Veritas et Venustas

Celebrity Payola & One Degree of Kevin Bacon

Really, I just wanted to put YouTube^TM video on my blog, to see how to do it. But then I found this Celebrity Payola video from the opening of the Apple Store: note that the Saturday Night Live crew all left with computers — and were asked on their way out if they had paid for them.

Kevin Bacon was there too.

via Curbed, from Animal

The Taking of Manhattan WTC

Quoting myself:

Exactly 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.

Back in Manhattan, the cuts and mismanagement at the World Trade Center continue. From today's Daily News, comes this story about the Fulton Transit Center:

"The cutesy stuff—the beautiful stuff—I have no interest in that if we don't have enough money to do the job," [MTA Board Member] Barry Feinstein said. "I don't care about a pretty building. I just don't care."

Justice and Beauty? Whatever, says Feinstein.

via The Gutter

Newsweek: Meier Museum In Rome A Lightning Rod For Protesters Against War And America

The building has become a flash point for anti-American sentiment and public disaffection for efforts to modernize the ancient city, which residents, historians and many visitors prefer were left untouched. Visitors have taken to expressing their dissatisfaction in graffiti. MEIER IS A CRIMINAL wrote one visitor in English on a construction tarp. IKEA: NOW SELLING TOILETS AT THE ARA PACIS wrote another in Italian. The site has also become a gathering spot for antiwar and anti-American protestors who point to its lack of regard for its surroundings as a symbol of everything they hate about the United States. According to most Italians interviewed at the site, the modern look is wholly unacceptable in the heart of the Eternal City.

Roman Ruin
A museum meant to celebrate the Eternal City’s antiquity has become a lightning rod for protesters against war and America.

 

Alessandro Bianchi / Reuters

Ugly or visionary? Meier’s new museum houses the Ara Pacis

May 18, 2006 - Rome’s historical center is a warm mix of dusty travertine and ochre-hued palazzi overgrown with lush vines and topped by a sea of basilica domes and terra-cotta rooftops. Cobblestone lanes wind around decrepit ruins that have been frozen in time for millennia. Crumbling facades are left to decay—some from blatant neglect and others simply to mark the passage of history. Symmetry and order are foreign concepts. But all of that changed this spring with the unveiling of American architect Richard Meier’s starkly un-Roman museum of the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace)—the first modern building project in the historical center since the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s destructive modernization of the 1930s. Now the characteristic labyrinth of quaint, decaying Rome is interrupted by what looks, at first glance, something like a space-age gas station.

The building has become a flash point for anti-American sentiment and public disaffection for efforts to modernize the ancient city, which residents, historians and many visitors prefer were left untouched. Visitors have taken to expressing their dissatisfaction in graffiti. MEIER IS A CRIMINAL wrote one visitor in English on a construction tarp. IKEA: NOW SELLING TOILETS AT THE ARA PACIS wrote another in Italian. The site has also become a gathering spot for antiwar and anti-American protestors who point to its lack of regard for its surroundings as a symbol of everything they hate about the United States. According to most Italians interviewed at the site, the modern look is wholly unacceptable in the heart of the Eternal City.

That judgment may be harsh, considering that the museum, still ringed with construction paraphernalia and tarpaulin fences, is only half built. When completed in September, the building will house a small auditorium, a 600-piece exhibit space, a fountain wall and a fake obelisk, as well as a rooftop coffee bar and viewing terrace from which the real glories of Rome can be seen. Right now, however, the building is a sterile structure of steel, glass and bleached cement, adorned with the odd block of obligatory travertine marble from Tivoli, tucked between the neoclassic church of St. Rocco, the imperial-age mausoleum of the Emperor Augustus and the traffic-clogged thoroughfare that hugs the Tiber River. Its showcase attraction—Augustus’ ancient altar of peace, one of the most important relief sculptures of its age—is open for viewing at 6.50 euros (about $8.30) a ticket, but most tourists just peer through the glass windows.

