L&U

2004-01-17T18:29:00.000-05:00

I have now moved this blog to www.christopherdgray.co.uk

See you there!

2002-11-25T17:27:00.000-05:00

On home as the sedimentation of experience

"Sitting around the breakfast table this morning, Nurri and I got to discussing our (divergent) feelings about the importance of having a home, and what even constituted one. She said something that initially struck me as obvious - that Home was the place where one laid down one's memories - but the more I thought about it, the more the idea's supposed obviousness began to dissolve.
That schema does account for the most traditional situation: you're born in a place, you have all your early and significant life events there, and even if you later have intense experiences elsewhere - a few years at college, a tropical honeymoon - you eventually return. Over the course of a life in one place, you lay down a rich sediment of associations and cross-referenced memories, in such a way that if you could rotate the whole thing on its vertical axis your life would be revealed as a tapestry of harmonics."

From v-2 Organisation | interface usability |

2002-11-25T09:14:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the absence...

Walker in the Wireless City November 24, 2002
By TOM VANDERBILT

IT is a late autumn day in Bryant Park. Red and yellow leaves swirl around clusters of green folding chairs. People sit in the thin afternoon light, talking on cellphones, to others, to themselves. The scent of a piquant cigar mixes with the crisp tang of fall.

As I sit in this verdantly genteel place, a whole other flurry of movement and social interaction is going on around me, one invisible to the eye. I watch it on my laptop, the modern equivalent of Jimmy Stewart in a wheelchair, binoculars in hand, in "Rear Window." In the small browser window of my iBook's Airport card, an antenna of sorts, I find myself at the nexus of any number of the wireless networks that have come to blanket the city.

There is one called "theorywireless1," another that says "Wlan," another labeled "www.nycwireless.net" and one called simply "X." I select the penultimate choice and within seconds have a free broadband connection to the Internet, something, it is estimated, found in less than 10 percent of American homes.

While most people were not watching, New York has become host to yet another layer of infrastructure, a random, interlinking constellation of what are called "wireless access points." A survey last summer found more than 12,000 access points bristling throughout Manhattan alone, many open to anyone with a wireless card, many others closed and private, and still others available for a fee.

None of these were laid down by city workers. No streets were torn up. No laws were passed. Rather, this network has been made possible by the proliferation of ever more affordable wireless routers and networking devices, which in turn transmit the low-range, unlicensed spectrum (a wild frontier, home also to baby monitors and cordless phones) known as 802.11b, or, more genially, Wi-Fi.

Walking the streets of New York today means walking amid an unseen tangle of Wi-Fi. The hum of Internet traffic mingles with the jostle of pedestrians. Data "packets" whiz by like bike messengers. In no place are the emerging social and urban aspects of this fact made clearer than Bryant Park, which last spring became what its operations director, Jerome Barth, calls "the first park to have installed a dedicated system that provides coverage throughout its entire footprint."

Not that you would notice. A thin antenna rising from the park's office serves as access point, while two similar antennas, on top of the bathrooms and the pizzeria near the Avenue of the Americas, function as what are called repeaters. These minor appurtenances drape the eight-acre park in high-speed Internet access.

The people who run the park now report that daily users of its high-speed access number in the high two figures. Come spring, they expect the daily figure to swell to several hundred. Internet sessions often last more than an hour.

"We are intent on loading the park with users and increasing what we call their `dwell time,' or how long they stay in the park," said Daniel A. Biederman, president of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation.

The idea of Internet access surfaced at one of the corporation's regular meetings more than a year ago, Mr. Biederman recalled: "What can we do to make people stay in the park? Why do they have to go back to their offices at 2? They have to go back to get on the Web. Why don't we give them the Web?"

The idea of fixed connections seemed discordant with the park's philosophy. "They were in portions of the park that didn't seem amenable enough, too noisy," Mr. Biederman said. "We wanted to have the same thing as we have with our seating: a random distribution of the function."

Enter NYC Wireless, an ad hoc group committed to the creation of free wireless access in public spaces throughout the city. Bryant Park would be the perfect showcase for their vision.

With some clever engineering and hardware from Cisco Systems and Intel, the wireless park was born. Just as park users could sit wherever they liked, so too could they gain access where they liked. The eight-megabytes-per-second connection was as free as the sunshine and the green grass.

"When we first started the group, we were concerned about the proliferation of paid hot spots in coffee shops, hotels and airports," said Anthony Townsend, a co-founder of NYC Wireless, using the popular term for a wireless access point. "We realized that if we could deploy a free hot spot at a given location, there would be no incentive for a commercial provider to ever set up a network there. People are always going to choose the lowest-cost option."

The group began small. The other co-founder, Terry Schmidt, set up a free network in the New World coffee shop downstairs from his Upper West Side apartment. But with Bryant Park as its flagship effort, and Madison Square and Tompkins Square Parks among its other areas of coverage, the group is building a loose network of free Wi-Fi throughout the city. Apart from its centralized efforts, the group's Web site is filled with announcements from those who have set up their own access points, a do-it-yourself response to the paid Wi-Fi found at Starbucks.

Rather than a paid telecommunications service, its founders regard wireless as an urban amenity with untold implications for a city's vibrancy. "Cities wouldn't work if we didn't have networks," Mr. Townsend said, "for moving people, goods, information."

"This technology flies in the face of all the `death of distance' and `end of geography' rhetoric of the 90's fiber optic boom," added Mr. Townsend, a doctoral student in urban planning at M.I.T. and a researcher at the Taub Urban Research Center of New York University. For regulatory reasons, the ranges of Wi-Fi transmitters tend to be within several hundred feet.

"It's a very intimate technology, very local," he said. And perfect for New York: the denser the city, the greater the number of people who can gain access to a network. "It's easier to achieve a critical mass. When we got to 50 hot spots, that looked like a lot more than Los Angeles or Atlanta. You could actually walk between them."

Rather than the death of place, it serves to reinforce place. "Places that have it will become special," he said. This in effect causes a kind of reimagining of the city's geography — i.e., where can I go to find a hot spot? — although interestingly, places with access already tend to be vital urban places.

BRYANT Park is an example of what the geographer Kevin Lynch, in his classic 1960 book "The Image of the City," called a node. Nodes, as he defined them, "may be primary junctions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one structure to another." They help give "legibility" to the city, help us to orient ourselves. Node is also a word synonymous with hot spot — a junction of Wi-Fi signals — and the electronic nodes are turning up in the same parks, airports and public gathering places that Mr. Lynch considered physical nodes.

For Mr. Townsend, there is much possibility, and still much to be learned, in the relationship between the physical Bryant Park and its virtual twin. For example, should there be some physical manifestation of the Internet activity in the park, like a light that grows brighter with more users? Should information about park events, dining options and other local information be posted on the Bryant Park portal?

Conversely, should the virtual park reflect the real one? "When the park closes, do we close the network down?" he asked.

Plans are in the works for a Bryant Park chat system, where users could meet online. This location-based service, as with other virtual meet-and-greet applications, represents a striking effort to overcome the social distancing augured by wireless itself: Why talk to the person next to you when you've got the world at your fingertips?

For Mr. Biederman, the wireless program is part of the evolving mission of Bryant Park, one of the world's most heavily trafficked (900 people per acre) and intensely managed public spaces. The park has kept track of its Internet users with the same vigor with which it sends two employees with clickers (one for men, one for women; a close male-female ratio is vital to its vision of a vibrant public place) to measure park attendance each day at the peak hour of 1:15 p.m. On daily walkthroughs, the park managers approach laptop users.

"We look over their shoulders a lot," Mr. Biederman said. "When I see someone using a laptop and I run up to them and say, `Hi, I'm the guy who runs the park, and I wanted to see what your reaction is to this,' it's almost like parental guidance."

That raises the issue of what is on people's screens at the park.

"We want to give users the greatest privacy possible in the usage of the system," Mr. Barth said. "We believe that just as Bryant Park is a very lawful place where people are extremely civilized, this will link in a manner to their Internet usage; that you won't feel comfortable surfing the Internet for reprehensible Web sites or pornography, because the social pressure around you will make it an unpleasant experience."

Call it "eyes on the net," an updated version of William H. Whyte's classic idea of "eyes on the street," espoused in books like "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" (1980). Whyte, whose time-lapse studies of pedestrian behavior and treatises on the desirability of movable chairs are the foundation stones of Bryant Park's revival, died in 1999, before the advent of the wireless park. And yet New York's emerging wireless citizens, like the cellphone users before them, would certainly have been germane to his studies of street-corner conversations, plaza footpaths and spatial relations.

Even if the Blackberry-armed New Yorker can check e-mail anywhere, Whyte might have noted that this behavior had its own distinct patterns, that people would feel more comfortable doing so in inviting public places like Bryant Park.

Whether or not Whyte would have envisioned the wireless park, Mr. Biederman thinks it is true to his thinking. "Anything that got people into parks, made them more pleasant — he would have thought this was terrific," he said.

DOWN the street from my house in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, a Linksys wireless router sits in the window of the apartment of Kevin Milani, a 28-year-old engineering school dropout and marketing consultant. As one of the far-flung band of people who have posted listings on the Web site of NYC Wireless, he invites those within range to use the bandwidth streaming into his house through a D.S.L. account provided by Panix, a New York company. It is one of many "stoop networks" to be found in Brooklyn.

"I have a lot of bandwidth I'm not using, so I might as well share," he said.

This is the remarkable idea at the heart of the free wireless movement. It's as if he invited people within 150 feet to watch whatever cable stations he happened not to be watching at the moment.

Nor is he overly concerned with the risks of leaving his electronic front door open. "A person could actually do quite a bit of damage if they wanted," he said. "I have backups. I am at risk just being connected to the Internet." As for his potential redistribution of the bandwidth provided by Panix, he said: "I don't think they really care. They're a bunch of techies."

But Panix does care. For residential accounts, says the company's president, Alexis Rosen, this is "strictly prohibited." For business users, it is "strongly discouraged." Predictably, large providers like Time Warner also take a dim view of bandwidth sharers. "The fact that the technology exists to go a couple of hundred feet is irrelevant in our minds," said Joseph DiGeso, vice president and general manager for high-speed online services at Time Warner Cable of New York. "The ability to tap into a phone line or cable box has existed for years, but it doesn't make it legal."

A larger concern for Mr. Rosen is security. The spread of broadband Internet has resulted in scores of connected computers that are, in effect, servers unto themselves. Mr. Rosen worries that such wireless arrangements are vulnerable to hackers or "script kiddies," less technically pro- ficient users who simply use code-breaking software.

"If you open your network to any fool who's got a wireless card in their machine," Mr. Rosen said, "they can use your machine to execute a bandwidth attack, or they can be the victim of a script kiddie and be used to execute an attack. And we can't even figure out who they are. We can only trace it back to you."

The electronic city is still fairly porous, as was demonstrated by a recent series of expeditions of the World Wide War Drive. War driving means cruising through the city logging unsecured access points. Christopher Blume, the 16-year-old New York coordinator of the war drive, trolls through Manhattan like a Baedeker of the ether.

"You learn to look for the abbreviations as you're driving by," he says. "Take `Bndemo.' You wouldn't think anything of that. But where I drive by, that's Barnes & Noble." (This summer, after the magazine 2600 published a log of the bookseller's network activity, including credit card numbers, the network was closed.)

Mr. Townsend of NYC Wireless concedes the additional security risks of a public wireless network, but adds that any network has its vulnerabilities. "I can sit here in my office and sniff the traffic going over the local network," he said. As for al Qaeda or child pornographers using Bryant Park, he argues that there is nothing anyone can do on a wireless network that couldn't be done at the public library.

With all their promise and peril, the emerging wireless networks raise the perennial questions about the dynamics and very nature of urban space. Can public life ever be made truly safe? How do you balance private and public space? What does the geographic distribution of the wireless networks say about the socioeconomic makeup of a city, especially one as large and complex as New York?

Quite a lot, as Marcos Lara, founder of the Public Internet Project, found out this summer. He and a research team, using a global positioning system, a laptop and an antenna, conducted a four-month survey of all wireless access points in Manhattan (www.publicinternetproject.org). Mr. Lara, 28, formerly of NYC Wireless and part of the Bryant Park initiative, is now working to bring broadband access into underserved communities. He also sells the results of his findings, correlated in a plotted, thematic map that, as he puts it, represents a "one-of-a-kind look into the use of wireless technologies in daily consumer life."

His drive also cast cold digital light on the notion of urban social disparity.

"It's one thing to hear about it," he said. "It's another thing to actually see it occurring on your screen as you drive down the block. You see the economically depressed areas. You think: `Well, maybe they have computers. Maybe they have technology.' Then you look down on the screen, and you have this unique portal into their world, and it's a desert."

Tom Vanderbilt is author of "Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America."

2002-07-16T14:43:00.000-04:00

Officials Unveil Plans for Rebuilding Trade Center Site July 16, 2002
Officials Unveil Plans for Rebuilding Trade Center Site
By EDWARD WYATT and CHARLES V. BAGLI

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey unveiled six preliminary plans today for redeveloping the World Trade Center site, all of which include a memorial park as the centerpiece to commemorate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Some designs include the footprints of the twin towers in the memorial. Others call for at least one soaring tower that evokes the oversize presence of the trade center in the Lower Manhattan skyline.

"I want to emphasize the plans you see today are not intended to represent the design and the details of memorials or other buildings," said the Port Authority chairman, Joseph J. Seymour. "They show where the various components of the redevelopment plan interrelate and how much space they may occupy. Once the land-use plans are approved, we can move to construction with architectural design criteria that provides unified, dignified and creative designs for the site's components."

The designs — which had been shown in recent days to government officials, architects and leaders of civic organizations involved in the rebuilding process — also restrict development on the site itself largely to commercial offices and retail space. Some proposals also call for a museum as part of the memorial. All of the plans would devote at least a third — some two-thirds — of the 16-acre site for the memorial.

Most designs designate existing buildings to the south for residential towers and for a cultural or a performing arts center. These elements are desired by planners to fulfill their goal of converting Lower Manhattan to a place that will attract visitors long after most office workers will have left at the end of the workday.

In a process of debate and refinement that is expected to last at least through the end of the year, the six designs, developed by planners for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, were described at a news conference this morning at the Federal Hall National Memorial, the landmark building on Wall Street.

What was unveiled today, however, is unlikely to survive through the planning process, officials said.

"The importance of this undertaking makes it essential that the Port Authority and its partners at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation build a consensus for development plans," Mr. Seymour said this morning. "First and foremost, we must respect the wishes of families, of community residents, local businesses and other stakeholders, acknowledging the legal obligations of our leaseholders."

The next step will be a public hearing on Saturday at the Javits Convention Center, where 5,000 people are expected to attend.

The designs underwent several stages of revision even as they were reviewed with public officials and others in recent days, people involved in the process say. A draft of the plans dated July 11 that was circulated among government and planning officials had eight versions of the six plans, including at least two that came directly from developers with interests downtown.

