Bauzeitgeist

More Trying to be a Tumblr on Blogspot: Al Jazeera edition.

2012-02-11T13:29:00.000-08:00

Top: Johannesburg.

Middle: Some city in China, I really don't remember, perhaps Ordos? A great, looming colonnade of high-rises, though, like some giant Chinese remake of a Nuremburg Zeppelinfeld.

Bottom: Ground Zero.

Someone Start a Tumblr: TV News Live Shot Backgrounds

2012-02-08T04:15:00.000-08:00

A report from the London studios. The camera points outward, from Victoria towards the heart of Westminster: Parliament at the center of the background. Unmistakeable Big Ben at left, the Palace's other tower, Victoria, still widely-recognized if far less iconic, at right. The shot excludes the white Abbey, keeping the atmosphere solely political. The correspondent's frame blots out a glassy, mid-century mid rise; and post-industrial Portcullis House's chimneyline is safely tucked in among the roofs. This is the London of tradition, ancientness.

Reporting from Athens, the backdrop seems positioned to invoke the opposite: rather than the famous vista of the ancient Parthenon, the uniformly low-rise, Mediterranean metroscape of Athens is punctuated, Montparnasse-style, by a drab, towering office block in the left mid-background. Despite its fiscal ineptness, Athens is a modern business center.

Chuck Todd, the goateed American cable-news talking-head pundit, travels with President Obama to Warsaw. Without the aide of slick newsroom graphics, there is little to announce the Polish capital. Burgeoning to be a European regional business hub, Warsaw is shown as a collage of curtain-walls. But a notable feature, over the left shoulder: the "signature" cutout at the base of the Intercontinental Hotel tower, a view out to the blurry horizon of the Masovian plains.

A professional baseball player is interviewed for a feel-good feature: pitcher turned climber, as the American sports star chose to ascend Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro in the off-season, to raise awareness for South Asian child sex slavery. The remainder of his rest period takes place in Tennessee, as the skyline of Nashville, busy and bland, flanks the athlete's shoulders as he recounts his adventure. His epaulet: a Jetsonian revolving restaurant of a Portman-designed Sheraton Hotel.

Nowadays, this is the sort of material to start a Tumblr with...

African Borders & African States

2011-09-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

This post is a slightly modified version of the "Foreign Correspondent's Report" that I submitted for the "Border Town/Divided Cities" design studio led by Emily Horne, of A Softer World, and Tim Maly, of Quiet Babylon, which was held in Toronto over the summer. Many thanks to them for allowing me to participate. --MMJ

Perhaps the most often-repeated sentiment about modern African states and the borders that demarcate them are that they were devised by European colonial powers, either as arbitrary lines on a blank canvas of lands and peoples which were unknown, or imposed to divide mercantilist, extractive spoils, or also to intentionally split apart existing kingdoms, chieftaincies, nations, tribes, and peoples in order to weaken and rule over them.

And this is mostly true, although the most nefarious conspiracies of a sophisticated coordination of parsing up a continent are a bit apocryphal. It is also helpful to compare the evolutions of nation-states and the divisions between ethnic groups elsewhere, including Europe itself, as such lines, although less arbitrary, have been subject to periodic, irregular alternations, not least due to war, aggression, empire-building, and subjugation.

European ignorance of or disregard for meaningful divisions that existed previously, especially between cultural groups, continues to have detrimental impacts on the modern states and populations they contain, Briefly, this post tried to illuminate several of the unique aspects that political and ethnic borders in Africa possess at the present time, and examine some the interactions between these different limits.

The creation of many African countries shares similar traits. The formation of various African countries evolved from the earliest European incursions into tropical Africa through to the post-colonial period. Juxtaposing chronological maps reveal many additions, subtractions, mergers and reformations which suggest the sculpting of a shape by carving, although the scalpel in hand was that of European political and economic affairs rather than a more natural or indigenous progression [see images of Cameroon below].

The evolution of the shape of Cameroon, from the German protectorate of Kamerun in 1910 above, to Anglo-French to French colony, to independent state in 1960.

The rough-hewn shape, looking much like the profile of a duck-billed,

crowned Parasauolophus dinosaur, is always existent but changes over time.

Top image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Firstly, European sea powers established forts and trading centers along the coast. Coincidently, more intrepid European explorers began penetrating the interior regions both from the Atlantic and Mediterranean (trans Saharan) ports, following either trade routes or rivers. It was not until the 20^th century that European nations had more fully charted colonial boundaries inland.

For France in particular, the historic Atlas shows a claim to an immense and unexplored zone stretching from the Mediterranean to the Equator. Earlier Swedish, Dutch, Danish and Portuguese trading posts along the Ivory Coast, Gold Coast and Slave Coast gave way to the British Sea superiority during the Victorian era; German possessions were surrendered to the French and British victors after World War I.

LANGUAGE & ETHNICITY

Again due to the colonial legacy, West Africa is a checkerboard of Anglophone and Francophone countries (with a single, tiny, Lusophone state, Guinea-Bissau, in one corner). The former French colonies are highly aligned, using a common CFA Franc currency with a single central bank, and with the whole of West Africa operating the regional cooperative body ECOWAS [below]. But in matters between former British and French zones, the barrier of language has stunted better regional integration, particularly in terms of cross-border trade.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)

This is evident when looking at route maps of regional airlines. For example, there is at least one flight per day on various airlines between Accra, the capital of English-speaking Ghana, and Monrovia, in English-speaking Liberia. The two nations are close allies and economic partners. However, these flights cross over French-speaking Cote D’Ivoire, and both cities have only a few flights per week to Abidjan, although it is one of the most important cities in all of French-speaking Africa, and Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire are about the same size.

When looking at the border regions themselves, the already-profuse polylingual abilities of many inhabitants will include knowledge of the legacy language of the neighboring country. For instance, people in Westernmost Ghana, in addition to speaking their own language, perhaps a few other indigenous African languages, and English, will speak French as well, due to the proximity of Cote D’Ivoire. In northern and eastern Liberia, it is common for many (illiterate) locals to speak French as well as English and their own tribal language.

This atmosphere in these frontier regions is further enhanced by the presence of a common ethnic identity or language on both sides of a national border—sometimes a single group has two different names in two different countries, such as the Dan/Mande/Gio in Liberia/Cote D’Ivoire. The international boundary is often a much newer phenomenon than the ethno-linguistic landscape of the area. A grandfather might have grandchildren living in the same area but in two different countries, and clan, kinship and ethnic links often straddle borders in West Africa.

CONFLICT

Such milieux have too often, unfortunately, not proven to be seams of regional stability, but have in recent decades (and recent months) become, and continue to be, zones in which insecurity, conflict and violence spill over borders. The clearest evidence of this is in Northeastern Liberia, especially in Nimba County. The first incident, in 1990, was the beginning of the two-decade long Liberia Civil War, with the crossing of the rebel warlord (and future elected president of Liberia; now in the Hague awaiting a verdict in his war crimes trial) Charles Taylor into Liberia from Cote D’Ivoire. This took place at the village of Buutuo.

Buutuo is also one of the locations of the second series of events, from this past winter and spring, as more than a million refugees fled political violence in Cote D’Ivoire, and sought shelter on the Liberian side of the border. Many of the villages, and even the very same families, which today host Ivorian refugees, were themselves refugees in Cote D’Ivoire in earlier years, fleeing the violence of the Liberian Civil War. There have been anecdotal reports this spring of Liberian families hosting the same Ivorian families which hosted them in previous decades.

Conversely, family and clan links across borders make the spread of this same violence more fluid, especially in that it is easier to recruit rebel armies in these regions to launch hostile action in neighboring countries.

LIBERIA

Liberia is unique among African countries. Aside from Ethiopia (which was briefly conquered by Italy) Liberia is the oldest sovereign state in Africa, declaring its statehood in 1847. Liberia was founded not by Europeans but by freed American slaves and their descendants. These families and individuals came from both the northern and southern United States in waves, intermingling with the local tribes as well as the arrival of Africans freed from slave ships arrested along the coast.

The early evolution of what was later to be modern Liberia, from an unexplored area called Malagueta by the Portuguese (from an 18th century Dutch map, top) to a series of various American settlements along the "Grain Coast" which began to organize into neighboring units, reaching independence in 1847. At bottom is a modern map of Liberia showing the original American settlement zone.

Liberia’s original American settlements were all along the coast. For its first decades, these arrivals only established any type of control over a narrow sliver of what Europeans had first called Malagueta or the Grain Coast (various types of grain pepper were traded with Portuguese ships here). Various arrivals from different parts of the United States formed unassociated settlements, which only later came to be unified into Liberia.

During the remainder of the 19th Century (top) and the early 20th century (above), the large inland claim of independent Liberia is slowly chopped away by European powers in their rush to control the continent.

Even after independence, these settlements exerted hegemony only a few miles inland, but by claiming control over the coast, Liberia was able to monopolize access to the interior beyond yet on the map Liberia extended its territorial claim deep into the Guinea Highlands—a temperate, almost Alpine region that is the source of the greater River Niger. Liberia was never able to gain actual control over much of this interior area, which eventually became part of French Guinea (now the Republic of Guinea). Modern Liberia is about the size of Pennsylvania.

Liberia in 2008, showing its 15 counties.

INTERNAL BORDERS

Liberia has evolved not only as a sovereign entity in relation to external neighbors, but also in its internal arrangement, especially in the legacy of its American settlements and the relationship between these “Americo-Liberian” zones and the indigenous African tribes in the interior.

After independence, this interior of Liberia was divided into districts called Frontiers, a distinction reflecting a lesser degree of administration, and control. It was not until after World War 2 that all of Liberia came to be made up of “Counties” which reflected both the original American settlements on the coast and the frontier areas. However, counties were and are still to this day governed not as federal units (like American states), but are entirely administered by the central government from the national capital.

Liberia's administrative districts in 1963. Compare with 2008 Map above.

Liberia's Chieftaincies in 1963.

Liberia's ethnic group areas in 1963.

These (3) reprinted from

Liberia in Maps by Stefan Von Gnielinksi.

Liberia's counties in 1970. Compare with 1963 and 2008 maps above.

AFRICAN GERRYMANDERING

New Liberian counties have continually been carved out from existing ones, most recently the creation of River Gee and Gbarpolu counties during the presidency of Charles Taylor from 1997 to 2003. In theory, these new subdivisions could lead to greater local autonomy and citizen empowerment, but on the other hand can also reinforce central government control.

Liberia in 1999, in the middle of Charles Taylor's presidency, in which two new counties were created (compare with 2008 and 1970 maps, above).

For instance, new counties need new appointed administrators and elected legislators, which give the central government and executive leader additional lucrative positions to distribute within its political party and support network. It is in this and in other ways that it is critical to note that the creation of arbitrary political boundaries did not end with the withdrawal of European powers, and continues to this day.

Compare the boundaries of Nigeria's increasing number of federal states

with the demarcations of its many linguistic and cultural areas.

A brief examination of Nigeria shows a similar continued proliferation of subnational prefectures, called States in Nigeria. These only roughly correspond to more historic boundaries of ethnic or religious division [compare images of Nigeria above]. It may be ironic that multiparty democracy and strong centralized control have sought to thwart ethnic identities by overlaying a series of borders. Conversely, perhaps a stronger national identity which de-emphasizes potential divisions based on language, tribe, or religion would lead to a better functioning state.

Unfortunately, recent episodes in African political affairs have proven that rival political groups will exploit divisions of identity for their own gain. Such were true of the Rwandan Genocide some 15 years ago which lead to an even larger conflict in the Congo that followed and more recently the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya, East Africa, but also manifested in the civil war which has split Cote D’Ivoire in northern and southern parts, with corrosive xenophobia leading to this year’s post election conflict which can at least be defined as ethnic cleansing, if not outright genocide.

RELIGION

A major component of the xenophobia which has festered in Cote D’Ivoire splits the citizenry along a divide that is older than African states themselves: the frontier between the coastal groups, whose traditional religions gave way to European Christianity and more recently quasi-American Fundamental/Pentecostalism, and the Muslim North, which has very recently turned away from moderation toward a Saudi-style fundamentalism.

This is most evident in Northern Nigeria, which has long been one of the greater centers of the Islamic faith. The northern states of Nigeria have all adopted Islamic Sharia law, and are now suffering from the violent terrorism of Boko Haram, which has claimed responsibility for bombings in major cities in northern Nigeria and most recently on a UN compound in Abuja, the country's capital.

CROSSINGS AND CHECKPOINTS

Although the mandates of ECOWAS direct West Africa’s common borders to be open to the movement of ECOWAS peoples, border crossings are still choke-points for the movement of goods and people, and present a difficult for non ECOWAS passport holders, which need visas for nearly every West African country beforehand.

Extraordinarily for internal boundaries (which do not involve customs, but are merely marked with signage in the United States or European countries, including those between EU Member States due to the Schengen Agreement), there are passport controls between Liberian counties, which require individuals to pull off the road, and speak to a police official or even enter a police station to register. There are good reasons for this in a post-conflict situation, in a region where smuggling of goods and humans is rampant, but it also, like so many government procedures in weak states, creates an opportunity for corruption.

Experiences at these crossing points are certainly more pleasant than what might be encountered elsewhere, the arbitrary and often-times horrifically violent road blocks that chopped up Liberia during the war, or those that exist elsewhere in the region to harass commercial and personal drivers for bribes—a potentially unsafe condition which makes overland travel in several parts of West Africa risky for non-Africans. Due to this concern and the poor condition of roadways, infrequent air travel becomes the only viable transport.

A Map of obstacles along overland transport routes in West Africa.