It didn’t help that Rome awarded the $24 million public-works contract to a New York architect rather than put the bid up for competition. A public bid, critics say, might have found an Italian designer whose sensibilities could have turned out something slightly more Italian—or at least slightly less American. The ultramodern minimalist design was never publicly debated but instead was approved, along with a slew of other so-called Millennium projects, six years ago behind the closed doors at Rome’s city hall. Since then, protesters have stopped construction more than a dozen times. Outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has called it “a monstrosity.”

At the museum’s partial opening in April, the polite applause of the curious gatherers could not hide their horror at the minimalist addition; many people stood in blatant dismay at the stark site. Nearby, a group of art historians and professors from the local university burned scale-models of the museum and chanted anti-American slogans. Architect Meier told the perplexed crowd, “I think the Ara Pacis symbolizes something about life in Rome moving on into the 21st century. That’s the most important thing for me about the building. I think it’s extremely important that Rome should not become a museum. It should have not only a rich history, but contemporary life as well.”

Barbie Nadeau Visitors express their views via graffiti

Clearly, not everyone agrees. Franco Leone of Calabria brought his 21-year-old daughter, a student of architecture in Rome, to see the site Saturday. “It’s just not in the right context,” he says. “In a city like Rome, you really need to integrate a new building into its ancient surroundings. They have not succeeded in this at all.” Enrica Infunti of La Spezia agrees. “It’s really horrible,” she says. “The meaning and the beauty of the Ara Pacis has been abandoned. Now it’s hidden here inside this cold, open structure. Where’s the warmth of Rome here? It has such negative energy.”

The city of Rome hired Meier, ironically, to overcome thousands of years of animosity toward the altar. Built between 13 and 9 B.C. to commemorate the peaceful times Emperor Augustus brought to his Romans, it has been pillaged, moved and rebuilt several times. In the late 1930s, Mussolini gathered together its many fragments, which had been scattered throughout the city, and rebuilt the altar in its current location next to Augustus’ mausoleum, where Mussolini had himself intended to be interred. He embraced the Ara Pacis as a symbol of his fascist regime and until his fall, it symbolized his grandiose dreams of global domination. For much of the 20th century, Italians were indifferent, and only foreign tourists and historians visited the site. Rome’s former mayor, Francesco Rutelli, commissioned Meier to build an appropriate museum around it to reinvigorate interest in the monument’s original Augustan history. “I wanted to make it a public destination, a new piazza space in Rome that people can come to whether they’re going to the museum or not, and just sit in the sun,” Meier says. “It’s bringing life to what was not a vital or active area before.” He’s succeeded in bringing Italians together—mainly in protest.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

Lord Voldemort & His Dark Prince

T h e  D e v i l  W e a r s  P r a d a

via The Gutter

Mississippi Charrette

THIS STORY is from the same magazine that gave me the Southern music cd's.

We hold these truths to be self-evident

Gehry's Atlantic Yards project is discussed at the end of the post.

FRANK GEHRY''s work is best when it is a single object that sits in contrast with its surroundings. To wit: his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain is a metal building on a prominent site in a traditional masonry city. Its form contrasts with everything around it. Its shiny color contrasts with everything around it. A modern jewel in a traditional setting, it is a beautiful, well-loved object.

Gehry's Disney Hall is just as interesting an object, but it sits on a too-wide street with empty lots and boring, late twentieth century buildings. In this setting, it comes off as less special. So does Gehry's Stata Center at MIT, in a section of Cambridge recently redeveloped.

Gehry's Performing Arts Center at Bard College is another step down from the Guggenheim. In the middle of open field ringed by lovely old trees, it refuses to engage the surrounding nature and in person comes off as silly and overwrought.

And now we come to what will probably be Gehry's worst work, the proposed Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn. Yes, it sits in a traditional city fabric, but it is an enormous project that spills out from its site to wipe out blocks of existing fabric and tower over the neighbors. There is so much of the mega-project that it is its own context. And frankly, given that situation, Gehry doesn't seem to know what to do.

It is an axiom of design that restraints bring out creativity and produce the best result. Michelangelo's Campidoglio in Rome is often used as an example of this principle: given two existing buildings to work with in creating a plaza, Michelangelo used the odd angle between the two to create one of the most beautiful piazzas in Rome. In Brooklyn, Gehry and the developer Forest City Ratner are simply bulldozing too much of what's already there.

