Dark tourism in Ukraine: the decay of Pripyat

Structures in the exclusion zone, like a backboard with no rims, have been left to nature. Photo Ivan Chernichkin for The New York Times 

PRIPYAT, Ukraine — Nature has done its ruthless work. The main soccer stadium is now a football forest. Birches and poplars have crowded the field, pushed through the asphalt running track, blocked an entrance to the grandstand. Moss grows in clumps on concrete steps and sprouts in rotted wooden seats. Less than two miles away, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded on April 26, 1986. The 50,000 workers and their families who lived here were evacuated by bus, never to return. Pripyat’s apartment blocks became an urban wilderness. The soccer goal posts at School No. 1 are hidden in a thicket of trees, down a leafy path with fresh animal tracks. “The final match of Euro 2012 will be played here to see who is the strongest,” Maxim Orel, a tour guide for Chernobylinterinform, a department of Ukraine’s Ministry of Emergency, said last week with gallows humor at the abandoned central stadium. “The winners will be mutants.” The actual final of the European Championships will be played two hours south, in Kiev, on July 1. During the tournament, Chernobyl is attracting fans of dark tourism, who wear their jerseys and scarves and wary eagerness. And the spew of radiation is being blamed a quarter century later for poisoning a soccer star from Bulgaria.

Keep on reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/sports/soccer/a-visit-to-chernobyl-which-some-athletes-can-recall-firsthand.html

The abandoned Middle School No. 3 decays in Pripyat, Ukraine, part of the contaminated area surrounding Chernobyl. Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

   

 Ghost Town Pripyat once had a population of about 50,000 people. They were given a few hours to evacuate in April 1986.Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

Read more about Pripyat:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/weekinreview/20chernobyl.html

Chernobyl. From http://www.chernobylee.com/blog/new-safe-confinement/

A render for the new Safe Confinement. From http://www.chernobylee.com/blog/new-safe-confinement/2007/09/

A nice architectural canopy in Battery Park City, NY

Sharing from NYTimes.com, an excerpt from Michael Kimmelman's article:

One of the best new works of architecture in New York isn’t a flashy skyscraper or museum but a fairly modest structure, an angular glass canopy over an obscure but busy pedestrian street called North End Way, in the shadow of One World Trade Center no less. Designed by Preston Scott Cohen, the canopy covers 11,000 square feet of an easement in Battery Park City; effectively, North End Way is a north-south passageway or alley, lined with shops and restaurants. Part of what makes this a notable public space is the quality of construction: the granite sidewalk, the lighting, the stainless-steel and glass storefronts, the street furniture. Goldman Sachs, whose headquarters at 200 West Street backs onto North End Way, owns and developed the arcade, which is zoned for public use. But it’s the canopy, which Goldman also commissioned, that formally elevates what is really just a gap between two buildings into something almost as inspired as the nave of a great Gothic cathedral. (....) 

It is composed of three tilting, jagged triangles. Picture giant shards of glass. They filter light gracefully through enameled panes, the light shifting with the passing day. The longest triangle is Mr. Cohen’s big statement: It slices the arcade, which bends toward the south end, along the diagonal. That sweeping diagonal brings together what could otherwise be — precisely because North End Way isn’t straight — a disjointed space. Stretching the length of the easement, the diagonal provides counterpoint to the regular beat of the canopy’s steel ribbing and the modules of 200 West’s facade. This all may sound complicated, but there’s an elegant simplicity to the three triangles slung from the same long wall. Those glass planes explode outward, upward and downward from the horizontal line where the canopy connects to 200 West. The tension between that steady horizontal and the fun-house effects of the triangles is what gives North End Way its architectural drama.

Pictures by Richard Perry, New York Times.

An ancient dolmen used as a cellar

I´m really curious about this image I´ve found in the book FACTS ABOUT CHAMPAGNE AND OTHER SPARKLING WINES, COLLECTED DURING NUMEROUS VISITS TO THE CHAMPAGNE AND OTHER VITICULTURAL DISTRICTS OF FRANCE, AND THE PRINCIPAL REMAINING WINE-PRODUCING COUNTRIES OF EUROPE. BY HENRY VIZETELLY. London, 1879.

