Architecture Lab

Via NY Times

The developer's rendering of 15 Penn Plaza, as seen from the north, shows it and the Empire State building in unimpeded spots on the skyline at sunset.

“To hear the two sides in the skyscraper war tell it, never has so much been at stake.

The owners of the Empire State Building and their supporters say their tower’s international status and New York City’s skyline are in mortal danger of an assault from a “monstrosity.”

Their rival: a proposed tower on 34th Street two avenues to the west that, according to its developers, will help the city grow and prosper, provide thousands of jobs and improve the quality of life for tens of thousands of New Yorkers.

What irks the former is that the latter would rise to be 1,216 feet, almost as tall as the Empire State Building, and would be just 900 feet away, a little too close for a building that has stood apart in the skyline for its entire 79-year life.

“The question here is: How close is too close to one of New York’s iconic landmarks,” Councilman Daniel R. Garodnick said Monday, after a hearing in which the owners of both properties made their cases, in advance of a City Council vote on Wednesday.

“Is this going to swallow up the Empire State Building,” Mr. Garodnick asked, “or are we just talking about another big building a couple of avenues away?”

The owners of the Empire State Building, Anthony E. and Peter L. Malkin, even want a 17-block no-go zone surrounding their 1,250-foot tall tower. This would prevent Vornado Realty Trust, which wants to erect the new building on Seventh Avenue, or any other developer, from putting up a similarly oversize building in the zone.

The City Planning Commission has already approved Vornado’s plan for a tower, called 15 Penn Plaza, opposite Pennsylvania Station. It would be 56 percent larger than what would ordinarily be allowed, in keeping with the city’s desire to promote high-density development close to transit hubs. But Community Board 5, whose district includes the area, did not approve. A committee at the board said the developer had not provided a rationale for such a large zoning bonus, especially since it did not have a tenant and might not build for years…..”

Read the rest of the article here
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The New York Times

For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk
By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.
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The capsules have no doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows. Photo: Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

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““It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”

When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.

Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.
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Mr. Nakanishi has lived at the Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 in Tokyo for six months, sleeping in a tiny plastic berth and storing his few belongings in a locker. Photo: Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

An upper bunk in the capsule hotel costs 59,000 yen a month -- about $640 -- for a space of 6.5 feet by 5 feet equipped with a light, a small TV and coat hooks. But that is far less than the cost of renting an apartment in Tokyo. Photo: Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Long-term dwellers like Mr. Nakanishi have special permission from the local authorities to let them register their capsules as their official abode, which makes it easier to land job interviews. Photo: Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

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Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.

The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight.

“In this bitter-cold New Year’s season, the government intends to do all it can to help those who face hardship,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a video posted Dec. 26 on YouTube. “You are not alone.”

On Friday, he visited a Tokyo shelter housing 700 homeless people, telling reporters that “help can’t wait.”

Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company.

Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed.
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The hotel's cafeteria is equipped with vending machines. The smell of cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel workers do their best to put guests at ease: "Welcome home," they say at the entrance. Photo: Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university but dreams of becoming a lawyer, studied for the law school entrance exam at a coffee shop in Tokyo. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, in a video message on YouTube, vowed to help the unemployed and homeless.

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The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says.

Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.

Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.

Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.

“Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel.

But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.

After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.

At 2 a.m. on one recent December night, two young women watched the American television show “24” on a TV inside the sauna. One said she had traveled to Tokyo from her native Gunma, north of the city, to look for work. She intended to be a hostess at one of the capital’s cabaret clubs, where women engage in conversation with men for a fee.

The woman, 20, said she was hoping to land a job with a club that would put her up in an apartment. She declined to give her name because she did not want her family to know her whereabouts.

“It’s tough to live like this, but it won’t be for too long,” she said. “At least there are more jobs here than in Gunma.”

The government says about 15,800 people live on the streets in Japan, but aid groups put the figure much higher, with at least 10,000 in Tokyo alone. Those numbers do not count the city’s “hidden” homeless, like those who live in capsule hotels. There is also a floating population that sleeps overnight in the country’s many 24-hour Internet cafes and saunas.

The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations.

These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society.

