Melissa Hope Matlins

Much ado has been made over Eliasson’s Waterfalls, and after seeing them at night I can confirm that at least some of the hype is justified. A leisurely stroll to the Eastern-most end of Grand Street at dusk, and you are treated to these lovely views of falling water along the promenade, mystically lit. One waterfall south of the pier is close up and clearly visible, and another peeks into view under the bridge in the distance. It just might be the biggest temporary piece of public art in New York City since Christo’s Gates.

Summertime at the Union Square GreenMarket is high season for both produce and people watching, as evidenced by my two photos from a prior Saturday. I do have a thing for radishes and there are lovely pink and white french breakfast varieties to be found there. Its also a bit cute to see city-born babies ogle their first fields of green, even if it is a plant shop atop pavement.

I make a really simple salad of chilled and thinly sliced radishes, dressed with salt/pepper/olive oil/balsamic vinegar/lemon.

There has been a spate of weird weather in New York City lately. Its kinda messing with my sleep. When I saw this heavy fog blanket over the skyline early one morning I thought it was a unique chance to test drive a new camera. It captured the white out conditions pretty well. This is the view from my balcony where I normally can see the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building.

The row of tenements along East Broadway looked nice and eerie too. After a few snaps I headed back to bed.

Last fall, shortly after hearing that the famed art/performance venue Galapagos would be closing, Dan and I put together a mock “proposal” for their site as part of the Riviera Real Estate exhibit at the Riviera Gallery. The exhibit pretty convincingly transformed the Gallery space into a real estate office, with agents, keys on the wall and imaginative listings in the window and on their website. And thus The Darwin was born, a new, luxury condominium atop the former Galapagos building, where “only the strong shall thrive.”

The building features a “reclaimed” Uraguayan rainforest in the lobby, in-loft waterfalls, a rooftop zoo, solar concentrators for tanning, and my personal favorite amenity, an in-pool shark tank so you can “swim with the sharks.”

It was a lighthearted way to raise issues about green living, buildings as status symbols, and rampant luxury development, especially in this part of town. I was reminded of our little tongue-in-cheek project when I read on Gothamist that a new performance venue will be moving into the former Galapagos space, and will be called Natural Selection. I’m kind of glad no one took our condo idea seriously. I thought it had a lot of potential.

As a side note, there is a lovely bar, Oulu, with a greenwall facade in Williamsburg now.

It pains me to mock sustainability initiatives, even when they are as unambitious and misguided as this one. However the launch of the “green” metrocard, green only in color, has come a little too fast on the heels our failed congestion pricing plan for me to pass up the opportunity. The congestion pricing plan was a holistic, transformative solution, and a prime example of the type of visionary thinking required to combat global climate change. The MTA’s proposed renewable energy initiatives can barely be called a patchwork solution. A close look at the language used shows that the initiatives aren’t even actionable.

For earth day, ONE day, the MTA will burn time and money to stock all vending machines with special “green” metrocards. Not cards made with recycled content. Not cards that are recyclable. Heck, if they are purchased as unlimited cards, they aren’t even reusable. Just special cards. With green logos. For earth day. They didn’t even bother to put a tree or a globe on them, how insensitive to our planet!

The poorly designed cards are meant to be a symbol of MTA’s renewable energy initiatives. Initiative goals include things like drawing a whopping 7% of MTA energy needs from renewable sources. Before 2015. Seven years from now. Other points are not so much goals as suggestions from the MTA to themselves, using language like “will evaluate ways to utilize water harvested from the subway system” and “will examine the feasibility of providing 14% of the power (at one bus depot!) from wind turbines.” Far be it from me to stand defiant in the face of progress, but who wants to buy yet another slip of plastic to commemorate these lackluster initiatives?

Via: Gothamist

From the controversial musician Rufus Wainwright comes an evening to remember - on June 21st, from 12pm to 12am, a “Blackout Sabbath.” This would be 12 hours spent by you, and whomever you think you could tolerate for 12 straight hours, without your TV, cellphone, computer, air conditioning or even lights, no electricity use at all. Suggestions for activities include making a list of things that you could do in the coming year to help the environment. I think I might try a picnic. This idea not only resonates with me for sustainable reasons, but because I remember the East Coast blackout and the fun was had without the distractions of electricity. I remember how lovely and quiet and truly dark it was at night! The Blackout Sabbath also recalls the true meaning of the Sabbath, to rest, and to give our busy gadgets that are such extensions of ourselves a break as well. Mark your calendars.

