prss release #11

prss release #11
,may 18 2008
the independent paper blog aggregator
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
beauty and waste: more thoughts on space and worship | architecture + morality
much ado about everyblock | serial consign
working with corbusier | archsociety
denounce starchitecture | notes on becoming a famous architect
technology experts to ‘design out crime’ against teenagers | 24dash.com
the last modern architect | new statesman
eisenman’s six point plan | building design
where truces and cease fires grow on trees… | subtopia
quantifying walkable urbanism | agents of urbanism
burnt-out bouwkunde | bye bye bouwkunde
i.
illustration | old architecture in delft
architektur muss brennen, by dennis87 (Delft’s faculty of Architecture on fire.
http://flickr.com/photos/dennis87/2491973652/sizes/o/
www.prss-release.org
1. Beauty and Waste: More
Thoughts on Space and Worship
While watching a television show the other day about bread, I learned of
a simple, but beautiful custom of Jewish bread bakers. While preparing
the traditional Jewish bread Chullah, the baker will tear off a portion
and bake it by itself, or simply throw it away. Traditionally, this was
for the temple priests, offered as a tithe. But the tradition continues
today to act as a sort of sacrifice, a reminder that God provides all that
is needed, and this portion of the bread can, in essence, be wasted.
This expresses very well what is at the core worship…that a component
of waste is helpful in understanding what it’s really about, that it’s
not a business, and that indulgence is, in a tangible way, a wonderful
reminder of all that we have been given.
stood from the paradigm of waste. Yes, waste, as in, a sacrifice. After
all, we agree we’ll only be here for a short time. So let’s enjoy it, and
let’s splurge on our place of worship. Let Wal-Mart keep costs down by
erecting ugly buildings. Let’s tack on another 5 years of a mortgage for
stained glass, stone, flexible spaces and flowing fonts. Let our buildings
speak volumes about our faith, let them say something when our words
cannot. Let our worship be influenced by natural, not artificial light, and
let the space be good for one thing and one thing only: worship.
Of course, there is a dark side to this way of thinking, and as always, we
must find a “happy medium.” I think of Soren Kierkegaard’s critique of
opulent, but spiritually dead churches. I found this quote here:
But in a conservative and efficient culture, waste has come to be seen
as an altogether negative concept. In a culture where the “bottom line”
dictates our thinking and where energy is to be prized, to waste at all
is almost a sign of weakness, or failure. Certainly no church with a
“green” conscious would want to be wasteful. But I’m not talking about
turning up the thermostat or using plastic plates instead of Styrofoam,
but substantial choices about space and aesthetics. We see, for example,
the elevation of the “big box church”, where, even when churches have
money, thoughts of beauty and waste are rarely afforded the architect.
Instead, any space, be it a movie theatre, basketball arena, or shopping
mall, can be converted into a place of worship, even if terribly tacky and
not suited very well to the task. I can hear the head pastor saying, “Hey,
they offered a free six month’s rent and it’ll seat 3,500! Perfect!”
But how can you convince someone that it might be worth creating a
space that’s less than efficient, and that might take years to complete,
not months? I could certainly quote scripture, where Jesus defends a
woman who cleans his feet with costly nard. Surely this text allows the
Church to be “wasteful” when it comes to adoring Christ. And it’s hard
to argue that beautiful spaces help us do such adoring. Yet, this idea is
foreign to many Protestants, who give little regard to aesthetics in lieu of
practicalities like financing, efficiency and multi-use space.
Instead of offering beauty and mystery to its congregants, it replaces
those needs with an emotional experience and preaching that promises
certainty. The spaces used is often more corporate and functional than
beautiful. Indeed, one has to wonder looking at the stage lighting and
drum set surrounded by Plexiglas if beauty ever entered their minds. In
other words, the space need not communicate; we’ll do all the talking.
And talk they do. And talk, and talk, and talk…
But true worship, and its space, I would argue, may best be under-
“Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher-theologian, once described how he went into the great cathedral in Copenhagen and sat
in a cushioned seat and watched as sunlight streamed through stained
glass windows. He saw the pastor, dressed in a velvet robe, take his
place behind the mahogany pulpit, open a gilded Bible, mark it with a
silk marker and read, ‘Jesus said, “If any man be my disciple he must
deny himself, sell whatsoever he has, give to the poor and take up his
cross and follow me.”’ Kierkegaard said, ‘As I looked around the room I
was amazed that nobody was laughing.”
Here, in very few words is the perfect critique of waste for all the wrong
reasons. When visual beauty takes the place of serving one’s neighbor,
the issue has gotten away from us.
But the other extreme offers us problems as well. I’m reminded of a
college friend critiquing the church, saying it was wasteful to even build
a church. God could be worshipped out in the fields just as well. Wasn’t
God in nature? But what about all that wasted nard? This story tells me
that if we waste our treasure correctly, then it’s okay to waste it.
Or in other words, there are ways in which we worship beyond our
feelings and our words; prayers in stone matter, too. Indeed they stand
apart from a world that is looking more and more monolithic, where
big box churches, malls and retail stores blend together all too seamlessly. Funny that when the architecture blends together, so too does the
music, theology, and driving motivations for even existing.
Architecture + Morality
http://architectureandmorality.blogspot.com/2008/05/beauty-and-wastegoals-of-worship.html
by Relievedebtor on May 8, 2008
2. much ado about everyblock
Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several
buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with
street furniture.
Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a
little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we
see?
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud
of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television
broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a
new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete,
open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of
behaviour. The behaviour of the street.
city can provide context about the metabolism of the city around us. So
instead of relying on the investigative perspicacity of local journalists,
a citizen could do a little data-crunching on Everyblock and determine
that violent crime had actually increased in their neighbourhood since
an anti-graffiti program had been instituted by a finger-pointing police
chief who was convinced of a connection between the two phenomena.
This ability to harvest information pertaining to specific “granular
locations” is the strength of Everyblock, a venue which Holovaty has
contextualized as a place where:
...you’ll find out when your local pizza place is inspected, but you
won’t find an analysis of the mayoral budget or Chicago’s bid for the
2016 Olympics (unless they plan to build a stadium near your house).
So maybe we shouldn’t be referring to the “informatized” city as being
composed of bits, or as a data town, perhaps City of Nodes is the most
appropriate description.
The above scenario is an excerpt from Dan Hill’s provocative text, The
Street as Platform, posted on City of Sound earlier this year. In this
meandering commentary, Hill takes a bird’s-eye view of urban space
and storyboards the city as a truly networked environment. In this city
of bits, information pertaining to pedestrian and traffic flows, commercial exchange, infrastructure updates and architectural intelligence is
aggregated, shared and brokered through a range of locative devices and
translated into content across a variety of web services. When considered as a conglomeration of data trajectories, urban space begins to take
on an almost organic character, one with a pulse and homeostasis.
Everyblock has definitely staked a claim somewhere in the no man’s
land between old media and new journalism, but there has been surprisingly little commentary from the urban design and architectural
contingents. Open API cartographic ventures have changed perception
and civic consciousness about the representation of the city—how might
these new data tools change our relationship and awareness of flows of
information through the city? We’ve heard much talk about citizen journalism over the last several years, what about citizen statisticians?