Courtesy of the USAID West Africa Trade Hub, 2007.

That the modern countries of Africa are nearly all independent versions of territories formed by Europeans during the colonial period unquestionably undermines their viability as states, and challenges mutual stability, regional cooperation.

It is only decades after independence that the younger generations are beginning partake in a collective national identity (thinking of themselves as ‘Nigerian’ as much as ‘Yoruba’ or ‘Igbo’ or ‘Ghanaian’ as much as ‘Akan’ or ‘Ashanti’ Most normally, however, these fellow citizens are united not by a shared or borrowed African language, but by a common European one (the widespread use of Swahili in East Africa being the major exception to this).

Partly, this is due a newer component in the national landscape: the African diaspora. Emigrants to Europe or the United States, such as the Nigerian community in Houston, the Liberian Community in Minnesota, or the Kenyan Community in southeastern Massachusetts, identify more nearly with their common nationality than their individual ethnicity. As these families return back to their home countries, or interact within their own kinship groups, they influence the evolution of national identity.

The on-going era of strong-man politics of sub-Saharan Africa have a vested interest in maintaining the external sovereign borders. The fascinating exception of newly-independent South Sudan offers an imperfect path to greater self-determination; the unrecognized states of Somaliland and Puntland in Somalia less so [below]; the horrible war over the attempt by Biafra to secede from Nigeria proves the rule.

A Map of Somalia, showing Somaliland and Puntland, self-declared but unrecognized independent states. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

On the domestic stage, the central governments have an alternate object to achieve the same ends: manipulating internal political and ethnic boundaries for power, or ignoring local property or traditional land use by communities in order to facilitate large foreign investment contracts for mineral and resource extraction—the so-called New Scramble for Africa. It is within this atmosphere that the still-young states of Africa, and their youthful populations, continue to struggle to establish a stable, common identity which can be the foundation for a fulfilling, peaceful nationhood.

A map of north-central Niger, showing the lucrative uranium concession area

which ignores the existence of the greater cultural zone of the

Taureg/Tamazight nomads, leading to armed conflict.

Courtesy the New York Times.

Wiederaufbau

2011-09-17T16:15:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, talk of rebuilding was already underway. Some proposed a literal reconstruction: the ultimate act of defiance, it was argued, would be to replicate exactly what had been there before. The World Trade Center would rise again.

This idea was never seriously considered by those who had control over the site's future. The merits were slim: the original towers never enjoyed the adulation they received in the afterlife. Their architecture was celebrated in visual eulogy, but the particular features of edifices, their mass, their facades, their positioning to each other and the ground, were still seen as commercial and aesthetic mistakes not to be revisited.

The program was different now, besides. That shadowy, windswept plaza had now become hollowed ground. Although the destroyed leasable office space, all of it, became an unquestionably essential element to any new construction, under the logic that guides the marking of a contemporary massacre, this could not be in the same spot, and was pushed outward. The center of the site, the erstwhile towers' lobbies, were declared the gravestones, to be visited by the busload.

Image courtesy Greatbuildings.com

No buildings could go here: these square territories were to be preserved. The towers' footprints were re-excavated, almost as if such an exact rebuilding had begun but was abandoned. Two great holes had once anchored tremendous, thousand-foot volumes of air-conditioned, flourescent-lit workspaces and their interstitial utility corridors. The exterior was erased as well: the metal frame and skin would be replaced by water, cascading into air.

Image courtesy Collision Detection (link below)

Yet, in a wonderful and unexpected result, the unloved, derided architecture of the towers, returns in memoriam. The jets of water that are the essence of Reflecting Absence mirror perfectly the World Trade Center's signature surface. What was once static metal is now kinetic fluid. The solid is void, yet those former spaces between the ribbons of aluminum strips on the faces of the towers have been molded into strands of liquid.

Image courtesy bbc.co.uk

Perhaps the most striking thing when the mock-up came into view, nestled incongruously in a suburban setting, was that the water walls were not the "thin sheets" described by the design jury that chose "Reflecting Absence" last year.
Rather, they were more like beaded curtains, with a striation that called to mind the vertical bands of the twin tower facades, dissolving in a cascade of tears.

Mitteilung von Ferien

2011-07-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Not that has been too rapid an output here, but please be informed that Bauzeitgeist will be on haitus at least until the end of July, if not later in August, for the following reasons:

(1) It is summer in the Northern Hemisphere. If you find yourself above the Tropic of Cancer, stop staring at a computer screen and go outside. I am trying to as much as possible.

(2) I am already in the middle of traveling, and this will continue over the next few weeks, namely: Boston-New York-Boston-Amsterdam-Nürnberg-München-Malta-Köln-Brussels-Paris-Conakry-Monrovia. This will, I hope, be great for finding topics to post on that are worth reading, but I can't keep up with any sort of production schedule on this blog or elsewhere. I'm trying out a novel concept of paying attention to my physical surroundings for a change (please see #1 above).

(3) As indicated by the itinerary in #2, I will be ending up back in West Africa. I will be going to Liberia for the remainder of 2011. I have been invited to lead the launch of a new economic development venture which should be very rewarding, and again, I hope provide some inspiration for some worthwhile essays here at Bauzeitgeist. More soon.

I have over a dozen half-finished posts around the place, all of which I hope to mature and eventually be of merit to read. Several of them are, alarmingly, months old, particularly a very detailed series of posts returning to the topic of African cities. I wish I had finished these up before now.

I am wildly optimistic that I will experience better bandwidth in Liberia than in my previous seasons there, which won't hinder my connectivity either for multimedia posts on this blog, or messages on the Bauzeitgeist twitter feed. The Bauzeitgeist channel on Vimeo may, however, not have any additions soon.

For anyone who just can't get enough of me, or think me slothful for taking a break, I'll also use this post to announce that I'm thrilled and honored to participating in Quiet Babylon and A Softer World's 10-week Toronto summer studio, Border Town as a Foreign Correspondent reporting from Monrovia. Perhaps I will post my correspondent's report from that--I suppose that would only make sense.

For readers of Bauzeitgeist, those regular supporters as well as the occasional or one-time visitors, these past months of writing have been enormously enjoyable and rewarding personally. Thanks to everyone for the attention, encouragement, and feedback. I certainly hope to keep up the pace into the fall, but in the meantime, please be patient as I attend to the personal and professional transition back to West Africa over the remainder of July and August.

Given the schedule for my return to Liberia, my time this summer in Europe will only be a previous few weeks, and in such case I'd frankly much rather be wandering around taking pictures in the Bavarian summer sun, or snorkeling in the Mediterranean, or even staring out the train window, than starting at this screen, blogging. I certainly hope you'd do the same. Thanks again to all for your continued interest.

Bis Später, MM Jones

Schöne Windkraftanlagen

2011-06-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, the Fast Company Design blog featured NL Architect's proposal for Power Flower wind turbines, "Can Beautiful Turbines Help Critics Embrace Wind Energy?", among other purported innovations, the post promoted the new design as an aesthetic improvement over existing wind turbine products.

Above three images courtesy of NL Architects via Designboom

I tend to avoid arguing about architectural beauty, in part because tastes are ultimately subjective, and also I like a lot of buildings that other people consider to be ugly. But in this case, I strongly question not only the assertion that the above proposal is really any more attractive than a regular wind turbine, but that the standard wind generation apparatus is, in the scope of what we install on our landscape, at all worthy of demerit.

Image courtesy Flickr user Swerz

As the FastCo. post mentions, the expanded utilization of wind power technology has been hampered by aesthetic arguments. Turbines are deemed by a large segment of the public to be hideous: a disfigurement of our bucolic countrysides. This argument is especially prominent in the United States, no more so typified than by the vicious, decades-long fight over the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, which has been the subject of much press, including a book published about five years ago.

Image courtesy Flickr user dtsomp

Image courtesy Flickr user Bob West

Image courtesy Flickr user Lutmans

Why is it that individuals have singled out wind turbines as the scourge of our contemporary landscape? Although strip malls, parking lots, and McMansions certainly have their detractors, none has been deemed so repellent that their introduction into our built environment was in any way seriously disrupted, compared to the insane histrionics associated with wind projects.

From this bizarre anti-turbine story.

Original Caption: "From his kitchen table of his Falmouth [Mass] home,

Neil Anderson holds the calendar where he and his wife record

their daily reactions to the wind turbine located nearby."

How scientific!

Images @Jess Bidgood/WGBH

While certainly wind turbines create noise, and stick up out of the ground in a noticeable manner, its mysterious how they invoke such fervent vitriol. Even when just considering the infrastructure of our power utilities: transmission lines, stretching to the horizon, upheld on the shoulders of humungous metallic skeletons, have been with us for close to 100 years. Has there been any public debate of this? Perhaps so, before my lifetime, the appearance of the monuments to distributed power across the country was challenged valiantly.

Image courtesy Flickr user theclyde

Like wind turbines, the fossil-fuel powered generation stations pierce the skyline in their own way. In the Cape Cod community of Sandwich, in the same county as the Cape Wind project would be, is the decades-old Mirant power plant, sitting right on the ocean, visible for miles along the beach, its stacks rising above the scrub pines and sand, and looming in the background of the multimillion-dollar views, pumping out emissions.

Image of Mirant oil-fired Power Plant, Sandwich, MA

courtesy Flickr user MRTGT

If there was any resistance to the initial construction of this belching behemoth, evidently at some point the population came to accept their own needs for reliable energy, and accepted this visual intervention, with all that the wind carries to their property.

But this has all happened in less-enlightened times, perhaps. Maybe these hideous necessities have built up the resistance to further visual reminders of our technological requirements, with contemporary society just not taking it any more?

Image courtesy Flickr user poplinre

Yet, these recent times have been an era in which an entirely new technology has spread around the globe, requiring the installation of countless points of infrastructure on the land: the adoption of mobile phone technology, which has bequethed upon our contemporary landscape the cell tower.

Image courtesy Flickr user Mark Sardella

Not that aesthetic complaints have been absent from this profusion of transmission towers. However, this has bizarrely resulted in the new typology of the faux-tree cell tower, with its subspecies, the faux-palm and faux-cactus tower. Outsized plastic evergreens, welcomed into our communities; deemed acceptable.

Image courtesy Flickr user The Pug Father Ohio

Actually not a real cactus. Image courtesy Search Net Media

Image courtesy of Flickr user rust.bucket ©David Baker

If wind turbines are not entirely welcomed, neither are they universally loathed. Despite the resistance within the United States to their appearance, they are becoming increasingly common here, and are widespread in many parts of Europe. A symbol of progressive ecological sensitivity, turbines have been cleverly employed by marketers to signal environmental responsibility and cultural cool to certain consumer segments.

Starwood's Element Hotels uses the wind turbine prominently

in its branding and advertising,

including animated web ads featuring spinning blades.

Global Parcel Shipper DHL's "Go Green" PR campaign features

wind turbines prominently in its literature.

Without ignoring the real detractions of turbines, with certain auditory and visual shortcomings, or being naïve to the stronger political and economic influences that support resistance to cleaner energy technologies, a reality that was brilliantly mocked recently by the Onion, I remain astonished at how unpopular wind turbines are among certain constituencies, and the aesthetic arguments used to support them.

If I were to argue on the aesthetic merits of the wind turbine, I would assert that they are sublime, romantic, and soothing, bringing an elegance to human electrical-production. Their metronomic cartwheeling, the blades pulsing like the beat of the human heart, openly evince the harnessing of clean electrical current from nature.

Ihre Welt

2011-06-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

Global perspectives, from Franklin Templeton Investments.

International businesspeople discuss pressing matters on the streets. Lift off, zooming out from Street View up into the sky. Big Ben stands squarely at the end of city block. The Crystler Building appears in the distance, with the Transamerica Pyramid just a short walk away. A helicopter view at the crown of Swiss Re, which overlooks the Sydney Opera House. Both the Pearl Orient TV Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center tucked into different parts of the city.

Elevating past a teleconference in a glazed meeting room (Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Sao Paulo on the screens) reveals the twin Petronas Towers, Taipei 101, the Burj Khalifa, followed by the Sears Tower. Up into the clouds, here is Bank of China, then the Burj al Arab (across the inlet from downtown).

All these, with the low-rise of Manhattan, San Francisco, and other cities filled in at their ankles, laid out on what I'm fairly confident began as a satellite image of Vancouver, carved into the face of Benjamin Franklin. A Canadian city, transformed, like Nakeel's World Archipelago in Dubai, into the visage of an American founding father, and sprinkled with the towers of the planet's financial centers.

This is their world.

Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

2011-06-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

Here are a series of scans from a booklet, Kazakhstan: Land of Wonders, published by the Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan in 2009 and distributed at a promotional event at the Kazakh Embassy in Washington, D.C. (Apologies for the low quality of the scanning).

"The Republic of Kazakhstan - a unitary state with a Presidential government"

The glossy handbook is an introduction to the achievements and enticements of the state, attempting to interest tourists, and more importantly foreign investors, to the Central Asian country, which in the post-Soviet period has enjoyed enormous dividends due to the mineral and energy deposits within its vast territory.

This windfall has allowed the post-Soviet regime to devise an entirely new capital, Astana, a city masterplanned by Kisho Kurakawa. President Nursultan Nazarbayev decreed that the capital be renamed and removed to this remote hamlet in 1998, and construction has been on-going since.

A remarkable aspect of the booklet is its promotion not only of this fanciful, glittering new Brasilia on the steppes through a series of photographs edifying the neo-islamic, plastic-paneling and cobalt-blue opaque glazing scheme of the country's new mosques, apartment towers, office complexes, and government ministries.

