New York City Streets: Top Down, Bottom-Up

July 28, 2010

Center for Architecture - nyc

Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner, NYC Department of Transportation

Sustainable Streets for New York City wants to maximize bus and bike transport.

Select Bus Service

Lane corridor for buses.

Pre board payment as 1/4 of bus time is due to on and off loading passengers.

Buses on 1st and 2nd Avenue and the M34.

Reasons to Bike

54% of all trips in NYC is less than two miles.
35% of all car trips in NYC is less than two miles

Tim Tompkins, President of Times Square Alliance.

53% more sidewalk space was added.

The pedestrian plaza is seen as a way to control and view the chaos inherent to Times Square.

Liz Berger, President, Alliance for Downtown New York

Downtown Manhattan has been a place to live and work since the 1600s.

Water Street has 19 million square feet of office space.

Atlanta has 10 million square feet of office space.

Wants to make the downtown area as a place to visit and congregate by creating more inviting public space.

Joan Byron, Director, Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative, Pratt Center for Community Development

Wants to remove the Sheridan Expressway to make it easier for deliveries to access Hunt's Point.

Removing it would elevate the Bruckner so that the Bronx River and local streets would reconnect.

Since an elevated highway would still exist, this strategy would seem to favor vehicular traffic over pedestrian traffic. It would make the crossing safer, but not a pleasant space as the pedestrian still crosses underneath a major highway.

Thomas Yu, Co-Chair, Chinatown Working Group

Truck traffic is necessary in Chinatown as the community involves a significant amount of deliveries.

Chinatown is bottleneck of businesses and tunnels.

Commuter buses from Chinatown to Flushing begins to connect satellite Asian districts.

Chinatown buses are technically interstate commerce, so the DOT can't regulate it--apparently, they owe 2 million dollars in fines to the city but it won't be collected.

Noah Budnick, Deputy Director for Advocacy, Transportation Alternatives

Slowing down traffic as a means to reach zero street fatalities.

Speeding is the result of 1/4 of NYC traffic fatalities.

Current speed limit is 30mph, you have a 50% survival chance if you get hit.

If the speed limit is 20mph, you have a 90% survival chance if you get hit.

The L!brary Initiative

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Scholastic Auditorium - SoHo

The L!brary Initiative as described by the Architecture League of New York:

In the past decade, more than 50 new libraries have been created in New York City elementary schools through the combined efforts of the Robin Hood Foundation and New York City Board of Education. The Library Initiative brought together architects, educators, and school administrators to envision how libraries could function as educational and community centers in schools—inviting myriad learning opportunities, from quiet reading to collaborative performances. Architects for the libraries worked in partnership with individual school communities; many of the projects benefited as well from collaborations with graphic and industrial designers and artists.

• The design thesis attempted to make the school library as a destination that kids want to visit like the playground, etc.
• Can a public/private partnership be driven by innovation?
• Some feel that successful classroom teachers should be working in the libraries as opposed to individuals with a Master in Library Sciences because they are better at activating schools and kids.
• Are there things that we know that are good regardless of whether or not we can quantify it?
• Have these libraries been successful....perhaps only time will tell?

Palladio Oggi

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

In conjunction with Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Morgan Library in New York City hosted a symposium on Palladio. Highlights below:

Guido Beltramini's presentation entitled Five Palladio Drawings and a Faun places Palladio in an historical context. Transparent elevations with distinctive foreground and background relationships as well as locating plans below elevations were a few of his many formalized drawing styles. Palladio established architectural drawing conventions used to this very day.

Interestingly, Beltramini connects Palladio's plan schematics with military exercise formation as diagrammed in the Bizantine Manuscript of Aelian. He additionally cites influences of troop movement representations in Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

Beltramini argues that Palladio's Venetian Bridge plan demonstrated the emergence of an architectural idea / conceptual agenda. His plan for the bridge demolished existing shops on either side of bridge by placing plazas on both ends. These moves contributed to his idea to make the bridge a "place".