[stephen kieran & james timberlake’s update of le corbusier’s modular
man / from their 2003 text refabricating architecture]
I’ve revisited Dan’s post several times over the past few months and
in doing so I am constantly reminded of Adrian Holovaty’s ambitious
Everyblock project. Everyblock is an urban-aggregator, one which pulls
together numerous streams of data into a unified civic interface. The
system provides a means to sort through the itemized and classified
“news” of the city (the paper trail of building permits, crime reports, lost
and found reports, geotagged photos, etc.) or to explore data spatially
by neighbourhood or district. Launched this past January, Everyblock
has been funded by a Knight News Challenge grant. The site is a direct
descendant of Chicago Crime, Holovaty’s noteworthy 2005 Google Maps
mashup [see previous post]. Everyblock currently allows users access to
a wide array of information pertaining to New York, Chicago and San
Francisco with plans for future expansion to additional cities.
One of the most interesting facets of this project is that it has provided
an additional perspective to the age-old “story-centric” worldview in
journalism, where news is viewed as a narrative and packaged and redistributed as a product. When broken down into discrete units (location,
time, place, etc.), the data connected to various events throughout the
Hopefully this post will inspire some exploration of Everyblock, as direct
experience is the best way to get a sense of the scope of this venture.
Holovaty has taken part in some quality interviews about the project
over the last few months. Check out his appearance on Fimoculous and
his discussion with Jon Udell. Matt Waite also posted a very nuanced
critique of Everyblock shortly after it launched.
While exploring Everyblock I can’t help but think of Italo Calvino’s
Invisible Cities, specifically the mercantile city of Ersilia. In Ersilia:
...the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white
or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark
a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings
become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the
inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their
support remains.
Limited only by emerging municipal information sharing initiatives and
data scraping ingenuity, Everyblock has the potential to develop into an
extremely robust prototype for the next generation of urban informatics.
Consider the manner in which Craigslist has has become an interface for
urban life in the cities in which it has been deployed, perhaps Everyblock will be an equally influential civic tool in the coming decade.
A tip of the cap to David Cohn for directing me toward Matt Waite’s
great commentary on Everyblock.
Serial Consign
http://serialconsign.com/node/211
by Greg J. Smith on May 12, 2008
3. Working With Corbusier
Discourse was being held at TKNRK office then. This article was read in
the ‘Essential Reading’ series of Discourse. This one was a very inspiring reading for everyone, helped to know in depth about the working
process, intimate life of Le Corbusier. This article is originally written
by Jerzy Soltan, worked with Le Corbusier for years. Here it is for those
who couldn’t participate in those Discourse sessions while we read:
Working with Le Corbusier
August 1, 1945 – the first day of my work with Le Corbusier. Around
nine in the morning, I was at his atelier, 35, rue de Sevrés, in Paris.
Physically, the atelier exhibited a strange charm and indeed, was the
antithesis of “modernism”. From the outside, from the little patch of
greenery – the Square Boucicault and the rue de Sevres – you confronted an old, quiet, classicist façade. You entered the building through a little gate, part of a large porte-cochére, and passed into a tiny courtyard.
Here you were under the eyes of an imposing female concierge. She
examined you warily. From the courtyard you turned left and got the full
taste of the premises: a huge, white gallery-corridor some thirty yards
long, five yards wide, wide, with a long row of classicist bay windows
on your right leading to a cloister garden. All of a sudden you realized
that you were in a Jesuit monastery. The bay windows opened onto a
sunny courtyard. The brilliant light filtered through old sycamore trees.
A mosaic of leaf shadows danced on the floor around your feet in the
courtyard you noticed one or two black-cassocked figures, breviaries in
hand, quietly enjoying a monastic promenade. The sun’s rays were full
of dusty particles. The building was old, dirty, smelly, and broken down.
It would later be totally razed, but when I entered it for the first time it
was very much there, full of an odd sort of attraction. The ground-floor
galleria let to a staircase landing was a door in total darkness. The door
let to the upper-level equivalent of the ground-floor gallery the atelier!
Eighty to ninety feet long and ten to fifteen feet wide, the atelier was in
fact a section of a long, white, dead-end corridor. A row of large windows was on one side, and a blank wall faced them. This wall separated
the atelier from the neighboring Saint Ignatius Church. Sometimes,
on particularly quiet days, or in the evenings after work, or on the
weekends, a Bach fugue or a gregrian chant trickled from the church
into the atelier. On this summer day, the atelier was not only full of sun,
the sound of birds, and the rustling of leaves, it was also full of bric-abrac. Old drafting tables, broken stools and chairs, creaky easels, broken
and half-broken architectural models in various scales, rolls of drawings, drafting utensils- all this competed for space in the second deeper
half of the atelier-corridor. And, of course, covering everything was a
thick layer of dust. Dust had been gathering here for six years, since
the beginning of thewar and the decay of the atelier into a débarras. It
was awakening at this time to its new, postwar life. The forward part of
the atelier was more orderly. Along the outer wall and perpendicular
to it were a few drafting tables, some stools and chairs. Drawings were
pinned up on the “church wall”; facing the windows, between the tables
and the wall, a large iron stove, installed ad hoc, dominated the space.
And in front of the stove, wearing indescribably dirty, formerly white
drafting overalls, reigned Gerald Hanning, Corbu’s only collaborator at
that time.
I soon discovered that Hanning, with his so very Anglo-Saxon name,
was French! We quickly struck up a close friendship. Now that I had
joined him, we would have two people to move around, depending on
whom Corbu would assign to what. Since each project had its own microspace, Hanning changed tables as he turned to each of them. At the
entranceway, to the left, was the boss’s table.
Le Corbusier’s working hours were implacably regular. During
my four years at the atelier, he worked at the rue de Sévres from two in
the afternoon to around seven. The hour of 2:00 P.M., I soon learned,
was holy. If you were a minute late you risked a reprimand. At first Corbu arrived either by subway (a convenient, direct metro line connected
his Michel-Ange-Molitor station with the atelier’s Sévres-Babylone) or
by taxi. Later on he started driving his old pistachio-green Simca Fiat
convertible. In his last years it would be the taxi again. The process of
returning home revealed quite a lot about Le Corbusier’s character. If
the work went well, if he enjoyed his own sketching and was
sure of what he intended to do, then he forgot about the hour
and might be home late for dinner. But if things did not go too
well, if he felt uncertain of his ideas and unhappy with his drawings,
then Corbu became jittery. He would fumble with his wristwatch – a
small, oddly feminine contraption, far too small for his big paw – and
finally say, grudgingly, “C’est difficile, l’architecture,” toss the pencil or
charcoal stub on the drawing, and slink out, as if ashamed to abandon
the project and me – and us – in a predicament.
During these early August days, I learned quite a bit about Le Corbusier’s daily routine. His schedule was rigidly organized. I remember
how touched I was by his Boy Scout earnestness: at 6 A.M., gymnastics and …. Painting, a kind of fine arts calisthenics; at 8 A.M.,
breakfast. Then Le Corbusier entered into probably the most
creative part of his day. He worked on the architectural and
urbanistic sketches to be transmitted to us in the afternoon. Outlines
of his written work would also be formulated then, along with some
larger parts of the writings. Spiritually nourished by the preceding
hours of physical and visual gymnastics, the hours of painting, he would
use the main morning time for his most inspired conceptualization. A
marvelous phenomenon indeed, this creative routine, implemented with
his native Swiss regularity, harnessing and channeling what is most
elusive. Corbu himself acknowledged the importance of this regimen.