Whereas some of this is evidently an attempt to forge an architectural identity for this young state, a land of an ancient, nomadic civilization, which for some time has had its islamic faith (and continues to have its political freedoms) repressed, much of the construction is strikingly reminiscent of the Soviet monumentality of its former client state than might be expected.

The vast, glistening plaza in central Astana is gated by the immense State Gas Corporation building, KazMunaiGaz, (above), which, with symbolism that maybe only partially intended, is the only construction to transect the monumental axis of the city's new administrative district. Its also unclear how much the architects intended the similarity to the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas (of course without the coral reef and shark tank), or, geographically and politically more related, Palace Square in St. Petersburg.

As if the new city couldn't be more reminiscent of its former Imperial Power, Astana also has a close copy of Moscow's Seven Sisters. The feel of 21st century Moscow is further embodied in that these Stalinist creations are surrounded by the cheap, gaudy shopping malls at their skirts.

"The impressive elegant palace made of white stone is a symbol of prosperity and power of state."

Astana has among its "most stunning" landmarks two works by Norman Foster & Partners. One, a metallic pyramid, has been labelled the Palace of Peace & Reconciliation, and lends itself most naturally to large international conferences. The other, which is also the second tallest building in the city, is a humungous leisuredrome, the Khan Shatyr, the world's largest tent, which includes an indoor beach so that bored bureaucrats can seek shelter from the merciless climate. (link to an excellent article, Foster in Kazakhstan, by Richard Orange, in Blueprint, 2010.)

It would certainly be possible to write a more extensive post about Astana, one of the greatest examples of the contemporary intersection between autocracy and starchitecture, but I really only intend this to be a brief post about the photographs in this booklet, and not only what they show of this developing country and its flashy capital, but also what the images reveal about the marketing of Kazakhstan as a destination for foreign tourism and capital.

What may be more notable than all the spreads of windy, glistening Astana, then, is a two-page panorama showing some sort of belching smelter plant blotting out the horizon. It suggests influence of both an older Socialist-Realist tradition of edifying Industry, but also a more neoliberal, emerging-economy inclination to boast of a country's economic capability--and is wholly ignorant of any aesthetic and ecological considerations. It would hard to imagine a European nation or American state billboarding its farting smokestacks to entice foreigners to visit.

Further in the handbook is another wide-angle shot of the Mangyshlak Peninsula, lapped by waters less neon and opaque than the new ministerial skyscrapers of Astana, is nearly postcard picturesque. Yet upon closer examination the photograph, surely captured by aircraft, implies some more complex economic forces at work. In the middle of the photograph, proletariat housing piles, too low to break the horizon stand back from the cliffs at the center of a planned settlement, while the waterfront property seems newly-occupied by enormous stucco-and-tile Malibu-Mediterranean McMansions sprouting half-complete out of the sandy precipice. At left, a luxurious, glittery-blue Esfahan-meets-Arizona estate centers on a lush tapis vert cascading down to the Caspian.

Chaos, Indeed

2011-06-12T08:21:00.000-07:00

Whitney Museum Expansion, New York @2001 OMA

Its difficult to imagine that the young, urbane staff of OMA/AMO does not have a contingent of aesthetically-conscious post-grads who have spent significant time in downtown Manhattan (anything in walking distance of the firm's Prada Epicenter on Broadway) at any time over the last decade or so.

However, it seems to have eluded the OMA/AMO team that the predominant retail interior of the district has for many years been the incomplete, 'raw' fit-out, that naked palimpsest of the building's previous industrial and/or dilapidated punk purposes.

For to only partially refurbish a sub-Houston Street storefront as an art gallery is a completely routine, unoriginal act. To declare it ironic or provocative, as OMA/AMO and the New Museum did in the brief display of the CRONOCAOS exhibit on the Bowery, is to be basically unaware of the interior appearance of both art galleries and retail shops in Manhattan.

Either that, or OMA/AMO/Koolhaas think their joke is a lot funnier than it really is. As seemingly every article on the exhibit, and the press release itself, seems to need to explain the partial revamp in detail (Ouroussouff, in The New York Times, called it "startling"). If a joke has to be explained, then is it really that clever?

****

But considered in another way, it is altogether fitting that the gallery housing CRONOCAOS was half-finished and in need of explanation, for the entire exhibit, and the theorizing behind it, is a half-baked, incomplete mess.

Aside from the theorizing itself, the content of the exhibit's boards suffer from a very low standard of editing, description, and visual communication. The narrative would not meet the standards of a mid-semester pin-up at a respectable architectural school, much less what would be produced by the in-house curating team of a major New York cultural institution.

An architecture student who presented this level of sloppiness would suffer a withering reviewfor making tutors sort through such an incoherently assembled mix of unrefined argument and unsupported assertion. The startling presence of so many typos, and the stylistic laziness (for example, putting some words in single quotes, and some in double) is annoying.

Some of the graphics themselves are not particularly convincing, and many appear to have been hurriedly churned out. Part of the problem may be that OMA/AMO's signature look, the lower-case-Helvetica-labels-over-multicolored-rectangles-as-diagram, which the office pioneered more than a decade ago in the early years of Photoshop and Illustrator, have become ubiquitously elementary, and have not aged well. Perhaps they should not have been preserved.

Meanings are elusive. Words and phrases are employed without bothering to define them adequately. Paragraphs trail off as unfinished thoughts...further lending to the breathless, bromidic atmosphere of the writing. Few opportunities to make cheesy puns or eye-rolling plays on words are passed up: the project on the Illinois Institute of Technology is titled "Miestakes"; an aspect of the Harvard Campus masterplan is named DMZ, standing for DeMoralized Zone. Statistics and facts are often either wrong, or asserted without citation. The caption of one board, for example, reads:

There is now a worldwide consensus, in all cultures and all political systems, that postwar architecture was wrong, that is deserves [sic] to die and disappear because it is 'ugly', and because it is declared responsible for many of our current ills...

In another part of the show, a board asserts that The Reichstag in Berlin contains "no trace of earlier identities..."

This may be just small nitpicking. But remember that CRONOCAOS is universally presented as nothing less than a cutting-edge visual and dialectic manifesto from the world's premier, avant-garde spatial think-tank and its celebrity-genius intellectual/practitioner.

In reality, its obvious that it is a speedy dust-off of earlier project boards, strung together in haste by interns, and while it points to many important questions, it is too disorganized, too shallow, and too incoherent to be regarded as successful museum exhibit, much less a mature architectural theory.

****

CRONOCAOS has promise. Across its presentation, it suggests a number of very good questions about historic preservation. These are important, relevant issues which are not being debated or called into question very widely elsewhere.

But CRONOCAOS asks too many questions, and delves into almost none of them--little effort is given to moving below a titillating, ostentatiously provocative surface to a deeper discussion or understanding of the issues. It is didactic when it should be speculative, brash when it needed to be erudite.

It so launches (emphasis added):

Embedded in huge waves of development, which seem to transform the planet at an ever accelerating speed, there is another kind of transformation at work: the area of the world declared immutable through various regimes of preservation is growing exponentially. A huge section of our world (about 12 percent) is now off-limits, submitted to regimes we don't know, have not thought through, cannot influence. At its moment of surreptitious apotheosis, preservation does not quite know what to do with its new empire.

Architects-- we who change the world -- have been oblivious or hostile to the manifestations of preservation. But the current moments sees the perfect intersection of two tendencies that will have so-far untheorized implications for architecture: the ambition of the global taskforce of preservation to rescue larger and larger territories of the planet, and the - corresponding? - global rage to eliminate the evidence of the post World War II parried of architecture as a social project. The various elements of this exhibition attempt to show the wrenching simultaneity of preservation and destruction that is destroying any sense of the linear evolution of time and propelling us into a period of CRONOCAOS.

OMA and AMO has been obsessed, from the beginning, with the past-- though we didn't always realize it at the time. On this wall are a selection of projects that have not been presented before as a body of work concerned with time and history. On the opposite wall, we show the documentary debris of these efforts. Together, the work reveals an inability to rest with any single approach towards the past. OMA has instead deployed an array of tactics, each one super-specific to the particularties of the project and the site. If there is one constant, it is the desire for the 'preserved' - when we choose to preserve it - to not be embalmed but to continue to stay alive and evolve...

Who thought this was good copy??

Initially, its confusing in that the pronoun "we" seems variably to stand in for: AMO/OMA; Rem Koolhaas; the profession of architecture; and society. There might be "preservation regimes" that OMA or Koolhaas aren't aware of, but to say suggest that "no one has thought through" them or "cannot access" them-- who wrote this stuff?? How arrogant to state that a subject that many other people are concerned with has just recently occurred to you, so here you are, helicoptering in to grace it with your veneer. How silly to claim to have been heretofore oblivious.

Then that 12%-- what is that supposed to mean? Does this include the Amazon Rainforest? The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Belgravia? Paris? Beacon Hill? The Grachtengordel? Teotihuancan? The Great Barrier Reef? There is absolutely no definition of this.

It would be bizarre to assert, in this end-of-nature era, that there is too much of the planet's surface that is defended against our consumption. The protection of just 12% of the earth's surface seems appallingly low, not secretive-danger-regime, as it is clearly suggested. And even if the figure refers strictly to 12% of mankind's built environment as being under some form of protection, that is clearly not the same as saying that it is off-limits to alteration.

Not many people think that Venice, Amsterdam, Paris or Charleston would be better off with the bulldozer; to lose architectural and cultural heritage for the sake of more building. There is also a question of whether many of the world's most popular tourist destinations would continue to be commercially viable or economically prosperous if they were built over. The only advantage would be to the builder.

As OMA well knows, tourism is a massive global industry, and one of the most effective transfers of foreign exchange to developing regions of the world. This is quite aside from the environmental and ecological considerations of endless cycles of throwing away and rebuilding our cities.

****

One wall of the CRONOCAOS exhibition is covered in a wall of tear-sheet, self-assembly exhibition catalogues (clever!), indexing several of OMA/AMO's projects from the past thirty years. Some of them, such as the firm's study of Lagos, Nigeria, have very little relationship to any issue of preservation.

Others, such as the innovative proposal for Zürich Kloten Airport's expansion, in which

we identified in the existing structures of ZRH enough abandoned or under-used sections to accommodate the entire program; all we needed to do was to stitch the 'found' spaces together with infrastructure in a sequence that accommodate the intended flows

sounds utterly fascinating. But the single-paragraph board is woefully insufficient to convey the achievements of the proposal itself, much less summarize the preservation implications of the intervention.

Many of the other projects included in CRONOCAOS take a much more pedestrian, tried-and-true approach to preservation: contrasting the original architecture by adding on an unapologetically contemporary expansion (Whitney Museum; Cornell's Milstein Hall; the Binnenhof, etc.) Some like the LACMA proposal, are made slightly more interesting by the relative youth of the original building. Unfortunately, none of these undertakings are presented with any measure of depth of detail.

Again, quick sentences have been dashed off and printed up, a painful, unenlightening mash of blathering snark, overzealous self-importance, and grandiose triumphalism. The project boards do not seem to have been re-examined or edited for the show, so that there seems no attempt foundation for a greater coherent theory.

Then there is wounded Rem, poor he whose genius was so great, the French state has punished him for its: his Maison à Bordeaux was listed, and the original, handicapped occupant died, but given its protections, it can't be altered for reuse by someone more ambulatory. However, this self-serving lament does not entertain the possibility that a model of high-design accessibility might have a wider benefit to society.

****

CRONOCAOS is at its most goading when it hints that destruction should be promoted, or when Koolhaas asserts there should a destruction commission as much as a landmarks board. These are clever, but unserious and flippant, and become ridiculous when Preservation becomes a global hegemon straw-man. On the other issues central to the preservation debate, many can be discovered in the exhibit, with a bit of work.

Societies struggle with contradictory desires for new and old (especially fast-growing, non Western countries, such as China). Preservation is intertwined with the more challenging struggles of contemporary culture: fleeting authenticity and economic viability. Few buildings are built with the intent that they stand forever, and materiality makes their lifespans very short indeed. Preservation oscillates between sanctifying some landmarks so quickly that their worth has not been established by consensus or pedigree (Maison à Bordeaux; perhaps Swiss Re also).

In other instances, recent but not yet historical treasures are not protected, and therefore destroyed before future generations can celebrate them. Robin Hood Gardens is not included here, nor are the Nakagin Capsule Tower or even the recent rejection of Le Corbusier buildings by UNESCO. A board which includes an image of Berlin's Palast der Republik makes no mention of that building's story, or the reconstruction of the faux-historic Schloß on the site. A further question of whether we can presume that a newer building will be better, prettier, or more valuable could also be put forward.

It has previously been observed that preservation either freezes an object in a state of dilapidation (Greek and Mayan ruins) or overhauls it to an idealized state, which is sometimes a contemporary invention (Colonial Williamsburg; The Palace of Knossos). The choice of archaeology and restoration by their nature eliminate the other possibilities, and present a structure's complicated, meandering history as a single, static image.

Preservation favors the masterpiece over the ordinary, and so magnifies the bias of the historical record toward the elite. OMA/AMO repeatedly use the term "mediocre" --winking at the concept that ugly or average architecture should be preserved as well--in contravention of the exhibit's more prominent assertion that there is already far too much preservation.

These are mostly not new ideas, and are certainly not OMA/AMO's fertilizing of "un-theorized" territory, as has been clearly set out. Indeed, most the above issues, when related to CRONOCAOS at all, are only really explored in articles about the exhibit, rather than in the exhibit itself.