But by yesterday, those plans had been significantly altered by architects at Beyer Blinder Belle, the urban planning and architecture firm hired to oversee the design process, making the plans that originated with developers all but unrecognizable to their authors.

Many planners, civic groups and community advocates have already expressed dismay that the Port Authority and state officials have insisted that designers incorporate what was already on the site and more: 11 million square feet of office space, 600,000 square feet of retail and an 800-room hotel. Those requirements, the critics say, allow little else and limit the possibilities for imaginative configurations of the property.

Some members of those groups have also begun to voice reactions to what they have seen that are lukewarm at best. On Saturday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he viewed the plans as "a starting point" from which to "collect as many different ideas as we can."

Mr. Bloomberg, who has an engineering degree and who helped to design his company's own office complexes, added that he would be giving his own ideas to the planners.

Others who have worked to influence the planning process have been more critical. "It's a plan for the Port Authority," said Susan S. Szenasy, a co-founder of Rebuild Downtown, Our Town, and editor of Metropolis, a design and culture magazine. "It has nothing to do with the call for a 21st-century design or a vibrant 24/7 community, or creating street life in the area. It's very discouraging. But we're living with the reality of everything the Port Authority needs. There's no room for fresh ideas."

Michael Petralia, a spokesman for the Port Authority, said the agency never intended to begin the planning process with a clean slate.

"We had to deal with the legal obligations that are a fact at the 16 acres," including the commercial, retail and hotel space that is under contract, Mr. Petralia said. "Those are part of the discussion, just as a memorial is part of it and transportation is part of it."

The final master plan for the site is likely to incorporate elements of all six initial proposals rather than adhere to any one proposal. But the preliminary designs will crystallize at least some of the issues facing Lower Manhattan and the redevelopment of the site, including the height and mass of commercial towers to be built, the size and location of a memorial park, which streets should be re-established and the location of a transit hub.

The plans include from two to six office towers, some topped by clear or empty shells to evoke the twin towers. Several include a huge tower, perhaps taller than the twin towers had been. One plan calls for a clear "beacon" tower that would be among the world's tallest structures.

The designs also incorporate several proposals that have been circulating among architects and planning and community groups for months, including restoring some of the streets that were eliminated when more than a dozen downtown blocks were combined to form the superblock for the trade center.

All six designs include a restoration of Greenwich Street, whose southward progression formerly ended at Barclay Street, at the site of 7 World Trade Center, and re-emerged south of Liberty Street.

Most of the six plans also call for the reopening of a corridor roughly along the line of Fulton Street, extending from Church Street westward to West Street, either as a pedestrian walkway through the redeveloped site or as a surface street. Two plans restore parts of Cortlandt and Dey Streets, usually as east-west pedestrian byways.

The proposed designs also offer several variations on whether and how to submerge West Street. One calls for the roadway to descend below ground from Vesey Street through Battery Park, creating an 18-acre memorial promenade extending from the trade center site south to the Battery.

One plan calls for an express roadway to be submerged from Chambers Street through Battery Park while allowing local traffic to continue to use a smaller West Street adjacent to the site. Another plan would submerge only the section from Vesey to Liberty Street. Others call for building a platform or a pedestrian walkway over the street.

2002-07-16T10:58:00.000-04:00

Think You Own the Sidewalk? July 16, 2002
Think You Own the Sidewalk?
By MARC SANTORA

On the sidewalks of New York there are jaywalkers, baby walkers, dog walkers, night walkers, cellphone talker-walkers, slow walkers, fast walkers, group walkers, drunken walkers, walkers with walkers and, of course, tourist walkers.

Unfortunately, all of these walkers are walking into one another.

"People no longer know how to walk on the sidewalk," said John Kalish, a television producer in Manhattan. "There was a time that any real New Yorker had a built-in sonar in terms of walking down the sidewalk, even a crowded one, and never bumping into someone. Now — forget it."

In a crowded city that is forever rebuilding itself, sometimes it is impossible to be a graceful walker. Still, strollers say that many problems could be avoided if some basic rules were followed.

First, walking rules are like driving rules.

"Stay to the right is the golden, No. 1 rule," said Chris Avila, 29, who has lived in the city for nine years.

Europeans used to driving on the left side of the road have acute problems getting used to New York sidewalks, said Giannandrea Marongiu, 36, who moved to New York from Italy five years ago. "They don't know where to go," he said. "They are all over the place."

Second, don't be a sudden stopper.

"People who stop short really get me," said Carla Melman, 26, a lifelong New Yorker. She said it was the equivalent of a car wreck on the Long Island Expressway on a Hamptons weekend.

Third, when walking with friends, don't crowd every lane of the sidewalk.

Ms. Avila said she reserves a special sidewalk in hell for "mall walkers," which she defined as groups who insist on walking three or four abreast. "They make me so mad," she said. "When you are around a group of mall walkers, you just have to find a way around them."

Fourth, keep it moving.

The average New York City fast walker does not have to get stuck behind a pack of mall walkers to grow sour. A single person moving at a slow clip-clop can be enough. There is even a word for this slowpoke: meanderthal. An Internet dictionary of slang defines him as "an annoying individual moving slowly and aimlessly in front of another individual who is in a bit of a hurry."

Fifth, don't be a heel stepper.

"I hate it when someone gives me a flat tire," Ms. Avila said. That happens when a heel stepper clips the back of her sandal, knocking it off her foot and causing her to become a sudden stopper.

Sixth, get off the phone.

Pedestrians say cellphone talker-walkers are so lost in their own hyperconnected universe that they are almost as likely to break the rules of walking as tourists. "When you are on a cellphone, you are a group of one," said Michelle Nevius, 32, a walking tour guide in Manhattan.

Roger Evans, a musician, agreed. "Typically I think of a cellphone talker as a guided missile," he said.

However, it is the bike messengers who many complain are the true missiles. Mike Nelson, a bike messenger born and raised in New York, says the walkers have gotten worse. "With the cellphones, Palm Pilots and all the other gizmos, people aren't even aware of what's around them any more," he said. "It's not just the bikers that will run them over, but also trucks, cabs, whatever."

Seventh, keep Fido on a tight leash.

Peter A. Perez, 28, a dog walker at the Wagging Tail, a dog care center in TriBeCa, says too many inexperienced dog walkers use long leashes that can become tripwires. And, he said, dog walkers should "never allow dogs to introduce dogs to other dogs," as this can create overactive obstacles.

Unnatural obstacles can also spoil a stroller's stride.

Scaffolding, a major walking hazard, seems to be growing like kudzu in front of buildings in the city. "You do see more scaffolding," said Ilyse Fink, a spokeswoman for the Department of Buildings. In 2000, nearly 4,000 permits were issued for new scaffolding and worker sheds, up from roughly 1,600 in 1995, Ms. Fink said, mostly because of tighter building inspection laws and building owners with more money for upkeep in flush times.

Ms. Fink volunteered her own pet peeve about city walkers. "I can't stand when people are standing at the corner talking to their friends or rubbernecking," she said. "I'm like: `Why don't you move? You don't do that when you are driving a car.' "

And Ms. Fink would not hang up the phone until she had pointed to another danger: baby strollers. As an admitted mother, she knows that mothers think of the stroller as an extension of themselves and, therefore, do not consider the added space they are occupying. "When I would be jaywalking with the stroller, people would be like, `Do you know you have a baby?' " she said.

Even if every walker followed all the unwritten walking rules, it would still be hard to get around because New York is more crowded. In 1991 there were 22,790,000 visitors to the city, according to NYC & Company, the city's convention and visitors' bureau. In 2000 there were 37,380,000 visitors walking the streets, it said. Add that to Manhattan's 1,537,195 residents and some 800,000 daily commuters until millions of people are fighting over the sidewalks.

Fred Kent, president of the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit group that advises communities on public planning, sees the walking crisis as part of a much larger problem. "I think it is all part of this trend away from being comfortable as a pedestrian," he said. American cities and American life in general is so focused on the car, he said, that "we are becoming enormously obese, because we have few opportunities to walk and very few opportunities to exercise."

Mr. Kent says walkers should not be mad at one another, for they have a common enemy. "They are in this situation by manipulation," he said. "We have developed rules for pedestrian traffic to enhance car traffic rather than traffic rules that would benefit pedestrians." But short of ripping up the city's roads, Mr. Kent could not offer a walking peace plan.

But Stella Cashman, who organizes racewalking events in Central Park, could. She pointed to the rules of track and field as a model to help ease the congestion. First, "no intentional contact (or pushing)." Second, "no attempts to impede the progress of others." Finally, "Allow sufficient distance (i.e. three steps) before cutting in front of another."

With those rules, a referee in some parts of the city would be awfully busy. At the corner of Canal and Broadway there is a perfect storm of pedestrian obstacles. Merchants sell everything from shoes to diamonds. Food vendors' carts face the storefronts. Nearby scaffolding, a subway entrance, a few homeless people on the ground and tourists looking for a deal make the corner nearly impossible to navigate.

"A lot of time I take to the street," said Kwok Wan, a letter carrier who has walked a route in the Chinatown area for 18 years. "If they are shopping, they are not moving."

Michael McDaniel, visiting from Birmingham, Ala., was shopping there with his family. He said he thought he obeyed the rules for walking in New York. "I follow the no-walk sign," he said. "Sometimes we ad-lib when we see other folks doing the same."

Mr. McDaniel acknowledged that his family often stopped suddenly if the urge struck them. But they were learning fast.

"Single file moves much faster," said Mr. McDaniel, now a reformed mall walker. "If we try and go three across, it slows us down."

2002-07-16T10:56:00.001-04:00

Memorial Park Plays Large Part in Preliminary Trade Center Plans July 16, 2002
Memorial Park Plays Large Part in Preliminary Trade Center Plans
By EDWARD WYATT and CHARLES V. BAGLI

All the competing plans for redeveloping the World Trade Center site include a memorial park as the centerpiece, covering as much as a third to two-thirds of the 16-acre site, according to people who have seen the six preliminary designs.

Some designs include the footprints of the twin towers in the memorial. Others call for at least one soaring tower that evokes the oversize presence of the trade center in the Lower Manhattan skyline.

The designs, which have been shown in recent days to government officials, architects and leaders of civic organizations involved in the rebuilding process, also restrict development on the site itself largely to commercial offices and retail space. Some proposals also call for a museum as part of the memorial.

Most designs also designate existing buildings to the south for residential towers and for a cultural or a performing arts center. These elements are desired by planners to fulfill their goal of converting Lower Manhattan to a place that will attract visitors long after most office workers will have left at the end of the workday.

In what will be the beginning of a process of debate and refinement lasting at least through the end of the year, the six designs, developed by planners for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, are scheduled to be released to the public today at a news conference at the Federal Hall National Memorial, the landmark building on Wall Street.

What is unveiled today, however, is unlikely to survive through the planning process, officials said yesterday. "This is the starting point for dialogue," Matthew Higgins, a spokesman for the development corporation, said yesterday. Part of that dialogue will include a large public hearing on Saturday at the Javits Convention Center, where 5,000 people are expected to participate.

The designs have undergone several stages of revision even as they have been reviewed with public officials and others in recent days, people involved in the process say. A draft of the plans dated July 11 that was circulated among government and planning officials had eight versions of the six plans, including at least two that came directly from developers with interests downtown.

But by yesterday, those plans had been significantly altered by architects at Beyer Blinder Belle, the urban planning and architecture firm hired to oversee the design process, making the plans that originated with developers all but unrecognizable to their authors.

Many planners, civic groups and community advocates have already expressed dismay that the Port Authority and state officials have insisted that designers incorporate what was already on the site and more: 11 million square feet of office space, 600,000 square feet of retail and an 800-room hotel. Those requirements, the critics say, allow little else and limit the possibilities for imaginative configurations of the property.

Some members of those groups have also begun to voice reactions to what they have seen that are lukewarm at best. On Saturday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he viewed the plans as "a starting point" from which to "collect as many different ideas as we can."

Mr. Bloomberg, who has an engineering degree and who helped to design his company's own office complexes, added that he would be giving his own ideas to the planners.

Others who have worked to influence the planning process have been more critical. "It's a plan for the Port Authority," said Susan S. Szenasy, a co-founder of Rebuild Downtown, Our Town, and editor of Metropolis, a design and culture magazine. "It has nothing to do with the call for a 21st-century design or a vibrant 24/7 community, or creating street life in the area. It's very discouraging. But we're living with the reality of everything the Port Authority needs. There's no room for fresh ideas."

Michael Petralia, a spokesman for the Port Authority, said the agency never intended to begin the planning process with a clean slate.

"We had to deal with the legal obligations that are a fact at the 16 acres," including the commercial, retail and hotel space that is under contract, Mr. Petralia said. "Those are part of the discussion, just as a memorial is part of it and transportation is part of it."

Mr. Petralia and Mr. Higgins declined to comment on the specific elements of the six designs.

Some who saw the plans yesterday praised elements that could raise opposition. Fredric Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, said some plans offered interesting ideas for memorial space and a museum that would require building where the towers had been, an area that many family members of the victims would like to be preserved.

The final master plan for the site is likely to incorporate elements of all six initial proposals rather than adhere to any one proposal. But the preliminary designs will crystallize at least some of the issues facing Lower Manhattan and the redevelopment of the site, including the height and mass of commercial towers to be built, the size and location of a memorial park, which streets should be re-established and the location of a transit hub.

The plans include from two to six office towers, some topped by glass-clad see-through structures, several hundred feet high, to evoke the twin towers. Several include a huge tower, perhaps taller than the twin towers had been. One plan calls for a clear "beacon" tower that would be among the world's tallest structures.

The designs also incorporate several proposals that have been circulating among architects and planning and community groups for months, including restoring some of the streets that were eliminated when more than a dozen downtown blocks were combined to form the superblock for the trade center.

People who have seen the proposals say that all six designs include a restoration of Greenwich Street, whose southward progression formerly ended at Barclay Street, at the site of 7 World Trade Center, and re-emerged south of Liberty Street.

Most of the six plans also call for the reopening of a corridor roughly along the line of Fulton Street, extending from Church Street westward to West Street, either as a pedestrian walkway through the redeveloped site or as a surface street. Two plans restore parts of Cortlandt and Dey Streets, usually as east-west pedestrian byways going through the site.

The proposed designs also offer several variations on whether and how to submerge West Street. One calls for the roadway to descend below ground from Vesey Street through Battery Park, creating an 18-acre memorial promenade extending from the trade center site south to the Battery.

One plan calls for an express roadway to be submerged from Chambers Street through Battery Park, while allowing local traffic to continue to use a smaller West Street adjacent to the site. Another plan would submerge only the section from Vesey to Liberty Street. Others call for building a platform or a pedestrian walkway over the street.

People who viewed the plans in recent days say they leave many questions unanswered. Among them are the location of the underground site of the PATH train tracks; most plans put the mezzanine station between Greenwich and Church Streets. What would be required for the condemnation and acquisition of property to build residential towers near the site remains unanswered.

