Neo-Modernism, Back To The Future Again

IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED, that a young man in a good architecture school, must be designing 1960s-style buildings. That's the impression you get from Dwell, which I read recently in the airport. The issue I read featured sober and straightforward new houses that all looked like they were built in the 1960s. The only exception was a silly article on the Junior Starchitects MRDV, with quotes like this: "We want to position our work outside of architecture, as a clear piece of sociology and ecology."

To see what that means, click here. Shades of 1960s British loonies Archigram.

UPDATE: More on Neo-1960s here.

More on the Starchitect / Simpler divide here (Post-Katrina housing fits designers' agendas. But can the city live with it?):

No one has yet picked MVRDV's mailbox or its alternative version, which looks suspiciously like a boat upended by Katrina.

Several architects said they were appalled by MVRDV's proposals, which play more to the academy than the needs of displaced residents, and may be uninhabitable.

"That's graphic design, not architecture," Timberlake said. Bingler was more blunt: "When are we going to reach the point when architects say, 'This is unprofessional?' . . . It may even be unethical."

Bingler said his firm, Concordia, had steered clear of trendy concepts. Its design features a peaked roof, but one that slopes in five directions.

A roof "that slopes in five directions" — thank god, they got over the trendiness.

1968, or 2008?

THE ONLY WAY we know the second part of this video wasn't made in 1962 is that that it has techno-pop and retro-style personal computers.

Royksopp - Remind Me (with Caveman)

Why, oh why, can't architects be like this?

Jacob Collins, The Hen Islands from Eastholm, 2008

THE PAINTER JACOB COLLINS says young artists don't worry about ideology and modernism versus tradition: if they see a beautiful traditional painting they think it's cool, even if their own work is very different.

Starting this Thursday, Jacob is having a show at Hirschl & Adler Modern. Jacob is one of the best.

Jacob Collins @ Hirschl & Adler Modern, May 8 — June 13, 2008

"Sure to get the vote of every thinking man"

DURING ONE OF ADLAI STEVENSONS PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS, a reporter told Stevenson that he was "sure to get the vote of every thinking man" in the country. "Thank you, but I need a majority to win," Stevenson said.

Yesterday's primaries in Indiana and North Carolina show that Hillary hasn't succeeded in making Obama look so much like an egghead that he can't win. But as people have feared for months now, she has hurt his popularity, and made it harder for him to beat McCain. I wish she would realize she's also hurting the Democratic Party, her own future races, and the political discourse in this country.

I've voted for Hillary in the New York Senate races, but her I'm More Macho tactics have damaged her standing with me. More importantly, she's based her campaign on not taking the high road.

She's acting like the queen in that old macho joke: "Balls," cried the Queen, "If I had t(w/o)o, I'd be the King." It's the opposite of the thinking man.

UPDATE: MAS chooses "Oppressive"

THE MUNICIPAL ART SOCIETY says the Atlantic Yards site may actually look more like the image on the left for the next few years:

Curbed has the details. along with a Reboot Poll that says "none of the above."

MAS - Atlantic Lots

Festive, or Oppressive?

A STORY IN TODAY'S DAILY NEWS presents revised designs for the Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn, designed by Frank Gehry.

Gehry calls the design "festive," and the photos are colorful. But imagine yourself as one of those little dots down on the sidewalk in the model. I think the chaotic shapes would feel oppressive over your head.

Rally to Stop Atlantic Yards - Saturday

Click here to enlarge letter:

Brooklyn Speaks

A Glutton for Punishment

NYU has released drawings for a proposed tower next to I.M. Pei's Washington Square Village [sic*]. As always, Curbed has the story.

A commenter on Curbed writes, "NYU obviously is looking for space, and it can only build up [but] I don't like towers in the park (at all) either."

Despite the reaction the last time I posted on Curbed, I replied:

NYU has several options, because there is a lot of open land in Washington Square South. I've given classes to architecture students at Notre Dame, the University of Miami and Georgia Tech on the principles of urban design, taught with 5 walking tours of New York City (we begin in Manhattan, work our way through Midtown and the Village, then go to Brooklyn and finish at Forest Hills Gardens - a "transect" of urbanism).

The third class begins under the arch in Washington Square, talks about the square, the Manhattan grid, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, then goes to Washington Square South [ditto] and finishes in the West Village piers on the Hudson.

All the students immediately experience the difference between the old streets of the Village and the monotonous superblocks of Washington Square South, which could be in Any New City, USA, even though a wonderful section of Greenwich Village used to stand exactly where they are now. This has a lot to do with why Washington Square is usually full of people, while the similarly sized space in Washington Square South north is usually devoid of a single soul. They're only a few hundred feet apart.