“When the country enjoyed rapid economic growth, standards of living improved across the board and class differences were obscured,” said Prof. Hiroshi Ishida of the University of Tokyo. “With a stagnating economy, class is more visible again.”

The government has poured money into bolstering Japan’s social welfare system, promising cash payments to households with children and abolishing tuition fees at public high schools.

Still, Naoto Iwaya, 46, is on the verge of joining the hopeless. A former tuna fisherman, he has been living at another capsule hotel in Tokyo since August. He most recently worked on a landfill at the city’s Haneda Airport, but that job ended last month.

“I have looked and looked, but there are no jobs. Now my savings are almost gone,” Mr. Iwaya said, after checking into an emergency shelter in Tokyo. He will be allowed to stay until Monday.

After that, he said, “I don’t know where I can go.”

Source: The New York Times

Pruned

Coinciding with the next issue (#18) of Kerb, the annual landscape architecture journal edited by students at RMIT, Melbourne, is their first ever international design competition, PlastiCity FantastiCity. The competition brief sounds wildly open ended, which could frustrate some but hopefully will only foster astonishing visions of the future city.
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Image courtesy of the Kerb 18 Editorial Team

What if when you take a lunch break, parks literally broke from the earth, airlifted above the clouds escaping into the sunlight, landing within the hour leaving you at peace with the world?
PlastiCity FantastiCity is remodeling the constructed city at any chosen scale to become a world of playful opportunity, where nothing that manifests itself in today’s cities is present. This ideas competition seeks a multidisciplinary approach to discover new potentials and possibilities within the world and in particular for the Landscape Architecture profession.
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“MEtreePOLIS, by NYC-based HWKN’s contribution in Kerb 17: Is Landscape Architecture Dead?, envisions a genetically modified Atlanta, Georgia, a hundred years from now: stratified like a forest, with a canopy at the top collecting water and energy and a single-surface city floor below of bio-renewable moss with no roads or pavements.

Watch Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner give a tour of their “fantasticity”:

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The registration deadline is December 18, 2009, and the submission deadline for panels is January 18, 2010.
Winners will receive cash prizes in addition to page spreads in Kerb 18.

Source: Pruned
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The New York Times

Nadau Lavergne Architects reimagines the Grand Concourse as a linear urban forest in one proposal in this show at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

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By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

“Decaying freeways, high-speed trains, levees, bicycle lanes — ever since Hurricane Katrina, infrastructure has been the hot topic among architects and architectural curators across the country. The chatter only grew louder after the Obama administration unveiled its economic stimulus package, igniting hopes of a major national transformation. “Intersections: The Grand Concourse Beyond 100,” which opened at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on Sunday, is the latest show to pick up on this trend.

A result of a nine-month competition sponsored by the museum and the Design Trust for Public Space, the show focuses on seven visions for the future of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx that range from urban farms to high-tech sound barriers for a nearby freeway. Much of the work is by students, and it reflects the kind of earnest idealism that has always been a staple of graduate studios.

However naïve these proposals may seem at first glance, though, they are all conceived at a manageable, human scale. And the more time you spend among them, the more you become aware of both the faded beauty of the Grand Concourse and the remarkable potential for revitalizing this century-old boulevard modeled on the Champs-Élysées. Eventually you begin to feel that the problem is not so much the innocence of planners and architects, but our own indifference and lack of political will.

A highlight of the show is a series of big, glossy photographs by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao. These are the first things you see, and a revelation: a startling illustration of the insensitive planning that contributed to the boulevard’s decay.

One side of an image taken from the rooftop of a housing project radiates with the vibrant green treetops of the Mosholu Parkway. A thick band of train tracks carves diagonally through the other side of the image, disrupting the calm. The Concourse looks lost and isolated between the two.

Smaller photos on another wall show the street front between 138th and 206th Streets. First you notice the uniformity of scale: rows of nearly identical six-story apartment houses interrupted by an occasional 10- or 12-story building. On closer inspection, however, that scale begins to break down, and a more subtle rhythm begins to emerge. Strips of small shops — a dry cleaner, barbershop, grocery markets, a Popeyes fried chicken — create little moments of energy in a barren cityscape isolated from the life of the city around them.