Geeks Crits Gehry
Chomsky Crits Gehry
DDDB Crits Ratner
“It's the scale, stupid”

Chomsky Crits Gehry

The $300m fixer-upper
The Boston Globe, October 29, 2004
By Steve Bailey, Globe Columnist

Chomsky, on the other hand, spent decades in the beloved Building 20, MIT's ''Magical Incubator." He would go back in a minute. In Chomsky's eighth-floor office, the walls slant in. ''If you look in the corner, you get vertigo," he says.

''The first time he came in, he almost passed out," says his assistant, Bev Stohl, who has loaded the office with plants to minimize the effect.

Chomsky finds the space not very usable. ''It is hard to get a blackboard up," he says. Responds Brooks, the CSAIL director: ''He hates the US government, too. He hates this country. Have you ever read anything he has written?"

The $300m fixer-upper
The Boston Globe, October 29, 2004
By Steve Bailey, Globe Columnist

It is a building all about the future, but in Frank Gehry's whimsical $300 million Stata Center at MIT an old-fashioned X marks the spot. The spot, that is, where the place still leaks when it rains.

At one point there were 38 of these Xs, marked in yellow tape, all around the building. Rodney Brooks, director of CSAIL (for MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), says all but two of the peskiest leaks have been fixed. Leak number 2 is just outside his lab; Leak 24 is around the corner.

Opened in May, the 1,000 or so people who work in the Stata are settling in. It is a jumble of a place, filled with walls that tilt like stacked building blocks. I like the Stata because it dares to be different. But like all new buildings, there are bugs to be worked out. That goes double for a building this complex.

The leaks are a product of the unconventional design where walls and roofs collide at radical angles. (Check out a spreadsheet on the leaks at: http://tig.csail.mit.edu/buildingstatus.html.) But there is more work to be done in this $300 million fixer-upper. Even Gehry concedes the Kiva, a chapel-like seminar room, is a ''mistake" that needs work. The walls and the floors seem to slope, creating a disorienting fun house effect. The day-care center, worried about evidence of rats, closed its handsome playground for 10 days this month to make changes. In August, a fire alarm triggered the sprinklers, creating a huge flood. And in the most high-tech of buildings, you often can't use your cellphone because of all the steel used in the construction.

Most of the problems can be fixed, given enough time and money. (Joke making its way around the Internet: First you pay millions to erect a Gehry building, then you spend millions to stop it from leaking.) The real test of the Stata will come over time. What do its inhabitants think?

Kathleen Richardson, a visiting social anthropologist from the University of Cambridge who studies scientists and their environments, surveyed about 100 of her fellow researchers at the Stata. Her findings: People liked the natural light, but worried the open floor plans compromised their privacy and security. Already, she says, there is a growing ''hermeticism" in the building where people are papering over or frosting their windows.

The Stata's two most famous residents -- Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Noam Chomsky, the famed linguist and anti-establishment activist -- exemplify the schism inside the building.

''I love it," says Berners-Lee, who worked for years in the dreary Tech Square building with so many of the other CSAIL researchers. It is the simple stuff he appreciates: ''I can open my window!"

Chomsky, on the other hand, spent decades in the beloved Building 20, MIT's ''Magical Incubator." He would go back in a minute. In Chomsky's eighth-floor office, the walls slant in. ''If you look in the corner, you get vertigo," he says.

''The first time he came in, he almost passed out," says his assistant, Bev Stohl, who has loaded the office with plants to minimize the effect.

Chomsky finds the space not very usable. ''It is hard to get a blackboard up," he says. Responds Brooks, the CSAIL director: ''He hates the US government, too. He hates this country. Have you ever read anything he has written?"

Gehry, the world's most famous architect, is concerned about Chomsky's unhappiness, but not surprised, either. He knew Chomsky would miss feeding the squirrels as he did from the window of his old office. ''I am a big Chomsky fan," says Gehry, ''and I will come to Boston to fix it in a minute."

In the meantime, Chomsky can always go downstairs and feed the rats outside the day-care center.

Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.