Nor is it clear when there will be a demand for new commercial space downtown. Many real estate analysts estimate that it will not be necessary to build a new office tower on the site before at least 2006.

2002-07-16T10:56:00.000-04:00

A Memorial Remembers the Hungry July 16, 2002
A Memorial Remembers the Hungry
By ROBERTA SMITH

The Irish Hunger Memorial opening today on the edge of the Hudson River near Manhattan's southern tip could be New York City's equivalent of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, an unconventional work of public art that strikes a deep emotional chord, sums up its artistic moment for a broad audience and expands the understanding of what a public memorial can be.

The work commemorates a 150-year-old tragedy, the great Irish famine of 1845-52. Although the subject lacks the national scope and immediacy of the war in Vietnam, the Hunger Memorial, which is in Battery Park City, illuminates Ireland's tragedy in undeniable human, even universal, terms; it can grip the viewer with its combination of information and spatial experience.

The new memorial is a startlingly realistic quarter-acre replication of an Irish hillside, complete with fallow potato furrows, stone walls, indigenous grasses and wildflowers and a real abandoned Irish fieldstone cottage. The 96-by-170-foot field rests on a giant concrete slab that is raised up and tilted on a huge wedge-shape base. It slopes upward from street level to a height of 25 feet. A packed dirt path winds up the slope, culminating in a hilltop with sweeping views of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

The field is a walk-in relic of a distant time and place tenderly inserted into the modern world almost as if it were an offering. From the riverside, the towering end wall of the plinth is shadowed by the broad overhang of the concrete slab, and cut by a ramped entrance that leads into the back of the cottage. Intended to resemble an Irish burial mound, or tumulus, it also suggests that the landscape has been flown in on a large spaceship — especially at night, when it is lighted from inside, creating an eerie glow. From its inception, the memorial was also intended to be a reminder of world hunger. The plinth is lined with glass-covered bands of text that mingle terse facts about the Irish famine with similarly disturbing statistics about world hunger today, along with quotations from Irish poetry and songs.

But the work's potential for contemporary resonance may be unusually great: today's dedication ceremony occurs in a city that saw history change course a short distance away less than six months after the groundbreaking for the memorial on March 15, 2001.

Located two blocks from ground zero, the Irish Hunger Memorial is likely to be embraced by many as a symbol of the hundreds of firefighters, police officers, rescue personnel and office workers of Irish descent who died in the World Trade Center attack. It was half completed when the attack came, and its earth-moving equipment and raw materials were commandeered during the rescue effort. But local police officers and firefighters familiar with the project protectively guarded the half-finished memorial from inadvertent damage or dismantling.

The Hunger Memorial will almost certainly add to the growing debate about the future use of the land on which the World Trade Center once stood. By coincidence, six proposals for the redevelopment of ground zero, each including plans for a 9/11 memorial, are about to go on view at Federal Hall National Monument.

Perhaps most important, the memorial has arrived at a time when Americans, especially young Americans, have a deeper understanding of tragedy and grief, of fate's capriciousness and of the complexities of power.

The work, which was created by Brian Tolle, a 38-year-old New York sculptor, exemplifies contemporary art's ability to meet the public's need for meaningful monuments with an appropriateness that may surprise both advocates and opponents of the new. While the low-lying black marble wedges of the Vietnam Memorial, designed by Maya Lin, might be called populist Minimal Art, Mr. Tolle's memorial is a form of populist postmodernism, a combination of reality and simulacra, of high and low, a layering of different historical periods and contrasting points of view. It is also a typically postmodern blend of existing art styles — Realism, Conceptual Art and Earth Art — bound together by historical fact and physical accuracy.

The work may cause a rolling of eyes among the original Earthwork artists. Their works tend to be hewn from the vast expanses of Nevada and New Mexico, miles from anywhere or anyone. In contrast, the memorial has a slight theme-park preciousness and detail. It is earthwork as Pop Art, a miniature at full scale.

But it also belongs to the tradition of the war memorial in the form of a deserted battlefield. Like those at Verdun and Gettysburg, it is a figure-less terrain in which the viewer stands in for the heroic statue. It commemorates human failure, human loss and human perseverance in a war fought with land, food and political might at the cost of at least one million lives.

The piece brings to fruition efforts dating back several decades to build a memorial to the famine in New York, where so many Irish immigrated to escape its reach. It began to take shape when Timothy S. Carey, president and chief executive of the Battery Park City Authority accompanied Governor George E. Pataki on a trip to Ireland, and the two men began to discuss Vesey Green, a half-acre square in Battery Park City, as a possible site. Upon their return, after the authority was formally charged with creating a monument, Mr. Carey selected a steering committee and hired Joyce Pomerantz Schwartz, an experienced art consultant, to guide the process of selecting the artist.

Battery Park City's 155 acres already include 13 large-scale public artworks, the Museum of Jewish Heritage (A Living Memorial to the Holocaust) and the New York City Police Memorial. Financed by the Battery Park City Authority, the new piece has only slightly run over its original $5 million budget, Mr. Carey said.

Mr. Tolle was among 13 artists selected from an initial review of 150 portfolios and one of five awarded a $10,000 stipend to create a model and proposal for the site. The selection of his scale model — like the budget projection, it's surprisingly close to the final outcome — was all but unanimous. He chose as collaborators Juergen Riehm and David Piscuskas of 1100 Architects of New York and Gail Wittwer-Laird, a landscape architect.

The only conditions were that the memorial be a contemplative space, retain the harbor view and incorporate text. The third condition reflected Mr. Carey's view that too many memorials and monuments become mute because they contain so little specific information about the events they commemorate.

Both Mr. Carey and Mr. Tolle relish the idea that the memorial can change and grow. Paths that form through the grass will be kept. Mr. Tolle devised an ingeniously flexible method of mounting the texts: they are silk-screened onto strips of clear Plexiglas that are simply leaned against the glass bands from the inside. When lighted, they appear to be etched, but they can be easily changed, injecting new facts about world hunger or additional history about the famine.

Mr. Tolle says that the project is "a synthesis of my interest in history, architecture and trying to make a memorial for a particular event that also lends itself to adaptation." He describes the memorial as "a little fragment of Ireland built on a heap of language," and this is almost literally true. Excluding the tons of earth that blanket the tilted concrete shelf and the irrigation system buried in it, nearly every particle of the monument has an Irish origin and a historical logic.

The 62 plants — including wild yellow iris, nettle and blackthorn — are specific to the Connacht boglands in County Mayo, whose rural landscape inspired Mr. Tolle. The fieldstone house and walls were imported stone by stone from a farm in the area belonging to Tom Slack, a cousin of Mr. Tolle's partner, Brian Clyne. (Built in the 1820's, the house had a dirt floor until 1945 and was occupied until 1960; it was donated to the memorial by the Slack family.)

The slope of the memorial is dotted with 32 large stones, one from each of Ireland's counties, and an ancient pilgrim stone, carved with an early Irish Cross of Arcs. The surrounding plaza and the base are clad with Kilkenny limestone, a green-gray stone that is studded with small, white, featherlike coils — fossils from the ancient Irish seabed.

The quarter-acre size of the monument adheres to the infamous Gregory Clause passed by the British Parliament in 1847, which decreed that cottiers whose plots exceeded that size would not be eligible for relief. The cottage is roofless because many farmers tore the thatches off their homes to prove destitution and qualify for relief.

The sentences that gird the limestone base from bottom to top have been gleaned from contemporary reports, newspaper editorials, parliamentary debate and parish priests and show how many people in the midst of the tragedy grasped its awful proportions. And also how many did not. In one line, the recipe for the soup ladled out in British-run soup kitchens (12 1/2 pounds of beef to 100 gallons of water) is compared with the recipe used in the soup kitchens established for victims of the famine by American Quakers (75 pounds of beef to 100 gallons of water).

The question of whether this elaborate artwork will have meaning beyond Irish history, or even beyond world hunger, is largely moot. It shows one instance and one cause of the immigration that has shaped and continues to shape New York City. It shows instances of suffering, prejudice and mismanagement so specific that they can't help but reverberate into our own time.

Mr. Tolle said he considered the tilt of the work crucial in separating the memorial from its setting. Without it, he said recently, "the piece would be a folly." But the slant that isolates the Hunger Memorial from its setting also establishes a crucial similarity. The Irish farmers tilled their land so intently that it became close to man-made, just like Manhattan. The crampedness, oldness and ekedness of the field, so unlike most American terra firma, itself communicates a sense of human determination and toil. It is a fragment from a man-made island placed upon another man-made island, one symbol of endurance atop another.

2002-07-15T13:36:00.000-04:00

The Star of Elm Street Stages a Comeback

July 11, 2002
The Star of Elm Street Stages a Comeback
By ANTHONY DePALMA

ATLANTA — ROGER W. HOLLOWAY approaches elm trees with a proselytizer's prose and a planter's gentle hand. His green thumb comes from the five generations of gardeners in his family who have run the Michler Florist and Greenhouse in Lexington, Ky., where he was born. His reverence for trees was instilled in him when his family moved to Ontario in the 1960's to run a tobacco farm. That was when he first saw elms disappear.

Back then, elms were still noble giants that lined streets and stood outside public buildings. One day Mr. Holloway found the elms at his grammar school door butchered into logs, splinters and sawdust. "Even today I can see those piles in my mind," said Mr. Holloway, 47. "I was so shocked. I thought something mean was going on."

Anyone who had ever sat in the shimmering shade of an elm or walked along a sweetly darkened elm-lined street would have agreed. The culprit was Dutch elm disease, a fungus spread by elm bark beetles. It arrived in 1931 in a shipment of French veneer logs. By the 1980's, it all but eliminated elms from North America.

It has been said that Americans loved the elm too much. Planting the trees exclusively along entire streets left them vulnerable to the epidemic. No one knows how many elms were lost; one estimate is 77 million.

Driven by his memories, Mr. Holloway, a commercial landscaper based here, has made it his mission to bring back the elm.

It was in 1995, while leafing through a nursery catalog, that Mr. Holloway discovered an American elm described as disease- tolerant. Like many people, he had assumed that elms were gone forever. The tree in the catalog, he learned, had originally come from Princeton Nurseries (today based in Allentown, N.J.), one of the largest wholesale nurseries in the country.

The elms known as Princeton elms have lined Washington Road, which leads to Princeton University, since about 1930. Mid-90's tests proved their ability to at least tolerate Dutch elm disease, and the variety may represent the best hope of raising the species from the horticultural dead.

While Princeton Nurseries has never stopped producing elms, it does almost nothing to market them. Mr. Holloway ordered a tree from the catalog and took cuttings, hoping to start trees that could fight the disease as effectively as the original.

Mr. Holloway's company, Riveredge Farms, is one of several that have begun to sell elms. With nostalgic ads and a Web site that encourages visitors to "plant a piece of history," Mr. Holloway hopes to tap a vein of longing for a vanishing American heritage.

Although he belongs to a family of horticulturalists, Mr. Holloway has plowed other fields. He was a theater graduate of Windham College in Vermont, a versatile actor. He was performing with a regional theater in Richmond in 1978 when his father, who was ill, asked him to help out in the family business. Mr. Holloway never returned to the stage.

At Riveredge Farms, he has created his own world. There is no river — no farm, either. Mr. Holloway's elms are grown at several nurseries in the South and trucked to a parcel here sandwiched between a car lot and a warehouse. Standing in orderly columns is something many Americans have never seen: healthy American elms.

Mr. Holloway says his potted saplings — their developed roots packed in soil — can be planted almost anywhere in the United States between April and October (and in many states year round). Established, they grow three to six feet a year. Despite wariness about Dutch elm disease among homeowners and landscapers, he said he has sold more than 10,000 in two years.

"We were surprised and delighted to find out we could bring back American elms to this campus," said Molly Shi Boren, whose husband, David L. Boren, is president of the University of Oklahoma. She bought 200 of Mr. Holloway's elms for the campus, in part because she remembers the Elm Street of her youth in Ada, Okla.

In East Hampton, N.Y., Ann Roberts, chairwoman of the tree committee of the Ladies' Village Improvement Society ordered dozens of seedlings to be developed in nurseries and transplanted to the streets. "People would rather have an elm tree than almost any other kind," she said.

In the mid-90's, when Mr. Holloway was refining his business plan, Alden M. Townsend, a research geneticist at the National Arboretum in Washington, Md., announced the results of a seven-year experiment. He had tested various elm varieties by injecting them with megadoses of the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease.

Two varieties, which he called Valley Forge and New Harmony, proved strongest: 86 percent of the New Harmony trees survived, as did a surprising 96 percent of the Valley Forge trees.

Princeton elms matched Valley Forge elms in survival rates, Dr. Townsend found. But the Princeton variety offered other advantages: a better record of longevity and a shape closer to the classic vase than to the spindly shape of the other varieties.

The elms on Washington Road in Princeton form one of the most beautiful allées in the United States. The first time Mr. Holloway saw the Princeton survivors in person, he was stunned. "It was twilight as we went through this extremely long allée," he said. "I thought, this is amazing."

The Princeton elm has no patent, said William Flemer III, the vice president of Princeton Nurseries and the son of the man who developed the tree in the 1920's. Being unpatented, it can be reproduced without permission.

But not everyone believes the Princeton variety is impervious to Dutch elm disease. James W. Consolloy, the grounds manager at Princeton University, said that when a new strain of the disease began attacking the trees about 10 years ago, he started a routine of spraying, pruning and sometimes injecting fungicide.

With any elm, there are no guarantees, Mr. Holloway said. He tells customers he will replace any tree that succumbs to the disease. "We know they've been growing in Princeton now for 70 years," he said. "And since we're growing them from root, we know what they'll look like 70 years from now when our grandchildren see them. And that's what this is all about."

About boys and noble giants.

2002-07-15T08:35:00.000-04:00

The Thirty Years' War

July 15, 2002
The Thirty Years' War
By RICK BASS

YAAK, Mont.
Where I live, some people decide whether to wave at each other, or even speak a greeting of the day, based on whether the person across from them supports protection of the last roadless areas here. This despite the fact that the timber in these areas is a nonissue: roadless areas are the farthest, most rugged, least productive areas, which is why roads haven't been built there yet.

It's estimated that the last remaining roadless areas in our national forests — a total of about 58.5 million acres across 39 states — contain less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the nation's timber. Yet the divisiveness over such an insignificant amount of timber casts a poisonous pall over entire communities. Some powerful elements in the timber and mining industries are trying wherever they can to scare local millworkers and businesses into believing we can't afford to protect these lands. Here in western Montana this can mean warnings of mill closings and labeling environmentalists as terrorists.

In my own valley, the Yaak — a gnarly, rank, mosquito-ridden jungle that's been subject to countless clearcuts in the last half-century — there's still not a single acre of roadless land protected as wilderness. Only 15 small roadless areas remain eligible for protection — the largest is only about 35,000 acres, and the smallest, 1,000 acres — little more than gardens, from the perspective of the Western landscape.