It´s an ancient dolmen but you can see a door at the ¨entrance¨ of much modern manufacture. This is an excellent example of  ¨appropriation¨, and change of use. Below, all I could find as a reference: 

 Chevalier of the Order of Franz Josef. Wine Juror for Great Britain at the Vienna and Paris Exhibitions of 1873 and 1878. Author of “The Wines of the World Characterized and Classed,” &c. While visiting the vineyards of Varrains and Chacé we came upon a couple of dolmens—vestiges of the ancient Celtic population of the valley of the Loire singularly abundant hereabouts. Brézé, the marquisate of which formerly belonged to Louis XVI.’s famous grand master of the ceremonies—immortalized by the rebuff he received from Mirabeau—boasts a noble château on the site of an ancient fortress, in connection with which there are contemporary excavations in the neighbouring limestone, designed for a garrison of 500 or 600 men. Beyond the vineyards of Saint-Florent, westward of Saumur and on the banks 147 of the Thouet, is an extensive plateau partially overgrown with vines, where may be traced the remains of a Roman camp. Moreover, in the southern environs of Saumur, in the midst of vineyards producing exclusively white wines, is one of the most remarkable dolmens known. This imposing structure, perfect in all respects save that one of the four enormous stones which roof it in has been split in two, and requires to be supported, is no less than 65 feet in length, 23 feet in width, and 10 feet high.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20889/20889-h/20889-h.htm

A model of New York City carved out of marble

I´m sharing from archpaper.com:

Artist Yukata Sone turned a village of Chinese artisans into urban topographers carving New York City out of marble.(....) As monumental as the solid block appears—it’s 21 ¾ inches by 104 3/8 inches by 33 ½ inches—the dozens of piers and bridges around Little Manhattan (2007- 2009) carved as softly undulating folds render the whole thing eerily buoyant and fleshy—an infrastructural nude.

Read the full article by Julie V. Lovine:

http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5636

Selected pictures of the Bollman´s truss

Simple beam of 50-foot span with three independent trussing systems. Bollman’s use of this method of support led to the development of his bridge truss. This drawing is of a temporary span used after the timber bridge at Harpers Ferry was destroyed during the Civil War. (In Baltimore and Ohio Collection, Museum of History and Technology.)

There´s always this ¨tension¨ between architects and civil engineers, they say that architects do not think too much about structural issues in defense of aesthetics. This is not true, at least for some of us.

Then, we say engineers design without aesthetic principles.

Today, I´ve been enjoying Contributions from The Museum of History and Technology: Paper 36.The Engineering Contributions of Wendel Bollman by Robert M. Vogel and I´d like to share some nice technical designs of old trusses and bridges.

Bollman’s original patent drawing, 1851. (In National Archives, Washington, D.C.)

Bollman skew bridge at Elysville (now Daniels), Maryland, built in 1853-1854. (Photo courtesy of Maryland Historical Society.)

Potomac River crossing of the Baltimore and Ohio at North Branch, Maryland, built in 1856. There are three Bollman deck trusses. (Photo courtesy of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.)

¨The development of structural engineering has always been as dependent upon the availability of materials as upon the expansion of theoretical concepts. Perhaps the greatest single step in the history of civil engineering was the introduction of iron as a primary structural material in the 19th century; it quickly released the bridge and the building from the confines of a technology based upon the limited strength of masonry and wood. Wendel Bollman, self-taught Baltimore civil engineer, was the first to evolve a system of bridging in iron to be consistently used on an American railroad, becoming one of the pioneers who ushered in the modern period of structural engineering.¨ Wendel Bollman’s name survives today solely in association with the Bollman truss, and even in this respect is known only to a few older civil and railroad engineers. The Bollman system of trussing, along with those of Whipple and Fink, may be said to have introduced the great age of the metal bridge, and thus, directly, the modern period of civil engineering. Bollman’s bridge truss, of which the first example was built in 1850, has the very significant distinction of being the first bridging system in the world employing iron in all of its principal structural members that was used consistently on a railroad. The importance of the transition from wood to iron as a structural and bridge building material is generally recognized, but it may be well to mention certain aspects of this change. The tradition of masonry bridge construction never attained the great strength in this country which it held in Europe, despite a number of notable exceptions. There were several reasons for this. From the very beginning of colonization, capital was scarce, a condition that prevailed until well into the 19th century and which prohibited the use of masonry because of the extremely high costs of labor and transport. An even more important economic consideration was the rapidity with which it was necessary to extend the construction of railways during their pioneer years. Unlike the early English and European railways, which invariably traversed areas of dense population and industrial activity, and were thus assured of a significant financial return almost from the moment that the first rail was down, the[Pg 80] Baltimore and Ohio and its contemporaries were launched upon an entirely different commercial prospect. Their principal business consisted not so much in along-the-line transactions as in haulage between principal terminals separated by great and largely desolate expanses. This meant that income was severely limited until the line was virtually complete from end to end, and it meant that commencement of return upon the initial investment was entirely dependent upon the speed of survey, graduation, tunneling, and bridging.¨

