American designer, architect and filmmaker Charles Eames–who together with his wife Ray, was responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century–appeared on the Arlene Francis “Home” show on NBC in 1956. It’s neat to see Eames on TV, but this episode is also an odd reminder of how square things were in 1950s America.
Metropolis Magazine published a feature last September on the rapid acceleration of New Urbanism in Omaha.
The magazine claims much of the groundwork for Omaha’s urban-design plan was put in place by the Omaha Community Foundation, which started working on a vision for the city in 1999. In 2002 the foundation asked Connie Spellman from the chamber of commerce to spearhead Omaha by Design, a nonprofit set up to focus their efforts, and they brought in Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces to help.
Omaha by Design came up with 73 urban-design recommendations as part of the Omaha Master Plan. The plan encompasses everything from the landscaping of street corners, the design of important civic sites, and streetlamp choices available for neighborhoods to regional development, protection of watersheds, and the creation of a citywide trail system.
“Corporations were realizing that Omaha didn’t have the energy that a lot of young workers were looking for,†Steve Jensen, Omaha’s planning director says. “They’re saying, ‘It’s important to have a city that’s interesting and active—and a little edgy.’†That’s something community leaders appreciate about Saddle Creek Records. According to the Omaha World Herald, the city helped finance Saddle Creek’s new entertainment complex in NoDo. The 56,000 square feet complex consists of Saddle Creek Records, live music venue Slowdown, the Film Streams art-house theater and spaces in which artists can work and live.
Joe Gudenrath, spokesman for Mayor Mike Fahey, said the mayor’s office was “active in encouraging them to locate in north downtown.”
“We didn’t want to take the chance of losing Saddle Creek Records to another city,” Gudenrath said.
New York Time Building by Khoi Vinh
Khoi Vinh is the Design Director for NYTimes.com. He started working in the paper’s new building this week. This is how he describes it:
The new Times building at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan’s midtown was designed by Renzo Piano, and whether it fits your taste or not, it’s hard to deny that it’s the most notable new skyscraper to rise on the island this decade.
From top to bottom, the new building is all metal and glass, like some kind of throwback to the early optimism of modernist impulses. But it feels not all anachronistic; rather, walking its hallways and staring out its windows, it’s almost brashly futuristic.
While this new structure looks and no doubt is impressive, I’m not a huge fan of tall buildings. I don’t mind gazing at them or pondering how they’re constucted, but I don’t want to work in one. For that I require a small, naturally lit, well ventilated space just steps from nature.
Yesterday afternoon, Darby picked up a handful of $.20 cents books from Habitat for Humanity’s discount store in downtown Bluffton. I’ve already ripped through the one that jumped out at me from the pile on the coffee table.
Tom Wolfe’s 1981 architecture essay in book form, From Bahaus to Our House, explains modernism in a smart but biting manner, a style he trademarked along with his white-suited public persona.
Let’s look at a small but telling passage about one of the founding fathers of the International Style.
Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundemental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
After putting the book down this morning, I wondered if any criticism might exist on the series of tubes. Google in concert with The New York Times provided the answer, as one might expect. Once upon a time, I visited libraries with card catalogs and microfiche for this type of information. Not now. Now Paul Goldberger’s 26-year old review in the Times is but a few keystrokes away. Goldberger says Wolfe has “a great ear, but no eye,” dismissing the book as a serious contribution to architectural thought.
Mr. Wolfe’s agility continues to dazzle, more than fourteen years after his essays first began to appear in print. But dazzle is not history, or architectural criticism, or even social criticism, and it is certainly not an inquiry into the nature of the relationship between architecture and society.
Of course Mr. Wolfe isn’t really writing history; he is writing social criticism, as he always does. I think that he is finally not very interested in architecture, anyway. What interests him much more are society’s reactions to architecture. And there he makes some observations that, while as simplistic and selective as his history, are at least amusing.
Architecture is unique among the arts for its formidable practicality. The product of architecture–buildings–can be understood in the most mundane terms as places to house a family or a business. Theorists can also spend decades elaborating radical, sometimes incomprehensible ideas about the built environment. For instance, Wolfe goes to lengths in this book to expose the socialist underpinnings at the foundation of modern architecture (and the various failings of its proponents to live up to those ideals).
Wolfe gets to the heart of client-architect relationships during this era. He depicts modernists from the Corbu/Gropius/Mies Van Der Rohe schools as pompous artistes with no interest whatsoever in pleasing clients, nor the masses. The academy’s complicit role in all this is also explained with little delicacy.
How does the word “democrat” make you feel? Given the Democratic Party’s total ineptitude at present, and the current state of American “democracy” chances are you’re not feeling too good about it. I know I’m not.
In December of 1949, 80-year old Frank Lloyd Wright, descended upon Radio City Music Hall and The Mary Margaret McBride Show. While discussing his organic architecure and his Middlewestern sensibilities, he said the Midwest is the heart of the country and the heart of democracy.
If democracy has a heart, of course, that’s the thing that particularly distinguishes it, isn’t it, from other -isms? The fact that it has a heart. The fact that it insists upon the individual as such and defends him. It has to live on genius–democracy. Democracy can’t take the handrail down the stair. A democrat has to have courage–keep his hand off the handrail and take the steps down the middle. That’s a democrat.
