Archinect - BEZOAR

Target "democratizes" the design of Doug Johnston

2013-02-27T18:30:00-05:00

Old school archinectors know about Doug Johnston's amazing work. We all go way back to his days as a school blogger around these parts.

For the last few years Doug (aka @hawktrainer) has been getting lots of eyeballs on his projects—a line of objects that exist somewhere between the edges of sculpture, craft, and function. It seems like Target also had its eyeballs on Doug's work (some of it created with a small team of artisans). Now you can get it for the great low price of... $6.99 (and for doug... zilch!) Oh well, what can I say... Maybe I should have bought Doug's work while I could still sort of afford it. Now he's a legend, thanks to Target! But now I can get the democratic version.

More here

Just climbing the shard, whatever...

2012-04-07T20:03:00-04:00

"What did you do last night?"

"Just, you know, CLIMB THE SHARD...Only the tallest building in the EU, under construction—without a permit!"

- PLACE HACKING (photos & more story...) Via @Goblinmerchant

(this rendering via bbc.co.uk)

Ecological Urbanism for the 21st Century

2012-02-05T21:12:00-05:00

A newly posted review essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jon Christensen, Robert McDonald, and Carrie Denning is a must-read for every urbanist or designer interested in landscape, ecologies, and the intellectual armature of both New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism. A pull quote to whet your appetite:

We've come a long way from the Roosevelt commission's concern with the "deficiencies" of country life, although the Obama administration recently created a White House Rural Council to "address challenges in rural America." To be sure, we still hear plenty of paeans to that "real America," though only one out of five Americans lives there now, as well as to "wild nature," though most ecologists have come to accept that virtually nothing about nature is untouched by humanity.

The dominant discourse these days, however, unabashedly celebrates the city as the future, in books with titles such as David Owen's Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Drivi...

Refried Bruces

2012-02-05T20:51:56-05:00

Regarding the "new drone culture war," Bruce Sterling writes in his blog, Beyond the Beyond (pay attention technophile three-D worshiping, military technoholics):

Being a drone fan, and imagining this emergent struggle has nothing to do with you… it’s like being a fan of atom science and thinking Nagasaki was some kind of accident. You just gotta be aware of the ambiguities while also knowing that there will be tremendous efforts to freeze, personalize and polarize the issues. If you don’t believe me, try writing the words ISRAELI DRONE on a t-shirt and walk around outside. You don’t even have to say you like ‘em or don’t like ‘em; the mere fact that you acknowledge them is enough for some piping geopolitical hot water.

To these thoughts Bruce attached a link to a post I wrote for Demilit called "Waiting for Doctorow." http://demilit.tumblr.com/post/16586056738/waiting-for-doctorow

Some recent digging I've been doing has to do with what I see as a suspicious intersection...

moby the dilettante architectural photographer

2012-01-30T17:17:00-05:00

"Moby likes #LA #architecture (but not uppercase letters, apparently). His new blog: http://mobylosangelesarchitecture.com/ " - @NathanUnbound

Sources

2012-01-20T18:43:33-05:00

We've all seen that video on Portlandia about the "technology loop" (we have, haven't we?). In a bit of an experiment to smooth together all the folds of surfing various networks and sources, I put together a Twitter feed for anyone that wants to peek into my library of foundness.

Ever since the decline of Delicious, it seems harder and harder to simply 'skim the radar,' so to speak. But a lot of people use Twitter, so this seemed to make sense.

https://twitter.com/#!/AJFavorite

If you are interested in the sources, I am basically using Stellar.io to cull Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter (both from @Demilit and @AlJavieera), and Flickr starred items. I use iftt recipes to pull from Stellar, Tumblr, and Google reader (perhaps with more recipes to come). Stay tuned, as they say...

Architecture Ryan Gosling

2012-01-12T23:41:00-05:00

On the heels of the "manarchist" Ryan Gosling tumblr, comes "Architecture Ryan Gosling."

http://architectureryangosling.tumblr.com/

A bit of Morphosis early history is set to close...

2012-01-12T14:05:00-05:00

According to a Dec. 28 article in the LAWeekly, Los Angeles restaurant institution Angeli Caffe is closing its doors. Owner Evan Kleinman searched for a buyer, but the LATimes reports that the last meal will be served on Jan. 13. Of course, no way to tell at this point what will happen to the architecture when a new tenant arrives...