Art loves Miami. Art loves Music. Art loves design. But mostly Art loves New York. There were a great number of these endearing tag lines meant to categorize a plethora of events in and around the Art Basel fair this year. The one thing that everyone seemed to have in common though, was New York. “Where are you from?” meant what borough. When you see your New York City neighbors under the umbrella nearby, you get the funny feeling that you are being followed.

Can you really blame them? If I told you that Art Basel Miami was just like a fun weekend in New York City, but with more art and less clothes, wouldn’t you want to go? There is so much partying going on that the seriousness of the enterprise tends to get overlooked. Which is why it was refreshing to see a few brave designers convey a shred or two of meaning.

One of my favorite works, unsurprisingly, was an architectural one. Shigeru Ban, best know for his cardboard tube architecture and laudable disaster relief housing, designed an elegant pavilion for Artek. Constructed entirely from recycled plastic beams, it was one of the few things at the fair with a sustainable agenda.

As Art Basel is mostly about looking, check out my slideshow for more images (and commentary.)

I attended my first Pechakucha in Tokyo last year, and was introduced to a revolutionary new format for architectural presentations: 20 images, 20 seconds each. Abbreviated pronouncements and diverse presenters are hallmarks of Pechakucha nights, now held around the world. Their popularity was evidenced by the line around the block for Pechakucha New York last month.

The doors of the historic St. Marks Church were closed in the faces of so many eager young architects when the event reached capacity. The lucky ones to make it in were treated to a Smorgasbord of presentation styles and designs, sometimes engaging, sometimes inspiring, and sometimes incomprehensible. And the incomprehensible presentations were not due to the poor acoustics of the chapel space.

Jessica Root from Treehugger delighted the audience with images of earth friendly sex toys, and some solar panels and windmills of course. 2×4’s t-shirt store project was another crowd-pleaser, although someone forgot to remind this firm (and Enrique Norten) about the 20 slide rule. Or the organizer couldn’t find a shepard’s crook to drag them offstage when their presentation time ran out.

Mariah Robertson’s purposefully disheveled performance piece titled “Neuroplasticity & the Perception of Time and Space” was an enjoyable mockery of the time limitation, employing a soundtrack of annoying “slide change” beeps to move everything along. She has also rediscovered the delights of the overhead slide projector - a nice display method that really worked in the barrel-vaulted space. The prize for “The Most Flagrant Use of Architectural Terminology” goes to Andrew Zago from Zago Architecture, for inventing a total of 34 words during the course of his seven minute presentation.

Good things came to those who patiently waited it out, because around ten o’clock Annie Choi, the infamous author of a scathing open letter to architects, took the stage and presented a series of responses to her letter from both enemies and fans. A snapshot of one of the criticisms is here (via PechakuchaNY), and more can be found on her website.

Decasia, an immersive extravaganza created by filmaker Bill Morrison and scored by Michael Gordon, is self-described as a “highbrow rave.” The multi-media event centers around a montage of deteriorating footage from the 1930’s, subject to extensive nitrate degradation, which creates fantastical bubbles, static, fading and otherwordly effects. Through a series of fortiutous circumstances, I found myself on the cold floor of the Angel Orensanz Foundation building, a formerly abondoned synagogue on the lower east side, with the flu, swaddled in my coat and clutching a ginger ale, experiencing this film. It was strangely appropriate environment to be ill in. The synagogue was built for this exact kind of all-consuming performance piece, and the orchestra was set up in the round along the balconies, behind three large screens hung for the projections.

I left with an a renewed curiousity about the materiality of film. Nitrate based film is a curiousity from a materials standpoint - as it is exceptionally hazardous, even deadly. Cellulose nitrate was used as a film base from the birth of cinema in the 1880’s through 1951, when Kodak, the major producer of commercial films, began manufacturing acetate exclusively. Nitrate is both extremely flammable and sensitive to decomposition, which makes it wonderful for artistic purposes, like the Decasia film, but a nightmare from a preservation standpoint. Nitrate decay generates a flammable gas, and projection fires (think of the memorable scene in Cinema Paradiso) were a common and tragic occurance. One byproduct of a Nitrate fire is oxygen - so the fire fuels itself. Nitrate film collections are now classified as hazardous materials, stored in partitioned fireproof rooms. The few theaters in the country which show them must pass rigorous safety tests, including encasing the film completely and extensively fireproofing booths.
For more information on Decasia: http://channel.creative-capital.org/project_270.html
Photos: www.ridgetheater.org

Tan Dun’s The First Empeoror, regardless of whether or not it is the proported second coming of opera, is an architectural spectacle of the highest order. At the center of the restrained set design is a monumental stair of massive blocks, which serve as floor, wall and ceiling, sometimes simultaneously.