Came across this old field recording from my brief stint abroad and thought I should share it. I remember the guy playing guitar in the background being obnoxious at the time but given some distance the music seems perfect. Bonus 10 points if you can tell me what the people to my left are talking about.

Jean long ago sent me the thrillingly titled “Transportation and Urban Development in Houston, 1830-1980,” written by Peter Papademetriou of the Houston Metro. Thank you, Jean. I just went back through it and read the really early parts, and I have a passage to share with you:

As a result of [expanding] commercial traffic, early improvements in transportation facilities were undertaken by private businessmen… in 1850 a group of merchants [including William Marsh Rice] formed the Houston Plank Road Company, a plan to construct a road of two-inch oak or three-inch pine planks. However, growing interest in the railroads led to cancellation of the project and through the 1870’s even the streets in the town of Houston itself remained dirt, except for an ill-fated shell paving project of 1858 which contributed to the phenomenon of dust rising in clouds, a complementary nuisance to the mud which otherwise plagued city residents. (p.7)

It’s tempting to imagine wooden highways stretching as far as the eye can see, met by offramps white with conchs and cowries. The reality is absent or, in any case, far less compelling, but it does make one salient point– the technologies we use for paving are not self-evident or even necessarily the best. We tried wood and calcite, and then concrete and asphalt somehow stuck. But when the overpasses start crumbling, maybe they’ll get replaced by stabilized earth, or close-mowed turf, or piezoelectric thermoplastics. If we’re supposed to imagine jetpacks and spaceports, why shouldn’t the surface under our feet undergo the same prospective futurity?

So another Paul Rudolph house is threatened with demolition. The owners still claim to love it, but it’s just not big enough for them any more. Apparently they’ve gotten much larger over the years. But this time, two men come to the rescue, cutting it precisely in half, trimming off three inches so it will fit on some trucks and removing it from its beachfront location to some ex- summer camp in the mountains.

Now, there are lots of sides to take in this story, from a simple congratulatory stance to disappointment to appreciation of the surreality of making a building exactly three inches shorter and completely removing it from context. These are all valid positions and emotions, but what each instance of this kind of story brings up to me is what provides the value in residential architecture. Many famous residential structures were never homes to begin with– they were “pavilions.” And other ones (the Glass House, pretty much everything by Corbusier) now exist mainly as an odd combination of personal monument, history museum, and technological archive. But what about those famous homes that people stubbornly insist on still using as domiciles? Aren’t they producing their own kind of domestic value? If a famous house becomes a museum, has it succeeded or failed?

Rudolph, like Lautner, is a good test case for this stuff because, in the midst of the architectural expression, all of this complex geometry and rhythm of line, there was a genuine interest in the domesticity of the space itself. Rudolph himself once said that a famous tensioned-roof lakehouse he designed was a failure because the reverse bow to the roof made the spaces look outward, and houses should always look in on themselves, on the hearth. I don’t want to sound too nostalgic here, but what paradigm-defining offices operating today are trying to simultaneously push the boundaries of practice while also developing and satisfying a genuine interest in the lives and home-spaces of their clients? I kind of feel that at some point, while being taught the history of modern architecture through the Villa, we forgot that people used to live in these houses.

Went to our favorite beach again today, and on the way back, I realized that another reason I like the beach so much is that the drive there takes you through the Ballona wetlands.

This area has fortunately been protected from development, and exists as an immense marshy plain, bisected by Playa Vista road, and bordered by the marina, cliffs, the 90 overpass, and the hideously ugly 40-foot wall of the Playa Del Rey lofts. With the condo towers of Marina Del Rey like foothills in the distance, it’s like having a scale model of the original valley in your own backyard. As can be seen above this swath of negative space is oriented such that it collects the sunsets every day, washing its interior with smog-enhanced reds and oranges. Somewhere between the waterlogged ground plane, the sulfuric sky full of pelicans, the immense void and a single road both scenic and free of traffic, a uniquely local public space has collected. It is primarily a vital component of the local ecosystem, but with all of the fencing and culverts helping the wetlands to regain a foothold and build in biodiversity, I prefer to think of it as a gigantic piece of land art, LA’s own Smithson. A bird/plant/amphibian/sunlight collecter for the West Side.

