London Canyonlands (pt. 2)

[Image: A BMW ad, showing us London geologically mixed, across a series of bridges and viaducts, with, say, Rio de Janeiro, Angkor Wat, and maybe... Macchu Picchu? View larger. Found via things magazine].

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG London Canyonlands and Offshore (again)).

Today's archidose #112

Helios House*, originally uploaded by fdo h.

Helios House, a "green" gas station in Los Angeles (corner of Robertson and Olympic Boulevards) by Office dA, in collaboration with Johnston Marklee and Ogilvy & Mather's Big.

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More space in the space hotel

[Image: Outside the space hotel... in space. You can see the Earth's curvature in the lower right-hand corner. Courtesy of Bigelow Aerospace].

The space hotel is back in the news.
According to the BBC, an "experimental spacecraft designed to test the viability of a hotel in space has been successfully sent into orbit" by a private company called Bigelow Aerospace.
The "inflatable and flexible core of the spacecraft expands to form a bigger structure after launch." Which is helpful, because Bigelow's ultimate goal is "to build a full-scale space hotel, dubbed Nautilus, which will link a series of inflatable modules together like a string of sausages."
However, two distracting bits of news then enter the story...
First, the BBC reports that "the company has sent a collection of pictures and other memorabilia from fee-paying customers keen to see their personal possessions photographed in space." And, second, we learn that the company "also hopes to activate a space-based bingo game to be played by people back on Earth."

1) Why would you want your personal possessions to be photographed in space? Here's my desk lamp... in space. Here are my dinner plates. Here is my couch.
2a) Does "space-based bingo" somehow augment one's experience of the game? I suppose it would. How does it work? Would there actually be an astronaut up there calling out numbers? And would you have to get up there in order to collect your prize?
2b) What about space-based Trivial Pursuit? An unnamed man, or woman, in orbit over the Earth's surface starts asking a series of difficult questions about history, science, politics, and the arts. The start of the game is never announced; the questions are broadcast on an AM radio station; you never know if you've won.

(Thanks to Alex Trevi for sharing the news).

Disturbing Indeterminate Horizons of Fresh Architecture

[Images: Three covers from Springer's Consequence Book Series on Fresh Architecture].

Does anyone know anything about these books? More specifically, have you read them – and, if so, how are they? Well-produced? Interesting? Over-academic? Boring? Life-changing and amazing?
I can only find the most basic book descriptions online – and most of those are in German – and I would simply order one of these to see what they're actually like (I don't have access to an architecture library) but they seem a little bit over-priced. A 100-page pamphlet for $25.95...?
Anyway, if anyone's ever run across one of these, let me know. The three books, above, are by Nat Chard, Shaun Murray, and Chora/Raoul Bunshoten, respectively.
Thanks!

Manufactured Landscapes

To get out of the heat yesterday I caught a matinee at the Film Forum of Manufactured Landscapes, a feature documentary by Jennifer Baichwal on photographer Edward Burtynsky. With so many pages on the internet about him and his photographs, I'll just give some impressions I had of the movie, hopefully without giving too much away.



The film opens with an extremely long pan across the floor of an assembly-line production facility in China, ending in the Burtynsky diptych below.


Manufacturing #10A/#10B, Cankun Factory, Xiamen City, 2005

In this first scene, the photographer gives his basic philosophy, namely the inseparability of man and nature and a change in the last 100 years from natural landscapes to industrial or manufactured landscapes, a change that requires a new way of thinking about our surroundings, our actions, and how the two resolve each other.


Oil Fields No. 1, Belridge, California 2002

What almost single-handedly makes Burtynsky's photographs so powerful and popular is scale, be it the scale of the photographs themselves (roughly 3x4' in galleries and museums) or the scale of what's presented, be it excavation, garbage, ships, dams, industrial processes, or the oil infrastructure. Filmmaker Baichwal uses this scale to her advantage, many times showing us a detail of one of his photographs and slowly zooming out until we see the whole image. In a way it replicates the museum experience, allowing us to see the sharp detail and deep focus of Burtynsky's photos, but it is also makes the final image even more powerful, a manipulative but effective cinematic presentation.


Three Gorges Dam Project, Feng Jie #5, Yangtze River, China 2002

One surprising aspect that comes across in the film is the way Burtynsky's photos are as manufactured as the landscapes he presents. This happens in a couple ways. First, the way he admits, is that he is part of the industrial landscape he presents, be it via driving or the processing of film. In that sense he's locating all of us (all of us not part of the third world) within the same landscapes, as we play a part in the excavation, dumping, and so forth that are supposedly required via our habits.

