sippey.com

the lovers and their black hole

Fantastic documentation of what looks like an amazing project from Dash Marshall in New York: An Apartment for Space Age Lovers. It features a Black Hole.  "The Black Hole is a flexible zone which can be annexed to the living room or bedroom, or optionally kept closed as a large walk-through closet space depending on the needs of The Lovers. It's big enough to gobble up anything The Lovers need to hide." I'd like to hire them just to describe my house.

mitch kapor is a very patient man

One of the great ongoing Berkeley sagas that Berkeleyside has been covering (well!) is Mitch Kapor's desire to build a home in North Berkeley, on a very odd lot that honestly would benefit from having a new home on it. But he's been having a hell of a time with it, thanks to the "Not In My Backyard" attitude of my fellow Berkeley citizens...except this time, the NIMBY's don't actually live in Kapor's back yard.

An unusual factor in the case is that immediate neighbors to the proposed home have publicly expressed their support for the Kapors’ plan. In his opposition brief to the court, Mr  Kulkari cited City Councilmember Linda Maio who remarked at the April Council appeal meeting that in her 20 years as a member of the Zoning Adjustment Board and City Council, this was the first time all immediate neighbors supported a project while other residents, who did not reside in the immediate vicinity, objected. Mr Kulkari compared the BHP group to “armchair planners” who were “raising their subjective objections from a comfortable distance away from the project location”.

Berkeley is fractal. Our city council isn't afraid to play armchair foreign policy...so our citizens aren't afraid to play armchair city planners. See also Michael Chabon's ode to Berkeley: "Nowhere else is the individual encumbered with a greater burden of shame and communal disapproval for having intruded, however innocently, on the sensibilities of another."

no toyo ito for BAMPFA

The Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive won't be getting this:

Kenneth Baker in the Chronicle:

Museum Director Lawrence Rinder explained the decision to change course - taken by the chancellor, the museum's board president, its chairman and Rinder himself - as a consequence of the global economic downturn over the past two years.

"It is ultimately the chancellor's decision," Rinder said, "but I agree with his analysis. ... We had set some interim fundraising benchmarks to have a standard by which to judge our success. ... The trigger point was in November, this month. By then we had brought in about $81 million toward our $200 million capital campaign. ... The gap was just too great, looking forward." The $200 million included anticipated cost overruns.

the arch

I grew up just outside St. Louis, and even though I haven't been back in years I love what they've done with the Busch Stadium grass for the All Star game.

The combo of Busch Stadium and the Arch reminds me of the great series of photographs that Joel Meyerowitz made of St. Louis. Here's one of them that lived in our house (as a poster reproduction) for years...

Here's Meyerowitz on the Arch...

Every city has a celebrated monument that sets it apart; a tower or cathedral, a square or park. St. Louis has the Arch. I found it deeply moving, profound. There were days when, standing beneath the Arch, I felt I knew the power of the pyramids. It was restorative, contemplative. It was more than a technological marvel or a symbol. It was pure form, the beauty of mathematics, a drawing on the heavens, perfect pitch. It was constant and it was never the same. Light and color made their way over its surface. I have seen the Arch change from a white you could not look at to black in broad daylight. I have seen it disappear, reflect like a mirror, and turn pink, sometimes all in one day. I remember mountains doing that. Standing beside it, one sees human scale diminish as when a figure stands at the ocean's edge. It contains the space that cathedrals aspire to. You feel it most when you submit to it.

And the Arch View Cafeteria? I think it was part of the Title Guaranty building, which was razed in 1983. Here's a streetview of the location today.

toby barlow on detroit

Toby Barlow, whose book Sharp Teeth I blogged about in early 2008, has a great piece in the Times about what's happening in Detroit -- the land of $1000 houses.

Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.

In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up.

mccarran airport is too small

A brief note to the architect who designs the next airport in Las Vegas: make it bigger. The current McCarran airpot is way too small. Not in terms of number of gates -- I'm not qualified to opine on whether this airport will need more gates. It needs to be just simply, physically bigger so that it's in scale with the rest of Las Vegas. You can't have a mall or a conference facility or a hotel that's 10x normal scale -- redwood-height ceilings, boulevard-width hallways, cavernous conference rooms, restaurants that seat thousands -- and have an airport that's merely "normal." It's too jarring, the experience is way out of scale. So at a minimum, the next version of McCarran needs to be at least as big as the United terminal at O'Hare. Preferably bigger. Much bigger.

by definition, she says

"Great cities are not like towns, only larger.  They are not like suburbs, only denser.  They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers."
-- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

pure richard meier lifestyle

File this under "living vicariously," a piece of direct mail on very tasteful letterhead, sent from 165 Charles St.  Ignoring the fact that someone really screwed up the database pull on this one, it's worth blogging in its entirety for the pure jaw-dropping lack of irony in its salesmanship.

Dear  ___________________,

We are pleased to report that Richard Meier's residential masterpiece, 165 Charles Street, is nearing completion with occupancy scheduled for early this summer.  The simple, elegant beauty of its shimmering glass silhouette can now be experienced firsthand.  A limited selection of 2 bedroom plus study and 3 bedroom homes remain priced from $5.150 million, as well as one spectacular 4897 square foot full floor residence with an 1160 square foot Great Room.  All enjoy breathtaking Hudson River and cityscape panoramas and benefit from the privileged Pure Richard Meier lifestyle, including 24-hour concierge, 50' infinity-edge lap pool, state-of-the-art fitness center and screening room.  Private wine cellars and storage are also available.

