The Battle of Alexander at Issus, Albrecht Altdorfer (1529). Europe is in the sun (is it setting or rising?), rendered in brown tones. The east is in a bluish twilight, the zone between sky and Europe, a frame of otherness that made the Renaissance concept of Europe possible.

Paula Z. Segal and Quilian Riano demand that New York City require the corporate owners of Liberty Plaza, a Privately-Owned Public Space, to keep their side of the bargain.

This is some kind of Turing test, right? Well I’m not going to be fooled. The project description was clearly generated by a script thats been hoovering up generic project descriptions from eVolo competition entries:

a deployable system that can reconfigure into any environment… a new definition of a campus… proto-design agenda of the Design Research Laboratory… pursuing architectural distinctions and differentiation to have embedded cognitive intelligibility… dividing the tower into groupings of program and open space, core articulation, and by activating open spaces with horizontal connections… distinct hierarchy of spaces and their connections, thus allowing the micro to develop the macro. The spaces connect based upon circulation patterns, room adjacencies and student capacities…

It appears to be a project carried out at the Architectural Association under Patrik Schumacher, who stirred the pot with an op-ed for the Architectural Review complaining about excessively fictional student projects. Is this his idea of an alternative? It doesn’t seem to be any more connected to reality, and has the added demerit of being completely boring.

Lebbeus Woods:

Hangar 17 at the JFK International Airport in New York City contains some of the strangest objects we might expect to encounter under the description artifacts. Twisted steel beams; battered and burned cars and ambulances; odd personal items bearing the traces of violence; items from a mall once lively with customers but no more—this is the stuff of many possible memorials to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, collected and preserved for that very purpose. The strangest thing is, this hangar, in all its unpretentious modesty may be the best memorial of its kind to the event that will ever be devised.

The images, by Francesc Torres show stacks of branching steel facade columns, merchandise from the WTC shops, business cards and drawings found amid the wreckage, and strange “composites”: disparate matter melted and fused into lumps. More images by Torres for National Geographic here.

Echoing Shades, Michael Johansson, 2011.