!
Herbert Muschamp calls it a “stairway to heaven penthouse paradise,” which is odd, since it looks more like a zipper than a staircase. The zipper on the fly of lower Manhattan. [“Chicka-boom!” indeed, Herbert.]
What is it? It’s Santiago Calatrava’s latest project for New York, a 1000′ residential tower of cantilvered cubehouses on South Street. (yes, as in Seaport. NYC zoning laws now require super-luxury buildings to be built adjacent to cornball-laden malls.) Each cube will be a single 10,000 SF residence, with a 2,000 SF terrace on the roof of the cube below.
The form is based on sculptures Calatrava has been noodling with in his garage, and on technology used in the Turning Torso tower [left] he’s completing in Malmo, Sweden (aka the Jersey City of Copenhagen).
If all goes according to plan, this architectural marvel will sit across the East River from Jean Nouvel‘s 1999 cantilevered glass-floored hotel, and will overlook Frank Gehry’s cloud-like floating Guggenheim. Oh, downtown will become an architectural paradise at last. Somehow, I think we’ll see WTC Memorial Ice Rinks in the footprints before then.
Related [?]: “A New Twist” for getting around lower Manhattan–entirely underground
Category: architecture
I Heart The Time Warner Mall
If you need me, I’ll be at the Time Warner Mall, getting in line for the escalator to Whole Foods, where I’ll be bellying up to New York’s only Jamba Juice.
“Whata Juice?” you say? Soon enough, you will be surrounded by seemingly rational people discussing the merits of Power-sized Bounce Back Blasts with Vita Boost. You can join in, or you can take your mall-snobbery and chain store disdain, grind it into a powder, dump it into your (Stick-in-the) Mud Truck coffee, plant your crabby ass on the IND, and slink home to watch Channel J.
Related:
“This is like a piece of Stamford in Midtown…It’s really nice that they brought the suburbs into the city.” [NYT]
Lockhart Steele, too, drinks the Kool-aid Jamba Juice
Felix Salmon worries rightly that this mall foretells the coming of a WTC Mall
Related to that:
“when they came for my greek-lookin’ coffee cups, I said nothing” [greg.org 7/02]
Shipping Containers, v. 4
It’s an inadvertent but recurring subject of interest here at greg.org: the architectural use of connex shipping containers. Sunday, NPR aired a puffy little interview with Zalmay Khalilzad, the new US envoy to Afghanistan; it turns out he’ll be living in a shipping container on the heavily fortified grounds of the embassy in Kabul. He’s not alone. According to this AP story on AfghanNews.net, over 100 containers were refurbished in Dubai to provide instant housing for the influx of US personnel. This picture comes from an account of someone posted to Kabul. Americans may have added microwaves, TV’s, private baths, A/C, “some tentative-looking shrubs and bushes” out front, and in one case, a pink flamingo to their containers, but except for their fresh coats of paint, they’d blend right in to the Kabul skyline. Except, of course, that US containers are reinforced with sandbags and ringed with concertina wire.
Don’t let a construction industry devastated by 30 years of chaos
get you down! Rebuild your marketplace with containers!
image: Barnaby Hall’s travelogue in Duke’s alumni magazine.
Turns out you can fit a lot of irony into a 40-foot shipping container. And just when you think it’s full, well, you can stuff in some more. Another Afghani-related compound, Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, is built from shipping containers. But so, it turns out, is the Army/CIA’s interrogation center at Bagram Air Base, the site of reported torture and human rights violations in the name of our war on terror. (As the WP quotes one official, “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”) They’re also the structure of choice for expanding Israeli outposts in the West Bank. Containers, concertina wire, and conflict apparently go hand in hand.
With their adaptability, rapid portability, and instant utility, containers are the architectural embodiment of “Flexible Response,” Donald Rumsfeld’s doctrine of military transformation. Of course, “Flexible Response” isn’t new; it grew from the Korean War, and Rumsfeld’s predecessor Robert McNamara implemented his own quant-heavy interpretation in Vietnam. The 21st-century version is just air-conditioned for our comfort.
