Happy New Year

To make a long story short, a recent discussion about a 1990s movie gave me the thought that the 20th century equivalent of Voltaire’s famous saying Il faut cultiver notre jardin might be Il faut se vautrer dans la boue de notre jardin (“We must wallow in the mud of our garden").

Here’s hoping that as we leave 2009 behind, we also leave behind the excessive materialism and egotism of the 20th century and come closer to returning to the Garden of Eden.

Peace, Love & Joy in 2010

The Revolution Will Be Televised - but will it succeed?

 

IN THE FIRST VIDEO the crowd disarms the Basij - but did they allow themselves to be disarmed? In the second video, government forces use SUVs to run over Iranian citizens. I don't think anyone knows how far the government forces will go (or not go), and what the outcome will be.

How is this not all over the media as well as YouTube? In any case, Andrew Sullivan continues with many links and videos.

My Apps

THE REST ARE @ http://bit.ly/VVapps What am I missing?

Tonight Is Said To Be The Loudest Night Of Chants

TEN PROTESTERS WERE KILLED TODAY, on a Shia holy day, by a regime that is supposed to be upholding Shia rule. It would be wonderful if this could be the end of the current government.

One of the ten killed is the nephew of the man most consider to be the rightfully elected President.

The New York Times reports:

The government crackdowns on mourning ceremonies in the past week provoked many people in the more traditional neighborhoods of south Tehran as earlier clashes have not, some residents said.

“People in my neighborhood have been going to the Ashura rituals every night with green fabric for the first time,” said Hamid, 33, a laborer who lives in the southern Tehran neighborhood of Shahreh-Ray and declined to give his last name. “They have been politicized recently, because of the suppression this month.”

Yet few protesters expected the scale of the bloodshed that broke out on Sunday. The memory of Hussein is so potent among Shiites that killing for any reason is strictly forbidden on Ashura, and Iranian rulers have always tried to avoid violence or even state executions during a two-month period surrounding the holiday.

“Ashura is a very symbolic day in our culture and it revives the notion that the innocents were killed by a villain,” said Fatemah Haghighhatjoo, a former member of the Iranian Parliament who is a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “Killing people on Ashura shows how far Khamenei is willing to go to suppress the protests.”

Good coverage here

For Unto Us A Child Is Born

And to all a good night

from the Cooper Square Hotel

LIVE ONLINE NOW: King's College Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols

For unto us a child was born, the King of Kings.
Click here for a video on YouTube

What I'm Reading (Holiday Edition)

LOOK UP ANY AILMENT, and Soignez-vous par le vin will tell you what wine to drink to feel better.

WARNING: May bring une crise de foie.

Après le saut - c'est magnifique!

Continue reading "What I'm Reading (Holiday Edition)"

More Signs of the Apocalypse - Paris is the new Dubai

Quoting myself:

One century ago, technology was threatening Paris with changes that already had them talking about the "Manhattanization" of Paris. Elevators and steel frames made it possible to build higher than before, railroads, subways and buses changed the concept of the neighborhood, the electric light alleviated the need for daylight in buildings. Buildings like the traditional Parisian apartment house -- a five or six story type with courtyards, gracious, well-lit stairways and shallow, naturally-well-ventilated apartments -- were considered obsolete in some quarters.

The future of Paris was debated in the French National Assembly. Codes were passed which still determine the character and look of Paris. One representative stood up in the assembly and said that the citizens of Paris have two rights, Justice and Beauty.

Today, the Mayor of Paris and the President of France are calling for glass towers in the City of Light. At least the President wants to keep the towers at the periphery ... mais Sacrebleu!

Steve Semes - The Future of the Past

The general public has never forgotten that the purpose of architecture and planning is to design beautiful buildings and places that offer joy in utility, or that the purpose of historic preservation is to preserve them — not as artifacts in a museum but as living examples of the way architects and planners should continue to design.

The Future of the Past, subtitled “A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism and Historic Preservation,” is a blueprint for recovering what architecture, urbanism and preservation once were and could once again be. Semes, an architect, runs the Rome Studies Program of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

David Brussat, "How to preserve the future of the past,"
Providence Journal (December 17, 2009)                   

“I love New York, King of all the cities,”“Lived up by the Guggenheim till I got some kiddies.”