Most of the proposals attempt to remedy that isolation through a mix of environmental initiative and technological innovation. The winning design, PUMP, by two Columbia University architecture and urban design graduate students, is a C-shaped structure that functions as an air-purifier, sound absorber and rainwater filter and can be clipped onto the side of the nearby Major Deegan Expressway. The roof of the structure’s sleek form would shelter traffic from rain while absorbing exhaust fumes. A small channel on its exterior would allow people to walk on a path overlooking the waterfront along the length of the expressway.

The plan’s real strength, however, is that it treats the Concourse as part of a larger urban matrix of distinct communities and local economies rather than as a uniform linear experience. A series of public promenades would extend westward off the Concourse, passing under the expressway toward the waterfront and connecting to public piers. The area’s dying industrial fabric would be revived through gentrification and a concentration of new environmentally friendly industries.

Angus McCullough, a senior at Wesleyan University, takes a more subversive approach. His proposal, “Live Wired,” would create video and audio installations in strategic points along the Concourse. A 24-hour image of the sky would be projected onto platform ceilings in nearby subway stations so that people underground could see the weather outside — a potentially mesmerizing way to pass the time if you’ve just missed a train. Meanwhile another video of people milling around on the platforms below would be projected onto the Concourse’s sidewalks. Aside from its voyeuristic appeal, the system would allow pedestrians to keep an eye out for an approaching subway train.

Other aspects of this design are a bit simplistic. Mr. McCullough, for example, imagines projecting unfolding Yankees games onto the Concourse’s sidewalks, and mounting microphones and loudspeakers outside bodegas to broadcast fragments of conversations as people walk by. Still, the concept touches on a critical urban subject: the intensifying battle between transparency and privacy in the public realm.

Oddly, it was the most earnest approaches that touched me most in the end, even when they were not particularly inventive or original. A proposal by the New York office of the international design firm EDAW that would create a strip of communal farmland down the middle of the Concourse verges on cliché. But it improves when you keep in mind the grittiness of some of the urban gardens in New York or Berlin and imagine them stretched out along several miles. A new light-rail line would run the length of the boulevard; traffic would be reduced to two lanes in each direction, down from the current six.

A raucous proposal by the French team Nadau Lavergne Architects would pile more activities on top of existing structures to add density to the neighborhood and create unexpected urban frictions. Schools and cultural institutions would be stacked over apartment complexes, freeing up the street level for commercial use. A graffiti-covered streetcar would run up and down the Concourse, linking it to Manhattan. The Concourse would be packed with trees, transforming it into a linear urban forest.

Part of what is moving about these proposals is that their approaches have become so familiar. Not long ago the notion of building farmland in the middle of a busy urban roadway would have seemed like madness; today it seems too obvious. So does the idea that segregating urban functions can drain the life from a city.

When you step back out onto the Grand Concourse after visiting the Bronx Museum show, you see the neighborhood with fresh eyes and a clearer understanding of its history and how it could be revived. If you linger there long enough, you are apt to be overtaken by sadness at lost opportunities and public inertia. And at how many of our cities’ grandest achievements exist in a sort of perpetual limbo — half-dead, half-alive.” The New York Times
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The New York Times

Some of the original machinery remains in the great hall of the former water pumping station. The platforms from which engineers once supervised machinery are used as a mezzanine office space.

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By CATHRIN SCHAER

“MICHAEL ELMGREEN and Ingar Dragset are artists who have exhibited from New York to Tokyo. But for the last 12 years, the globe-trotting artistic duo, collaborators since 1995, have lived in Berlin. And at a certain point, they decided it was time to buy.

“We were never particularly interested in property investment,” said Mr. Dragset, who is from Norway (Mr. Elmgreen is from Denmark).

The two men, once a couple but now just artistic partners, originally moved to Berlin because it was near Copenhagen, where they had lived, and because it seemed full of energy as well as inexpensive. But after a decade in Berlin, Mr. Dragset said, “We were tired of fixing up spaces and having to leave them after a couple of years.”
And, he added, “both privately, and within our art practice, we love spatial challenges — so we were looking for somewhere we could apply the concepts we had been working with in our art.”

