Itinerant Urbanist

Steve Jobs as photographed by Jim Wilson of the New York Times.

“And it came to pass, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses’s hand…” Okay, it’s only one tablet in Steve Jobs’ hand, and its called the iPad, not the iTablet. And we don’t yet know whether it’s going to help the publishing industry save itself from itself.

I just want to point out that early last year, when I wrote about the unfortunate aspects of the Kindle (allegiance to Amazon, weird pointy corners) and my disappointment with the limitations of the E-Ink substrate (no color), I said a little prayer to Apple:

As I ride the slower Amtrak train home through a dark winter landscape, I’m feeling far less sanguine about technological magic. The paperback book I’m reading suddenly feels like a marvel of efficiency. For the Kindle, the Sony, the Plastic Logic, or any of the other iterations we’ll be seeing in the near future to supplant 600 years of habit, the challenge is to do what Apple has done: design a device for readers that is beautiful and functional enough to become a cultural totem, and ensure that it not only connects seamlessly to a brilliantly organized, bottomless market of written material but that it also allows access to every other market on the planet. Apple did it once. Per­haps it can do it again.

Has Apple answered my prayer? Maybe. My first impression: it looks a little big, a hardback, not a paperback. But it might big enough to properly display a glossy magazine layout. 1.5 pounds. $500 to $800. Hmmm.

An afterthought: Last year, when I went up to visit the E-Ink people in Cambridge, MA, I was entertaining an elaborate fantasy about producing a magazine for, if not the Kindle, then one of the larger format electronic readers like the iRex or the Plastic Logic. Then I learned that E-Ink doesn’t do color. So I was hoping that the Steve Jobs dog and pony show yesterday would feature a state of the art electronic magazine and even an iTunes store for magazines, or individual articles. Maybe the device could be used for those things, but it doesn’t seem like it’s at the top of anyone’s list of priorities out there in Cupertino. Too bad.

Haitian house at Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village, Americus, Georgia

I’ve been thinking a lot about Haiti which, beyond donating a little money to my NGO of choice, is really all I can do. I have visited a couple of places where natural disasters have erased entire towns, the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina and Greensburg, Kansas after the 2007 tornado, so I can envision wholesale destruction. But these were smallish towns in a big, wealthy country, not the capital city of a small, impoverished country. I keep looking at the pictures and reading the death toll estimates — 40,000, 100,000, 200,000 — and I can’t begin to comprehend what the numbers mean.

I’ve been thinking about Haiti and remembered this house. It was on display at Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village in Americus, Georgia. I saw it in 2003, when I was on my road trip for my book, The Perfect $100,000 House. It was the house that Habitat was supposedly building in Haiti and I thought it was one of the few architecturally distinctive things that the organization has ever done. I fell in love with it and praised it in my book, but I have no idea how many of them were actually built. The house was designed to be hurricane resistant, so the vaulted concrete roof is steel-reinforced, but I suspect the concrete block walls lack the rebar or added structure that would allow it to withstand an earthquake.

Anyway, do-gooders including Habitat, Architecture for Humanity, and Article 25 are gearing up for the rebuilding effort that will need to begin shortly. I have no doubt that these organizations will come up with inspiring prototypes for housing that is hardened against both earthquakes and hurricanes, but the real question here (as it was and still is in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast) is who will build? Who has the money and the will to rebuild hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of homes, mostly for desperately poor people, and do it properly? Are we talking about wholesale housing projects or is there a way to assemble a cheap kit of parts that would allow individual Haitians to rebuild their own modest dwellings but build them stronger?

P.S. I thought this LA Times piece about Haiti’s substandard construction was also worth reading along with the similar NY Times piece.

P.P.S. I’ve got a new Metropolis column up about the naked hotel, and a Travel + Leisure piece about CityCenter in Las Vegas. Plus a T+L web thing about the world’s most beautiful airports.

Obama in Bushwick.

1. Early in 2004, I began entertaining myself by sending goofy pictures from the White House website to a friend in Tokyo.

2. So I wound up writing my Metropolis column about the Bush administration’s use of its website, “A President And His Dog”, published in August 2004.

3. The column was included in Looking Closer Five: Critical Writings in Graphic Design, published in 2007.

4. For some reason, Gong Szeto, an old friend and a brilliant web designer, read that column in August of 2009.

5. And, in September, he suggested to Julie Lasky, editor of Change Observer, that she commission a sequel, an essay about the Obama administration’s website.

