Urban Nomads, 21st Century-Style

From Hennessy & Papanek’s classic 1973 hippie DIY book, Nomadic Furniture comes the “Resource Tower”:

It organizes living space in a radically different way. Usually we put bookcases and storage walls all over the room’s walls. We suggest [as shown in the lower plan] that getting it all together in the center of the room makes an interesting alternative.

nomad_arch_resource_tower.jpg

Interesting indeed, especially after reading about the freestanding Aristo Pods, Luxo Pods, and Boho Pods being put into Jade, a new mid-block condo conversion in the Flatiron District.

jade_pod.jpg

The project is named after Jade Jagger and promised “Jade Living” [sic] at its finest. As Triple Mint explains the tiny galley kitchens, “These pods are a kind of tacit admission that many people in New York end up living like global nomads.” Yeah, except that, back in the day, the nomads didn’t buy their plywood pods already made and lacquered in Jade-picked colors; they built them their own damn nomadic selves.
Jade by Jagger [triple mint via curbed, whose commenter made the plywood call]
resource tower image via the exhaustively interesting The Legacy of The Urban Nomads

And Some Have ‘Starchitect’ Thrust Upon Them

Supposedly reluctant starchitect Rem Koolhaas talked with the NYT’s Robin Pogrebin about the mutiny in his firm, OMA’s NY office, which is headed by supposedly reluctant starchitect-in-training Josh Prince-Ramus. Since the completion of the office’s Seattle Library in 2004, PR [sic] has been the subject of many articles in which he professes annoyance at being the subject of so many articles.
“But he [i.e., Koolhaas] said that he didn’t seek this status, that stardom had been pressed on him by a media culture that craves major figures. ‘In America the cult of celebrity makes the reality of a partnership harder to maintain,’ he said.”
PR concurs, “The media’s desire to make everything about an individual doesn’t reflect our reality.” Damn media and their craving for starchitects.
Now if we could just do something about those damn clients: Said Bill Lively, the go-to guy for the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, which is just getting underway, “‘We’re going to have a Koolhaas-O.M.A. theater.'”
And as the client on another big OMA project in the works, an arts center in Louisville, explained, “‘The Koolhaas name obviously led us to the firm, but as I’ve learned over the years, you’re working with individuals…I think Josh is a celebrity in his own right.'” Nice.
Joshua Prince-Ramus Leaving Koolhaas’s O.M.A. to Start New Architecture Firm [nyt]
Previously: You can call me Rem
PS: archinect’s forum called this story two months ago.

Ouroussoff, Koolhaas, and The Scalable Jane Jacobs

I still can’t tell if I was the only one kind of weirded out by the sudden and overwhelming outpouring of nostalgic loss and ruminating over the death of Jane Jacobs.
Archinect, Tropolism, Curbed, Kottke, even the Home of the Whopper of Superficiality, Gawker, had a paean to the urban theorist/activist within hours after she died.
Not to speak too ill of her or her vital, inspiring ideas and all, but I wonder if someone with a Nexis account can look up how many mentions Jacob had garnered in the weeks, months, even year or two before her death, just to get a little bit of perspective.
Of course, I’m always troubled when I end up agreeing with Witold Rybczynski, who pointed out what many New Yorkers already know as giant, extruded “luxury” condo towers fill up once-edgy, heterogeneous neighborhoods and a once-risky High Line is on track to become the High Lawn for a dozen-plus starchitected buildings: vibrant city fabric is now a luxury amenity.
But Kottke’s right and too nice to be righter when he says that Nicolai Ouroussoff‘s counter-examples to Jacob’s idealized dense cityscape–Lincoln Center and the WTC–are a joke. There needs to be some contrast and some alleviation of the pressure that a dense city creates, but as recently as like five minutes ago, Lincoln Center was a consensus failure set for a Diller+Scofidial jazzing up. You know, to pump up the energy level and get some more street-level activity going.
Meanwhile, mall developers are, oddly, the ones working the hardest to apply Jacobs’ multi-use, multi-constituency formulas to their newest urban destination retail experience centers [sic], which are essentially privately owned and managed downtowns.
Ouroussoff’s strongest refutation of Jacobism is, of course, LA, but what if that’s some kind of Jacobist diversity/vibrancy, just with a car’s extended range?
No one going to Manhattan anymore because it’s too crowded and expensive. From Williamsburg to The Slope and who-knows-where, Brooklyn is ascendant. I wonder if the Jacobs ideals still hold true, just on a larger scale than her little legs could imagine.
Koolhaas talked about the NY Grid and the city center’s march northward over 200 years, From within (the) Wall to Five Points to Allen to Bowery to Astor to Sixth to Fifth to Park to. Then once at Columbia, I watched him make the same argument, only about the Pearl River Delta, where the entirety of Hong Kong and Kowloon is the late 19th century Delancey Street of the late 21st century.
Now look what I’ve done. I started out only wanting to mention that in fact, according to the buzz, Lincoln Center is supposed to suck, [I don’t really think it happens to, but then, I don’t use it that much, except to enjoy all the unobstructed light it sends into the apartment.] but now I’ve wound around and ended up agreeing with that monkey who curated the dress show at his “Prada Epicenter” [sic sic sic]. It’s late. Let me sleep on this, and in the morning, after a nice big glass of Diet Coke, I’ll come back adn solve the Problems Facing Our Cities.
Hal Foster on Koolhaas on urban congestion, Delirious New York, and the Pearl River Delta. [lrb.co.uk]

