Veritas et Venustas

Now we know how to pronounce his name

“Made off," [one of his victims at the Palm Beach Country Club] said. "You know, like he Madoff with all our money."

A Palm Beach Enclave, Stunned by an Inside Job

Dog Bites Man Update: Stephen Bayley Barks Again

THE ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE CRITIC who said about an immensely popular new town developed by Prince Charles, "Ill show you a real carbuncle, Charles," also wrote the following about the building below:

Enemies of interesting modern buildings often seek refuge in puerile nursery imagery - carbuncles, wirelesses, gherkins and so on - when they cannot organise credible arguments.

...how wonderfully exciting to see stuffy old Prague at last getting ready to see its first excellent building since the 18th century. 'A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone.'

It's as though they increasingly want the world to rise up and reject their silly ideas.

Happily, the residents of the beautiful and historic city of Prague have done just that.

NYC Inflatable Art

Idiot's Guide to Architecture

FROM ROBERT ADAM and Building magazine comes this new Idiot's Guide to Architecture.

The first paragraph is below. The rest of the piece is here.

When architects want to rubbish traditional design they call it “pastiche”. They roll out the P word and think that’s enough to damn it. It’s so easy. But when Bradford metropolitan council has a policy that says “new development must not resort to pastiche”, when Hertfordshire council stipulates that “proposals that provide a pastiche … should be discouraged”, when someone senior in English Heritage announces that there’s “no contest” between “good modern design and pastiche”, it’s serious. When pastiche is something officials want to stop, perhaps we ought to think carefully about what it means.

continued

Saa-ba-TI-a, SA-ba-tia, SA-ba-tia (sung to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus)

Darren Hauck/Getty Images

PITCHERS AND CATCHERS report to the Yankees' spring training camp in 44 days — and who will be reporting with Mr. Sabathia?

I'd like to see either Mr. Teixeira or Mr. Manny Ramirez reporting for cleanup duty a few days later, when the rest of the players come in. Teixeira would be much better, since he's a switch hitter, 28 years old, and an excellent first basemen who doesn't take the day off like Manny. Even if Manny would sign for one year, which might make him play hard all year, he still would have to DH, and that would mean that Matsui or Damon (probably Matsui) would have to sit a lot.

The Yanks have a lot of hitting, but a masher like Manny behind A-Rod would make both the 3 and 4 spots better. Teixeira's like Sabathia — 28-year-old players with this much talent rarely come into free agency these days.

UPDATE: I don't want 300 strikeout, 330 OBP Mike Cameron, with declining defensive skills at 36. Let's have some home-grown youth.

Why don't We the People give the Big Three contracts to build railroad cars and streetcars?

UPDATE: Freidman continues to put all his bailout eggs in one green technology basket, talking about what he calls "Car 2.0." I'm talking about Detroit 2.0.

SINCE I WAS A KID, my immediate family has owned 12 BMWs, 3 Volvos, 2 Alfa Romeos, a Mercedes, a VW, a Fiat 2100, a Rover 2000 TC and a Triumph TR-4. Obviously I can understand why Detroit's market share in the US went down to 42%. So I was glad to hear President Obama say he won't simply bailout the Big Three and let them carry on as usual.

Tom Freidman wants us to nationalize the Big Three and turn them into clean, green car machines. I don't think that's a good plan either. As Obama says, there's little reason to think that the US government would do a good job making cars, and I think the old model of buying a new car every year is over (not to mention not green). Plus, in the middle of a recession, not many people can afford to give up their old gas guzzlers when they have so little resale value.

But as momentum grows for the idea that infrastructure money should be spent on things like rail rather than roads (and even neighborhood centers), how about the idea that we the people give the Big Three large contracts for railroad cars and streetcars? We should have a lot more of those, and we're currently buying them from other countries.

All the state DOTs are used to privileged positions for feeding at the public trough, but we don't need any more highways. We need high-speed rail (much cleaner and greener than airplanes), light rail and even boulevards for the light rail to run on. For fifty years, we've been giving traffic engineers money to build auto sewers that ruin our cities and blight our countryside. As we reinvent the way we live, we need to reinvent the way we move around. Our cars and our sprawling way of life are the biggest reason why we're number one in pollution and oil depletion.

V&V: Roger Rabbit Does Detroit

BuffaloBeast.com

Dog Bites Man: Another Architecture Critic Attacks New Urbanism and Prince Charles

THE BRITISH NEWSPAPER the Observer is the Sunday edition of the (former Manchester) Guardian. After two Guardian writers criticized Andres Duany and Prince Charles last week, the Observer's Stephen Bayley got even more critical on Sunday.

In the second sentence, he took on the whole US, slamming Duany as a "a citizen of the civilisation that gave us Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the most beguiling concession to cultural curiosity is the occasional spectacle of female mud-wrestling." Visiting Poundbury, he says, "is to be delivered to the furniture floor of a provincial department store in 1954, translated into architecture. It is fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute."

"No expression exists in the architectural vocabulary to describe the style of Poundbury," he continues, "although if we are to be as loose with our terminological inexactitudes as Poundbury's designers have been with their architectural details and application of taste, then you could say it is 18th century."

As with the Guardian's architecture critic, it all comes down to style for Bayley. He's a Modernist ideologue who thinks Modernism is the only acceptable architecture style. Anything else means a Jihad.

This architectural culture explains why so many buildings given the top award by the Royal Institute of British Architects are later torn down. In 2005, the RIBA gave their top architectural prize to an ugly and grossly over-budget Scottish Parliament building that the British public voted one of the top twelve buildings in Britain to be demolished. The prize itself, the Stirling Prize, was named for a British architect who had one of his own award-winning buildings demolished.

He doesn't understand the difference between architecture and urbanism.
Dog Bites Man — British Public Hates Award Winning Architecture