring the bejeezus out of the common folks.

The reviewer points out that if that's the main goal of most architecture (at least the historical stuff and the corporate/government buildings of today), it doesn't do a very good job, considering that many major buildings seem to be built as a company or government is about to crash and burn.

It kinda makes me want to read the book, but after I've read a review by someone who seems to have the author's number, it makes it feel a little pointless. Or maybe it's more like it makes me feel like I'm joining the other kids on the playground in making fun of the kid whose pants just fell down.

O Lost

2005-09-26T13:55:00.000-04:00

I know that I said I would post the rest of my Asheville pics, but I had some severe problems with Blogger this weekend. For some reason it wasn't uploading images or publishing my post. I'm hoping it was just a problem with the laptop I was using, so I'm sending this one out from work to test everything out.

Anyway, I typed out a long post with the rest of my pictures only to lose it completely when I tried to publish, which was thoroughly disheartening. Anyone who's typed out a long email and had their webmail session time out before they could send it knows the reluctance I feel in reconstructing my lost missive.

But anyway, the title of this post is the original title to Thomas Wolfe's awesome novel "Look Homeward, Angel." The great Max Perkins allegedly edited down a huge and unweildy manuscript into a masterpiece, but more recently the original manuscript was published and seems to give evidence that Perkins wasn't as necessary as the stories would lead you to believe.

LHA was one of my favorite books when I read it in high school, and it is appropos to my blog post because not only is Thomas Wolfe from Asheville, but the town of Altamont in which the novel takes place is unmistakably the Asheville of Wolfe's youth. You can even walk around town and find the boarding house his mom owned and his dad's cemetery monument shop, both of which feature prominently in the book. Just another thing that I love about Asheville but which didn't make it into my once and future post with the rest of my vacation pics.

Also, I've always loved Wolfe's "O Lost," which is scattered through LHA and was his original title for the book. Another title I love is "All Shook Down," an album by the Replacements that features on it's cover a wet dog on deserted street.

Slack

2005-09-22T20:30:00.000-04:00

I can't believe it's been a couple of weeks since I posted. I've been so busy since I got back from vacation that I didn't really have time to blog, and this week I've been sick and have mostly just been laying around being miserable. However, I don't want to let this thing lapse too long, so here are the promised pictures from Asheville (or as K says, "Ashevegas".)*

These pictures are extremely low quality, as they were taken on a cell phone by an inexperienced photographer (me) who was more concerned with talking with his girlfriend and parents than in getting good shots. Also, hotmail is only allowing me to download them as bitmaps, which may further decrease their usefulness.

If you've never been there, let me tell you that Asheville is a great town. It's way up in the mountains, only a few minutes away from the Blue Ridge Parkway (the headquarters of the parkway is actually located here.) It also has a few colleges scattered around, most notably a branch of the University of North Carolina.

However, the most striking thing about Asheville is it's architecture. As far as I understand it, Asheville was a fairly unremarkable regional center until the late 1800's. Sometime around there, the wealthy began flocking to the area to take advantage of the crisp mountain air as a remedy for their consumption, or tuberculosis, as the vaccine wouldn't be used in the US until after WWII. Many of them came to live in sanitariums (F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife was to die in an Asheville sanitarium fire), but a lot of them built their own homes, and eventually businesses in the area. Because most of these rich folks were from New York, dowtown Asheville is very Art Deco. But honestly, it's not just the art deco style that they copied from New York, as I had spinach dip at a little cafe at the corner of Battery Park Ave. and Wall St., across the street from a big triangular office tower called the Flat Iron Building.

The biggest spender in Asheville George W. Vanderbilt, who decided to go a little further afield (and up the fancypants ladder) to build his house, and modeled his Biltmore Estate on the Chateau de Blois in France, home to several French Kings and briefly, Joan of Arc. Check out the slanted stairwell from the Chateau to see the family resemblance. There is a touch of New York at Biltmore, though, because the grounds were designed by Frederik Law Olmsted designer of both Central Park and Prospect Park, who was basically the father of landscape architecture.

Another famous rich guy in Asheville was E.W. Grove, who built this wicked huge hotel out of big slabs of granite called the Grove Park Inn, which sits on the side of a mountain overlooking Asheville. I've prowled around there when I lived nearby, and it will totally make you feel like you're in the Shining. Very creepy, yet luxurious. As my girlfriend remarked, "the furniture in the bathroom is nicer than the stuff in my own apartment."