To date, it's a 30-year war, ever since the United States Forest Service inventoried these last roadless areas for wilderness designation in 1972. Must it be this way for another 30 years? Rural communities of 50 or 100 people fighting over philosophical scraps of land that really belong to every American?

When I began this fight, I was a young man, and went hiking almost every day in many of these public treasures, though almost always with a dull worry in my heart, knowing that these places were not protected for future generations. I'm middle-aged now, with a middle-aged man's responsibilities. Yet still my heart is heavy with that worry of my younger days: How can we defend the nation's last roadless areas?

We've been arguing for decades that building roads in our national forests, where the Forest Service sells public resources (often at a loss), leaves behind damaged land whose repair the taxpayers are left to finance. At last count, the projected cost for such repairs was $8.4 billion. We've been arguing about the necessity of genetic and ecologic diversity. Grizzlies and other rare and endangered species like bull trout depend on the sanctuary provided by roadless areas. We've been arguing that local economies adjacent to wilderness areas are often thriving.

But political recognition of the merits of these arguments has been long delayed. The Clinton administration began the process of establishing permanent protection for these lands in 1998. The Forest Service held hundreds of public meetings over the course of two years, and received an overwhelming public response in favor of protection. But the Bush administration requested further analysis, complaining that there hadn't been enough local input. Last fall over 80 percent of the residents in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana who responded during a second comment period asked — again — for the land to be protected. Recognizing this public will, Representatives Jay Inslee of Washington and Sherwood Boehler of New York have introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill for the Interior Department to protect roadless areas. Votes on this proposal are expected as early as this week.

I admit I've grown a bit tired of arguing for the beauty and the economic benefits of wilderness, of the need to protect the endangered species that rely on these lands. I am sick of the polls, which show again and again that we want these lands protected. But what I am not sick of is beseeching, on behalf of wilderness, and the future. If these last wildlands had been protected yesterday — or last year, or the year before — little if anything would have changed. That's the point. We choose to live, vacation and work in these lands, hoping they will remain as much the same and secure as possible. Is that so radical?

The Wilderness Act of 1964 passed the House by 373 to 1. I am still naïve enough — and patriotic enough — to believe that a vote for protecting our last roadless areas can still pass beyond the brittle barriers of party lines: that conservatives can still know what it means to conserve, and liberals what it means to liberate. That we can have joy and logging, both; that we can survive, and then flourish, with our wilderness.

Rick Bass is the author, most recently, of ``The Hermit's Story.''

2002-07-15T08:25:00.000-04:00

Reclaiming a Lost River, Building a Community

July 10, 2002
Reclaiming a Lost River, Building a Community
By D. J. WALDIE

LOS ANGELES
So much is breaking up Los Angeles — from secession movements in the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood to the growing divide between the city's wealthy and working poor — that it may come as a shock to learn there is something knitting the city together. Angelenos are gathering with a common purpose to bring life to the banks of the neglected Los Angeles River, a 51-mile-long, sunbaked concrete ditch best known as the location for fiery car chases in action movies.

The river descends from foothills capped by million-dollar houses, past movie studios in the San Fernando Valley, through gritty, working-class neighborhoods where converted garages pass for affordable housing, and across the flood plain south of downtown where the river, until now, was ignored by freeway commuters and residents alike.

These crowded neighborhoods are the side of Los Angeles that lies behind the postcard image of a vaguely parklike city. In fact, Los Angeles is park-poor. By one common measure, the city has only 1.2 acres of city parkland for every 1,000 residents. (The average for the 12 densest cities is 8 acres.) Near the river, the ratio is half an acre per 1,000 residents. Los Angeles also has one of the lowest ratios of public open space to land area among big cities. The city of New York sets aside nearly 26 percent of its area as open space; Los Angeles residents have a meager 10 percent, according to a 2001 study by the Trust for Public Land.

Los Angeles never had its own Robert Moses, the master builder of superb public places in New York. Los Angeles almost had a plan as grand as any Moses might have drawn — designed in 1930 by Olmsted Brothers, the landscape architecture firm headed by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, who with Calvert Vaux designed Central Park. The Olmsted plan would have framed a still-living river with a wide band of parks and wetlands and set aside 70,000 acres of open space for public use.

Timid city officials shelved the plan, and today the city has just 30,000 acres of parkland spread over 470 square miles. When the river flooded in 1934 and 1938, killing more than 100 people, the city abandoned its unquiet river to the Army Corps of Engineers and the utter placelessness of a slab-sided channel shut behind fences and locked gates.

What the city shunned for 60 years is now the only place left to create open space in the heart of Los Angeles, and everyone knows it. Nearly $90 million in public funding has already been allocated for greening the banks of the river, as much as $60 million more will become available through a bond measure approved by voters in March, and more will come from regional open-space agencies. The city, county agencies, environmental organizations, neighborhood associations and ordinary residents are returning to the riverside to work on parks, landscaping and bike paths.

The largest of the open-space projects, already under way, is a pair of urban parks reclaimed from former rail yards that will give Chinatown a 32-acre park a few hundred feet from the river and, two miles upstream, a small state park that could grow to 100 acres of trails and wetlands. These are to be part of the Los Angeles River Greenway, a name that deliberately recalls the ambitious Olmsted plan, which will eventually extend from the river's headwaters in the San Fernando Valley to the ocean.

Recovering parks from industrial brownfields won't restore a lost Eden. The river will always be a flood-control channel, constrained by concrete to protect more than 150,000 working-class households on the flood plain. The greening of the Los Angeles River is a sobering demonstration of the limits of environmental restoration in an urban landscape.

But it's also a hopeful demonstration of how a perilously fragmented Los Angeles can pull itself together. The banks of the river are becoming crowded with volunteers planting trees and schoolchildren learning for the first time about the river that runs through their neighborhood. The greenway could be our anti-freeway, binding together some of the gaps in the fabric of this city.

It has been the nature of Angelenos to be heedless about their landscape, to have taken what was an oasis in the semi-desert and made it an empty abstraction. That's changing, because it must, as we finally gather at the river.

D.J. Waldie lives in Lakewood, Calif., where he is a city official. He is author of "Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out

2002-07-15T07:45:00.000-04:00

Just Off the Expressway, Ancient New York

July 13, 2002
Just Off the Expressway, Ancient New York
By BARBARA STEWART

Once you know what to look for, a very old tree is nearly as easy to spot as a very old human.

Trees show their age in the color and texture of their bark, the circumference of their bases, the height of their lowest branches and the shapes of their trunks, branches and roots. The bark of an old beech, for instance, is dull, dark gray and fragile-looking, in contrast to a mature beech nearby with pale, shiny bark.

Bruce Kershner, a forest ecologist and vice president of the newly created New York Old Growth Forest Association, is good at dating trees at a glance. When he stopped before the Queens Giant, a towering tulip tree with bark worn smooth up to its lowest branch, 75 feet high, he put its age at 425 to 450 years old.

"This is just — sheez," he said. "Born in 1550. As tall as the younger redwoods. The oldest living thing in New York City."

New York City?

Many people believe that over the past 450 years, the colonists, farmers, loggers and developers at some point cleared every woodsy patch and felled every old tree in the city.

But a small group of tree-lovers know better. In Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, wildlife and rare birds and vegetation flourish among trees that have been growing since the 1700's. A hiking trail next to Orchard Beach, which is crowded with people every summer weekend, winds through tulip trees and black birches that were saplings 300 years ago.

In fact, several tree experts say, New York State has more ancient forestland than any other state in the Northeast. Hikers and university researchers are exploring, discovering and mapping more and more spots of old-growth trees on wind-swept mountainsides, in wide swaths of forest, on thin rocky soil and on slivers of woods near malls and housing developments.

A few discoveries have been especially striking: 500-year-old pitch pines near Saratoga Springs and 1,700-year-old northern white cedars near Niagara. The only other equally ancient discovery east of the Mississippi is of the baldcypresses of Black River in North Carolina, which are also thought to be 1,700 years old.

"Those two are duking it out for the oldest living things," said Robert Leverett, a Massachusetts engineer and retired Air Force major who is considered one of the foremost authorities on ancient forests.

These old-growth forests are irreplaceable scientific repositories, Mr. Leverett said. "What were the forests like when the Europeans came over?" he asked. "These are scientific baselines to study, say, global warming, ozone pollution, environmental effects." But these are places, he said, that have not been manipulated by humans.

Tree-ring analysis of pencil-size core samples of old trees can reveal historical droughts, fires and weather patterns, said Neil Peterson, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Until recently, only a handful of environmentalists and forestry academics knew or cared about the Northeast's ancient trees. University forestry schools, which counted big lumber companies among their major donors, taught that virgin forests and nearly all trees older than 200 years were gone, and that old trees were, if anything, a liability, Mr. Leverett said. The students took those attitudes to the federal and state forest services.

But anger over the destruction of California's thousand-year-old redwoods during the 1980's stirred interest east of the Rockies. Could there be virgin forest left in the long-settled Northeast? Mr. Leverett, who identified some of the first known old-growth forests in the Northeast, said that environmental officials were skeptical, and often still are.

"People at the fringes are just getting the word," he said. "Some are finding it unbelievable, but the ages are there. There is an overwhelming body of data."

Now Northeastern old-growth forestry is taught at universities, Mr. Leverett said.

Peter Duncan of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said the state manages its oldest trees along with the younger ones as a matter of course.

New York regarded wilderness as a treasure and a resource in the 19th century, long before most other states. Much of the woodland of the Northeast was destroyed by heavy logging during that time, but many of New York's hardwood trees were spared because they were useless as lumber, on inaccessible peaks and hillsides or far from streams used to float lumber to towns.

In 1895, the state created Adirondack Park, six million acres to be protected forever as wilderness and watershed. It now has more than half a million acres of virgin forest, as much as all the rest of the Northeast, said Barbara McMartin, a mathematician who has written 23 Adirondack guidebooks. Michael Kudish, a forestry professor at Paul Smith's College in Brighton, N.Y., in the Adirondacks, said that over the past 30 years, he had mapped 97 square miles of virgin forest in the Catskills.

Though virgin forest is extremely rare outside of state parks, it still exists in odd corners and on mountain peaks. Woods are often preserved on estates that have been passed down intact since the 18th or 19th centuries.

And, yes, there are old trees in the five boroughs.

Last month, Mr. Kershner, the forest ecologist, squeezed through a fence around a construction site and entered the woodsy edge of Alley Pond Park in Douglaston, Queens. "Are you ready for this?" he asked.

Trucks rumbled past on the Long Island Expressway, a few hundred yards away. But the woods were dense with towering trees. He paused at one after another. "Two hundred and eighty years, I think," he said of a broad, rough tulip tree. "And see that beech? Two hundred and fifty, I'd say."

The age of the Queens Giant has not been precisely determined by laboratory analysis. Of the few city tree experts who know of it, one thinks that 350 to 400 years is a fairer guess. But the signs of its great age could not be more obvious: the long expanse of worn, or balding surface, caused by peeling layers of bark; the thick, flaring roots, like buttresses on a medieval cathedral; the weird, gnarly twists of the outer branches; higher up, the unusually craggy texture of the bark. And it is surrounded by tulips and beeches nearly as old, at 250 to 350 years, Mr. Kershner said.

"If we can find it in New York City," he said, "we can find it anywhere."

2002-07-02T09:11:00.000-04:00

Two articles on Libeskind's first UK building:

Independent on Sunday:
Movie director or architect? No contest
Janet Street-Porter
30 June 2002

The beauty of brilliant architecture is that it takes us on a journey of discovery. Why I care so much about the work of an architect such as Daniel Libeskind rather than that of Steven Spielberg is because Libeskind never underestimates his public. He creates extraordinary structures that open our eyes to possibilities we never dreamt existed, ways of seeing that change your preconceptions for ever.

Observer:
War and pieces
Deyan Sudjic
Sunday June 30, 2002

Manchester is a big, confident city, but an oddly shapeless one. It has nothing like Glasgow's handsome grid of stone streets or Liverpool's heroic riverfront to define it. As if the whole city were set to default mode, that shapelessness is being faithfully reproduced in its struggles to fill the void left by its vanishing industrial past. Its big urban renewal projects take the form of isolated pieces of more or less distinguished architecture, lost in seas of junk.

2002-07-01T10:23:00.000-04:00

RIBA awards the best in UK housing design
“The homes that have been singled out for the Housing Design Awards show that it is possible to build attractive new houses at high density on brownfield sites. However, these examples of excellence are currently few and far between. We need to make sure they become the rule and not the exception. Government can help in this by providing incentives to the market and affordable housing providers to build better.”

Haworth Tompkins Architects, Burrell Foley Fischer, Proctor Matthews Architects and Shed KM each took an award, while Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects scored twice.

2002-06-27T09:21:00.000-04:00

How depressing...

New poll reveals ‘English desire for bungalows’

2002-06-17T09:32:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the extended break - I was sitting some professional exams...

Cities gain bohemian boom

It's bohemians and gays that make a town rich, not shopping malls, says a controversial US academic

2002-05-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

Just reviewed this: Ferruccio Vitale: Landscape Architect of the Country Place Era, to appear shortly here. The author argues Vitale was of an intellectual match compared to Olmstead who practiced before and through Vitale's career. I'm not convinced, and the historic photos of the 'Country Place' homes and gardens don't exactly help.

This looks more up my street, although its all in dutch.

I just installed a counter the other night and amazingly people are coming to this site. Thanks and I hope I'm providing interesting content for you. If not, well, tough.

2002-04-29T19:36:00.000-04:00

Building blocks of change

Samuel Mockbee was a pioneering architect, driven by a need to address the inequalities of America's deep south. In a corner of Alabama, he fought to improve the lives of the poor, while remaining faithful to their spirit. Caroline Roux pays tribute to his work

2002-04-29T08:50:00.000-04:00

Sir Peter Shepheard, Architect, Dies at 88

April 28, 2002

Sir Peter Shepheard, Architect, Dies at 88
By ERIC PACE

Sir Peter Shepheard, a British modern architect, planner and landscape architect who was a dean and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, died on April 11 at his home in London. He was 88.

2002-04-25T11:12:00.000-04:00

Glenn Murcutt: Crocodile Dundee With a T-Square

April 25, 2002
Glenn Murcutt: Crocodile Dundee With a T-Square
By JANE PERLEZ
MORUYA, Australia — WHEN Tom and Dee Magney hired Glenn Murcutt to design a weekend house near the beach, after years of camping out on the remote windswept site, they asked for a place that would bring the wilderness indoors. "Glenn said, `I'll give you one big veranda,' " Mr. Magney recalled.

