Fourth of July 2009 - Van Cortlandt Manor

The Manor of Van Cortlandt was an 86,000 acre tract that ran from the Hudson River to Connecticut. 2009 is the 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage to the New World.

Slideshow with 3 more photos

If Mamet watched his own plays he would have known this.

“I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart,” David Mamet wrote last year in the Village Voice. That has a lot to do with why I don't like his plays.

A Day In Paris (malevolent version)

If you need another reason: climate change, smog & pregnancy

MINNESOTA GOVERNOR Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, was on The Brian Lehrer Show today. Asked what he thought about climate change, he said that while he's not completely convinced, he knows that pollution causes enough problems to convince him that we should fight it. He could have added that Peak Oil problems will come back when the economy recovers (or even if it doesn't).

Here's another reason to fight pollution: a team from the University of California, Irvine, has shown that pregnant women who live within 1.9 miles of a major roadway in Los Angeles are 128% more at risk for premature births. How about pregnant women, or anyone else, who spends 3 to 4 hours a day in congested traffic, breathing the exhaust from the car in front of them?

Discovery, via treehugger

"You're not an environmentalist if you're also a NIMBY."

"As both Berkeley and Oakland debate their downtown plans, there is growing recognition that the fight against global warming requires greater urban density.

Global warming is changing far more than just the climate. It's altering the way environmentalists view development...."

East Bay Express

My Trouble With Typepad

WHEN I started with Typepad, their templates had no controls for letter spacing. I wanted that, so I hired someone to add that single feature for me. WHAT A MISTAKE!

I had to pay him, I had to permanently pay a little more every month to Typepad, and most importantly, as Typepad came out with feature after feature (including letter spacing controls), many were unavailable to me.

I regularly try to add a feature, such as social networking links for digg and del.icio.us, only to get an error message saying that I can't use that feature. All because I changed the letter spacing and nothing more. Typepad tells me that because I used an "advanced" template I'm considered to be an advanced user.

Meanwhile, Typepad doesn't provide a way to easily and accurately import my 1,700 post blog into a standard template, which would solve all my problems and save me money to boot.

Baron Rogers: Let's not squabble about style (but New Urbanism is "tawdry pastiche").

AFTER THE PRESIDENT of the Royal Institute of British Architects promoted New Urbanism for England in 2004, Richard Rogers wrote to the Guardian,

Riba president George Ferguson is right to say we must put urban studies at the heart of the urban renaissance.... Since my Reith Lectures in 1995, I have maintained that the only sustainable urban form is the compact, multi-centred city, which mixes living, work and play, and benefits from well-connected, well-designed public spaces and buildings and environmental responsibility....

But these principles are not the sole preserve of "new urbanism". There is little new in this movement except for its blending of well-established urban design principles with a romantic neoclassical style that often tumbles into tawdry pastiche. This is no leap forward in the 21st century.

Instead of squabbling about style, [emphasis mine] we should focus on the need to restructure our professional education. Too many planners are still ignorant of how buildings and spaces interact in three dimensions, while many architects remain oblivious to communities, land values or land uses.

Architecture, landscape and planning should be studied together in a single undergraduate degree after which graduates would specialise. This approach works well in many other European countries and would create a holistic approach to the design of the urban environment and give us a common language.

Of course when he says there "is little new in this movement except for its blending of well-established urban design principles with a romantic neoclassical style that often tumbles into tawdry pastiche" he is squabbling about style.

In other words, cities may have any style they want, as long as it's modern, by which he means we may follow the precedents of 1920, if they express technology, but not the precedents of 1910, which express human values rather than technological ones. And somehow that will be a "leap forward into the 21st century."

On the other hand, show me a building by Rogers that is not a civic building that follows the "well-established" principles of urban design. I exclude the civic buildings, because they can be a object buildings that cry "look at me," like the popular Musée Beaubourg. But the Lloyd's tower, for example, should not. And Rogers's much-discussed Chelsea Barracks plan is a classic anti-urban Modernist scheme.

I'm sure that Rogers does know the difference between a good street and a bad one. He lives, after all, in a Georgian house on what I'm told is a beautiful street (which reminds me of this story about Rem Koolhaas*). But have any of his buildings made a street better?

V&V: One Problem With Richard Rogers's Architecture Is That It Isn't Really "New"

Continue reading "Baron Rogers: Let's not squabble about style (but New Urbanism is "tawdry pastiche")."