0 Yen Houses, 0 Yen Movies

zero_yen_house.jpg
In 2004, Kyohei Sakaguchi published 0 Yen Houses, a book of photographs of street people architecture in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. A burgeoning urban street population, mostly men in their 50’s and 60’s, is one consequence of the Japanese economic and real estate situation over the last 10-15 years. These men often continue to work, but they’re unable to afford housing, so they improvise their own, squatting on public lands (river banks and parks, mostly). They often form the favelas that preoccupy the nomadic scavenger-artist Tadashi Kawamata [who, after 20+ years of roaming, might be able to come home now that Japan has some, too.]
Police give advance notice when they’re coming to inspect, so the street people are able to move their houses–and then replace them after the police have gone.
This kind of accommodation to the extreme prices and densities of Japan is like a grey market version of Atelier Bow Wow’s study of Pet Architecture, the impossibly tiny structures that inhabit even the most improbably small slivers of land in Tokyo. [On the other end of the spectrum, of course, is Klein Dytham’s Billboard Building, a 2m-wide (at most) spec bldg put up on a former 3-car parking lot in the extremely expensive Hiro-o neighborhood after the road was widened–and the parking lot was rendered unusable.

water_tower_living.jpg

It turns out that Sakaguchi first gained attention for some video pieces he did while still in college [Waseda U.’s architecture program]. Whether they’re art, documentary, or home movies, who can say, but they seem to fit the jishu eiga/self-made movie mode pretty well. The first, Living in a Water Tank, is just what it sounds like, a video diary of the 21-year-old Sakaguchi’s life inside an unused apartment building rooftop water tank.
home_rider.jpg
Then he made House Biker, in which he cruised around Tokyo on a pimped out pizza delivery scooter with a functioning microhouse on the back. He called it his “O Yen Movie,” a retroactive extension of the new “Zero Yen” brand.
Sakaguchi’s work seems to provoke some embarassment and discomfort among Japanese audiences, but like most things in Japan, it mostly just entertains. Take last year’s Zero Yen House Tour, in which Sakaguchi led a bunch of college students in a contest to build their own shelters using only scavenged materials. If only their plight wasn’t so aesthetically interesting, who knows, they might get some help; but right now, these homeless guys might be too cool for their own good.
0 Yen House, published by Little More and available at amazon-uk [littlemore.co.jp]
0 Yen House Tour, Kyoto Seika Univ. [kyoto-seika.ac.jp]
Happiness is just a riverside shack for designer homeless [timesonline, “designer homeless”?? via archinect]
Sakaguchi Kyohei’s homepage, mostly in Japanese, but there’s a link to autotranslations as well. [kyohei sakaguchi]

Actually, If You Put It That Way…

The 71-year-old scion of a real estate family, Mori inaugurated his latest city, Omotesando Hills, in one of Tokyo’s most fashionable neighborhoods last month. There, well-heeled residents can now live just above some of the priciest retail shops on Earth, wandering sparkling hallways where $1,000 Jimmy Choo heels sell alongside $21 ice creams. “What the Guggenheim does with art, we do with shops,” Mori said in an interview at Roppongi Hills. “That is the only difference.”