“If the generations come”, he wrote, “attach any importance to my
work as an architect, it is to these unknown labors that one as
to attribute its deeper meaning.” It is wrong to assume, I believe,
as have suggested, that Le Corbusier was devoting this time to the conceptualization of shapes to be applied directly in his architecture; rather,
it was for him a period of concentration during which his imagination,
catalyzed by the activity of painting, could probe most deeply into his
subconscious. It his remarkably sensitive poetic metaphors and associations.
It was not long after I settled into my work routine that I received on
of my most intense Corbusierian shocks. To appreciate its intensity,
one has to remember my own background. From a provincial school of
architecture, I had brought with me to Paris the “form-follows-function”
and neue Sachlichkeit spirit. In my earlier milieu, discussions of aesthetics were simply missing; visual concerns were smuggled in as afterthoughts, if they appeared at all. Such considerations were not becoming
to a serious, socially minded architect. Imaginge my amazement, then,
when during an argument with Corbu about the final permutations of
the St.-Dié project, he turned to me said, “Mais mon cher Soltan, il faut
que ce soit beau.” This remark, of course, destroyed my argument. I was
demolished, demolished but also delighted; Le Corbusier had offered
me, openly, aboveboard, a marvelous gift that for years I had been eyeing secretly, from a distance. “Il faut que ce soit beau” – it has to be
beautiful. To have the guts not only to speak of visual quality but to
put one’s thought so bluntly!
Hanning left the atelier and did not return. The short-lived trio was
reduced again to a duo. It was Le Corbusier and me alone. The financial
situation did not improve. The projects were not backed up by any solid
commissions, and as a result, Le Corbusier could not pay me. Eventually
my military commitment ended ( I was not formally demobilized after
World War II and six years of P.O.W. camps until this time) and with
it military board and lodging. I had to live. Corbu agreed that I should
moonlight in the morning and work for him in the afternoon. Through
Hanning I obtained some work, first with a group of young former collaborators of Corbu’s (Bossu, Dupré, Miquel and Senvat) and second
with Pierre Jeanneret, so that I found myself a member of two duos: in
the morning with Pierre Jeanneret, in the afternoon with Corbu.
Most of the people who worked with Corbu had a love-hate relationship with him. A number of factors worked to create this ambivalent response. First, I already knew Le Corbusier well enough to realize
that he was not easy to get along with. He was quick to anger and could
be quite nasty. Second, there were political objections to him. After all,
he did go to Vichy to sniff out the Pétain regime. Nothing came of it, but
for those who want to see the worst, the fact remains. These same people
forget that some twenty years earlier, Corbu had worked in the Soviet
Union backed by the Trotsky group, the more enlightened, artistically
receptive milieu in the Russian Revolution. When Stalin and his obscurantists came to power, Le Corbusier’s building chances in
the Soviet Union evaporated. Neither could Corbu’s enemies
guess that five years later he would undertake his fruitful
relationship with the Roman Catholic church through the artistically active French branch of the Dominican order. It is in
fact owing to this order that Le Corbusier got the chance to realize some
of his most meaningful work: the chapel at Ronchamp, the monastic
building complex of Notre Dame de la Tourette, the unfinished chapel
at Firminy. Politically, nonetheless, Corbu represents a confusing, contradictory picture and one easily subject to different
interpretations according to the bias of the observer. To some,
his backing by enlightened Marxists and condemnation by Stalinists indicate a praiseworthy sort of radicalism. To others, his distance from
the French Communist party, to which several of his close
friends like Fernand Léger and Picasso adhered, was proof of
his disloyalty. Again, some would see in his dealings with the Vichy
regime evidence of fascist sympathies, while others would emphasize
his quick retreat from that group. And finally, Le Corbusier’s work for
the Dominican order might appear daring and progressive to some (the
order was unorthodox enough to have had difficulties with the Vatican)
and a retreat into clericalism to others.
My own contact with Corbu led me always to think of him as a man full
of boyish eagerness to try everything to win a commission, a
tempting piece of work, an exciting project. Never mind the dangers,
never mind the not-yet-healed wounds from the previous skirmish.
As long as a temptation was there, Le Corbusier would jump at it. For
those who are not able to accept the depth of his youthful eagerness to
land good work, Corbu will always remain a political mystery.
His artistic complexity was so evident that corresponding simplicity on
other levels (political, for instance) seems to me to have been almost
inevitable.
During my very first days with Corbu, I realized that while I was, of
course, expected to give the projects as much of myself as I could,
each project was really his own- his own flesh and blood. My
experience in Poland, working as a student for mature, locally famous
architects, had led me to believe that I was hired to give the project if not
its total quality, then at least its unique coloration. I often suspected that
the project meant more to me than to my boss, that, in fact, the boss
did not “live” the work in full. In Le Corbusier’s case, one never had
any doubt that he was willing to give it his whole self. Some
time later, when the atelier was in full swing, I asked him what would
be the optimum number of projects he felt he could handle
simultaneously, on different levels of advancement; what
number would make him happiest? Corbu, perplexed hesitated for
a while and then shot back, “Five”. Indeed, it it possible to have more if
one has to hold them totally?
Yes, Corbu’s work was his. It was, so to speak, physiologically his.
But at the same time, he never spoke about the processes related
to the production of his work in the first person. He would never
say “I”. It was always “we”. Other architects, whose contribution
to the birth of a building is often not much more than hiring the right
team and drinking the right cocktail to secure the commission, would
sprinkle the conversation with “I’s”: “I did it, I imagine, I feel, I.. .. ..” it
sometimes seems that the number of “I’s” is in inverse proportion to the
boss’s input to the work, inverse to his creative potency. In Corbu’s case,
the “we” becomes, then, quite proper. The project was his. Applying
this inverse logic, he would “we did it, we imagine, we’ll do it this way.”
Perhaps too, the plural represents a kind of residue of the old Esprit
Nouveau times, when he wrote under several names to make the publication more convincing. A crowd of participants is more than a ChalesEdouard Jeanneret, an Amédée Ozenfant. We: Jeanneret, Le Corbusier,
Saugnier…. Sometimes the “we” became a royal pluralis maiestatis. Le
Corbusier would jot down a new variant of solution. A few minutes later
he would pick the sketch up again and say, “Well, here is something we
drew as a possible counter-proposal.”
When someone literally lives his work, when his very existence constitutes a creative process, the strain of that process can sometimes be a
curse. Le Corbusier himself called this phenomenon les angoisses de la
création – the pains of creation. I quickly discovered just how intense
those pains could be, not only for the author, but also for his entourage,
myself included.
