kottke.org posts about architecture
NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff on the legacy of Jane Jacobs and why her views on cities aren’t universally applicable:
The activists of Ms. Jacobs’s generation may have saved SoHo from Mr. Moses’ bulldozers, but they could not stop it from becoming an open-air mall. The old buildings are still there, the streets are once again paved in cobblestone, but the rich mix of manufacturers, artists and gallery owners has been replaced by homogenous crowds of lemming-like shoppers. Nothing is produced there any more. It is a corner of the city that is nearly as soulless, in its way, as the superblocks that Ms. Jacobs so reviled.
But I have a hard time believing — as Mr. Ouroussoff does — that:
…on an urban island packed with visual noise, the plaza at Lincoln Center — or even at the old World Trade Center — can be a welcome contrast in scale, a moment of haunting silence amid the chaos. Similarly, the shimmering glass towers that frame lower Park Avenue are awe-inspiring precisely because they offer a sharp contrast to the quiet tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side.
Surely we can devise better ways of introducing contrasts in scale into our cities than building Lincoln Centers.
Ouroussoff’s article includes a companion audio slideshow of him talking about Jacobs and also of West Village residents sharing their views on their neighborhood that Jacbos lived in and wrote about long ago.
Among the many things New York is famous for is the tiny apartments of its inhabitants. Our first apartment here was about 400 square feet and somehow the people who lived downstairs from us in an apartment with the same footprint fit two people and two pitbull-type dogs into that space. In a recently released book, Apartment Therapy’s Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan reveals that he and his wife live in a 250 square foot apartment in the West Village.
Having such small apartments, city residents want to make the most of the space that they have. In designing a loft apartment for his son, architect Kyu Sung Woo came up with an interesting solution to the space problem…he fit two stories into a one-story apartment. The result is The Interlocking Puzzle Loft, a surprisingly spacious two-bedroom palace crammed into 700 square feet.
As shown and described in this article from Dwell, the key element in the loft is the half-height bedroom above the kitchen and the bedroom’s walkway positioned above the short downstairs hall closet and back kitchen counter, which allows the apartment’s inhabitants to stand up in the bedroom. Pretty genius idea.
I can’t find a permanent link to it, but for the next week or so, you can see the NY Times package on the Empire State Building, which turns 75 this year. Lots of photos, rememberances, etc.
Modernist prefab houses are all the rage these days. “Designed by architects, constructed in factories and trucked to their sites, these houses had the look the couple wanted, at a lower price.” The Dwell House had a lot to do with current interest is modern prefab housing.
Aerial photos of cities taken by Olivo Barbieri with a tilt-shift lens look like scale models. I’m familiar with the tilt-shift (Jake noodled around with one awhile back), but didn’t imagine you could use it to achieve such a convincing optical illusion. (via bldgblog via waxy)
Related to the stories about binding books with human skin from earlier in the week, apparently architect Le Corbusier bound one of his favorite books (Don Quixote) with the hide from one of his favorite dogs (Pinceau). The result looks like that textbook in Harry Potter that you needed to stroke the spine to get it to open without biting you.
Profile of architect Renzo Piano. “People are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries [i.e. suburbs] into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be.”
Is Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building, causing earthquakes? “The considerable stress might be transferred into the upper crust due to the extremely soft sedimentary rocks beneath the Taipei basin. Deeper down this may have reopened an old earthquake fault”. (thx, malatron)
Steven Johnson on the ride into Hong Kong from the airport. “The approach into Hong Kong is as breathtaking as any I’ve ever experienced.” I agree completely.
Just looking at the Grand Canyon Skywalk (more info here) makes me go all queasy. 70 feet out from the edge of the cliff and 4000 feet down? No thanks! Genius idea though.
Being in Hong Kong is sufficient reason to revisit the Skyscraper Page, especially its excellent diagrams. Here are the 25 tallest buildings in Hong Kong; the tallest is 2 IFC, which is currently the fifth tallest building in the world (top 10).
My favorite Hong Kong skyscraper is the HSBC Building. Designed by Norman Foster, it’s the building that every architecture geek friend of yours tells you to check out while you’re in Hong Kong. Initially, I thought yeah, yeah, how great can it be, it looks kinda like every other modern steel and glass building, and then we went inside and rode the escalator up through the glass ceiling and into a huge atrium. Pretty cool. And then I saw the building from the side and also at night when the side stairwells are lit up with alternating red and white lighted patterns, and I really started to appreciate why it’s such a revered building; the Chinese even believe it’s got some of the best Feng Shui in HK.
Pan of the newish MoMA building in NYC. I like the new building, but I agree that there are too many people sometimes; they’re certainly not having a problem with that $20 admission price. (via cdl)
Update: a rebuttal by Greg Allen.
Mock-up photos of the “East Village” retail complex planned for Las Vegas. There’s even a displaced meatpacking district and Washington Square arch.
Antarctic base will be built on skis. The movable station “will prevent the possibility of the base drifting out into the ocean on the back of an iceberg that has ‘calved’ off the shelf”.
An update on the development of the High Line. The latest designs will be on display at the MoMA.
I didn’t think it was possible: someone has come up with a new take on the “what’s cool, what’s not cool on the Internet” thing.
People I would or wouldn’t fuck on the Internet.
I’m not sure whether I’m disappointed or relieved that I’m in the “I wouldn’t fuck” column. At the very least, this guy owes me an explanation as to why I’m not spongeworthy.
At least he spelled my name right…more than I can say for a lot of the other words on the page. Mispellings galore & bad grammer….I think he goes in my “wouldn’t fuck” column. No soup for you. Next!
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