Polemically, CRONOCAOS has not been nurtured to a degree that such issues are adequately, purposefully juxtaposed, or present any fresh insights. The potential for meaningful argument struggles for attention on a surface paved with embellishment and meaningless prattle. To walk through the CRONOCAOS exhibit is to read someone's scribbled notes of a brainstorming session which you didn't attend and which no one has followed up on. It is no window into an exclusive salon of avant-garde architectural theory, nor a useable manifesto for our young century.

Mein Leiblingsgebäude in Bridgeport

2011-06-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

BRIDGEPORT.

As mentioned in the previous posts, I've been taking the Boston to New York train frequently this Spring. Passing through cities every half hour or so, I've come to admire one building in particular. It's located in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at the corner of Helen and Arctic Streets, just east of that city's faded, half-occupied downtown.

Its the original 1873 Remington Arms Factory, a former munitions plant, which became in 1915 the southern portion of a 73-acre General Electric campus, but has stood vacant and disused for decades in the marginalized, depressed district, the fourth largest city in America's wealthiest state.

Buildings like this tower aren't made any more, although one of the reasons I also like it is that, in form and translucence, it is similar to the Hejduk Towers in the City of Culture Galicia, Spain. Given that passengers from New York to New Haven pass by this complex, inspiration for Hejduk's design, and Eisenman's realization, is not out of the question.

Image of Hejduk Towers in Spain courtesy this website

Aside from being unused, the factory suffered from arson in August of 2010, possibly due to squatters. Under pressure from government, which views the historic complex as a hazard (and is owed back taxes), the assembly halls have already been partially raised, acts which are in evidence from the passing train. It is also said to be occupied by spirits.

Image courtesy this website

I can't find anything specific plans of the tower or its use. Although chimney-like, I imagine it might have been the administrative offices of the plant. There is also no detail at hand about saving or reusing the tower. Maybe it will be pulled down in the last phase of the demolition. I wonder if anything will go in its place.

Krone der Großstadt

2011-05-31T11:21:00.000-07:00

Just a few minutes after my last observations from inside Boston's South Station, I spotted a similar skyline-themed simulacrum once the journey commenced, on the wall of the Amtrak dining car (apologies for abysmal quality of the iPhone photography. My camera has been sent for repairs. Never buy a Panasonic).

The mural goes from right to left, north to south, covering the whole northeastern BosWash megalopolis: Boston-Providence-New London-New Haven-Bridgeport-New York-Trenton-Philadelphia-Wilmington-Aberdeen-Baltimore-Washington-Quantico-Fredricksburg-Richmond-Newport News-Norfolk, which corresponds to the route of the (sort of) high-speed Acela line.

Like the JetBlue murals, each city is reduced to a recognizable, or semi-recognizable symbolism of its skyline. There is a mixture of both historic landmarks, well-known tourist attractions, and otherwise a long line of office buildings of various cities-- with each location getting roughly equal space, so that small cities are almost as highly profiled as the anchor cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.

Boston's Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge

The northern terminus is Boston, which is indicated by a cable-less Zakim Bridge, with the Prudential in the background.

Providence, Rhode Island. Courtesy Flickr user bunkosquad.

Strangely, both Stamford and Newark, which have intriguing, heteromorphic corporate skylines, don't make the cut, while 15,000-strong Aberdeen, Maryland and the New Jersey state capital, Trenton, are both listed. Perhaps Aberdeen is the hometown of some prominent Amtrak executive. It has no skyline to speak of, and Trenton just a few office buildings opposite the state capitol--neither seem to have any landmarks on the mural.

New London has a few multistory buildings in its actual downtown, which is dominated by a concrete transmission tower. This is polished over for the sake of the mural, as it is represented by what I presume to be the Groton Monument (which isn't even in New London, technically).

This is actually the tallest structure in New London, Connecticut.

Despite being both dull and hideous, New Haven's two tallest office towers are represented, Kevin Roche's unique and renown Knights of Columbus headquarters, despite its distinctive profile, is nowhere to be found.

The artists included this...

...but not this:

New York is basically reduced to some unidentifiable rectangles surrounding the unmistakeable Empire State Building, which flows directly into Philadelphia's Market Street triptych, which then imperceptibly melds with the totally unmemorable, anonymous back-office mid-rises of Wilmington.

Philadelphia, courtesy Flickr user Fordan.

Wilmington, Delaware, courtesy Flickr user gravgirt

Baltimore, courtesy Flickr user Spike51551

After Baltimore, the mural reaches its representative climax with the huge, oversized dome-and-obelisk pair, the Capitol and Washington Monument--only the Empire State Building rivals them in size.

Probably the most curious inclusion of all is the Quantico Marine Base, where, among many other top-secret goings-on, Bradley Manning sat in the brig until recently. Its recognizable by the pyramid of the Marine Corp Museum, which I guess is a tourist draw, but still an somewhat unsettling contemporary reference.

National Museum of the Marine Corps, Quantico.

via Wikipedia contributor RadioFan

As with New London and Aberdeen, Fredricksburg, Virginia isn't exactly Shenzhen, and seems to be marked by some colonial church spire. Colonial Williamsburg Governor's Palace rises taller than the anonymous office blocks of Richmond. Probably the artists were encouraged to highlight popular tourist destinations, to hopefully inspire some commuters to become repeat riders, with family in tow on a vacation.

Like the urban region itself, the mural peters out anticlimactically in southern Virginia: Norfolk and Newport News take up the left-handside of the mural, before it reaches the corner of the wall, at the end of the dining car.

Amerikanischen Stadtkrönen

2011-05-30T17:28:00.000-07:00

BOSTON, NEWARK, BALTIMORE, CHICAGO, SAN FRANCISCO, PITTSBURGH, RALEIGH, CHARLOTTE.

The waiting room of Boston's South Station is a soaring volume, like a high school gymnasium, It is currently made more so, as at present it is adorned with a group of enormous fabric advertising banners, hanging from the ceiling girders, like varsity championship pennants. The adverts were for JetBlue Airways, informing the rail-riding public of all the cities that JetBlue serves non-stop from Boston Logan Airport, which sits a few miles across the harbor from the train station.

Perhaps railway passengers should not, in this age of carbon footprints, be encouraged to travel to Baltimore or Newark by airplane instead of rail at all. Separately, the artistic talent evinced by the banners' graphic design, which seems could be accomplished by an Adobe Illustrator novice in a few minutes, do not deserve much merit in a purely aesthetic sense. However, the ads are interesting in the way represent their subjects, and what this suggests about American cities and their architectural identities.

In this series, multicolored simulacra skylines stand in for the cities of Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago, Newark, Pittsburgh, Raleigh and San Francisco. Some of these cities are undeniably better-known than others. Non-Americans might not even really know where Charlotte or Raleigh are (both in North Carolina)--which might cause some mutual surprise, given their size and economic might. Several of these cities do not make the top of the list of destinations for either Americans or foreigners, so as advertising subjects they are unusual, and further it is curious to consider the artistic choices made in their simulation.

Two of them, San Francisco and Chicago, are both celebrated as among America's most beautiful, historic, thriving, celebrated metropolitan centers, and also are home to what are arguably some of the country's most recognizable skyscrapers. San Francisco is home to the unique Transamerica Pyramid, an icon of that city. Chicago is home to many well-known tall buildings, but there another pyramidal form, the John Hancock Tower is widely recognized as a symbol of that great metropolis.

The Chicago poster may be my favorite of the lot. It conveys a portion of the Chicago's enormous skyline at a wonderful, theatrical moment in the northern approach down Lake Shore Drive, when that parkway aligns with Michigan Avenue's Magnificent Mile, marking the beginning of the city center. This humungous entry gate is anchored by several tall buildings, three of which are shown here: the John Hancock Building and the Four Seasons Hotel, with its quad-anchor of faux lanterns on top, and the art deco Playboy/Colgate-Palmolive Building.

Prior the the Hancock's construction, the Playboy building dominated this south-facing perspective of the city center. Originally the headquarters for the Palmolive multinational, the building was refurbished in 2006-2008 into a luxurious condominium tower.

©2007 Bauzeitgeist.

Probably the most well-known icon of all the buildings represented in the JetBlue ad series, the Transamerica Pyramid dominates the representation of San Francisco. The artist has given some more detail to the composition, pairing the pyramid with the unique outline of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, its multileveled guest room wings connected by a translucent spine of glass sky lobbies, its roof capped by decorative masts, giving the whole block a futuristic, insect-like form. Thirdly, the much shorter Embarcadero Center West makes an appearance at the bottom left in orange.

image of San Francisco courtesy of Flickr user m.john16 2007.

Mandarin Oriental and Embarcadero Center West can be seen at left.

Charlotte's visage shows the Bank of America and Duke Energy Headquarters buildings. BoA's tower was one several shiny, paramount regional banking headquarter towers that Cesar Pelli completed in the 1990s in the United States, and in both use, appearance and compositional participation is strikingly similar to his Key Bank Tower in Cleveland.

image of Charlotte courtesy of Flickr user Willamor Media

Raleigh is another North Carolina late-20th century service-industry boomtown. The tallest office building is named for BB&T Bank Building (Officially, 2 Hannover Square) and was built in 1991. At left, the Royal Bank of Canada Plaza, which was completed in 2008, includes several floors of condominiums and is capped by a small steeple.

top image of Raleigh courtesy of Flickr user twbuckner2009

Its not entirely clear, but it seems that the Newark poster is meant to feature the skyline Jersey City, which was built up in the last few decades in the waves of decentralization of Wall Street, and thus serves as a Manhattan version of the Isle of Dogs.

image of Newark courtesy Flickr user Anita363

These low-rise triangles are intended to be the Baltimore Harbor aquarium, the anchor to the urban renewal project of twenty years ago, which transformed the waterfront into a tourism center, a feat which spawned imitation downtown acquaria and boutique retro-ballpark districts throughout the United States and elsewhere.

image of Baltimore courtesy Flickr user Nemeers12010

Pittsburgh's advertisement, though spare, successfully conveys the unique, romantic affinity that so many of its residents and former residents hold for it. It shows one of its yellow river bridges, as well as the "Fifth Avenue Place" building, twenty years on from its erection in the postmodern ebullience (pink granite from Spain, accent granite from Finland) of that brief rust belt renaissance of the mid-1990s. Today its lobby is a tired, half-empty shopping arcade.

The other element in the banner is presumably the old US Steel Building, built in the 1970s as a symbol of America's corporate-industrial might, and still Pittsburgh's tallest building. Its kind of an impressive edifice, especially up close.

image of Pittsburgh courtesy Flickr user peapunk6

Aside from the Skyscraper Page crowd, it would perhaps be a challenge for many to identify these cities based on their skylines alone, much less these 5-minute Adobe Illustrator cartoons of each. Perhaps even residents of these cities wouldn't recognize a drawing derivating from the regional bank tower or luxury hotel high-rise which looms over their metropole. Generically, how many Pennsylvanians would see this and say, 'oh yes, there's old Pittsburgh, and they got the bridge right, too...'

More directly, in terms of its commercial persuasion, I wonder how many in its audience glance up and are convinced by those semi-opaque rectangles to fly to New Jersey. How many erstwhile denizens of Raleigh would see this ad and exclaim "How I long to see the RBC building in real life…that to me is home!"

The Corporate Parks of Kevin Roche

2011-05-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

Union Carbide, Danbury, Connecticut, centered around the parking garages

I was fortunate to be passing through New Haven, Connecticut earlier this month and had the time to visit the Architecture Gallery at Yale to see the exhibit on the work of Kevin Roche before the event ended (There is also a book on his work published to coincide with the show).

Lucent Technologies Research, Lisle, Illinois

Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates designed some very lovely buildings in their time (here is a wonderful first person account and homage to the Ford Foundation headquarters by one of the firm's erstwhile employees, Lebbeus Woods). A major focus of the exhibition the firm's well-known urban interventions, in New York,Atlanta, Singapore, Dublin, New Haven, and elsewhere.

Grupo Santander, Madrid, Spain

Less famous, yet quite as substantial, is a collection of massive corporate headquarters, a series of tremendous exurban campuses in Connecticut, Westchester County, New Jersey, Illinois, Spain, France and elsewhere. Most of these were purpose-built for some of the most prominent names of the multinational era: Union Carbide; Merck Pharmaceuticals; Alcatel Lucent Telecom; General Foods; Conoco-Phillips; Spain's Grupo Santander, among others. This specialization in the practice stretches back to the early days of the firm, as it was a continuation of Eero Saarinen's office, with Roche and Dinkeloo closing out the execution of such classics as the John Deere Headquarters in Moline, Illinois.

Richardson-Vicks, in Wilton Connecticut, connected to the original farm house, with the parking on the roof

The relative lack of appreciation for this typology is easy enough to understand. These privately-held, peripherally-located compounds are by their nature and intention not easily accessible to the public--although John Deere loves getting visitors 365 days a year.

This fortessing has served its intended purpose, especially as many of these corporations are not universally adored, Merck being a Big Pharma behemoth; Conoco-Phillips being a petroleum supermajor; and Union Carbide going down in history as one of the most reviled corporations of the 20th century. Such controversial entities do not generally welcome architectural tourists (see earlier post on attempting to visit to Paul Rudolph's Burroughs Wellcome HQ in North Carolina). Thirdly, the very typology of a sprawling, exurban groundscraper, embracing wasteful land use and abandoning the centers of America's cities, has been impugned in decades hence.

Borland International, in Scotts Valley, California

So this exhibit was a rare and unapologetic celebration of this spatial category, and a juxtaposition of some of the most dedicated and substantial efforts of this genus from one of its major practitioners. Together the several examples embody the tremendous gestation of both corporate post-modernism and post-modern corporatism.

