2010-03-10
Philip Johnson say "I'm a Whore".
DAY 4
7:00 PM: Drinks at Prime Meats, in Brooklyn, with my wife. Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs. Why, then, does it feel so much more honest? Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable? Could the real problem with Las Vegas — my real problem with Las Vegas — be that its commercial imperatives are simply too transparent? Are my insecurities the problem? Maybe a bit of artifice is what I need to survive; the make-up that makes the model appealing. Anyway, the punch is good. Time for another round.
7:00 PM: Drinks at Prime Meats, in Brooklyn, with my wife. Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs. Why, then, does it feel so much more honest? Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable? Could the real problem with Las Vegas — my real problem with Las Vegas — be that its commercial imperatives are simply too transparent? Are my insecurities the problem? Maybe a bit of artifice is what I need to survive; the make-up that makes the model appealing. Anyway, the punch is good. Time for another round.
2010-03-09
C: Margaret's always accusing people of weaving "narratives of loss." And she should. Why are people so nostalgic? Sure, there's a laundry list of things that are wrong, and sure, there's never been a bigger need for thoughtful planning. But why does this always translate into some New Urbanist fantasy? Rae's book, despite its own narrative of loss, does one thing remarkably well: it exposes the contingency of early twentieth-century urbanism by showing how a city such as New Haven was a product of world events (inventions, policy prescriptions, demographic trends), that just as easily might not have transpired. Early twentieth-century urbanism was anything but inevitable; take away the conditions (for example, the invention, development and dissemination of steam power), and you wouldn't have had, for example, the density or the heterogeneity that you had in a city like New Haven in 1900.
G: Yeah, Rae provides the best evidence against the New Urbanism that he himself wants to argue for. It's so basic and yet it is ignored by so many people: for something to thrive, it has to have the right conditions. What we all admire about a city such as New Haven in 1900 are things that, today, would require an enormous investment in artificial support mechanisms. The New Urbanist approach is a variant on the Field of Dreams theory: build it and it will happen. But this isn't the case. The conditions don't really exist for the sorts of things they want to grow.
2010-02-26
this studio has convinced me against the idea of "timeless" architecture. Engaging the poetic, the political, the pragmatic. Engage anything, fuck a goat if you need. everything is an incitement to create, to conjure matter and organization where there previously was none. but when the collective debris of it all adds up - a straightjacket of dogmas. Spaces of intentional orchaestration. Maybe instead of creating, it is time to unmake and loosen things up a bit.
2010-02-24
2010-02-23
snigger
2010-02-14
relationship of legislation to city growth
LATHROP, Calif. — Drive along foreclosure alley, through new planned communities that look like tile-roofed versions of a 21st century ghost town, and you see what happens when people gamble with houses instead of casino chips.
Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Nobody is home in the cities of the future.
In a decade, they saw real property defy reality in real time in these insta-neighborhoods that sprouted in what had been some of the world’s most productive farmland.
In places like Lathrop, Manteca and Tracy, population nearly doubled in 10 years, and home prices tripled. After inhaling all this real estate helium, some developers and their apologists in urban planning circles hailed the boom as the new America at the far exurban fringe. Every citizen a homeowner! Half-acre lots for all! No credit, no problem!
Others saw it as the residential embodiment of the Edward Abbey line that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Now median home prices have fallen from $500,000 to $150,000 — among the most precipitous drops in the nation — and still the houses sit empty, spooky and see-through, waiting on demography and psychology to catch up.
In strip malls where tenants seem to last no longer than the life cycle of a gold fish, the bottom-feeders have moved in. “Coming soon: Cigarette City,” reads one sign here in Lathrop, near a “Cash Advance” outlet.
Take a pulse: How can a community possibly be healthy when one in eight houses are in some stage of foreclosure? How can a town attract new people when the crime rate has spiked well above the national average? How can a family dream, or even save, when unemployment hovers around 16 percent?
Yet if these staggered exurbs, about two hours inland from San Francisco, were an illness, they would not quite be Abbey’s cancer. Though sick, foreclosure alley is not terminal. This is not Detroit with sunshine. It will be reborn, remade, inhabited. The question is: as what?
Nationwide, a record 2.8 million homes received foreclosure notices last year — up 119 percent from two years ago. Just under 5 million homeowners — 1 in 10 mortgages — owe more than their houses are worth. The impulse is to walk away. Surrender. And many have.
