The Design Observer Group

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Report: Quilian Riano & Dk Osseo-Asare

“Mention to anyone in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, that you are planning a trip to the port city of Buenaventura, on the Pacific Coast, and you will likely encounter stern warnings and looks of disbelief. Buenaventura holds a special, troubled place in the Colombian psyche. For decades the inability of the federal government to tame the hyper-violent city — despite efforts by the wildly popular and controversial president Alvaro Uribe — typifies the disruptive power of what has become a zone of insurgency — Colombia’s “wild frontier.” As recently as a few years ago, drug traffickers and right-wing militants fought daily turf wars in the city’s slums while guerrillas and paramilitaries battled for control of the sole access route to the city through the Andes. Although a massive military presence has dramatically improved security, even today skirmishes are not uncommon along the main road into the city, where the guerrillas now fight U.S.-trained Colombian government forces.

Ultimately the battle for Buenaventura is about control. The city of Buenaventura (population 325,000), home to one of Colombia’s largest and most profitable seaports, is also close to the country’s most productive coca fields. This strategic location accounts for the city’s shadow economy of illegal cocaine exports and imported black market dollars, which flow along with regulated products like coffee and sugar cane. External forces (the central government, shareholders of Buenaventura’s privately owned port authority, the U.S. State Department) seek to regulate the city in order to ensure an uninterrupted flow of legal goods. At the same time, a parallel set of local players (guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug lords) prefers instead to maintain a status quo of informal instability that enables the transshipment of illegal drugs to markets in Western Europe and the United States.
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But even as Buenaventurans work to improve their collective condition, they are caught in this tangled web of competing interests that exploit the city for profit (legal and illegal) yet fail to invest in the its future. Part of the problem is that many in the country perceive Buenaventura as peripheral. Physically, the city is remote — an island located at the western edge of the Andes. Economically, it is marginal…. ”

Read the rest of the articles at The Design Observer Group

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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““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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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 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

LA Times

Architecture: Star architects emerge, but even they find limits
Real power remained elusive for even them.
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By Christopher Hawthorne architecture critic
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Architecture, arguably for the first time in its history, found itself at the very center of American cultural and political life in the decade that is wrapping up. That centrality helped make stars out of architecture’s top talents. With the aid of powerful software, adventuresome clients and, not least, a flood of new wealth and easy financing, it also produced a rush of inventive buildings, in styles stretching from fluid to wildly sculptural to neomodern.

But the notion that architects had suddenly acquired more power than ever before, as opposed to more visibility, opportunity or cachet, turned out to be hollow. Along with producing so many terrific individual pieces of architecture, what the decade did repeatedly in this country was to give the profession a cold look at the limits of its influence.
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In the haze of shock, grief and recrimination that followed the destruction of Minoru Yamasaki’s twin towers, rebuilding at the site, which quickly became known as ground zero, became one mantra America convinced itself we could rally around. But the process ground slowly toward gridlock: Daniel Libeskind wound up winning a high-profile master-plan competition for the site, then saw his proposal slowly gutted while he turned to designing condo towers for Sacramento and Covington, Ky. The memorial to the World Trade Center’s 2,700 victims, by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, was also delayed and diluted; it is scheduled to open, at least in part, by 2011.

The real authors of ground zero’s dismal script were former New York Gov. George Pataki and developer Larry Silverstein. Both tried to use the rebuilding process — speeding up or slowing it down, depending on the month — to further their own ambition, often to a shameless degree.

In the middle years of the decade, as the economy roared back to life, architects saw their role as cultural stars expand. Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, an acoustic as well as architectural triumph, finally opened on Grand Avenue in 2003, joined down the hill by Thom Mayne’s hulking Caltrans District 7 Headquarters the following year. Sustainable design edged into the mainstream; I knew that long journey was nearly complete the day an editor for the first time allowed to me to use the term green architecture without quotation marks.

In a few thrilling cases, some combustible mixture of architectural talent, engineering prowess, national ambition or free-flowing credit came together to produce truly significant buildings, most notably the CCTV Tower in Beijing by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, an icon of rising Chinese power that also, with its Mobius-like profile, managed to re- invent skyscraper form.

At the same time, private developers began to show an interest in architecture’s most innovative firms as cutting-edge architects started designing not just museums, concert halls and private homes but huge commercial projects. Among the most compelling of that group was Jean Nouvel’s design for the “Green Blade” condominium project in Century City, a knife-thin tower wrapped in lush hanging gardens that was abandoned after the economy collapsed in 2008.

Four years after 9/11 a second national tragedy would strike, throwing the gap between design prowess and planning smarts once again into high relief. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and their aftermath were followed by some of the same rush of interest in an architectural rescue that had applied at ground zero. In teams big and small, architects poured into the Gulf and New Orleans.

What they found was that the structure of city and regional planning, which should have been the sturdy foundation on which they built their individual feats of creativity, had withered away in Louisiana and Mississippi, as in much of the rest of the nation, to almost nothing. A roster of talented architects produced inventive house designs for New Orleans. Nonprofits have suggested ways to bring certain neighborhoods back to life. But without a robust commitment to planning as a regionally minded and publicly funded exercise, those interventions have had little more than a piecemeal effect.

Sadly enough, many of the same disappointments were in store when it came to President Barack Obama’s massive stimulus package earlier this year. Obama’s roots in big-city life gave many reason to hope he would promote a new age of investment in urbanism. But Obama is nothing if not a pragmatist, and in the end he allowed Congress to write the legislation. That made it almost by definition heavy on retrograde road-widening improvements and light on inventive solutions for 21st century cities.