Anyway, near the end of his life, Grove decided to build an enormous (for Asheville) building in the heart of downtown that would consist of a large shopping center on the bottom couple of floors that would serve as the base for a tall office tower. Here's an engraved glass panel that shows what it was supposed to look like.

I did say what it was "supposed" to look like because he died before it could be completed. In fact, he died right after they completed the ground level shopping center, so the builders or his kids or whatever just decided to cap things off, and they scrapped the tall tower. What remains is the Grove Arcade, a pretty nifty little mall that looks charmingly massive.

I'll stop here for today, but I'll post some more pictures tomorrow. Promise.

Back to the Drawing Board

2005-09-08T12:30:00.000-04:00

In jr. high there was a girl named Katrina(the only one I've ever known) that I really didn't like. It adds an extra little bit of *yuck* whenever I think of the hurricane and what happened to the Gulf Coast.

Not that I needed any more yuck, of course. You can read any number of bloggers sympathize with or criticize various groups of human beings about the situation they find themselves in or the choices they made during the aftermath of the storm, and I don't really feel like I can add much, but it can't help but be on everyone's mind, including my own.

One of the things that occurred to me today was the enormity of the task of resettling New Orleans. I know there are some who don't want to rebuild it, but I think that we can't help but rebuild it. I know that many of the residents of smaller towns in Mississippi and Louisiana will be forgotten as time passes, like the victims of Floyd in 1999. But losing New Orleans would be too much of a shock for the nation. I think it's somewhat analagous to 9/11 in a way -- if 20 random buildings in 20 cities had been attacked, I don't think we would have the same kind of wrangle about what would replace them. But because the WTC was so iconic, people felt it just had to get replaced by something equally, if not more symbolic.

While there were no terrorists involved in Hurricane Katrina, I think people will feel the same way about New Orleans. You can't just give up on a whole city, especially one so unique and steeped in history.

So what's going to happen? I saw one of the holdouts getting interviewed saying that he wasn't going to leave because he doesn't have any papers for his home and he'll lose everything if he goes. I don't know what he meant by that exactly, but what I think he means is that he doesn't have an official deed to his house or insurance or anything. I'm sure that a lot of those homes in the poorer sections of the city were passed down to children or sold off the books to friends or neighbors to avoid taxes and legal fees.

But even if there were paperwork available for everyone, resettlement will be a mess. Most of those homes were timber framed and will have soaked up a lot of contaminated water making them weak and hazardous to the health of anyone who might want to live there, so they'll have to be torn down. With much of the city levelled and lots of people looking to return, what will they put in to take it's place? Will it be lots of cookie-cutter housing projects? Probably. Undoubtedly Habitat for Humanity will get involved as well.

What I hope is that we'll take this opportunity to bring in some design professionals to take a look at what will be a unique opportunity in the history of the U.S. -- building an entire city from scratch. Naturally, I will offer them my Babble/On plans free of charge, but I'm sure plenty of architects and engineers would jump at the chance to take on the challenge of designing housing for thousands of people in a uniquely-challenging environment.

I will be very interested in seeing how the government, humanitarian organizations and private citizens rise to the challenge of building most of a city from scratch, an urban planners dream.

Rockin' in the Free World

2005-09-08T01:38:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm back from vacationing in the drier parts of the American South, and like Nixon I'm tanned, rested and ready. I had a great time with the family up in Asheville on Thursday, and I took some pictures with my crummy camera phone of the fantastic architecture, which I'll show you tomorrow.

In the meantime, I've posted three tracks from that Cambodian rock music rekkid that I talked about last week. Considering the provenance of these recordings and the uncertain fates of their creators (and the meager size and benevloent disposition of my readership), I doubt that there are significant risks to posting these up, but if the RIAA comes knockin' I'm pulling these down pronto. Get 'em while they're free!

"Track 8" is an awesome bluesy stomper that sound like Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets" with an occasional sweaty James Brown breakdown. I'm willing to bet this guy got ahold of a Screamin' Jay Hawkins record at some point.

There's no need to try to guess what the guys playing on "Track 13" were listening to, as this seems to be a local remake of Them's "Gloria" (what is it with Cambodians and Van Morrison?) I wish I knew if they took as many liberties with it as Patti Smith would a few years later (Buddha was reincarnated for somebody's Karma, but not mine...), but they certainly sound like they mean it.