The result was a long metal pavilion with a northern exposure over the Pacific Ocean, 70 miles from Canberra in southeast Australia, designed to capture the light in winter. A gently swooping metal roof mirrors the shape of the surrounding hills. Its sheen blends with the silvery grasses; over time the metal has dulled to a color that matches the gray fur of the kangaroos that come by at dusk. The locals call it the chook house, the Australian term for a chicken pen. "It's a tough site," Mr. Murcutt said with characteristic bluntness, "and I designed a tough building."

The house, completed in 1984, became one of the most admired works of Mr. Murcutt, this year's surprise winner of architecture's most prestigious award, the Pritzker Prize, which was announced last week.

Few thought that Mr. Murcutt, 66, was a contender. And for good reason: the prize usually goes to celebrity names — Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Sir Norman Foster — who head big firms with institutional and commercial projects in world capitals. Mr. Murcutt, by contrast, works alone, designing modest environmentally conscious homes inspired by farm sheds and Aboriginal structures he has inspected in the continent's remotest regions.

He has refused to work outside Australia, insisting that the best architecture comes from an intimate understanding of culture, climate and environment. Although influenced by Mies van der Rohe and by the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, Mr. Murcutt is uncompromising in his attachment to the Australian landscape.

"I can design for other places," he said. "But it's important for me to be working in my own culture, in a place that is my own life. I don't think it is appropriate to design in one country and produce it in another country." Moreover, he said, working outside Australia would mean a complete change in work habits.

Mr. Murcutt is that rare species in top-flight architecture: a sole practitioner. He works without a computer at home in Sydney in a 13-square-foot office that he shares with his wife, Wendy Lewin, also an architect. He is passionate in his distaste for the computer, now the compulsory tool of virtually every architect. "Stupid things, they are," he said. "They are not truly logical: click on this, click on that." Further, he says, the computer destroys the eye-hand connection that he considers vital to good architecture. He works on a drafting board with pen and ink. "Computers make buildings more like cardboard than buildings," he said.

Such dissenting views earned him the attention of the Pritzker jury, and Mr. Murcutt said he had been receiving congratulatory faxes suggesting that it was a good omen that recognition had diverted from the large power buildings. "Here we have a one-person office that should serve as a role model," said Jorge Silvetti, a Pritzker juror and chairman of the architecture department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. "It shows that it's possible to have a serious practice that investigates issues important to people's lives but doesn't depend on size or marketing."

Mr. Murcutt's passion has been residential. He insists that he designs houses, not homes. "I don't call them homes," he said. "The people in them makes them homes. They're houses."

Since the house at Moruya, Mr. Murcutt has designed a variety of residences, including a new interior for an old terrace house in Sydney for the Magneys, a prefabricated metal house for an Aboriginal artist in the tropical Northern Territory and a Mediterranean-style home in a Sydney suburb for Ken Done, an artist.

But he is not exclusively an architect of houses. He has created some restaurants and a small-scale local history museum at Kempsey on the coast north of Sydney. With Ms. Lewin, he designed a $1.3 million teaching center for the arts, known as the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center in Riverdale, New South Wales, honoring the Australian painter Arthur Boyd, who died in 1999.

On the drawing boards is a winery in the countryside and a 75-room hotel on the southern coast of Australia, at Moonlight Head, in Victoria, where the winds roar in from Antarctica. The hotel is being built in climatic extremes: cold in winter but with the threat of bush fires in the summer. Because it must be able to withstand an "ember attack," sprinklers will be installed on the roof. Mr. Murcutt and Ms. Lewin are working with an engineer to devise a system that will treat the waste from the hotel so it can be used as fertilizer and to irrigate nearby pastures.

The couple and her 13-year-old daughter, Anna Lewin-Tzannes, live in in Mosman, a harborside suburb of Sydney. "You wouldn't want to know," Ms. Lewin said with a laugh when asked about their house. A narrow structure about 100 years old, the house is about to undergo renovation that will result in "better space, better light," Ms. Lewin said. For their own getaway, Mr. Murcutt bought one of his early works, a 1972 farmhouse on a working cattle farm in Kempsey, and 10 years ago added a guest house.

Mr. Murcutt was deeply influenced by his father, Arthur, who ran a gold mine in New Guinea, where young Glenn grew up until the outbreak of war there in 1941. Later, his father built boats and ran a joinery business, where Glenn was first exposed to American architecture magazines.

By the time he was well established in the late 1980's, Mr. Murcutt came in contact with Aboriginal design, which reinforces his deep sensitivity to the environment. It was a great revelation, he said. "I was shown bark shelters with bent bark roofing. They would take a tree, cut the tree in long lengths and then bend it to form sheeting." The bark worked in much the same way as his metal roofing. Afterward, Mr. Murcutt explored territory inhabited by Aborigines in the vast desert regions of northern Australia, closely examining their way of building.

Like his new houses, Mr. Murcutt's renovations have been considered revolutionary in Australia. Pleased with their Moruya weekend house, the Magneys wanted to downscale in Sydney from an elaborate Victorian mansion filled with English mahogany to a "very selfish house — nowhere to look after grandchildren."

Mr. Murcutt suggested they look for a house with a northerly exposure in fashionable Paddington. They found a run-down terrace house overlooking a nature reserve of eucalyptus trees and ferns. The Magneys lived there for three years, and every six months or so Mr. Murcutt would visit, armed with his tools of trade.

"He would come with greaseproof paper from the supermarket and a little notebook 3 inches by 3 inches," Mrs. Magney said. "He sits and sketches and sketches, then goes away, and he comes back with a sketch that's pretty good. Refining and refining, that's why the houses end up the way they do — good to live in, good to look at."

Mr. Murcutt tore out the entire inside of the house, leaving a shell of three walls. From the original warren of rooms, several large spaces emerged. He designed a generous entrance room, with a study for Mr. Magney, a tax lawyer, built discreetly to the side. He floated a slightly elevated bedroom, reached by four stairs, at the end of the entrance. A side staircase reaches down to the main living area. This is a large room with an open-air kitchen, an Aalto birch dining table and a living area of Aalto couches, chairs, coffee tables and bookshelves. The soft northern light floods in from wall-to-ceiling glass doors. An outdoor deck faces the nature reserve, and a long ornamental pool provides a soothing coolness in Sydney's hot summer.

"I could live in it," Mr. Murcutt said. "It orients very well. The light quality is very good, the space is very good. I think I've respected the historic aspect of the house."

But neighbors disagreed. They disliked the terra cotta color he chose for the exterior and back walls of the garden, intended as a reminder of Aboriginal art. Mr. Murcutt fought the zoning council to win approval for so much glass. He blazed a trail. Now the trend in the area is for sleek interiors inside old exteriors. The interior at Paddington is painted all white, offset in the entrance by a painted English 19th-century desk that Mrs. Magney inherited from her father and a long Louis VI gilded mirror, a reminder of their former lifestyle.

Did Mr. Murcutt cringe at the antiques? Apparently not. "He's very polite," Mrs. Magney said. "He makes suggestions. He spends time summing you up." One detail, however, was too much. When the architect visited the Moruya house and found a metal barbecue grill in front of the glass windows, he quietly hauled it out of sight.

After returning to Sydney this week from a conference in Norway, Mr. Murcutt said he had no plans to change the way he worked. "I have so much work to achieve here," he said. "If I worked in other countries I'd have to engage other people. I've got a good life. It's hard, but it's a good life."

He is not even planning to replace the computer he formerly owned. It was used solely as a word processor for form letters declining requests that poured in for a Murcutt work.

2002-04-15T13:33:00.000-04:00

Alison Brooks architects

“I wanted to address some of the big, big problems that need to be addressed, particularly in London,” Brooks says. “The quality of housing and the quality of public space really suffered in the 1980s under Thatcher, and there’s been, in the last 10 years in London, a movement to start investing in the public realm and looking at things that haven’t been looked at in a long time: new forms of housing, sustainable housing, urban design and infrastructure—all of that stuff that Britain’s been pretty far behind on. So that was my big ambition.”

2002-04-15T09:25:00.000-04:00

April 15, 2002
Australian Architect Receives Pritzker Prize
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
lenn Murcutt of Australia has won the Pritzker Architecture Prize for 2002; the announcement is to be made today by the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the award. Mr. Murcutt, 66, lives and practices in Sydney. The prize, which carries a $100,000 grant, is to be presented at a ceremony on May 29 at the Campidoglio in Rome.
Mr. Murcutt is best known as a pioneer in sustainable, or green, architecture, which attempts to diminish the impact of buildings on the natural environment. His designs are formally rigorous, minimal structures that recall the work of Charles and Ray Eames. But Mr. Murcutt's selection by the Pritzker jury can be seen as an acknowledgment that sustainability now overrides aesthetic criteria in the urbanizing world.
Environmental advocates estimate that sealed buildings produce half the world's greenhouse gases. Much of this pollution has become concentrated in the atmosphere over Australia, where the ozone layer has been damaged by emissions that can take up to 15 years to migrate from industrialized nations in the Northern Hemisphere to Australia and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere.
For Mr. Murcutt, who also breeds livestock, this damage has been felt beyond architecture. To contend with the hazards of harsh ultraviolet radiation penetrating a compromised ozone layer, "I have had to change my animals from white to black-furred," he said in a recent telephone interview.
Mr. Murcutt, who cites Freud, Jung and Thoreau among his influences, is a solo practitioner. All aspects of a building's design are rendered by his own hand. There is a three-year waiting list for prospective clients. Most of his projects are private houses.

This personal approach echoes that of early modern architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, whose work was rooted in the craft tradition. Mr. Murcutt's work is, in turn, a further development of Miesian spareness, in which the surrounding landscape provides a richness not seen in the design itself.

Mr. Murcutt's public works include a local history museum and visitors center in Kempsey, New South Wales; a Roman Catholic presbytery and community hall in Sydney; a visitors center in the Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory; and the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center in Riversdale, New South Wales. His innovations in sustainable design have also been adopted by architects for large projects in urban settings.

Pritzker Prize watchers may note that it has been 11 years since an American architect received this honor, and many may suspect that this is not a simple case of oversight.

The Pritzker jurors are J. Carter Brown, Giovanni Agnelli, Ada Louise Huxtable (a former architecture critic for The New York Times), Carlos Jimenez, Jorge Silvetti and Lord Rothschild.

2002-03-27T09:05:00.000-05:00

. Defenders of bamboo say that, if properly installed, it is as strong as steel, and far more supple. That is handy in a seaport where typhoons periodically lash half-finished skyscrapers, peeling off the scaffolding like an old layer of skin. The scaffolds routinely rise 50 or 60 stories

For Raising Skyscrapers, Bamboo Does Nicely

March 27, 2002

HONG KONG JOURNAL

For Raising Skyscrapers, Bamboo Does Nicely

By MARK LANDLER

HONG KONG, March 22 — Perched on a bamboo construction scaffold 18 floors above a swarming expressway, his legs wrapped around a pole, his lips around a cigarette, Ho Siu Leung looks, against all odds, like a man at ease. Mr. Ho has been clambering up and down these creaky contraptions since he was 14. He is now a weather-beaten 54.

But even he concedes there is something nutty about what he does.

"It's hard work, it's low paying, and it's very dangerous," Mr. Ho said during a rushed lunch break. "If I slip, it's all over for me."

Mr. Ho did slip once, years ago, while erecting a bamboo scaffold on a luxury apartment tower on Victoria Peak, which looms above the city. He fell three stories to the pavement, and woke up in the hospital after lying unconscious for two days.

But he went right back to work.

"Obviously, you can't be afraid of heights," Mr. Ho said.

With its swelling population and scarce real estate, Hong Kong has long specialized in vertiginous building projects. As it emerges from an economic downturn, ever-taller skyscrapers are again sprouting throughout the territory.

For all its relentless progress, Hong Kong has clung doggedly to an ancient Chinese construction technique — surrounding its towers in a latticework of bamboo poles no different from those used by builders in China a thousand years ago.

Nowadays, scaffolding is used most commonly to give bricklayers and tile workers a platform on which to do exterior work.

The Chinese mainland has banned the use of such scaffolds on buildings taller than six stories because of fears that the quality of bamboo has deteriorated in recent years. There are rumors that Beijing may soon ban them altogether.

However, in Hong Kong, where bamboo is legal, it is still used in a vast majority of construction projects. The scaffolds routinely rise 50 or 60 stories.

Defenders of bamboo say that, if properly installed, it is as strong as steel, and far more supple. That is handy in a seaport where typhoons periodically lash half-finished skyscrapers, peeling off the scaffolding like an old layer of skin.

"It bends in high winds, while steel scaffolding breaks," said Norman Foster, the British architect who designed the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters, one of the most celebrated towers in this former British colony.

Lord Foster recalls doing a double take when he saw his building under construction: for all its Buck Rogers modernism, it was erected with bamboo. "It's difficult to think of a design concept that has needed less improvement over time," he said.

Bamboo is not only timeless, its champions say, but elegant. The typical scaffold has slender, hollow rods arranged in a graceful cross-hatch pattern. The poles that support soaring edifices are often no thicker than a man's clenched fist.

Francis So's family has built bamboo scaffolds for 80 years. Ask him about the engineering, though, and he waves his hands dismissively. "Forget about the calculations," he said. "Let me tell you about the history."

From its roots in the monsoon-soaked Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guanxi, where dense forests of bamboo grow in valleys and on hillsides, bamboo scaffolding has developed over the centuries into a trade, with its own rhythms and rituals.

Young workers serve as apprentices to bamboo masters for three years, washing their clothes and carrying their lunch pails while learning the art of lashing poles. An experienced bamboo worker, Mr. So said, knows instinctively how thick a bamboo pole must be to support a multistory framework above it.

The workers also learn to scamper up swaying scaffolds with long bamboo poles slung over their shoulders. Most wear Chinese-style cotton slippers, and sometimes go bareheaded. Although they are required by law to wear safety harnesses, these are mostly for show.

"What are we supposed to tie ourselves to?" Mr. Ho asked, pointing at the sky above the scaffold. "We're already at the top of the building."

Mr. Ho oversees a crew of seven men, who work eight hours a day, six days a week. They cannot afford to tarry because the tower is rising beneath them at a rate of one floor per five days. No other city builds this quickly.

Mr. Ho's current project, with seven apartment towers of 46 stories each, guarantees his men months of employment. From their bamboo aerie, they have a jaw-dropping view of the container port in Kowloon.

But to gaze at the marine traffic would violate Rule No. 1 of bamboo scaffolding: Don't look down.

Looking up can be hazardous as well. Another worker, Ho Kit Man, recalls being struck in the face by a rock dropped by a colleague above him. After a dozen stitches, he was back on the job. But he points proudly to a scar over his right eye.

"It all depends on whether you've got the guts to do the job," said Mr. Ho, whose father, brothers and cousins are bamboo workers.

Like most men on his crew, Mr. Ho migrated to Hong Kong as a child from nearby Guangdong Province. Ho Kit Man and Ho Siu Leung are from the same village. Given that they have the same name, they are likely distant relatives.