How could some of the real Village be brought to Washington Square South without tearing down what's there now? Well, look at Pei's almost identical towers in Philadelphia, the Society Hill Towers. Because Ed Bacon (1 degree of Kevin Bacon) was Philadelphia's planner in charge, he imposed new rowhouses on Pei, who usually preferred the wide open spaces of superblocks. Low to medium rise buildings (two to ten stories) and perhaps even a tower or two could similarly and easily be placed around Pei's towers, and the streets of the village would be better for it.

The axis of Wooster Street still runs through both blocks of Washington Square South, and both blocks have a lot of empty street frontage along other Village Streets. Urban infill there would be a piece of cake. NYU's decision to continue the tower in the park model is a mistake. People don't move to New York to live in suburbia. I'm sure a good "visual preference" survey of NYU students would show they prefer traditional New York streets to empty superblocks. Every day of the week, the surrounding streets are full of people enjoying themselves, while the blocks sit virtually abandoned.

An earlier story in Curbed showed plans for other block (below). I have only one (hyphenated) word to say in response: sub-urban.

* A typical developer ploy is to name your project after whatever you are destroying: Fox Run Estates, Town Center Shopping, Washington Square Village.

Continue reading "A Glutton for Punishment"

eeFray iFiWay @ arbucksStay (Limited Time Offer)

HERE ARE INSTRUCTIONS for free WiFi at Starbucks on your iPhone or Macbook.

Which reminds me of a story:

Continue reading "eeFray iFiWay @ arbucksStay (Limited Time Offer)"

Kunstler on Colbert Report Tonight Last Night

Click here to watch the video

World Made By Hand
The Colbert Report

We Build This City

NEW YORK CITY's Sustainable Streets program is an important development. Download the plan here.

All the best blocks in New York,

are shaped by stone and brick buildings. If you don't agree, show me the block.

Non-architects don't find this surprising. They look around and say, "Of course." Look at Time Out's list of The 50 Best Blocks in New York.

Time Out is hip and young and has nothing against Modernist architecture. But when you go looking for the best blocks in the city, if you're not an ideologue you're going to see that glass buildings don't make city streets as well as masonry buildings. Some good blocks might have a single glass building that makes an interesting contrast. But if you go somewhere like Midtown that has quite a few blocks made primarily of glass towers, you'll find pretty boring blocks. Upper Park Avenue is one of our most beautiful streets — Park Avenue right above Grand Central is boring.

Young architects and architecture students have a lot of trouble with these ideas, because they've been taught anti-urban ideas. First, that the architect's vision and the building's uniqueness are more important than making a good block and a good city. And, they're interested in architectural fashion, which for at least the last 10 years has been in a neo-60s mode. That means glass, and lots of it.

Find this a little hard to believe? Well take a look at these comments at Curbed, where I'm called a "douche," "a major douche" and an "old, ugly NIMBY piece of shit" (by people I've never met). What did I say that was so terrible? Here it is:

There is no connection between glass-skinned buildings and "progressive" or "innovative." Corporations and developers have built hundred of thousands of them since 1950.

What separates New York from most of America, particularly most of America built since 1950, is that it is a place where people can walk and want to walk. Eighty per cent of Manhattan residents don't own a car. (FWIW, I was born here and I do own a car.)

Density and interconnected streets allow one to walk. Beautiful, safe and interesting streets make us want to walk.

All the best blocks in New York (that is all the places where people most want to walk, live and work) are shaped entirely or primarily by masonry buildings. If you disagree, what blocks are you talking about?

New York has long had diverse and eclectic buildings and streets, and there's nothing wrong with a new or different building here or there. Lever House and the Seagram Building were interesting additions to Park Avenue. But Park Avenue between Lever House and Grand Central before all the corporate glass towers were built. And midtown was a more interesting and beautiful place before it became dominated by glass towers, as it is now. Who enjoys walking along Madison Avenue in the 50s?

[continued]

Cities Need Both Order and Richness
What's Good For Starchitects Is Good For The World
What's So Good About This?
Dog Bites Man

Continue reading "All the best blocks in New York,"

The Way We Live Now

David Becomes Goliath

(The photo's been anonymously moving around the internet — see the original here.)

Travels with my iPhone

A Bedford horse farm in the early spring.

The same farm a few days later.

BEDFORD, NEW YORK is about as close as you can be to New York City with any real illusion of being in the country. I lived and worked there and should write about it and post some photos. But for now, here are some photos from my iPhone and a few earlier words (look in the second and third paragraphs).

Continue reading "Travels with my iPhone"

PS: Urbanism & An Architecture of Place

ON MY WAY TO BEDFORD, I drove by the the new Yankee Stadium. It's next to the old stadium (ruined by blind engineers in the early 1970s), and unlike CitiField, is urban. Down the hill from the Grand Concourse, next to the subway, the new stadium usually comes right up to the street.