The projects in the atelier were preceded by serious and
conscientious research. Conceptualization, of course, went on
simultaneously. A half-lucid, half-unconscious “feedback” and
“feed-forward” process operated in Corbu’s mind. (I learned
then about the investigatory method Le Corbusier wanted applied: from
the general to the particular and from the particular to the general. I
will write more about this method later.) He immersed himself deeper
and deeper into the project. Each afternoon he brought from
home new ideas, new sketches, new notes. They were not easy to
decipher. Corbu had the ability to communicate clearly what he really
felt had to be done, but he also had his own sense of how much information to give, where to stop. The sketches at some point became fuzzy, a
sign that the represented more his digging into proposal. He would then
pass them on to me- to us- sometimes with a mischievous smile. The
role of the team was then to interpret, clarify, and present the concept
for his scrutiny, in a precise graphic form, sometimes as a model. The
more intuitive his thoughts, the more difficult it became with the help of
Hanning. Later I had to do it by myself in the empty atelier. Later still,
when the team grew, it was the whole group who put heads together
in consultation, led by the most experienced job captains, experts in
“Corbu reading.”
As time went on, Corbu’s notes became more and more complex, his evaluation of our interpretations more sharp and intolerant.
Every day at 2:00, just before his appearance, a cloud of panic hovered
over the atelier. And then the day would come when the door opened
and one felt that Corbu was a different man: He zooms directly to the
table of the job captain responsible for the project, keeping his hat and
coat on. He is in a hurry. Awkwardly, he pulls a crumbled piece of paper
from his pocket. He puts it on the table and says, “This time I believe
we’ve got it.” He is smiling. I give a sigh of relief. Maybe the world is not
so bad after all, and I am not such a complete idiot. Corbu leaves me
with his latest product. He leaves me to absorb it. Later on the will approach my table again, but instead of starting another discussion of the
same project, he will tackle a completely different subject. “Soltan, what
about a little repast today? We received a small gift from the country
and my wife’s rabbit in wine sauce is really quite good.” This invitation
became the ultimate sign of peace, as well as approval and tanks for the
last few days’ work. It was also an apology. Corbu was aware of his
weaknesses, the intemperance of his behavior. He could not
overcome it, but he tried hard to counterbalance it. For me the
dinner was not merely a social pleasure. Corbu guessed, as many years
later he frankly admitted, that the moonlighting did not represent a basis for an adequate budget. In fact, during this period I was often simply
hungry. Food was scarce in France in the summer of 1945; all of it was
very expensive, and most of it was tightly rationed.
To be Continued.....
Archsociety
http://www.archsociety.com/e107_plugins/content/content.
php?content.24
by admin, on June 18, 2007
4. 51. Denounce Starchitecture
Starchitects Have Reason to be Gloomy
First, the good news. The early model of the starchitect incited by the
image-mongering of Frank Lloyd Wright is still in play. It captured the
extra-architectural imagination of the popular press and helped catapulted the careers of many architects ever since. Unfortunately we may
now be seeing a more universal fatigue with the entire enterprise. Now,
the bad news. The fatigue has become so bad that starchitects have now
become a popular instrument of ridicule by the media in popular culture. The starchitect have come to represent vanity, greed and shallowness; an enterprise that is ethically challenged. The model has so many
broken windows that it has become popular for every lowly wayward to
throw a brick at it.
So many architects who have worked up the ranks to gain starchitect
status are beginning to question whether there may be fools gold at the
end of the rainbow.
This reminds me of the old adage “Be careful what you wish for...”. As
one journalist put it “[it] reminds me of the one Looney Tune that terrified me as a child, where a selfish and gluttonous Porky Pig is subjected
by a mad scientist to a nightmare of unending force-feeding. Enough
already. Please. Enough.”
In his article Anti-Starchitecture Chic:What’s a budding celebrity architect to do when the winds of change begin shifting away from fame?,
Philip Nobel describes the current plight of the Starchitect.
Are we ready for something new? Starchitecture culture in its current form—characterized by the premature coronation of designers
based on flashy forms and blowout press coverage, the infection of
schools with the idea of fame as a career objective....[has reached it’s]
current levels of saturation
We’re bored with the stars...even at such previously starstruck
schools as Princeton, Col­um­bia, and Yale—who are rejecting stardom as an aspirational model and are looking for other, perhaps
more grounded ways to build a practice. Some of them also report
a widespread dissatisfaction among their peers with the type of
­teaching—typically image-heavy and form-centric—that s­ tarchitecture
has imposed on so many schools. In a related development, younger
firms are more often using generic titles rather than marketing themselves exclusively as name-brand stars on the hoof...
Backlash is in the air, and using the same refined organs that so ably
guided their rise, the smart stars can feel it.
So what to do? Here are three suggestions:
1.Denounce Starchitecture.
2.Denounce Starchitecture.
3.Denounce Starchitecture.
If you are not yet famous, do as I said in last week’s post. Don’t tell anyone you want to be a famous architect. Don’t tell anyone you read this
blog. Just chill out with it. I was’t kidding. If this doesn’t work laugh at it
If you are an almost famous architect [a prince in waiting] , Nobel’s
article outlines the pros and cons of renouncing the monarchy of fame
even while you are being crowned.
market yourself by saying “I am not a star” (as Josh Prince-Ramus
has done since his split with Rem) [but this] is only to buy into the
same tired trope. To get work, architects must sell a thing—the idea
of a building—that by definition does not exist at the time of the sale.
So recourse to some sort of theater is appealing. And their customers, prepared as they are to spend millions, are not the most easily
sold—and in many cases, particularly for corporate or institutional
jobs, they want the splash that only a star (or, it has to be said, a really
great building) can reliably bring. It’s a puzzle; the economic pressures
to operate as a star are many, and the alternative strategies are few.
The only truly credible course may be to reject the very idea of using
yourself as a brand, to work and work well, and then to get what press
you get in the course of yet more good work. Boring maybe, but until
a less destructive model of high-profile practice emerges, it’s the right
thing to do.
But what if you have a full blown case of Starchitectamyelitis what do
you do? If you are a true virtuoso you can just denounce yourself. Nobel
describes the real genius of Frank Gehry at the top of his game.
Gehry, of course, is an expert at managing his fame. Perhaps that’s
why he felt compelled recently to deliver to me a T-shirt tastefully
printed with “Fuck Frank Gehry,” and insist by proxy (the New York–
based creator of the shirts acting as courier) that I wear it at the 2007
Temko Critics Panel (“What to Make of Starchitecture, and Who to
Blame for It”). Apparently the shirts are popular at the offices of Gehry
Partners LLP, and Frank was feeling frisky. My fellow panelists were
amused and assumed I was a sellout, so it did have an effect on the
proceedings. But I declined to wear the gift—ethics, you know, and
anyway I prefer to get paid to advertise—and I responded by sending
back a shirt with my name and a similar blunt mes­sage. May he wear
it in good health—in front of as many cameras as possible.
The Home Secretary also announced proposals to extend the British
Crime Survey (BCS) to include surveys of under-16s’ experiences of
crime.
By extending the BCS, the Government will build on current research to
understand as fully as possible young people’s concerns and experiences
about crime - establishing the most comprehensive picture of youth
victimisation.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: “We know that young people remain
more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.
“I am delighted that so many of our best designers have contributed
their time and expertise to today’s event and I look forward to seeing
genuinely new and commercially viable products flow from it.
“The role that good design can play in cutting crime is well established
but success depends on effective partnerships between Government, the
police and the design industry.
“We have made a clear commitment in last year’s Crime Strategy to
bring design into the centre of our fight against crime and to receive
such strong support from our partners is extremely encouraging.
“I want to ensure that young people are offered as much protection from
crime as possible, and receive support if they do become victims, whilst
also tackling offending vigorously.
