Expectations for New York´s cityscape

Hudson Yards project by Kohn Pedersen Fox assoc. Picture by KPF

¨More than a century ago, the author O. Henry said about New York City, “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.” The point, of course, is that the city will never be finished: It’s always been driven by the tireless impulse to tear down and build up. Rather than revel in its history like many cities, New York pushes for the new — though a reverence for the mammoth structures of its industrial glory has led to innovative plans for adaptive reuse. As the Bloomberg years wane and the recession grinds on, a number of high-profile projects remain unfinished. Construction spending (including infrastructure) has dropped in the city from a peak of $33 billion in 2008 to a projected $26 billion this year. New building permits are down considerably; the city issued 2,110 in the first half of 2008, compared to 764 in the first half of this year. “Huge question marks remain, especially for publicly funded projects,” warns Richard Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress. Still, grand ambitions persist. From affordable housing and open space — hallmarks of PlaNYC, one of the mayor’s legacies — to cultural facilities and commercial development, the transformation of the cityscape may slow, but it will never stop.¨

REFERENCE

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/2011/New-York/City-Reimagined/

A discussion about the architecture of Romanticism

Frontispiece of Marc-Antoine Laugier. Allegorical engraving of the Vitruvian primitive hut. From http://thearchitectureofearlychildhood.blogspot.com/

I´m reading Crome Yellow, a book by Aldous Huxley, an ironic novel about the pretentious British upper-class trying to forget what happened at the World War I.

In chapter XI, there is a discussion about an ostentatious villa -Crome Yellow-, where the group is reunited. Supposedly, the house was rebuilt with the grandeur of brick technology, pretty far from the Romanticism of SXIX.

From page 59:

¨The great thing about Crome,¨ said Mr. Scogan, seizing the opportunity to speak, ¨is the fact that it´s so unmistakably and aggressively a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley´s tower, in the ¨Epipsychidion,¨which, if I remember rightly-

¨Seems not now a work of human art,

But as it were titanic, in the heart

Of earth having assumed its form and grown

Out of the mountain, from the living stone,

Lifting itself in caverns light and high.¨

No, no; there isn´t any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life. Since the days of William Morris that´s a fact which we in England have been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men have solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts, cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance, and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own ¨as it were titanic¨ charm. W now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?.¨

Abtei im Eichwald. Oil on canvas by Caspar David Friedrich. Google images 

Painting by Frank Forsgard Manclark, 'The Leith Artist' - Romantic Edinburgh. edinphoto.org.uk

Advances on vertical urban agriculture

Figure 12: Project for West Haymarket, Lincoln, VAST 2008, by Brown, Nelson and Patzlaff, UNL. Rendering. Source: Abel/UNL.

Figure 13: Project for West Haymarket, Lincoln, VAST 2008, by Brodersen, Burke an Stovall, UNL. Rendering. Source: Abel/UNL.

¨Since 2008 a substantial level of urban agriculture has also been included in VAST projects. Already threatened in many countries by drought and reduced capacity, the effects of global warming on food production around the world are likely to hit consumers especially hard in the future, as souring fuel prices in turn raise the cost of importing food from distant sources overseas, which may themselves be sorely stressed by climate change. However, as with trigeneration and other forms of distributed energy, the benefits of closing distances between the points of production and consumption are applicable to any part of the world, as in North America, where great distances typically separate consumers from producers. As fuel costs rise and alternative sources shrink, the economics of producing food within cities on expensive sites will also doubtless become more favorable in future. The growing use of intensive farming techniques such as hydroponics and aeroponics, which greatly increase the efficiency of food production whilst reducing the amount of water and space required, will also ultimately help to lower costs. However, aside from subsidized or experimental projects, the high capital investment entailed in building purpose-designed structures would appear to limit the development of stand-alone vertical farms in cities for some time yet.