Some architects have responded to the decade’s repeated disappointments in the political sphere by retreating into self-contained, occasionally hermetic debates over form and digital design. Many have come to accept what all of us are at least occasionally tempted to concede: that the idea of architects as influential political actors is always based on illusion, that power is something that uses architecture rather than the other way around.

But others have moved dramatically in the other direction, looking for ways to pursue engagement with social and environmental ills — and with Washington. That split has noticeably widened since the economy melted down, and the two camps that it is beginning to create within the profession are likely to spend the next decade battling to shape a new definition of what architecture is, means and can do.” LA TIMES
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OMA – Lectures
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Rem Koolhaas
Keynote lecture on two strands of thinking in sustainability: advancement vs. apocalypse.
Ecological Urbanism Conference, Harvard University, 3 April, 2009

“Because you invited me here, we did some research. We looked first at antiquity and realized that 25 years before Christ there was already a profound knowledge about ecology and how people should build to be economical, logical, and beautiful. Vitruvius (1), for instance, was completely aware that the sun would cast shadows at different inclinations depending on the orientation of the site, and that his architecture should address these conditions (2). Since the sun was shining from the south, the hottest parts of Roman baths should also be in the south (3). This knowledge was not limited to individual buildings, but extended to the planning of cities that were effortless and logical, based on engagements with and an understanding of nature.
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During the Renaissance, this knowledge was cultivated and further amplified. A century later, the so-called Enlightenment broke out, and with Enlightenment came a formal launch of modernity. What we see is that the Enlightenment had a phenomenal effect on reason, in terms of triggering the apparatus of modernity in a surprisingly short time. Also inscribed in Enlightenment were people like Goethe, who effortlessly combined art and science, and people like Caspar David Friedrich. His paintings show highly sophisticated and cultivated people in search of and interacting with nature in a way that doesn’t show any tension or alienation; the interaction actually seems to work for both sides (4). Perhaps the very final outcome of this highly reasonable streak of our civilization is the nuclear power plant (5).
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There is also an entirely different streak in our culture. It is a not a narrative of linear and reasonable progress, but a narrative of disasters and fundamental tensions between nature and mankind. It depicts nature as a kind of punishment of mankind and, occasionally, mankind as a punisher of nature (6, 7). That narrative, however we look at it – religiously or otherwise – is a fundamentally anti-modern one, which insists on apocalyptic expectations. Friedrich symbolizes this feeling in some of his paintings, which generated a series of prophets. Perhaps Malthus was the first one, with his belief that a premature death must visit the human race. Others were Paul Ehrlich in 1968 (8) and James Lovelock (9).

What we have are two completely opposite strains, both with very eloquent and impressive practitioners. Both ideologies read the same phenomena in completely contradictory terms: one as a line of reasonableness and the other as a line of disastrous manipulation and wrongness. The confusion at the current moment is generated by the tension between these two lines. We are not able to disentangle them or understand when one of the traditions speaks and when the other speaks. This polarity is still operating and has been for a long time.

To introduce a slightly more autobiographical moment, when I studied in London in 1968, I was taught in a school where tropical architecture was still on the curriculum. Although I didn’t take it entirely seriously, I was fascinated by its teachers, who taught us an incredible respect for the landscape. They taught us to look at other cities to see how they work, and to look at seemingly completely non-architectural environments. For them, no issue was too humble or lowly. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry (10) made drawings of open sewers and ways to clean them. That kind of humility in architectural education has practically disappeared.
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But it’s not only about humility. They were also interested in the tropics as a special domain, which is now the front line of the tensions and impossibilities that we are confronted with. They looked at these areas in great depth and were able to analyze to what extent this climate required specific architectures and planning. The studies also examined how an architecture could emerge that would actually persist in this climate without the degree of artificiality that we now take for granted. What I find touching in retrospect is not only the earnestness of this discourse, but also the conviction that they had relevant knowledge worth teaching. The equivalent of this kind of knowledge today is rather tenuous in our academies.

They developed a repertoire of measures, avoiding air conditioning and the trappings of typical Western architecture, and created strange prisons of avoidance. They also created an aesthetic that was able to renew modern architecture, which at the same time was running into issues of Puritanism and unpopularity. They not only worked on architecture, but also on cities or villages. I am impressed by the perhaps condescending, but still highly efficient didactic intensity of this kind of effort. Even the simplest words were explained in plausible language. As a student, I cannot say that I embraced this knowledge. But in retrospect, I was being confronted with knowledge that was on the way out because it was in the way of development. That is one of the tragedies.

I have since become increasingly involved in researching Africa and the tropics, and have found examples of engineering for Lagos by an East German firm. They seemed to ruthlessly turn Lagos into a modern metropolis, making everything local disappear. But upon closer inspection, the project coexisted plausibly with expressions of poverty and of social improvisation. Though it appeared completely chaotic, things actually worked extremely well in a process of mutual interdependence. There is a subtlety to this kind of engineering that is not visible at first sight. But if you look over time as the infrastructure decays, you see that it has a certain depth (11).

That depth came not from the capitalist West, but from the Communist world, which influenced Africa in the 1960s and 70s. It was so frugal, so efficient, so methodical and so coherent that it could actually realize complex and subtle entities. In the period between 1965 and 75 there was an incredible ability to take difficult conditions seriously, to take different climates seriously, to take the question of energy use seriously and to try and combine the words “design” and “science”. Unfortunately, 30 years later, these words are further apart than ever before.

