Veritas et Venustas: November 2007 Archives

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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Dog Bites Man / It couldn't happen to a nicer pair

Lizz and Andrés with Ted, the brother of Bud and Frank

Chicago Tribune: Controversial urbanists win top architecture award

I HAVE a Starchitecture story I can't tell in public, because it names too many names in one short anecdote. The gist of the story is how hard it is to become a Starchitect wtihout becoming an egotistical a**hole. Two stunning exceptions to the rule are Lizz and Andrés. They're two of the main reasons New Urbanism is a collegial and collaborative movement, so unlike the Howard Roark world of the avant garde.

Congratulations on winning the Driehaus Award. Here's the story from the Chicago Tribune:

Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the controversial husband and wife team who lead the traditional town planning movement called the New Urbanism, were named the winners Tuesday of next year's Richard H. Driehaus Prize, which goes annually to a tradition-minded designer and now comes with $200,000 in prize money.

"The Richard H. Driehaus Prize was created to celebrate classicism in the contemporary world. As champions of the New Urbanism movement, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have promoted the value system that defines classical architecture. Their body of work emphasizes community and context, which are the underpinnings of classical design," said Driehaus, founder and chairman of Driehaus Capital Management.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk will receive the award on March 29 in Chicago. Previously, the award was accompanied by a grant of $100,000, the same as the Pritzker Prize. But Driehaus recently doubled the amount, in part to attract attention to his prize....

They are among the nation's leading critics of suburban sprawl, arguing that car-dominated settlement patterns have victimized everyone from commuters stuck in traffic jams to inner-city residents who lack access to jobs and services that have spread to the suburban fringe.

chicagotribune.com

Controversial urbanists win top architecture award
By Blair Kamin
Tribune

11:44 AM CST, November 27, 2007

Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the controversial husband and wife team who lead the traditional town planning movement called the New Urbanism, were named the winners Tuesday of next year's Richard H. Driehaus Prize, which goes annually to a tradition-minded designer and now comes with $200,000 in prize money.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk are by far the best-known winners of the award, which was established in 2003 by Chicago investor Richard Driehaus as a kind of alternative to the better-known Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is endowed by the billionaire Pritzker family of Chicago and typically goes to a leading modernist. They are also the first team to win it while Plater-Zyberk is the first female winner.

The two have designed scores of towns, neighborhoods and regional plans, including Seaside, the Florida panhandle resort community that formed the backdrop for the movie "The Truman Show." In 2005, Duany led a weeklong state-sponsored brainstorming session, or "charrette," to redesign 11 cities and towns in Mississippi that had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

"The Richard H. Driehaus Prize was created to celebrate classicism in the contemporary world. As champions of the New Urbanism movement, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have promoted the value system that defines classical architecture. Their body of work emphasizes community and context, which are the underpinnings of classical design," said Driehaus, founder and chairman of Driehaus Capital Managemen.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk will receive the award on March 29 in Chicago. Previously, the award was accompanied by a grant of $100,000, the same as the Pritzker Prize. But Driehaus recently doubled the amount, in part to attract attention to his prize.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk should draw plenty of attention by themselves, however.

They are among the nation's leading critics of suburban sprawl, arguing that car-dominated settlement patterns have victimized everyone from commuters stuck in traffic jams to inner-city residents who lack access to jobs and services that have spread to the suburban fringe.

Beginning with Seaside, which opened in the early 1980s, they have revived traditional town planning principles, bringing back street grids, front porches, town squares and other elements of pedestrian-friendly town planning that suburban planners had largely abandoned in favor of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs.

Some architects, critics and academics regard their efforts as nostalgic or arrogant, saying that sprawl is here to stay and that it offers middle-class people the mobility, privacy and choice once enjoyed solely by the rich.

But Duany and Plater-Zyberk have persisted, and many communities have adopted their principles — or watered-down versions of them. In their book, "Suburban Nation," published in 2000, they write: "[We] believe more strongly than ever in the power of good design to overcome the ills created by bad design, or, more accurately, by design's conspicuous absence."