North Street (now Guilford Avenue) bridge, Baltimore. In this transitional composite structure cast iron was used only in the relatively short sections of the upper chord. For the long unsupported compression members of the web system, standard wrought-iron angles and channels were built up into a large section. The decorative cast-iron end posts were non-structural. (Photo in the L. N. Edwards Collection, Museum of History and Technology.)

Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad bridge over Quincy Bay (branch of the Mississippi River) at Quincy, Illinois. The pivot draw-span was formed of two Bollman deck trusses supported at their outer ends by hog chains. The bridge was built in 1867-1868 by the Detroit Bridge and Iron Co., Bollman licensee. (Clarke, Account of the Iron Railway Bridge ... at Quincy, Illinois.)

Patapsco River crossing of the Baltimore and Ohio between Thistle and Ilchester, Maryland. (Photo 695, Baltimore and Ohio Collection, Museum of History and Technology.)

Read the full paper:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33912/33912-h/33912-h.htm#Page_99

The Wrong House. The architecture of Alfred Hitchcock

An interesting book for those who love movies and architecture. ¨A must read¨ one.

From the Guardian, by Deyan Sudjic:

Camille Paglia pointed out Hitchcock's continuing architectural obsessions years ago. The architecture critic Steven Jacobs has documented them in detail. Jacobs has examined, shot by shot, Hitchcock's key scenes, used them to draw floorplans and published the results in a book entitled Hitchcock and the Wrong House. It's a remarkable exercise that demonstrates the unpredictable interaction between spaces that can only exist in the film world and those that are more physical and can be realised in the architectural world. (.....)

What makes it so fascinating as a study is that it shows the precise point at which physical reality overlaps with dreamlike images. There are other connections between film and architecture worth pursuing, too. They are both activities that require introversion and extroversion of their practitioners. To make a film, just as to design a building, takes a creative impulse, as well as the business acumen to assemble the finance, and the personality to impose one's will on construction workers, actors and crew.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/20/architecture-cinema-hitchcock-frank-gehry

Picture from google images

Set of Rope. From Eduardo Morais.com

This is an excerpt from the excellent review by Ken Mogg, Australia:

‘Authoritative’ is how I would describe this book. Steven Jacobs, an art historian, lectures on film history at Sint Lukas College of Art, Brussels, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, and on urban studies at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Hitchcock scholar Michael Walker had the pleasure of participating with Jacobs in a recent symposium, and emailed me afterwards: ‘Steven Jacobs knows his stuff’. The Wrong House is more than a taxonomy of the buildings in Hitchcock films, or a small history of interior and exterior design traced in those buildings, or a description of architectural motifs (staircases, windows) that recur in the films. It is all of those, but is finally about filmmaking itself. The stimulus is Hitchcock’s holistic vision which respected the work of numerous skilled colleagues - and Jacobs is clearly up to taking the measure of the visual components of that vision.