This joint entity, design and science, was stimulated and sponsored not only by designers and scientists, but also by free-form intellectuals like Marshal MacLuhan and Ian McHarg, a sociologist who, in Design with Nature, wrote one of the most subtle manifestos on how culture and nature could coexist.

At a reunion on a boat in the Mediterranean in 1965 (12), the anthropologist Margaret Mead and other intellectuals discussed at a very high level of intelligence the issues that we are discussing now. They produced sketches in which, almost as a matter of course, human energy, solar energy, and commercial forms of energy are intertwined and mixed in ways we barely know how to do now. What I find particularly impressive in the handwriting of these sketches is how enforced and urgent it is compared to our current, more smooth and perfect renderings. These sketches show the inevitability of nature and networks operating together.

Perhaps Buckminster Fuller’s contribution to the field was the apotheosis of this combination of nature and network. He did the most with the least, producing on the one hand diagrams of ponderous simplicity. On the other hand, he worked on radical inventories of the world, both of cultural and natural elements, documenting the neck-and-neck race between them in a very forward-looking way. For instance, this group was appalled by the predominance of American consumption. Fuller was able to show, in diagrams produced for a mainstream publication, how the problems of the world could be resolved by switching military resources into other domains (13). This kind of clarity doesn’t exist at this moment at all. It is the absence of this kind of clarity that makes us so desperate for a degree of coherence.

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Fuller also made a diagram of energy in the world running in certain kinds of streaks or vents, therefore enhancing the entire efficiency of the system (14). There’s more about it later. Now, if you put everything that’s happening in the late 1960s and early 70s in a cloud or cluster, it seems that there is a very confusing mixture of good and bad. But if you put the events into different zones or categories, a pattern emerges. There are of course many crises, but an explosion of green consciousness as a response to those crises. At the same time, a highly developed and imaginative form of engineering, theorized by Fuller and others, was put into practice: the bridge across the Bosporus, the reversal of a river current to irrigate entire parts of Siberia, the spread of computers, the Concorde, the World Trade Center, and the first international conference about international environmental issues.

Against this backdrop came the first Club of Rome meeting, which talked about the limits of growth (15). It was a reasonable and dramatically illustrated argument about the limits of resources, and showed how in the next hundred years we have to be more careful and more restrained in our consumption. But then the market economy was unleashed in the mid 70s. The market economy had a devastating effect on the knowledge that had been accumulated at this point. This forced the apocalyptic streak of the polarity that I defined at the beginning.

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Twenty years later, the Club of Rome is completely open about the fact that “global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill … In searching for a new enemy to unite us.” In the same year, they even suggested that “democracy is no longer well suited for the task ahead” (16, 17). You see a perverse amplification and intensification of the arguments: seemingly rational, but actually on the apocalyptic side.

So, these two tendencies almost merge, or the evidence that they use is the same. But one continues to use the evidence for a rational and reasonable future, such as the application of atomic power. In France, about 80 percent of electricity is generated from nuclear energy. The country in which the Enlightenment began is still the most enlightened nation, in a way, with its energy policy.

Scientists like Freeman Dyson relativize the disaster of CO2 levels, saying that actually they could also, in certain areas, have a positive effect (18). He is, of course, completely vilified for these statements. But this kind of thinking leads perhaps to a school of thought that engineering can finally offer a number of strategies that could help us.

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Then there is the apocalyptic streak, which portrays trains powered by coal as a holocaust (19), and which develops more and more extreme scenarios (20, 21). For example the deadline on intervention that the Club of Rome envisioned in its first report has been revised to four years, confronting all of us with a desperate time limit.

We have an energetic crew of people working on the problem, but we doubt their seriousness and whether they have the necessary information at their disposal. Interesting accusations emerge: “White people with blue eyes have caused it”. “America can no longer dictate”. “Western consumption is no longer necessary”. “The dollar has to be abandoned”. What you see is a push back of the American position (22, 23, 24).

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Now, what about architecture? I think what the crisis will mean for us is an end to the ¥€$ regime. For those who didn’t recognize it, this is a collection of masterpieces by architects in the last ten years (25). It’s a skyline of icons showing, mercilessly, that an icon may be individually plausible, but that collectively they form an ultimately counterproductive and self-canceling kind of landscape. So that is out.

Unfortunately, the sum total of current architectural knowledge hasn’t grown beyond this opposition. That is where the market economy and the evolution of architectural culture have been extremely irresponsible in letting knowledge simply disappear between the different preoccupations. I still think that architectural dialectics are between buildings like Falling Water and Farnsworth House, and are therefore not deep enough.

We have all of these images of buildings that do not perform correctly, but our answers are not necessarily very deep. I don’t exclude myself from any of these comments, as I hope you realize. Embarrassingly, we have been equating responsibility with literal greening. The boutique of Ann Demeulemeester in Seoul, for example, covered entirely in green (26). Even significant buildings by serious architects, such as the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, for me almost fall into the same category (27). What is very difficult about architecture today is that architects themselves are the main commentators, using a language that is either outrageously innocent or deeply calculated – probably both – but in a shocking way. If you read the criticism in the New York Times by Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architect’s commentary seems to work very well, because Ouroussoff is extremely happy with this building. A question that doesn’t seem to be asked is: is it all so necessary? And, do we need more aquariums? We have a kind of Parthenon with a planetarium, a piazza, and a rainforest. I would politely submit that it is not a Parthenon. In Abu Dhabi, Foster makes a much more serious effort with his zero-carbon city, Masdar, which will have no cars and will be carbon neutral by using technologies that are still to be revealed.