Angeli was a very early Morphosis project, back when Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi were partners, and the hottest restaurant designers around LA [see this clipping from Sam Hall Kaplan]. Michele Saee was project architect at the time according to a 2009 interview in Dwell.

Photo below from the LATimes:

The Morphosis "morphopedia" [top photo also from Morphosis] states that: "A partial gridwork was added to the façade of a building on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles as an inexpensive way of making and marking an addition. The façade was meant to appear as if it predated the existing building. By using minimal means, it creates a series of shifts i...

Intelligence Community Campus (Please tell me it is LEED Certified)

2011-12-05T22:57:28-05:00

The Army Corps won’t say which agencies would be based at the site [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s headquarters] beyond that it’s working with the DIA on the proposal.

But...

A rendering of the project, however, shows a mock directory suggesting the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation all as prospective tenants. But a spokeswoman for the Army Corps said Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), the firm that designed the rendering, included those agencies purely for illustrative purposes.

Oops!

Story: BizJournal [via @subtopes]

Occupy the Mural

2011-12-01T16:39:49-05:00

So here is a doozy... The Los Angeles mayor decided to send 1,000 cops to de-camp Occupy LA, and now he is looting the artwork. "The mayor's office recognizes that this has historical significance so we're working together to make sure that we come up with a good and appropriate solution" (via @longdrivesouth). Thus, the mayor's cultural police forces are looking to permanently preserve the mural which had been painted on a plywood structure, built around a fragile fountain in the middle of the plaza.

All of this can make the head spin in circles with its absurd logic. While the occupation was pronounced unsanitary and dangerous, and while the mayor decided they no longer had a space for speech, one of the very forms of the speech itself now rises to the level of permanence. It rises to icon, a cultural treasure they will probably put on a tourism brochure some day. And while the culture itself that made the piece may be deemed to be criminally trespassing on the space of the pl...

Tents in the Sky

2011-11-17T20:34:16-05:00

According to English Dept doctoral student Irene Yoon: "Architecture school floats tents in the air at occupy cal. :)"

And @DarthNader: "In response to police demolition of the encampment, #Occupycal floats tents with balloons!"

And more here from @zunguzungu: “thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night”

Also, showing that Occupy is thinking both vertically and horizontally, in New York City, the Verizon building got projected with a Mic Check and a poem...

Go to A Giant Load of Gibberish for more

Boxy and Timely

2011-11-17T18:15:30-05:00

Forest City Ratner has released renderings of their SHoP-designed high-rise condos for Atlantic Yards. And let's face it, assuming Ratner doesn't backtrack on the design yet again, the project resembles the same ho-hum, cookie-cutter vertical sprawl of a thousand-and-one other transit-oriented development boondoggles. But this one is even special-er, cus the business and modular-savvy of SHoP seems to have been put to good use for Ratner's union-busting scheme. As L Magazine writes:

The union workers who would be assembling the towers, in various factories, before they're stacked up, would stand to make less the half the hourly wage they could expect if the tower was constructed on-site. Forest City Ratner told the Times, "We are in the process of attempting to reach an agreement that will work for the building trades and Forest City in an effort to create permanent employment," because they are definitely trustworthy when it comes to delivering the jobs they'd long promised th...

Rafael Viñoly on a Sunday

2011-11-13T03:53:28-05:00

[Updates below. Link fixed to "some" word below.]

The New York Times features architect Rafael Viñoly on the 'Sunday Routine'.

Says the Times: "He divides his Sundays between the drawing board and the keyboard: he owns nine pianos, and as a child in Uruguay he trained to be a classical pianist. Mr. Viñoly, 67, lives in TriBeCa with his wife, Diana, an interior designer. The couple, whose three grown children and three grandchildren live in the neighborhood, also have homes in Water Mill, N.Y., and London."

Some select quotes:

I wear these gray sweat pants that are 35 or 40 years old. They’re like part of my skin. I don’t wash them too much, because they’d fall apart. I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they’re a necessity.

Sunday is a phenomenal day for work. Disgusting, right? Repugnant! But in the office we’ve created this theory that Sunday is a great time to focus on creative projects, so the place is always full of people when I ...

“The Grass Is Closed” at the University of California campuses

2011-11-11T19:55:19-05:00

Facing not only the privatization of public education and the concomitant worsening of the quality of schools, it has become more than apparent that students at UC Berkeley (and many other places) in addition now must make visible the degree of violence unleashed by the administration on its own people.