When I first heard about cityLAB, Dana Cuff and Robert Sherman’s urban futures research program at UCLA, it took me almost a year until I actually went to their website and looked at the work, today. Not knowing the work of either person, I was expecting some well researched but MOR urban solutions– streetscape improvement, transportation solutions, you know the drill.

What I found was so much more. Two of their projects in particular, LA2016 and PropX: lessons learned, are a delirious combination of projective urbanism and dystopian realism that manages not to flinch away from the big decisions while refusing to mediate between poles. It is sustainable without being green, specific without being perscriptive and comprehensive without being totalitarian. The work frequently toes the line between solution and dystopia, and dances around the difficult questions by posing its own, better ones. It may sound from this description that I love their work. A more accurate description is that I am terrified by it.

Inverted pyramid megastructures above the freeways, inhabitable beach mutations, and postapocalyptic tract housing inhabited by the last existing motorheads– sometimes it’s more exciting than realistic, but we have plenty of realistic urbanisms, thank you. So, all I have to say, is take a look at it, and laugh, promote, or recoil in horror. I think they’re looking for all three of those reactions.

___

On the other end of the spectrum, also strangely compelling for entirely different reasons, is the UCLA Urban Simulation Team. This group is dedicated to making a rediculously detailed 3d model of, well, all of Los Angleles. “The model is accurate enough for the graffiti on the walls and signs in the windows to be legible.”

These models, built on top of the 3d GIS surveys, are intended for use by urban planners, emergency response teams, transportation planners, and, in a slightly more sinister fashion, security consultants. More interestingly, they claim that “this system is being extended to support a client server capability which will allow the seamless interactive navigation of the entire Virtual Los Angeles Model… while simultaneously supporting hundreds of remote interactive users.”

So what do we have here? An accurate, detailed, comprehensive 3d model of one of the largest cities in the world, that can be used simultaneously by many people in real-time. I think sometimes the future creeps up on us because the websites look boring. I’ll leave it up to you to imagine what you most want done with this waiting terabyte of virtual city, but personally I’m starting my Godzilla model tomorrow.

My readership of the New York Times is sometimes challenged by articles, usually ones in the House and Home section, or Style, or this time, in Travel, where an article just appeared about the tribulations of the second home.

(emphasis added):

“The vegetable garden — the production of too many vegetables, and the guilt of not eating them,” said Susan E. Bell, a paleontologist from New York City, who with her husband, Byron, an architect, owns a house he designed in Woodstock, N.Y. “And then, of course, all the effort it takes to persuade the house guests to take the vegetables with them. And then the guilt if you don’t have house guests: you feel guilty not to be sharing your house with your friends, who are stuck in the city.”

Do the Bells, like so many others, eventually want to retire to their weekend house, which is on 50 acres between two waterfalls and has 96 windows, some of them unwashed since it was built? “Oh, no,” Mr. Bell said. “We want to retire to New York City — and relax!”

I am convinced that many of the life-style writers at the NYT just make up people when they need anecdotes. This, in my world, does not exist. There are no paleontologists with 50 acre compounds in Woodstock, and they certainly don’t complain about their largesse if they do exist. This sort of interview creates some kind of freakish magnetic affect that makes me want to go back to NY while still avoiding it completely.

There’s a new article in Metropolis online in the “speak truth to power” category. And while I agree with most of the (rather broad) formulations–the most famous does not equate with the most talented, iconic buildings are often one-dimensional– I really can’t rally behind the whole argument.

First off, the article seems to be equates “starchitecture” with theory-driven unbuilt work, which seems to me to be patently untrue. The most recognisable architects of the moment, Gehry and Liebskind,have been spending the last decade (or at least the last five years)building continuously and steadily. And while I appreciate a trulycritical review of theICA Boston, I don’t think that Diller Scofidio + Renfrocan really be fit into the star category, no matter how you shove. Maybe among students and critics, but certainly not the general populace.

I also think it’s somewhat backhanded to say the building is slapdash or hackneyed– this is an enormously complex project that pushes the boundaries in a number of ways (especially for
Boston). In addition, an even cursory perusal ofDS+R’s work would point to the fact that this firm actuallyhas a rather deep understanding of the way buildings work on an urban scale; whatever problems the street front of this building has, to simply attribute it universally to the fame of the firm in general is the kind of lazy criticism the article started out fighting against. It
seems to me that perhaps this particular critic doesn’t like a)Starchitects or b)Conceptulaized practice, and is attempting to conflate the two to kill two birds with one stone.