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I didn’t really want to talk about our own work, but there is one project that resonates with the material here. It also indicates the direction in which I think we need to move: we need to step out of this amalgamation of good intentions and branding in a political direction and a direction of engineering. We are working on an analysis of what Europe could do with power harvested from the North Sea. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and England all have large territories on the North Sea (28). We have divided them into sections, which means that Holland could be conceived as having a new shape, extending into the North Sea.

The project imagines that wind energy could be combined, and that supply and demand could be regulated (29). A single ring of integrated wind turbines would not only generate energy, but would also have additional benefits like the reuse of some of the redundant oil-extraction apparatus, and potentially even generate its own tourism. A single ring could generate more energy than the Middle East currently produces each year (30). Looking even further, there would be a potential North-South connection to try to exploit the specific potentials in each area: wind, tidal, and solar. All these sources of energy can be mobilized into a single European grid (31). It’s simply through the combination of politics and engineering that this needs to be addressed.

In working on this material, I discovered that what we are doing is inadvertently exactly what Fuller proposed when he looked at the map forty years ago (32).

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OMA Lectures
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New York Times

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

“ROME — What would Pope Urban VIII have made of Maxxi, the new museum of contemporary art designed by Zaha Hadid on the outskirts of this city’s historic quarter? My guess is that he would have been ecstatic.

This 17th-century pope, one of the most prominent cultural patrons in Roman history, understood that great cities are not frozen in time. He loved dreaming up lavish new projects over breakfast with his artistic soul mate, the Baroque sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini. When Bernini needed bronze for the baldachin in St. Peter’s, the pope simply ordered it torn out of the Pantheon. Neither was afraid to make his mark on the city.
Since then the architectural scene here has become a lot duller. True, Mussolini commissioned some impressive civic works, most notably for the fascist EUR district. But for most of the last half-century Romans have been content to gaze languidly toward the past. The handful of ambitious new cultural buildings that have appeared, like Renzo Piano’s marvelous Parco della Musica, tend toward the dignified and respectable.”
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“Maxxi, which opens to the public on Saturday for a two-day “architectural preview,” jolts this city back to the present like a thunderclap. Its sensual lines seem to draw the energy of the city right up into its belly, making everything around it look timid. The galleries (which will remain empty of art until the spring, when the museum is scheduled to hold its first exhibition) would probably have sent a shiver of joy up the old pope’s spine. Even Bernini, I suspect, would have appreciated their curves.
The completion of the museum is proof that this city is no longer allergic to the new and a rebuke to those who still see Rome as a catalog of architectural relics for scholars or tourists. It affirms the view that cities thrive when each generation attempts to rise to the challenges of the past while remaining true to contemporary values. That means that yes, we too — the living — have something to contribute.”
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“The museum stands in a drowsy neighborhood of early-20th-century apartment buildings and former army barracks called Flaminio.

Set back from the street in the middle of a block and overlooking a gravel plaza, the building offers no big visual fireworks, and at first glance it looks surprisingly sedate. From the south, its smooth, almost silky, concrete forms are largely hidden behind an old factory building that has been transformed into a gallery for temporary exhibitions. From the north it is shielded by the long curved wall of the main galleries.

The energy builds as you walk toward it. The best route is along Via Luigi Poletti, which approaches the site at an angle from the northwest. As you get close, the road veers to the east, but you continue forward, following a path along the convex exterior of the building as it curves toward the plaza. The path narrows as it approaches the main entry, creating a sense of acceleration.”
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“At the entrance, a concrete box that houses an upper-level gallery projects out above your head, its front tilted forward menacingly.

Ms. Hadid has used similar ideas before, most notably in a factory she designed for BMW on the outskirts of Leipzig, Germany. The idea is to weave her buildings into the network of streets and sidewalks that surround them — into the infrastructure that binds us together. But it is also a way of making architecture — which is about static objects — more dynamic by capturing the energy of bodies charging through space.

In Rome this strategy reaches a crescendo in the museum’s towering lobby. A bookstore, cafe and information counter are scattered informally around the hall; corridors snake off in different directions. A monumental black staircase climbs up through the space, one end disappearing into a narrow canyonlike crevice and hinting at more mysteries to come.

If a question remains about the building, it has to do with the galleries, which are arranged as a series of long intertwining bands, some 300 feet long, as if the ramps of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim had somehow come unraveled. The slight curves of the spaces lure you forward in anticipation of what’s around the next bend.

The sense of forward momentum is reinforced by the lighting system: a glass skylight that is broken up by long, knifelike metal fins that run the entire length of the room. The fins protect the artworks from direct sunlight while allowing those inside the galleries to see an occasional patch of sky. A second system just above, of steel grids, blocks out the harshest southern light. I was there on an overcast afternoon, and the light was lively and warm without being distracting.”
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“What we don’t know, however, and won’t know for a while, is whether the galleries strike the right balance between the need to move crowds and the stillness required for contemplating art. Ms. Hadid has created a flexible system of hanging partitions that can be used to divide the spaces into smaller galleries; and as you climb to the top, one of the bands breaks into several discrete spaces on different levels.