– Minoru Mori, real estate developer and Mariko’s uncle

Conspicuous Consumption Shapes New Tokyo Skyline
[washpost]

Needed: 6 Containers Of Pistachio-Colored Drywall

On Saturday, the Rem Koolhaas Prada store in SoHo was either engulfed in flames, soaked in water and smoke, or both.
The ostentatiously exposed drywall was Prada green and imported, if not actually manufactured to spec. [What’s the stock color of Italian drywall? Anybody?] Watch for the just-arrived merch to show up, freshly drycleaned, at a TJ Maxx far from you, very soon.
And what’s this? The Guggenheim is still hanging out in the building? Did landlord collector Peter Brant get his forever for-sale Warhol Last Supper out of their gallery in time?
Verbose Coma has pictures,, Gothamist has roundups, and modernartnotes has a draft checklist of art in the building [verbosecoma via gothamist]

When You’re A Nail, Everything Looks Like A Hole

A tabloid summary of Herbert Muschamp’s long essay on 2 Columbus Circle: back in the day
AbEx: straight
Historicism, Pop: gay
Museum of Modern Art: straight
Gallery of Modern Art [aka 2 Columbus]: gay
But didn’t AbEx evangelizer Frank O’Hara and modernist architect Philip Johnson also work at MoMA? And hasn’t Muschamp talked about what a great pickup joint MoMA was in the 70’s?
Maybe it’s not a question of straight and gay, HM, but butch and femme. Or maybe, you know, it’s you, Herb. All I know is, Muschamp’s architecture writing has totally blossomed since he came out of that Times arch. critic closet of his. It’s a lifestyle choice [sic] we should all support.
The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle [nyt]

Who Lost Gordon Bunshaft’s Travertine House?

bunshaft_travertine_house.jpg
Modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft’s widow willed his exquisite travertine-clad Georgica Pond home–his only domestic design– and their carefully installed collection of modern art to MoMA when he died in 1994.
MoMA sold it to Martha Stewart in 1994 without any restrictions or covenants. Stewart, caught up in the Minimalist revival of the day, hired John Pawson to redo it.
Several years later the house, a gutted shambles on the brink of a poorly conceived expansion and with some of its travertine scavenged for Stewart’s Bedford, NY kitchen, was transferred to Stewart’s daughter Alexis, who put it on the market in 2004.
It sold to retro textile guy Donald Maharam, who disingenuously declared the house an unrestorable ruin and razed it in July.
The culpability compounds with each set of hands that touched this property.
Bunshaft could have put covenants on it before willing it to MoMA, but didn’t, possibly on the assumption that the Museum would, by the nature of its mission, take steps to preserve this important design.
MoMA could have put restrictions on the house when it sold it to Stewart but didn’t. MoMA’s not in the house business, so the idea that MoMA woulda shoulda kept it is naive at best. As is any idea that Bunshaft could’ve intended for MoMA to do anything but benefit from the gift of the house.
But still, the operating principles here were fiduciary, not curatorial or conservationist; and yet the “understanding” with Stewart and the publicity around it at the time, points to a perceived responsibility beyond merely maximizing the museum’s return from a donation. Q: Did the Museum set aside the proceeds from the sale for future acquisitions? “Art-for-art,” as befits a deaccession? I highly doubt it. If not, however the sale was presented–or spun– in the press, on the museum’s ledger, the house was a financial asset, not a work of art.
Stewart could have left the house as is, but didn’t. Can anyone be surprised by that? Martha Stewart is a hack. The queen of hacks. It was her penury and negligence that let the house deteriorate. She’s lucky that an over-inflated sense of your own aesthetic superiority leading to the decimation of a modernist landmark isn’t a crime, or she’d still be in jail.
Ever since the sale, MoMA said it had a “good faith agreement” with Stewart to preserve the house, which was a stripped, weed-covered shell when her lawsuits with the house’s next door neighbor were finally settled.
Pawson’s a frickin’ hack, but he coulda–no, he was just Stewart’s hack.
Alexis… this was a wealth transfer mechanism, nothing more.
Maharam’s a hack, and a spineless hack at that. He could have restored the house if he cared to, instead he hides behind the excuse that it was beyond help. The incremental expense of doing so is approximately zero compared to the price of the land. And it’s not like he can build anything else; wetlands zoning restricts him to Bunshaft’s original footprints (and whatever Stewart/Pawson managed to get approved.)
Did someone mention approvals? That’d be the East Hampton town board who sat by while one of the few interesting feats of architecture in the whole place was modified and destroyed. But then, why should important modernist design get any better treatment in the potato fields of the Hamptons than they do on the corner of Central Park?
In LA, three of Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete block houses hover on the brink of ruin. Important corporate headquarters–including one of Bunshaft’s–get redeveloped with impunity. Modernist preservation groups like Docomomo whimper to no effect. How many 20th century landmarks must be lost before something changes?
Without any explicit agreements anywhere regarding its preservation, without any laws, zoning, landmark designations or other institutional protections, and in the face of the Hamptons real estate juggernaut, the house was doomed before Mrs. Bunshaft’s assistant ever called Frank Campbell.
I used to sail and kayak on Georgica, often with the express purpose of seeing Bunshaft’s art and the luxurious simplicity of his house. So excuse me if I seem especially pissed and despondent.
Martha’s Touch [nationaltrust.org via archinect]
Also: The Architecture Newspaper’s earlier coverage [archpaper.com, includes pic]
Disrepair At Martha’s [the easthampton star, 2002]
HC&G says MoMA chose Stewart’s bid over her Georgica neighbor, developer Harry Macklowe, on the understanding that she would do righter by the house.
[11/05 update: An earlier version of this post criticized the Preservation article as cribbed from previously published accounts of the Bunshaft house saga. This speculation was prompted by similarities in quotes and by a dangling reference to a “Krinsky,” Bunshaft’s biographer who goes otherwise unmentioned in the Preservation piece. The writer of that piece has since contacted me–presumably because I unfairly called him a hack–and provided further information that shows my purely text-based speculations were incorrect. The Krinsky thing was a copy editing oversight; and guess what, the same people talking about the same thing tend to do it in similar ways, so no surprise if their quotes sound similar.
Anyway, my apologies to the writer, an innocent bystander who got hit when I started flinging all those “hack”s around.]