What they leave behind, along with the gang presence, the vandalism and the absence of vested owners, is a slum. A new slum. In an influential article in the Atlantic in 2008, the writer Christopher B. Leinberger predicted that the catastrophic collapse of the new home market could turn many of today’s McMansions into tenements.
I’m not sure of that. After several days in foreclosure alley, this broad swath of the Central Valley that has been rated by some economists as the most stressed region during the Great Recession, I can’t see such apocalyptic forecasts coming true.
Yes, huge developments are empty, with rising crime at the edges, and thousands of homes owned by banks that can’t unload them even at fire-sale prices.
But through it all, the country churns and expands, unlike most other Western democracies. That great American natural resource — tomorrow — will have to save the suburban slums.
Through immigration and high birth rates, the United States is expected to add another 100 million people by 2050. If you don’t believe me, consider that we’ve added 105 million people since 1970. This is more than the population of France. More than Italy. More than Germany. Currently, we have a net gain of one person every 13 seconds.
At some point, the market will settle on proper pricing levels. At its peak, only 11 percent of the people in this valley could afford the median home price.
In the meantime, during these low, ragged years, a few lessons about urban planning can be picked from the stucco pile.
One is that, at least here in California, the outlying cities themselves encouraged the boom, spurred by the state’s broken tax system. Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.
Second, look at the cities with stable and recovering home markets. On this coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and San Diego come to mind. All of these cities have fairly strict development codes, trying to hem in their excess sprawl. Developers, many of them, hate these restrictions. They said the coastal cities would eventually price the middle class out, and start to empty.
It hasn’t happened. Just the opposite. The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums.
Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live.
2010-02-13
Many of the architects I respect in the 20th century -- [Alvar] Aalto, [Mies] Van der Rohe, [Louis] Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright -- they kept designing houses until they died. Now many big architects after they start designing buildings, stop designing houses because it not interesting commercially. The effort is so big but the profit is so small.
Designing office buildings is much easier than a house. You design for an average. But for a house, it is a particular request for each client and there is no repetition of rooms.
2010-02-03
2010-01-29
Space, real and virtual. Digital Democracy. In-Between Spaces. Gordon Matta Clark
small piecemeal interventions. "networked", a set of tools for groundup change
2010-01-27
Soundtracks to Walks in the City
(to John)
Headless Heros (http://www.myspace.com/denofheroes)
The Silence of Love is a beautiful themed album of covers, the motivation for making the Headless Heroes project was really music for music's sake. “I just wanted to make an album with great musicians and great songs... the rest would work itself out.”
Moodswing Orchaestra
because the music is almost as good as the cover and their name. which is still saying alot.
Olafur Arnalds (http://foundsongs.erasedtapes.com/)
from the Wiki: "Arnalds was a drummer of hardcore/metal bands Fighting Shit and Celestine as well as a other bands. He also contributed banjo, guitar and piano for in his friend's solo project "My Summer as a Salvation Soldier"
But adding to the allure, Found Songs (as if the title isn't seduction enough) is a ballad in piano and strings. 7 songs composed in 7 days, each released as they are done being recorded. Instant Music. This video will melt you. http://vimeo.com/6284199
Colour me punch-drunk, my first semi-proper post to an imagined audience. Hello World.
2010-01-26
source: http://urbanomnibus.net/2009/01/in-praise-of-slowness/
In Praise of Slowness:
Thoughts on Writing About the Future of the City
“To bring New York down to date, a man would have to be published with the speed of light – and not even Harper is that quick.” – E. B. White
In 2005, the corner of Plaza Street and Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn was a weedy parking lot for Union Temple, the oldest congregation in the borough. As of this writing, in the first days of 2009, there’s a smooth gray sidewalk, a few freshly planted saplings, and a 15-story, 102-unit glass condominium building, designed by the architect Richard Meier, being busily punch-listed for its first occupants.
Does that change – this particular building and rebuilding of the city – seem fast or slow? It’s a question I find myself asking twice most mornings: first, while walking by that construction site on my way to Prospect Park, and then again an hour or so later, sitting down at my computer to write, as a journalist, about buildings and the city. What strikes me is how different the question seems in each context – how sharp the disconnect is between the immediacy required of journalism and the sheer evolutionary slowness of the city itself.