Second, the way he shows, Burtynsky will manipulate what he's shooting to the extent he can, for reasons of beauty or emotional impact. I'm guessing at the reasoning as he's not explicit about this and the director does not pursue it. An example of his manipulation is the photo of the destruction of a town displaced by the Three Gorges Dam Project above; we hear the photographer cue the man and his donkey, after which Burtynsky's assistant gives the man what looks like money. The final image gains a center via the location of the man and his donkey in the foreground, though it also gains some meaning (tradition vs. progress, natural energy vs. machine energy, etc.) that might not otherwise be there. If the photographer saw the man walking and asked him to repeat his actions we're not sure, though the director's willingness to include this scene does something: it asks us to question what Burtynsky's is showing us as much as Burtynsky asks us to question what he's photographing.


Urban Renewal #14,, Hongkou District, Shanghai, 2004

Much of the film deals with China and its fast-paced development, or what Burtynsky calls coming late to the party of modernization. He sees that country's action as extremely important in this century, and I'm sure he's not alone. But where his photographs again focus on scale -- of cities, of buildings, of change (in the above case of "urban renewal") -- the filmmakers show us the lives that are being displaced and the ones replacing them; we hear them talk about the places they live and we can't help but notice the break that is occurring, a break that has already happened in other places around the world. These scenes are when the film is its best, when it goes where Burtynsky's photos can't or won't, the human scale.


Three Gorges Dam Project, Wan Zhou #4, Yangtze River, China 2002

For more on Burtynsky, be sure to check out his web page, which includes large versions of some of his photographs, and his TED | Talks lecture, parts of which are included in the film.

3 Things

A bit of news, a new web page, and some shameless self-promotion.

1. Margaret Helfand, Noted Female Architect, Dies at 59
Architectural Record reports the sad news that New York-based architect Helfand died on June 20 from colon cancer. I've always been impressed with her work, what Record describes as a "clean, Modernist vocabulary and skillful use of natural materials, combined with a quiet and subtle inventiveness."
(via ArchNewsNow)

2. MIMOA is a new, user-generated web page on exploring architecture in Europe that recently launched. While it's still in demo/beta mode, it looks quite impressive, if a bit sluggish and ad-heavy.

3. My page is included as one of the top 25 property blogs (in the Architecture & building category) in the UK's Times Online. They say of this page, "a daily helping of architecture from The Big Apple. There are lot of pictures of wacky new buildings from around the planet. Be inspired." What I like about this sort of thing isn't the publicity but finding other pages of interest, and there's a few here I didn't know about and that will find their way into the sidebar over time.

William Stout + G.E. Kidder Smith

Looking for a book at the web page of San Francisco-based William Stout Architectural Books I saw the following announcement:

"We have recently purchased the architectural library of writer/architect G.E. Kidder Smith. Kidder Smith was born in 1913 in Birmingham, Alabama and received his education at Princeton, getting his MFA in 1935.

Kidder Smith wrote and photographed the books; Brazil Builds, Switzerland Builds, Sweden Builds, Italy Builds, The New Churches of Europe, A Pictorial History of Architecture in America, The Beacon Guide to New England Houses of Worship, Source Book of American Architecture and other books.

Kidder Smith practiced and lived in New York, but spent much of his time traveling all over the world researching for his books."

While Kidder Smith is not a household name, I remember the Builds series from the library at undergraduate architecture school, especially the ones on Italy and Switzerland. From what I remember of those books, he presented work that was Modernist yet of its place, what now goes by the monicker Critical Regionalism.

A selection of Kidder Smith's books shows an equal appreciation of Modernism and the vernacular. Here's some books that stood out for me, in no particular order:



Left column, top to bottom:

Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture. Tange, Kenzo, Walter Gropius, and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. 1960.

The Japanese House: A Tradition for Contemporary Architecture. Engel, Heinrich. 1964.

Folk Architecture of the East Mediterranean. Branch, Daniel Paulk. 1966.

Traditional Architecture in Kuwait and the Northern Gulf. Lewcock, Ronald and Zahra Freeth. 1978.

Art of Islam: Language and Meaning. Burckhardt, Titus. 1976.

Right column, top to bottom:

Prehistoric Architecture in the Eastern United States. Morgan, William N. 1980.

American Building Art. The 19th century - The 20th century (2 Vols.). Condit, Carl W. 1960-61.