The artists Michael Elmgreen, left, and Ingar Dragset

When they saw an advertisement for the old water-pumping station in a Berlin suburb, a working-class area called Neukölln, the pair’s creative antennae began to twitch. The former pumping station, surrounded by fully grown chestnut trees and flanked by apartment buildings on a residential street, had remained empty since the early 1990s because nobody knew quite what to do with such an oversize hall stuck in the middle of a non-industrial location.

“Almost too good to be true,” Mr. Dragset said. “Especially considering the price, which was ridiculously low compared to any other European capital.” He declined to specify but said it was similar to a typical two-bedroom apartment in Oslo, which is about $700,000. The renovations cost about the same as the purchase price.

The exterior of the 1920s building, located in a Berlin suburb, remained relatively untouched.

Working with two young architects, Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese, whom they met through friends, the two began renovations that took about a year. Fortunately the solid old industrial building was in good condition and drastic structural changes were unnecessary. New wiring, heating and plumbing were needed, but as Mr. Dragset explained, “basically we’ve broken down more walls than we’ve built.”

In the great hall of the former water pumping station, platforms from which engineers supervised machinery are now used as mezzanine office space.

The main space is used for fabricating artworks created by Mr. Elmgreen and Mr. Dragset.

After the initial apprehension at owning their own property, Mr. Dragset said, they began to treat the renovations more like an art project, playing with the space and coming up with clever uses for the former station’s various features. For example, the four large vents in the upper floor once used to ventilate the building have been transformed into a fireplace, a table, a guest bed and an embedded bathtub.

"Both privately, and within our art practice, we love spatial challenges -- so we were looking for somewhere we could apply the concepts we had been working with in our art," Mr. Dragset said.

An art work sits in the main hall, used to rehearse "Drama Queens," a play with Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons, done in London.

There’s no clutter: just white walls, glacial light streaming in through old warehouse-style windows, trees silently waving at visitors from the outside and what feels like acres of floor space.

The building is now both home and studio space. Generally, the renovation materials have been inexpensive. Most of the floors are sanded asphalt covered in clear polyurethane that goes with the industrial nature of the building. On one hand, “it’s reminiscent of the building’s industrial history,” Mr. Wenk said. “On the other hand, it’s very economical.” In smaller rooms, the asphalt was sanded more finely, he explained, then tinted to reflect the personal nature of the rooms.

Photo: Mark Simon for The New York Times

Behind the mezzanine office, a kitchen of stainless steel and wood provides room for the studio staff to have working lunches.

The tub in this bathroom was sunk into the floor.

In the attic, a new 16-foot-high window opens fully, creating the feel of a terrace.

"The combination of vast floor space and the small, quirky nooks means you can be very hidden here, or very exposed depending on your moods or needs," Mr. Dragset said.

The farther up and back one goes, the more private the space becomes. The back boasts five levels, including two private areas for the artists, a kitchen, an attic living room and four bathrooms. And the renovated attic space is reminiscent of a playboy’s penthouse. In this upper section, a window in the roof slides back at the push of a button like something out of Dr. Evil’s lair.

“We deliberately made the borders between the work and living spaces fleeting,” Mr. Dragset said. “The combination of vast floor space and the small, quirky nooks means you can be very hidden here, or very exposed depending on your moods or needs.”
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Source: The New York Times
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from NYT
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

“The death of Charles Gwathmey early this month has provoked a lot of nostalgic reminiscence in the New York architecture world: not just about Mr. Gwathmey himself, but also about the New York Five, a group of influential architects of which he was part.

Mr. Gwathmey in his apartment in Manhattan (Photo: Diane Bondareff/The New York Times)

This nostalgia has much to do with what’s been lost in the years since the group’s prominence in the 1970s. The early years of that decade was a time when this city was beginning to close itself off to innovative architecture. But it was also a time when New York could still claim to be the country’s center of architectural thought, and Mr. Gwathmey and his colleagues had a great deal to do with maintaining that pre-eminence in the public imagination. The New York Five came to represent the idea that architecture could still express and advance our values as a culture. To some, the group embodies the last heroic period in New York architecture.

That the five came together at all seems almost an accident of fate. They had no real manifesto, no common aesthetic. Several young, promising New York architects were invited by Arthur Drexler, the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s legendary architecture department, to meet informally in the museum board room one day in the late ’60s to talk about their work. More meetings followed, a few attendees dropped out, others joined in. When the book “Five Architects,” which inspired the group’s name, was published in 1972, its success was a shock to everyone.