Conoco-Philips Headquarters, in Houston, Texas facing Interstate 10 across a series of shallow ponds.

While its easy enough nowadays to find images of these works online, the show, with its large format photo prints on the walls, evinced well these sprawling, outscaled creations, which are difficult to access and can only be fully examined from above. Several original models were carted out of the firm's storage, allowing exhibition visitors to fly over these verdant campuses like an executive in a company helicopter.

From this vantage, the cog-like office pavilion of the Merck Headquarters took up but a tiny portion of the table top presentation model of the whole estate. A cloverleaf exit ramp looped into a flyover over New Jersey County Road 523, becoming Merck Drive as it slips past a placid landscaped pond and hundreds of acres of verdant woodland.

General Foods, Rye Brook, New York,

hailed both as a 20th century version of a classic English manor, and a Mesoamerican-inspired postmodern palace,

faces a highway with a 3-level parking garage at its base.

General Foods was acquired by Philip Morris soon after it moved into the building,

and the building has had difficulty being utilized since.

What might be the most spectacular of the group is the astoundingly massive Bouygues World Headquarters, in Saint-Quentin-Yvelines, France, outside Paris. A humungous, shiny aluminium Versailles: three multi-tiered office sheds arranged in a wide clearing in the suburban forest.

A focal, janus-faced main chateau has four massive semicircular wings curving out from a central atrium to surround open plazas. This palace sits opposite two identical, chevron-shaped blocks with matching octoganal glass entry domes held up by white columns.

This tripartate group is aligned on an axis across a central rectangular reflecting pond. The two sides are connected by a cement causeway, which ends at a circular drive, a winding, divided entryway connecting eventually to the peripheral auto-route, which is really just a short distance away through the trees.

Bouygues World Headquarters, Saint-Quentin Yvelines, France

Images ©Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates

This Building Gave Me a Headache

2011-05-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

BOSTON.

One of the better-written Wikipedia articles that I can recall coming across is the entry for Boston City Hall. Not only does it give a concise summary of the building's unique origins, but also discusses the debate around its architectural merit, with subsections titled "Description of the Architecture" and "Intentions of the Architects" and "Reception of the Architecture" (neutrality disputed). Considered a brutalist masterpiece by many architectural historians, it is reviled with equal fervor, especially among the citizens of the city and the public employees housed within.

There's not much to be accomplished in declaring if the building is ugly, or not. No one can definitely assert this anyway, for an aesthetic judgement is subjective by nature. As long as one person finds the building repellant, then it is ugly, and as long as a single person finds it pleasing, then it is not.

I've spent a fair amount of time in this building over the last ten years, and in using the building, taken an interest in how the argument intersects issues of appearance and performance-- form and function, perhaps.

In a previous position as an administrator of a downtown construction site, I used to have to visit a permitting office on an upper floor once a month to renew the site's public area use authorization in person, often waiting 20 or more minutes in a small alcove, waiting my turn to visit a particular city employee's cubicle.

An iPhone photo of the Permitting Department Ceiling,

Separately, I would have to visit a sub-basement to stand in line to occasionally clear my car of any overdue parking violations. Adjacent to this are the banks of windows where civil unions can be granted. I have often wondered just what the newly wed make of their austere matrimonial venue.

I should generally say that if concrete is your thing, this building really is a joy. The exterior is often extolled, but also many of the less-trafficked areas of the building enjoy a pristine condition which engenders moments of delight. The vacant upper stairwell somehow evokes both the sublime rush of a serene temple and the aggressive minimalism of a perfectly preserved stage set from a James Bond escape scene. The underused space benefits from a lack of wear, soil, litter, and graffiti. This itself is something of a paradox of the building: its best parts are those which are least used (a phenomenon probably not uncommon to buildings as they age).

Many other, more central parts of the building are not in such a like-new condition. Not only are these spaces worn, but these immutable concrete spaces are also in many cases haphazardly modified for their current use. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when I had to revisit City Hall for the first time in years, and spend the entire day in a meeting on one of the upper floors.

When I left in the late afternoon, I had a headache. Not because I was oppressed by the cruel, ungentle concrete or visually assaulted by the phalaxes of oversized dentil mouldings. But because I had been sitting for hours in stale, overheated air.

As the air conditioning system is binary, the vents were still blasting heat into the offices, despite the warm spring weather. Most of the upper rows of offices lack operable windows, so natural, local mitigation is difficult. The building's circulation system was poor-- a design shortcoming which does not rest quite as squarely with the architect as purely formal issues, in the usual estimation.

HVAC shortcomings may be the leading complaint in buildings new and old. Its an engineering issue that is roughly at the opposite end of the spectrum from aesthetic concerns. Especially factoring in the age of the building, and that it is an overworn, undercared public asset, it seems unfair put the blame on the original designer.

Yet it remains that using this building was simply not physically pleasant--and I was only a visitor for one business day; this was not my place of work. Sitting for hours in this stuffy office, I heard the clerk complain about the general discomfort: too hot in the summer, requiring a clip-on fan at their cubicle partition, and too cold in the winter, requiring a space-heater under their desk.

I wonder how much time the design team at Kallmann McKimmell & Knowles spent considering these people, and their workdays, their minutes or hours of interaction with the building. It is in this aspect that the building's utility suffers from their formal agenda. From the front entrance to the upper office mezzanines, architectural space has been informally reconfigured and edited to conform to daily needs, comforts, and functions. What is grand, bold, and austere is made haphazard, curious, and casual.

This is especially true at the building's entry, which, like so many buildings these days, is the stage for a security zone. What was an open entry hall has been rudely partitioned for this process. The personnel have even installed a length of faux white picket fence to funnel users out of the building. (Presumably the campy irony of this gesture was not intended?)

Nearby, adjacent to the decrepit central elevator bank, is a forlorn row of Bell telephone booths, a privacy alcove now used as easy-access storage for trolleys of event furnishings. A rather nicely-poured stairway, standing apart from the walls a bit like a tree in the corner of a yard, is roped off casually--not to be used.

The view out the large windows, overlooking the brick steppe of the surrounding plaza, shows the overhang of thefortress utilized as a carport for city and employee vehicles. A shipping containers used as maintenance storage has been placed in this cave-like shelter, too.

Looking not down and out, but in and up from this same corner of the entry level reveals a startling gesture of the building. Starting at raised interior platform, which forms the floor of the inner courtyard, a soaring, pristine space transcends the upper levels in a cathedral-like exultation. Light shines down from an unseen source above, trickling down the tremendous cliffsides of banded and layered concrete, appearing both engineered and geological; monumental and flawless surfaces despite their decades of age. This civic alter unites the various floors of the building, its light stretching to illuminates the public entryway.

In all my times into and out of the building, rushing to this floor and that, I had never noticed it, Because of a flimsy barricade blocking the foot of the steps, I could not get closer to stand underneath, to see the source of the light, and understand the building better.

Stadt des Glaubens

2011-04-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

TULSA.

In researching the previous post concerning Cote D'Ivoire, and reading about the political conflict there, I was directed to a press release by the office of US Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who, in direct contravention of not only the US Government's official position on the situation, but also the overwhelming majority of the wider international community, is squarely in support of the incumbent, Gbagbo. Senator Inhofe shares this position with other, more infamous Americans such as televangelist Pat Robertson, who has a history of transacting with autocrats in the region. It has been repeatedly speculated that this group largely supports Gbagbo because of his Christianity, while his opponent, Ouattara, is Muslim.

In reaching the posting on Senator Inhofe's site, I was surprised to find an image of a strange, Emerald City-like profile of golden-glass towers on the site's header, next to the posing Congressman. The dated assemblage, resplendently rising over a flat, lush green landscape, momentarily caused me to think, as I was in the midst of deciphering the various monuments of Yamoussoukro, that Inhofe's office had put up a stock photo of a complex in Abidjan or even Yamoussoukro that I didn't recognize, to accompany the position statement on Cote D'Ivoire.

But the towers soon disappeared, as the image box rotated through a slideshow of Oklahoma scenes, suggesting the towers were landmarks of Oklahoma.

Instead, some research revealed that this is the Cityplex, a large complex just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Wikipedia reports that the development was originally a project of televangalist Oral Roberts, to be called the City of Faith Medical and Research Center:

In 1977 Oral Roberts claimed to have a vision to build the City of Faith Medical and Research Center, which would be a successful hospital.^[1]^[2] While City of Faith was under construction between 1979 and 1981 Roberts claimed to have more visions of Jesus who encouraged him to continue the project. This included his famous vision of a 900-foot (270 m) tall Jesus in 1980. In a letter, Roberts spoke of the vision: "when I opened my eyes, there He stood...some 900 feet tall, looking at me; His eyes...Oh! His eyes! He stood a full 300 feet taller than the 600 foot tall City of Faith." ^[3]
The hospital accepted its first patient in November 1981. By 1986 the City of Faith was losing over $10 million dollars a year.^[4] In 1987, with costs spiraling out of control, the medical center went largely vacant.^[4] Roberts told a television audience unless he raised $8 million by March, God would "call him home" (a euphemism for death).^[5] The donations goal was reached but Roberts soon began looking for buyers or people to manage the facility.^[4] In 1989, only eight years after it opened, the City of Faith was $25 million in debt and Roberts closed the hospital (the last patient left on 16 October).^[6] Most of the complex was converted to office space and leased out as CityPlex Towers.

Cityplex is halfway around the globe from the underused, half-empty Fondation Félix Houphouët-Boigny, or Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, and the other pharaonic monuments that divinely inspiration decreed to rise from the red dust and verdant fields of Yamoussoukro. The graphics team for the Oklahoma Senator's office website likely thought that an allusion to Oral Roberts, legendary in the heavily-evangelical state, was generally a good association for the very conservative politician.

Unlikely that they considered the parallels between Oral Robert's grand projet and the architectural embodiments of Ivorian politics. Yet the scrublands of northeastern Oklahoma and the bush of central Ivory Coast are connected by a hubristic tangent, juxtaposing these contemporaneous constructions, aesthetically akin, supercilious and sanctimonious.

Surrounded by parking lots, the office block's front cul-de-sac is still called City of Faith way. The Cityplex website helpfully markets its office and medical suites at commercial rates.

Hauptstadt des Großenwahnsinnig

2011-04-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

YAMOUSSOUKRO.

In the past month, numerous reports have described increasingly awful fighting of Côte D'Ivoire with forces battling in many parts of the country, including urban warfare in the country's main city, Abidjan. For months, the internationally-recognized winner of last year's election, Alassane Ouattara, tried to begin his term from the confines of a faded luxury hotel at the edge of the city's lagoon. Recently, the other man claiming to have won the election, incumbent strong-man Laurent Gbagbo, is now fortified in a subterranean bunker beneath the Presidential Palace in the plateau section of the city, refusing to accept defeat.

Despite the presence of two presidents in the city, as well the national legislature, ministries, courts, and foreign embassies, Abidjan has not been the capital of Côte D'Ivoire for nearly thirty years. Officially, the capital of the republic has been in the center the country some 250-km to the northwest, in the city of Yamoussoukro.

Yamoussoukro may at first appear to be the country's Abuja, its Canberra, its Brasilia--a modern, purpose-built capital near the geographic center of the country. Yet Yamoussoukro was neither chosen to unify a multiethnic nation on neutral turf, nor remove the bureaucrats from a colonial cosmopolis to better administer the people's work.

Distant Yamoussoukro has a far more peculiar origin than any of these cities, with far less democratic intentions behind its transformation from rural village to capital city. In reading a recent summary of the modern history of the Ivory Coast, I was reminded of the country's odd post-independence history, which is in many ways manifested strikingly in this bizarre creation, what has been called an African Versailles.

The Wikipedia entry gives the broad outlines of Yamoussoukro's history. It was an unimportant chieftan's village for most of existence, and was so at the time of the birth of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who would become a member of the French Assembly, and later Cote D'Ivoire's post-colonial president, sometimes referred to as the father of the Ivory Coast.

After several decades of rule from the fast-growing littoral metropolis of Abidjan, its gleaming skyline and clover-leafed expressways a marvel of West Africa, the already long-ruling President declared that he would bequeath his vast plantation holdings in his birthplace to the state, in order to transform his remote home town into a new national capital. Flush coffers of a state-controlled cocoa and coffee commodities boom through the 1970s facilitated the realization of the President's commandments, and the capital officially transferred in 1983.

As with many African countries, Cote D'Ivoire's perennial, systematic problems are rooted not only in its colonial invention as an artificial territory of administration, but also in their post-colonial dysfunction, autocratically governed by a cult of personality, with its rampant, jaw-dropping corruption.

Yamoussoukro is the built embodiment of this monarchical despotism and gentlemanly kleptomania, of which Houphouët-Boigny is not unique and which is not endemic to post-colonial Africa. This phenomenon results in the imperial president, as an absolute ruler over a one-party state, exploiting the entire country as his personal property, not only syphoning the state's resources to his personal comfort, but employing state apparatus to both conceal and facilitate this graft, while undertaking the memorialization his own egoism.

©Google Earth.

A classic example of this, Yamoussoukro is a museum of massive monuments of the state and the glory of its leader, while at the same time well-located and internally arranged to facilitate and conceal the nefarious accumulation of power and resources. In relocating the capital from the colonial port to his ancestral hinterland, Houphouët-Boigny performed a political act of geographic nepotism, as described by the eminent scholar of African architecture, Nnamdi Elleh, in his essay on Yamoussoukro.

Similar to Canberra and Brasilia, Yamoussoukro's center features an artificial lagoon, which makes a peninsula out of the what appears to be the center of the city, separating the market town, called Habitat from the presidential compound.

©Google Earth.

