Veritas et Venustas

Where to give money for tsunami victims

INTBAU has made a list of organizations taking donations: click here.

Santa Fe Airport

his is the “passenger deplaning arrival point” and “airport baggage retrieval area” at the Santa Fe airport, designed by Santa Fe architect John Gaw Meem. It's another airport that shows that the International Style is not necessarily the best way to design an airport.

It's logical to say that high-tech architecture is the best expression for a modern airport, like the new Ronald Reagan National Airport, or Norman Foster's Stansted Airport, two recent, pleasant airports. But most Modernist airports are placeless, with no sense of arrival, local character or climate, and even the best achieve their local character only through the view through their large windows — if they're well situated. And even the best, like National and Stanstead, can't equal the sense of arrival at New York's Grand Central or former Pennsylvania Station (“You used to enter the city like a god,” Vincent Scully wrote about the old and new Penn Stations, “Now you creep in like a rat.”), which were built for the high-tech transportation of their day.

There are a few more pictures of the airport below. I'll post photos of it and the rest of Santa Fe in the next days. Previous posts about airports are here, here and here.

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The "baggage retrieval conveyor system" in its entirety.

The “waiting room"” is on the left, next to the main entrance, and the ticket counters are on the right. The door to the parking lot is at the end of the hall, while the entrance on the left and door to the runway form a cross axis.

My last post this yearOn Pale Male & Lola

Pale Male and Lola are building their nest in their architect designed penthouse. Good news.

Duany On the Avante-Garde

From the New Discourse list:

“The problem inherent in the contemporary architectural situation is not that it is modern, but that it is avant garde. The relentless pursuit of the unprecedented undermines two essential roles of architecture: the collective endeavor that is required for an urbanism; and the establishment of a transmissible body of knowledge. The latter prevents the teaching of architecture, thereby lowering the quality of the production.

I was just reading Susan Sontag's obituary in the Times. She became famous in the 6O's by arguing that the defining characteristic of the current avant garde is a 'sensibility  centered on artifice, exaggeration and the veneration of style.'

It became clear to me that the new discourse cannot be primarily about style. That would be complicit in the avant-garde sensibility, and it would be to engage in our opponent's discourse. Ours must be a deeply serious pursuit of an ethical architecture engaged in the important issues that confront our society. We should be based on the traditions that have shared these concerns—excluding neither the classical nor the modern where the can contribute.”

Andrés Duany
DUANY PLATER-ZYBERK & CO.
1023 SW 25th Avenue
Miami, Florida  33135
Phone: 305.644.1023
Fax: 305.644.1021
www.dpz.com

Santa Fe Today

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Season's Greetings

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
hitched to everything else in the universe.”
John Muir, Sierra Club founder



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