What the five architects did share, however, was a desire to reassert the importance of architecture as art form during a crisis in the profession. By the mid-1960s much of the Modernist dream was in ruins, and one of its central tenets — that architecture could act as an agent of positive social change — lay buried beneath decades of failed urban housing projects, soulless government buildings and sterile concrete plazas.

Charles Gwathmey, part of a generation of architects who put their own aesthetic stamp on the "high Modernist" style, died on August 3. He was known both for residential work -- he built living spaces for Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jerry Seinfeld -- and sometimes controversial public buildings. (Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

While in his 20s Mr. Gwathmey became a sensation by building a house for his parents on the East End of Long Island. The house, completed in 1966, was consistently described as one of the most influential buildings of the modern era. Two years later he and Robert Siegel founded Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. (Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Perhaps the firm's best known work was its addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's design of the Guggenheim Museum on the Upper East Side, the rectangular tower beside the building's famous spiral. (Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)

At the same time activists like Jane Jacobs were portraying modern architecture as the product of smug, pointy-headed academics out of touch with the way real people live. Her vision of the ideal city — a historical community of brownstones, front stoops and corner stores — was modeled on the North End in Boston and Greenwich Village. It left little room for new architectural ideas.

Faced with such a hostile climate, some of the New York Five began looking to other creative disciplines for a way out of this malaise. John Hejduk, for example, often cited Fernand Léger and Juan Gris as an inspiration. The carefully assembled forms of Michael Graves’s early projects drew inspiration from the still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi. (Even Richard Meier’s refined glass-and-steel aesthetic, which owed its most obvious debt to orthodox Modernism, turned the classical Modernist house into a fetishized art object.)

The 1967 Hanselmann house, designed by the New York Five architect Michael Graves, in Fort Wayne, Ind. -(Tom Yee/Condé Nast Publications)

The group’s greatest contribution, in retrospect, was its assertion that architecture had not reached a dead end. The architects saw themselves as artists and thinkers — not activists — and this was particularly true of Peter Eisenman, sometimes to a fault. The distorted grids of his early houses, with their references to Renaissance precedents and Structuralist theory, were not only a way to thumb a nose gleefully at Jacobs-style populism; they also elevated conceptual ideas above material and structure, the life of the mind over the life of the body.
To many in the profession this aesthetic approach represented a way forward. Philip Johnson, who seemed to rule the American architectural scene from his perch as a trustee at the Museum of Modern Art, began to fete the five over lunches at the Four Seasons and black-tie dinners at the Century club. He introduced them to powerful figures in the art establishment.

Yet to those who were paying attention, the party’s end was evident almost as soon as it had started. By the mid-1980s the effort to suburbanize the city’s core and make it safe for tourists — a process that many associate with Rudolph W. Giuliani and his mayoral quality-of-life campaigns a decade later — was well under way, and the group’s members had splintered off in different directions.

Mr. Graves, once a dogmatic Modernist, retreated into an ersatz historicism. Mr. Hejduk, who died in 2000, beat a similar retreat into academia. Although Mr. Meier continues to create works of remarkable refinement, his vision has not significantly changed in decades. Only Mr. Eisenman has kept up a theoretical practice, one in which the work is continually evolving, but he has built little — and nothing in New York.

The country’s creative energy shifted westward, to Los Angeles, whose vibrant mix of urban grit and nature, abundance of relatively cheap land and lack of confining historical traditions allowed architects to experiment with a freedom that had become virtually impossible in New York.

Mr. Gwathmey's Astor Place condominium tower drew criticism from those who said it was insufficiently deferential to its surroundings. (Photo: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times)

Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Robert Mangurian, Craig Hodgetts — these architects were not only the creative equals of their New York counterparts, they were making architecture that was rooted in popular culture and as rich in ideas as anything that has come out of New York in decades. They have been joined by a younger generation, including Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan, Neil Denari and the team of Kevin Daly and Chris Genik, that has no real equivalent in New York.

A similar energy could be found in Europe and Japan, where the crisis of Modernism had not been felt as deeply and architects had never stopped experimenting.