Notes on becoming a famous architect
http://famousarchitect.blogspot.com/2008/05/51-denounce-starchitecture.html
by Conrad Newel on May 17, 2008
5. Technology experts to ‘design out
crime’ against teenagers
Forty of the UK’s leading technology designers and manufacturers will
today join Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and a number of young people
to discuss new ways of harnessing the power of design to protect young
people from crime - particularly theft of ‘hot products’ like mobile
phones and MP3 players.
The event, hosted by the Design Council, is the first time that senior designers from leading technology firms, including Sony and Nokia, have
joined young people, youth workers, branding experts and representatives from the police to develop products and services which will protect
young people from becoming victims of crime.
The focus is on generating innovative design briefs which offer a clear
business opportunity for manufacturers who will be encouraged to
develop them into the next generation of crime-safe gadgets.
New research published today by the Design Council on behalf of the
Home Office shows that the vast majority of 11-16 year olds in England
carry a gadget with them at some point.
The data also shows that one in eight (12 per cent) have been the victim
of ‘hot product’ theft in the last three years and one in three (31 per cent)
victims were listening to music on headphones, talking or texting on a
phone or playing on a games console when their item was stolen.
“Extending the British Crime Survey will help us to understand better
how crime affects young people and do even more to prevent it. This
summer we will publish a Youth Crime Action Plan to further coordinate
this effort across Government.”
The research published today by the Design Council on behalf of the
Home Office involved 1,000 11-16 year-olds who were questioned about
their experiences of ‘hot product’ crime. The survey revealed that:
* One in eight (12 per cent) in England has been the victim of ‘hot product’ theft in the last three years
* 97 per cent carry a gadget with them at some point
* One in three (31 per cent) victims were listening to music on headphones, talking or texting on a phone or playing on a games console
when their item was stolen
* 85 per cent frequently carry their phones with them
* 35 per cent carry an MP3 player;
* Nearly half of those surveyed estimated the value of these products
to be between £100 and £500
* Almost two thirds are concerned about the items being stolen.
Police recorded crime figures show that robbery has fallen by seven per
cent since 2002/03 with the latest data showing a 21 per cent since last
year.
With over half of robberies involving a mobile phone the Government’s
work with the Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum to block stolen
phones has contributed to this trend. Good design has also cut vehicle
crime by 50 per cent over ten years through central locking and detachable car stereos, for example.
Design Council Chief Executive David Kester said: “By bringing together
for the first time manufacturers, designers, victims of crime, technologists and crime experts, we can not only bring an unrivalled level of
creativity to the problem - we can also identify the business opportunities which will ultimately bring these crime-reducing innovations off the
drawing board and onto the market.
“By adopting this collegiate approach, design has already shown amazing successes in addressing difficult challenges such as crime reduction,
improving public services and creating more sustainable communities.”
24Dash.com
http://www.24dash.com/news/Communities/2008-05-15-Technologyexperts-to-design-out-crime-against-teenagers
by Jon Land on May 15, 2008
6. The last modern architect
Richard Rogers’s achievements as a maker of extraordinary buildings
are in danger of being obscured by his status as a new Labour panjandrum
balance of the celebratory shtick by asking rigorous questions along the
lines of: “Of the many wonderful buildings you have designed, Richard,
which is the most wonderfully advanced and totally misunderstood by
the reactionary Establishment?” But, on the other hand, maybe he’ll give
Rogers an easy ride.
Philip Johnson once referred to Rogers’s sometime partner Norman
Foster as “the last modern architect”. He was wrong. Foster has looked
back. He has proved to be the first neo-modern architect, the master
of retrospective synthetic-modernism, producing an oeuvre which has
paid nostalgic homage to the early modern canon by ransacking it for
inspirational models.
If Johnson’s sobriquet is applicable to anyone, it is Rogers, who, in his
work, has looked the other way - although he clings to a touchingly
retardataire gamut of modernist notions: that modernism is something
more than a style; that architecture is a tool of social improvement; that
sustainability is more than a fashion masked as a moral imperative;
that “design-led” regeneration benefits someone other than architects
and builders; that British urbanism can be susceptible to prescriptions borrowed from cities which are collectively attuned to density;
that the suppression of private transport can be effected in a sprawling
megalopolis such as London. The sentiments are as laudable as they are
conventional.
While he could more usefully have been getting his mouth wired
(which would also have prevented him from mauling the language), the
wretched John Prescott paid attention to Rogers and so too, later, did
Ken Livingstone. It is thus ultimately due to his persuasive orthodoxies
being taken up as policy that flocks of very banal architects were granted
the chance to litter Britain with off-the-peg apartment blocks - soulless,
repetitive, infrastructureless, “luxury” hutches, intended no doubt to
represent the populist face of synthetic-modernism but turning out to be
its resistible armpit. The pity of it is that Rogers the architect of genius
and maker of extraordinary bespoke structures is in danger (in Britain
at least) of being eclipsed by the theorist, urbanist and new Labour consigliere who shares his name and his body, but not his gifts.
The bumf for the Richard Rogers exhibition at the Design Museum tells
us that, during the five years of its construction, Rogers referred to his
most celebrated work as Beaubourg rather than as the Pompidou Centre
“because he was reluctant to see the structure associated so closely with
its namesake, the right-wing politician who was seen as responsible for
stamping out the insurrectionary outburst of May 1968”.
Where does one start?
Namesake is not a synonym of dedicatee. The events of May 1968 were,
pace the energetically mythologising industry now surrounding them,
hardly insurrectionary. Georges Pompidou was a centrist. His strategy
towards the brattish students was one of conciliation and appeasement;
he did not stamp out their crummy posturing. He still had three years
to live when, in 1971, Rogers and Renzo Piano won the competition to
design what was then known as “le Centre du plateau Beaubourg”. It
did not officially become “le Centre national d’art et de culture GeorgesPompidou” until January 1975, nine months after the president’s death
- and that name took some years to seep into the vernacular.
What we have here is the Design Museum’s quaintly mendacious attempt to invest this peer of the realm and panjandrum of the soft plu
tocracy with a familiar gamut of revolutionary, right-on and, no doubt,
anti-elitist properties. Still, this is only to be expected: the most potent
weapon in the curatorial repertoire is a tongue so ambitiously taut that
it can reach the jejunum. Of course, Alan Yentob, who interviews him
at the museum on 25 June (£20: obviously a snip), may redress the
Given that architects routinely claim that the creation of buildings
demands spatial, three- dimensional and “vertical” faculties and that the
creation of place demands the left-hemisphere abilities of linearity and
sequentiality, it is odd how keen architects are to promote themselves
as urbanists. It’s an unnatural progression, but no more or less hubristic
than actors aspiring to direct, footballers wanting to become managers:
success in the one has little to do with prowess in the other. The Pompidou Centre staging of this exhibition did not carry the subtitle “From the
House to the City”. That was a tactful omission.
Though Rogers is never likely to become a byword for dystopianism,
there is an evident congruence with the case of Le Corbusier, whose
transcendent greatness is in his buildings and his plastic audacity, not
in his hectoring manifestos, certainly not in his talentless acolytes’
instant slums. Like Le Corbusier, Rogers has persistently reinvented his
architecture: there is no such thing as a Rogers “signature” any more
than there is a Corbusian one. There are, rather, styles, which are here
discarded with alacrity, there developed and honed. Picasso’s edict to
copy anyone but yourself has been zealously observed down four and a
half decades, while Eliot’s often forgotten rider - “A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse
in interest” - was early on brazenly ignored: the sources of the borrowings were hardly covert.