Wooden Houses. Futagawa, Yukio. 1978.

Norwegian Architecture Throughout the Ages. Alnaes, Eyvind and Georg Eliassen, Reidar Lund, Arne Pedersen, Olav Platou. 1950.

Orthogonal Town Planning in Antiquity. Castagnoli, Ferdinando. 1971.

The Aesthetic Townscape. Ashihara, Yoshinobu. 1983.

While Stout's prices can be a bit steep ($700.00 for the book on traditional architecture in Kuwait!), it's really interesting to see an individual's library in one place like this, illustrating his interests throughout his life, but also -- and maybe most importantly -- the importance of books in that life.

G.E. Kidder Smith's featured books can be found here and his whole library at William Stout can be found here.

The Deck

[Image: Sergio Bianchi's Bellegra retreat, via Metropolis].

In an unfortunately subscriber-only article, Metropolis calls our attention to "an artists’ retreat in Bellegra, a small town 40 miles southeast of Rome."
The building, we read, was designed by Sergio Bianchi, whose "idea for a Modernist villa designed according to the principles of organic architecture," proved to be so controversial in the context of Italy's "archaic building laws" that it took more than six years to construct.
The design itself was "inspired" by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Metropolis writes that, "although the villa – which has a biological sewage system and a roof fitted for solar panels – is more visually and environmentally harmonious with the landscape than its neighbors, a group of squat clay-tile-roof stucco homes, it provoked strong resistance from local authorities."
Those authorities said, somewhat unbelievably, that the building "was too much like science fiction.”

[Image: Sergio Bianchi's Bellegra retreat, via Metropolis].

In any case, I'm posting this really just because I love the deck – in fact, I love the whole structure of this building.
I love how, as you can see in that first picture, above, there's a small room, not quite cantilevered, elevated over an outdoor patio – and that, above that room, there's a deck, poised under a slatted horizontal screen that allows you to watch the sky.
I also love the little walkway that extends beyond the right-hand side of the picture. The whole thing is like this maze of platforms, decks, patios, and cantilevered rooms, connected by terraces, hanging off a limestone core in the middle of the Italian countryside.
I'd like two, please.

Chicago Withers and Grows

Looking at Lynn Becker's blog I was taken aback to see my cartoon face (along with Edward Lifson and somebody who turns out to be Kevin Nance) with a big X across it, though looking at his article on the withering architectural coverage in my old beat, Chicago, I realized he wasn't out to whack me.



Check out the piece for some bad news (besides Becker, Kamin's the only name in town, once again) and the good news (AIA Chicago is overhauling its magazine -- something I ranted about a year ago, before I left for New York -- and Lee Bey's web page is now in blog form, meaning more frequent postings and a feed).

Today's archidose #111

slice, originally uploaded by twoeightnine.

East Building of the National Gallery of Art by I. M. Pei.

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One Jackson Square

About a month ago Curbed posted images of One Jackson Square, an undulating, glass-wall mid-rise designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) for the corner of Greenwich and 8th Avenues.



Being a sucker for the sexy sight-specific gesture (a la their famous 333 Wacker Drive in Chicago), I bookmarked the page for some investigation, but have just now gotten around to it.



As mentioned, the site is located at Greenwich and 8th Avenue (currently an open lot used for surface parking), across from the triangular Jackson Square. The neighborhood is the convergence of Greenwich Village, the Meatpacking District, and Chelsea.



Even with these credentials (three immensely popular neighborhoods and a patch of green), the immediate site is less than friendly, with lots of traffic on both Greenwich and 8th Avenues to contend with. Crossing 8th, especially, is quite an adventure.



This image below shows the appeal of the design, its walls curling around the corner to, in effect, connect the different neighborhoods, at least as a gesture. It makes for an appealing face across from Jackson Square and its scale is suited to the surrounding buildings and streets.



What also makes this project appealing to me is the presentation, the way the renderings acknowledge that there will be a variety of furnishings, curtains, and light levels taking place behind the transparent curtain wall. So many glass buildings ignore this fact, and therefore can't live up to their intentions as presented in glossy renderings. While I'm still critical of glassy buildings and prefer buildings with some weight or mass, I'm digging these curves.



As well, the undulations continue into the lobby, recalling the spaces of Richard Serra's sculptures on display this summer at MoMA.

Monday, Monday

My weekly page update:

Sidwell Friends Middle School in Washington, District of Columbia by Kieran Timberlake Associates.

The updated book feature is Grant Jones/Jones – Jones: ILARIS: The Puget Sound Plan, edited by Jane Amidon.

