looking at photos by uxbridge of older european cities.

looking at renderings of ShangHai competition.

over to photos again. back to renderings. now I'm on a horse. etc...

I'm overcome with a crippling sensation that our profession has absolutely nothing left to offer to anyone anymore. We come bearing nonsensical gifts we pulled straight out of our asses. Saddest part is we can't even take care of ourselves anymore either.

We should all (professionals, students and teachers) come together in one place and just jump over a cliff. Lemming style.


@jump: I wasn't aware of the Lissitzky reference. Makes sense for Holl to pull of another litteral interpretation. His work is littered with them.

ha. rusty. some truth there.

that many folks don't get the reference is i suppose just indication of the lack of history in archi-school, or maybe simply that our focus on newness has taken the shine off of the constructivists (they were big in the 90's when i was in school, so most of us old-ish folks probably got the joke).

i didn't mean it as a critique of steven holl. he is a very good architect referring to another very good architect. but you know... whatever...


architects have lots to offer. there is a lot of good architecture going on too.

maybe the shiny spectacles that are often built by developer are not the best, but that is the point isn't it? there is a lot of mediocre classical architecture out there too. not everyone was brunneleschi, or even scamozzi...

as for the state of things today, if it isn't better maybe we are simply not trying hard enough.

Uxbridge： china data is misleading. Why not try hongkong? Also, do you have the data for the greenspace each person has in paris?

I prefer some architecture drawings instead of words.

jump:"architects have lots to offer. there is a lot of good architecture going on too."

I know. I was being animated for the sake of some lols. Lots of great work is coming from all corners of the world (even *gasp* China). But so is a lot of mind-numbing crap. Yes, developers are building their Mario World castles in the sky, but never underestimate your fellow architect's ability to delude themselves. Like wholeheartedly believing that using towers is the only way to achieve urban densities. At that point you start doing a disservice to your community.

Maybe that's my beef? We have a lot more power to fuck things up than ever before. A series of fugly 19th century buildings are fairly harmless compared to power of destruction modern developments can have. And when you start building at the scale of CHINA, the mistakes can be spotted from the moon.

"maybe simply that our focus on newness has taken the shine off of the constructivists (they were big in the 90's when i was in school"

90's was a long ass time ago. Constructivism hasn't really been topic de jour in offices in the last decade or so. In fact, not much I learned at school ever came up again. Heh.

jbushkey posted a link to virtual tour of paris earlier in te thread. Sloppy podcast that could have been executed in 1/10 of time if they rehearsed, but still extremely informative. It talked of Paris urban decisions that date back to Napoleon's time. Most of the terminology and design concepts they utilized at the time was thought to me back in the school (in the 90's!) but hasn't really been discussed since. A shame. Some of the academic topics and concepts should have a stronger presence in our profession.

Hong Kong's density is an average 16,000 people per square mile. That puts it slightly above London's average density (12,000 people per square mile) in terms of city density.

The problem with population densities is that they are stretched out over the entire "legal realm" of the city.

Hong Kong has a surprising number of parks, parking lots, green belts and buffers. Judging from aerial photography, many of Hong Kong's massive residential towers seem to be about 1 tower per 3 acres. It actually comes out to more or less 25 people per acre. That's about 10 units per acre.

That's actually on par with condensed American suburbs. And that's a really sad figure for effectively affording city services over such a large geographical surface.

In Levallois-Perrett, that's a 104 people per acre or roughly 41 units per acre. That's a substantial amount of money in a tax basin. And Parisan-styled infrastructure is far from cheap.

A huge difference here is that a neighborhood like Levallois-Perrett or Napoli has narrow roads, almost

almost no road buffer space, no 'interstates' or 'expressways', no green space and very minimal in terms of parks or open space.