Rogers’s works of the 1960s and early 1970s afford the considerable
pleasure of watching an increasingly accomplished chameleon donning
and doffing guises, doing its stuff, trying on different voices: Charles and
Ray Eames and Craig Elwood, Alison and Peter Smithson, Le Corbusier
himself, Mies van der Rohe, Paul Rudolph in his various manners. This
is not a matter of imitation but, on the contrary, of self-discovery. But
even from that idiomatically protean period - before Rogers was Rogers,
so to speak - there are intimations of what will become recurrent themes
and consistent preoccupations: the interplay of transparency and opacity, of the hidden and the overt; a highly unorthodox, almost counterintuitive response to sites; a tension between technological exigencies
and compositional balance; a marriage of the forms and silhouettes
associable with brutalism to the materials associable with engineering, aviation and the process of building. Contrary to what might be
expected, this is an enduring marriage.
Renzo Piano described the Pompidou Centre as “almost a parody of
technology”. One might go further. It demonstrates the sculptural potential of technological components, of (what might be) found objects. It
obviously owes a debt to Archigram’s unbuilt projects but it also hints at
what has become increasingly obvious in the City of London, Bordeaux,
Antwerp, Strasbourg, Madrid and Cardiff - that Rogers is an architect of
the picturesque with decidedly Gothic leanings. His structural methods
are Gothic, his vertiginous spaces are Gothic, his accretive tendency is
Gothic. The cowls of his Antwerp Law Courts are like penitents’ hoods.
The “pods” of his Bordeaux courts recall both fat, jolly monks and alembics - which at least suggest a humane sort of justice. The latter building,
like Lloyd’s and the Pompidou, is crammed on to the very perimeter
of its site. Like a medieval cathedral, it is hugger-mugger with the city
about it. But it is also a sort of defensive wall round whose end, beside
the tram track, there is a delightful space of five different eras that the
courts almost alchemically tie together. And unlike the giant conversation pit achieved by building the Pompidou on a north-south axis tight
to rue Beau bourg, this Bordelais space is not overrun by mimes, clowns,
jugglers, fire-eaters, street theatre workers and dog-on-string operatives.
An exhibition such as this is an exhibition about rather than an exhibition of, say, paintings, wigs, two-headed sheep. What it shows are
analogues, fragments and representations. Which tend, of course, to
be idealised: architectural photography is a form of propaganda or, at
least, self-advertisement. And although maquettes are splendid objects
in their own right (witness the Musée des plans-reliefs in les Invalides)
they cannot begin to transport their audience, cannot replicate the
delight of moving through spaces that go further beyond the functional
than any in contemporary architecture. There is a lot of stuff in these
buildings, a lot of incident. They are rich, energetic, restless, maximalist, sensorily affecting. A facet of Rogers’s genius is that you get a lot for
your money.
“Richard Rogers + Architects: From the House to the City” is at the
Design Museum, London SE1, until 25 August (info: www.designmuseum.org)
Jonathan Meades’s latest TV series, “Magnetic North”, starts on 15
May on BBC2 (7pm)
New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/200805150027
by Jonathan Meades on May 15, 2008
7. Eisenman’s six point plan
Peter Eisenman set out his thoughts on architecture at RIAS
2008
Point one: Architecture in a media culture
Media has invaded every aspect of our lives. It is difficult to walk out on
the street or stand in a crowded elevator without encountering people
speaking into cellular phones at the top of their voices as if no one
else was around. People leave their homes and workplaces and within
seconds are checking their Blackberries. Their iPhones provide instant
messaging email, news, telephone and music—it’s as if they were attached to a computer.
Less and less people are able to be in the real physical world without the
support of the virtual world. This has brought about a situation in which
people have lost the capacity to focus on something for any length of
time. This is partly because media configures time in discrete segments.
Focus is conditioned by how long one can watch something before there
is an advertisement. In newspapers stories keep getting shorter, the
condensed version is available on the internet. This leads today to a corruption of what we think of as communication, with a lessening of the
capacity to read or write correct sentences. While irrelevant information
multiplies, communication diminishes. If architecture is a form of media
it is a weak one. To combat the hegemony of the media, architecture has
had to resort to more and more spectacular imaging. Shapes generated
through digital processes become both built icons that have no meaning
but also only refer to their own internal processes. Just think of any
architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment,
and instead one finds media.
Point two: Students have become passive
The corollary to the prevalent media culture is that the viewing subject
has become increasingly passive. In this state of passivity people demand more and more images, more visual and aural information and in
a state of passivity people demand things that are easily consumed.
The more passive people become the more they are presented by the
media with supposed opportunities to exercise choice. Vote for this,
vote for whatever stories you want to hear, vote for what popular song
you want to hear, vote for what commercial you want to see. This voting
gives the appearance of active participation, but it is merely another
form of sedation because the voting is irrelevant It is part of the attempt
to make people believe they are participating when in fact they are
becoming more and more passive.
Students also have become passive. More passive than students in the
past. This is not a condemnation but a fact. To move students to act or
to protest for or against anything today is impossible. Rather they have
a sense of entitlement. The generations that remember 1968 feel that
those kinds of student protests are almost impossible today. For the last
seven years we have had in the US one of the most problematic governments in our history. Probably the most problematic since the mid-19th
century and president Millard Fillmore. Our reputation in Europe, our
dollar, our economy, the spirit of our people, has been weakened. In
such a state of ennui people feel they can do little to bring about change.
With the war in Iraq draining our economy there is still the possibility that the political party responsible for today’s conditions will be
re-elected.
Will this have consequences for architecture?
Point three: Computers make design standards poorer
This passivity is related to architecture. Architecture today relies on one
of passivity’s most insidious forms—the computer.
Architects used to draw volumes, using shading and selecting a perspective. In learning how to draw one began to understand not only what it
was like to draw like Palladio or Le Corbusier but also the extent of the
differences in their work. A wall section of Palladio felt different to the
hand than one of Le Corbusier’s. It is important to understand such differences because they convey ideas. One learned to make a plan. Now,
with a computer, one does not have to draw. By clicking a mouse from
point to point, one can connect dots that make plans, one can change
colours, materials and light. Photoshop is a fantastic tool for those who
do not have to think.
There is no answer to this question because “Why?” is the wrong question.
Why? Because the computer can produce it. One could ask these
architects: “Why is this one better than that one?” Or “Which one of
the crumpled paper buildings is better?” Or “Which one is the best and
why?”
There is no answer again to these questions. Why? Because there is no
value system in place for judging, and there is no relationship to be able
to judge between the image produced and its meaning as an icon.
These icons are made from algorithmic processes that have nothing to
do with architectural thinking.
Point five: We are in a period of late style
The problem is as follows. “So what?” my students say, “Why draw Palladio? How will it help me get a job?” The implication is this: “If it’s not
going to help me get a job, I don’t want to do it.” In this sense, architecture does not matter. In a liberal capital society, getting a job matters,
and my students are in school precisely for this reason.