Chelsea Barracks: The Truth Is Out There

After the Chelsea barracks banter, can we get back to the brief?
London Evening Standard, June 23, 2009
by Simon Jenkins

In truth... (t)here is some doubt over the real significance of the role played by the prince.

Rogers blamed him for "single-handedly" stopping his scheme, thus raising ghosts of republicanism and incurring the sympathy and outrage of fellow architect.

I am informed that the reality was rather different. Rogers had felt so confident of his influence in the corridors of London power that he produced a plan for the £1billion site which disregarded Westminster's planning brief so as to increase the profit for the luxury developers, the Candy brothers, then project partners of the Qataris.

The planning brief stipulated no more than six storeys, in conformity to building heights in the neighbourhood, and banned glass, steel and plastic exterior surfaces, in favour of brick, stone and slate.

The brief for one of the largest residential schemes in inner London was that it should reflect the scale and style of adjacent Chelsea and Pimlico.

Rogers put in a proposal for a nine-storey block in his familiar glass and steel cladding. He initially overawed Westminster's planning officers and won their tentative approval at a steering committee last September.

But by the time the design was approaching the full planning committee last Thursday, a torrent of local opposition alerted councillors to the variations from the brief and made rejection almost certain.

It was the variation and local opposition, rather the intervention of the Prince of Wales, that led the Qataris to decide that discretion was the better part of valour and withdraw their plan before last week's meeting.

The Qataris have now parted from the Candys and Rogers and put the site out, as they should have done at the start, to competition for a master plan.

They have announced a desire to see a variegated development "expressed through a variety of architectural styles".

I am again informed that the long list of architects is unlikely to include either Rogers or the prince's favoured Terry. In other words the site will not be submerged under one thundering "iconography", whether modernist or classicist.

This is good news. Westminster's brief could not have been clearer in this respect, indicating that people in this part of London wanted high density but low rise, in what should pass muster as variegated London vernacular.

There should be no more of the "20th-century revival" glass walls going up along the banks of the Thames.

In other words, architects here and elsewhere should be denied a claimed sovereignty over the design of the residential quarters of the capital.

They should rather mediate the views of groups local and metropolitan, residents present and future and those who take daily pleasure in the appearance of the city and feel entitled to be heard.

There is a reason why the London town house set in a terrace street remains the most desired urban property anywhere, rich and poor, East End and West End.

Now that's what I really call good humor (with apologies to Bullwinkle)

http://twitpic.com/482s.jpg

Laboratorio del Gelato

My latest response to the architecture critic of the London Times

THE ARCHITECTURE CRITIC OF THE LONDON TIMES commented on the Battle of Chelsea Barracks in the Wall Street Journal, and in response I've written three (count them, 3) posts in the comments section. The article is here, and the comments here. My first comment is also here.

Photograph © Robert A.M. Stern Architects

"The market deciding what it preferred"? Being American I don't know all the nuances of the British situation, but I do know there was much more involved than just the market.

Let's start with the architects. Architecture schools aggressively promote ideological pedagogies. There are over 30 architecture schools in Britain, but when Prince Charles said there should be one in the country that taught traditional architecture and urbanism, the architectural establishment successfully campaigned to put his school out of business. Part of the campaign included personal smears in the newspapers (Mr. Pearman, you still haven't commented on why it's appropriate to include Camillagate transcripts in your blog post on Chelsea Barracks).

When I was in architecture school in America in the late 1970s, the atmosphere was more open-minded. My teachers included Michael Graves, Kenneth Frampton, Robert Stern, Leon Krier, a number of Lou Kahn proteges and Norman Foster, who taught one of the most popular studios in the school (he was known as "the architect's architect"). But there was a backlash among young Modernists like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Bernard Tschumi (all graduates of the AA, I think), who successfully set out to banish diversity of thought and promote an esoteric, elitist program that we see today at places like Harvard, Columbia and Princeton. The "autonomous architecture" and "culture of architecture" enforced at these schools has no place for traditional architecture and urbanism, which are systematically and aggressively opposed.

Combine that with the fact that Modernism did indeed express Western culture for a few decades in the second half of the 20th century, and you have a combination of old paradigms, inertia and active promotion of ideology within the architectural establishment producing the situation of the last few decades.

