Decorative boards to blend vacant homes into Cleveland neighborhoods

This vacant Slavic Village house has been an eyesore and magnet for trouble. Now it's part of a pilot program that Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka launched to artistically board houses as part of the effort to limit the harm done to communities.Chuck Crow, The Plain Dealer

In a couple of posts, I've been showing the urban problems triggered by the houses left empty. The neighbors' property value is instantly dropped and Cities have no money to keep watching for vandals. 
For example, " a new study suggests that Philadelphia's 40,000 vacant buildings reduce home values by as much as $8,000 and cost the city $20 million per year in maintenance." (Catherine Lucey) http://articles.philly.com/2010-11-11/news/24954008_1_property-values-abandoned-property-vacant-land

To my surprise, Cleveland found a kind of solution, a little naive... here it is:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka is testing a way to board up vacant houses so they don't look like glaring neon signs saying nobody's home.

Pianka brought in a Chicago man who specializes in making plywood to look like doors and windows. He gets vacant homes to blend into the neighborhood and not stand out as eyesores that draw drive-by vandals as well as vagrants and kids.

A $20,000 grant is paying for the program, which involves 22 mostly residential properties and should be done by Labor Day.

Reference:

Excerpt of the post by Sandra Livingston at

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/08/program_uses_decorative_boards.html

Robert A.M. Sterns speaks about the history of New York´s apartments

AIA NY Design Awards 2011: Architecture Honor Award Winners

Horizontal Skyscraper – Vanke Center. Shenzhen, China. Steven Holl Architects

APAP Openschool. Anyang, Korea. LOT-EK

Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant.Brooklyn, New York. A triventure of Greeley-Hansen, Hazen & Sawyer and Malcolm Pirnie in association with Ennead Architects

Sperone Westwater. New York, New York. Foster + Partners, Adamson Associates (Architect of record)

UCSF Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building. San Francisco, CA. Rafael Viñoly Architects, SmithGroup (Architect of record)

REFERENCE:

My selection of pictures from http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2011/04/110419-AIA-NY-Design-Award-Winners.asp

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Celebrates 100 Years

Frank Lloyd Wright

Most architects are well acquainted with Taliesin, one of the most storied dwellings in America. Situated in the rolling countryside near Spring Green, Wisconsin, the 600-acre estate was Frank Lloyd Wright’s primary residence and studio for more than four decades. It also was the original campus for Wright’s architecture school.

This year marks Taliesin’s centennial — a remarkable birthday for a work of architecture that wouldn’t look out of place among today’s modern homes. “Like his Oak Park house, Wright used Taliesin as an opportunity to experiment,” says Anthony Alofsin, a noted Wright scholar. “He was constantly testing new ideas.”

Wright set out to build Taliesin in 1911 after many years in Chicago, bringing with him Mamah Borthwick Cheney, his mistress and former client. The architect, then 43 years old, was deeply connected to the bucolic site, as his Welsh relatives had settled in the area in the 1800s.

The house began as a wood-and-stone bungalow tucked into the brow of a hill (“Taliesin” is Welsh for “shining brow”); over the years, it grew into a 37,000-square-foot complex. Wright experts emphasize that Taliesin was intentionally never finished. “It’s a perfect demonstration of what organic architecture might mean: It’s constantly adapting to life,” says Sidney Robinson, a faculty member at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

Taliesin’s tour season begins on April 28. In honor of the estate’s centennial, a series of special events will be held at the Wisconsin estate this year. For information, view the Taliesin preservation web site.

REFERENCE:

Excerpt from the article by Jenna M. McKnight All pictures downloaded from the article.

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2011/04/110422-Taliesin.asp

Two reflections from Franz Kafka

Creation. Creación. Digital painting by Myriam B. Mahiques

http://www.wix.com/mbmahiques/art#!portfolio/vstc2=various

39. The disharmony of the world seems, comfortingly enough, to be merely an arithmetical one.

57. A flight of steps which has not been hollowed out by many feet is, from its own point of view, only a blank wooden contraption that has been hammered together.

Some of the futuristic buildings in the 2011 eVolo Skyscraper Competition

A Redesigned Hoover Dam Yheu-Shen Chua

Hydra Power Station. Milos Vlastic, Vuk Djordjevic, Ana Lazovic, Milica Stankovic

¨Hosted by the architecture magazine eVolo, the competition is meant to stimulate discussion, development and promotion of new concepts for vertical density. Participants are asked to examine the relationships among the skyscraper and the natural world, the community and the city.

