Archinect - Lost at SEA

The Geography of The Fast and The Furious

2019-03-07T10:29:17-05:00

What I think about when I think about The Fast & The Furious... cultural geography, architecture and landscapes of the blockbuster film series. Originally posted on my Medium blog.

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Escape Velocity

American Identity in The Fast & The Furious

“Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die […] They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. […] At first sight there is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. But it is a spectacle as old as the world; all that is new is to see a whole people performing in it.”-Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840).[i]

The Fast and The Furious. 2 Fast 2 Furious. The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift. Fast & Furious. Fast Five. Fast and Furious 6. Furious 7. The Fate of The Furious.

Two more films are promised. The Fast & Furious franchise is incredibly popular, and while not apolitical, they ...

Land Of The Dead: "Coco" and the Anthropocene

2018-09-06T11:08:43-04:00

Some thoughts on Pixar's "Coco" - originally posted over on my blog on Medium.

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Old town. Favela. Souk. Slum. Ghetto. Historic district. Shanty Town. Handmade architecture. Organic urbanism. As long as humans have organized themselves into a coherent society, they have constructed habitats. These have been largely built by hand. Even today, steel beams are guided into place by gloved workers, assisted by machines and logistics. Yet the most compelling of human habitats are agglomerations, where master plans are often overwhelmed or superseded by a grassroots assembly that meets basic needs first, expresses an innate creativity second, and leaves a legacy, third.

Works of singular architecture may tweak these priorities, but the most compelling urban environments are often those built by a community or their forebears, arranged according to functional needs, and expressing some essential values of that community. When gentrification wrecks a historic neighborhood an...

Mistaking Clouds for Mountains

2017-11-20T23:59:43-05:00

Some thoughts on architecture in the Anthropocene. Originally posted over at my Medium page.

[Seattle & Olympic Mountains]

“Here we go mistaking clouds for mountains
Here’s the thing that brings the sparrows to the fountains”
Andrew Bird, “Danse Caribe”

“What was the human world like in the eyes of the mountains?
Perhaps just something they saw on a leisurely afternoon.”
Cixin Liu , The Dark Forest

Our most revered monuments are dedicated to eternity. From pharaohs’ tombs to climate-crisis seed vaults, the permanence fallacy is pervasive through our recorded history. Our ongoing civilizational project seeks to assert its own continuity through inherited and future legacies encoded in the built environment. Whenever we paste the Parthenon in Nashville, or rebuild the Datong City Wall, or spiff up a shabby Villa Savoye, we do so as much to cement our own legacy as savvy curators of the past, as to ensure the perseverance of a particular building, city, or concept in its ideal historical...

Bloedel Reserve Guesthouse 360

2016-10-27T15:02:36-04:00

Freeway Park #360

2016-10-04T00:41:00-04:00

360-degree virtual tour of Seattle's Freeway Park (Lawrence Halprin, 1976):

#SDF2016 #360

2016-09-10T22:10:00-04:00

360-degree virtual tour of the Seattle Design Festival.

h ttps://roundme.com/tour/75641/view/

I-5 Colonnade Park

2014-10-04T03:10:00-04:00

[photoset: under I-5, capitol hill/eastlake, seattle]

Life Support: the Neukom Vivarium

2014-07-20T17:57:00-04:00

Tucked into a corner of Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park, a nondescript glass shed is easily passed by. While the park contains a flashy collection of public art (including a Calder, a Serra, an Oldenburg), the most compelling work here could easily be mistaken for a community greenhouse. Which, in a sense, it is...

Mark Dion's Neukom Vivarium installation (2006, with Owen Richards Architects) consists of only a few essential elements: the shed tapers boldly from end-to-end but is otherwise fairly banal, with a simply detailed curtain wall. Inside, a 60-foot log lies in a tiled planter bed. Daylight filters through green-tinted skylights. The tiled walls are decorated with illustrations of insects, plants, and animals.

This decomposing trunk is a 'nurse log' kept here in a giant vitrine for observation. In nature, the nurse log is an essential component of the forest ecosystem, especially in the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest (where replenishing natural forest fires ar...