Some unrelated links for your enjoyment:

The Brothers Brick
A blog devoted to, yep, LEGOs.

Cool Town Studios
A blog focused on real estate development targeted at urban smart growth for the creative class. (via Architect Online; added to sidebar under blogs::urban)

Kreutzer and the City
A new blog in Danish (and sometimes English) by Danish architect David Kreutzers. (added to sidebar under blogs::architecture)

Ground Conditions

[Image: San Francisco, photographed in profile from Sausalito].

In preparation for an overnight business trip to San Francisco this weekend, I was flipping through the Lonely Planet Guide to San Francisco – when I read something that is surely old news for anyone living in that city, but that nonetheless completely blew me away.
It turns out that part of San Francisco is actually built on the wrecked and scuttled remains of old ships.

[Image: A shipwreck that has absolutely no connection to San Francisco].

The Lonely Planet guide writes that "most of this walk [through the streets near the Embarcadero] is over reclaimed land, some of it layered over the scores of sailing ships scuttled in the bay to provide landfill."
Stunned – and absolutely fascinated by this sort of thing – I determined to learn more.
And it's true: a good part of coastal San Francisco is not built on solid ground, but on the forgotten residue of buried ships.
In an image that makes me want to cry it's so cool, the basements of some 19th-century San Francisco homes weren't basements at all... they were the hulls of lost ships.
"As late as Jan 1857," we read, "old hulks still obstructed the harbor while others had been overtaken by the bayward march of the city front and formed basements or cellars to tenements built on their decks. Even now [1888] remains of the vessels are found under the filled foundations of houses."
In other words, when you walked downstairs to grab a jar of preserved fruit – you stepped into the remains of an old ship.
It's almost literally unbelievable.

[Image: Another shipwreck – unrelated, as far as I'm aware, to San Francisco].

Best of all, those ships are still down there – and they're still being discovered.

In the late 1960s, as San Francisco was building its BART subway system, discoveries of ships and ship fragments occurred regularly. Over the following decades, ships and pieces of ships appeared during several major construction projects along the shore. As recently as 1994, construction workers digging a tunnel found a 200-foot-long (61-meter) ship 35 feet (11 meters) underground. Rather than attempt to remove the ship – which would have been both costly and dangerous – they simply tunneled right through it. When buried ships are found, they’re sometimes looted for bottles, coins, and other valuable antiques frequently found inside. Among the prizes found in the ships have been intact, sealed bottles of champagne and whiskey, nautical equipment, and a variety of personal effects from the passengers and crews.

I'm just waiting for some rare and world-destroying virus to be found, festering away in the subterranean hold of an abandoned schooner, forgotten by city historians...
Some random cable guy discovers it, digging down into someone's backyard to fix a transmission problem. His shovel cracks through the outer wooden shell of a 19th-century frigate, releasing a cloud of invisible bacteria... he inhales it... his brain begins to bleed... Eli Roth directs the film version.
But this also reminds me of the now classic film Quatermass and the Pit – a movie which genuinely needs to be remade, and I would gladly serve as a screenplay consultant – in which London Tube excavations uncover a buried spaceship... out of which emerge weird aliens intent on vanquishing the Queen's English. Or something like that.
But the question remains: do you really know what's beneath your house or apartment...?
An entire armada of lost fishing ships, now rotting in the mud, nameless and undiscovered, shivering with every earthquake.

The Science Barge

Here's something I'll definitely have to keep an eye out for:

The Science Barge is a sustainable urban farm designed by New York Sun Works, an environmental nonprofit organization. The Science Barge tours New York City’s public waterfront parks, offering sustainability education programs to wide audiences.

(via Coudal)

If these reefs are islands

[Images: A map of Japan's Okinotori Islands, via the BBC, next to an unrelated image of a different reef; all reef images used in this post are from different locations].

The BBC revisited an amazingly interesting story last week when they explained that Japan is now growing coral reefs in a bid to extend their territorial sovereignty into the Philippine Sea.
Successfully transplanting and cultivating these reefs would, in theory, allow Japan "to protect an exclusive economic zone off its coast" – expanding Japanese maritime power more than 1000 miles south of Tokyo.

According to the Law of the Sea, Japan can lay exclusive claim to the natural resources 370km (230 miles) from its shores. So, if these outcrops are Japanese islands, the exclusive economic zone stretches far further from the coast of the main islands of Japan then it would do otherwise. To bolster Tokyo's claim, officials have posted a large metal address plaque on one of them making clear they are Japanese. They have also built a lighthouse nearby.