"Track 15" is typical of the best songs on the compilation in that it features female vox and a slightly haunted melody that soars over the rest of the music. It reminds me a little bit of Ennio Morricone's film work of the same period, particularly "Il Gardenio del Delize." With both songs, I imagine a couple of really groovy foreign spies or vampires (or both!) tooling around in an Aston Martin, draped in slick clothes and Italian sunglasses.

Enjoy the songs, and let me know what you think.

Storm Surge

2005-08-30T20:09:00.000-04:00

Everyone is up to their armpits in Katrina right now, not least of which are the poor unfortunates of the lower Mississippi Delta region caught in the middle of it. The biggest tragedy is of course the loss of life that occurred during the storm's impact and will no doubt increase with the rising flood waters. Almost as tragic is the destruction of people's homes and livelihoods, especially considering how economically tenuous that part of the country is these days.

Far down the list of tragedy is the damage done to many of the beautiful buildings in New Orleans, a city I have yet to see. There's something sad and shocking about seeing your landscape change for the worse, I think, and the presumed loss of many great old structures certainly makes me wish I had gone down with friends a few years back when I had the chance.

I know that many will be restored by their wealthy owners, and no doubt many more will be saved by federal/state emergency funds, but I imagine that in a city as poor as New Orleans many will just be torn down.

A stranger bit of structural damage occurred in Alabama during the storm when an oil rig in dock for repairs was wrenched free of it's moorings and crashed into this suspension bridge.

There's a better picture floating around on the web, but it's copy-protected somehow and I can't post it. That must've been a hell of a thing to see, huh? Like one building crashing into another.

Seeing that reminded me that I had heard somewhere about a floating airport that someone wanted to build. I know that a few congested Asian cities have built airports that either jut out into the harbor or are actually built on artificial islands, but this project for San Diego is just crazy.

The idea is to build a road out from the heart of the city to a floating structure that would act as both an airport and deep water marine terminal. I guess they don't have to worry about tropical storms too much out there, but the whole thing seems a bit dicey to me. Still they make some pretty strong arguments on the website, so who knows?

Just an FYI, I'll be on vacation for a few days in the piney woods of North Cackalacka for a few days, then I'll be back in NYC for a fake-ation for a couple more, so my AutoCAD output will be very light. I'll try to post some southern architectural pics from my trusty cell phone while I'm visiting.

Imitation of Art

2005-08-28T22:37:00.000-04:00

Interesting article in the New York Times on architectural plagiarism. Apparently, architecture wasn't covered by intellectual property law in the U.S. until 1990!

UPDATE! Here's the slide show from the NYTimes if you don't want to subscribe or want to look at this next week.

Office Tower in Marseilles by Zaha Hadid (Left) vs. Airport Lounge Partition by SHoP (Right)

Eyebeam Museum proposals by Thomas Leeser (Left) and Diller & Scofidio (Right, and also the winner)

Art Museum of Western Virginia by Randall Stout (Top) vs. The Guggenheim Bilbao by Frank Gehry Superstar (Bottom)

The One That Didn't Get Away

2005-08-27T12:06:00.000-04:00

Gentle Reader, let my words lift you up out of comfortable reading chair and beckon you to come along with me to faraway Southeast Asia, strife-torn and mysterious, once home to people like me who wanted to build whole cities according to their own specifications (except that they didn't have computers and were rich kings, so they just actually built them.) Here, in the lazy waters of the Mekong River, they pulled this monster out of the water.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a catfish. A 9ft., 650lb. catfish. Look at the size of that monster! It's funny, because there's currently a bit of a dust-up in the southern (catfish-producing) states about whether or not to ban the cheaper and arguably better-tasting Vietnamese catfish from the States after a test revealed some prohibited antibiotics in a few samples. Looking at a picture of what the Leviathan above looked like when cut into steaks, you can see why the more petite domestic model might have reason to be a little nervous.

But SE Asia has been on my mind lately for another reason, namely a compilation of Cambodian popular music from the 1960's and '70's called Cambodia Rocks. It's a winsome collection of garage rock and psychadelic songs performed in the native tongue but obviously inspired by what was going on in America and Britain at the time. I've heard a bunch of '60's rock from South America (Os Mutantes!) and Japan, but this Cambodian stuff was so fantastic and took me completely by surprise. The guitar is edgey and bluesy, and the vocals are really ethereal and affecting.