6. So I wrote one. In December. And it’s now up at Change Observer.

7. Not that I’m nostalgic or anything, but the Bush website made for a more amusing essay.

Engelbert Humperdinck meets Daniel Libeskind.

I keep thinking I should say something. I should list the highs and lows of the past decade or make predictions for the new one. And, yeah, I could cobble together a pretty good roster of momentous architectural events of the early 21st century and make a few guesses about what might happen in the near future. And I might just do that. Soon.

The photo above was taken in October, when I was in Las Vegas reporting a story about the recently opened CityCenter complex for the February issue of Travel + Leisure. And it seems like as good an illustration as any that the idea of progress, that human knowledge and skills move relentlessly forward, is not quite right.

The jaggy, future-ish building in the background is the Crystals shopping mall, with architecture by Daniel Libeskind and interiors by David Rockwell. In the foreground is the Strip, where every pop cultural moment that ever was lives on for all eternity. Engelbert Humperdinck is there, as are Donnie and Marie, Garth Brooks, Sha Na Na, and the Kingston Trio. Nothing and no one ever dies.

Crystals is actually Libeskind’s second shopping mall. His first is in Bern, Switzerland. As it turns out, the architect, famous for his museums and his highbrow blather, is very good at malls. And his showboat architectural style actually makes perfect sense on The Strip.

And, of course, Libeskind has done some conceptual thinking about the shopping mall. Here’s what he said when I asked him about museums versus malls:

A luxe mall with a Louis Vuitton store as its flagship was not what I would have anticipated a decade ago when I visited Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. I guess what I’m saying is that predictions, especially the ones that suppose that change is in any way linear, are generally wrong. The future — whether we’re talking a decade, or a century, or a millennium — is more like a cavalcade of lateral shifts. And, hey, maybe Libeskind is on to something; maybe the thing to look at is typological, rather than technological or stylistic, change.

More later.

p.s. Speaking of progress that isn’t progress, here’s a my Metropolis column about the Las Vegas Monorail.

p.p.s. Happy New Decade!!!

In early 2008, I was in Dubai on assignment for Travel + Leisure and found myself struggling with the logic of the place. People –architects, developers, publicists, taxi drivers — kept explaining to me that Dubai was building endless towers, theme parks, artificial islands, entire districts (like the Waterfront development with its projected population of 1.5 million) because it was going to emerge as the world’s leading financial center, displacing cities like London, New York and Hong Kong. A new planet would form with Dubai at its center and despite the fact that the population of actual Emiratees was quite small, moneyed people from someplace else would eagerly gobble up a stupefying number of condos and villas. Now, as Dubai seeks a bailout for the second time in a year, it seems increasingly clear that I could never quite grasp the logic of the boom there because there was no logic. It was, much like the housing bubble in this country, predicated on infinite demand for real estate that was only of any value in times of infinite demand.

This paragraph jumped out at me from yesterday’s New York Times:

While I have no doubt that Dubai’s troubles have the potential to further screw things up — for one thing, they own Barneys — I don’t believe that the mega-Emirate is typical of heavily indebted nations. We’re talking about a government that is the ultimate speculative real estate developer. When China builds a brand new city to house, say, 300,000, they are building it for a very real population.* Dubai, by contrast, builds at an unprecedented pace for market that, as it turns out, is imaginary.

The photo above is how the Dubai skyline looked from a boat a short distance off shore, murky, like a mirage. I snapped it while touring the The Palm, several clusters of artificial islands shaped like palm trees and The World, another cluster of islands shaped like the countries of the world. Below is a Palm frond, full of McMansions, “villas” in local parlance, squeezed together at Fire Island density. The World, as of March 2008, was utterly uninhabited. The next group of artificial islands was going to be called The Universe,but I’m guessing that current circumstances may have put a damper on those plans.

*Actually, China may also be building for an imaginary population.

The Buffalo Skyway

A piece I submitted to the New York Times op-ed section back in January just ran in today’s paper. It’s been updated somewhat, tied to the current unemployment situation, and condensed …a lot. Looking at the Interstate system and other roadways as a vast repository of land and infrastructure is something I’ve been doing for a while. An earlier and more nuanced take on the subject ran in Metropolis back in January.