When Charles spoke up for traditional design, the majority of people other than architects and architecture critics agreed with him. But we have to remember that Modernist buildings made a great deal of money for developers, who tend to operate by fomula, and that modern corporations wanted buildings with very large "floorplates." And that governments, even the governments of people like Red Ken, listen to business leaders and their professional advisors like Barons Rogers and Foster. In these circles, the now-outdated ideas that Modernism is "progressive" and "creative" are particularly popular. That all adds up to more going on than just "the market."

Here in New York, developers made a great deal of money with glass towers, both residential and office towers. Apartments above the 10th floor cost significantly more than lower apartments (and therefore make more money for the builder). But these glass towers often diminished the character and quality of the streets they stood on, and there was a strong public backlash against them. In other words, yes there was a strong market for residential towers built by Starchitects, but the larger market, the citizenry, often opposed these buildings, even in Manhattan (see Foster's current design for Madison Avenue). In the current market, traditional buildings have held their value much better. According to the New Yorker magazine, Bob Stern's traditional luxury building at 15 Central Park West is "the most financially successful building in the history of New York," raising doubts about the financial wisdom of the developers who built towers by Charlie Gwathmey and Richard Meier (the latter's building facing the Hudson River also leaked like a sieve).

A story in the Property section of today's Times says, "Modernism - it's so last year." http://tinyurl.com/mde9hb Despite what you say about the market, I know that doesn't mean that cosmopolitan architecture critics will suddenly praise traditionalism. You, Rogers and Riba will continue to promote Modernism, but the public is less ideological. It will be eclectic, sometimes liking tradition and sometimes liking Modernism. It even likes some of the godawful towers that I think have changed London for the worse. But on the whole, it will reject the ideological attitude that the architectural establishment has successfully promoted the last few decades, an attitude that says Modernism is the only way to build and that tradition is antiquated and conservative.

OMG

THIS is London?

Click to enlarge

WHEN I WAS A STUDENT IN LONDON, it had three towers: the 28 story Hilton (from which you could look at the Queen in her garden); a Charing Cross office tower which was kept empty for some sort of tax deal; and the Post Office tower, a slender, mainly unoccupied tower that doesn't really count — it's a modern Tour Eiffel more than a tower. With the exception of things like church steeples, the rest of London was probably entirely under 120 feet tall, with most of it much lower than that.

Viewed from afar, it was a much more beautiful place. And up close, the new tower streets range from boring to downright oppressive. As Leon Krier says, architects have done more damage to London since World War II than the Luftwaffe did during it.

Walking by the new Thom Mayne Cooper Union building @ night this thought comes to mind -

"LET'S BE PSYCHOTIC!"

Fair & Balanced, My A**

"We just paid $3 billion for these television stations. We'll tell you what the news is."

Young British Architects

The following is from the London Observer. When I look at the work of some of the architects mentioned I don't see how their work is less individualistic or more contextual than the work of most Starchitects. But the ideas expressed are encouraging:

Younger architects may well query the Prince's right to intervene in what is supposed to be a democratic process, but they don't dismiss his arguments. "All the young architects I've spoken to who've read Prince Charles's speech [to the Royal Institute of British Architects last month] can't find a word to disagree with," says Patrick Lynch of Lynch Architects, who has a background in the history and philosophy of architecture, and argues, both in print and through his work, that individualism, the pursuit of money and the idea of progress have disrupted the relationships between people and their places.

Lynch's generation tends to be more sceptical than its elders about trophy buildings and the architecture of spectacle. "The ideas of modernism - that transparency was valuable, that steel was the future - now feel a bit childish," says Kieran Long, editor of the Architects' Journal, who is an enthusiast for the work of the young generation. "Culture is more complicated than that. We're not as interested in the future as we used to be, certainly not the future as it looked in the 1950s. For the new generation, the solution could equally be white walls and a shadow gap, or a thick pediment."

Patrick Lynch is actively hostile to what he sees as the inevitable decline of modernism into what he calls the "idiot avant garde, which means that all your work ultimately looks the same, whatever the climate". He claims that younger architects are disenchanted with "the idea that technological progress equals artistic progress equals moral progress equals virtue, which leads to the kind of thinking that it's OK to go and build for a completely unpalatable regime and fuck up the planet for money, because you're working in your signature style and it's an expression of individual creativity".