But as good as the music is, the context in which they were created is pretty mind-blowing. All these huge American G.I.'s come over with transistor radios playing all this rock music, and I imagine that teenagers all over Cambodia must've thought they had just been invaded by rock and roll aliens. I have no idea what they must've thought, but it probably didn't sound like much that they've heard before. I have this record of a neo-traditional Laotian group called the Khac Chi Ensemble, and some of their stuff sounds a bit like rock and roll even though it's recorded on native instruments and they're performing traditional songs, so I'm not sure what the music scene was like, but it still must've been impressive to hear all these snarling guitars and shouting foreigners, all while bombs were blowing up everything.

So there's all these kids learning to play guitar and singing about whatever it is that they're singing about, but really rocking out and it sounds like they're having fun. But then, just as they're putting together all these great songs that could've been hits in the U.S. if they were in English, the nation gets plunged into a brutal civil war and the Khmer Rouge destroy everything associated with modernity and city life. The guitars and presumably the guitarists are all gone. Hauntingly, the record doesn't list any info for who's playing the music, when they were recorded or even what the names of the songs are. I can imagine that somebody must've found a trunk in an attic that wasn't burned, where some kid squirreled away his favorite records and maybe his guitar, hoping that he'd get a chance to play them once again someday.

Imitation of Life

2005-08-24T11:36:00.000-04:00

Legendary video game programmer Sid Meier created a game called Civilization (apparently, the best selling video game series of all time) to which I was hopelessly addicted. The basic premise is that the game begins in the year 4000, B.C. and you the player control the first and only village of one of the major civilizations (Persians, Chinese, Babylonians, but also Sioux, Americans?, Zulus -- it's very multi-multi), which you must then grow into a major empire. The game can be won by blowing everyone else up, but you can also win by getting enough technology to develop space travel or by becoming economically dominant.

The reason the game is so fun to play is because it changes completely every time you play it, and it also has a bizarre tendency to replicate actual historical and contemporary socio-political situations. The amazing thing is that it does this not because the programmers inserted a chunk of code that enacts a script for the Cuban missile crisis, but because the rules that govern gameplay are so well-modeled on real-life economic and political theories that the game becames a crudely accurate world history simulator.

See, Sid Meier hit on an idea that has always captivated me, which is that most complex systems are the result of much simpler rules sets that, once understood, can help to account for things that appear to be random or impossibly complicated. It's the reason that I first majored in physics (an early physics TA once told me that the reason that he switched from pre-med to physics was because pot had destroyed his short-term memory and with physics you can derive almost everything from a few equations instead of having to memorize page after page of names and rules) and then philosophy at school, and it's the reason that I'm so fascinated with neuroscience, and it has a profound effect on the way I see the world and how I behave in it. For example, if I go on a diet I want a couple of simple rules that I can follow (like "don't eat two of everything") rather than trying to deal with figuring out which things have carbs or how many "points" my meal might consist of.

The reason I bring all this up on my blog is because it occurs to me that if I take a piece of terrain, follow the basic rules of architectural design and pay attention to the laws of physics, the construction of my virtual city might bring up some intriguingly real-life situations. In the near term, I know that I'm going to be tempted to make some non-descript, standardized houses and commercial spaces to begin to fill out the city. While I don't have to worry about actual monetary cost, my design time is limited and therefore valuable, and I just don't think that I'll be able to hold myself back from making some generic looking neighborhood before long, just so I can have something that looks like a city instead of a portfolio of eccentricly amateur office towers.

Down the road, though, I can imagine more interesting results. I've already had people suggest design changes in the comments section, so it seems inevitable that I'll end up working on some commissions (for free, of course) for my readers, and I'm sure that people will prefer for their home to be on a particularly nice piece of property or in the most interesting neighborhood around, which seems like it could create some kind of real estate market. Similarly, it seems like there will come a time when I've built a first draft of Babble/On and I'll want to go back and revise it a bit by eliminating some of my clumsy early attempts at design and replacing them with new ideas, probably because they'll be occupying some of the best spots in the city center. Will I want to just destroy the old buildings, or will I have gotten used to the neighborhood looking a certain way? Will my readers have an opinion about saving some of the old buildings? It seems like this might result in something like a historical preservation society of a sort.

