An Alarmed Architect’s Complaint: Preservation Distorts the Past

Has preservation become a dangerous epidemic? Is it destroying our cities?

That’s the conclusion you may come to after seeing “Cronocaos” at the New Museum. Organized by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, a partner in Mr. Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the show draws on ideas that have been floating around architectural circles for several years now — particularly the view among many academics that preservation movements around the world, working hand in hand with governments and developers, have become a force for gentrification and social displacement, driving out the poor to make room for wealthy homeowners and tourists.

Mr. Koolhaas’s vision is even more apocalyptic. A skilled provocateur, he paints a picture of an army of well-meaning but clueless preservationists who, in their zeal to protect the world’s architectural legacies, end up debasing them by creating tasteful scenery for docile consumers while airbrushing out the most difficult chapters of history. The result, he argues, is a new form of historical amnesia, one that, perversely, only further alienates us from the past.

“Cronocaos” was first shown at the 2010 architecture biennale in Venice, the ultimate example of what can happen to an aged city when it is repackaged for tourists. In New York, the show is housed in a former restaurant-supply store next to the museum on the Bowery, in a neighborhood where the threats to urban diversity include culture as well as tourism. The Bowery’s lively bar scene has been pushed out by galleries and boutiques. CBGB, the former rock club, is a John Varvatos store.

To highlight this transformation, Mr. Koolhaas and Mr. Shigematsu kept the supply store’s yellow awning, painting the show’s title directly over the old lettering. Inside, the architects drew a line down the middle of the space, transforming one side into a pristine white gallery and leaving the other raw and untouched.

The result is startling. The uneven, patched-up floors and soiled walls of the old space look vibrant and alive; the new space looks sterile, an illustration of how even the minimalist renovations favored by art galleries today, which often are promoted as ways of preserving a building’s character, can cleanse it of historical meaning. (To sharpen the contrast further, Mr. Koolhaas scattered a few beat-up tables and chairs, salvaged when CBGB was closed five years ago, throughout the room.)

This has become a global phenomenon. All over the world, historic centers are being sanitized of signs of age and decay, losing any sense of the identity that buildings accumulate over time. Facades are carefully scrubbed clean; interiors, often blending minimalist white walls and a few painstakingly restored historic details, are reduced to a bland perfection. And new buildings are designed in watered-down period styles, further eroding the distinction between what’s real and what’s fake, and producing what Mr. Koolhaas calls a “low-grade, unintended timelessness.”

Mr. Koolhaas argues that this process continues to spread. Using an assortment of graphs and charts, he claims that 12 percent of the earth’s surface has already been landmarked by groups like Unesco, and that figure is expected to rise steeply in the near future. What’s more, the age of what is being preserved continues to shrink. In the late 19th century only ancient monuments received legal protection; today buildings that are 30 years old are regularly listed as historic sites. (Mr. Koolhaas’s own architecture is part of this trend. A house he designed in Bordeaux, France, was declared a national monument only three years after its completion in 1998.)

This phenomenon is coupled with another disturbing trend: the selective demolition of the most socially ambitious architecture of the 1960s and ’70s — the last period when architects were able to do large-scale public work — which has been condemned as a monstrous expression of Modernism.

In Germany, monuments like the Palast der Republik, whose government offices, restaurants and nightclubs were once the social heart of East Berlin, became shorthand for a period many West Germans wanted to forget. Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 capsule tower, one of the most radical housing experiments built in postwar Japan, lies in a state of ruin, awaiting demolition. To Mr. Koolhaas, these examples are part of a widespread campaign to stamp out an entire period in architectural history — a form of censorship that is driven by ideological as much as aesthetic concerns.

The New Museum show is essentially a manifesto, of course, but what saves it from becoming pure polemic is that Mr. Koolhaas is a first-rate architect as well as an original thinker. Some of the best parts of the show involve his efforts to find ways out of this mess.

A 1995 competition design for an expansion of Zurich international airport sought to make sense of what had become a confusing labyrinth of mismatched terminals built over several decades. Rather than tear down the existing structures, Mr. Koolhaas proposed filling in leftover spaces between them with centralized entrance halls and new retail zones. He then created a circulation route to tie it all together. The experience would have been more like traveling though a real city than a conventional airport. By keeping the various historical layers intact, and playing up their differences, he aimed to breathe new life into a dead environment. (The plan was rejected.)

In another, more extreme proposal, from 2003, Mr. Koolhaas suggested creating preservation sectors in Beijing, in which everything from traditional hutongs to postwar Communist housing blocks would be protected, along with the way of life they housed. The rest of the city would be a kind of free-for-all where planners and architects could experiment with new ideas and urban strategies without the crushing burden of history.