The water feature is shaped like the open jaws of a crocodile, appearing from above to swallow the central market district. In fact, this body of water is known as les Lacs du Caïmans, as the President, perhaps inspired by contemporaneous James Bond villians, had sacred crocodiles bred in the lake--the feeding of which is featured as a major tourist attraction for visitors to the city. Previously, the village neither had a lagoon, nor crocodiles, and there is no specific precedent among the area's traditional beliefs for crocodiles to be considered sacred, or to be captive totems. This carnivorous theater is described at the beginning of a wonderful short story about Yamoussoukro by V.S. Naipaul: The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro.

Foreign tourists viewing the feeding of the sacred crocodiles.

If there is a tourist attraction of truly global renown in Yamoussoukro, inarguably it is the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, which is considered to be the largest church in the world. To underscore this: the largest Christian temple on the planet is in the middle of the West African bush, in one of the poorest countries in the world.

Image courtesy Matthias Offodile.

This cathedral might be worth a separate essay all on its own, as its Pierre Fakhoury (sounds like fakery) design is reported to have cost US$300million to construct, the impact of this outlay on the Republic's fiscal health has never been officially ascertained. Built in the model of St. Peter's in Rome, only larger in a gesture of scale that would foretell the simulacra of Dubai and China in later decades. The church, visible for many miles in all directions, lies at the far southwestern edge of the capital.

Image courtesy Matthias Offodile

The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro.

Indeed, all the monumental architecture of Yamoussoukro is on the periphery of the city, surrounded on all other sides by vacant fields, and forest. These acres themselves are often sliced by straight, unpaved tracks and half-finished divided boulevards, interrupted by empty roundabouts, some of which terminate at still more construction sites of undetermined purpose.These are, or were, also the agricultural plantations of the President's family, which, recall, were supposedly donated to the state by the grace of the founding father for the purposes of constructing the new capital. But just like Louis XIV, the Sun King at Versailles, it is difficult to determine the dividing line between Boigny and Core D'Ivoire.

Image courtesy this website.

While many of these imposing landmarks tend to be strictly axial within themselves and their grounds, often with manicured lawns and gardens, they are not arranged together or in relation to each other in any organized visual or symbolic logic that governs Washington, Brasilia, Canberra, or even Abuja or Astana. While beaux-arts alignment of Versailles or the Vatican is alluded to within each construction, there is no larger relationship between these buildings.

Image courtesy this website.

According to Nnamdi Elleh's anaylsis of the capital's formation, Yamoussoukro's plan was intended not to convey democratic unity and balances of institutional power, and was not intended to be urban, but was intended instead to retain the rural character of the original, ancestral village, with the addition of a series of isolated villas, creating a sort of idyllic monumentality that is nearer to a Roman, pre-modern manifestation of imperial power.

It is therefore not the humungous Basilica that is most special, but the Presidential Residence. Surrounded by high walls and guarded by sacred reptiles, the multi-acre presidential compound is on the northwestern edge of the town and is strictly off-limits. The estate has actually swallowed up Houphouët-Boigny's ancestral village itself, architecturally consuming the origins of the state like the crocodiles in the pond. It is unknown if the village has been preserved as a type of historic diorama inside its walls.

A foyer in the Palace of Hosts, the Presidential apartments. ©District of Yamoussoukro

Today the citadel is centered on a modernist block known as the Palais des Hôtes, the grounds of the Présidence is asymmetrial, with the axis of the palace not itself aligned with the half-hearted tapis vert of the lawn down to Les Lacs du Caïmans.

©Google Earth

Neither aligns with any street grid or landmark beyond, and the entrance of the estate is in the rear. Even the Basilica, itself so pristinely arranged, does not relate in any way to the Presidential compound nearby, from which it is visually blocked by a jumbled quadrant of structures on the western auto-route out of town toward the airport.

The Western side of the capital, showing the lagoon at center, the Basilica at lower left, and the presidential compound at upper left. ©Google Earth

The Basilica is only the most impressive of the city's monumental edifices. The north side of the city includes the sizable Lyceé Scientifique, and far out of town is yet another astoundingly large university, this of the Institute Nationale Polytechnique Felix Houphouët-Boigny (INP-HB), a futuristic campus which houses a number of former universities which were merged into one under the president's name.

The INP-HB Campus courtesy Google Earth. The rigid plan of the campus's partial octagon is juxtaposed to the informal community on the left-side of the auto-route. Likely home university employees and even some students.

Various details of the massive INP-HB. Images courtesy Matthias Offodile.

Also on the north side of town is a rather tinny, forlorn communications tower, another element to pierce the gently-rolling hillsides of the region.

The forlorn Telecom tower, on the city's northern edge, near the polytechnique.

top ©Google Earth, bottom courtesy Matthias Offodile.

Aside from these religious, presidential, and educational constructions, the southeastern quadrant of the city, where the auto-route from Abidjan enters the capital, has been more recently arranged with a number of grands projets, which together seek to position the city not as the national capital but as an international conference destination.

The City's Southeast, showing the Golf Course, the Hotel Président, the Fondation FHB,

the Palais du Congrès and the auto-route to Abidjan, right.

Map and Satellite ©Google Earth.

Coming into town on this road, visitors will see on a golf course to the left, with a luxurious club house, and the sprawling complex of the Hôtel Président, which seems to have its own multi-winged conference center.

The Hotel Président complex. Image Courtesy This Website.

Across a large lagoon piscine sits the accommodation itself: a 14-story tower of 250-rooms, capped by an oversized, flying-saucer panoramic restaurant, undoubtedly serving French cuisine and forming the third element of the city's skyline. This hospitality compound was according to Naipaul at least for a time operated by the French Sofitel group.

Le Hotel Président, formerly a Sofitel. Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Far more opulent and imposing is the nearby Fondation Félix Houphouët-Boigny, in which the assets of the citizenry have constructed an institution to remember the President as a great statesman. Referred to as 'peace research' house, it seems to be mostly a marble-clad conference center.

The central axis of the Fondation's pile oozes out into a wide frontal parking lot, which is then picked up by a minor residential street, only to die unceremoniously at the block containing the city's tourist office, which bars this axial connect to the main autoroute at an account angle. Nearby, the parallel central axis of the Palais du Congrès is likewise blocked from meeting the auto-route by an unkempt field.

Adjacent to this is the Palais de Congrès, which was originally built as the Maison du PDCI-RDA, the headquarters of the President's political party, the only one legal in the country during his reign. Lest it be misconstrued by name or function to have any democratic legislative purpose, the Congrès in the name seems to refer to its function largely as an additional conference facility.

Some distance northeast of here, across the auto-route's bend into the city, is one of the more recent constructions, La Maison des Députés, an impressively hulking pink pyramid, surrounded by several acres of gardens and swimming pools. This was built by the Chinese in 2006 to house delegates to the Group of 77 meeting, which includes 300 rooms, including ten presidential suites. It seems it may be intended to, in the future, serve as extended-stay hotel for the country's representatives.

Maison des Députés, Yamoussoukro's most recent monument.

Purpose-built to house international delegates to the Group of 77 meeting.

Images courtesy Matthias Offodile.

Its quite amazing to note the priority here, in that it seems that an international convention was provided with luxurious hotel rooms before any dedicated building for the Assemblé Nationale was constructed (or converted from the city's several immense conference halls).

There is no legislative house in the city at present, just as there is nothing housing or representing the judiciary, no diplomatic representation, and not even ministerial buildings of the executive branch. There is only the Presidency, its assets and its memorials, and indeed the website of the City celebrates the southwestern zone of the city as a full-service destination for G-level international summits.

This would be astonishing for the capital of any country purporting democratic ideals. It is all the more shocking to consider that these half-dozen underused or vacant edifices sit in the center of a country and region with massive poverty and unmet housing demand.

The architect credited with this creation is the Tunisian-French Olivier Clément Cacoub, who made a career of almost exclusively realizing the derangement of African despots, as a sort of African Albert Speer. This oeuvre includes an exercise quite similar to that of Yamoussoukro: the transformation of Zairian kleptocrat Mobutu Sésé-Seko's riverside home village of Gbadolite into a sort of despotic Disneyland, with multiple palaces and a private airport, famously designed to accept the Concorde, which the dictator liked to charter. This Versailles of the Jungle, as it was named, is now sinking back into a forlorn forest carrefour, Mobutu's palaces looted and burned, being swallowed up by the swamps.

Yamoussoukro's airport was likewise said to be built with this specification, although this may be apocryphal, as lots of African airports could have accommodated the supersonic airliner. At present, there is not even scheduled commercial service within the country, due to the decade-0ld civil war. However, it does seem that when the Basilica was consecrated, Pope John Paul II flew from Rome to perform the ceremony. Naturally, a multi-story, largely windowless palace was built to host him, in an event that must have seen the city at near capacity. That event was followed less than five years later by the death of Houphouët-Boigny in 1994, an event reportedly attended by at least 27 heads of state, including François Mitterand.

The House of the Pope. Image Courtesy Matthias Offodile.

The airport likely saw a flurry of activity again in 2006, during the Group of 77 meeting, when landing strip thick with the private jets of foreign dignitaries, and the whole city was bustling with the various delegations. This institution is dominated by the Chinese, who, its safe to speculate, built the Maison des Députés for the meeting. This took place during a lull in the civil war, which saw the country effectively divided into two zones, with the frontier not far north of Yamoussoukro.

Since the conflict heated up again in 2011, the focus of the action has entirely been on Abidjan, where all political and government activity takes place. In trying to legitimize their respective claims to power, neither Gbagbo nor Ouattara attempted to occupy any buildings in Yamoussoukro or administer the country from there. Instead, the pair played a chess match from across a coastal lagoon. When fighting broke out, Pro-Ouattara rebels quickly moved from the far west across the country, easily occupying towns. On March 30th, forces loyal to Ouattara marched into Yamoussoukro, effortlessly capturing the capital, but pausing only a short time on their march southeast to the main prize: Abidjan, the center of power.

Volkshöfe

2011-04-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

Note that some of the razed buildings are still outlined on the street map.

CHICAGO and LONDON.

Last week, the final tower block of the Cabrini-Green Houses, a massive public housing campus on the near north side of Chicago, was demolished. This denouement had been announced in the press several months previously, and indeed the complex had been systematically evacuated and razed over a period of many years. But the wrecking balls of the last several days mark the final nail in the coffin for the famously-troubled housing estate, which for years was a war zone of gang violence and drug abuse.

Just about the only commemoration of this Pruitt-Igoe moment was a local artist's lighting installation, featuring flickering bursts of light appearing like a final battle of automatic weapons fire was taking place in the vacant concrete shell of a building where guns were in abundance.

This is a very different fate than has been enjoyed by a pair of council towers in London, the Balfron in East London and the Trellick Tower, the signature backdrop of up-market Notting Hill, a publicly-subsidized residential block that experienced equally-diabolical lawlessness and whose name today is about as equally well-known in the popular culture of its home country.

The Trellik underwent a sustained period of pervasive inhumanity that is on the one hand horrifying and the other so nearly identical to the worst reports out of Cabrini-Green as to introduce the possibility of conflated urban mythology-- especially as the vague anecdotes of the Trellik's Wikipedia article are un-cited-- although it seems to be verifiable that girls were raped in the circulation spaces of both structures at some point, and that both Trellick and Cabrini-Green were contemporaneously metonyms for public-housing hells.

Cabrini-Green via the Tumblr 41'52'55''N 87'37'40''W

And yet in the same years that Cabrini-Green has been systematically evacuated and erased, Trellick has become the undisputed domicile of choice for contemporary ironic hipsterism. Its place as the mighty temple of retro-fetishized gentrification is evinced by the presence of a vintage clothing boutique at the base of the building, called: RELLIK, its storefront looking as if the original tower signage lost its first letter over the course of the decades.

Trellick-printed consumer products: a plate and skirt

by People Always Need Plates, sold at the London Transport Museum.

Beyond its immediate surroundings, Trellick is celebrated in fancy designer flatware sold in art museum gift shops, while its older sister on the other side of the British capital, the near-identically formed Balfron, is famed in music videos and apocalyptic feature films, and more recently, celebrated by professional photographers.

Balfron Tower by artist Simon Terrill

I wonder what would have made the difference to have had Cabrini-Green gentrified rather than abandoned. The estate possesses both the most potent name recognition and accompanying hip-hop lore of any public housing the US, which today's hipsters consumed as suburban teens in previous decades. Add to this the oft-noted, curious circumstance of its enviable location, cheek-by-jowl with the Old Town and Gold Coast, the most valuable real-estate in the midwestern United States, would seem to provide a ready market of affluent ironic gentrifiers, ready to sign a lease to set up house like they were squatting in a rap video, enjoying the proximity of the EL train to their office jobs in the Loop.

Cabrini-Green in mid-center, seen from a condominium tower on the shore of Lake Michigan

There are all sorts of reasons for the divergent fates of the Chicago houses and the London towers, but not least of them is the simple fact that the Trellick and Balfour are fantastical brutalist exuberances, whereas the Cabrini-Green towers are dull, anonymous blocks. Goldfinger's unique, whimsical form of thick concrete make his works prime for design-geek admiration, and a large part of the appeal of the London blocks over Cabrini-Green is surely the appeal of the iconic forms of the former compared to the dank, banal slabs of the Chicago campus, which will never been called masterpieces. Nonetheless, this ugliness might have been embraced as a further support the urban gentrification fantasy's irony.

While a longer essay might explore the social and political factors which unquestionably influenced this divergence as much as any design issue, such as American racism and the Thatcherite ownership agenda, it might be useful instead, in focusing on the aesthetic and cultural juxtaposition, to include a third series of public housing constructions: the work of Bertrand Goldberg for the Chicago Housing Authority.