Mr. So, whose company employs 400 workers, said they often play up the risks of the job to demand higher wages. At a going rate of about $100 a day, he said, they are already among the highest paid laborers in the industry.

But Hong Kong's construction industry does have a high rate of injuries and fatalities. That leads Tsang Kam-shing, a gentle man who has built bamboo scaffolding for 20 of his 40 years, to hope his son will not follow in his footsteps.

"This is cow work," he said, using a Cantonese expression that means grinding menial labor.

2002-03-25T08:38:00.000-05:00

Deyan Sudjic goes off on one regarding Scotland and architecture...

The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland has just launched a £25,000 annual prize for the best building of the year - in Scotland - in a wave of complacency and self-congratulation that flies in the face of the concrete and pebbledash reality

There is nobody in Scotland with the stature of Jacques Herzog, for example, who, though based in Basel, a city infinitely more provincial than Edinburgh, has managed to transform the way that architecture is seen around the world.

2002-03-20T11:02:00.000-05:00

What Does This City Need? O.K., You Asked

"Mr. Garvin said that the question about downtown was how big it is possible to think. And at least for now, he said, all the forces are supporting the kind of historic vision that New York has not seen since perhaps the creation of Central Park in the mid-1800's. Branches of government and agencies within government that generally don't even talk to each other, Mr. Garvin said, are aligned. People want something to be inspired by."

March 20, 2002
What Does This City Need? O.K., You Asked
By KIRK JOHNSON
Alexander Garvin's temporary office overlooking the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan is all but empty of detail and clutter — a desk, a few chairs, a panoramic view of the city. That's about it, and, given Mr. Garvin's job, it seems about right.

Think: Blank slate.

Mr. Garvin, a 61-year-old adjunct professor of planning at Yale University, has been hired by the city's Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to think the big thoughts about where downtown might go from here. The wounded city is the canvas on which he will be expected to project a new plan that will partly be about physical architecture and buildings, but which will also be a kind of narrative — the new story of New York and how it might fit back together.

"We have a chance to start all over again," he said. "Things are possible at the moment that have not been possible in my lifetime."

Just as important as his academic credentials, Mr. Garvin said, is his origin: he is a city kid from the concrete up. He has never lived farther than a mile from where he was born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He has made his career thinking about cities and writing about them and, for 30 years, teaching about them. He's a walking headline: Ultimate city kid gets ultimate city job.

"I'm a certified provincial," he said.

That Mr. Garvin was hired at all as the development corporation's vice president for planning, design and development is also a testament to the revolution in thinking about New York's recovery that has taken place since the early weeks after the terrorist attacks in September. Back then the trade center's lease-holder, Larry A. Silverstein, proposed simply rebuilding the towers as they had been before, or constructing a new complex that could rise quickly on the site to replace the nearly 13.5 million feet of office space that had been lost.

Hardly anyone talks that way now, and Mr. Garvin is the public face on the new, more ambitious view. He made his name in part with his 1996 book, "The American City," which lays out in 477 weighty pages his critique of how dozens of cities have succeeded, but more often failed, to plan their futures.

A central argument of Mr. Garvin's book is that every urban planning project must start a market reaction — a business response outside of the site itself — or it is doomed to failure. Thinking about ground zero, by that measure, means thinking about everything from the street grid of Lower Manhattan to mass transit's connections out into the suburbs and the restaurants of Broad Street.

AND his cornerstone thought, Mr. Garvin said, is to think big. His inspiration is the early 20th century planner, Daniel Burnham, who laid out much of Chicago and lived by the dictum that small ideas always fail.

"They have no magic to stir men's blood and will not be realized," Mr. Burnham wrote.

Mr. Garvin said that the question about downtown was how big it is possible to think. And at least for now, he said, all the forces are supporting the kind of historic vision that New York has not seen since perhaps the creation of Central Park in the mid-1800's. Branches of government and agencies within government that generally don't even talk to each other, Mr. Garvin said, are aligned. People want something to be inspired by.

"How much further we can go — that's what we're going to be trying to test," he said.

Some of Mr. Garvin's ideas are indeed hugely ambitious. He would like to see new train lines and connections that would make Lower Manhattan a single-seat train ride from Long Island and Westchester. He wants to look at the possibility of extending Fulton Street, which now ends at the boundary of the trade center property, all the way across Manhattan, making it a crosstown artery anchored by Battery Park City on one end and the South Street Seaport on the other.

And many of his ideas, he admits, are also still sketchy, or perhaps best kept close to the vest. He has been around New York politics long enough, he said, serving for years on the city's Planning Commission, and in various other urban development jobs since the early 1970's, to know that with something as politically sensitive and crucial to the city's future as rebuilding downtown, you walk gently, however blood-stirring your plan might be.

"I don't think you produce something full blown from the head of Zeus and say, `Here,' " he said. "What we've got to do is start putting some of the pieces out, and as you put out all these pieces you arrive at a point where there's some general agreement."

But there are perhaps hints from Mr. Garvin's life about the story he will tell downtown. His parents, Jacques and Margarita Garvin, were both born in Riga, Latvia, but were apparently so in love with the idea of New York that even as they made plans in 1939 to escape from Europe, they bought advance tickets to the World's Fair being held in Queens that year.

Mr. Garvin's father started a food business in Flushing, supplying delis with things like macaroni salad. Mr. Garvin himself is single with no children, and he grew up, he said, with the city as his playground and the subway as the means of exploring it. He fell in love with New York, he said, by seeing it as a giant living fabric of places that were surprisingly, wonderfully connected.

"I'd take the subway to places I'd never been to, just to see what was there," he said

2002-03-19T08:45:00.000-05:00

Who says the only way is up?

"It manages to make the massive structure that is needed to keep such a high structure standing disappear. It is big, but, in the context of New York, it is just another tree in the forest."

Deyan Sudjic talks about whether London should (or can even avoid) becoming a skyscraper city.

2002-03-18T08:49:00.000-05:00

IHT: Sure it's tiny, it has no view, but hey, it's home Less is more" say the Japanese of their minimalist theatrical art called Noh. Completely the opposite applies to capsule hotel accommodation in Osaka and Tokyo: less is really less. A plastic cubicle, no larger than 150 by 200 centimeters, might not be everyone's idea of a blissful sleep, but for hundreds of office workers who have missed their last train home to a cozy bed, a capsule hotel, capuseru hoteru, is a godsend.
.
With the World Cup coming at the end of May, and hotel space possibly at a premium, these seemingly peculiar accommodations may turn out to be one solution for the pressed visitor.

2002-03-04T10:37:00.000-05:00

Googlewhacked!

APA Private Practice Division Archives 8. Distract with aerial photographs and historical maps. These make great conversation pieces and are excellent distractions for people eager to exclaim, “Hey, there’s my house!”

2002-03-01T14:18:00.000-05:00

Notes from Metropolis: Guiding Light | Metropolis Magazine | March 2002

Samuel Mockbee died at the University of Mississippi Medical Center on December 30, 2001, at 2:48 p.m. He was 57, and by his own admission just hitting his stride as an architect. He believed--as earlier generations used to--that architects need the weight of life and experience before they can design with empathy, technical understanding, and political savvy. Though his life was cut short, his influence is likely to endure.

2002-03-01T14:10:00.000-05:00

Far Corner: The Other Environmental Crisis | Metropolis Magazine | March 2002

"Here, as the exhibition text had it, were ideas from "the finest professionals in the fields of design, engineering, ecology, art, and planning," and the whole was indistinguishable from an end-of-year student show at a trendy architecture school."

2002-03-01T08:07:00.000-05:00

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Mayor backs Ground Zero 'towers of light' memorial Mayor backs Ground Zero 'towers of light' memorial

2002-02-28T13:42:00.000-05:00

Architecture's New Motto: Design Till You Drop Architecture's New Motto: Design Till You Drop
By FRED BERNSTEIN

ASK Daniel Herman who designed the plaid shirt he's wearing to lunch in a TriBeCa restaurant, and he turns a little red. "I don't know," said Mr. Herman, a 31-year-old architect based in Los Angeles. "There's some designer's name on it."

Mr. Herman, who got the shirt from his mother for Christmas, doesn't like shopping, and he's not alone. In the seven chapters he wrote for the improbably named "Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping" (Taschen, $60) — an 800-page book edited by Rem Koolhaas and others, which is to be published tomorrow — Mr. Herman contends that most of the 20th century's best-known architects had "nothing but contempt for shopping."

Even after it became clear that shopping was a driving force behind postwar development ("Suburbs," Mr. Herman said, "begin with malls."), such pre-eminent architects as Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Mies van der Rohe turned their noses up at store and mall commissions. As a result, they lost a chance to shape retail design, and the world ended up with the formless mall interiors that Mr. Koolhaas derides as "junkspace."

Mr. Herman's interest in shopping (as a subject) arose while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1997. Mr. Koolhaas was conducting a seminar on shopping with students whose research would eventually become the "Guide to Shopping" (photocopies of which have been circulating in architecture schools for several years now). To research his seven chapters, Mr. Herman drove across the country with his wife, the architect Linda Chung, and visited more than 100 malls, including the Galleria in Houston (among the first designed with links to hotels and office buildings) and the vast Mall of America in Minnesota.

While inspecting no fewer than five shopping centers in Paramus, N.J., Mr. Herman said, he came to understand that malls aren't meant to last. "We throw them away and move on," he said. "It's survival of the biggest." Mr. Herman emerged with critical data; his wife "emerged with shoes."

While in New York last week for a publication party, Mr. Herman toured the new Prada store in SoHo designed by Mr. Koolhaas, and the TriBeCa Issey Miyake boutique by Frank Gehry, which, along with the new Gaultier store by Philippe Starck, may signal a resurgence of interest by name designers in shopping.

On the morning after the party, Mr. Herman answered questions from House & Home.

Q. Why is it so rare for serious architects to design stores?

A. Architects want to do houses, museums and schools; those are considered serious pursuits. Stores and malls are way down on the bottom of the list. One reason is the taint of commerce. Another reason is impermanence. The one thing you can say for sure about a store is that it isn't likely to be around in 10 years.

Q. Are there exceptions?

A. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1948 V. C. Morris boutique, in San Francisco, was designed as a jewelry store. Now it's a gallery, but it's entirely intact. It's a kind of study for the Guggenheim, with a circular ramp. Wright really organized the space, which is rare in shopping design; most stores and malls are just boxes.

Q. What about the other great modern architects of the 20th century?

A. Le Corbusier did a scheme for a shoe store that was never built. Louis Kahn did a couple of small shops. Alvar Aalto never did a store. Mies did a shopping concourse for the Toronto-Dominion Center, but you never hear it called a mall.

Q. Is it possible to design stores and still be taken seriously?

A. Well, Jon Jerde is the pre-eminent shopping architect of our time. I give him a lot of credit for trying to do something new: shopping/entertainment complexes which through sheer density and complexity have helped revive dilapidated city centers. Yet Jerde's reputation among serious architects is very poor.

Q. So even architects like Frank Gehry stayed away from shopping altogether?

A. Actually, early in his career, Gehry was one of the few "high architects" who saw shopping as a legitimate pursuit. Back then, he did a lot of malls for the Rouse Company. But then, around 1982, he kind of reinvented himself. Now, in his monograph, there's 18 pages on the Guggenheim Bilbao, and half a page on Centerpoint Mall, in Oxnard, Calif.

Q. But he did do a store for Issey Miyake.

A. It's beautiful, but he really just applied design motifs to the space. He isn't really engaging the subject of shopping.

Q. Outside of high-end boutiques, do name architects get to do many stores?

A. Rarely. Stanley Marcus [of Neiman Marcus], who died last month, wanted to do interesting buildings, so he hired Philip Johnson, Kevin Roche, Edward Larrabee Barnes and Gyo Obata. But he said these architects really had no interest in shopping per se, and most of the projects were failures.

Q. How so?

A. Barnes designed a Neiman-anchored mall, but he had it stepping up a hill, and that was bad for pedestrian traffic. And, according to Marcus, the stores "died on the vine." Marcus later said that Barnes had never been in a store; his wife did all the shopping. And Philip Johnson did a Neiman's in San Francisco; on the inside you would never know that a major architectural figure was involved. It is indistinguishable from any other department store. The attitude seems to be: leave the inside to the store experts; we don't want to get our hands dirty with retail.

Q. So Philip Johnson has never been inside a Wal-Mart. Why does that matter?

A. Shopping is infiltrating every sphere of modern life. But architects stayed on the sidelines. Had Le Corbusier given a department store the kind of attention he gave to the problem of making a city, or a monastery or a church, he would have added to the repository of thinking on the subject. And we would have had a lot less junk space now.

Q. And is the situation changing now?

A. You do see a few architects really engaging in shopping. There's Rem, and [Jacques] Herzog and [Pierre] de Meuron — they were the Pritzker Prize winners in 2001 — they're also doing stores for Prada. And they did a boutique in Zurich. So shopping may be entering its Bilbao phase.

Q. Meaning stores will be buildings everyone wants to see?

A. For a while, after Bilbao, museum buildings became more important than the art inside.

Q. So we'll have stores as stars?

A. The individual stores that are produced may or may not succeed. But they've already succeeded in bringing a level of seriousness to the undertaking of creating shopping space. For the first time, the architecture schools are offering "shopping studios." Rem started that at Harvard, and other schools have followed. So architecture students are no longer being taught that good architects only do housing and museums. The real legacy may be that after Rem, it will be safe for architects who want to be thought of as cool to do designs for shopping.

2002-02-24T23:55:00.000-05:00

The great non-building builders. Deyan Sudjic

Archigram was a sweeter, gentler and essentially English version of the futurists. They were six architects who, almost by accident, stumbled into creating the only architectural movement that has meant anything to the outside world that this country has produced in 50 years.

2002-02-24T23:48:00.000-05:00

Projects for Prada
by OMA/AMO and Rem Koolhaas and The Prince Street Prada store
by John Menick - 01/28/2002

If it isn't well understood it's at least generally experienced that shopping has become an end in itself. Once, probably fairly recently, if someone needed a pair of shoes, they went out and unceremoniously bought a pair. Shopping was perfunctory, utilitarian, transparent in its function. Over the past half-century, multinational capitalism -- or some Disneyfied version of it -- has turned shopping into a form of entertainment to be enjoyed free from all the fuss of having to actually buy something.

2002-02-24T18:14:00.000-05:00

That was my mother...Eleanor Cooney

There's a Japanese word, kawaisoo, which, roughly translated, means 'the pity of things'.

2002-02-21T11:59:00.000-05:00

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Jonathan Glancey: Cornish coastal towns redevelopment
Cornwall is a county of glorious, wave beaten beaches. Cornwall is also a county of mostly lacklustre and even fishy architecture. Many visitors are disappointed by the rows of dreary huts pasted with satellite dishes sitting along its dramatic coastline. But then Cornwall is not a wealthy place.