Bikini Baristas

2014-07-15T17:06:00-04:00

A few years ago, as I prepared to move to China from Italy, I anticipated some serious withdrawal symptoms. I had grown accustomed - no, dependent - on Rome's ubiquitous cafes. Any slot of space big enough to hold an espresso machine could qualify. Place a rickety table out on the cobblestones, and you're in business. My daily routine would take me to these cafe-bars four or five times daily... for a morning croissant and doppio with soda back, a few times throughout the day for a cappuccino or americano (iced in summer, though I always felt a little guilty about this...), and, usually, after work for a beer or two. These cafes were everywhere, and I knew I would miss them. While Shanghai had its fair share of Starbucks and a few other chains, "real" cafes were sparse... and those that had invested in the bulky, imported, expensive equipment were usually too crowded to be enjoyable.

So, I was excited to move to Seattle, in part due to its famous coffee culture. While Starbucks is do...

Synthetic St. & Burlap Blvd.

2014-07-07T16:08:00-04:00

One of Seattle's true lost wonders, Boeing Plant #2 was constructed in the run-up to World War II, as a production facility for new, metal aircraft, replacing the obsolete Plant #1, whose facilities were (somewhat shockingly, from today's perspective) focused on the production of wooden aircraft, and thus lacked the metalworking facilities required for the new models.

In a very real sense, the construction of this new, modern facility represented the shifting economy in early 20th century Seattle. The city has always, it seems, been a 'company town' in the sense that a single industry (if not a single company!) has dominated the city's economic growth in each era. The city was essentially founded as a logging community (allegedly supplying much of the lumber used to build San Francisco), and while a vibrant trading economy developed in the years of the Klondike gold rush, lumber and associated industries flourished right up into the 20th century. Boeing, the corporation that would do...

Seed of a Garden

2014-07-03T22:06:00-04:00

Chinese garden design is an artistic practice that, by most accounts, has evolved over thousands of years. Several of Suzhou's famous gardens claim to have been founded in the first and second centuries C.E., their design evolving over time with expansion, destruction, restoration, etc. While many of China's remaining classical gardens are now protected landmarks (and, thus, frozen in their design), the typology is best appreciated as an ever-evolving synthesis of landscape and architecture, with a design that is constantly in flux, with each generation making their own modifications and refinements.

Which is to say, I can't criticize Seattle's Chinese Garden too harshly, given that they've only completed a small portion of their ambitious plan. What exists now, in a park adjacent to South Seattle Community College, is disappointing, consisting of a barren courtyard and one small pavilion, with the rough contours of future ponds sculpted in gravel. If and when the garden is completed...

Gate to Nowhere

2014-06-24T14:00:00-04:00

I-5 is one of the most frustrating things about Seattle. The highway slices north-south between downtown and the Capitol Hill and First Hill neighborhoods, severing most of the surface roads running east to west, effectively disconnecting the hilltop neighborhoods from the commercial core. The deleterious effect on Seattle's urbanism was certainly recognized early on - as evinced by the design for Freeway Park (Lawrence Halprin, 1976), which attempts to mend the gap with brutalist concrete and hanging gardens.

While I-5 was being completed, another north-south route was being planned. Located a few miles east, the road would have cut through quiet Montlake neighborhood and portions of the Washington Park Arboretum. Thanks to protests in 1969, the project was scrapped, but several ramps had been constructed, over the wetlands between the arboretum and SR-520.

Over the intervening decades, the abandoned ramps became a popular spot for graffiti artists, skateboarders, picnics, outdoor pa...

Lost at SEA

2014-06-23T22:31:59-04:00

I was hoping for some culture shock.

After a year each in Basel and Rome, and three years in Shanghai, I had become somewhat addicted to novelty, to that sense of discovery one feels exploring a new city. Arrival is a thrill. You know nothing, but find your way, assembling a mental map from disintegrating brochures or hasty sketches reproduced from hostel cork-boards. Stringing together fragments of the local language you learn enough, at first, to order a beer; later, to ask directions, or joke with colleagues. The novelty fades, and you move on, exploring further afield. You dig into the history books, try to determine why the city formed the way it did, try to uncover aspects of the culture that will inform its future growth.

While living abroad, I tried to understand culture through architecture and urban morphology. I tried to identify unique formal devices that I could borrow for my own projects, tried to find typologies that were common across continents, or specific to a cer...