Here’s the AP’s glowing, realtor-like description of Khalilzad’s new pad: “Three containers were used to create his relatively palatial hootch, with a formal dining room that can seat eight, a front sitting room and a side lawn. A wooden fence around the ambassadorial residence gives it privacy and a suburban hominess.”
A hootch? If you have to ask–and I had to– a hootch is soldiers’ slang for instant housing, particularly the aluminum sheds they inhabited in Vietnam.
Related: the Darren Almond shipping container post that started it all, plus some unexpectedly moving memorial realizations.
Looking at The Sun
You know how, on a cloudless afternoon, when you’re working in your orange grove, or driving your airboat in search of alligators, or maybe settling into lounge chair with a just-before-five cocktail on your unusually prominent, screened-in veranda–which the gal over in the developer’s office calls an “outdoor room,” but which, to the unindoctrinated northern eye, really looks like the marmoset habitat at the zoo, just minus the trees–and, for a fleeting instant, the glint of the sun reflecting off the belly of a jet flying north at 41,000 feet catches your eye and causes you to look up?
To a man on that plane, for a few minutes, anyway–at least three, but not more than five, it’s really hard to say when it began, since staring out the window is a somewhat novice, absentminded activity to which the man, a very frequent flier, rarely resorts, unless it’s a flight going into LaGuardia around magic hour, in which case he hopes the approach is across Brooklyn if he’s in A/C and up the Hudson if he’s in D/F (and yes, in addition to the Delta Shuttle, which offers but one class of service, there are planes where the first class seats are lettered A/C and D/F, so you can’t jump to the conclusion that the guy’s always flying coach, poor bastard, even if this particular plane is operated by an airline called Song, which is Deltan for “Southwest,” and which eschews a first class section for all leather seats in colors–plums, pumpkins, chartreuses and AOL blues–that signal “edgy” and “hip” and “out of the box” in the suburban Atlanta corridors of brand management power, corridors where the same self-defeating imperative to prove one’s corporate coolness explains locals’ fervor for “Hotlanta, which is a lot like New York. Really.” and the commissioning of flight crew uniforms from their daughters’ must-have bag designer Kate Spade, which are, with an enthusiastic lack of awareness, bespangled with Office Space-style “flair”), not that either side will offer a view this trip, what with his plane flying either over, around, through, or into a hurricane, a phenomenon which looks stunning from the international space station but which is turns the plane’s rows of windows into more than enough lightboxes to preview simultaneously every slide of every grandchild of every tanned, facelifted, tennis-braceleted busybody on this plane–that glint is revealed to be a perfectly round, white reflection of the sun itself, which pans across the dark green Evergladian landscape 41,000 feet below, like a helicopter searchlight on Cops, only much faster and wider and in daylight (by definition, duh), or like the moon, hanging low enough on the horizon when you drive along the unlit freeway at night that it ducks behind trees, warehouses, and billboards.
SWAT team blames Gehry architecture for delay in trapping Cleveland shooter
It took police more than seven hours to shoot and capture the gunman who opened fire in the newly opened Peter B. Lewis Building for Case Western’s business school. It was “almost a cat and mouse game,” said Cleveland Police Chief Edward Lohn. Why so long? “As the SWAT team entered the building, they were constantly under fire,” Lohn said. “They couldn’t return fire because of the design of the building. They didn’t have a clear shot.”
The design, of course, is by Frank Gehry, an architect whose work has never been described as “SWAT-team-friendly.” [Since when is “designed to give a clear shot” considered a desirable building feature?! -ed.] Gehry was brought in by Lewis, Cleveland’s biggest philanthropist (except when he’s cutting off all the cultural organizations in the city and calling for the replacement of CWRU’s entire board. Another story.), to work a little of that Bilbao magic, to create an instantly recognizable architectural signature, an icon, his (Gehry’s? or Lewis’s?) own Fallingwater. [Insert Falling Ice joke here.]
In a moment of Any Publicity is Good Publicity, perhaps, Cleveland’s mayor gloated of the city’s newest signature architecture: “This building now becomes a homicide site,” a backhanded reference to Bilbao, Spain, where Basque terrorists failed to blow up Gehry’s Guggenheim building (with grenades in flower pots in Jeff Koons’ Puppy actually. Bilbao still wins on style. Another digression.)