But the "traditional" architecture is poorly done. HOK's designers (HOK designs virtually all the new ballparks) should take some courses at the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America. With a little training, their buildings would be a lot better.

V&V: They're Not McKim, Mead & White

Urbanism and An Architecture of Place

CitiField has no city, and the Metropolitans have no metropolis.

OVER AT DESIGN OBSERVER, the great Michael Bierut wrote a good piece on baseball parks that I thought was a little too quick to equate traditional design with "nostalgia" while asking the question, "Why is it so hard to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs in the 21st century?"

In the comments, I said,

Michael,

I suspect you're trolling here, but I'll bite a little bit.

Why are you assuming that the architecture of the 21st Century should be the same as the architecture called for by 19th century architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies Van Der Rohe?

They wanted a Zeitgeist architecture, an architecture of time, which they tied to the expression of technology. The architecture needed today, I believe is the architecture of community and place. And sustainability.

There was a time when Modernism accurately expressed our culture, but that time is past. It is now nothing more than an expression of style, and that expression is increasingly ego-centric, anti-urban and unsustainable.

We need buidings that add up to the creation of good places. Extensive studies by Chris Alexander, Space Syntax and many others increasingly show that the qualities that do that are timeless and universal.

My standard for judging CitiField is not whether or not it's nostalgic, but whether or not it's a good place. That's determined by many qualities including the spatial experience, the proportions of the facades, the quality of the materials, etc.

Continue reading "Urbanism and An Architecture of Place"

For the New Spartans

UPDATE: After another good start, Wang is now 5 and 0 in 2008, with a 3.23 ERA. But with Hughes, A-Rod and Jorgie all on the DH it could be a long year for Yankee fans.

DESPITE two World Series rings in four years, which is two more than the Yankees have had this century, some Sox fans still feel the need to misanthropically attack the Yankees. They use stats to show that Derek Jeter is one of the worst defensive players in baseball, and that Chien Ming Wang, who since he first came up has won more games than any other pitcher in baseball, can't possibly win.

So I was interested to see this quote from Red Sox Nation favorite son baseball analyst Peter Gammons:

First of all, range factor is a phony stat. It will tell you that Roberto Alomar is a mediocre second baseman, and he's the best I've ever seen. It doesn't take into consideration instinct. Jeter is the most consistent of the three [Jeter, A-Rod, Nomahr] making the tough play, and he makes the double play -- starting and finishing -- the best... I say this each October: the best thing about watching the postseason is watching Jeter play every day for 15-20 games so I go home each winter realizing how great he really is. No stat sheet shows that.

Then last week, White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen said this,

He’s the best thing ever in the game. He’s got everything you want. Who’s better than Derek Jeter? Nobody in the game.

Julio Lugo, my a**.

Derek Jeter, Bill James & Moneyball
Summer's Calling
Winning Players (New York Times: "Baseball's Leading Man of Math Has Some Second Thoughts About the Numbers")
Is the old Athens of America the new Sparta?

Continue reading "For the New Spartans"

Live from New York

It was 72º as the Stock Exchange closed for the day, and Stone Street started to fill up.

One hour later:

A father and son team own most of the restaurants on Stone Street, the oldest paved street in America (some claim). Private ventures joined city and state agencies in paying $1.8 million to rebuild the dilapidated, which once it gets warm becomes one big outdoor food court and drinking center.

Because if there's anything New York City needs it's another glass-covered office building ...

UPDATE: Curbed readers comment here.

1775 Broadway (above), soon to be 3 Columbus Circle (below)

To get the glass on, workers are today hammering the cornice off this old friend (the Newsweek Building), designed by the architects of the Empire State Building.

More photos and info @ Curbed

Looks great ...

LEATHERHEADS is disappointing. The cinematography is beautiful, the sets are excellent, the music (by Randy Newman) is very good ... but the movie is a comedy with only a few good jokes and even fewer good lines. An homage to the screwball comedies of the early twentieth century, it cries out, hopelessly, for their witty banter.

George Clooney directs and stars in the movie. He shows he could be a good screwball actor, but his director lets him mug and stay on screen too long. Renee Zellweger is either badly cast or badly directed.

There are writers today who can write funny dialogue. But while Hollywood hires great technicians, it rarely hires great writers these days. We all suffer as a result.

More capsule reviews, after the jump

UDPATE: There's some good news here, where Whit Stillman, "the WASPy Woody Allen," reports he's at work on a new movie set in Jamaica.

(full disclosure: Whit was one of my college roommates - the last I heard he was scouting locations in Jamaica)

Continue reading "Looks great ..."

Munich, My Munich

Copyright © R. Sterflinger. Courtesy of the Fremdenverkehrsamt München.

THE NEW YORK TIMES wrote about Munich here. I wrote about it here.