As good a film as any to demonstrate what I mean may be the underrated Dial M for Murder (USA 1954). For a start, it reflects both the German and English strains in Hitchcock’s work, present from the start of his career (and whose first two features were in fact shot in Germany). As Jacobs emphasises: “Rather than expressionism, the Kammerspielfilm, which also developed in German film culture of the 1920s, proved influential for Hitchcock’s entire career. … The combination of intimacy, careful exploration of domestic interiors, use of highly charged objects, and mobile camera work … also characterize several of Hitchcock’s films …”. (pp. 16-17) A possible stumbling-block for Jacobs in the case of Dial M for Murder is its diabolical would-be wife-murderer Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) who surely owes his basic devilry to such mastermind figures as Doctor Caligari and Doctor Mabuse, and the Devil himself in Murnau’s Faust (Germany 1926) - that is to say, to the non-Kammerspiel German films.[1] (Gavin Elster in Vertigo [1958] may have a similar provenance.) But of course Wendice’s scale of operations is definitely narrower, more domestic, than theirs. Jacobs’s essential point stands.

At the same time, an emphasis on domesticity - on hearth and home - can’t easily be separated from Hitchcock’s Englishness. John Ruskin had called the Victorian home “a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods” (p. 33) For his part, Hitchcock was always intrigued by the relatively ‘cosy’ nature of English murder. From The Lodger (UK 1926) to Dial M for Murder is a straight line. Perversely, the Warner Brothers managers on Dial M opposed Hitchcock’s hope of shooting the film in London (on location and at the Elstree Studios). They couldn’t see any difference between a Brownstone New York street on their back lot and the characteristic Edwardian mansion houses in Randolph Crescent, Maida Vale, which Hitchcock had earmarked for his fictitious ‘Charrington Gardens’. Still, and despite further problems with what he called the ‘shocking taste’ of his set-dresser, he was able to impose a look on the apartment interior that reflected the Wendices’ sophistication. Jacobs details their many artworks, including a Fragonard-like painting in the bedroom. Furthermore, at one point Margot Wendice (Grace Kelly) leaves her purse on a table where we see art books on Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Bellini, and French Impressionism. The studio now saw fit to issue a press release stating that “because he is a man of taste and culture, Hitchcock hand-picked many of the props, including an original Rosa Bonheur oil painting, long hidden in Warners’ property gallery, and a pair of valuable Wedgewood vases”(p. 107). My guess would be that the holistic Hitchcock dictated that press release himself.

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/23/wrong-house-hitchcock.html

Image from archined.nl

When trees have a negative (?) urban impact

Newcastle, Australia. Image downloaded from http://www.luxuo.com/travel/l

I was working once for a case about trees, beautiful old pines that blocked the view of the City of Los Angeles at a property on hill side. Both homeowners, on the trees' ground and above, were involved in legal issues.

The pines where trimmed (chopped I'd say), they looked like amputated, but the homeowner with the view could see Los Angeles far away and considered the value of his property was increased.

I love cities with trees, my native city, Buenos Aires is full of them, you walk in between trees and it's a nice sensation. Let's see what's going on in Newcastle, Australia: 

 Newcastle, Australia, should be crowned the world capital of tree drama. Residents there in recent months have shown such intense love and complete disdain for trees that one has to wonder whether there's anything else important going on in Newcastle beyond its flora. The latest dose of Newcastle tree-sanity results from a plan to plant 30,000 trees throughout the city. For local politicians, such projects are often an easy way claim credit for something undeniably popular. But in the Stockton section of Newcastle, this seemingly feel-good proposition has brought locals to their feet in protest and put the city council on an unexpectedly hot set of seats. "There are no parts of Stockton, no people in Stockton that are going to benefit from these trees," resident Bob Dein told the Newcastle Herald. It's hard to imagine a neighborhood where more trees would be a bad thing, but for residents of seaside Stockton, new trees mean a reduced view. Dein and about 50 other residents have signed a petition protesting the tree proposal, arguing that the plantings will negatively impact their views of the ocean and, as a result, their property values.

Keep on reading Nate Berg's article:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/05/newcastle-australia-world-capital-tree-drama/1982/

Architectural Record's Cocktail Napkin Sketch Contest 2012

If you are a licensed architect or related professional who practices in the United States, you can enter this remarkable contest. All you need is a white cocktail napkin and pen to demonstrate that the art of the sketch is still alive. Two grand prize winning submissions will be published in the September issue of Architectural Record and winners will receive a box of napkins with their sketch printed on it. Winners and finalists will be seen in our online Cocktail Napkin Sketch Gallery. Deadline is 5:00 PM EST on June 22, 2012.

http://archrecord.construction.com/call4entries/Napkin-Sketch-Contest-2012.asp