Brooklyn’s own Gowanus Canal is on the verge of becoming a Superfund site, pretty incredible since my friend was spotted paddling down the Canal in January, clearly at his own peril. The pending Superfund declaration has generated significant debate about how, exactly, the polluted waterway will be remediated. The industrial polluters that once lined the Gowanus are long-gone, but New York City’s own 19th century sewer system, which combines sewage from buildings with stormwater from streets, empties into the Canal and other waterways surrounding the city practically every time it rains. (It has been raining for almost a week straight here, so it’s on my mind.)
ARO Principal Stephen Cassell, and his friend Susannah Drake, Principal at dlandstudio, have a proposal for you – “Sponge Parks” along the Canal that will harness the incredible absorptive power of dirt and plant roots to capture water where it hits the ground, stemming the tide of stormwater that slicks our urban surfaces, building rooftops, sidewalks and roads. I have to admit, the term Sponge Park sounds pretty fun, a place that you might want to hang out in, enjoy the weather and such. It a significant improvement over the industry terminology of bioswales and rain gardens; the former sounding too technical and the latter sounding too age of Aquarius.
Filed under: Green, New York City, Sustainability, Urbanism | Tags: 21st century plowshare, bed stuy meadow, guerilla gardening
I braved the rain on Saturday in support of a beautiful and simple vision – to blanket the vacant lots of New York City’s Bed Stuy neighborhood with native wildflowers. The project’s creators, 21st Century Plowshare, supplied us volunteers with nifty bags filled with a seed/sand mixture and “seed bombs” for throwing over fences (shown here in Kate Glicksberg’s great photo). I am hoping that April showers will work their magic and we will see some sprouts soon. More neighborhood plantings are in the works. And testament to the power of the idea – New York Times coverage here.
Image: Kate Glicksberg via 21st Century Plowshare
Incredibly, all it seemed to take was a few sparks from the Lunar New Year’s celebrations to ignite a 500 foot high tower, part of Beijing’s iconic new CCTV development, designed by Rem Koolhaas of OMA. Thankfully the structure was unoccupied, so we can ponder the figurative meaning of this destruction, and not the mourn the loss of life, surprising considering how close this person got to the blaze.
If the end of the olympic games marked the technical end date of China’s great building boom, this fire has surely marked the symbolic end. This building pair was cutely dubbed the “underpants” and “boot” because of their radical shapes. From some angles, it would appear that the boot was kicking the underpants forward, almost encouraging the CCTV tower, and China by extension, to stride confidently into the future. At the time the building was conceived in 2004, the future was an endless building boom for China, fueled by a surge in US consumer spending. I think we know how that turned out.
A massive urban development, an abundance of cheap labor and financing, a star architect, an ambitious design, a worldwide event, a now vacant tower, a project over budget, a year or more behind schedule, finally a huge burnout. It’s like the program summary of an avant garde opera. Architectural critic Paul Goldberger, recognizing the building’s flair for drama, recently wrote: “a building which I had thought was going to be a pretentious piece of structural exhibitionism—turned out to be a compelling and exciting piece of structural exhibitionism.”
Below, a rendering of the CCTV development in happier times.
Photograph: PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images via Times Online
Architecture’s Ten Best of 2008 by Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker
Why is there a blog dedicated to pictures of people asleep on the subway? In the words of is creator, “Because seeing people fall asleep on the subway is a universal language…” I didn’t realize it, but I have been holding on to this picture that I took on the train back from the airport last summer, just waiting for a site like this. Thanks for the post, Asleep On The Subway! And for letting me know that blogging about micro-topics is a legitimate trend. If you have any doubt, check out my friend’s blog on Round Signs.
I thought I was crazy for trying to bike through the winter, but then Stephan has to go and one-up us all by taking a leisurely paddle down the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn just as temperatures were dropping into the teens yesterday. Nice looking dory. For more information on this handmade boat check out The Free Seas/Mare Liberum.
Image via Gowanus Lounge
Filed under: Urbanism
Shoes are in the news a lot lately. It’s still unclear if the thousands of pairs of shoes that fell off a truck and onto the Palmetto Expressway in Florida this morning was an accident, performance art, or political commentary. The Soles4Souls charity plans to aid in the cleanup effort and re-distribute them, in a more orderly fashion, in Haiti.