Previous winners of the Driehaus Prize include architect Allan Greenberg and urban planner Jaquelin Robertson. Duany and Plater-Zyberk were selected by a jury that included Driehaus and Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of The New Yorker. The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, a bastion of traditional design, administers the Driehaus Prize.

bkamin@tribune.com

November 28, 2007 in Architecture, Classicism, Culture, Current Affairs, Education, New Urbanism | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Monday, November 26, 2007

UPDATED: “Exxon Accused of Trying to Mislead Public” on Global Warming

UPDATE: From the Guardian: “The denial industry”

For years, a network of fake citizens' groups and bogus scientific bodies has been claiming that science of global warming is inconclusive. They set back action on climate change by a decade. But who funded them? Exxon's involvement is well known, but not the strange role of Big Tobacco. In the first of three extracts from his new book, George Monbiot tells a bizarre and shocking new story

ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?

The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists ~~124~~ [153] organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".

Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.

By funding a large number of organisations, Exxon helps to create the impression that doubt about climate change is widespread. For those who do not understand that scientific findings cannot be trusted if they have not appeared in peer-reviewed journals, the names of these institutes help to suggest that serious researchers are challenging the consensus.

After the jump, 153 organizations that receive funding or donations from ExxonMobil, according to ExxonSecrets.org.

From the New York Times:

HOUSTON, Jan. 3 — The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report on Wednesday accusing Exxon Mobil of spending millions of dollars to manipulate public opinion on the seriousness of global warming.

“Many of the tactics, and even some of the same organizations and actors used by Exxon Mobil to mislead the public, draw upon the tobacco industry’s 40-year disinformation campaign,” the report said.

The report said that a task force that Exxon Mobil helped create on global climate science in 1998 included someone who had led a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, “which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by secondhand smoke.”

Climate Change: Newsweek Documents Conservative Coverup of Global Warming

UPDATE: Newsweek Documents Conservative Coverup of Global Warming

StopGlobalWarming.org: Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine

From ExxonSecrets.org:

“These are the think tanks and front group organizations which have been, or still are, funded by ExxonMobil. They are at the heart of the campaign against the climate science and action on climate change.”

November 26, 2007 in Current Affairs, Science, Urbanism, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ocean's Thirteen

WHAT A WASTE of time and money. It cost $100 million to make, but Ocean's Thirteen is not exciting, beautiful, witty, clever or enlightening. It's not actually bad, but it's not good, either.

The flick has holes in the plot and self-aggrandizing insider jokes. The stars walk through their parts and collect their millions. It's a shame that Hollywood looks on movies like this as something to aspire to.

November 26, 2007 in Culture, Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Friday, November 23, 2007

It's The Place, Stupid! (*with explanation, below)

THANKS to some YouTube videos, I think I finally understand the problem surrounding the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. A lovely street has had a cancerous hole torn in it so that there will be an unobstructed view of the Acropolis from Bernard Tschumi's new museum. Now the cancer may be spreading: the museum has asked and received permission to tear down two more buildings that previous negotiations had specified must stay. That destruction would double or triple the size of the hole in the street wall and further damage the street.

The hole in the street reveals Bernard Tschumi's New Acropolis Museum, a behemoth completely out of scale with the buildings that shape the street. The museum is very tall, so that museum goers can look over the roofs of the buildings in front of it and have an unobstructed view of the Acropolis. But the poor people eating in Tschumi's cafeteria, while they'll have an unobstructed view of the Parthenon, will have a a partially blocked view of the Acropolis. Obvious Question: if it's really so important to have a full view of the Acropolis while you chow down, why didn't Tschumi design the cafeteria differently? On the other hand, as I think you've guessed, II don't believe it is so important.

I haven't been to Athens in 25 years, so I can't comment on Nikos's commentary on the pervasiveness of the destruction of the old courtyard buildings and their replacement by flimsy Modernist apartment buildings (other than to say that knowing Nikos I'm sure he's right). But having seen these grainy images on YouTube, what strikes me is the importance of the street and the place, not just the building.

