Today's archidose #121

Munchen-7290020, originally uploaded by rucativava.

Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany by Herzog & de Meuron.

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New York Designs Podcasts

Video podcasts are available for The Architectural League's New York Designs lecture series.

"The series provides a forum for the presentation of innovative and accomplished built work in New York City. Starts and Finishes, the 2007 program theme, focused on the evolution of a project from conception through construction. By comparing generative ideas to completed buildings and by highlighting the beginning and end points of the design process, the series attempts to illuminate the linkages between the conceptual and built realms. Architects whose projects were selected by the jury presented their work in lectures on June 7 and June 14, 2007."

Lectures include Tom Hanrahan of hanrahan Meyers, Markus Dochantschi of studioMDA, Yolande Daniels of Studio SUMO, Lynn Gaffney, and Sandra Wheeler & Alfred Zollinger of Matter Architecture Practice.

(via hMa Blog)

Literary Dose #9

"One can paint a very silly picture of the architectural journalism, not just anyone of its practitioners, but of almost anyone of them. He or she is the second degree of the reactive mindlessness. Where the architect had to wait until he has been asked to do something for a client, the critic has to wait until the architect has done something in reaction to that client. At the end of the communication chain there is a reader who, at best, will react to this reaction. Here we have a carousel of emptiness. No wonder architectural journalism belongs to the least respected forms of cultural mediation. It is very instructive to compare this role play with the practice of embedded journalism as we know it since the Iraq War in 2003. Highly graphical pictures were brought to us right from the battle field. But these pictures were screened. They never really showed the grim side of the story. They were reminding more of a war film, than of capturing the reality of that war. Getting glitzy pictures and paying the prize of becoming a puppet of prefabricated reality. Very much visibility, very little understanding. The embeddee infiltrates his subject, but the subject very much infiltrates the embeddee to secure "operational security." It is hardly exaggerated to take this description of embedded journalism as being particularly apt to the practice of architectural journalism today. The most respected magazines and most authoritarian critics are often acting as shameless ghost writers, dividing their time between laudations and boring introductions to architect's monographs. Moreover, more often than not they base whole careers on the ones of design celebrities, rather than searching the world for architectural themes bigger than architecture. Is there any escape from this deliberate slavery? Perhaps it can be found in the very embeddedness of architecture itself."

- Ole Bouman, from "A New Brief for Architecture," in Organizing for Change (2007), edited by Michael Shamiyeh & DOM Research Laboratory.

One or two nights in the Sodium Hotel

[Image: Bolivia's salt hotel; photographed by Jose Luis Quintana/Reuters].

Ten years ago this month, I took a Polish-language tour of a salt mine outside Kraków – because, at the bottom of the mine, there was a church made from salt.
It was carved from the walls of the mine itself.
That increasingly distant and somewhat surreal experience – I don't speak a word of Polish, and everyone on the tour was from Austria – came to mind when I read about a new salt hotel in Bolivia.
It's a hotel made from salt.
According to National Geographic, the hotel is "constructed solely of salt blocks on the white plains of the Salar de Uyuni in southwestern Bolivia." The Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt desert. Until tourists began visiting it, however, "the only inhabitants of the chilly, harsh region were salt miners, who still extract 25,000 tons of salt annually from the 10 billion tons available."
I know at least this writer is curious if they'll someday build an exact, to-scale replica of the city of Edinburgh: shining there, in the Andean heat, with white cubic walls, the city will then be shaved down – bit by bit, brick by brick – and drunk with shots of tequila. You can salt your chips with it.
Or perhaps architectural enthusiasts will forego the Snow Show... and buy tickets to Bolivia, instead: the Salt Show.
Mineral pavilions designed by Zaha Hadid. Sodium towers by OMA.

(Via Super Colossal and Boing Boing).

Infrastructure is patriotic

[Image: Photo by Allen Brisson-Smith for The New York Times].