In an earlier satire today, I wanted to bring attention to the convoluted logic that the Chancellor uses to justify that they have not been within the law when approaching protesters and occupations. But in the piece, I also wanted to bring attention to the larger pattern of "weaponizing" or instrumentalizing space in order to do the dirty work of the police in more permanent ways. The fictitious phrase "peaceful brutality" I coined, which isn't so far from the absurdity of the Chancellor's own words of "not non-violent," refers to a serious architectural matter. UC does this over and over again: using "public" space to make "peaceful brutality" permanent.

For this reason, a p...

The design of peaceful brutality

2011-11-11T13:03:42-05:00

Dear Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor (UC Berkeley),

I wanted to express my concern for your troubles, sir. Your message is not getting across and your power is in jeopardy. First of all, the Associated Press characterized the brave actions taken by the police in front of the storied Sproul Hall on Wednesday as “nudging.” But as I saw it—in person—the police had no choice except to rescue, as peacefully as possible, three hostage tents from "Occupy Cal." And they did so without “nudging” a single soul on that lawn.

You were correct to point out in your Nov 10, 2011 email that, what you called the "not non-violent" actions taken by the occupiers, put the police in considerable harm—liberal media be damned! In truth, protesters were confronted by the police with what you should be innovatively messaging as "peaceful brutality." Example: "The REI tents were liberated using peaceful brutality."

Second of all, and more worrisome, is the real threat posed by protesters like those t...

Neil Brenner, mapping, and the Harvard GSD

2011-11-10T00:36:02-05:00

Mohsen Mostafavi and the Harvard GSD accomplished quite a coup by hiring Neil Brenner. Brenner has been a very prominent scholar in the fields of urbanism, planning, and geography to name a few. He was formerly at the sociology department of NYU. His work on Henri Lefebvre (see this book) has attained wide currency in various disciplines, as well as writings with several collaborators on neoliberal urbanization.

The program at Harvard gained a challenging thinker, and someone who surely will question rather than merely lubricate the work of the school. So with that celebratory intro, check out his lecture, "The Urbanization Question, or, the Field Formerly Known as Urban Studies"

Brenner offers eight theses about urban studies, the first being the apparently contradictory one that urban studies has not considered its subject matter, ie the urban. Jeremy Crampton

Also, somewhat related to the expansion of the critical urbanism tack at Harvard, a mini-conference coming soon t...

#OccupyCal and the brave police raid for two tents

2011-11-09T23:13:07-05:00

[with 11/10 updates]

Police mobilized in force to remove #OccupyCal tents today. A couple of small groups had managed to set up just two tents after UC Berkeley police confiscated most other ones, following a large rally. There were maybe two hundred people congregated to block off the shock troops.

Then, the Alameda Sheriffs arrived in full military regalia. They assembled near the side of Sproul Hall. They marched in, and set up a human corridor parallel to the building wall, and counted down to zero. The cops then started smacking folks around for no reason, except apparently to rescue those two hostage tents from the occupiers. Someone took a video from the second floor (see below). This is a space, you could say, "owned" by the taxpayers of California. The attack was entirely unprovoked, and if you play the video, you see how they hit folks indiscriminately, including several women of various ages.

I still am processing so much of what I saw today... At one point dur...

Fixes: Investigating alterations of space/objects

2011-11-08T11:46:46-05:00

Chris Berthelsen, aka a-small-lab, is a documentation freak with a keen eye for everyday landscapes and quotidian acts.

Check out his blog: Fixes: Investigating alterations of space/objects at the public/private boundary in suburban Tokyo.

Chris writes: 'Fixes' are ways of thinking and doing amongst the passivity of 'modern' living. Signals of direct, personal, human creativity, they illustrate real sustainability: repair rather than replace; make rather than buy; create/adapt rather than accept.

See also his graffiti research in Tokyo and tokyo diy gardening (with Jared Braiterman), and keep exploring from there!

"Occupy: What Architecture Can Do"

2011-11-07T15:33:40-05:00

[edited w/ updates!] Two weeks ago I posted a note about "Architecture noticing Occupy" that mentioned Reinhold Martin's participation in a panel at Columbia about Occupy Wall Street, etc. Today, Design Observer features Martin's post "Occupy: What Architecture Can Do". David Gissen also recently posted some reflections on Occupy Oakland. I suggest reading both!