Quake programmers take note: Floor plans are available. Unfortunately, the video walkthrough (boldly titled, “Risk, Learn, Grow”) is currently offline back up! controversy’s over.
Architectural Survivor 3: See Who Gets Voted Off The Island
It’s architectural reality TV, with so many last-minute campaigns, twists and turns, you’d think Fox was running it, not the Port Authority. The final two bachelors, er architect groups in the design “competition” for the WTC site have been workin’ it hard, according to design reporter Julie Iovine’s NYTimes article, even turning up on Oprah. Herbert Muschamp weighs in, too, slightly chastened. Meanwhile, Edward Wyatt’s report of a LMDC committee’s surprise recommendation of THINK over (the Pataki/Bloomberg-favored) Libeskind sounds like a promo for the finale of Joe Millionaire. And just as “surprising,” or “real,” for that matter. Whether angling to arrive at a lecture with a victim family member or throwing shade on each other’s designs, these architects ingenuously perform for the camera.
Shipping Containers, v. 3
A sporadically recurring topic here at greg.org, the non-shipping use of shipping containers. [Instigating post here, extensive post here.]
Shipping container used in an illegal Israeli outpost, image:nytimes.com
Samantha Shapiro’s NYTimes Mag story, “The Unsettlers,” profiles young, militant Israelis who pioneer illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Shipping container used in an illegal Israeli outpost in the Jordan Valley, image:metropolismag.com
Stephen Zacks’ review in the Feb. 2003 Metropolis of a (cancelled) exhibit on architecture and urban planning in the West Bank, where Israeli hilltop settlements use suburban sprawl to control the surrounding territory. Architect Eyal Weizman: “It’s almost like you have a model of the terrain and you cut a section at say six hundred meters, and everything that’s above is Israeli. What was created was an incredible fragmentation of the terrain into two systems that work across the vertical axis.” The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has published Weizman’s exhaustively documented settlement map of the West Bank.
For all your settling needs, illegal or otherwise, the Shipping Container Store: passing the mountainous container landscape along the NJ Turnpike, I saw Interport Maintenance Corp., which sells shipping containers. Delivery is extra.
What’re THINK Thinking?
Team THINK’s winning WTC design: lattice towers with a, um,
museum? embedded in it image: vinoly.com
Goin’ to hear THINK architect/model Rafael Vinoly at Urban Center tonight (as suggested by Gawker)? Ask him if the reason he was a no-show yesterday on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show was that listener’s early comment, which surprised Lehrer, about how THINK’s towers appear to have an airplane embedded in it? Listen to the exchange is in the “3rd audio clip. [2016 updated link to WNYC archive page currently has no audio.]
[Note: If you watch THINK’s video on The NYT‘s slideshow, the shape of the “airplane” is quite different; it looks more like a giant aluminum cheese straw. For THINK’s sake, I hope that’s closer to their intentions. One team of architects trying to sneak a shudder-inducing memorial past us is more than enough, thanks.]
[2016 update: lmao of course most of these links are dead, I cannot BELIEVE that the realaudio of WNYC’s show from 13 yrs earlier is not there anymore! But I un-hotlinked and updated the image and the Vinoly link. Swimming against the tide of time, also Gawker RIP]
On WTC Site Designs
What I hope doesn’t carry through from the plans the LMDC selected from Daniel Libeskind and THINK Team:
What I hope does carry through:
What Filler calls such a concept, which I personally favor: “unquestionably the most provocative.” [I think he’s talking about the latticework as Ban’s, not the memorial. I like both.]
Despite a lot of overwrought reaction, Filler wins the greg.org “smartest critic” award for agreeing with me on so many points: this memorial idea, the 1,776′ tower, and (finally!) the Eisenman-as-ruin-as-memorial-instigator analysis.
Herbert Muschamp: Think THINK!
Herbert Muschamp, the Professor Emile Flostre of architectural empathicalism, gives his blessing to the THINK team’s proposal to build a World Cultural Center at the former WTC site.