Because their buildings were identified with royalty, architects, at the time, were more important than generals--which actually means Palladio was also a schmoozer. Beltramini claims that Palladio was anti-war even though he was born during the war period.

As Beltramini's presentation described Palladio's formal relationships, Erica Naginski focuses upon the anti-Palladio as a reaction against mathematical form generators. She cites Piranesi as a refutation of systems because his drawings place moldings in the wrong places, are overly ornate and mixes and matches the Greek orders.

James Ackerman basically told charming stories based on his tenure and breadth of knowledge.

• The double entablature on the Pantheon was actually an accident because they built it before they realized that tall enough columns couldn't be easily transported.
• Country homes and the San Francisco city hall are some of the American influences.
• Palladio represented a pre-democratic society, so we should ask ourselves if we should truly be mimicking it.
• Vignola puts buildings together by combining orders and often misses the big picture.

Alina Payne attempts to trace Palladio's influence over the past 500 years

• Neo-classicism is Palladio's legacy.
• He wasn't the only game in town; Giacomo da Vignola was one of many competitors.
• In the 19th century, neo-Baroque eclipses Palladio.
• Simplicity, restraint, and repetition means Palladio is back.
• Colin Rowe brings him back in the 1900s with the Mathematics of the Ideal Villa as it was trying to create order and composition in a wild landscape.

K. Michael Hays begins with Palladio as an authority figure, but then proceeds to de-construct the role of the Architect as an expert.

• Schematized - Architect as the imagination whose job it is to schematize
• Grid Diagram becomes the structure so the schema becomes the building.
• An EX-trinsic structure imposes itself as defined by the Architect.
• The Architect creates the system/diagram which carries information
• The Architect is the Big Other with the "big idea"
• Gregg Lynn links the grid to non-totalized heterogenaiety
• Parametric/Plannametric relationships - indifferent attitude---architectural features can be attached to other disciplines.

Therefore, there is no relation between the drawing and Architect because the current technology allows form to become random and not necessarily specific to architecture. Architecture has gone beyond form to performance which coincides with the demise of the authority of the Big Other leading to a multi-media diffusion of devices.

Preston Scott Cohen's examines the changing view of the stair.

• For Palladio's centralized plan, the stair is pushed off to the side.
• In modernity, the car disturbs the grid.
• The Guggenheim is the antithesis of it all.

Emerging Voices - Tatiana Bilbao + Molo

New Museum - 24 March 2010

Tatiana Bilbao spoke very swiftly and passionately about her work. It sounded as if her words could not keep pace with her thoughts. It's possible that was because English wasn't her primary language, but I have a feeling she would sound the same in her native tongue.

She described Mexico City as unplanned and developed as Responsive Urbanism.

She discussed the Talpa Virgin Pilgrimage Route. Her firm was responsible for the Master Plan that provided infrastructure elements along the route. She invited various artists and architects from around the world to create sites of contemplation.

She also discussed the Culiacan Botanical Gardens where again she serves as the master planner and mediator between the 35 world renowned artists invited to construct site specific pieces. Located in northwest central Mexico on the Pacific, Culiacan is currently one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico due to its drug trade.

Through these two projects, Bilbao paints herself as the multi-disciplinarian planner. She naturally heaps praise on her colleagues and delegates responsibility without compromise to her design sensibilities and ego.

In contrast to the frenetic Bilbao, Stephanie Forsythe + Todd MacAllen, the Molo principals spoke with a measured and patient rhythm. The Vancouver based architects opened with the Northern Sky Circle project, a carved snow space in Alaska. Unlike typical architects, they were closely involved with physically shaping the snow and carving the ice.

A project that looks promising is the Nebuta House in Japan--a house for big mystical paper lantern sculptures.

The firm is also know for the cool products that financially sustain their firm. The two come across as thoughtful and a bit like "hip" hippies. They search for a connection to our land as a source of design inspiration. They projected some photos of a surf trip spent following the upstream salmon breeding route.