NY Times: Munich Redux: Germany’s Hot Spot of the Moment

V&V: Munich, New York & Starchitects

Forever England

ENGLAND wouldn't be England without pubs and hand-pulled bitters. Some of the best pubs are in Oxford. The New York Times wrote about them here.

NY Times: Journeys / Oxford England / A Pub Crawl Through the Centuries

V&V: London Pubs

They're Back — Spring is Sprung

Our Hudson Valley Anthroposophical Farm, @ the Union Square Farmer's Market

Continue reading "They're Back — Spring is Sprung"

Is the old Athens of America the new Sparta?

PS: Of course it all feels better after Chien Ming Wang throws a two-hit (a two-out bunt in the ninth and a home run off Bobby Abreu's glove that he should have caught), complete-game win.

PPS: How much blame should the Brahmins take here? Overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of immigration, they withdrew and circled the wagons. Instead of sharing their wonderful culture they held others down and became elite and esoteric. No wonder that when the 1960s came, so many Cabots and Lowells became hippies.

PPPS: Sparta

ONCE AGAIN, the Yankees travel up to Fenway to beat up, and be beaten up by, the Red Sox. For several years now, they've not only played each other to a draw, but they've worn themselves out playing 19 regular season games every year. Both teams frequently slump after a Yankees - Red Sox series. Since no other team goes through such a long, intense series, it makes it easier for other teams to win the Wild Card.

Each team starts tonight's game at 5 and 5 and is struggling to find a groove. The Yanks are missing Captain Jeter and Posada can't catch. Mike Lowell just went on the DL and the DH, Yankee Killer Papi, isn't even halfway to the Mendoza line. This is not what they need. The games will probably be intense, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Baseball genius Bud Selig doesn't think so, because every game will sell out.

We know the Sox fans take this competition more seriously than Yankee fans. Terry Francona tells us so. So does Peter Gammons. Is this somehow related to Dennis Lehane's idea of a Boston culture that feels they "don't belong to the pahty"? When I was in college in the Hub of the Universe I had Boston Brahmin friends who had a Second City, New York obsession, so I don't know.

Nor do I understand all the talk below from Boston fans about how much their team, not just the Yankees, "sucks." The same team that won the World Series, along the way beating the Yankees as dramatically as can be, "sucks"?

Many of the same players won the World Series again the next year. Before they did, they had another August slump, and once again the cries of "they suck" came out.

My attitude is a) it's only a game, and b) players like Bernie and Mo and Papi and Mike Lowell are doing their best. I don't know if it's a regional thing, or a generational thing to say they suck. My team doesn't suck.

After the jump, you'll see what I mean. It seems very strange.

From the comments on a Red Sox blog, many from the blog owners (names changed to protect the guilty):

Yesterday, amazed and frustrated beyond words by the meltdown in Baltimore, I ignored the Red Sox for the first time this season. They won.

Based on this hardened principle, and based on the wrath I feel churning in my stomach after this afternoon's loss, I am going to ignore this maddening ballclub for a full week. I won't post here, comment on here, check scores or watch or read anything about baseball for seven days. I have other hobbies; I enjoy politics, and there seems to be a presidential race on that I've been ignoring. I have been needing to work my way through the perpetually growing list of books I want to read. I've always wanted to sear out my eyes with a red-hot poker. All these things would be better than following six or seven games of Red Sox baseball. In any case, I imagine I'll be more productive at work, as well.

I fully expect that when I return, the Red Sox will be battling the Indians and Tigers for who can give away the wild card to the Mariners (the Mariners!) the fastest. I have no desire to watch that train wreck, and this team cannot hold me hostage any longer. Screw them. Well, for a week, anyway.

See you later.

Posted by PPP at 06:01 PM in Sox Gamers/Postmortems | Permalink | Comments (74)

Wait, so what I've been saying all along, based on watching almost every single game of the year, is finally taking hold of other Sox fans? You mean I wasn't just a doomsayer, a panic artist? You mean that I might actually have been observant?

This team, as I have been saying for WEEKS, even when they had a ten game lead, is troubled, big time. It's finally somehwat redeeming that someone else might be seeing what I saw long ago.

I assume many of our posters here will jump on this, calling me overly pessimistic, but I do recall one of our new authors here a couple of months ago saying the Yankees were completely dead, that only firing Joe Torre might do anything, that the team was a nightmare. I am doing nothing of the sort with the Sox -- this skid is on the players and not management (though management isn't blameless). Somehow I don't expect I will escape being criticized for my attitude, however well-justified it's panning out to have been.

[ED - NB: These Sox went on to win the World Series.]

Posted by: SSS | Sunday, August 12, 2007 at 07:29 PM

Continue reading "Is the old Athens of America the new Sparta?"