As with most things Wright, I’m blown away. The man could really think and he had an undying passion to care a great deal about important things. Nothing is more important than freedom and nothing is more American than freedom. Democrats–affiliated with the political party of that name, or not–need to be free to stand up and tell it like it is. I, for one, am not loyal to a man nor an office nor a political party. I’m loyal to my country. A country that needs me to be an agent for change, to speak up against institutional injustice, to offer better ideas.
Here’s one: Let’s stop paying oilmen to invade other countries and start paying teachers to educate our youth.
Cusato Cottages, LLC wants to house victims of Katrina in cute but functional little cottages. And the idea has traction on Capitol Hill.
According to the Jackson Clarion Ledger:
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., won approval of an amendment doubling to $1.2 billion the $600 million Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran set aside for a pilot program to build Katrina Cottages, tiny homes resistant to flooding and strong winds.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco have asked Congress to approve money for the cottages, which would replace thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers now housing hurricane victims.
The smallest cottage, a 308-square-foot unit, is estimated to cost about $35,000 to build, compared to roughly $75,000 FEMA spends to buy and deliver a trailer.
The cottages, built in the traditional Gulf Coast vernacular, can be placed on a lot while rebuilding of the main home is underway. When all is said and done, the family has gained a valuable guest house.
Abercorn Commons is the first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified shopping mall to open in the U.S., and it’s located nearby in Savannah.
According to Savannah Morning News, Melaver Inc.–the site’s developer–is incorporating water, energy and materials conservation techniques to meet these standards. The elements include a cistern that harvests rainwater for irrigation; waterless urinals; energy efficient heating and air-conditioning systems; and a white roof coating to reflect heat.
The commercial real estate project is also home to the first ever LEED certified McDonald’s. The McDonald’s features large windows that allow daylight to reach 75 percent of the interior of the restaurant, reducing lighting costs. The restaurant also boasts bike racks, preferred parking for hybrid vehicles, porous pavement and a white roof.
I learned today that a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece is located right under our noses here in Beaufort County. The “Stevens House” is owned today by Joel Silver, Hollywood’s top grossing producer, with films like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and The Matrix under his belt. According to The Beaufort County Open Land Trust, Mr. Silver has meticulously completed the majority of Wright’s original plan, thus fulfilling Wright’s dream of making Auldbrass a great 20th century architectural treasure.
Here’s more on the plantation from a 2003 New York Times article:
Of Wright’s thousand-odd commissions in the United States, Auldbrass is his only one in the region, and his only Southern plantation. Wright had just completed Fallingwater, the critically acclaimed house perched over a waterfall in Mill Run, Pa., when C. Leigh Stevens, a wealthy Michigan industrial consultant, commissioned a Lowcountry retreat and gentleman’s farm in a swampy, 4,000-acre tract on the banks of the Combahee River, 20 miles upstream from the Atlantic. Wright conceived Auldbrass as a collection of one-story, slender buildings of polished cypress. His design called for a main house, a guest house and cabins, a caretaker’s residence, staff cabins, a barn, stables, kennels for dogs, a ”dining barge” floating in a pond on the property and an aviary, all unified by material and design: cypress walls canted inward at an 81-degree angle, copper roofs, doors with ornamental panes and hexagonal tables.
The monumentality of Wright’s plantation (as all large properties are referred to in the area, whether or not crops are planted) lies in its understatement. Dwarfed by old oaks, obscured by the stables and with a barely discernible front door, Wright’s dark, asymmetrical main house at Auldbrass is a rebuke of the prevailing Southern-plantation ideal — the becolumned brick pile (the most famous in South Carolina being the 1742 Drayton Hall) that rises emphatically out of the grass as the most potent expression of control and order a colonial planter could muster. Commissioned the same year that ”Gone With the Wind” had its premiere, modernist Auldbrass must have seemed as alien to its neighbors in the early 1940’s as Joel Silver does today.
The name Auldbrass is Wright’s modification of ”Old Brass,” the name (which is thought to refer to slaves beyond working age and of mixed African and Native American descent) given to the property in the mid-19th century. Wright’s logo for Auldbrass, a stylized arrow, was his nod to the iconography of the Yemassee Indians, who inhabited this area before the arrival of the British. The same arrow motif is cut from panels just under the eaves of the main house. After dusk, when light from inside the house illuminates the arrow design on these panels, the building has the look of a paper lantern.
Radical architect, Adam Kalkin, lives in a unique shelter in New Jersey called “Bunny Lane”. It’s a small house fitted inside an industrial shed.
Kalkin is also noted for building the Quick House from recycled shipping containers. In the Vassar College alumni magazine, Kalkin, who studied English as an undergrad, says:
The cargo containers, with a life span of about 20 years when used for their original purpose, have an “infinite life span” when stationary and properly maintained. Giving these formerly mobile containers a permanent home as homes means that despite providing the structure for a brand-new house, each container comes with its own ready-made and traveled history. “You can look at them both as junk or as something special,” Kalkin notes. “To me they are like a treasured antique: they may not be inherently valuable, but the history and the storytelling add value.” Kalkin’s inventive architectural vision grows directly out of his belief in interconnectedness. He argues, “We come from a culture of sampling. I’m just out there in the world picking out things and reusing things—sampling—from my experience and from what other people have already invested a lot of time and energy in. I think there’s a tremendous amount of richness out there.”
Caterina has a definite knack for finding great things to post about, especially for those who find living in a container an attractive proposition.
Container Homes Reference desk:
http://www.covepark.org/
http://www.lot-ek.com/index.htm
http://www.containercity.com/
http://www.architectureandhygiene.com/12conHouse/12con_main.html