There are several things to like about the proposal, not the least of which is to turn the emphasis from the overwhelming commercial interests on the site, which the market can take care of just fine, thanks. Think’s proposal most closely ressembles Paul Goldberger’s call for an “Eiffel Tower for the 21st century,” which would place greater importance on technological and symbolic marvel than on purely functional architecture (go ahead, tell me how many rentable square feet is the Eiffel Tower?). And I thought the WTC-WCC connection struck a powerful chord.
Enough with the turn-ons, now the hang-ups: the awkward relation to the oh-so-holy footprints; the lattices’ form, too-close-to-the-originals evocation of the towers which, I think, will age poorly; skepticism of such a project’s survival in the pathetic, poisonous political environment of the rebuilding process.
For my part, such open towers would make my own idea for a memorial possible: large, quiet halls in space (x,y,z space) near the points of impact on the original towers.
On The Transformative Power of Architecture, or The Caribbean Light At The End of The Tunnel
image via globalsecurity.org
Last month I wrote about art and architecture made from connex containers, the standard 40-foot steel boxes used for international shipping. #1 architects MVRDV proposed a complex made from them for Rotterdam, their home town (and a major port). As the discussion on this architecture message board shows, container architecture is an idea with a lot of adherents.
Now you can add the Department of Military Aesthetics to the list. Containers were used to construct Camp Delta, the more permanent neighbor of Camp X-Ray, on the military base under US control (if not jurisdiction) in Guantanamo, Cuba. Here’s a description from Joseph Lelyveld’s very long NY Review of Books article about the quandary of the Guantanamo detainees:
Delta was thrown together for $9.7 million by a private contractor, Brown and Root Services�a division of Vice President Cheney’s old company, Halliburton�which flew in low-wage contract labor from the Philippines and India to get the job done, in much the same way that Asians were once brought to the Caribbean to harvest sugar cane. The cell blocks are assembled from the standard forty-foot steel boxes called connex containers that are used in international shipping: five cells to a container, eight containers to a cell block, with four lined up on each side of a central corridor where the lights and fans are installed. Welders cut away three sides of each container, replacing them with sidings of steel mesh, leaving the roof, floor, and one steel wall into which a window was cut. Floor-level toilets were installed�the kind requiring squatting, traditionally described as � la turque�and now these are sometimes mentioned as an example of American sensitivity to the cultural needs of the detainees.
On Rem’s Ideas of Verticality and Shopping
Rem Koolhaas’s Projects for Prada, Part 1, underneath a table-like sculpture by Wade Guyton
From the NY Post:
Firefighters had to rescue shoppers from a stuck elevator in the super-trendy Prada store in SoHo the other day. A mother and her two young daughters were celebrating one of the girls’ birthdays at the Rem Koolhas [sic]-designed boutique at around 4 p.m. when they entered the high-tech, round glass elevator. The thick double doors jammed, trapping them inside for an hour and a half with a mannequin dressed in a see-through plastic raincoat. Since Koolhas neglected to include an escape hatch, the FDNY used a power saw to cut a hole in the steel roof big enough for a ladder. The store was closed for 45 minutes while sparks flew and onlookers gawked from the sidewalk. The apologetic manager presented the liberated shoppers with free cosmetics.
Prada representatives have not responded to requests for confirmation/information, and store employees have been asked not to comment.
For more of Koolhaas’s views on current trends in retail, check his two most recent publications: The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping and Projects for Prada Part 1. stay tuned. [I particularly recommend the Prada book.]
On Reading (Between) the Lines
Thinking about Koolhaas’ Delirious New York again. This 1978 book, billed as a “retroactive manifesto,” tells the story of Simeon deWitt, Governeur Morris and John Rutherford, who boldly mapped out the Manhattan Grid in 1811. “…Each block is now alone like an island, fundamentally on its own. Manhattan turns into a dry archipelago of blocks.” The grid set the terms for Manhattan’s future and foreordained–according to Koolhaas–NYC’s vertical development (ie., the skyscraper). Apex Art had an interesting exhibit in 2000, “Block,” which featured Austrian architecture students’ responses to what Koolhaas called “Manhattanism.”