Enclosed please find a recent article featured in The New York Times portraying not only Richard Meier's undivided attention to every exterior and interior detail, but also his love for this collection of private homes.  We invite you to make an appointment to come experience his masterpiece with a private tour of 165 Charles Street.

Kind regards,
______________________

Just a few notes, because I can't resist...

• If I'm parsing that second sentence correctly, does that mean that one can actually gaze upwards at the building's remarkable facade?  For free?
• I'm surprised that they haven't trademarked the phrase "Pure Richard Meier Lifestyle."  How will they sell the rights to Target?
• Private wine cellars.  Sweet.
• What, they couldn't get the rights to the Vanity Fair piece on his towers?  Or ship a DVD copy of the Law & Order episode it turned into?

And in case you missed it, this building is a masterpiece.  Because they said so.  Twice.

what a lovely shade of pink

Via Jerry Michalski, a presentation by Jay Cross titled Another Pattern Language: Real Life Patterns Chez Christopher Alexander, which details the patterns of Alexander's own house in the Berkeley hills.

Warning: not for the architecturally faint at heart.

simulacra for everyone!

Fascinating piece in the NYTimes about people building new homes that are designed to look like they've been converted from industrial uses.

Mr. Binkley predicts that factory chic will become more popular, partly for nostalgic reasons: these designs will remind Baby Boomers of architecture they loved - though not necessarily lived in - from a time gone by.

I'm imagining an entire neighborhood of these.  The faux-converted firehouse next to the faux-converted cannery next to the faux-converted warehouse next to the faux-converted barn.  All with exposed beams, exposed brick walls and exposed duct work.  All containing piles of newly purchased, artfully stacked coffee table books filled with images of actual firehouses, canneries, warehouses and barns that have been converted to residential use.

Update:  a kind reader sends a link to this glorious MetropolisMag.com piece, "I am the Uncool Hunter," complete with photos of a Frederick, Colorado development filled with faux-conversions.

fit and finish

If you ever have the opportunity to either seriously renovate or build a house, whatever you do, pay attention to where you put your light switches. Otherwise you're in for one of those daily annoyances that will eventually drive you to...walk across the room to turn off a light.

What you need to do it right is a patient architect, an informed electrician and several uninterrupted hours of time. Walk through every (framed or unframed) doorway, and do your best to visualize that instinctual reach for the throw. Stand at your imaginary sink and think about your disposal. Imagine you're doing your last rounds before going to bed -- what's the sequence of shutting down the house? Review the drawings that come out of that session. At length. And then do the whole thing again. And then again.

Our architect was fabulous at laying out the big picture; cluing us in to how the rooms would play against one another, why this doorway needed be here, why this ledge needed to be this high. But we (collectively) just couldn't get it together on this particular fit and finish detail. At the point in the project (a) the house was barely framed (and always dark), (b) schedules were tight and (c) budgets tighter. We didn't afford ourselves the time to do it right. We were stuck with one initial draft of schematics, one one-hour walkthrough, and an offsite review of the final schematics.

There's one switch that drives me batty. Our back hallway has an overhead track. Its switch is near the back door. But I'm about ready to have an electrican rip up out the wall and run conduit to create a second switch for that track at the near end of that hallway, so that when I'm doing my nightly rounds I don't need to trek that extra six or seven feet. It's not that I don't need the exercise, it's that it reminds me -- daily -- that we rushed that part of the project, and that we're paying for it now in the annoyance factor.

unbearable lightness

Wow. Maureen Dowd tees off on the memorial designs for ground zero, in an aptly titled op-ed: Unbearable Lightness of Memory.

The ugliness of Al Qaeda's vicious blow to America is obscured by these prettified designs, which look oddly like spas or fancy malls or aromatherapy centers. It's easy to visualize toned women with yoga mats strolling through these New Age pavilions filled with waterfalls and floating trees and sunken gardens and suspended votives. Mass murder dulled by architectural Musak.

The designs are reflections of our psychobabble culture, exuding that horrible and impossible concept, closure. Our grief and anger have been sentimentalized and stripped of a larger historical and moral purpose.

(The site so desperately needs and deserves Maya Lin. Not something from Lin herself, but rather from this generation's Lin, that transforms the space and the discussion about the space the way Lin did.)

reimagining

Bryan Boyer reimagines Chap Lap Kok Airport.

Security has become a lost concept. The impotence of metal detectors and x-ray machines has become such a point of shame that they have been adandoned altogether. Passengers are allowed to carry with them whatever they like, but they must first pass through the flooded terminal. There are no regulations on luggage because nothing survives the passage through this lake. One never quite manages to float their luggage to the other side, the change finds its way out of one's pockets, and passports gets all wrinkled. Passengers no longer worry about forgetting toothbrushes or important documents: nobody wants a water-logged contract anyways. In the water one leaves their possessions, their identity, their worries...