Yet education does not help you get a job. In fact, the better you are at
Photoshop the more attractive you are to an office, the better you will
work in that office.
If I ask a student to make a diagram or a plan that shows the ideas of
a building, they cannot do it. They are so used to connecting dots on a
computer that they cannot produce an idea of a building in a plan or a
diagram. This is certain to affect not only their future, but the future of
our profession.
Point four: Today’s buildings lack meaning or reference
The computer is able to produce the most incredible imagery which
become the iconic images of magazines and competitions. To win a competition today one has to produce shapes and icons by computer.
But these are icons with little meaning or relationship to things in the
real world. According to the American pragmatist philosopher C S
Peirce there were three categories of signs: icons, symbols, and indices.
The icon had a visual likeness to an object.
Robert Venturi’s famous dictum categorised buildings as either “a duck
or a decorated shed”; the difference between an icon and symbol in
architectural terms.
A “duck” is a building that looks like its object—a hotdog stand in the
form of a giant hotdog or, in Venturi’s terms, a place that sells ducks
taking the very same shape as a duck. This visual similitude produces
what Peirce calls an icon which can be understood at first glance.
Venturi’s other term, the “decorated shed”, describes a public facade for
what amounts to a generic box like building. The decorated shed is more
a symbol, in Peirce’s terms, which has an agreed upon, or conventional
meaning. A classical facade symbolises a public building, whether it is a
bank a library or school.
Today the shape of buildings become icons which have none of these
external references. They may not necessarily look like anything or
they may only resemble the processes that made them. In this case they
do not relate outwardly but refer inwardly. These are icons that have
little cultural meaning or reference. There is no reason to ask our more
famous architects: “Why does it look like this?”
Edward Said in his book On Late Style describes lateness as a moment
in time when there are no new paradigms or ideological, cultural, political conditions that cause significant change. Lateness can be understood
as a historical moment which may contain the possibilities of a new
future paradigm.
For example there were reasons in the late 19th century for architecture
to change. These included changes in psychology introduced by Freud;
in physics by Einstein; in mathematics with Heisenberg; and in flight
with the Wright brothers. These changes caused a reaction against the
Victorian and imperial styles of the period and articulated a new paradigm: modernism.
With each new paradigm, whether it is the French revolution or the
Renaissance, there is an early phase, which in modernism was from
1914-1939; a high phase, which in modernism occurred 1954-1968 when
it was consumed by liberal capital after the war; and a period of opposition. The year 1968 saw an internal, implosive revolution, one that
reacted against institutions representing the cultural past of many of the
western societies. This was followed by post modernism’s eclectic return
to a language that seemed to have meaning. The Deconstructivist exhibition at the MoMA in 1988 put an end to this cliché and kitsch style.
Today I say we are in a period of late style. A period in which there is no
new paradigm. Computation and the visual may produce a shift from
the notational but this in itself is not a new paradigm. It is merely a tool.
The question remains: What happens when one reaches the end of a
historical cycle? On Late Style by Edward Said describes such a moment
in culture before a shift to a new paradigm. A moment not of fate or
hopelessness but one that contains a possibility of looking at a great
style for the possibility of the new and the transformative. He uses as an
example Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, written at the end of Beethoven’s
career. This was the composer’s response to the seeming impossibility
of innovation. Instead Beethoven wrote a piece that was difficult, even
anarchic, that could not be easily understood and was outside of his
characteristic and known style. Beethoven’s later work is an example of
the complexity ambivalence, and the “undecidability” that characterises
a late style.
Point six: To be an architect is a social act
This last point deals with architecture and its unique autonomy. Since
the Renaissance in Italy when Brunelleschi, Alberti and Bramanti
established what can be called the persistencies of architecture—subjectobject relationships—these persistencies have remained operative to
this day. Alberti’s dictum that “a house is a small city and a city is a large
house”, remains with us in all works that we see. In other words the
relationship between the part and the whole: the figure and the ground,
the house to its site, the site to the street, the street to its neighbourhood
and the neighbourhood to the city.
These issues constitute the basis of what would be called the dialectical
synthesis as an aspect of the ongoing metaphysical project. Thus one of
the things that must be investigated is the problematic part-to-whole
relationship—which is part of a Hegelian dialectical idea of thesis and
anti-thesis forming a new whole or synthesis—and the relationship of
building to ground.
Germany decades ago, stretching 879 miles from the Baltic Sea to the
Czech Republic, was a tangled jungle of barbed wire, landmines, booby
traps and soldier patrols, it was also, much like the Korean DMZ, a kind
of sanctuary for considerable wildlife.
When the Berlin Wall fell German environmentalists fought to protect
the long line of no-man’s-land as a Green Belt, connecting it with
Europe’s larger green belt that has followed the path of the Iron Curtain
from the north of Finland south to the Adriatic Sea.
Architecture has traditionally been concerned with these dialectical categories, whether it is inside/outside, figure/ground, subject/object. For
me today, it is necessary to look within architecture to see if it is possible
to break up this synthetic project from within. This attempt is what
post-structuralism would consider the displacement of the metaphysics
of presence.
If we continue to think that what is presented is necessarily truthful or
what we see is truthful and also beautiful then we will continue to subscribe to the myth that architecture is the wonder of the metaphysics of
presence. It may become possible with such an awareness to move away
from what I call the hegemony of the image.
People always say formalism is the project of architecture’s autonomists.
For me it is precisely this autonomy which is architecture’s delay of engaging with society. If it is architecture’s activity and its own discourse
which in fact impacts society, then to be an architect is a social act.
This does not mean social in the form of making people feel better or
happy. Or building houses for the poor or shopping malls for the rich or
garages for Mercedes. I am talking about understanding those conditions of autonomy that are architectural, that make for an engagement
with society in the sense of operating against the existing hegemonic
social and political structures of our time. That is what architecture has
always been.
Building Design
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3113560
by Peter Eisenman on May 14, 2008
8. where truces and cease fires grow
on trees…
[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife,
Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]
Up until now the German Green Belt has had very little legal protection,
and while it still has a long ways to go, Spiegel reports that the groundwork for a new agreement between the federal Government and the
local German states which directly assume responsibility for the Green
Belt have reached some form of legal outlines for its protection. Currently, only a third of the natural corridor is designated a nature conservation area, but that could soon be increased. The Green Belt itself though
is of great interest.
The no-man's-land that emerged, ranging from 60 to 200 meters
wide, provided the ideal conditions for the flourishing of flora and
fauna. Up to 600 endangered species, including the black stork and the
lady's slipper orchid, thrived in this unusual terrain.
What has made this green corridor remarkable is the interlocking
of over 100 types of biotopes, including forests, fens and meadows.
Hubert Weiger, president of BUND, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung on
[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife,
Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]
While the "inner German border” that once divided East and West
Tuesday that "in other places species become extinct because their habitats shrink to islands due urban sprawl." According to Geidezis this is
unique in Central Europe. "You don't find these connecting biotopes in
Europe any more. Most have been split up, preventing animals from
traveling from place to place."
I will leave you to go read about the details of the legal proceedings that
aim to protect the Green Belt. I am more curious about what perhaps it
could symbolize in a heightened era of protracted border security.