Goldberg most famously designed the iconic Marina City, a self-contained development on the banks of the Chicago River. On the South Side of the city, Goldberg was contracted by the CHA to design the Raymond Hilliard Homes, featuring Goldberg's signature ovoid fenestration and footprint, were designed to instill pride of place in the low-income and elderly residents. Never featuring the crumbling decay or the chaotic villainy of the Cabrini-Green Homes, the RHH enjoyed several uneventful decades of occupation.

Image from the Bertrand Goldberg Archive.

In 2006, at the height of the real estate boom, under a program to rehabilitate the CHA's physical assets, the RHH underwent a US$100m renovation into market-rate housing.

Likewise, the 70-acre expanse of the former Cabrini-Green area has for nearly a decade been slowly converted from a field of towers to a much low-rise mixture of private, market-rate condominiums and town-homes, and suburban-style cul-de-sac'ed subsidized housing, called North Town Village-- a name unlikely to roll off the tongue of hip-hop performers, instill fear in suburban teens, or generally enter the American mythology.

Teju Cole's Open City

2011-03-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK.

The year is only a quarter of the way through, and has already yielded a debut novel that is being highly acclaimed: Open City, by Nigerian-American author Teju Cole.

The book is clearly influenced by the writing of W.G. Sebald, and in many ways alludes to Sebald's masterpiece, Austerlitz. Part of the novel takes place in Brussels, and there is even discussion of King Leopold, discussion of ancestors surviving war-ravaged Germany, passages about the Holocaust, and a number of other discrete references to Sebald's scenery, including mention of crossing the English Channel--the opening scene of Austerlitz.

Cole's novel is very much its own work, however, with a more contemporary, and American (and African) atmosphere, centered on a far less anonymous main character, who in addition to his perambulations across Manhattan and his four-week visit to Brussels, spends many parts of the novel discussing his family and other relationships, including some wonderful passages recollecting a childhood in Nigeria, including Lagos.

Walter Benjamin, Freud, and a number of classical composers are also mentioned. The main character, Julius, is not merely a passively-observing, historical-recollection flaneur, but a young man of color who experiences New York main in terms of his own relationships. These other characters balance the narrative's psycho-geographical musings and are more critical to the action than Julius's wanderings.

These introspective strolls are delightful. Below are two architectural passages, one from the very beginning and the second from near the end of the novel:

One Sunday Morning in November, after a trek through the relatively quiet streets on the Upper West Side, I arrived at the large, sun-brightened plaza at Columbus Circle. The area had changed recently. It had become a more commercial and tourist destination thanks to the pair of buildings erected for the Time Warner corporation on the site. The buildings, constructed at great speed, had just opened, and were filled with shops selling tailored shirts, designer suits, jewelry, appliances for the gourmet cook, handmade leather accessories, and imported decorative items. On the upper floors were some of the costliest restaurants in the city, advertising truffles, caviar, Kobe beef, and pricey "tasting menus." Above the restaurants were apartments that included the most expensive residence in the city. Curiosity brought me into the shops on the ground level once or twice before, but the cost of the items, and what I perceived as the generally snobbish atmosphere, had kept me from returning until that Sunday morning.

It was the day of the New York Marathon. I hadn't known…To escape the din, which seemed to be mounting, I decided to go into the shopping center. In addition to the Armani and Hugo Boss shops, there was a bookshop on the second floor. In there, I thought I might catch some quiet and drink a cup of coffee before heading back home. But the entrance of the crowd overflow from the street, and cordons made it impossible to get into the towers. --Open City, pp. 8-9

From where I stood, I could see, behind the diner, the massive AT&T Long Lines building on Church Street. It was a windowless tower, a giant concrete slab rising into the sky, with little more than a few ventilation openings, which resembled periscopes, to indicate that this was a building rather than a dense brick fabricated by a gargantuan machine. Each floor was at least double the height of that found in a normal office building, so that the whole tower, intimidating though it was, came to only twenty-nine stories. The military aspect of the Long Lines building was intensified by the thickened corners, elongated shafts with which the building mimicked the form of a castle's keep flanked by gatehouse towers, and which concealed the elevators, ductwork, and plumbing. Those few workers who used the building, I imagined, must after a few years become moles, their circadian rhythms completely distorted, their skin depigmented to the point of transparency. Long Lines, which I continued to stare at, as though it had drawn me into a trace, seemed like nothing so much as a monument or a stele.

I was drawn out of my thoughts by the voice of a security officer: You can't stand here, move along, sir. I moved, and came down to the side street. --- Open City, pp. 218-219

Above images of Time Warner Center ©2005-2008 Bauzeitgeist.
Bottom image of AT&T Long Lines Building courtesy of Flickr user wallyg

The Guardian of Guangzhou

2011-03-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

THE BANKS OF THE PEARL RIVER, GUANGZHOU.

Peter Kelly's curious diatribe in Blueprint late last year is a weakly-argued disgruntlement by a professional print journalist toward bloggers, blaming them for their lack of formal criticism of new architecture, as most chose instead explore niche topics or personal interests.

In response, many so-besieged bloggers have aligned themselves with a general dissatisfaction of the state of current architectural criticism, in which many print critics seem wedded to the public relations arms of celebrity architectural offices, real estate developers, and government, and are accused of being either adolescently star-struck, or agents in a larger power brokerage, of which the newspaper as a whole is part.

With this debate on-going, it is all the more remarkable to have Jonathan Glancey of the Manchester Guardian file simultaneous print and video reviews of a large project by a major architect: global hyperstar Zaha Hadid and her recently-opened Guangzhou Opera House in Southern China. These twin adorations, with the print piece embarrassingly headlined, "Move over Sydney!" perfectly exhibit the pathetic state of architectural journalism, which has so engendered starchitect hagiography in general and the Zaha-worship in particular.

Both the video and article don't offer anything remotely technical, other than reporting that the acoustic designer helpfully declares his own work to be "perfect." Even for a popular, non-professional audience, the absence of any level of specific performative analysis is astonishing. Its as if music were reviewed while avoiding all mention of the instrument's harmonies or the singer's pitch, or if a film was reviewed while excluding analysis of the camera work or editing.

Its one of the most remarkable buildings not just in China, but in the whole world!

Jonathan Glancey says virtually nothing specific or meaningful about the architectural design, and says a lot that makes little sense, be it either helplessly vague or annoyingly cliched. Glancey's verbage is a parade of contemporary architectural bromides, kicking off the video with the hugely-dated metaphor that a particularly unusual architectural form was built by an alien civilization. Elsewhere he compares the building to a bolt of lightning. He variously characterizes the "geometry" as either impossible and gravity-defying.

Where on Earth or in space is this otherworldly monument?!

Most ignominiously, Glancey repeats, almost word for word, the architectural office's own PR metaphor for the structure: a typically empty comparison of the opera house to a natural phenomenon:

From Simon Yu of the ZHA project team: "“We liked erosion and stones. It worked well next to the Pearl River. The metaphor is two pebbles picked from the bed of the river and placed on the river bank.”

From the ZHA press release (via Dezeen): Shaped to resemble two pebbles on the bank of the Pearl River, the building houses a 1,800-seat theatre plus 400-seat multifunctional hall, rehearsal rooms and entrance hall...Like pebbles in a stream smoothed by erosion, the Guangzhou Opera House sits in perfect harmony with its riverside location.

From the Guardian: Set in Haixinsha Square, a brand new stretch of south China's ever-expanding trading city, the opera house takes the form of what appear to be two enormous pebbles that might have been washed up on the shores of the Pearl river, on which Guangzhou stands. Rough-shaped things sheathed in triangles of granite and glass protrusions, one houses the main auditorium while the smaller encloses a multipurpose performance space.

From the Video: "...Rest like Giant pebbles on shore of pearl river. They act as the cultural anchor of massive development of new financial towers..."

In one of the most revealing moments of the video, Glancey, standing head-on to the camera on an upper level balcony high above the "gravity-defying foyers", seems to apologize for the roaring din of the intermission crowd mingling below ("Its very loud…but its supposed to be…its an opera house," he says in a high, contrite tone), as if his slight frame could censor whatever auditory flaw he perceives to need masking.

Sometimes, just sometimes, architecture makes you want to burst out into song! ...the building behind me does all the singing you'll ever want!

The view behind him, through a massive, irregular space, is an extremely intriguing one, and the noise could be either a purposefully or unintentionally enjoyable experience, but Glancey neither asks Zaha (or the acoustics consultant) about this effect, nor gets out of the way to let the camera lean over the balcony for his audience. In this way, not only is it not clear what there is in the building to dislike, there isn't even a very good expression of what may, at least within the realm of possibility, be some effective or enjoyable aspects of the architecture.

Very nice? Its a bit more than that! Its a truly radical design!

This can't even be called criticism. There is no portion of the reporting that lets up even momentarily on the blood-rushing, exhilarating promotion of the subjects at hand. There is no point where he criticizes the building.

The building, even when empty, has this quality of being restlessly alive.!

Image courtesy of the Guardian by Dan Chung

With its speedy editing and great number of dark night shots, it is difficult to get a visual sense of the form of the interior or exterior of the opera house in the four minute video, its pop-synth soundtrack not withstanding. Redeemably, the Guardian's 20-image slideshow provides a much more thorough visual understanding of the space, but Glancey's own works remain confusing. But providing an understanding of the architecture is not the point. Even more than the building itself, the purpose is to promote the personality behind it.

Even Zaha seems dazzled by the result!!

Tellingly, there is as much face time on the clip as there are shots of the new construction, whether inside or outside. In four minutes of video, the viewer has more time to examine Glancey's teeth and Zaha's leathery complexion than gain a spatial understanding of the building.

A virtuoso performance!!

Glancey's breathless, hyperbolic intoxication isn't just hilariously over-enthusiastic, but is actually detrimental in several ways. Glancey is obviously drunk on both celebrity-workship and signature form-making. Aside from his floor-licking veneration of Zaha and her opera house, one of Glancey's main points is that the citizens and leaders of Cardiff, and Britain by extension, are pathetically timorous and myopic to have not done whatever it took to get a Zaha building. As if a Zaha Opera House=Zaha Opera House (even the Lauraete herself had to chide Glancey mildly for this view), and more broadly ignoring whatever political or fiscal context the Cardiff Opera House project had to navigate to work. Glancey exhibits no concern for this.

Guangzhou's gain is Cardiff's loss. Zaha Hadid is a trailblazer! But the trail she blazes so very brightly has still to light up British towns and cities... Zaha had hoped to built an opera house like this years ago in Cardiff Bay in Wales, but an unholy chorus of dim local politics and cultural philistinism wrecked her plans.

While Glancey mentions how the Opera House anchors a new district of this enormous city, there is almost no visual or verbal exploration of this. More specifically, the social, political, and economic milieux in which this Opera House was solicited and realized is almost entirely ignored. Glancey flatly states: "this extraordinary building has been a very big event in China," as vague and meaningless as any of his other declarations.

Although its appeal will be global...it is built very much for local conditions.

In fact, it is left to a completely non-architectural journal to cover these issues at all: it is only by happening to read a column in the Financial Times--but not by its architecture critic Edwin Heathcote, but its South China correspondent, Rahul Jacob-- that the larger context of still-impoverished China, with Guangzhou its Dickensian factory-opolis, is incorporated into a discussion of the building:

This conundrum – of an opera house that cost more than $200m to build but has the concert schedule of an institution flailing financially – might seem baffling at first but it is emblematic of the problems facing China. It has a government that is eager to spend lavishly on trophy projects such as high-speed railways and concert halls but not always the will to manage the minutiae of ensuring that ticket prices are affordable or that programming is adequate.
The GOH is the most extreme example. “You have the GOH with no [resident] symphony and no opera chorus,” says one observer. “Beijing and the local government pitched in to build the opera house but when it comes to programming the attitude is ‘You mean we have to pay for that too?’”

Instead, Glancey closes with a bang:

Is this a great building? Well, yes I think it is...A marriage of high, intellectual, brilliant avant-garde architecture and true populism...what a wonderful meeting that is. A grand, avant-garde architecture opera house for everyone.

Not so much avant-garde as Avant-Guardian. At least he didn't blog about it.

A tweet from Dwell Magazine, linking to Glancey's video in the Guardian.

Hantel

2011-03-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

SOMEWHERE in CHICAGOLAND.

From Chicago magazine, 2009 (I must get a better scanner). Although on a different intellectual spectrum than Ross Racine, the visual absurdity of the cul-de-sac becoming a haltère produces (presumably without intention) similar ironies and about our residential sprawl and its defensive organization.

NB: Recently, Lebbeus Woods picked up on Racine's work, and discusses it from his perspective.

The Business in Bahrain

2011-03-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

My tweet above from February 18th might have only been a pithy, hyperbolic aphorism, but as the protests continue in the Gulf, I wanted to explore this thought a bit further.

The historic uprisings that have roared across the North Africa and the Middle East reached tiny, affluent Bahrain about a month ago. There, the protests bravely continue, with increasingly disturbing reporting in recent days describing an increasingly violent, militarized and sectarian confrontation.

From when the crowds first gathered in the streets of Manama in mid-February, the particular nature of Bahrain's ultramodern built environment gave the events there a different character from the previous events in Tunisia and Egypt or the simultaneous street marches in Yemen, Jordan and elsewhere; quite apart from what is now civil war in Libya.