At the moment, though, the flow of spaces seems a bit relentless. And until partitions are installed, art is hung and rehung, and curators begin to get a feel for the spaces that only comes after several years of organizing exhibitions in them, we won’t know for sure how well the galleries work. There are some, I expect, who will point to the decision to show off the museum while it is still empty — indeed, before its collection has even been put together — as yet more proof that contemporary architecture always overshadows the art it houses. More patient minds will wait to see for themselves.”
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“Meanwhile, Rome’s faith in Ms. Hadid, and in the new world she represents, has been fully rewarded. For years she has been steadily building up a body of work that demonstrates she is about more than glamour — she is one of architecture’s most original and powerful voices — and Maxxi will only add to her legacy. A generation of Romans can now walk out their front doors knowing that the conversation with the past is not so one-sided.

If Pope Urban were alive today, I’m certain he and Ms. Hadid would be having breakfast right now, plotting the next move.”

The NewYork Times
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The New York Times

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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

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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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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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NY TIMES
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

TUTTGART, Germany — The clash between builders and preservationists is as old as architecture itself, but it reached a fever pitch in the recent gilded age. And it is especially fraught in Germany, where the construction boom that began with the country’s reunification sometimes seems like a convenient tool for smoothing over unpleasant historical truths.

Few current projects better illustrate this conflict than Stuttgart 21, a plan to build an enormous new railway station, along with 37 miles of underground track, in the heart of this old industrial city. The $7 billion development, which is expected to be approved by the end of the year, is part of an ever-expanding high-speed train network that planners hope will one day link the entire continent. As one of the largest developments in Europe, it could radically transform the city center.

But the design shows a callous disregard for architectural history. Its construction would require the partial destruction of one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks: the Hauptbahnhof, Paul Bonatz’s Stuttgart central rail terminal, a monument of early German Modernism built from 1914 to 1928.

And in a particularly perverse gesture of “facadism” — a favorite tactic of bureaucrats and developers in which a few architectural elements are preserved while the rest of a structure is bulldozed — it would leave the station’s main hall and tower standing like some architectural amputee.
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Even more troubling, Stuttgart 21 joins a growing list of misguided projects that are reducing Germany’s 20th-century architectural history to a fairy tale version of the truth.

Bonatz’s most celebrated works, like a system of streamlined locks and bridges built along the Rhine in the late 1920s, have a spare elegance reminiscent of the best examples of W.P.A. architecture in America. And even some of his Nazi-era work, like the 1936 Basel Art Museum, has an undeniably human dimension. Its stone facade, with its low classical arches, remains one of the city’s beloved landmarks.

But Bonatz is not an easy architect to love. The struggle to keep his practice afloat at the height of the Nazi era led him into endless compromises — aesthetic and moral. His studies for a gargantuan round stadium and a Munich train station — mercifully never built — represented the kind of grotesquely overblown classicism that Hitler adored. At the same time, his criticism of the work of Paul Troost, one of Hitler’s favorite architects, irritated the Gestapo. He eventually fled to Turkey.

Bonatz, in other words, was the kind of morally ambiguous opportunist found throughout architectural history, someone who may have ignored uncomfortable political realities when it served his interests and who fine-tuned his aesthetic to suit the values of his clients. Yet he also produced works of undeniable beauty.

Completed several years before Hitler took power, the Stuttgart terminal may be Bonatz’s most masterly architectural balancing act. Its imposing front facade, marked by a shallow arcade and towering stone pillars, is as haunting as an early de Chirico painting. Framed by stone entry halls at either end, it has a severe, stripped-down Classicism that also suggests why Bonatz was able to continue building well into the Nazi era. The two monumental wings, which extend back to frame the tracks, only add to the terminal’s imposing scale.

Yet Bonatz carefully softened this effect by placing the clock tower at the station’s southeast corner. The position of the tower, which once housed private waiting rooms for the king, helps to break down the design’s symmetry and gives it a human dimension. Set slightly off center from the city’s historic axis, it also demonstrates a genuine sensitivity to context, locking the design into a larger urban composition without interrupting the flow of traffic.

Stylistically, the design embodies Bonatz’s quest to find a balance between Classicism and Modernism. The first of the two wings, built from 1914 to 1917, is the most traditional and conservative, with spiraling wood staircases inside and elaborate ironwork grates over the first-floor windows. The great entry hall, built at the same time, had a traditional wood beam ceiling.

By the mid-1920s, when Bonatz was designing the second entry hall, he was using brick vaults instead of timber. The final wing, designed a few years later, was the most streamlined, its windows forming staccato horizontal bands that suggest that the architect was moving toward a more Modern aesthetic.

The entire composition can be read as an effort to come to terms with some of the period’s deepest anxieties: the struggle to keep pace with jolting technological and social changes and the related fear of losing contact with the past.

The new station, designed by Ingenhoven Architects, lacks similar ambitions. To construct it, the German rail authority plans to destroy everything but the terminal’s main halls and tower. The platforms would be buried underground, with the tracks set parallel to the old entry hall. A vast plaza would sit on top of this lower level, its surface pierced by big, eye-shaped light wells. Four new entryways, with shell-shaped glass and concrete roofs, would lead down to the platforms from the plaza’s corners.

The plan’s defenders argue that it is critical to the city’s economic future. It will reaffirm Stuttgart’s place as a hinge between Western and Eastern Europe, as well as speed up travel south, to Athens. What’s more, demolishing the old tracks and burying the platforms underground will free acres of valuable real estate in the city center — something that could generate billions of Euros in revenue for the rail authority.