Of course, all of this depends on maintaining a readership and actually getting a whole city designed, which means I should get cracking on that cheese building tomorrow and get some new pictures up.

Step Into Cheese

2005-08-22T19:04:00.000-04:00

Here's another quick post of the cheese building. I only had time today to make the cheese holes a little more crisp. I also decided to make the two holes on the edge of the glass tower carry straight on back to enhance the "chunkiness" effect, but I'm thinking it might be better to have the holes wrap around the corners. Also note the hole that acts as a doorway on the front. The radius is 12'.

Cheesey Design

2005-08-20T17:40:00.000-04:00

Perhaps inspired by 30 St. Mary Axe, the building that looks like a gherkin, I have an idea in my head for a big building that looks like swiss cheese. Maybe it will be the headquarters for the Ministry of Cheese in Babble/On. I decided to poke around on line to find some precedents. Here's a link to a little swiss cheese house that looks like it should be used in conjunction with a Monopoly board printed on a giant Triscuit. Then I found this building, which looks like the kind of swiss cheese that classy, jet-setting robots would eat.

Here's a rough sketch of the basic idea. The blue part would be glass and the yellow would be colored concrete or something. I'll probably be working on this for the next week or so, although I'd like to do a fancy modern house also.

The Centre of Attention

2005-08-18T23:15:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend and I were having a spirited debate about the definition of gherkin the other day, which prompted us to turn to the final arbiter of such things, the world wide web. It's strange that this is where I turn for so much information these days, I can't imagine what life was like before it became so commonplace. Where did people get movie times? The newspaper? Really? How did you settle debates about who played the title role in Small Wonder? Books? I know that I'm just begging for someone to post a comment about how they had to walk 2 miles through snow up to their waist just to get the movie times when they were little, but it's amazing how indispensible the internet has become for me in my daily life.

So anyway, we turned to the internet to decide whether I was wrong in claiming that all of those little, bumpy dill pickles I like to eat are called gherkins, or whether some of these were not gherkins, or whether gherkins were some other thing entirely. As I'm sure you'll understand, the internet presented myriad sources supporting every possible side of the argument, so the debate still rages today. The gherkin googling did have at least one positive outcome, however. When I clicked on a link referring to an "erotic gherkin for London skyline" (how could I not?), I discovered that someone had built a huge new building in London since I moved away 4 years ago. It's called the "erotic gherkin" or simply "the gherkin" by many because of it's shape, which is like a pickle -- a cylinder that's tapered at both ends. It's also known as the "Swiss Re" building (the "Re" is short for re-insurance), it's largest tennant, but it's official name is "30 St. Mary Axe" which is also it's address in the financial district in London.

Being such a modern and more importantly, tall building in a city with so few buildings that have either attribute, it's drawn a lot of attention, both good and bad, from the press and the general public.

But tonight I went to a screening of a documentary that shows the horror of what happens when a building gets too much of the bad attention. Of course I'm referring to the twin towers of the World Trade Center that were destroyed in a single act of terrorism in 2001, just before I moved to New York. The documentary is entitled "Inside 9/11" and will be shown on the National Geographic Channel in two parts this weekend. They showed us a 70-minute version of the complete 4-hour program, but even from that I could tell how thoroughly they had reconstructed the events from the latest evidence. The recordings of the terrorists and flight crew aboard the planes are particularly engrossing. There's also quite a bit of backstory, tracing 20 or so years of the history of terrorism in the US and the lives of the perpetrators themselves in particular. There followed a panel discussion as well that was both chilling and informative and (perhaps because it was invite-only) surprisingly free of the pitfalls of most audience Q+A sessions.

I'm not going to try to say anything about whether we should continue to build or live in huge buildings, but I think that it's hard to deny that they end up being imbued with a lot of symbolic meaning. The WTC were seen as the embodiment of a certain sort of capitalist power by both the people that worked in them and tragically, by the terrorists that attacked them. Right now, various interested parties are waging a pretty vigorous debate about what sort of new symbol should be built in their place. Should we focus on remembering the tragedy or on the resilience and defiance of the American people? I think that in the end the developer is just going to ignore everyone and go with whatever makes the most economic sense for him, which seems somewhat appropriate, or at least closest to the original feel of the Towers. At any rate, it seems like whatever gets built there will mean a lot more to people than just a place to work or catch the PATH train. Sometimes a Gherkin isn't just a gherkin.