My street was barely a twinkle in deWitt & Co’s eyes then. In fact, the two buildings above both date from the 1920’s, when Park Avenue got its first real upgrade (from putting the NY Central railroad below grade. It’s the train to New Haven, you know). But like the rest of Manhattan, it’s character is inexorably derived to the grid. But not in the way Koolhaas thought. It’s the street, not the block, that’s really wonderful. On approach my street’s most interesting feature is the forest-dense trees that fill the space between the blocks.
John Cage was interested in the spaces between, whether between sounds or between notes or text on a page. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to use Cage’s music in Souvenir (November 2001). And Gustavo Bonevardi, a creator of Towers of Light (a project which played a role in my writing Souvenir and which has an indirect reference in the movie) said of it: “…in effect, we’re not rebuilding the towers themselves, but the void between them.”
How To Tell Me and Brad Pitt Apart
Took a whirlwind trip to the Yale School of Architecture to see an exhibition (mostly) of the theoretical works of the Rotterdam architecture firm, MVRDV. Ivory tower academics? Nope. They actually build. A lot. And Yale dean Robert Stern rightly praises “their belief that invention grows out of knowledge is refreshing in a profession too often mired in fashion.”
Through projects like Metacity/Datatown to Pig City to the 3D City Ballet, the firm’s just-the-facts analytical approach to the problems of urban density have yield results that are inventive, increasingly sophisticated, and, yes, beautiful. It’s fitting that the exhibit’s in New Haven; after all, what is Connecticut, but a classically American “approach to the problems of urban density”? MVRDV’s never met a sprawl it didn’t want to render obsolete. Their “more-in-less-space-is-more” love of the city can be attributed in part to their early tenure with Rem Delirious New York Koolhaas (they were over him before he was ever kool). But it’s also the hardearned appreciation of space that comes from living in a country which, according to Nature’s logic, should be entirely underwater.
MVRDV’s most-discussed theoretical project is Pig City, their turns-out-to-be-explosively-controversial proposal to concentrate Holland’s massive (and land-intensive) pork industry into self-contained skyscrapers. The Dutch architecture site Archined has many heated comments about Pig City’s moral/ethical implications.
Although Winy Maas (the M in MVRDV) told me about it in May, I didn’t write about it here, but Pig City (and the firm) got caught up in the political upheaval and violence that shocked the Dutch last Spring. Pim Fortuyn had appropriated Pig City into his right-ist party’s platform. The dam on the lagoon broke when Fortuyn was assassinated by an leftist (and animal rights activist), and Winy & Co. were faced with unexpected censorship and death threats.
America’s probably a vapid, welcome respite for these guys. While a suburbanite couple in the gallery with me today sniffed, the guestbook was full of celebratory comments. Winy’s gonna have groupies, too; he’s taking the Eli’s through the (s)paces next Spring, studying the urban mechanisms of New York.
All nice, but they also enjoy America’s greatest reward for the contemporary architect, the adulation of Hollywood celebrities. Architecture writer David Sokol, reports in Metropolis (three times!) that “MVRDV, in case you haven’t heard, is actor Brad Pitt’s favorite architecture firm.” Actually, no, I hadn’t heard, so I looked it up. According to The Pitt Center, MVRDV are only Pitt’s third favorite architects (after Gehry and that damn Koolhaas, FYI). Brad say’s they’re #3, I say they’re #1. Write that down.
On why Rem Koolhaas should wake up every day thanking his mother
Usually, when you get googled for “I went to high school with Ben Affleck” or “red vines and hidden meaning,” you’re left to wonder who the hell that was, and what’s going on in those folks’ heads? So imagine my thrill when the guy searching for “Rem Koolhaas architecture and Matt Damon” sends a confessional email and includes a link to his weblog, Laughing Boy. Check it out [Mom, this doesn’t include you.] Of course, I still have no idea what’s going on in Laughing Boy’s head, but it’s pretty funny nonetheless.
While on that search query, there’s a great quote in Deborah Solomon’s logically warped and implausibly generousNYTimes Magazine article about the Guggenheim and its wack director Tom Krens. Smarmy casino developer and recovering binge art collector Steve Wynn said of Rem Koolhaas, ”If his name were Sid Schwartz, no one would want him.”