Not all of his ideas are viable; some seem intended mainly to challenge conventional wisdom about preservation and its benefits, and in doing so, to liberate architecture just a little from stale ideas. Yet Mr. Koolhaas’s bigger point is worth paying attention to: in the realm of preservation, as in so much else, we seem to have become a world terrified of too much direct contact with reality.

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Source:  NYT

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

Over-reaching ambition is the order of the week as Liverpool tries to outshine Shanghai, an ex-footballer plans to outdo the Teletubbies and Shoreditch lands a shiny skyscraper.

Bright lights ... Why does Liverpool want to emulate Pudong's showy sky at night? Photograph: Image Source / Rex Features

Ambition can get the better of architects, buildings and even entire cities. When you hear people joking about British cities turning into lesser versions of modern Shanghai – all shiny high-rise towers – you should ask them to take the subject more seriously. Liverpool is twinned with Shanghai, and just as the two cities boast superb early 20th-century waterfronts – Liverpool’s Pier Head and Shanghai’s Bund – so Liverpool now wants to emulate its Chinese twin’s bombastic new Pudong district.

Unesco has taken Liverpool to task for this. If the city grants planning permission for the Liverpool Waters development proposal put forward by Peel Holdings for a shock of Shanghai-style skyscrapers, its historic centre could well be struck off the official list of World Heritage Sites. Liverpool Waters does resemble a parody of Shanghai or Dubai; if nothing else, developing it will make Liverpool look behind the times now that the tide is turning against such over-the-top Blingitecture. Peel Holdings, however, doesn’t think much of Unesco: “We are right and they are completely wrong”, a company spokesman told the Liverpool Daily Post.

Sore-ditch ... will Amanda Levete be the woman to ruin east London? Photograph: David Levene

Amanda Levete was also in hot water this week, criticised by Turner prize winning artist Rachel Whiteread over her design for a twisting, shining and very prominent 225ft skyscraper planned for Shoreditch, north of the City of London. As Chris Dyson, a local architect, told Building Design, “The choice of architect is glamorous and she [Levete] is very good, but the building is inappropriate for the context.” Shoreditch is not downtown Chicago, where Jeanne Gang has designed an eye-catching skyscraper that rises elegantly and appropriately from its site.

In her tower’s defence, Levete told The Architects’ Journal: “I understand the emotional issues raised by large developments. But the evolution of a city is bigger than us all.” And, so much so, that if and when Shoreditch shoots skywards and goes slickly corporate, the very artists who have done so much to inject new life into this old quarter will probably move elsewhere.

Flower power ... Make's petal house for Gary Neville. Photograph: Make Architects

How about Bolton? Here, Gary Neville, the former Manchester United defender, has been granted planning permission to build a house that is either an interesting example of Land art, or else something to do with the Teletubbies. Designed by Make architects, this underground “eco” house will look like the petals of a flower from above, radiating from a central kitchen. The architects compare it, rather ambitiously, to the neolithic Skara Brae settlement in Orkney, but with all mod cons.

Meanwhile, Saif al-Islam Gadaffi, who once studied architecture and engineering science, was charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity. In 2007 Gadaffi junior announced a hugely ambitious scheme to turn the east coast of Libya into “the world’s largest sustainable region”, albeit one with new luxury hotels, resorts and spas, all under the design guidance of Norman Foster. My Guardian colleague, Steve Rose, was at the launch in Cyrene; Steve was justifiably sceptical.

Finally, it was announced this week that two men would stand trial for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the would-be architect who was stabbed to death at a bus stop in Eltham, south-east London in 1993. The murderers ended Lawrence’s life and ambition, yet his memory lives on not just among family and friends, but in the Stephen Lawrence prize aimed at encouraging young British architects and their ambitions for the future, skywards or otherwise.

Source:  Guardian UK

Populous wins national award for Target Field design

Demand for architectural design drops in April

Demand for architectural design fell in April to the lowest point of the year.

The Architecture Billings Index, which indicates construction volume, decreased marginally to 47.6 in April from 50.5 in March, according to American Institute of Architects data released Wednesday.

The benchmark for the index is 50. Anything above that indicates an increase in architectural billings and anything below indicates a decrease. The AIA surveys a panel of member firms monthly, asking if billings increased, decreased, or stayed the same. The national association then weighs the responses for the index.

April was the first month in 2011 the index swung below 50.

The sharp decline in demand for architectural services has analysts scratching their heads. Kermit Baker, chief economist at AIA, said he is unsure whether to attribute the drop to an industry-wide reversal in demand for design or a bump in the road.

“The fact that most construction projects funded under the federal stimulus program have completed their design work, the anxiety around the possibility of a shutdown in the federal government in April, as well as the unusually severe weather in the Southeast had something to do with this falloff,” Baker said. “However, the majority of firms are reporting at least one stalled project in-house because of the continued difficulty in obtaining financing.”