Second Avenue Subway--Ongoing

AIA Center, NYC, 12 February 2010

A Brief Timeline

• 1880 - Elevated Line constructed on 2nd Avenue
• 1941 - Elevated Line torn down because of health reasons
• 1956 - Third Avenue El Demolished
• 2007 - Another ground breaking

Phase I - 96th Street to 63rd Street.

• Three New Stations at 72nd, 86th, and 96th.
• Two tracks stacked on top of each other.
• Tunnel Boring machine is scheduled to break through the Q line in 2011.
• New Stations are 70-90 feet below grade.
• Two main water feeds approximately 48" diameter are buried on 2nd avenue and supported by the ground; one was replaced with a new 36" diameter main.
• Stability issues with existing buildings that might not be able to handle underground blasting--DoB is verifying these cases and the owner is responsible for stabilizing.

Designs

• Entry Canopy - like South Ferry; access needs to be protected from weather by code
• Design theory--TBM boring at an upwards angle
• 12x12 Granite floor tiles in station with Porcelain wall panels.
• Five elevators at the 72nd Street Entrance on a corner lot probably through the fan plants.
• Fan plants mostly occupied by air shafts and emergency stairs.

Update

• 72nd Street Blasting as just started
• No TBM yet
• 63rd Street contract work to be awarded by the end of 2010
• One Billion still needed towards the end of completion date---should be provided by state government.
• 2016 Phase 1 Completion Date

The Thing about Zhan Ke Jia

I've always been drawn towards the quiet, contemplative and lingering films. Typically, they convey mood and narrative through meticulously composed cinematography and minimal dialogue. Distinctive works that that come to mind are Stranger than Paradise, Paris Texas, and anything by Andrei Tarkovsky. In all respects, Zhan Ke Jia's work could be included among them. However, his cinematography places the individual in scenes of diconnection and abandonment--resulting in an extreme sense of hopelessness.

Zhan Ke films take place mostly contemporary China and tend to focus on the daily and often monotonous life of the average citizen. The films' locations could be captured majestically--or even grandly imposing. Instead, he strives for a preponderance of ordinariness through the use of diminutive shots and dull color tones. While Wim Wenders characters find themselves lost in a grand and majestic backdrop, Zhan Ke undercuts any potential majesty in favor of banality.

Sanxia Haoren aka Still Life (2006)

The narrative traces one man's search for is wife paralleled by one woman's search for her husband. Ultimately, the two protagonists confront and accept the reality that their relationship had likely died so long ago. The setting is the valley flooded by the construction of the controversial Three Gorges Dam. The dam effectively serves as a dual symbol of disconnection--between the individuals themselves as well as there relationship to the egocentric whims of the state.

Architecture of Doom

Peter Cohen's documentary, The Architecture of Doom, frames the rise of Nazism within the context of an aesthetic movement. Cohen compellingly argues that art was instrumental in defining Hitler's Nazi ideology. However, all of the evidence is circumstantial. His obsessive compulsion with ideal forms may have pre-dated his exposure to the Romantic artistic movement.

An avid follower of art and architecture, Hitler is shown visiting urban landmarks as the Paris Opera house, various museums, and the Greek ruins. The Aryan ideal is embodied through Hitler's affinity towards Romantic portraiture and classical Greek sculptures.

"Degenerate art" is assigned to Cubist distortion of the human form and its subject matter is further connected with physical deformity within mental institutions. The resulting Nazi emphasis on purity and cleanliness culminates through comparisons of Jews to vermin.

Ultimately, Cohen's presents a compelling, yet superficial argument. Clearly, there are parallels between the Nazi ideal and the artistic romanticism of form. It's a bit negligent and simplistic to assume the aesthetic movement as the sole instrument in defining Nazism. The documentary fails to rigorously examine Germany's political and historical context during Hitler's rise.