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.

Mini-trend warning - New York City is having a love affair with all things Nordic. I am basing this on three things that I like, two things somewhat design-y in nature:

1. I just saw the Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, featuring a curious, streamlined set design reminiscent of a postwar cruise ship, or repurposed military vessel. This is a tale based in Denmark after all. It would have been nice to throw a classic Jacobsen or Panton piece of furniture in there, it would have been right at home. Even the weird puppet in this picture - part of the play within the play - made sense in a quirky Scandinavian sort of way.

2. Speaking of quirky Scandinavians and streamlined design, New Yorkers flocked to the new Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn this weekend. I didn’t feel like camping out in front of the store for a week, but someone else was lucky enough to be greeted by cheerful Ikea employees at the door and took this picture. I think they are beating ballons together, like at a baseball game? And singing? A tribute to good and inexpensive design perhaps?

3. My friend Siggi’s Icelandic yogurt is called Siggi’s Skyr. Plus all the architect’s in my firm are mad for it, so maybe this item is design-related too.

Its hard to get the media’s attention these days. They are pretty crisis focused. Especially when it comes to architectural stories. If you live in New York City you would think that all architects, engineers and construction crews are hopelessly inept and that our buildings collapse dramatically all the time, most of them before they are even completed. Sometimes you have to do something a little sensational to garner media attention or raise awareness of change for the good.

The Pink Project is a bold first move by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation. Leave it to a media superstar to create some seriously attention getting architecture. Pink fabric houses - supported by aluminum frames and dramatically lit by PV-powered florescent tubes, dot the otherwise abandoned landscape of the industrial canal in the lower 9th ward. They are symbols of the 150 real homes to be built by the foundation in this community. Flashy move for the media? Sure. But they are a much more potent symbol of hope for forgotten New Orleans then the FEMA trailers.

Image via: Make It Right, photo courtesy of Mavis Yorks

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.

Looks like Washington D.C. will be taking the honors as the first stateside city to launch a real bicycle sharing program. After a pilot program in NYC last summer, I was hoping that my hometown would take the lead. Its hard not to get excited about these sleek looking racks and wheels though, very European.

This weekend The Washington Post marvelously captured the general public’s paranoia about new street furniture, bicycling, sharing, socialist enterprises, and new things in general, when they wrote of the new bike racks:

“Yet another homeland security device?
Actually, they are being installed to make us more like people abroad rather than protect us from them.”

Remain calm.

image: via The Washington Post

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

Thousands of curiousity seekers, including this one, braved a chilly December day to view a handful of paintings and prints by the mysterious artist Banksy in a claustrophobic townhouse cum gallery in Chelsea. Known for his elaborate street art, known for sneaking his paintings into museums, known for not being known - he is not particularly known for gallery shows, and it was pretty obvious why. His work, like that of most graffiti artists, dies inside a gallery, where it is separated from the street, from buildings, from its context. Graffiti is most interesting to me, because it is the only form of art entirely dependent on architecture as a medium.

There were two compelling ideas presented here that were giggly spoofs on art and commerce. Next to each work was a fairly astronomical price (at least I believe so) scrawled directly on the wall, in pencil. Kind of like a discount store. My favorite piece was a handwritten note, which described a “promotion” of sorts. If you purchased a Banksy piece, an identical work would be installed in a public place by the artist. Now that is giving back!

“To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder,” or so Bernard Tschumi famously said. This image from his book Architecture and Disjunction pretty much haunted my thoughts and dreams as an undergrad. I was constantly thinking, why am I not radical enough to show a picture of someone being pushed out of a window, or allow someone to push me out of a window, or push someone out of a window?

It turns out I was just in the wrong discipline. I should have been an “urban acrobat.” Why push someone else out of a window when they can push themselves? All of the fun with none of the anger. Check out this fantastic youtube video on urban acrobatics, or parkouring. These are the kinds of spontaneous “events” that architects fantasize about, and their lawyers have nightmares about.