The original, unedited version of the piece I wrote for the Times concluded like this:

The most significant thing about the Interstate system, however, is that it represents a huge quantity of land, about 40 acres per mile or 1.87 million acres. And untold quantities surrounding land have been scarred by proximity to the Interstate. Anyone who drives knows that the areas around interchanges, designed for maximum expedience, are among the least appealing landscapes in America. Instead of continuing to write-off the land adjacent to the highways, and the median strips, as an eternal no-man’s land, we should look at this acreage as a resource. And instead of decrying the development that gloms on to the interstate as sprawl, we should figure out a way to transform those land use patterns into something efficient, livable, and sustainable.

We no longer have a frontier, we’ve learned that open space is finite and can’t afford to throw away or squander land. If, in our cities, we are redeveloping what’s known as brownfield sites, disused industrial property, perhaps it’s time to reclaim land blighted by the highway system. If our interstate system is transformed so that it’s no longer just a ghetto for the internal combustion engine, and if enough of the people still driving are driving cars that pollute less – and, yes, trucks will have to evolve, too — and make less noise, the interchanges, sprawling mazes of Byzantine traffic patterns and massive parking lots can be transformed into urban hubs, where people might actually want to live or work, change trains or even go for a stroll. Instead of devoting tens of billions of dollars to repaving Eisenhower’s vision of the future, we should use that money and our ingenuity to establish a vision of our own.

The Barclays Center, hemmed in by ghost towers, courtesy of the New York Times.

Okay, I have a soft spot for Shop, a local architecture firm that is better than most at wedding innovative form to urbanistic function. And, unlike most people who are outraged by the Atlantic Yards debacle, I am basically okay with the idea of putting a basketball arena at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic. My okayness with the arena, however is predicated on a major upgrade for the nasty mess of a subway/railroad station below and serious amelioration of the monstrous traffic situation outside. And my okayness is tempered by the recent projection from the city’s Independent Budget Office that shows the city losing some 39 million on this deal over the next 30 years.

I think the Shop collaboration with Ellerbe Becket has produced the best renderings I’ve seen for the arena, better than all those Frank Gehry renderings. Having said that, I feel compelled to point out that they are just renderings and renderings, especially in this case, mean nothing. For one thing, I can’t help but notice the ghost buildings that appear in many of the elevations, place holders for the towers that will someday, perhaps, spring up. The potential out-sized badness of those undefined shadow buildings has the potential to undermine any niceness our talented friends at Shop can provide. The plan, I’m afraid, is still the problem.

P.S. Yes, I seem to have taken the summer off. Not planned. It just happened.

P.P.S. Check out this dialog on light that I moderated on Change Observer. And this story about historic tract houses for Met Home. And my take on parametric design in Metropolis. (And, any day now, there will be a Metropolis column on Frank Gehry which is now a bit dated. Oh well.)

P.P.P.S And here it is 9-11. It’s been a very long eight years, hasn’t it?

The Sears Tower “Ledge.” (Photo by Kichiro Sato for AP.) Courtesy of Archipreneur.

Oh, to be as open and trusting as five year old Anna Kane of Alton, Ill. I find that after many years of listening to architects and engineers talk about how they do the amazing things they do, I have less faith than I used to in their infallibility. Or maybe the infallibility of the design software upon which their professional reputations now rest. And there is something about the transparent overhang, whether we’re talking the Grand Canyon version, or the newly opened Sears Tower Ledge that spooks me.

Rationally speaking, I have no doubt that the bright boys at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and at MTH Industries, a glass and metal fabricator, know exactly what they’re doing. And that they’ve carefully calibrated the wind and tourist loads to over-engineer this under-engineered looking thingamajig. Irrationally speaking, I feel they’re tempting fate. Some primitive part of my brain is screaming, “No Anna! No!”

Oh, and the Sears Tower photo reminded me of that other picture of a girl floating in space:

Case Study House #22. (Photo by Julius Shulman. )

Nets Arena at Atlantic Yards as designed by Ellerbe Becket (via the New York Times), with ghostly Gehry towers in the background.

From today’s New York Times, as reported by Charles Bagli:

Citing financial concerns, the developer of the long-delayed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn has scrapped plans for a Frank Gehry-designed $1 billion glass-walled basketball arena for the Nets in favor of a less expensive arena.

The new design, which will cost about $200 million less, comes from Ellerbe Becket, an architectural firm based in Kansas City, Mo., that specializes in convention centers, stadiums and arenas and designed Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, where the Indiana Pacers play. Officials who have seen the design say that while it resembles Conseco Fieldhouse it also bears a likeness to an “airplane hangar.”