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I love New York, King of all the Cities
Lived up by the Guggenheim, till I got some kiddies
Moved to Connecticut, bye George Pataki
Volvo to the dry-cleaners, pickin’ up my khakis

Shoppin’ mall is close, my community is gated
My shorties are all private school educated
Home theater system, 60-inch plasma
Clean suburban air, much better for my asthma

Still hit the city, Times Square, keep it real
Hard Rock Cafe for the appetizer deal
M&M Store, Disney Store, I’m in heaven
I own this town from 41st to 47th

Take you to The Lion King, that show is fantastic
Leave half an hour early so I can beat the traffic
I can get home really fast, driver rocks an E-Z Pass
Land of cheaper gas and the upper middle class

via Huffington Post

A Street Is A Terrible Thing To Waste, Part III

I WROTE the following more than two years ago but for various reasons never posted it. After Léon Krier's recent talk and booksigning for CNU New York and the Municipal Art Society, however, I had dinner with Krier and talked to him about how some of his urban-infill ideas might work in re-urbanizing some of the vast, anti-urban housing projects Robert Moses built. The good news is that many of the projects are under the sole ownership of the City, so that plans for using some of their vacant land can be ambitious. The city needs affordable housing, and the City has lots of land that could be better used. More on this later, perhaps with some new drawings by Krier.

The "after" picture below is a CAD/photo composite. I'll try to post some real photos in the next few weeks, along with the post about urbanizing the housing projects.

Before & After

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS: New York City real estate has gotten so expensive that it can support infill buildings that used to be commercially unviable. Take the example of Houston Street, which has looked like a de-militarized zone ever since Robert Moses widened it by tearing down buildings on the south side of the street, leaving exposed to view for decades party walls that were never meant to be seen. But in the last decade developers have built narrow loft-style buildings on these lots, because sale prices of $1,000 per square foot and up could finally pay for those narrow and inefficient structures. The result is that the pedestrian-free zone is once again looking like a place where people might want to walk.

The narrow new structures are what New Urbanists call "liner buildings": buildings that line the street to hide ugly, anti-pedestrian conditions behind them, like parking lots or exposed party walls. Now the market is paying for luxury apartment houses along Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side that will hide some of the vast stretches of anti-urban, Moses-built housing there (it's the form of the housing and their blocks that's anti-urban, not the Mitchell Lama or welfare housing within).

The Good News is that these market rate apartments give New York the possibility of more beautiful and walkable streets. What Jane Jacobs called urban removal projects gave us just the opposite: amorphous streets with ugly towers looming over them. Walkability requires safe, interesting and comfortable streets.

A good street is like an outdoor room, with a well proportioned, enclosed space. Since the time of the Greeks and the Romans we've known that the streets should be shaped by buildings with heights at least 1/3 as tall as the distance to the buildings on the opposite side of the street. If they're not that tall, or taller, they're too low to contain the space of the street, and pedestrians become uncomfortable. That's why Manhattan's best wide streets, like Broadway and Park Avenue, have taller buildings than the narrower side streets around them.

In Nathan Glazer's recent book From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter With the American City, Glazer speculates that the politics of New York's sprawling projects will ensure large swaths of concentrated poor tenants for decades to come, and he doesn't see that uni-income concentration as a good thing. So it's a victory for the city that the market is already trumping politics and potentially making a better place for all of us.

But the bad news is two-fold: during the recent boom in Manhattan "market rate" meant "only for the rich," and that's a problem for the city, just as block after block of nothing but the poor can be. I believe the first problem may end when the economy goes down and the Euro-buyers take their Euros and go home, perhaps sooner than we think.

This New York City street looks like something in Orlando.

The second part of the problem is that even though these buildings these buildings along Columbus have high construction budgets and are improving the streetscape they've inherited from the projects, their architectural and urban design is still poor. An opportunity is being lost, because ever since the rise of Modernism, New York City has left so many urban design decisions in the hands of the developers.

Paris, Rome, London and even Washington don't operate that way, and New York didn't use to either. But developers are the largest political donors in New York State, and they have killed all plans that might deny them the right to make as much short-term gain as possible, even if that comes at the expense of the long-term needs of the city.

When Joe Rose, Rudolph Giuliani's Planning Commissioner, tried to institute a form-based planning code that would have made development on our city streets more about the streets and less about views for the few tenants in the upper floors (I talked about Rose and form-based codes in What's Good For Starchitects Is Good For The World), developers killed that plan in less than a day, leaving us with one glass tower after another in the boom of the 00's (the uh-ohs). Many feel we're turning into Houston-on-Hudson.

So the good news is that today's market is affording us (literally) the opportunity to create many of the urban-removal mistakes of the past. The bad news is that we're still letting the developers set too many terms of the debate, and too many of their bottom-line decisions are coming at the expense of the city and the street.

Curbed's coverage

After the jump, an aerial view of the site.

Continue reading "A Street Is A Terrible Thing To Waste, Part III"

On the first day of Christmas,

Toronto gave Philly,
A pitcher but took away Lee.

(But she was wearing those green things)

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