The watchword of the moment is not modernity but modesty. This happens, usefully, to be an approach that fits the times. The architecture profession has been worse hit than any other by recession, with the larger, commercial firms, especially those that have been dependent on the building boom in the Middle East, laying off up to 10 per cent of their staff, and graduates finding it almost impossible to get jobs. More than 1,500 architects are currently claiming benefit.

Something Rotten in the State of Architectural Criticism - Alas Poor Prince!

FROM THE ONLINE COMMENTS (on page two) for the article Prince Charles Tears Down Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood:

Hugh Pearman wrote:

Hello everyone. My position: although I regard the Rogers scheme for Chelsea Barracks as flawed, I cannot agree with the proposition that any project such as this can be stopped on the whim of an unelected prince merely by writing to a fellow royal.

John Massengale: I have no idea what Mr. Murdoch's views are on Charles. Do me the credit of allowing me my own opinions as a critic and as a citizen.

John Massengale wrote:

Dear Mr. Pearman,

I apologize for making an incorrect assumption, but Rupert Murdoch frequently dictates positions in his papers, as you well know. There is also a bias against Prince Charles among British architecture critics and at the Times.

Quentin Letts wrote in the Daily Mail, "There is a spooky uniformity among these architecture critics. Almost to a man they are pro-Rogers. And yet the British people are largely pro-Charles. Why such a gulf between critics and public? Is something going on that we have not been told? One of the chief Rogers cheerleaders is a man called Pearman from The Sunday Times (prop: R Murdoch, no friend of our monarchy). This week he took to the Wall Street Journal (prop: R Murdoch) to attack the Prince. In his article, he described Lord Rogers as ‘an active member of the House of Lords’. Baloney. I haven’t heard Rogers say a word in the Chamber since March 2008, and that was a speech full of self-congratulation."

Prince Charles picked up the actions of the neighborhood's Chelsea Barracks Action Group, to great public acclaim. He has not been elected, but in two polls the British public have approved his actions 2 to 1, as has been mentioned here and as you well know.

To me that is far more admirable than the way the way Baron Rogers used back-room politicing to try to stop a Terry scheme a few years ago, the way the Times regularly put negative personal stories about Charles in the paper (in the days of Diana and Cammillagate) a day or two after he would comment on architecture, and the way you yourself dredged up the old Camillagate tapes on your website story on Chelsea Barracks. How are they related?

It's also noticeable that architecture criticism in the Journal has changed since Murdoch bought the paper. They used to be pro-traditional, but now they are polemically pro-Modernist, against the preferences of Journal readers.

"There is a spooky uniformity among these architecture critics"

From the London Daily Mail:

There is a spooky uniformity among these architecture critics. Almost to a man they are pro-Rogers. And yet the British people are largely pro-Charles. Why such a gulf between critics and public? Is something going on that we have not been told?

Continue reading ""There is a spooky uniformity among these architecture critics""

Muggles & Magic

“What this project has shown me is that there is no place for pessimistic disbelief in the world; it’s just not useful. Once you’ve decided to be on the side of audacious wonder, beauty, and joy, you can’t go back.”

Swoon, a Brooklyn artist

HAVE YOU NOTICED that the media is now using "magical thinking" to mean "delusional thinking"? Talking about derivatives trading and Wall Street greed, for example. It probably comes from Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which takes the term from the social sciences.

But greed is not magical. Swoon might be. She's definitely, whether she knows it or not, neo-60s (think Haight-Ashbury circa 1966, when magic and infinite possibilities were in the air).

The Prague Spring, or 1989?

When I was in Prague in 1986, the Czechs were the most oppressed and depressed people I had seen -- but at the same time you could see they hadn't forgotton the Prague Spring. Will Iran's struggle take that long? It will if Khameini has his way.

Here's what they are singing:

Oh Iran, oh bejeweled land
Oh, your soil is the wellspring of the arts
Far from you may the thoughts of evil be
May you remain lasting and eternal
Oh enemy, if you are of stone, I am of iron
May my life be sacrificed for my pure motherland
Since your love became my calling
My thoughts are never far from you
In your cause, when do our lives have value?
May the land of our Iran be eternal...

Allaho Akbar

I'm a Christian, but that's what I'm thinking tonight.