From Metropolis Magazine, July 2005, written by yours truly:

He has retained architect Frank Gehry and landscape architect Laurie Olin to woo the cognoscenti. But do we judge Ratner’s intentions by what he’s built in the past or what he’s promising for the future? When I look out my window I stare directly at one of his projects—a windowless high-rise multiplex with an Aztec-patterned facade—and question whether Ratner should be charged with redeveloping such a substantial chunk of the borough.

Ratner, of course, cites the economy and the delaying tactics of the Atlantic Yards opponents for his return to the mediocre architecture that is his calling card. The word architects like to use for the Ellerbe Becket approach is “normative.” It’s a highbrow way of saying, “You can find arenas pretty much like this one in cities around the country.” Like, say, Springfield, Missouri. The Nets arena will be of a piece with Ratner’s Atlantic Terminal and MetroTech. It will be ultra-normative. Oh, and he can only pay the MTA $20 million of the $100 million he currently owes them for development rights of the railyard. Can we please, please pull the plug on this ill-conceived mess and do a proper development plan for the area?

For the full story, see the Atlantic Yards Report.

And courtesy of our Asia desk, this highly non-normative, but also non-nice, stadium from Ellerbe Becket.  My first thought:  “Eeeeew.”

Ikea’s Vava lamp.

Every year I go to the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center expecting that, after spending a few hours roaming the aisles looking at the latest high style furniture, I’ll come away with some insight about the state of the world. Here’s what happened this year: the first piece of furniture that really caught my eye, that made me think “I want that,” was a chest of 16 small drawers. It looked like something you might find in a Chinese apothecary shop, but done up in pale Scandinavian style. I walked up to get a closer look, and then realized: I’m in the fucking IKEA booth.

For ICFF, IKEA put together a credible display of their most innovative design ideas, some of which will hit stores in the US this summer. The chest that got my attention, by designer Ehlen Johansson, is cleverly configured so that the drawers can nest inside one another for flat-pack shipping. And the spiky lamp above, Vava by Wiebke Braasch, is made of folded palm leaves. The products in the IKEA booth were distinguished by their exploratory, risk taking nature, something there was generally very little of at this year’s fair. Clearly the low end is where the action is.

Another timely booth was Design for a Dollar , showcasing the work of Pratt Institute’s Department of Industrial Design. Students each had to design a product that could be manufactured for that impossibly low cost. Elegant solutions included the lovely Orange Votive Candles by David Steivurzel, made from soy-based wax and discarded orange peels, Scissors by Brian Persico, manufactured from discarded saw blades, and my favorite, winner of the Fred Sandback award for extreme minimalism, the Three String Shelf by Lara Knutson (see photo below).

Three String Shelf by Pratt industrial design student Lara Knutson.

Zeitgeist aside, there were a few things that I simply liked. The always interesting English firm SCP was showing a trio of knitted lambswool pouffes, Henry, Frank and Ernest, by designer Donna Wilson (see below) Pouffes typically work very hard at being sculptural and austere, but these managed to convey coziness without seeming overly nostalgic. Also, Umbra was displaying a new wine rack by one of their favorite designers, Alan Wisniewski, a folded ribbon of metal (see below) that looks to me like a cross-section of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim.

Henry, Frank and Ernest by Donna Wilson.

Wine rack for Umbra by Alan Wisniewski

The most unexpected thing at Javits this year was the expansive new Japan Pavilion, a mini-World’s Fair of innovative product design from ceramic soy sauce dispensers to cunning one-slice toasters. The strangest thing I found there was Paro (see below), a plush baby harp seal used in “robot therapy.” While Japanese hospitals and nursing homes acknowledge that contact with furry pets can have a therapeutic effect, they don’t like having actual animals on the premises. Robotic animals, however, are perfectly fine. So this furry automaton behaves like a real pet, only better:

By interaction with people, Paro responds as if it is alive, moving its head and legs, making sounds, and showing your preferred behavior. Paro also imitates the voice of a real baby harp seal.

A Washington Post article reports that the robo-seals were very popular in US retirement homeswith seniors suffering from dementia. Personally, I found the faux creatures a little spooky. I began to wonder how these lovable little seals would go over in a home for retired Canadian fisherman. I was envisioning Paro goes Cujo; clearly it was time get the hell out of Javits.

The Paro robotic baby harp seal at rest.

Other stuff I liked:

Crayon Rings by sneaker designer Timothy Liles.

Koda Bag by Skinny Vinny.

Dining table by Moe.

MShelving by Loadbearing.

Bunny-shaped tote bag from +d.