However, the major geopolitical question remains: are these reefs truly islands?

At the moment, the Okinotori Islands (as they're called) are merely "rocky outcrops"; but, by artificially enhancing their landmass through reefs – using reef "seeds" and "eggs" – Japan can create sovereign territory.
This means that they'll win economic control over all the minerals, oil, fish, natural gas, etc. etc., located in the area – providing friendly sea routes for American military ships in the process.
The U.S., of course, thinks that Japan's sovereign reefs are a great idea; China, unsurprisingly, thinks the whole thing sucks.
In fact, we read:

Chinese interest in Okinotori lies in its location: along the route U.S. warships would likely take from bases in Guam in the event of a confrontation over Taiwan. China's efforts to map the sea bottom, apparently so its submarines could intercept U.S. aircraft carriers in a crisis, have drawn sharp protests from Japan that China is violating its EEZ.

Which means that these artificial encrustations of living matter, planted for political reasons at the beginning of the 21st century, could very well influence the future outcome of marine combat between the United States and China.
A tiny bit more information about all this is available at the Times.

So the rest of this story could go in any number of directions: 1) A speculative survey of other "rocky outcrops" and manmade reefs, to see who might be able to claim them and why. For instance, if Japan's reef-based territorial ambitions are successful, could this establish a legal precedent for other such experimental terrains? Will this then lead to a new and exciting summer course at Columbia's School of Architecture...? Or a new class at SCI-Arc, guest-taught by BLDGBLOG: From Gothic Cathedrals to Sovereign Reefs: The Science Fiction of Architectural Structures...
Or perhaps it could mean that the U.S. will turn away from Treasury-depleting global military adventurism to spend money on more interesting projects within its own borders – funding a whole new series of Hawaiian islands, designed by Thom Mayne, that would extend Hawaii archipelagically toward Asia...
Greece, inspired, would then expand the Cyclades with a cluster of designer islands, slowly growing to dominate the Mediterranean once again – a kind of inverse-Odyssey in which the islands themselves do all the traveling...
Or maybe there'll be a whole new terrestrial future in store for Scotland's Outer Hebrides, or for the Isle of Man, or for Friesland – or perhaps even a whole new Nova Scotia, extending hundreds of nautical miles into the waters of the north Atlantic, a distant, fog-shrouded world of melancholic introspection, visited by poets...
2) It's worth remembering that the possession of land and territory has not always been a recognized marker of political sovereignty – and so the Earth, in the sense of geophysical terrain, is here being swept up into a model of human governance that has only existed for a few hundred years, and which may only exist for a few decades more.
So, under a different political system, these artificial reefs would be quite literally meaningless.
3) The generation of new territory for the purpose of extending – or consolidating – political power is nothing new. As but one example, I happen to be reading The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, a book that "tells the story of how Germans transformed their landscape over the last 250 years by reclaiming marsh and fen, draining moors, straightening rivers, and building dams in the high valleys."
The relevance of this here, in the context of artificial Japanese reefs in the south Pacific, is that Frederick the Great used hydrological reclamation projects – i.e. marsh draining and river redirection – literally to create new territory; this expanded the political reach of Prussia by generating more Earth upon which German-speaking settlers could then build farms and villages. All in all, this was a process of both "agricultural improvement and internal colonization," and it "increasingly assumed the character of a military operation."
As David Blackbourn, the book's author, further notes: "External conquests created additional territory on which to make internal conquests, spaces on the map out of which new land could be made." Indeed: "For Prussia, a state that was expanding through military conquest across the swampy North European plain, borders and reclamation went together."
4) Finally, last week New Scientist ran a whole bunch of little articles called "The last place on Earth..." In each case, that leading phrase was followed by a subheading, such as: "...to be discovered," or "...where no explorer has set foot."
Another of those articles was: "...to be unclaimed by any nation."
As the magazine comments in that piece: "States will go to great lengths to secure territorial claims over what appear to be worthless pieces of land." After all, "owning even a remote rock can significantly extend a nation's access to marine resources such as oil and fish."
But those "great lengths" to which the nations of tomorrow may someday go could include the outright geo-architectural construction of whole new landmasses, islands, and offshore microcontinents. These terrains will be governed by Kurtzian technocrats, with iron fists, whose unchecked cruelty will inspire the literary classics of the 22nd century...
In any case, all of these points seem to imply that architects may need to brush up on their marine geotechnical skills – as well as on the legal issues surrounding the archipelagic future of political sovereignty.