2002-02-18T22:16:00.000-05:00

Guardian Unlimited | World dispatch | Neither safe nor sound Neither safe nor sound

Rules imposed by China on travel to Tibet on the pretext of 'ensuring safety' have created a corrupt system that fails to protect tourists from danger, writes John Gittings

2002-02-14T13:59:00.000-05:00

Are you local?
New Forest council wants to introduce a strict residency test to keep out rich commuters. But will this controversial plan help the county's homes become affordable?

2002-02-13T18:53:00.000-05:00

Revolutions in taste in garden design, over 4 centuries

Garden revolutions
The following essay, which has been revised, was first published in Tom Turner's City as landscape: a post-Postmodern view of planning and design (Spons:London, 1996).

2002-02-13T11:07:00.000-05:00

Archigram wins RIBA's Royal Gold Medal
The phenomenon that is Archigram (from ARCHItecture and teleGRAM) changed the world of architecture in the sixties and seventies and has influenced many world class, and less famous, architects - and architecture generally - ever since. Indeed the group's ideas have grown even more relevant as time passes. 1991 saw the reissue of the book that they put together in 1972, and the Archigram exhibition has been touring the world since 1994.

2002-02-12T14:00:00.000-05:00

New York New Visions

New York New Visions is a coalition of 20 architecture, planning, and design organizations that came together immediately following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

2002-02-12T13:53:00.000-05:00

I thought I was a control freak:

Shin Takamatsu

CLiCK
to enter the architecture of Shin Takamatsu

Your screen's resolution MUST be at
1024x768 (or larger) and your browser maximized completely to avoid cropping images.

2002-02-12T13:50:00.000-05:00

ArchiNed News:Shin Takamatsu

'Architecture says more than words. I think I should vanish from the site now…'

2002-02-11T09:21:00.000-05:00

They cannot be serious. Deyan Sudjic Broadway Malyan, with their plans for a prime London site, are nothing new. They are just the latest architects whose elephantine tread has ruined our cities

2002-02-10T12:31:00.000-05:00

Samuel Mockbee, 57, architect to the poor

By JIM DWYER
The New York Times METROPOLITAN DESK | January 6, 2002, Sunday

Samuel Mockbee, an architect and teacher whose commitment to bringing high-quality building design to the most impoverished residents of rural Alabama inspired other architects, died on Dec. 30 in Jackson. He was 57 and lived in Canton.

The cause was complications from leukemia, said his wife, Jacquelyn Johnson Mockbee.

Mockbee so loved the pure act of building that he eventually abandoned fee-paying clients in favor of working at the construction site with a crowd of hammer-bearing students gathered around him. He was a burly man who wore custom-made raw silk shirts and reveled in the art of ribald storytelling. His clients were the poor of Black Warrior River in Hale County, the same depressed region of Alabama recorded by James Agee and Walker Evans in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941). What he offered through his Rural Studio student workshop in Greensboro, Ala., associated with Auburn University, was small-scale architecture that could help lift people out of poverty by providing affordable housing as well as community buildings.

“Sam Mockbee and his Auburn students prove that architecture can still be a fine art and a social service at the same time,” said Robert Campbell, the architecture critic, in a new book on the Rural Studio.

A fifth-generation Mississippian, Mockbee was born on Dec. 23, 1944, in Meridian. The son of a traveling shoe salesman, he prized schooldays when he was home sick, so he could spend time drawing pictures of houses for his mother, his wife said. By the fourth grade, he knew he wanted to be an architect.

Before going to architecture school, he joined the Army in 1967, serving two years as an artillery officer at Fort Benning, Ga. He briefly met his future wife, also born in Meridian, on a blind date in 1968. On a second blind date, two years later, he asked her to marry him.

Mockbee attended Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1974. After practicing on his own, he formed a partnership with Coleman Coker in 1984. The two young architects quickly made a name for themselves with designs that treated regional motifs boldly with a modernist rigor. They were identified, along with Scogin, Elam, Bray of Atlanta and Clark Menefee of Charleston, S.C., as strong new voices of architecture coming from the South. In 1990 their firm, Mockbee Coker, was selected by the Architectural League of New York to participate in the prestigious Emerging Voices series.

But the business of architecture was not for Mockbee, who had also begun to paint in a myth-laden vernacular style; in 1991 he started teaching at Auburn University. In 1993 he founded Rural Studio with the help of D.K. Ruth, then the head of Auburn's architecture department.

The workshop was a hands-on exercise in getting buildings built for those who needed them most. Guided by recommendations from local community groups, Mockbee would sometimes knock on the doors of the most dilapidated shanties in Hale County and offer to build the residents a new home, community center or chapel. Students conducted detailed interviews and did the construction themselves, using tires, hay bales, old license plates and other materials that were donated or scavenged. The designs themselves had a modern sleekness embellished with traditional southern amenities, like porches and dog trots. A new smokehouse, the longtime dream of one elderly homeowner, was trimmed in glass bottle bottoms but also recalled the sculptural form of Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp.

When Mockbee learned in 1998 that he had leukemia, he cut back on an active schedule as a visiting professor at the architecture schools at Harvard, Yale and other universities; a bone marrow transplant enabled him to continue his work with Rural Studio. In 2000 he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his work there.

Mockbee once told his students, defining the purpose of the workshop, that it was “about being decent and trying to provide a decent community for all its citizens,” adding, “It’s about being democratic.”

In addition to his wife, Mockbee is survived by his daughters, Margaret, of Oxford; Sarah Ann, of Canton; Carol, of Auburn, Ala.; and a son, Julius, of Canton.

2002-02-09T10:42:00.000-05:00

A very evocative review of the landscape and people of Newfoundland; location for the film adaptation of The Shipping News.

This cruel & empty land

On seaside cliffs, the wind has blown so hard for so long that the trees are no more than chest-high, gnarled into natural bonsai called tuckamore.

2002-02-08T17:12:00.000-05:00

Volkswagen's Glaeserne Manufaktur (glass factory), opened by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder as a Christmas present to the city of Dresden last month, is an industrial revelation. A revolution even. A beautiful gathering of ultra-modern buildings, it is as far from the car plants of Dagenham and Longbridge as it is possible to imagine.

2002-02-08T17:09:00.000-05:00

Gabion: Thomas Heatherwick and Newcastle’s Blue Carpet. 1/3

“Well,” says Tom Heatherwick, slightly defensively, “I think it’s blue enough.” This is possibly the oddest defence of a work of art since Turner had to explain why all his paintings were so yellow. But when the work in question has been six years in the making, takes the form of a new public square in Newcastle, and has always been described as a “blue carpet”, well, people expect blue. They expect Yves Klein blue, or its close relation, Will Alsop blue. What they get with Heatherwick’s square is grey with a sparkly hint of blue. Some Tynesiders have been muttering that it’s not blue enough. Hence Heatherwick’s defence.

2002-02-06T21:11:00.000-05:00

Thank you Blogger & BlogSpot.

This evening I eventually had a spare second to actually sit down and work out that Freeservers no longer allows FTP access. Hence no publishing for months. Sorry. Not that anyone reads this, but it was annoying me. Anyway, BlogSpot to the rescue and a new look aswell. I'm just going to stick with this template and not try anything fancy (except perhaps adding some meta tags and key words so I can register it with the search engines). L&U is dead. Long live L&U.

2002-01-30T12:35:00.000-05:00

New Ways to Avoid or Destroy Video Surveillance

Two new projects help citizens regain some of their privacy by helping them to avoid surveillance or destroy it. The Institute for Applied Autonomy's iSee is an interactive map that shows walkers the path of least surveillance between any two points in Manhattan. And for those who want to take the direct route, an anonymous group explains how to disable inappropriate cameras.

2002-01-30T12:33:00.000-05:00

Bikes Paint Messages As You Ride (Project BIKE)

An anonymous investment of $500 has allowed the distribution of a tool that turns any bicycle into a street-writing device. Bradley Pitts (mailto:bmpitts9@hotmail.com), a spokesperson for the group that created the tool, calls it "an efficient way to get a message out on the street... over and over and over again."

2002-01-18T13:41:00.000-05:00

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society | Ups and downs of high-rise living
Birmingham city council is planning to demolish nearly all of its 315 tower blocks at a time when London property developers are talking of a tower block comeback. So is high-rise doomed or does it represent a solution for overcrowded cities? Matt Weaver sets out the arguments for and against.

2002-01-17T23:31:00.000-05:00

Brits Flocking to Flora and Fauna A giant, futuristic greenhouse large enough to contain a tropical rainforest will become one of England's top five visitor attractions this month

2002-01-11T09:50:00.000-05:00

Go-ahead for world's biggest offshore windfarm

The Irish government today gave the go-ahead for the world's biggest off-shore wind-generated power plant.

The £400 million project will be sited in the Irish Sea, five miles from the coast of Ireland's Co Wicklow and 40 miles south of Dublin.
It will be capable of producing 520 megawatts of electricity 10% of the Irish Republic's power requirements, and enough for 500,000 households from a series of 200 turbines sunk in an undersea sand bank that runs for a total of 24 miles.
Frank Fahey, Ireland's Marine and Natural Resources Minister, formally granted a licence for the wind farm after the conclusion of negotiations with eirtricity, the group behind the scheme.
Construction of the marine wind park is due to start later this year and it will be developed on a phased basis.
Fahey gave assurances today that the huge plant would pose no environmental problems.
The underwater sections of its turbines, each sunk into at least 15 metres of the sea bed, are expected to encourage marine wild life species.
A exclusion zone for navigation is to be extended around the location, already largely avoided by shipping because of the hazard generated by the Arklow Sandbank site of the plant a move that is expected to help protect fish.
The development, which will be three times larger than any other similar project, is set to lower significantly Ireland's current 86% dependence on imported energy.
The minister said: "It's a big power station and will provide 10% of our electricity from the cleanest energy in the world.

"We have had a lot of public consultations over this eight submissions were received and they were all in favour.

"It will be visible from a number of points on land in clear, bright weather, but it should not be a major impact on scenery.

"Clearly, it is a very good and economic form of energy. This is the first project of its type here, and it is fair to say the marine environment is beginning to become much more important to our economy.

"We will have further wind farms and are at present developing technology for wave-generation of electricity. Our Marine Institute is one of the first organisations in the world to come forward with proposals for that.

Eirtricity comprises a number of Irish-owned companies, headed by Eddie O'Connor, former chief of the Irish government-backed Bord na Mona peat-producing company.

The company already operates two land-based wind farms in Ireland, with two more under construction, and offers power at a price 10% lower than orthodox electricity to several hundred small and medium-sized business customers throughout the Republic.

O'Connor said: "The development of major offshore wind energy parks will be the biggest energy revolution since the internal combustion engine.

"Offshore wind energy alone could provide up to two thirds of Europes electricity needs by 2020.

"The resource is there, the technology is proven, the costs continue to drop all that is needed is the political will to see it happen."

2001-12-14T10:50:00.000-05:00

New Lanark gets world heritage status...

AJ

Originally nominated for the World Heritage List in 1986, it was re-nominated in June 2000 by the late Scottish First Minister Donald Dewar. The status means New Lanark will join 690 sites from across the world which are valued for their “outstanding universal value”.

2001-12-13T10:34:00.000-05:00

How not to impress the public...

NYPOST.COM : ARTISTES PROVIDE LANDFILL OVERKILL By GERSH KUNTZMAN

December 10, 2001 -- Metro Gnome

A MOUND of decaying trash at the Fresh Kills Landfill will be home to a memorial to World Trade Center victims. That much, we know.

After that, it's anyone's guess what will be done with Staten Island's mothballed garbage dump - and I say that even after getting a sneak peak at six competing plans to convert it from one of the nation's most notorious dumps into one of the world's largest urban parks.

The six finalists in the Municipal Art Society's design competition "Fresh Kills: Landfill to Landscape" were unveiled Wednesday night at the Staten Island Institute for Arts and Sciences.

The gala opening drew a mix of Manhattan's hip urban-design crowd, with their rimless eyeglasses, trendy East Village clothes and impenetrable architectural jargon, and Staten Island community leaders, with their aviator frames, sensible brown suits and hopes that the plans will include mundane, but much-needed, resources, such as ball fields, roadway improvements and community centers.

"I'll like the idea of making that area beautiful again, but it's got to have plenty of recreational space, too," said Russ Nicholson, who, at 71, is on every local board, advisory committee and community group.

"People gotta live!"

Nicholson liked a few things he saw on Wednesday night, but mostly, he was overwhelmed by pretentiousness. I was, too.

Often, a bad idea can look good "on paper." Well, in a design competition, even the best ideas can look lousy on paper.

For instance, one design, pompously called Lifescape, presented a series of "threads, islands and mats" that combine to form "an expansive green matrix of infinite horizons and newly connected ecosystems." Whatever. Perhaps it would've made more sense if the diagram looked more like a park and less like a Pollock.

Another finalist broke up the site into five "seeds": "Experimental Field," "Material Datum," "Depositional Edge," "Tectonic Zone" and "Event Surface." I would tell you what the designers envisioned, but, frankly, I don't have the slightest idea . . . except that it involves trees.

Even professional architecture people were flummoxed by the vague schematics and self-important explication.

"It's typical pretentiousness," said Philip Nobel, a critic for Metropolis and ArtForum. "These designers are just building a wall of attitude between their actual ideas - whatever they are - and the public."

That's not to say there weren't good ideas buried among all the "network of transects," "vertical zonation of species" and "eco-spheres" to create a new city landmark 21/2 times the size of Central Park.

One design, called rePark, envisions an outdoor movie theater, equestrian trails, gyms, ball fields, a memorial forest, a golf course, a water park made out of reused garbage barges, and a 3-mile-long, U-shaped picnic table made out of recycled laundry-detergent bottles.

Another scheme, called Fresh Kills Parkland, has many of those amenities, plus a nifty meadow that would focus the eyes toward lower Manhattan.

On Saturday, all six finalists will present their designs at the Richmond County clerk's office. A jury will select the winner, who will then spend the next 35 years galvanizing public support, wrangling permits, finagling budget allocations and, if we're all lucky, building the damned thing.

Saturday's session is open to the public, so expect a room packed with Staten Islanders who have been waiting 40 years for someone to plant oaks instead of offal at Fresh Kills. The voice of the people won't count in the voting, but don't expect this silent majority to remain quiet.

"We want people to have strong opinions," said Ellen Ryan of the Municipal Art Society. "And we certainly won't stop them from booing or cheering."

You heard the lady.

2001-12-13T08:34:00.000-05:00

AJ's preview of the above

AJ

A swathe of wide ranging reforms were announced in the long awaited Planning Green Paper, published yesterday.

2001-12-13T08:33:00.000-05:00

DTLR | Planning Green Paper: Planning: Delivering a Fundamental Change

Department for Transport,
Local Government and the Regions
Planning Green Paper
Planning: Delivering a Fundamental Change

Couple of things to note:
Proposal to abolish structure plans, local plans and unitary development plans and replace them with a new Local Development Framework (LDF), prepared by district/unitary councils.