However, it can be argued that a lot of those features that many cities pride themselves on are often too expensive for their benefit.

i still teach the constructivists in modern arch history class. it is required so students can understand most of the big names now. they all come from that same pot of ideas. prolly i only do that cuz of my age.



we always had the power to muck things up. remember the dumbbell typology in new york? a nightmare built on a nightmare. it was not so long ago that cities were death traps in the west, a lot like developing countries today actually. except worse. and fewer alternatives.

now we have figured out how not to die as urban dwellers we have the luxury of arguing over what shape our cities should be. in china as much as anywhere. its kinda a good thing, really, even with all the fugly-ness.

but if i was going to be negative about anything i would say i am more worried/interested in working out a way to deal with slums than to bitch about bad tower design. firms like elemental and so on seem to be doing interesting things in that way if at a small scale....i find that encouraging.

but... but... evil towers!

speaking of slums...

"remember the dumbbell typology in new york? a nightmare built on a nightmare."

Which was succeeded by another nightmare. Stick the poor fucks into cross or y shaped housing projects. Improvement on building code issues? Yes. Block-busters that destroy communities? Absolutely.

Sad truth is that architecture can not solve the ills of the world, be that poverty or social inequality. The best we can do, when called up to plate, is to aim for 51% success rate; solve more little problems than we create :)

ps. I totally forgot you teach. I knew that, but then forgot. I bet I know more about bituminous waterproofing than you. So there!

Mies,
Showed New York how to build a tall building that left a set back space for the people, but the new yorkers didn't listen, and now setbacks at the plaza level are rare. I'm talking about the Seagrams in case you don't already know.

The last project I helped design for China, I remember the other "designers" saying things like "oh dont worry about it the crazier it is the more they like it", I asked where was there zoning ordinance and code the reply "just use the IBC because I don't think they even have one". I remember students that were sent to my alma mater to study "tall buildings" because we were the best, China is biding its time and will one day say ok Western architects you have nothing left to show us get out of our country. Not to say things against China, every dog has his day, and right now its China's.

Thanks CE your comment led me to "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces". I am going to watch the movie later today.

You don't need setback space for every building, just one for several blocks would be fine.

cmrhm, how did u come to the conclusion of how many open spaces are needed?

lol rusty. i run a practice too. i only went back into academia after working for years in offices here in japan and in europe. so am not entirely ignorant. just mostly.

but yeah, evil towers, and chinese architects do it better, and all that.


i live in a ville radieuse type place myself in tokyo and its fantastic. i don't blame y shaped buildings for culture problems. but those dumb-bells were really nasty. since then though, i think we can blame hell on humanity at large and not on the architectural sub-species.

Hi creativity:

the developer don't want to loose precious ground floor space, city need high dencity in downtown area to boost business. All these push all the developments to occupy the ground space 100%. just accationally, city has bonus zoning ordinance for some area, if the developer develop a public space, they could develop higher with additional air rights. Of course I simplified the scenario, but what I want to say is the business determine a public space or not. Nothing else.

Thats why we have codes and zoning. Business left to discipline themselves FFFF everything up. The wreckage of our economy is the perfect example.

financial forces cannot be controlled, but they can be guided. as the architect, the conceive r of the ideas, it is up to you cmrhm to find a balance.

But I was told free market economy is the solution to everything. It's like Windex of economic purity. Are you saying Ayn Rand is a fiction writer? :)

beekay31 and rustystuds,

Just for the record...

About the situation in South Korea, actually building codes is more systematic than in most of US cities.
In South Korea, there are several steps of building codes to be applied. Simply saying, firstly national wide building code and city wide and district wide which reflects local conditions, and lot by lot regulation which reflects condition of each lot.
They are all documented and easy to access through the Internet.
So most of architects can easily figure out what to do in order to satisfy building codes without many meetings with county and attorneys that speeds up the whole process.

The reason that rustystuds thinks there in South Korea is lack of building codes is because Songdo is a new city out of bare ground.

It's true that in South Korea Bureaucracy is not sophisticated comparing with US, but building code in cities is quite well set up.

Here is one example what an incomplete or unfair city zoning could provide an unusual building design. (I am just guessing here.)

[img\http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fGDoWdwtFYs/TWHr0EvCQ6I/AAAAAAAAAOE/9l0ngqEZutQ/s1600/indiaMillsTower_01.jpg[/img]

Sorry. here is the image:

It kinda looks like Florida where you get 15 story towers next to two story houses.