The building seems lovely. A good deal of its charm comes from its place on a wonderful, well-proportioned street, shaped by appropriately sized Neo Classical buildings with detail and grace, stunning trees that cause a wonderful dappled light on the stone surface of the street, and a blessed absence of cars. The whole is greater than the sum of the excellent individual parts.

Tschumi's building is an alien invader that smashes the space, looms over it with no human scale and makes a terrific regional place look like any crass development anywhere. If the two buildings are destroyed, the continued assault on the character of the place would cause even more damage to Athens than the loss of a fine individual building.

One can tear down even a very fine building if the trade off is that it is replaced by a good piazza and a great civic monument. But what is proposed is a destructive and lopsided trade. Doubling or tripling the size of the hole in the street, and further exposing the UFO behind it, would be ten or twenty times worse, not just twice as bad.

Video links and other photos after the jump

* Since this post is now circulating around Athens, let me explain the title. When Bill Clinton was first running for President, his staff would debate the issues of the day and how to present them to the voters. A list of the most important campaign issues was kept on a blackboard and regularly updated. One day Clinton's chief campaign advisor came in, erased the list, and in large letters wrote, "It's The Economy, Stupid!"

November 23, 2007 in Architecture, Classicism, Culture, Current Affairs, Travel, Urbanism, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

It's The Location, Stupid!

From BuildingGreen.com:

The world’s first LEED Platinum building, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Philip Merrill Environmental Center is loaded with green features: photovoltaic panels, rainwater harvesting, composting toilets... However, moving the organization’s staff of around 100 into the new building meant that many employees who had been able to walk to work in the older downtown facility now have to drive roughly ten miles to get there. To their credit, the organization spent two years looking for a downtown building to house their growing staff... The fact remains, however, that the additional energy use from more employees driving to work may well exceed the energy savings realized by the green building.

Designers and builders expend significant effort to ensure that our buildings use as little energy as possible. This is a good thing—and very obvious to anyone who has been involved with green building for any length of time. What is not so obvious is that many buildings are responsible for much more energy use getting people to and from those buildings. That’s right—for an average office building in the United States, calculations done by Environmental Building News (EBN) show that commuting by office workers accounts for 30% more energy than the building itself uses. For an average new office building built to code, transportation accounts for more than twice as much energy use as building operation.

Download the Building Green PDF

November 23, 2007 in Architecture, Culture, Current Affairs, New Urbanism, Urbanism, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Green Council News

Cannon House Caucus Room, Carrère & Hastings, 1908

THE GREEN ARCHITECTURE & URBANISM COUNCIL has a new venue for the second day, the Congressional House Caucus Room in the Cannon House Office Building, designed by Carrère & Hastings in 1908. The first and last days we're meeting in the Alexandria Lyceum, where the first Congress for the New Urbanism, the first Classical League meeting and the first Classical Council were held (there's also a reception the first night at the Alexandria Athenæum, where the CNU, the Classical League and the Classical Council all met). But there's a wedding at the Lyceum on Wednesday, so we're going over to Capitol Hill. At lunchtime, we'll take a short tour of the US Capitol building. A good time will be had by all.

Cannon House Building Rotunda, Carrère & Hastings, 1908

Green Architecture & Urbanism Council - Convenient Solutions for the Inconvenient Truth

November 21, 2007 in Architecture, Classicism, Culture, Education, New Urbanism, Religion & Metaphysics, Urbanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Houston on Hudson Hallelujah, Hosannas on High (NOT)

FIRST we had Atlantic Yards. Now we have Hudson Yards. Do we really need further proof that the New York City Department of City Planning should live up to its name and plan the city's streets and blocks and then follow that up with a form-based code, instead of leaving the design of the city to developers and their architects?

Anti-urban, suburban-style office parks like the one below are not the reason people pay $2,000 a foot to live in Manhattan.

As usual, Curbed has all the info.