Rendered Useful

2005-08-16T18:38:00.000-04:00

I've been messing around with rendering the past few days and thought I'd post what pictures of what might be the final state of that building I was working on. For those unfamiliar with the term, "rendering" a computer model means that you add color and texture so that it seems realistic. Because all of this detail can really make the hamsters running on wheels in your computer so tired that they pass out or slip off their furry little mortal coils, you usually assign textures and details to the model using a bunch of commands and dialogue boxes, but don't actually see the result until you hit the "render" button, go out and grab a cup of coffee and then wander back to see the computer display the finished product. Even then, AutoCAD doesn't let you zoom or pan around your drawing once it's rendered -- you have to go back to your more simple model view to do that. While this building only took about 5 seconds to render on my machine, more detailed objects could take hours or even days to render.

I decided to just slap some texture on the building without worrying too much about color schemes or realism, just to get an idea of how it all works. I used a granite sample with two different color schemes to add to the walls and floors. I used a semi-gloss slate blue on the doors, and I made the roof (and the windows, natch) entirely out of glass. Here are front and rear views of the building.

And here's a close-up of the no doubt impossible window I used for the stairwell. The only way it would work is if you used some really strong reinforcement beam along the axis of the granite "eye", and you'd probably have to add a vertical stabilizing beam as well that would run through the middle and become a mullion on both of the windows. It kinda echoes the shape of the roof though, which I like.

Thunder, Lightning Strike!

2005-08-15T17:42:00.000-04:00

I went to the New York City Dragon Boat Festival yesterday, and it was fun but hot, hot, hot. Fortunately, Commissioner Benepe beseached the dragons for some much-needed rain when someone passed him a mic, and boy did those dragons deliver. I've heard that my very own neighborhood, Williamsburg, was especially hard hit, looking like a tornado tore through it. And take a look at this picture, provided by a friend of a friend of a friend.

Just goes to show that those spires are good for something more than beating out the Chrysler Building.

The title of today's post comes from the title of one of the best records of last year, The Go Team's "Thunder, Lightning, Strike" which sounds like the entire 1980's all mashed up into one album. Lot's of old-skool hip-hop sounds mixed up with new-wavey synths and sit-come themes. It works better than it sounds, trust me. Anyway, I saw that they released a tour-only ep in Australia recently, which I was able to procure through the magic of the inter-web. I can't wait for their sophomore sophomoric effort.

Galinsky a Go-Go

2005-08-12T10:49:00.000-04:00

After telling you about the movie Proteus, it got me thinking about My Architect, a documentary about another guy on a mad quest to fill the world with perfect forms, in this case legendary (and legendarily nutty) architect Louis I. Kahn. In addtion to showing some marvelous buildings and a who's who of famous architects singing his praises, the film also exlpores his bizarre family life -- or should I say family lives, as Kahn had three of them. That's right, he maintained three separate sets of wives and children at the same time. One of his sons, Nathaniel, is the writer/director of the film. In the end, though, he died alone in a Penn Station restroom, with nobody at his side. In fact, they couldn't even notify anyone of his death for a while because he had scratched out the address on his passport. Obviously he didn't feel like any one place or family was his true home, but whether this was the result of guilt, arrogance or just a desire not to play favorites, we'll never know.

In a bit of a coincidence, I was on-line recently looking up a famous architecture firm that my office will be working with for the next couple of years (Tod Williams/Billie Tsien) and came across a listing for one of their buildings on Galinsky.com, a website dedicated to exploring great buildings. And they mean explore in more than just the figurative or virtual sense as they give driving directions and other visitor info for each building. Very cool.

The coincidence comes from the fact that one of TW/BT's buildings is a next door neighbor to one of Kahn's out in California. Tying things up into an even tighter bundle, TW/BT's only public New York building is the American Folk Art Museum, located right next door to MoMA, also part of my post about the movie Proteus.

This isn't that impressive, is it?

I'm a big fan of TW/BT and I'm super-duper psyched-up to get a chance to see them at work. And Louis Kahn's buildings took my my breath away when I watched the movie. I recommed checking out their work on-line, in film or in person if you want to see some really great design, or at the very least, design that may influence the work I do for Babble/On.