Finally, there is the belief that large-scale infrastructure projects are just what we need in tough times. We need jobs, don’t we? And aren’t the best parts of the old building being saved?

What’s scary about this approach is its familiarity. Engineers, stop watches in hand, calculate the most efficient time between two points. Politicians crunch numbers, estimating that the bigger the job, the bigger the rewards. Developers begin counting the profits to be made when large swaths of public land are turned over to private interests.

Meanwhile, those who care about cities and their history are placated with the facadist dodge. And architecture is reduced to a picture postcard — an empty, superficial veneer.

In the case of Stuttgart, the nuances that breathe life into the design — the sequence of spaces leading from the city to the tracks, the conflict between tradition and modernity, will be lost. The new entry halls, however elegantly conceived, are likely to make the old hall seem like an appendage, stripping it of the function that gave it meaning.

There were other possible options. A proposal by the architect Roland Ostertag that would have replaced the existing train shed with a barrel-shaped glass roof would have been far more elegant and economical. Moving part of the tracks underground could have been part of that scheme too. And the difference in travel time would probably have been minimal. Many opponents of the plan assert that the new design would shave just a few minutes of travel time between Stuttgart and Ulm, the next stop on the line. Replacing the tracks that run between the two cities would save much more time. When I spoke to the station’s architect, he did not dispute this claim.

But this option was never fully explored, lest it give ammunition to the project’s opponents.

The insistence on putting economics above culture has already led to the destruction of major historic monuments like the Palace of the Republic in Berlin, a landmark of the East German period. It may soon lead to the dismemberment of Tempelhof Airport, one of the few great architectural accomplishments of the early Nazi period. If it continues, it will lead to a cheapened, oversimplified view of history, one that suppresses the conflicts and contradictions that make cities vital.” New York Times
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from LA Times
By Lauren Beale

“Homes designed by big names such as Richard Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright rarely hit the market. But the housing market slide has changed that.”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Feliz stands as the largest example of his “textile block” style using patterned concrete. Richard Neutra’s Singleton House artfully integrates a modernist structure with its natural setting. John Lautner’s Wolff House exemplifies his bold use of wood, glass and stone.

The chance to own such homes has largely been the domain of a wealthy few — until recently.

The Ennis, Singleton and Wolff houses are all up for sale, along with dozens of others in Southern California by well-known architects. The housing market slide has enlarged the usually scant inventory of big-name architect homes for sale and redefined the premium that such houses used to command.

“I haven’t seen so many opportunities in terms of choice and relative value since the ’70s,” said Crosby Doe, a Beverly Hills real estate agent who has specialized in architectural properties since he sold his first Neutra in 1974. “Three years ago people would call me from all around the world and say, ‘I want a Lautner,’ and there were none available.”

For Steven Ehrlich, the chance to buy a Rudolph Schindler-designed house in Inglewood for $265,000 came unexpectedly.

The Culver City architect discovered the faded Schindler house while attending a dinner party next door. It’s one of three Schindler homes on the tidy tree-lined residential street and had sat empty for two years. Built in 1940, the two-bedroom, one-bathroom house had never been substantially upgraded.

“The property needed major work, the landscaping was gone, and the inside was a mess,” said Phil Seymour of the Seymour Group, Elite Properties Realty, Beverly Hills, who shared the probate sale listing with Zizi Pak of the same office.

So the pair listed the 981-square-foot contemporary in June at $180,000, the kind of price that a similar no-name house would bear. It drew 35 offers and closed in a month.

Seymour thinks the architect’s name generated the intense response that pushed the price up. “It had the cachet of being designed by Mr. Schindler.”
The modest, low-slung home has such Schindler details as subtle changes in ceiling heights and his original cabinetry in the living room and bedrooms.

“It’s a find,” Ehrlich said. “It was very important that we save this house.”

A recent sampling of area listings shows scores of homes by architects with followings, including Schindlers priced from $595,000 to $3,995,000, Lautners from $1,495,000 to $5,895,000, and Neutras from $795,000 to $14,995,000. Wright’s La Miniatura is listed at $6,950,000 and the Ennis House at $15 million. Although not officially tracked, the inventory is higher than several years ago, said real estate agents who specialize in such houses.

“Usually there’s one, and then it’s gone,” Doe said. “Now there are options.”

Following the pattern of the overall market, which has been driven by foreclosure sales and first-time buyers, “the majority of buyers are looking for total bargains,” he said.

At the high end of the price range, some sellers are simply biding their time.

“For the most part, these homes are faring well because they have fallen into very strong hands,” Doe said. “People understand what they have and are not willing to slash the prices and give them away.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t some deals out there though, Doe said.

“I just saw a house I sold for $1.4 million — a Robert Thorgusen that went to foreclosure — and the bank is asking $859,800. But this is really rare.”
Tightened lending and the one-size-fits-all approach to appraisals that have accompanied the market downturn have leveled the playing field, putting the prices of homes akin to works of art on par with plain stucco boxes. What three years ago might have been a markup of 20% or more may today only translate into a faster sale or multiple offers.

Brian Linder, a real estate agent at the Value of Architecture in Beverly Hills, said he believes the market for good design remains strong.

“However, the lenders are no longer seeing any value in good design,” he said. “The banks care about dollars per square foot in the neighborhood — bedrooms and bathrooms — that sold in the last three months.”