What if somehow in a great show of geopolitical magic all of the border
fences, boundary walls and separation barriers that callous the world’s
neighborly skin suddenly vanished? Miles of scrappy national security
architecture just dissolved in a great disappearing act leaving only trails
of dirt behind on its barren stage. And then, over the course of a few
years, filling in these tracts of severed farms and semi-conquered wetlands, of annexed soils and halved rural pasturtopias, new post-conflict
species of borderzone flora and fauna colored in the rugged footprints
with epic flourishes of greenery.
Forgive me for sounding ridiculously hippie dippie here, but imagine
the borders of the future bound in bloom instead of barricade; crossings blended by mossy sutures rather than surgical fences and political
non-futures.
teams of landscape architects and horticulturalists are organized from
both sides of all the old fences. Each region designs its own celestial
garden corridor -- a strip garden in a long line of international strip
gardens -- that turns the remnant jetties of border conflict into opulent
open air greenhouses shared and protected by joint nations. Local
cross-border communities would maintain them. Dignitaries from all
over the world would hail them as these long lush paths to political
healing, while travelers and ecologists would wander down the rolling
green carpets siphoning unsmelled fragrances through their nostrils and
basking in the Eden like experience of post-militarized botanical reverie.
The border grown into the geography of a dispersed global ecological
refuge. Stitching nations together with enclaves of freshly oxygenated
public space these elongated nature preserves would help to spawn innovative conservation policy, allow new species to emerge, and even old
ones to re-emerge. Call them peace parks, green belts, border gardens,
whatever, Subtopia will surely be there enjoying an eternal picnic under
those canopies where truces and cease fires grow on trees.
Subtopia
http://subtopia.blogspot.com/2008/05/where-truces-and-cease-firesgrow-on.html
by Bryan Finoki on May 13, 2008
9. Quantifying Walkable Urbanism
Walkable urbanism is the new buzzword in community planning and
development. Websites are dedicated to neighborhood walks, the brookings institute has a collection of several articles by Chris Leinberger, and
now you can even check the walkable score of your own neighborhood.
[Image: Walkable urbanism is a new trend in the popular perception
of neighborhoods. Courtesy of FN Mag.]
A new google maps mashup that ranks your neighborhood based on
proximity to local services, both in diversity and density.
Suppose these old curvilinear scars of border space could be remade
into the world’s longest and narrowest public parks project. Bi-national
Walk Score ranks your neighborhood based on 100 total possible points.
* 90-100 = Walker’s Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on
foot and many people get by without owning a car.
* 70-90 = Very Walkable: It’s possible to get by without owning a car.
* 50-70 = Some Walkable Locations: Some stores and amenities are
within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike,
public transportation, or car.
* 25-50 = Not Walkable: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must.
* 0-25 = Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within
walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!
I put in four places I have lived to see how they rank, as well as to visualize the progression from my suburban childhood to my urban lifestyle in
Manhattan.
The Woodlands, TX - 8 years (I’m ignoring my first 10 years in different locations around Houston)
At a week score of 14, this subdivision was clearly in the realm of “car
culture.” Despite this fact, it was a nice place to live because the original
master planners set up a framework to leave as many trees as possible.
Thus, “The Woodlands” really felt like it. So, many of the people living
there were trading the convenience of walkable urbanism for the serenity of the picturesque.
Atlanta, GA - 8 years
Pretty damn close to perfection, but what else do you expect of Manhattan than walkable neighborhoods. Although, I have to say that perfection is not without it’s annoyances - density is a blessing and a curse.
For now we’ll weigh the blessing side a little more.
Paris, France - 6 months (during my time in Atlanta)
This is merely to point out that Walk Score is not perfect. This probably
has more to do with the limited Google database of Parisian services,
because Paris was equally walkable to Manhattan, and more pleasant at
that. Walk Score is the first to admit the flaws in their system, however.
Among these are safety, street/block size, topography, and weather.
Despite all this, Walk Score is not only fun to compare the places you
have lived, but a good indicator of the neighborhood. If you are trying to
move, you can utilize this site to rate a few neighborhoods in a city you
are unfamiliar with.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this tool is the real estate tile.
This may be the first step in monetizing walkable urbanism. Much like
the recent development in sustainable practices, economic incentives
have arisen to influence a cultural shift. If that is the case, good bye “big
box,” hello Jane Jacobs.
Check your own neighborhood’s score at Walk Score. Then, come back
and answer the new survey at the top of the page, so I can see how walkable the neighborhoods of my readers are.
At a surprisingly impressive score of 85 for Atlanta, the last neighborhood I lived in definitely reflects the score. However, if you look at the
first apartment I lived in during college, it scores a 46. This is much
more on par with our impression of the city of Atlanta. Although, on my
last visit to the city earlier this year they have come a long way in developing street level retail and walkable streets in midtown.
New York, NY - 2 years
Agents of Urbanism
http://agentsofurbanism.com/2008/05/15/quantifying-walkable-urbanism
by the urban agent on May 15, 2008
10. Burnt-out Bouwkunde.
About the fragile relation between the real and the virtual
Two physical souvenirs are in my pocket: the key to room 8.11 and key
‘fiets 4’, which matching bike might be saved in the basement. When I
see a photo of the ruins I still try to identify where during the last years
were my desk, bookcases, etc..
Tuesday 13th I left the scene when I saw smoke on level 8. I headed
for OTB, where the warm welcome also implied a room, computer and
coffee. The first e-mail came in before noon, from Nigeria; cousin Hugo
wanted to know if I was still alive. More mails came with the same
question. The burning of Bouwkunde seemed to spread like fire. Paul
Stouten and I started to organise the work and meetings with students
for the rest of the week and the weeks to come. I finished the afternoon
with tea in the good company of Iwan Kriens and Ina Klaasen. Until late
in the evening mails and phone calls kept on coming in.
Indeed, this fire destroyed a lot. Whoever you meet – next-door colleagues and those who used to work elsewhere in the building – no one
has problems to bring up a list of losses.
For me, the typed and later printed production of almost forty years
went up in smoke (forty, by the way is the number of the learning-period), as well as what I preserved from scientific allies, and a selection of
opponents to stay sharp; as well as books and other forms of publication
about the social and spatial aspects of urban renewal and regeneration,
for the use of students; as well as old books worth saving, larded with
my notes; as well as CD’s with electronic versions of books or chapters;
as well as students’ research reports, papers, graduation reports, tests,
marks lists; two paintings, antique photo’s, pictures, small statues,
minerals and fossils among which a mammoth tooth which once accompanied the writing of my dissertation; (farewell) presents of students.
And all things that in the coming days, may be months, will float to the
surface called memory. So far about the destructive side of the fire.
There can be imagined a constructive side. No longer I can, need, have
to decide what to keep and what to give away. Matter has become
virtual, but in the practice of daily life this was already going on. Except
of course with regard to the art and fossils. ‘Less’ might lead in time to
more consciousness of emptiness and consequently to new space. This
philosophical approach to the phenomenon of attachment and loss
might on the one hand be utter nonsense, but on the other hand it may
make it easier to stay on track.
bye bye bouwkunde
http://bouwkunde.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/your-storiesplease/#comments
by Edward Hulsbergen on May 15, 2008
the hall of the faculty of architecture in Delft in the 70s. Architecture as a social experiment, no more.