Baker also echoed Redwood Trust  CEO Martin Hughes’ sentiment when he said financing continues to be the main roadblock to recovery. Hughes testified before the Senate Banking Committee Wednesday.

The new projects inquiry index also experienced a sharp drop in April, falling to 55 from 58.7 a month prior, according to AIA.

The regional buildings index was highest in the Northeast at 51.2, followed by the Midwest at 51.1, the South at 48.3, and the West at 47.7. The index was the highest in the multifamily residential sector (53.9) followed by the commercial/industrial sector (49.9), the institutional sector (45.9) and the mixed practice sector (45.2).

Young architectural firm lands major projects, expands staff

Reaching higher in a recession

Architecture Killed the American Folk Art Museum

Last night, the American Folk Art Museum — that beloved, bedeviled museum on West 53rd Street — confirmed what many of us had feared for years. It is in such deep debt and has such low attendance numbers that it will sell its building and relocate back to a lobby space one sixth its current size near Lincoln Center. Sad as it is to say, this news comes as no surprise, and the culprit is the museum’s physical home.

Despite the many rave reviews the 30,000-square-foot building received when it opened in December 2001, it was immediately clear to many that the building was not only ugly and confining, it was also all but useless for showing art — especially art as visionary as this museum’s. In the past decade, AFAM has mounted shows of some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, including Martin Ramirez, Henry Darger, Adolf Wolfli, and Thomas Chambers. Yet from the outside it looked like a bronzed Kleenex box or a miniature suburban professional building. The inside was worse. Dominated by showy staircases of many scales going in different directions, ill-conceived nooks and niches, the galleries were long narrow corridors or landings, sometimes only a few feet wide, making it impossible to see the art. The largest exhibition spaces had the look of a gloomy cloakroom. The architects responsible for this utter lack of imagination and hubristic mess of starchitectural vanity, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, were praised for their intelligent use of materials. The building was called astonishing, a shrine, a temple, a Zen masterpiece. In reality, every one of their decisions reflected a total lack of feeling for, even a disdain for, art. Before he died, the Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp, who’d said nice things about the building when it opened, confided to me that my loathing was “probably right.”

This terrible building will be sold to MoMA for an undisclosed sum. I can only imagine that MoMA will use the building for office space — perhaps freeing up much-needed room for its own sorely cramped permanent collection — or tear it down and start again.

We may be at the beginning of a long period of undoing, of rebuilding or destroying architectural failures. In the years to come, those who oversaw and built many new museums and museum wings will have much to answer for. During a period when the West accumulated more wealth than at any time in the history of the world, a vast amount of ill-conceived space for art was constructed, as institutions wasted their energy on atriums and useless entertainment areas. Books and dissertations will be written, panels will be convened, ridicule will be heaped, as our descendants look back at these atrocious buildings and wonder how so much went so wrong. The American Folk Art Museum will probably be the first to be razed, and not the last.

Source: NY Mag

[Update: Now read NY Mag architecture critic Justin Davidson’s rebuttal: Jerry Saltz Has It All Wrong About the American Folk Art Museum]

[Update 2:  Now read Architecture Record article:  Tod Williams Worries That Folk Art Museum Will Be Razed Following Sale to MoMA]

UNStudio Architecture design of Education Executive Agency & Tax offices in Groningen, Netherlands

A new, 92 meter tall complex of soft, undulating curves marks the skyline of Groningen. This asymmetric, aerodynamic construction is set amidst small, ancient woodland, sheltering rare and protected species. The project includes the design, construction and financing of two public institutions; the national tax offices and the student loan administration. The commission from the RGD (National Buildings Service) includes, besides the architecture, the management and building maintenance and care of facilities and services for a period of 20 years. Accommodating 2,500 workstations, parking facilities for 1,500 bicycles and 675 cars in an underground garage, the building will be surrounded by a large public city garden with pond and a multifunctional pavilion with commercial functions.

The architecture aims to present these institutions with a softer, more human and approachable profile. Tall buildings are generally associated with mid-twentieth century modernism. Their harsh, businesslike exteriors contain powerful, inaccessible-seeming strongholds. By contrast, the DUO and Tax offices deliberately cloak a commanding public institution in an organic, friendlier and more future-oriented form.

“We paid a great deal of attention to how people would move through the building. The office spaces are designed in such a way that they do not create simple linear corridors leading to dead ends, but instead each corridor has a route which introduces a kind of landscape into the building. You can take endless walks through the building, where there is a great deal of transparency, also towards the surrounding landscape.”

The governmental office complex is built as part of a far-reaching form of public-private partnership (DBFMO) that is designed to effectuate on a more efficient use of public funds. The design, construction, financing, managing and maintenance of the building was hosted by one consortium consisting of Strukton, Ballast Nedam and John Laing. This consortium won the competition for the project on the basis of a combination of esthetic, technical and financial criteria. UNStudio, as the architect of the project, collaborated with Lodewijk Baljon for the landscape design, Arup for the engineering and Studio Linse as the interior advisor.