Quote of the Day re Chelsea Barracks

FROM DaveHill'sLondonBlog: Kit Malthouse: Bricks Are The Future

What a relief! An act of large-scale vandalism has been averted. London should be grateful to the Qataris for their wisdom in turning away from yet another glass and steel disaster. It is my fervent hope that the developers will now work on a proposal that enhances and embraces Chelsea and the Royal Hospital.

This decision should mark a turning point in development in the capital. No more concrete, no more glass and steel. Brick and stone and slate must be the way forward, so that in 100 years time Londoners will still recognise their own city.

It is perfectly possible for modern architecture to embrace ancient materials and proportions without being pastiche. We hope that the developers will find a new architect who has the skills to produce something truly beautiful that will form part of London's third world heritage site in years to come.

Kit Malthouse, London's Deputy Mayor

One Problem With Richard Rogers's Architecture Is That It Isn't Really "New"

ONE SUMMER I was lucky enough to visit Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre and the under-construction Musée Beaubourg designed by Richard Rogers. I wrote about it here. Quoting myself,

Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre (Glass House) is a great house. Chareau designed it in the early 1930s, a time in Paris when Modernism was mainly in the future and its promise was great. By Modernism, I don't mean stylistic elements like flat roofs and glass block, but the promise of technology and even democracy.

When I first went to France 35 years later, it was still, along with many great things, the land of smelly Turkish toilets and unpotable water. But Chareau's bathroom in his first residential design was lyrical, with magical exposed pipes and tubs on display in the middle of the room like great works of art.

I was moved by Chareau's eloquence when I got to visit the house in 1977 as an architecture student. On the same day we saw the ham-fisted poetry of Richard Rogers at the Pompidou Center, still under construction. Rogers gave us a tour, and described a massive indent in a cavernous floor as "the poet's corner." Only a decade or two later, his giant and clumsy exposed pipes on the outside of the Pompidou had to be replaced at great expense. Putting them out in the rain had been a silly idea.

At the Maison de Verre, plumbing and technology were new, and Chareau's design was responsive and inspired. Forty-five years later, Richard Rogers rehash of the same ideas at the Pompidou Center sometimes descended into the insensitive and clichéd. Modernism was a tired ideology.

It would have been more accurate to say that in Rogers's hands Modernism was a tired ideology. Frankly, both Rogers's proclamations in the Battle of Chelsea Barracks and his designs seem heavy-handed and boorish.

Rogers talks about the importance of good urbanism, but his designs for Chelsea and the Lloyd's tower (which like Beaubourg had to be rebuilt at great expense when still new) are anti-urban. He makes object-buildings rather than buildings which make good streets for pedestrians.

The object-oriented site plan for Chelsea is straight out of the Modernism of the 1950s, when Rogers was in school. His emphasis on developing a personal style — with an emphasis on the "new" and "different" — is a fifty-year old cliche. His personal expression of these cliches seems just as tired.

Rogers would like us to think the Battle of Chelsea Barracks is about "style" and "nostalgia," because he's an ideologue who can only see architecture that connects to history and cultural achievements as backwards. But a good urban plan for the Chelsea site would start with the streets and the blocks and then allow the blocks to be filled in by a variety of architects and developers.

The criteria for selecting those architects and builders would be a demonstrated ability to make buildings and places that improve the city. Rogers only seems to be capable of making objects that call attention to their singularity at the expense of the city.

Baron Rogers tries to present these cliched ideas as an expression of our time (another Modernist cliche), and tries to present his ego-driven backroom deals as more democratic than the public dealings of Prince Charles. Charles is a prince, but he is supporting the ideas of the Chelsea Barracks Action Group, and polls show that public opinion is running two to one in his favor (here and here).

Sympathy for Rogers's top-down, back-room dealing is over. It is bottom-up planning of the sort that Charles supports that is new and democratic.

Related Tweets from me @jmassengale:

Despite what the Modernists say, the Battle of Chelsea Barracks is about urbanism and placemaking, not "style" or royal meddling.

Chelsea Barracks: Lord Rogers should design cities the way his wife cooks, with a nod to tradition and taste.

Chelsea Barracks: Baron "Bully Boy" Rogers says he wants an urban design debate with Prince Charles. He doesn't.

London Daily Mail: Lord Rogers is as mad as a hornet - Prince Charles is right to speak out against his barracks project
BD: Richard Rogers vs. Prince Charles
V&V: Lord Rogers, Bully Boy

All he is saying, is give peace a chance.