Cairo, Africa's and the Arab world's largest city, is enormous; densely built-up and developed. Its dusty-brown concrete jungle was constantly on display, live from Tahrir Square; and a significant chapter in the Egyptian revolution involved a night-time urban battle, simulcast live on international satellite news, showing protesters and their foes squaring off among the overpasses and on-ramps that twist across the Tahrir Square area, passing enormous international hotels like the Hilton and Four Seasons as they link to the bridges over the Nile.

Image courtesy of Katu.com

However, Cairo, famously dilapidated, a faded Paris of the East, is a layered mix of centuries-old warrens of side-streets, long, wide boulevards, and public plazas (for a more detailed essay on how Cairo's plan facilitated the uprising, I recommend this great essay and the super-excellent blog Mammoth also has a spatial essay on the Tahrir Square revolution).

Al Jazeera Live, 19 January 2011

Little Bahrain, on the other hand, has one of the greatest concentrations of wealth within any nation, and for decades has used this capital to constantly upgrade itself into an international business destination. In the past decade, it has redoubled its efforts, as part of a regional trio with its larger neighbor, Qatar, and of course, Dubai, of which, like so much global urban development over the last decade, it sees as its model (Dubai itself being a derivative of the high-rise enclaving and luxury spatial products of the American sunbelt).

Rendering of Bahrain Financial Harbour, courtesy of Cluttons Bahrain.

Recently, Bahrain answered these emirates' burgeoning urbanization and financial marketing with a building boom of its own, complete with glossy marketing campaign: Business-Friendly Bahrain. Broadly speaking, the architectural icons of this phenomenon, the face of this transformation, have been the vaguely-unique outlines the matching, sail-shaped pairs of Bahrain Financial Harbour and its twin, the Bahrain World Trade Centre, both built in 2007-2008.

In the past month, the tagline has been morbidly modified by dark humorists to Bullet-Flying Bahrain. In the background of broadcast footage of tear-gas assaults and water-cannon advances stand the gleaming new (and even unfinished) skyscrapers of Manama's ready-made financial district and waterfront leisure zone. [Update 20 March: for more on Bahrain's bruised business reputation from Wall Street Journal and Businessweek]

Previous images from Bahrain.com. Note, words embedded in script at top, including "Gold" and "Upgrade"

Less soaring, but no less signature, are the massive enclosures of Manama's many, many malls. A country with only slightly more people than greater Hartford, Connecticut, has no less than six huge shopping malls. Even in this mature stage of global consumerism, the array of North American and European brand-stores within them is remarkable.

Instead of ancient casbahs or labyrinthine souks, much less colonial-era boulevards or squares, Manama has acres of air-conditioned bazaars, connected to shiny office towers and luxury hotels--a model of sun-belt aspirational overconsumption catering not only to the minority population of moneyed native Bahrainis, but aimed squarely at the expense accounts and expat compensation packages of defense contractors of Loudon County, energy technicians from Laredo, and bankers from London. These malls and skyscrapers are supposed to attract and retain these orgmen.

An online advert for United Airlines inaugurating non-stop service from Washington-Dulles, aerotropolis of the military industrial complex, to Bahrain, home of the US Navy 5th Fleet and major staging area for ongoing wars and defense-contractor nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. ©2009 UAL Corp.

Warfare has long since moved from grassy battlefield to the built-up city. Two decades ago, in Bosnia, the novelty of CNN operating a de facto broadcast base from Sarajevo's Holiday Inn, immortalized in popular culture, was a sad reminder of the city's previous promises of prosperity during its Olympics, and highlighted the peculiar interconnectedness of the planet, including its factional violence. Americans were challenged to imagine a mass grave, but not a chain motel.

Reprinted from NY Times Nick Kristof and NBC's Richard Engel from 18 Feb 2011, early in the street fighting when both reporters were on the ground.

In Bahrain, the protesters' physical focal point has been Pearl Square. In search of a Bahraini equivalent of the vast, Place de la Concorde-style Tahrir Square, the protestors have centered on a lowly traffic circus in the center of the city, with one of the few icons that the country had before the building boom: a white concrete sculpture topped with a sphere symbolizing a pearl, and recalling the time when the barren island's only wealth came from diving for pearls, and was not instead used to purchase them at Chanel at the mall. (Additionally, and in contravention of norms of decency and combat engagement, the country's main hospital was violently militarized by the government over perceived sympathy toward the protesters, who were the patients).

The Pearl Roundabout Monument, prior to 19 March.

For now, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Spa, the Payless Shoes outlet, and the Marks & Spencer of Manama are not yet the grounds of the bloody battles of the diminutive traffic circus that is Pearl Square. Most of the malls have been sealed, as if in mourning. But through the seering haze, the 5-star hotels, class-A office space, and supermalls of the Seef form a blue-gray backdrop to the foreground's fighting, viewable on Al Jazeera.

Images courtesy of MSNBC

That the fighting has not occurred inside these buildings is not to say that these new developments are unrelated to the unrest. On 13 March, the New York Times reported that the protesters had blocked access to the financial district, and were attacked with tear gas:

The demonstrations on Sunday occurred on King Faisal Highway at the entrance to Manama’s financial district...“It is like a ghost town with the highway closed and the financial district closed,” Hussein Muhammad, a bookstore owner and activist, said by telephone. “Thousands of people came all morning, and hundreds were injured.” Two demonstrators suffered serious head injuries, witnesses said...The demonstrators have grown frustrated that they have been allowed to hold on to Pearl Square, a traffic circle, but have not achieved their political goals. That is why, they said, they chose to move on the financial center in a country that prizes its business-friendly policies...

Spatial disgruntlement, the built manifestation of the population's marginalization by the country's elite, is one of the roots of this unrest. This wildly-circulated power-point of Google Earth images, comparing the immaculately verdant edens behind the high walls of the country's elite palaces, against the tiny, irregular clusters of citizen's housing was reported to have infuriated the public. Even if, much like social-networking itself, it is difficult to measure its influence on street protestors' will and courage, they evince the disconnect within the society. These new skyscrapers and shopping centers are monuments to the political and social hegemony which the Bahraini people see as their oppressor.

Image reprinted from BusinessInsider.com. Link in above paragraph to the incredible power point.

For many Bahraini citizens, the glass-and-steel towers of the seafront do not represent progress. It is a huge irony that a similar sentiment was so publicly and eloquently on display in the most recent Venice Biennale: Bahrain's award-winning project was imbued with a frankness and progressive attitude that is, in light of the last month, increasingly anachronistic (its tempting to wonder if the Google Earth slideshow was not inspired by this installation).

Bahrain Pavilion from 2010 Venice Biennale. Image courtesy of e-architect.com

From an outside perspective, in the cosmopolitan banality of Manama's skyline, its possible to see not only Abu Dhabi or Kuwait, but even Las Vegas or Miami. While such street-war on Brickell Avenue or the Strip remain incomprehensible, somehow the strange juxtaposition of the rock-hurling resistance against the imposing instant skyline manifest a wider culpability in this conflict, a guilt that is as global as the brands in the mall directories.

We didn't need this violence to know that dueling Burberry boutiques are no substitute for fishing rights, or a decent education, or the chance at a meaningful career. But the events in Bahrain ask a more nefarious question, as to whether these exclusive zones, the purpose-built, privatized spatial products of debt-and--consumption, are fortress-like enough to protect the state from the dissatisfaction of its people, or have a role to play, in favor of one side or the other whatever the outcome of this revolution will be.

UPDATE 20 MARCH: The Pearl Square Monument was raised by the government on 19 March:

Schmücken mit Arkitektur

2011-03-14T11:28:00.001-07:00

I've never shopped at a mall-brand or big box furniture chain in order to stock up on knick-knacks. I have usually been someone in real need of more bookshelf space, rather than things to go on bookshelves. I think there is something unadventurous in shopping for "accessories" to make one's home look more coordinated. Glazed pottery, full of nothing, chosen to match the area rug. "Wall-art" from Ikea. "Home Accents." "Décor." Uninspired inspiration.

Despite this, I don't have anything against Crate & Barrel or Habitat. I enjoy owning stuff too much to be an anti-consumer but don't can't afford to be a design snob. What's worth considering in all of this is the pervasive architectural vogue, a popular currency of fashion and consumption to convey the urbane aspirations of upmarket retailers. Budget nesters can buy a piece of architecture. No need to frame the degree: just shop. Tchotkes convey intellect.

For example, here is a collection of Stone Buildings from the young, hip, less-expensive undermarque of Crate & Barrel: CB2. Little model houses, perhaps created at the direction of an individual with a formal architectural education. Or at least someone flipped through a monograph or two.

At first, I thought I knew the genesis of the pitched-roof item at right, but I can't figure it out now. Is a simple house with oversized stairs really an original idea? I had thought surely it stood in the corner of some Rossi drawing or was shown in colored-pencil perspective in Ungers. Such a folly of High PoMo, I can see it in a Graves watercolor, standing on a green hill. Perhaps its just the models' toy-block essence that makes me think of the bright crayon and pastel-shadowed geometry of the postmodern drawings of my childhood.

In the foreground, a conical crown of a hut's roof has been faceted, resulting in a sort of truncated Torre Hejduk.

Torre Hejduk. Courtesy of Flickr User José Camba.

At left, the iconic "saw-toothed" roofline designates an assembly plant, recalling the industrial inspiration of the Bauhaus, (though the Bauhaus campus was generally flat-roofed).

Courtesy Flickr User Explorer Björn.

Lest I think too deeply into the potential references to architectural history in all of this, the trio are labeled, respectively: House, Temple, Condo.

That's right: the factory has become the condo. How au courant.

On Special now at CB2. Buy them alone, or get the whole set at discount.

Half Price at the Ennis House

2011-02-28T18:48:00.000-08:00

HIGH UP in the LOS FELIZ HILLS, LOS ANGELES.

When I was in Los Angeles recently I not only did I finally visit Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House, a building I had always wondered to see, but among other things discovered that, having been up for sale since June 2009 by its foundation, the asking price has been halved. Press release from the Ennis House Foundation is here.

The realtors' exclusive listing is here: $7,495,000, aside from the bill for the second half of a necessary restoration, requiring an amount approaching or exceeding the sales price. What was inspired by delicate, uninhabited ruins, disintegrating into the harsh climate, is now just that. Better photographs than mine appear in the L.A. Times in an article from January.

Apart from owning an historic Frank Lloyd Wright house, and having an enormous and beautifully-designed home in general, and also residing in a leafy, secluded corner of Los Angeles, and apparently having $20m to drop, this is a rare opportunity to purchase a National Register of Historic Places listing, in addition to being a city and state landmark.

Aside from all that, there are a number of awesome aspects to this house that I came to appreciate on a recent visit, which show how Wright was interpreting a spatial and aesthetic heritage in simultaneous ways. Not only are its Mayan-Revival form and textile-block construction intoxicatingly exotic, the entire edifice, so precipitously situated on a winding, narrow road well up in the Los Feliz hills, is Mesoamerican in its monumentality. In its pyramidal shape, spilling down from the residence on a series of terraces and block-built faces and also in the wide entry drive-forecourt, recalling Yucatec platforms and plazas, the essence of Maya architecture is captured quite grandly.

The entry court. The cliff-edge view gives the sense of floating.

I haven't come across what may have been written previously to provide insight into Wright's inspiration for the Ennis, which Wikipedia explains came specifically from the fanciful, Puuc-style structures of Uxmal. If I've retained my Wright scholarship, the architect never traveled to Mexico in person, but the academic reports and images of which were inspiring the Pan-American imagination of the art-deco, post-Panama Canal era.

In addition to providing that quintessential Angeline panorama of the grey-brown office blocks of downtown and Wilshire, another Mesoamerican Wright design, the Hollyhock House, atop a lone, pyramidal hill on Hollywood Boulevard, is visible almost directly south about a mile.

The Ennis House's massive pyramidal platform is best viewed from the Hollyhock House to the south.

Hollyhock House. Not textile-block, but still Mayan.

I recalled how, summiting the crumbling pyramids at Tikal in the Peten, the otherworldly, cresteria-crowned sanctuaries of that abandoned city's other mounds were visible above the tree line--that the temples transcended the space, reverently facing each other in a perpetual watch, long after their builders and civilization had vanished.

All this can be yours (Zestimate is $2.4m, by the way. I recommend walking in and low-balling 'em).

Mark Bradford at the ICA

2011-02-06T14:56:00.000-08:00

There is still more than a month remaining to view the Mark Bradford retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Los Angeles-based Bradford's subject is the American city and urban society, and his huge, mixed-media canvases reference maps and cartography--he even reports using Google Earth as a starting point for his pieces.

His most renown works explicitly evoke city blocks, neighborhoods, and inner city territories of racial and class conflict. One of his most powerful works, Scorched Earth, 2006, with its tortured territories of blood red and charred black, recalls the 1921 race riots of Tulsa, Oklahoma with a distressed map of that city with its racial divisions, which became a battleground. Bradford has experienced the chaos of riots first-hand in his native Los Angeles, and many of his immense, warped yet neatly segregated collages appear to have survived trauma and assault--especially up-close.

Made of found materials, the works are painfully distressed by Bradford's processes, which involve both detailed assembly and unforgiving destruction (he wears away at his agglomerations with an industrial sander). As elevations, his work directly imitates the forlorn urban streetscapes plastered with wilted, faded signage and partially-identifiable billboard advertising-- themselves the very ingredients of his assemblage--but as plans the works devastatingly evoke the disordered, interrupted and segregated topographies of America's urban centers. Overlapping raditations streets-like and block-like, suggest the disunity and discordance of America's urban spaces, and the explosions of violence that occur within them.

"Its about…tracing the ghost of cities past. Its the pulling off of a layer and finding another underneath" -- Mark Bradford