Mr. Gwathmey created a proposal for the World Trade Center site, along with Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman and Steven Holl. (Photo: dbox/archphoto)

Given that reality, it should not be surprising to anyone that the most important works of contemporary architecture to rise in New York over the past decade — Mr. Gehry’s IAC headquarters on the West Side Highway, Mr. Mayne’s Cooper Union building, the Tokyo firm Sanaa’s New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery and Jean Nouvel’s tower under construction in Chelsea — were designed not by New Yorkers but by Angelenos, a Japanese woman and a Frenchman.

It is hard to know how the current financial crisis will affect this trend. More than once I’ve heard it suggested that the downturn will be good for architecture. The argument goes something like this: The economic tailspin will put an end to the boom in gaudy residential towers that are distorting the city’s skyline. Cheap rents will attract young, hungry creative types. This will spawn a cultural flowering similar to that of the 1970s, when the Bronx was burning, graffiti artists were the norm and Gordon Matta-Clark was carving up empty warehouses on the Hudson River piers with a power saw.

But cheap rents alone won’t do it. On the contrary, the construction slowdown, if it lasts long enough, will likely drive many young talents out of the profession for good. It also looks less and less likely that a government-sponsored, Works Progress Administration-style civic project will revive the profession — another favorite fantasy of the ever-optimistic architecture scene.

Real change will first demand a radical shift in our cultural priorities. Politicians will have to embrace the cosmopolitanism that was once the city’s core identity. New York’s cultural institutions will need to shake off the complacency that comes with age and respectability. Architects will need to see blind obedience once again as a vice, not a virtue. And New Yorkers will have to remember why they came to the city in the first place: to find a refuge from suburbia, not to replicate it. That’s a tall order.”

Source: The New York Times
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from [the belly of an architect]

Hybrids II is a new magazine from a+t architecture publishers.
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Hybrids II is the latest launch from a+t architecture publishers, focusing on Low-rise Mixed-use Buildings. This is the second issue in a+t’s Hybrids series and features a good selection of projects – most of them currently under construction in Europe and Asia – carefully presented and analysed through technical drawings and diagrams. The magazine also includes an extensive theoretical essay that contextualizes the evolution of hybrid typologies through time, from the invention of the skyscraper to the utopian mega-structures conceived by Archizoom in the 1960s.

Jakob+Macfarlane: Docks de Paris, Paris, France, 2007.
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Hybrid buildings have adapted to the needs of contemporary cities, mitigating the division between the private and public realms. These are horizontal projects that are invasive in nature, proposing complexity of form, volumetric fragmentation and functional diversity. Often experimental in their design approach, they shatter the borders between the architectural and the urban, challenging pre-established notions of density and scale.

OMA: Bryghusprojektet, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008.
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Visit a+t for additional information on this magazine and other publications.

Source: [the belly of an architect]
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MONU

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR MONU – magazine on urbanism #9 – EXOTIC URBANISM

” Ever since our cities became areas of continuous interaction and ever-expanding exchange the term “exotic” – understood as counterpart to the “local”, the “native” or even the “authentic” – has become a rather vague term. Who – in actual fact – is still able to distinguish between the one and the other, between the exotic and the local? Who would be interested anyway? Yet, once again, there seems to be an increasing fascination with, and interest in, importing and seeing certain urban elements from other parts of the world in our own cities. There are, apparently, more Japanese people visiting the fake Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas than the original in Paris. What makes this displacement so interesting today? Continue Reading

Archis - Volume #15 is now out.

” Once there was life without books. It’s hard to imagine what that must have been like: an age of stories and knowledge of the world which stretched no farther than a day’s walk. The introduction of the written source constituted nothing less than the creation of a time and space capsule. The story, the idea, insight, knowledge were suddenly free of their messenger and were all able to bridge distances, able to surface, vanish and reappear.
Just as there was a time before the book, there will also be a time after it. In this issue ‘The Last Book’ project is taken up, but as to the consequences of publishing exclusively online – the loss of filters such as the publisher, editor and publication costs – we can only guess. Yet it is clear that our centuries old house of knowledge is undergoing a fundamental renovation, beginning with the solid base of the library. ” Volume #15

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