Agents who specialize in these types of properties used to be able to recommend architectural appraisers who could compare similar homes in a wider area.

“Those days are gone,” Linder said.

Buyers may perceive the value of the home and be willing to pay the price, he said, but that doesn’t mean they can get the lender on board. To close, the buyer will have to make up the difference between what the lender will fund and what the seller is asking.

“It takes more cash to buy these properties after last September and the mortgage meltdown,” Doe agreed.

Linder is selling a Westwood condominium designed by Neutra in a development where the previous two units of the same size sold quickly for more than list price with multiple offers. Although the two-bedroom, 1,353-square-foot condo was priced at $795,000, a generic unit in the same neighborhood would be worth $650,000 to the bank, he said.

This one was on the market a couple of weeks, received one offer and is in escrow below list price.

“That’s not what I would have expected based on the previous sales,” Linder said.

“Two years ago, I’d be trying to set the premium,” he said, by adding 20% or 25% over comparable sales. “Now I try to come on the market right away at an attractive price that will generate multiple offers.”

The auction sale of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 21 in the Hollywood Hills in late 2006 for more than $3 million “was the oh-my-God benchmark” for architectural premiums, Linder said.

“The house, after all, measures just 1,300 square feet,” he said. “Most properties of its size in that neighborhood would have sold as a tear-down.”

The counterpoint to that event was the failed sale in May 2008 of Neutra’s Kaufmann House and an adjoining orchard in Palm Springs for more than $19 million.

“All eyes in the architectural world were upon that auction,” said Doe, but the sale fell through. “It put a pause in the market.”

Five months later, the five-bedroom, six-bathroom, glass-sheathed modernist masterpiece of 3,162 square feet was listed for about $6 million less. But the market by then was vastly different. The Kaufmann House was taken off the market.

Today, Barry Sloane of Sotheby’s International Realty, Beverly Hills, gauges the architectural premium by less tangible measurements.

He sold Neutra’s 1934 Sten-Frenke residence in Santa Monica this month for $4.7 million. The three-bedroom, 3 1/2 -bathroom home, a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, came on the market in January at $5,999,000.

“The premium translates into the deal going through rather than selling higher,” he said.
But not every architectural home is being snapped up, even among those that rarely reach the market, such as houses by brothers Charles and Henry Greene.

Maggie Navarro of Coldwell Banker, Pasadena, had the listing on the Greene & Greene-designed Spinks House, which was taken off the market in late summer.
“My seller got discouraged,” Navarro said. “We had great showings, people loved the house, and then they didn’t write an offer.”

The 1906 Pasadena house with six bedrooms and six bathrooms in more than 5,000 square feet was listed at $4,625,000.

“Those Greene & Greenes attract a real specific audience, and unfortunately most of the people who love them can’t afford them,” she said.

As for the dollar premium once associated with architectural homes, Linder doesn’t expect it to return in the current market and, in fact, thinks prices haven’t found the bottom yet.

“If you can afford to wait,” he said, “there probably will be better deals to be had.”
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Source: LA Times
lauren.beale@latimes.com
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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 Planetizen
by: Nate Berg

To fight homelessness, some cities provide services, some build housing, and some arrest people. Often it’s a combination of the three, but now many critics are calling on officials to de-emphasize the law enforcement element. Los Angeles is Ground Zero.

“On any given night in America, there are about 664,000 people sleeping on the street. On that same night in Los Angeles, there are more than 40,000 — the highest concentration of homeless people in any American city. Many of these homeless people can be found in downtown L.A.’s infamous ‘Skid Row’ neighborhood. This 50-square block area has been called ground zero for homelessness in the U.S. and one of the most-policed areas in the world, but the thousands bundled in sleeping bags and tents on its sidewalks every night call it home.

They’ve been doing it for decades, and though it’s frowned upon by many in the city – from politicians to law enforcement officials to business leaders to regular residents – it is an accepted reality. The Los Angeles Police Department and the homeless population of Skid Row have a kind of informal agreement that once night falls the area becomes an unofficial campsite. Tents are left standing and occupants are allowed to sleep through the night, uninterrupted by flashlights and badges. Uninterrupted, that is, if all people are doing is sleeping. Any other illegal activity remains subject to punishment, especially since the adoption of a “zero-tolerance” enforcement policy in 2006. Particularly high numbers of citations and arrests in this part of town show that for the LAPD, to permit homeless people to sleep on public property is not to look blindly on its consequences.

A 2009 joint report from the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty singled out Los Angeles as the nation’s “meanest city” in terms of police enforcement of the homeless.

But a 2007 legal settlement between the city and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California has watered down that “zero-tolerance” policy to “some-tolerance”. In the face of a 2003 lawsuit seeking to repeal a more than 40 year-old law that prohibits people from sleeping on public sidewalks, the city agreed that until it built 1,250 units of affordable housing it would not enforce the law, allowing people to sleep on public sidewalks from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. anywhere in the city.

Allowing people to sleep legally on public sidewalks may not be the solution to homelessness, but many experts on homelessness and civil rights agree that it represents a major step towards a solution. Arresting people for sleeping on sidewalks criminalizes homelessness, and that, many say, sustains homelessness. Others argue that it is the homeless themselves who perpetuate their own situation by refusing services and remaining on the street. They say the only effective way to deal with them is by strict enforcement and institutionalization.