Image via: Sun-Sentinel
Architecture can be most intriguing in ruins. 339 Lafayette Street appears as a mirage at the end of a City block – a ghost of New York’s past. Also known as the “Peace Pentagon,” the building at the corner of Bleeker and Lafayette has been home to a number of activist organizations since its purchase by the War Resisters League in 1969. The facade is not particularly distinguished, and the building is unrenovated after 90 years of existence. Motley stacks of books, flags, and signs obscure many windows, and banners, like this one opposing the first Gulf War from 1991, are often strewn across the cornice. The building is just a sort of backdrop for messages – an architectural sandwich board.
Times are tough for peace, and the non-profit institute that owns and operates the building can no longer ignore the estimated value of the property, and its deteriorating condition, and is contemplating a sale. Tenants, unsurprisingly, are protesting.
Image: Ed Hedemann via Peace Pentagon
Artist Tadashi Kawamata conjures up magical childhood memories for many with the construction of his ad-hoc treehouses in Madison Square Park.
Though they are a bit too wee for full grown humans to occupy, the structures (or as the artist likes to refer to them, displacements) form a pleasant juxtaposition when viewed against the surrounding skyline of staid gray office buildings. Each house was constructed on site, board by board, and whimsically adapts to the contours of tree branches. The artist also wants to assure you that no trees were harmed in the making of this artwork. Bark is protected with rubber sleeves, and lumber secured with racheting straps, not nails.
The Treehouses project marks the return of Kawamata’s public art to New York City. In 1992, he famously swathed the decrepit and intriguing Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island in a lacy network of boards. What does it all mean? Kawamata’s work resonates with the public because it sparks the imagination, asking questions, provoking a visceral reaction but but providing few answers. Public and private? The city vs. nature? A commentary on the ephemeral? Homelessness? Perhaps.
A (little) more info on: The Tree Huts blog
Today, 8/8/08, would fall short of auspicious if I failed to post Olympics-related material. So rather than focusing entirely on the Beijing smog, I will cloak my discussion of environmental pollution in the architecture of the much beloved “Bird’s Nest,” the new National Stadium by quirky-tects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Nicolai Oursoussof’s effervescent New York Times review of the building brilliantly skewered the sophisticated architectural allusions and their witty contradictions, so I don’t feel that I should paper over this territory. In his analysis were mentions of other, memorable olympic stadiums, and I think a visual guide of the buildings he covered is in order, as they may be difficult to recall from memory if you are younger than 100. Here you are, and quotes from the article:
“Until now, the number of memorable Olympic stadiums could be counted on one hand. There is Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Stadium, by Werner March, with its imposing ring of stone columns, a symbol of fascism’s absolute disregard for the individual.
In an intentional counterpoint, Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto designed transparent tentlike roof canopies for the 1972 Olympic Stadium in Munich, daring in their structural innovation.
And there is the elegant ring of slender Y-shaped columns supporting Pier Luigi Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport, which was a minor venue at the 1960 Games in Rome.” Nicolai Oursoussof
It appears to me that the Olympic stadiums of old have birthed a rather precocious youngster in the Bird’s Nest, another symbol of an era. Wholly unlike, say, the stadium shown here for the Atlanta games, so undistinguished that no photos are taken of its exterior facade.
Its always a little hard to rate the success of a work of architecture from afar. The flashy close-ups of the Bird’s Nest that accompanied the Times piece are luscious and a little misleading. Contextual photos of the new stadium are hard to come by, which is why I prefer this image below, that shows the swoopy stadium landlocked in a drab sea of staid office buildings. In this photo, the Bird’s Nest really demonstrates its ability, and by inference China’s ability, to briefly flirt with non-conformity, with all things blobular, dynamic and maybe even subversive.
But when the games are over, the citizens of Beijing will likely emerge from the liberating form of this nest, head straight back to their office buildings and work up a smog so thick it may obscure the stadium from view forever. That’s progress.
“‘We could build another Phoenix inside the one we already
have, double the population of the city, and … still have
a population density that is less than it was in 1950,’
[architect Michael Hallmark] says.”
It was a real surprise to read this quote, or even to read thoughtful coverage of urban planning issues at all in the populist paper USA Today this week. High gas prices = densification planing in Phoenix. Everyone moves downtown. Suburbs become cities too. In a generation, our children long to move to the country the way that we longed to leave the suburbs for the cities.