The top three awards went to designs that focus on the environment, whether it’s through cleaning polluted air or re-imagining one of the marvels of the modern world, the Hoover Dam. A host of honorable mentions include environmental cleanup facilities, sustainable communities and even subterranean communities for the living and the dead.¨

These are some of the pictures in the gallery.

First Place: A Ferris Wheel Greenhouse Made of Recycled Cars. Julien Combes and Gaël Brulé

Flattened tower. Yoann Mescam, Paul-Eric Schirr-Bonnans, and Xavier Schirr-Bonnans

Tower of the dead. Israel López Balan, Elsa Mendoza Andrés, Moisés Adrián Hernández García

The sixth Borough. John Houser

Seascrapers. YoungWan Kim, SueHwan Kwun, JunYoung Park, JoongHa Park

REFERENCES for text and pictures:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-04/2011-skyscraper-contest-floating-islands-energy-harvesters-and-other-buildings-future

Advances on urban gardens in USA

Detroit urban farm. From http://aslathedirt.files.wordpress.com/

Representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.), URS, and City of Chicago outlined how to safely farm an urban garden on top of a contaminated site at a national conference on brownfields. As Amy Yersavich, Ohio E.P.A. explained, “urban gardens aren’t going to come and go. They are here to stay so we need to focus on making them safe.” In fact, in many cities like Detroit, San Francisco, and New York City, urban gardening on all types of sites is “moving forward with leaps and bounds.” She has noticed that even Rustbelt states are transforming their brownfields into urban gardens. “Everyone wants fresh, healthy, local foods.”

Urban agriculture is the “production, distribution, marketing, and disposal of food and other products in the centers and edges of metropolitan areas.” This budding field deals with neighborhood mobilization, land and water use, pollution, health, and other issues. Programs can be private or public, volunteer-led, linked with food banks, or constructed by a landscape architect or horticultural expert. Even some park departments are starting urban farming programs.

For residential urban gardens, it’s important to look at whether the backyard used to be part of an industrial brownfield site. “A backyard could have been a brownfield in the past, or nearby some defunct facility.” Yersavich said residential gardens may have also been sites of historic “burn pits,” used early in the century to burn garbage. In addition, lead paint flakes can spread to yards.

REFERENCE: Excerpt from the article Keeping Urban Farmers Safe. By The dirt ASLA-

http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/dirt/24069/keeping-urban-farmers-safe

Concepts on the great wall of China

The great wall of China. From blog.chinatraveldepot.com

¨The Great Wall of China was finished at its most northerly location. The construction work moved up from the south-east and south-west and joined at this point. This system of building in sections was also followed on a small scale within the two great armies of workers, the eastern and western armies. It was carried out in the following manner: groups of about twenty workers were formed, each of which had to take on a section of the wall, about five hundred metres long. A neighbouring group then built a wall of similar length to meet them. But then afterwards, when the sections were fully joined, construction was not continued on any further at the end of this thousand-metre section. Instead the groups of workers were shipped off again to build the wall in completely different regions. Naturally, with this method many large gaps arose, which were filled in only gradually and slowly, many of them not until after it had already been reported that the building of the wall was complete. In fact, there are said to be gaps which have never been built in at all, although that’s merely an assertion which probably belongs among the many legends which have arisen about the structure and which, for individual people at least, are impossible to prove with their own eyes and according to their own standards, because the structure is so immense.

Now, at first one might think it would have been more advantageous in every way to build in continuous sections or at least continuously within two main sections. For the wall was conceived as a protection against the people of the north, as was commonly announced and universally known. But how can protection be provided by a wall which is not built continuously? In fact, not only can such a wall not protect, but the structure itself is in constant danger. Those parts of the wall left standing abandoned in deserted regions could always be destroyed easily by the nomads, especially by those back then who, worried about the building of the wall, changed their place of residence with incredible speed, like grasshoppers, and thus perhaps had an even better overall view of how the construction was proceeding than we did, the people who built it. However, there was really no other way to carry out the construction except the way it happened.¨

Image from http://www.destination360.com

From ¨The Great Wall of China¨. Written by Franz Kafka in 1917, first published in 1931