The approach to vertical farming in VAST projects has instead been to create flexible spaces for food production within large scale, mixed-use developments where opportunities exist for offsetting the higher costs of providing space for one function against the lower costs of another. This has been combined with on-site systems of water collection and power generation, including, as with some of the UNL and UNSW projects, integrated wind turbines. One team at UNL, for example, capitalized on the favourable conditions in Nebraska for wind power - the state is proudly described locally as the future 'Saudi Arabia of wind power' - filling open spaces between the vertical elements of their design with large arrays of vertical axis turbines, or 'wind harps' (Figure 12). Another UNL team proposed a regular infrastructure of farming towers and wind-turbines combined with multi-functional blocks of space on the city grid that could be extended throughout Lincoln (Figure 13).¨

Project for Barangaroo, Sydney, VAST 2009, by Lei, Guo and Zheng.

Excerpt from the article The Vertical Garden City: Towards a New Urban Topology, by Chris Abel:

http://www.planetizen.com/node/50957

50th Anniversary of the Berlin Wall

Some remaining parts of the Berlin Wall, August 2011

The Berlin Wall has now been torn down for nearly as long (22 years) as it stood (28 years). Yet it was such a powerful symbol of the Cold War that it still evokes a strong response today, a half-century after it was constructed in the summer of 1961.

Germans will gather this weekend (after August 12, 2011) at the spot where the wall stood and reflect on how it shaped their lives and their society. While most of the wall is gone, a section still stands in the center of the city on a street called Bernauer Strasse. When the city was divided, this area was a no-man's land, covered in barbed wire and constantly monitored from watch towers.

NPR's Bilal Qureshi recently visited the street, in what is now one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods. Trams and bikes glide along in front of renovated apartment buildings. And that no-man's land has been turned into a park.

Excerpt and pictures from npr.org

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139561087/remembering-the-berlin-wall-50-years-on

1961

1989

1989

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer launches book

Pampulha Church of São Francisco de Assis in Pampulha, Brazil by Oscar Niemeyer. From http://www.dwell.com/articles/three-buildings-cathy-leff.html

Brasilia Cathedral. From http://ashfieldhansendesign.blogspot.com

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer launches book

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer has launched a book with photos and sketches of the churches and chapels he has designed over his long career.

"The Churches of Oscar Niemeyer" was launched Tuesday night in Rio de Janeiro.

The 103-year-old Niemeyer is responsible for more than 600 modernist projects around the world. They include the sweeping concrete structures that house Brazil's government in the capital of Brasilia, and U.N. headquarters in New York.

Niemeyer has won numerous awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988. He is still working.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Piedras sagradas como hierofanía

Stonehenge. Bajada de mbyers.net

En la mentalidad “primitiva” o arcaica, los objetos del mundo exterior, tanto, por lo demás, como los actos humanos propiamente dichos, no tienen valor intrínseco autónomo. Una piedra será sagrada por el hecho de que su forma acusa una participación en un símbolo determinado, o también porque constituye una hierofanía, posee mana, conmemora un acto mítico, etcétera. El objeto aparece entonces como un receptáculo de una fuerza extraña que lo diferencia de su medio y le confiere sentido y valor. Esa fuerza puede estar en su substancia o en su forma; transmisible por medio de hierofanía o de ritual. Esta roca se hará sagrada porque su propia existencia es una hierofanía: incomprensible, invulnerable, es lo que el hombre no es. Resiste al tiempo, su realidad se ve duplicada por la perennidad. He aquí una piedra de las más vulgares: será convertida en “preciosa”, es decir, se la impregnará de una fuerza mágica o religiosa en virtud de su sola forma simbólica o de su origen: “piedra de rayo”, que se supone caída del cielo; perla, porque viene del fondo del océano. Será sagrada porque es morada de los antepasados (India, Indonesia) o porque otrora fue el teatro de una teofanía (así, el bethel que sirvió de lecho a Jacob) o porque un sacrificio, un juramento, la consagraron. (Mircea Eliade. El Mito del Eterno Retorno. Cap.1)

Piedras incas. Google images

A book about the first lady in architecture

Elizabeth Wilbraham (1632-1705). From http://www.independent.co.uk/a

How could I miss it? Well, of course I didn´t know anything about Mrs Elizabeth Wilbraham, who was Britain´s earliest female architect. And, it´s stated at John Millar´s book that she was ¨the right hand¨ of Christopher Wren. From The Independent, the review of the book ¨First Woman Architect¨, expected to be published in 2012:

Wotton House, is seen related to Buckingham House. Supposedly Wilbraham participated in the design. From http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/

Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham was the first woman architect, and she not only tutored the young genius Christopher Wren, but helped him design 18 of the 52 London churches that were commissioned by him following the Great Fire of London in 1666. This apparently extraordinary claim is due to appear in a book, First Woman Architect, being prepared by the American historian (and ex-Charterhouse public schoolboy) John Millar.

Millar's claims will cause a furore among Wren scholars. "Some," Millar tells me, "have already said I can't be right, simply because they haven't heard of it." Neither, presumably, have Tony and Cherie Blair, who bought the South Pavilion of Wotton House in Buckinghamshire two years ago for £4m – Wotton House being one of Wilbraham's pieces de resistance, according to Millar.

Millar is putting Wilbraham on a pedestal at precisely the moment that British women architects are objecting to being stashed under their professional pedestal: the Royal Institute of British Architects' president-elect, Angela Brady, has launched a campaign to get architectural practices to employ women designers as 50 per cent of their staff; the figure is currently 19 per cent.

But Elizabeth Wilbraham remains a tantalising figure: now you see her, now you don't. She is not mentioned in substantial books about Wren's life and architecture by authors including Paul Jeffrey, Margaret Whinney, Bryan Little, Adrian Tinniswood or, most recently, the slab of research by Lisa Jardine titled On a Grander Scale.

"The Wren connection is problematical, of course," admits Millar. "There is no smoking gun. My book will show what connections there are. Wren had no time to learn architecture until he was 33. Of all the people who could have taught him – and there were very few architects in the UK in the early 1660s – Wilbraham's style is by far the closest to his, based on her documented buildings. The 18 City churches she designed for him share a number of unusual design features with other documented Wilbraham designs – details that don't show up on Wren's other buildings."

In a century when it was inconceivable that any woman should openly pursue a profession, Wilbraham managed to practise architecture more or less secretly, and was centrally involved in the design of up to a dozen houses for her wealthy family.

Keep on reading:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/architecture/elizabeth-wilbraham-the-first-lady-of-architecture-2215936.html

Read more:

http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/critics/the-first-woman-architect/8608009.article

Thames Town: another ghost city in China

Thames Town  is the English name for a new town in Songjiang, about 30 km from central Shanghai, China and situated on the Yangtze River. It is named after the River Thames in England, the United Kingdom. The architecture both imitates and is influenced by classic English market town styles. There are cobbled streets, Victorian terraces, corner shops—empty as in an abandoned film set. Some of the architecture has been directly copied from buildings found in England, including the church (copied from one in Clifton, Bristol) and a pub and fish and chip shop (copied from buildings in Lyme Regis, Dorset).(wikipedia.org)

Thames Town in Songjiang. Wikipedia.org

Thames Town in China. From metagini.com

Thames Town in Songjiang. Wikipedia.org

Another empty street in Thames Town. Picture from contactcollective.blogspot.com

Business Insider brings us a look at another ghost town built to capture the spirit of Britain: Thames Town. To really throw off your bearings, here is the Times of India reporting from Chicago on the Chinese city that conjures old England:

One such city is Thames Town, built as a replica of an Austrian village, Hallstatt, at the cost of $9 billion. It was built in 2006 as part of Shanghai’s “One City, Nine Town” initiative, an attempt to decentralize the city. Today, it’s a ghost town, with empty shops, almost no resident and unused roads.

It has an artificial lake and a few tourists – photographing every building there for the past few years – have been the only sign of human life there.

Blogger triplefivedrew, who visited Thames Town in 2010, likened the place to the set of The Truman Show.

This is a 3D render of what Thames Town was expected to be. Picture from metro.co.uk

First picture and excerpt from Eric Jaffe´s post:

http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/06/21/chinas-british-style-ghost-town/