Serra at MoMA

Yesterday I made it to MoMA to see the Richard Serra Retrospective, on display in the courtyard and two interior galleries until September 10.

Two large-scale pieces are located in the courtyard, one of them being Intersection II, from 1992/3. Four identical conical sections are placed in a roughly mirrored, symmetrical composition, creating a central space and two curving paths on either side. It's a great piece to walk through, as well as to watch how people move through and react to the massive cor-ten steel sections.



The steel, although weatherproof, has a flakiness along much of the lengths that rewards close inspection.



Intersection II's siting in the courtyard appears to relate itself to the other exterior Serra, 1998's Torqued Ellipse IV, as its "axis" points to the latter.



Torqued Ellipse IV is a continuous tilting plane with a small gap for access to the interior space. Even though Serra points the first of his pieces towards this second one, the visitor must walk around it to reach the interior, making he or she experience the changing perspective of the steel's tilt.



While the two pieces outside are what Serra's become known for, the three new pieces in the second floor galleries take his sculpture to another level, experientially. My favorite, Sequence (pictured below from MoMA's web page, as photography is not allowed in these galleries), is comprised of two continuous bands that interlock to create a sort of "S" from overhead, though as I moved along the winding path it was close to impossible to picture it in plan; or, as described in the exhibition literature: "This work engages with memory -- with the inevitable inability of the viewer to construct any distinct memory of these almost indistinguishable and every-changing spaces."



Thinking back to the experience of the pieces in the courtyard and in the second floor gallery (the sixth floor gallery is mainly older work I won't deal with here), I wonder what made the interior experiences so much more impressive than the courtyard ones for me, in addition to the complexity of the spaces created by the ever-present tilting cor-ten planes. I've concluded that the gallery space itself has a lot to do with it. The courtyard context not only distracts from, or competes with the pure experience of Serra's sculptures, it is also on a scale much greater than the spaces he created. Inside, the space containing the sculptures is only slightly larger (making one wonder how the pieces were installed) so the experience of the sculptures' spaces is that much more "pure." As well, the white walls and ceilings are a great contrast to the rusted steel.

Waves of Change

Here's a great excuse to travel to Australia.

International Urban Design Conference
Gold Coast, Australia 6,7 & 8 September, 2007.

The Conference theme “Waves of Change – Cities at Crossroads” will challenge us all to examine our towns and cities.

Population growth and economic prosperity have consequences on the environment and on the longer term social well-being of our communities.

The wave of environmental challenges will affect communities through global warming and likely sea level rises. The ability of urban centres world-wide to cope with the impacts of high level fuel costs will also be examined. The physical separation of home from work and recreation may need to be re-addressed in city design.

>> Day one celebrates the official conference launch followed by challenging keynote addresses about the issues confronting our cities and what we might do about it.

>> Day two is a whirlpool of presentations taking the macro view down to micro insights into local and international research, design tools and models that can lead the way towards sustainable urban habitats.

>> Day three erupts with a hot debate moderated by Jennie Brockie, followed by even more keynote addresses exploring the ways and means of building capacity within our communities, our future designers, and policy makers to implement the necessary adaptations to our cities.

The event includes workshops, debates and tours of South East Queensland, Australia’s fastest growing region showcasing the attributes of a premier tourist destination, from tall buildings to medium density housing to the hinterland “Eco-village” development.

The conference Gala Dinner will include the bi-annual Gold Coast Urban Design awards for 2007.

Confirmed speakers include:

* Mr Michael Sorkin - USA
* Prof Kongjian Yu - China
* Mr Michael Norton - UK
* Prof Elaine Gallagher - Canada
* Prof Ian Bentley - UK
* Mr Jeremy Harris - USA
* Ms Ruth Durack - AUS
* Mr Richard Neville - AUS

Today's archidose #110

sverre_fehn_biennale_nordic_pav2, originally uploaded by jiathwee.

Nordic Pavilion in Venice, Italy by Sverre Fehn (1962).

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The Labyrinth and the Stairway

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord].

Artist Michelle Lord, whose "Future Ruins" we featured here on BLDGBLOG the other day, has another project on display this year as part of Architecture Week in the UK.
This project, the "City of the Immortals," inspired by a Jorge Luis Borges short story called "The Immortal," gives viewers a shadowy glimpse into Lord's ongoing "fascination with fictional or un-built environments."

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord; also available in a slightly bigger version].