An one last note– any kind of blanket criticism of work by any firm based upon it’s fame inside or outside the profession ignores a very important fact– these offices are chock-full of the smartest graduates from the best schools in the last five years. They’revertiable hives of budding archigenious. Despite the failings of any particular Gehry or OMA project, there is usually a shocking amount of good idea per square yard, if you look closely enough. In my opinion, the mediocrity ofstarchitecture is less often due to the ego of the principal* and more often the result of a combination of incredible complexity of program, high expectations, and too much importance placed upon iconic status or innovation for innovation’s sake. Such buildings become overworked or hackneyed because of all of the attention paid, not despite it.

*Unless your first name is Zaha or your last name is Nouvel.

A (selected) list of names to prove why I could never be an announcer or host on any NPR program, local or national (nasal voice and stutter aside.)

Marin Alsop
Karen Grigsby Bates
Kajon Cermak
Thea Chaloner
Farai Chideva
Andrei Codrescu
Korva Coleman
E.J. Dionne
Mandalit del Barco
Priya Finnemore
Corey Flintoff
David Folkenflik
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro
Tre Giles
Tom Gjelten
Vertamae Grosvenor
Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Danyell Irby
Ina Jaffe
Xeni Jardin
Sasha Khoka
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Vy Pham
Ofeibea Quist-Arcton
Guy Raz
Kai Risdahl
Cokie Roberts
Lakshmi Singh
JC Swiatek
Neda Ulaby
Nick van der Kolk
Doualy Xaykaothao
John Ydstie
Daniel Zwerdling

I am afraid that my name is simply too boring.

I thought that post was a little lame so here’s some augmentation:

The NYTimes graphic department has done another fantastic job, this time describing the new supercollider in Europe. I say “Europe,” because the tunnel, 300 feet down and nearly 17 miles in circumfrence, goes beneath both France and Switzerland. It’s the Twin Cities of subatomic particles. It’s funny, what with the “primordial fire”, acceleration to the speed of light, and 7000-ton cameras, what I’m most impressed by is the idea of a 17 mile underground circle. Makes me want to go for a run– who wants to be in the supercollider half marathon? You start with your backs facing, pass each other once, and end with a photo-collision finish.

I’m kind of surprised that nobody has yet written a popular analysis of what different social networking sites say about our relationship to different creative media. So I’m going to attempt an off-the-cuff index, right now (in order of the complexity of involved technology):

text: people apparently find it the most natural to either produce public journals, or convey in a viral fashion tiny bits of social information. Not much fiction, not much strict journalism, but a whole lot in-between.

photos: once again, not a terribly surprising outcome: most of the action is in the form of complusive indexing, sharing, and commenting. One interesting note is that the division between pro and amateur is blurring, as home operators get flashier websites and pros start making “high-caste” flickr groups. You don’t see Michael Gondry posting on YouTube.

visual art: other than websites themselves, the bulk of popular graphic design appears to be in the Clever T-Shirt area. Go fig.

audio: the “podcast revolution” hasn’t exactly exploded– i think everyone underestimated how difficult it is to write, perform, and edit an entertaining and cohesive audio narrative. In addition to the more prosaic mp3 blog concept, a more interesting phenomenon is the almost immediate and universal adoption of MySpace by performers, remixers, and fans. There were many previous attempts to make a social networking site specifically for performers and bands, but what this ignored is that there’s no reason to have a presence if you can’t contact the people who buy your records.

and, video: was anyone else surprised that there is more collective national skill in editing video than audio or writing? YouTube does have a soft core of crappy-resolution digicam videos, but the outer shell is finely-crafted amateur commercials, shorts, and music videos. I guess it shouldn’t be that shocking– my generation’s favorite childhood toy might have been the parent’s video camera. How many tons of magnetic tape have been used to immotalize 1980’s puppet shows and child-auteur plays?

The only quick conclusion I can draw from all of this is that media are not interchangable, and that some are more naturally social. Text is probably at the bottom of the barbaric yawp list right now, actually, superceded by the flickr photoset– probably from the temptation of the biggest vacation slideshow ever made. There’s also the wonderful fiction of objectivity created by an image. So you heard it here, folks– if you have something to say to 10 million strangers, say it with a picture. Or even better, a moving picture. It’ll last longer.