After yesterday's bridge collapse in Minneapolis – a bridge my sister and her family drove across everyday – the decaying state of American infrastructure is becoming all the more apparent.
Last month it was an exploding steam pipe in Manhattan; a few years ago it was the levees of southern Louisiana; and anyone who drives a car in the U.S. has probably noticed that the roads here are not particularly well-kept. The sheer number of potholes in the city of Philadelphia, for instance, was enough to convince me, only half-jokingly, that if the city was not going to spend any money fixing the streets, then they should at least help underwrite repair bills for all the broken axles, blown suspensions, and sometimes major fender benders caused by the city's rather obvious display of custodial irresponsibility.

[Image: Photo by Jeff Wheeler/The Star Tribune/AP; via The Guardian].

In any case, The New York Times opines today that these system-wide failures "are an indication that this country is not investing enough in keeping its vital infrastructure in good repair."

Transportation officials know many of the nation’s 600,000 bridges are in need of repair or replacement. About one in eight has been deemed "structurally deficient," a term that typically means a component of the bridge's structure has been rated poor or worse, but does not necessarily warn of imminent collapse.
Most deficient bridges, which included the span of Interstate 35W over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, remain open to traffic.

Worse, 13.6 percent of U.S. bridges – i.e. more than 81,000 bridges – are "functionally obsolete."

[Image: Photo by Heather Munro/The Star Tribune/AP; via The Guardian].

Ironically, only six days ago the Federal Highway Administration announced a $5.3 million grant program meant to stimulate and reward innovative research in bridge repair and design.
"Nearly $5.3 million in grants will be awarded to bridge projects in 25 states to help develop new technologies to speed bridge construction and make them safer," we read on the FHA website.
None of those grants will be going to Minnesota.

[Images: Photos courtesy of The New York Times].

It's interesting to point out, then, that the Federal Highway Administration's annual budget appears to be hovering around $35-40 billion a year – and, while I'm on the subject, annual government subsidies for Amtrak come in at slightly more than $1 billion. That's $1 billion every year to help commuter train lines run.
To use but one financial reference point, the U.S. government is spending $12 billion per month in Iraq – billions and billions of dollars of which have literally been lost.
Infrastructure is patriotic.
There is no reason to question the political loyalties of those who would advocate spending taxpayer dollars on national infrastructure – from highway bridges and railway lines to steam pipes, levees, electrical lines, and subway tunnels – instead of on military adventures abroad.
Four months of foreign war would be enough to double the annual budget for the Federal Highway Administration – if that's what one would choose to spend the money on – taking care of quite a few of those 81,000+ bridges which are still open to traffic and yet "functionally obsolete."
Perhaps the best way to be "pro-American" these days is to lobby for modern, safe, and trustworthy infrastructure – and the economic efficiencies to which that domestic investment would lead.
At the risk of promoting a kind of isolationist infrastructural nationalism, I'd say that urban design and engineering is a sadly under-appreciated – yet incredibly exciting – way to serve your country.

Ant Urbanism

Future Australians perplexed by the design of their cities might have ants to blame: "The movement of ants could help solve traffic jams and crowd congestion, Australian scientists say, and the findings could be used in future town planning systems."
Indeed, we're told, "Humans could learn from ants about how to deal with... exiting large venues after concerts or sporting events." Eat grass, for instance, and dig lots of orderly holes.
Apparently, whilst being studied, "ants moved in an orderly fashion, and never seemed to panic, even when there was danger or congestion."
In any case: do ants offer interesting analogies and parallels for fields such as robotics? I'm sure they do.
But I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical when it comes to using ant behavior as a model for urban design; something tells me ants act like ants because they're ants, and that to rebuild our cities and streets so that the built environment responds best to those of us who might act like ants might be artistically fascinating – but perhaps a little foolish.

(Thanks, Steve! Previously on BLDGBLOG: Tracking Ants and Nest-casting. See also inhuman urbanism, animal urbanism, and simian urbanism).

Today's archidose #120

Turning Torso in the clouds, originally uploaded by occam.

HSB Turning Torso in Malmö, Sweden by Santiago Calatrava.

See also Today's archidose #31.

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