Both posts are short and accesible pieces on the ties between architecture and the Occupy movement. Both converge on the conclusion that there is a strong dimension to OWS about the right to housing. Martin says:

And architectural thinking can contribute something invaluable to this extraordinary process by offering tangible models of possible worlds, possible forms of shelter, and possible ways of living together, to be debated in general assemblies both real and virtual.

Martin sustains that "Assisted by decades of voluminous research and activist practice in slums, emergency housing, and encampments of various so...

"Options on the table"

2011-11-04T12:32:15-04:00

Altering our scholarship policy will be only as a last resort, but in order to create a sustainable model, it has to be one of the options on the table — Jamshed Bharucha

Further, you tell me how to run admissions to make sure that you get enough wealthy students in classes? Do you think it will look like Cooper Union looks now? Or more like any other school that rewards privilege over merit? — slavin

It seems like as good a time as any to ponder how it was that Cooper Union got to be Cooper Union, and how the accomplishments of its graduates reflect an admission policy that gave opportunity to talented students who otherwise would not have had it.

Here is donor signage by Pentagram inside the new Cooper Union building. Seems now like a weird anti-monument:

From the NYTimes article linked above, (emphasis added): Peter Cooper, a self-taught industrialist, inventor and social reformer, founded the college with the mission of making higher education available to all; it w...

"...For every homeless person, at least four houses are sitting empty"

2011-11-03T18:21:39-04:00

There is a must-read article by Fred Bernstein in the Huffington Post, mostly for some of the facts that, if proven to be verifiable, are alarming (while not all that surprising), such as: There are at least 14 million vacation homes in the United States. That means that for every homeless person, at least four houses are sitting empty. The article ends with this rather agitating and rousing call to social justice -- not (spoiler): In a more just world, anyone seeking to build a 30,000-square-foot house would also have to fund a homeless shelter -- and make it at least as big as their guest wing.
Relatedly, read also this article about how Harlem landlords sit on vacant properties that they refuse to upgrade.
Above, a NYTimes article (will not bother to hate-link) that focuses on the violence that erupted in Oakland last night. Note the Citi sponsorship on the right. Something to chew on, for violence takes on many forms of appearance. We might—indeed, must—ask what v...

Cooper Union's shaky finances: tuition to come?

2011-11-01T20:39:50-04:00

Via @bldgblog: Kevin Slavin writes... (w/ emphasis added)

The former president and current trustees have imperiled the future of the only tuition-free undergraduate degree in the United States, and unless someone has an idea for how to make up $16MM a year, it ends soon, quietly, after 150 years.

No one will ever know the names of the trustees who “invested” over $170MM on a new building that no one wanted. Generating over $10MM in annual interest payments alone on an operating budget that used to be $40MM.

All for a building that will soon be populated like all the other buildings in Manhattan: a bunch of people born wealthy, unaware that where they are sitting was ever any different.

And: "Cooper wouldn't even be Cooper anymore." More to be found on Google News, etc...

(photo taken by me)

What 7 Billion is supposed to look like...

2011-11-01T17:21:18-04:00

From the New York Times Lens blog, this is apparently what 7 billion people look like when you "picture" the latest world population...

Hordes of teeming brown masses of humanity overcrowding a train (run for your life!) Which is, of course, saturated with its Malthusian hysteria.

Yet thanks to my colleagues in geography, we hear that the image chosen by the Times to represent the 7 billion appeared before in the same blog:

Strike the previous and now add: "hordes of brown Muslim masses on an immovable train!" As we read under the photo, the image actually comes from a Muslim festival weekend in Bangladesh, and that explains a lot more. Crowded transport is an ur-image that in the approved Western imagination is actually what "proper" urbanism strives for (except not as dark). Thus, it's not all that related to teeming global populations at all, is it? In other words, the image reflects a temporary moment of pilgrimage. Highly questionable on the part of the Times, the...

In Context

2011-10-31T17:20:55-04:00

From "Isolated Buildings" by David Schalliol in MASContext 3: Work.

A quick invite to entice you to see my selection of articles from the archives of MAS Context.