This work in particular represents "a vast fictional topography that exists within the walls of a mythological Roman city." Within that city, according to the Borges story, "a lone figure traverses its magnificent, eternal architecture in search of immortality."
At one point Borges describes how this narrator ascends a ladder, pulling himself up toward "a circle of sky" – through which he promptly pokes his head, making a discovery: "I began to glimpse capitals and astragals," he tells us, "triangular pediments and vaults, confused pageants of granite and marble. Thus I was afforded this ascension from the blind region of dark interwoven labyrinths into the resplendent City."

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord; see bigger].

The story continues:

A labyrinth is a structure compounded to confuse men; its architecture, rich in symmetries, is subordinated to that end. In the palace I imperfectly explored, the architecture lacked any such finality. It abounded in dead-end corridors, high unattainable windows, portentous doors which led to a cell or pit, incredible inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades hung downwards. Other stairways, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, would die without leading anywhere, after making two or three turns in the lofty darkness of the cupolas.

In any case, Lord has physically constructed the architecture described by Borges; her interiors thus "intentionally evoke spatial and geometric confusion, where great pillars extend into infinity and endless staircases appear to intertwine like a three dimensional maze to form a ‘nonsense’ structure or architectural folly."

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord; also available in a moderately larger version].

Citing Piranesi as an influence, she assembles a "composite of both the real and the invented." This "demonstrates the power of paper architecture to convincingly simulate reality, where a freshly made model can evoke a lengthy history and its diminutive scale conjure up a life-size space. An intricate hybrid of photography, sculpture and architecture; the artificial eye of the camera subtly transforms these hand crafted models into a large sprawling complex, a new imaginary city."

[Image: From "City of the Immortals" by Michelle Lord; also available in a slightly bigger version].

Lord's "City of the Immortals" is on display till June 24 in Birmingham, England.

(Vaguely related: Edinburgh).

East River Housing

Last night I attended a presentation and panel discussion on New Waterfront Housing in Brooklyn and Queens. Three of the four* recent and ongoing projects presented are located on the East River, on former industrial sites.

:: Queens West by Arquitectonica
:: River East by Studio V
:: Northside Piers by FXFowle

And not presented last night, but discussed here is
:: Silvercup West by Richard Rogers

(*The fourth project presented was Averne by the Sea by EEK Architects.)

Moderator Bonnie Harken raised some important issues, ones not adequately addressed in the presentations or the later discussion. These include the allotment and design of public spaces in private developments, access to the waterfront, affordable housing, and issues of sustainability. I'll try to address these issues relative to each, though I'm more interested in the overall effect of these developments, on the city, the waterfront, and the environment.


Location plan

As can be seen in the aerial above, three of the four developments along the East River occur in a tight clump in Long Island City, across from Midtown Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. Only Northside Piers is located in Brooklyn, in the Williamsburg neighborhood. The projects are presented below south to north.


Northside Piers: Aerial view and west-facing facade of tower one

Northside Piers is a three-tower condo development with townhouses and enclosed parking. Phase one, now under construction, includes the easternmost tower and its podium. Daniel Kaplan from FXFowle primarily talked about the design's attempt to be contextual to both the neighborhood and the water, the former grounded by gravity and the latter floating or levitating.


Queens West Stage II: Aerial rendering from the west

Arquitectonica's portion of the huge Queens West development is six residential towers atop or attached to podiums with low-rise housing and parking, the last pushed to the eastern edges of the site, away from the valuable real estate by the water. Bernardo Fort-Brescia spoke of the East River's potential as being a space about which the city is oriented, like Paris or London, unlike New York's past which has turned its back on the water.


River East: Two aerial renderings from the west, from QueensWest.com

Small by comparison to the previous two developments, River East is a two-tower residential development with townhouses concealing parking on a podium base to the east of the towers. The site plan creates a street that ends at a plaza near the water. Jay Valgora of Studio V spoke of their attempt to incorporate some of the qualities of Long Island City's traditional architecture and urban scale into the project (townhouses, "green" billboards), while using a contemporary language throughout.


Silvercup West: Rendering looking northeast

As mentioned already, Silvercup West was not part of last night's presentation, though along with River East and Queens West it is part of a string of developments that will create a wall of sorts along the East River in Long Island City. Unlike the other developments, Silvercup West incorporates office space in one of its towers, the northern one closest to the Queensborough Bridge.