This is not a new concern of architecture journalists, but it is one more often put in spatial rather than temporal terms. Do we write about figure or ground, the building itself or the building in context? Maybe it’s the prospect of a few years of stillness, but I’ve recently been thinking more about time. And what’s obvious is that the city is slow, and we write too fast.
Do we write about figure or ground, the building itself or the building in context? The city is slow, and we write too fast.Hollywood marketers talk about “eventizing” a movie, and architecture marketers have caught on to the strategy as well. For the most visible public buildings – museums, schools, performing arts centers – the publicists typically call in the design press corps before the construction workers have even left, then allocate the release of photographs according to each publication’s status and audience. It’s a race against the punch-list, with the result being that new buildings are treated more as commodities to be consumed, rather than long-living parts of the fabric of the city. Architecture is covered as event rather than as ongoing presence. I can’t begrudge the institutions’ motives: good press makes good donors, and everyone needs those. Nor can I feign my own indifference to these shiny new things (that Meier building included). Often they’re spectacular, occasionally they’re profound, and they make for tidy stories. But the baubles soak up too much of the attention of us writers, especially now when we are constrained by shrinking page counts and an increasingly global audience. The slow city hardly stands a chance.
If this were a tolerable, even pleasurable diversion for a while, it seems less relevant now. Climate change has raised the stakes, at the same time that it has changed the subject. The design of buildings and the building of cities is taking on extraordinary significance in a world whose geopolitics is increasingly defined by a dominantly urban population and an imperiled environment, and it means something different than it did before. It can no longer be primarily understood aesthetically, socially or economically (complex though those perspectives are), but requires technical and scientific considerations as well. If the ecology and engineering of cities used to be happily opaque – irrelevant compared to how the city looked and how it was used – today the energy use of buildings and transit systems, the flows of water and goods, even the electronic networks that support the city, are all crucial to the broader life of the city. For architecture journalists, this means a shift towards topics that in the past may have been more likely to be covered by science and technology writers. The meaning of buildings, and the built city, has changed.
New buildings are treated more as commodities to be consumed, rather than long-living parts of the fabric of the city.So has the pace of the story. The emerging storyline of the 21st century city is its relationship to climate change. Yet that emergence is slow and hidden. The New York Times science writer Andrew Revkin calls them “slow drip” stories. “Global science is all someday somewhere,” he frets. “Newspapers are about today. These issues are the antithesis of the stuff we’ve been calling news for the last 150 years.”
That’s the crux of my internal dialogue as I walk across Grand Army Plaza. As a singular object the Meier building is shiny, new and pretty – but who does it matter to, how and when? It seems to spit out one-liners, which everyone hears differently: the pleasures of luxury and the evils of gentrification; the technological pride of modernism or its gross acontextualism; the environmental advantages of density or an infrastructure that’s becoming overwhelmed. All these readings are valid, all these readings are changing. How do I do justice to them in the story of the city moving forward?
Environmental writing could be a model. Deeply linked to a tradition of activism, based nearly always on direct observation, it has never struggled to summon a sense of lasting immediacy out of the present conditions of the physical world – however slowly they may change. But the trouble is that it often gets its backbone from a romantic ideal about nature, as a quasi-spiritual absolute that frames the discussion. In his new Library of America collection “American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau,” Bill McKibben describes an overarching interest in this “collision between people and the rest of the world.” The difference, and the hard part, is accounting for the city’s incontrovertibly human nature. I like the fact that for Revkin, “the story,” as he puts it, isn’t “the environment” or “climate change,” but the “efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits” – two things the city exemplifies.
As construction on the Meier building has wound down, and the daily additions have become finer grained – a new curb-cut or door frame, rather than a whole floor or a wall of windows – I’ve been tempted to think of it in terms of an urban version of the ecological succession that turns a field into forest. By that logic, the site’s transformation is nearly complete and the climax state is coming soon, in the form of a cluster of kids waiting for the school bus and a Town Car idling at the curb. But it would be a false climax. Ecologists don’t view nature as something static, and neither is the city. The building is finished. Some people are moving in while others in the neighborhood might soon be pushed out. Classrooms may be overcrowded. New suburban sprawl might be avoided. But none of those stories can be rushed. The meaning of the building in the city has just begun. Its story is still in the future.
Andrew Blum is a contributing editor at Wired and Metropolis magazines, and a contributing editor at Urban Omnibus. He lives in Brooklyn.
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