Atelier Bow-Wow House, Blog

bow_wow_lot.jpgThe awesome and ingenious Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow (the Japanese translation, Atelier Wan, sounds nicely like “1,” too) is keeping a blog of the combination house/studio they’re building for themselves in Naka Meguro, a central, dense, and expensive section of Tokyo. The lot they found was affordable only because it’s tiny and enclosed on all sides. Still, it’s zoned for more than 660 sqm, (including underground) of live/work space.
Because of their shape–a square-ish lot blocked in and invisible from the street, and connected to it by only a narrow passageway or easement–plots like this are called flagpole sites. The site poses just the kind of severe challenges that AB-W has specialized in addressing, though.
To fit their live/work program into the envelope of the building, they have integrated and jig-sawed the home and studio spaces together, and they seem to have managed to carve out incredible space, light, privacy, and even some views on a lot that looks like something out of a Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit. Of course, it’s all in Japanese, so good luck with that excite.co.jp translator…
House & Atelier Bow-Wow [via archinect]
Tokyo House: projects for flagpole, eel, and box sites

Atelier Bow-Wow House, Blog

bow_wow_lot.jpgThe awesome and ingenious Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow (the Japanese translation, Atelier Wan, sounds nicely like “1,” too) is keeping a blog of the combination house/studio they’re building for themselves in Naka Meguro, a central, dense, and expensive section of Tokyo. The lot they found was affordable only because it’s tiny and enclosed on all sides. Still, it’s zoned for more than 660 sqm, (including underground) of live/work space.
Because of their shape–a square-ish lot blocked in and invisible from the street, and connected to it by only a narrow passageway or easement–plots like this are called flagpole sites. The site poses just the kind of severe challenges that AB-W has specialized in addressing, though.
To fit their live/work program into the envelope of the building, they have integrated and jig-sawed the home and studio spaces together, and they seem to have managed to carve out incredible space, light, privacy, and even some views on a lot that looks like something out of a Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit. Of course, it’s all in Japanese, so good luck with that excite.co.jp translator…
House & Atelier Bow-Wow [via archinect]
Tokyo House: projects for flagpole, eel, and box sites

Klein Dytham’s Billboard Building

klein_dytham_minamiazabu.jpgThis new building is across the street from my in-law’s apt. in Tokyo, in the Minami Azabu neighborhood about 5-min. walk from Roppongi Hills.
It just went up a few months ago, and the evening I went over to examine it close up, the young Japanese architect happened to be there with a photographer, taking pictures for the firm’s website. These pictures, in fact, at Klein Dytham.
The site used to be a tiny parking lot, he said, but then the road/sidewalk was widened, cutting into the lot. As you might expect, there’s a tiny little service core in the tapering end at left, but if there’s a basement, its entrance is well-hidden. Basically, what you see is what you get: a rare spec building with a strong architectural presence.
Now, one day back from Tokyo, just as I’m about to post this, I find that Regine has already scooped me on the building that I’ve been walking by almost daily for the last month.

Billboard House Moto Azabu
[huh? klein-dytham]