Statutory Regional Spatial Strategies (RSS) to replace current system of Regional Planning Guidance. RSS will be much wider ranging than current guidance and better integrated with other regional strategies.

2001-12-12T08:46:00.000-05:00

Prince Charles gets down and dirty

"However, I can also imagine that my presence is about as welcome as a police raid on a brothel."

2001-12-06T17:40:00.000-05:00

Celebrity Landscape Architects Death Match
The Dutch square off against the French, in low country home territory...

"Absent Architecture
December 3, 2001

On Thursday evening the Berlage Institute organised a discussion in conjunction with the Alliance Française and Archilab on the theme of hybrid landscapes. A new generation of French architects uses nature in a playful way to create artificial landscapes, thereby breaking open the traditional relationship between city and countryside. The evening opened with a short presentation the work of Dominique Lyon, Jakob MacFarlane, and Francois Roche. In attendance were Winy Maas Adriaan Geuze and Aaron Betsky."

ArchiNed News: hybrid landscapes

2001-11-29T21:26:00.000-05:00

Can't find anything other than the following link:

.archlog: the weblog of architecture Landscape architect great A.E. Bye died this past weekend.

2001-11-26T09:36:00.000-05:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Edinburgh launches first centre for small practices

A group of architects in Edinburgh has set up a pioneering resource centre for small practices which could be replicated across the UK

2001-11-26T09:30:00.000-05:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Franck Lohsen McCrery Architects has unveiled the first comprehensive masterplan for the devastated World Trade Center site.

2001-11-26T09:28:00.000-05:00

This depresses me somewhat...

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Landscape Institute honours the best of design in 2001

2001-11-13T09:38:00.000-05:00

West 8 to be part of a group of 13 international architects and urban designers selected to help breathe new life into town and city centres across Yorkshire.AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs

2001-11-13T09:36:00.000-05:00

Murray + Dunlop seek planning for £6m River Clyde housing scheme

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs "The 1,200m² development will provide 65 mainly two-bed apartments. The majority will be executive apartments but a percentage is expected to be affordable."

Don't like the sound of this. Executive apartments?

2001-11-13T08:46:00.000-05:00

Sony's empty 'City in a Box' Successful cities have a life of their own. Careful packaging is no substitute for a festive street or neighborhood. The urban experience can't be reduced to a formula, not even by a corporate monolith with an $85 million construction budget.

2001-11-09T09:42:00.000-05:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has been cleared of plagiarism after an eight-year legal battle. The Pritzker Prize winner is now considering ways to recover his £500,000 costs – which could include legal action against the expert witness for the case.

2001-11-07T09:18:00.000-05:00

Foster to be outsed by turquoise & green stilt building?

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Will Alsop has unveiled a scheme for the contested Spitalfields Market site, at the request of the Spitalfields Market Under Threat (SMUT) campaign.

2001-11-01T17:37:00.000-05:00

Gabion: Prefab homes revival: A new generation tackles an old idea 1/3

Until they were reinvented as glorious parts of our national heritage and listed, prefabs - that's prefabricated homes - had a bit of a bad name, didn't they? Somehow, the little "temporary" factory-made homes produced in the 1940s as a cure for bomb damage came to be associated with big, expensive, later failures of another type of prefab building - the tower block. But now, hey presto! Tower blocks are all right again, are routinely refurbished rather than dynamited, and the best ones are inevitably now also listed as historically and architecturally important.

2001-11-01T17:32:00.000-05:00

Murray
Grove, Hackney, London

Murray Grove Cartwright Pickard Architects Hackney, London

"The accommodation is targeted at young single people, couples and flat sharers, who might prefer low-rental housing for a few years rather than the greater commitment of a mortgage."

First read about this in Dwell, April 2001.

2001-11-01T16:21:00.000-05:00

Jean-Luc Godard Quotations To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated.

2001-10-31T23:06:00.000-05:00

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Da Vinci comes to life 500 years on Almost 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out what fans call the "Mona Lisa of bridges" and what critics said could not be built.
Five centuries after a Turkish sultan rejected the project the bridge opened yesterday, albeit 1,500 miles north of the sunny spot he intended.

2001-10-31T09:13:00.000-05:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Energy surveys slam UK buildings

Two reports from the Oxford Energy Advice Centre and the Association for the Conservation of Energy have attacked UK residential and commercial buildings for their lack of energy efficiency.

2001-10-29T09:24:00.000-05:00

Guardian Unlimited Observer | Review | Strictly for faux village people Strictly for faux village people

An attempt to create a new London village is marred by bad design and execution

Deyan Sudjic
Sunday October 28, 2001

2001-10-28T21:35:00.000-05:00

Chris Gray design portfolio Queens Plaza Ideas Competition

"Queens Plaza Ideas Competition [COMPETITION TEXT]
Kinetic & Acoustic
We live…
The city leaps in a dance of a million moves.
The city sings with the music of a million notes."

Blatant plug for landscapearchitecture.andmuchmore.com.

Check out my entry for the latest Van Alen institute competition.

2001-10-19T17:34:00.000-04:00

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Bricks and mortals "Architecture is not a great profession," he says. "It is not particularly well paid and it is extremely hard to do something good."

2001-10-17T14:11:00.000-04:00

. : Nightscapes and Glass Buildings

"Erieta Attali is a young Greek photographer whose focus as an artist has tended to occupy a no man’s land between landscape, archaeology, and architecture."

Kenneth Frampton

2001-10-17T14:08:00.000-04:00

The Artistic Dimension, Hellenic Ministry of Culture The landscapes of Erieta Attali. “First and Last Landscapes” (1996), the human element has completely vanished, leaving behind a hard and merciless landscape: “Here are no longer any signs of man, just earth, stone and sky, as though in these dry mountains and arid valleys the alchemical elements had been reduced to two… As Attali’s title suggests, these landscapes are either very young or very old: empty and waiting, a tabula rasa, or else drained and exhausted”.

2001-10-17T13:35:00.000-04:00

ArchiNed News: Hageneiland VINEX MVRDV If so many people buy pullovers from H&M, then what's the problem with a house by MVRDV?

2001-10-12T10:15:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Metaphor tastes Turkish delight with archaeological museum win – images

New London-based practice Metaphor has won an extraordinary commission to design a temporary museum of archaeology at Zeugma in south-east Anatolia, Turkey.

2001-10-11T09:26:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Scots: ‘now sort out planning’

The RIAS has called for the planning system in Scotland to be overhauled and markedly improved by involving more architects in the development control process.

2001-10-09T09:44:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal.

War is declared: yes, Prince Charles is at it again

2001-10-09T09:40:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal.

Scotland launches ‘vital’ policy on architecture

Scotland now has a national policy on architecture for Scotland which will make a "vital" contribution to improving people's lives socially, economically, culturally and environmentally, the country’s Deputy Culture Minister Allan Wilson said today.

2001-10-05T12:15:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Tadao Ando scoops US art institute project

Tadao Ando is to design a new building to house the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s collections and special exhibitions in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the US.

The architect will design a new facility for the Institute to support its research and academic programmes and house the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. The Clark has already selected landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand to work with Ando to house its 140 acre rural Berkshire site.

2001-10-02T11:19:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Tall versus terror - 1.10.1

Rather more considered stories about tall buildings reach the Sunday papers this week, following the spate of ‘no-one will ever go in one again’ stuff that followed NY11/9.

2001-09-26T08:56:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs £8,000 prize offered in student housing competition

Circle 33 Housing Group and the Architecture Foundation have launched a student competition to promote innovation in housing.

'Accomodating Change' aims to attract students of architecture to the field of affordable housing design. It is open to both undergraduates and postgraduates. A prize fund of £8,000 will be allocated by the jury.
Organisers hope the competition will encourage better housing design and 'the development of new housing typologies and processes'.
'The house and its social corollary - housing - continues to be one of the most fascinating, complex and challenging areas of architectural study,’ said a spokeswoman for the foundation. ‘What then should the homes of tomorrow look like? Or perhaps more importantly - how will they work, how will they accommodate changing lifestyles, age, mobility, aspirations and technologies?'

2001-09-17T08:04:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Skyscrapers likely to be cut down to size after NYC attacks

Changes to US building codes after the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre could make some future skyscraper projects uneconomic, according to one of the world's leading forensic engineering specialists.

2001-08-28T09:16:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Tiny homes called micro-flats

Tiny homes called micro-flats are set to be introduced in London to allow struggling young professionals to join the capital's booming housing market.

The miniature flats, based on the design of yachts and caravans have space for a double bedroom, lounge, shower room, kitchen and balcony.
But they measure just 25 metres square - about the same size as a mobile home.
Their compact layout means the properties will sell for a fraction of the price of the average city pad.
Costing £60,000 - £80,000 the flatlets have been billed as a housing solution for lower paid professionals.

2001-08-24T09:34:00.000-04:00

AJ Published 24 August 2001 at 11:33

Grimshaw and Arup design stunning new links into Battersea

The developer of the redundant Battersea power station has unveiled a series of major public transport schemes to improve access to the Thames-side site – including a redevelopment of an existing railway bridge by Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, and another footbridge by Arup.

2001-08-23T10:40:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Prince’s Foundation launches new-look design programme

The Prince’s Foundation has unveiled the first in a range of new courses now being designed to replace the year-long foundation course which was dropped earlier this summer (see "Prince drops Foundation bombshell").

2001-08-22T13:57:00.000-04:00

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | How do they do it?

In Paris, they care about the people who use public transport. Earlier this year, for example, the regional transport authority offered a soothing cup of green tea and a relaxing 10-minute massage to Metro passengers. "Let's dream, let's smile, let's relax, let's love . . . Join us for massage and tea-tasting. Together, let's make city rhyme with stress-free," said the poster. Even the PR-speak is more fruity on the Metro than on the tube, and London is never going to rhyme with anything relaxing.

2001-08-17T13:03:00.000-04:00

Read it before ONE magazine disappears into the internet ether....

ONE - Design Matters Finland's Fire Bugs

Most visitors pass through Vuosaari, Finland, as fast as they can. Sure there's golf, the pines and sea shore — it's just that for many, the main attraction is the motorway and metro, which run together to lead travelers away from town into a hot district of Helsinki. Back in World War II, however, Vuosaari saved Helsinki from destruction. By lighting a series of bonfires in what was then a wilderness, the Fins deceived Russian night bombardiers into dropping their loads well away from Helsinki's population center.
Heikkinin-Komonen Architects was given the task of commemorating the glorious deception and created a strip of 132 lightposts that line the road in honor of the fires. A crowd-pleasing special effect was also added: a low fiery glow, produced by the innovative use of perforated metal plates, is projected in a flickering moiré pattern that, to quick moving commuters, resembles actual fire. If they're just going to rush through, you may as well give them a bit of history to remember as they do.
—John Alderman

2001-08-14T09:06:00.000-04:00

AJ from The Architects’ Journal. Architecture news and information. Companies, buildings, design, products, jobs Bolivia battles poverty with a competition call-up

Architecture chiefs in Bolivia are waging a war against poverty by launching an international design competition for an urban park with education and leisure spaces.

City leaders in La Paz said the huge park would replace a run-down area as part of a strategy to create "a green urban fabric in the city and its outskirts." The park should allow nature and culture to interact with technology, craftsmanship and industry.
"It must include educational spaces for children and youths and contribute to the promotion of strategies capable of fighting against poverty and encouraging creative aptitudes through leisure activities," said the organisers.

2001-08-12T20:20:00.000-04:00

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | What does green mean? What does green mean?

We talk about eco-friendly architecture - but is it just so much hot air? By Jonathan Glancey

2001-08-12T20:14:00.000-04:00

Gabion: Kasbah meets Archigram: “Architects of Air” in Edinburgh. 1/2 Chill-out zones are undergoing something of a revival at the moment, along with all architectural things one vaguely associates with the 1960s. So it comes as no surprise to find the sixth “luminarium”, by the outfit collectively known as Architects of Air, arriving in the very heart of the Edinburgh Festival.

2001-08-11T12:03:00.000-04:00

Architects storm
the Big House
Here's a question for you: Are architects the new mega-stars of the art world? This summer, unless you've been living under a rock, you'll have noticed the unusually high number of architects preening, promoting and, well, producing. Just take a look at New York City, where Frank Gehry at the Guggenheim is squaring off against Mies van der Rohe at MOMA and the Whitney in a high-stakes throwdown for attendance records and street cred. Not the usual Pop Art or Abs Exp suspects...but actually two architects, in the very throne rooms of Olympia.ArtKrush - The Artist Run Website

2001-08-08T10:35:00.000-04:00

Jeremy Cresswell Northern Business Editor
(jwcresswell@scotsman.com)
THE birthplace of three of the world’s greatest ocean liners - Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and QE2 - is destined to be swallowed up by a massive Clydeside business, leisure and housing complex being masterminded by Scottish Enterprise Dumbartonshire.

Never again will the former John Brown Shipyard echo to the rattle of riveting hammers or the crackle of welding torches as thousands of men crafted ships and, for the past 30 years, platforms and rigs for the North Sea oil and gas industry.

Curtain goes down on the end of an era as Clydeside yard puts up For Sale sign

2001-08-08T09:41:00.000-04:00

Architects David Lea and Patrick Borer have followed in the footsteps of Foster and Partners by winning this year’s Gold Medal in Architecture from the Royal Society of Architects in Wales.

The architects clinched the prize, announced during this week’s National Eisteddfod of Wales in Denbigh, for a pioneering building which does not use cement.

The project comprises a number of innovative features including rammed earth construction, autonomous water treatment and renewable energy systems. The main innovations are: unstabilised, non-reinforced rammed earth elements as load bearing supports internally; sheep’s wool insulation within the timber framed external walls; the exclusion of cement from the whole development and solar water heating panels linked to a heat main which is also supplied by a biomass fuelled boiler.

Cement-free building clinches Welsh Gold Medal

2001-08-03T09:11:00.000-04:00

London's first covered footbridge across the River Thames is to be called Jubilee Bridge, it was announced today.

The £14 million project, which will connect Bankside to the City, was granted planning permission last night following a council meeting, the Jubilee Bridge Trust said.

It is hoped it will be more successful than the nearby ill-fated Millennium Bridge which shut in June 2000 just days after its official opening when its wobbly state left people walking across it feeling sick.

Bill Higgins, founder of the Jubilee Bridge Trust, said: "It's going to be a lightweight glass and steel structure. We're taking a pretty ugly bridge and making it more modern."

He added that the bridge was unlikely to suffer from the same problems as the Millennium Bridge. "The big difference was that they were trying a new design and also they had to dig into the river," Higgins said.

"We have none of these problems because we're building of the side of an existing structure."

New £14m Jubilee Bridge to span Thames

2001-08-03T09:09:00.000-04:00

Survey work to start on Newquay artificial reef plan

A survey of the seabed is to be carried out as part of a £1 million plan to build Europe's first artificial surfing reef, it emerged today.

Newquay artificial reef plan