Flipping through a stack of browser tabs to uncover a hidden thread within the archives of MAS Context, I found myself interested in the tensions and latent cross-provocations gravitating around ideas of social practices. In a Fall 2010 number devoted entirely to the theme of “Public,” editor in chief Iker Gil wrote, with lucid foresight of what was to come in various 2011 uprisings: “Why react when we can act? We want a PUBLIC that demands more and proposes more.” And that’s exactly what happened this year, it would appear.

But to judge by voices and images in MASContext, there has not been (fortunately!) a monolithic approach within the architecture and architecture-related disciplines about how exactly to act... Read the Rest...

Hitler is surprised to learn who designed the architecture building

2011-10-31T10:56:23-04:00

Via Mason White... Someone made a "Hitler finds out" that roasts Rem Koolhaas/OMA's design for Milstein Hall at Cornell University and the admin who chose him... Someone perhaps with a not-unjustified love for Barkow Leibinger. Even Steven Holl gets name-checked. And the old order of the Texas Rangers will be erased from the collective memory.

On Police, "the 99%," and space

2011-10-29T13:45:29-04:00

Highly recommend reading, in its entirety, "Not Your Friend: Dissensus and the Police," by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi aka @southsouth, a response to certain olive-branch pleas to the police. But most especially, on political space, she writes:

One of the most useful and succinct definitions about a relationship or non-relationship with police regimes has been contributed by (but does not originate with) the contemporary French social theorist and labor historian Jacques Rancière, who I think will prove to be a crucial theorist for how we observe the rise of the current political mobilization that necessitates reclaiming space.

"Politics stands in distinct opposition to the police. The police is a distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible) whose principle is the absence of void and of supplement."

What does this mean? For one, politics does not have a commonsensical meaning of politicians, citizenry, etc. Instead, Rancière defines politics as the distribution of ...

presenting #whOWNSpace...

2011-10-28T16:52:38-04:00

Following up on Mapping POPOS in NYC yesterday, I woke up to find this next item in my inbox this morning, from the friends at DSGNAGNC, in collaboration with Do-Tank Brooklyn and not an alternative: #whOWNSpace...

...goals are:

1- TO REVEAL conflicting rules and ownerships in the increasingly privatized and commercialized spaces that make up the contemporary neoliberal urban condition

2- TO QUESTION those rules and the current state of our "public" space; discussing the intentions and conditions surrounding our open spaces

3- TO ADVOCATE FOR AND PROPOSE new uses and designs that encourage more public and open spaces for neighborhood uses in accordance to the Call to Action for the Rights of Neighborhoods

We Create Tools that Reveal Spatial Conflict
We Question Private Space
We Question Public Space
We Advocate for Change
We Conceive of Alternatives for Collective use

Mapping POPOS in New York

2011-10-27T17:12:14-04:00

Privately-Owned Public Open Space (POPOS), or their cousins, POPS (apparently not exactly open, yet accessible)... Spurred by Zuccotti Park, WNYC and NY World ask you "to map and report on New York City's Privately-Owned Public Spaces, aka POPS. We want to figure out how public these public spaces really are."

Found at: Crowd-Sourcing the Lowdown on New York’s Privately Owned Public Spaces which reports:

To judge by some early reports, not all of these “public” places are quite as public as they are supposed to be. Here’s what a user named Charles had to say about the Broadway Atrium in Lower Manhattan:

"I’ve tried several times to walk through this lobby (to avoid having to detour around it) and have been stopped and instructed to provide ID, which I regard as an inappropriate infringement. I’ve also asked if, in future, I would be permitted to walk through with a bicycle, and have been told No…Do I not have the right to walk through (with or without a bicycle), unimped...

"A design solution for unnecessary police barricades" ~ @markasaurus

2011-10-27T14:11:26-04:00

Photo at http://twitter.com/#!/markasaurus/status/129616697987575808

"(Oakland Mayor) Jean Quan's lawn fence has been turned into art! #occupyoakland http://lockerz.com/s/150748238"

Oakland as "terror threat"

2011-10-26T14:53:14-04:00

The bumbling, wasteful (reported cost: $2 million in one night), and violent escalation of repression in Oakland yesterday was the direct result of the militarization of local police forces thanks to millions of dollars in grants from the Department of Homeland Security.

Where have I seen them do this before...? Oh yeah, they recently practiced at UC Berkeley's memorial stadium:

Sadly, Oakland is closing five schools today.