These represent two of the dominant ideological perspectives on the issue — two states of mind that have shaped this country’s approach to homelessness for the past three decades. But in recent years, some public officials and civic leaders have begun to question the existing models for dealing with homelessness, arguing that the persistence of the problem shows that what has been done up until now isn’t working. Across the country, cities and communities are trying out new strategies to address the issue, and some of them have made significant progress and actually reduced homelessness for the first time in nearly 30 years. These new approaches have much to teach Los Angeles and other American cities that continue to struggle with homelessness today…”

Read the rest of the article here
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Article by By JIM LEWIS from New York Times
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“Go ahead and say it; everyone does. Certainly I did. Here’s a striking building, perched on a slope outside the small Austrian town of Leoben — a sleek structure made of glass, wood and concrete, stately but agile, sure in its rhythms and proportions: each part bears an obvious relationship to the whole. In the daytime, the corridors and rooms are flooded with sunshine. At night, the whole structure glows from within. A markedly well-made building, and what is it? A prison.

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Everybody says this, or something like it: I guess crime does pay, after all. Or, That’s bigger than my apartment. (New Yorkers, in particular, tend to take this route.) Or, Maybe I should move to Austria and rob a couple of banks. It’s a reflex, and perfectly understandable, though it’s also foolish and untrue — about as sensible as looking at a new hospital wing and saying, Gee, I wish I had cancer.
To be more accurate, free people say these things. Prisoners don’t. Nor, for the most part, do the guards, the wardens or the administrators; nor do legal scholars or experts on corrections; nor does Josef Hohensinn, who designed the Leoben prison. They all say something else: No one, however down-and-out or cynical, wants to go to prison, however comfortable it may be.

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Still, the argument goes, the place must be a country club for white-collar criminals. (No, it holds everyone from prisoners awaiting trial to the standard run of felons.) Then it must cost a fortune. (A little more than other prisons, maybe, but not by much — as a rule, the more a corrections center bristles with overt security, with cameras, and squads of guards, and isolation cells, the more expensive it’s going to be.) And that’s glass? (Yes, though it’s shatterproof. And yes, those are the cells and that is a little balcony, albeit caged in with heavy bars, and below it is a courtyard.) The whole thing seems impossible, oxymoronic, like a luxury D.M.V., and yet there it is.
One gray day in February, Hohensinn drove me from his office in Graz down to Leoben, an hourlong trip through a region isolated by mountains and still transitioning out of an industrial economy. He is a compact man in his early 50s, with bushy eyebrows, a gappy smile and an air about him of cheerful confidence, mixed with a kind of Alpine soulfulness. Before the prison opened, late in 2004, he had a solid career building public housing. Now he is the Man Who Built That Prison, a distinction that dismays him slightly, if only because, as he says, “One always has mixed feelings about having one work singled out for attention.”

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Leoben has received quite a lot of attention. In America, its public profile has been limited to a series of get-a-load-of-this e-mail messages and mocking blog posts (where the prison is often misidentified as a corrections center outside Chicago), but in Europe, Hohensinn’s design has become more of a model — not universally accepted, but not easily ignored either. It is the opening statement in a debate about what it means to construct a better prison. Already there are plans to build something like it outside of Berlin.
The day Hohensinn and I visited, Leoben was dreary, and there were traces of sleet in the air; as we approached, the building looked both idle and inviting, like a college library during winter break — or it would have, anyway, were it not for the razor wire coiled along the concrete wall of the yard and the sentence carved below it, a line from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the United States signed and ratified) that reads: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.”
Inside the prison it felt like Sunday afternoon, though in fact it was a Tuesday. There was a glassy brightness over everything, and most surprising, an unbreakable silence. Prisons are usually clamorous places, filled with the sound of metal doors opening and closing, and the general racket that comes with holding large numbers of men in a confined space. Noise is part of the chaos of prison life; Leoben was serene. I mentioned as much to Hohensinn, and he smiled and pointed to the whitewashed ceilings. He had taken great care to install soundproofing.

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An assistant warden accompanied us on our tour, one of three guards on duty tasked with watching more than 200 inmates. On one side of the prison there was a block of prisoners on remand; on the other side were the convicts, living in units called pods — groups of 15 one-person cells with floor-to-ceiling windows, private lavatories and a common space that includes a small kitchen. We came upon one prisoner cooking a late lunch for a few of his podmates; we stood there for a bit, chatting. They were wearing their own clothes. The utensils on the table were metal. “They are criminals,” Hohensinn said to me, “but they are also human beings. The more normal a life you give them here, the less necessary it is to resocialize them when they leave.” His principle, he said, was simple: “Maximum security outside; maximum freedom inside.” (The bars over the balconies are there to ensure the inmates’ safety, Hohensinn said; the surrounding wall outside is more than enough to make sure no one gets free.)
We walked around some more. There was a gymnasium, a prayer room, a room for conjugal visits. I asked Hohensinn what he would do if, contrary to fact, it were conclusively proved that prisons like his encouraged crime rather than diminished it. Would he renounce the design? He shook his head. “The prisoners’ dignity is all I really care about,” he told me.

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Suppose we can’t bring ourselves to be quite so magnanimous. Suppose all we’re interested in is reducing crime. If you trust a criminal with a better environment, will he prove trustworthy? As far as Leoben is concerned, it’s too soon to tell. The place has been open for only four years. But I noticed something as we were leaving, and in the absence of any other data it seemed significant. In the three or four hours we spent roaming all through the place, I hadn’t seen a single example of vandalism….”

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