The three projects discussed last night have numerous similarities, most likely dictated by the fact they are all developer, market-rate projects located on the water: glassy towers with balconies; low-scale podiums with townhouses (or similar residential), parking, and retail (in some cases); and open (public) space along the waterfront. In each case the architects used unique concepts and approaches to describe their projects, though ultimately they all arrived at basically the same thing.

The tower on a podium idea can be found in Chicago, Vancouver, and many other North American cities, as a means to be contextual while creating a profit for the developer and capturing views. In the process the towers quickly transform the skyline, while the podiums -- if not treated carefully by the architect and the developer/owner -- become blank walls or decorative fronts that lead to dead streets at odds with the city's context. It's hard to find fault with the architects' approaches, as they all appear to embrace the city's street life and attempt to extend it towards the water, though in the case of these waterfront developments the water must be enough of a draw to bring people that far east, meaning a continuous network of parks and open space is required, not just patches part of each development. FXFowle briefly presented their open space study (PDF linke) for the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront, though with a tight budget and private money to be made in the rezoning of the waterfront, these towers look like they'll outpace the city's attempts at creating parkland on the East River.

Returning to Silvercup West, the main reason I include it here is for contrast. In terms of program, Silvercup West is admirable not only for its incorporation of office space but for its namesake sound studios that will occupy some of the base. These moves ensure two things: an active 24-hour development full of workers and residents, and the extension of a semi-industrial use on the water. What the other developments ignore is what they're replacing, and as the waterfront is eaten up more and more by middle-upper class housing, the industrial uses are pushed further out along with their employees. Granted the city is preserving certain industrial zones, I'm guessing this waterfront is just too valuable for something like Silvercup West to be replicated down the shore. This issue is related to affordable housing, something the architects presented as being part of their projects (approx. 20% in each), though how this affordable mix relates to the context was absent, as context was discussed formally rather than socially.

Architecturally, Silvercup West is an obvious contrast to the other three. Where those are basically variations on the same glass box and brick podium, Rogers conceals the residences behind a steel frame that recalls the adjacent bridge but also gives it a distinct presence on the skyline. As more and more is built (and more and more will be built) along the water in Queens and Brooklyn, architects and developers need to strive for distinction in their buildings, not just their marketing campaigns.

Lastly, a couple issues barely addressed last night were access and sustainability. Some of these areas, particularly the northern stretches of Long Island City and Astoria, are removed from the subway. This creates the need for parking garages and can lead to a relatively dead street life. The city needs to step in and find ways to address this gap, perhaps creating a north-south spine (an elevated on Vernon Boulevard!) that connects the waterfront to the trains connecting Long Island to Manhattan. Issues of sustainability seemed to arise in terms of green space on the waterfront and the preservation of corridors for birds, though I don't recall any discussion of it relative to the architecture, something that needs to be remedied in future developments.

Today's archidose #109

Porto, Metro S.Bento. Álvaro Siza, originally uploaded by z.z.

The Sao Bento station of Porto Metro in Porto, Portugal by Álvaro Siza.

Many more images of the station and other Porto architecture can be found in z.z's architectura, Porto set.

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:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
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Future Ruins

[Image: From "Future Ruins" by Michelle Lord].

Over on Ballardian we read about a new project by artist Michelle Lord, called "Future Ruins."
Lord writes: “Inspired by author J.G. Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the urban environment, Future Ruins is a photographic critique of the urban planning of the 1970s and Ballard’s novels of the same period."

[Image: From "Future Ruins" by Michelle Lord].

"Set against a backdrop of Birmingham’s few remaining concrete structures such as Spaghetti Junction, Central Library and New Street Station signal box," Lord continues, "Future Ruins aims to highlight the temporality of our landscape, particularly at a time when Birmingham has embarked on a process of regeneration in order to redefine itself."

Familiar architectural locations around the city take on the appearance of evacuated spaces occupied by strange, carefully arranged structures, built from the technological detritus of abandoned television sets, cars, computers and domestic appliances.

The show is on display until June 23, as part of the UK's 2007 Architecture Week.
Lord, meanwhile, is also the artist behind "Four Corners," a photographic exploration of "fictional space."
According to the 24 Hour Museum: "The images featured in Four Corners tell the tale of a woman who becomes alienated from the room she occupies as it takes on a strange life of its own. Furniture defies gravity and ghostly figures emerge from the shadows in the dreamlike chamber depicted, understandably giving our subject the creeps as her room appears to transform itself."

(For those of you who like this sort of thing, Ballardian actually interviewed me about architecture, urban design, and the novels of J.G. Ballard, back in November).