The life-cycle approach of a DBFMO contract requires that all relevant experts (designers, lawyers, installation specialists, financial specialists, facility specialists) are involved from the start of the project in order to find the best, most cost effective and environmentally-friendly solutions for the continued use and maintenance of the building. This working methodology stimulates not only creative and innovative ideas, but facilitates a reduction of total costs over the entire contract period compared to the traditional means of contracting. In PPP projects contracts are not awarded to the lowest bidder, but to the party with most effective solutions providing the best value for money.

“In a PPP-construction you have to consider all the details concerning maintenance and the sustainable use of the building from the very early stages. It is a unique way to gather all the specialists and the end user around the table from the very outset of the project.”

View additional photos and project details

Source: Architizer

‘Why Architecture Matters’ gets behind the facades

“It’s all architecture.” So said master designer I.M. Pei some years back, when an interviewer asked him to distinguish between the different styles then prevalent on the American landscape. Pei’s good-humored evasion is true enough. In simplest terms, architecture, as the design and construction of buildings, legitimately includes everything from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia State Capitol and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater to a prefabricated barn outside Dallas and the Shell station at the end of my street. But in the popular imagination, and to most architects and builders as well, architecture is very much more than simple shelter. It is art, and when it is done well, it can inspire the soul.

It is to this conviction that Paul Goldberger addresses his latest book, “Why Architecture Matters” (Yale, $26). In his introduction, Goldberger, architecture critic for the New Yorker since 1997 and prior to that for The New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer, elaborates that his purpose is to “explain what buildings do beyond keeping us out of the rain.” To do so, he divides his analysis into chapters with titles like “Meaning, Culture, and Symbol,” “Architecture as Object,” “Architecture as Space,” “Buildings and Time” and so on. These categories are general enough, and the architectural masterpieces he writes about significant enough, that many of his examples could comfortably fit into any number of slots. For example, the Parthenon, highlighted in the chapter “Architecture as Object,” could just as easily be included in “Meaning, Culture, and Symbol.” Goldberger’s aim in making these choices isn’t to present definitive judgments but rather to illuminate specific aspects of the craft.

Though average Americans may not think about architecture in the abstract very much, if at all, they certainly deal with it on a daily basis, from their own homes, businesses and offices to their kids’ schools. As Goldberger declares: “To be engaged with architecture is to be engaged with almost everything else as well: culture, society, politics, business, history, family, religion, education. Every building exists to house something, and what it houses is itself part of the pursuit of architecture.” And, he contends, all those houses, businesses, office towers and schools that we thread our way through, around, into and out of say something about us and our culture. Goldberger’s intent is to help the reader to understand this and learn how to read the built environment and the society that produces it based on some of the best that has been constructed down the ages.

Even so, the finest buildings still have to be practical. After all, if they leak, what good are they? Goldberger is surprisingly forgiving on this score. “It is churlish to complain that Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses leak or that Le Corbusier’s weather badly or that Frank Gehry’s are difficult to construct,” he writes, “all of which may be more or less true, but what of it? That leaky roof is not our problem, and neither is the fact that we might not wish to live in such a building ourselves.” Except, of course, when the leaky roof is our problem or we do live in a mediocre building inspired by some flawed original that was praised by the aesthetic community and whose disastrous knockoffs now inconvenience thousands. Goldberger doesn’t dwell much on design failure and its consequences in this volume, but perhaps that is another book.

What he does emphasize are the principles of good design, and the numerous accompanying, clear, black-and-white illustrations, heavily tipped toward more recent decades, help make his points. In architecture, as in perhaps no other field, is the cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” so true. Among the buildings illustrated are the Pantheon in Rome, the Lincoln Memorial, Penn Station, the glass pyramid at the Louvre and the Seagram Building in New York. Goldberger’s prose is admirably jargon-free and straightforward but, alas, lacks the sparkle and pepper that Ada Louise Huxtable, his predecessor at The Times, was so famous for. Still, “Why Architecture Matters” is a good introduction to a fascinating subject that should indeed very much matter to everyone.

Source: al.com

Progress Report: Ground Zero Projects

1 World Trade Center: It’s reported that it’s currently rising about one story per week, with 64 of the 104 floors built. Estimated completion: End of 2013

2 World Trade Center: Crews are currently working on the basement. Estimated completion: Undetermined

3 World Trade Center: Basement work is going slowly, full tower construction is in flux. Estimated completion: Depends on finding a tenant

4 World Trade Center: Steel is going up and the structure stands about 23 stories, rising about one floor per week. Estimated completion: Sometime in 2013

9/11 Memorial: Work is ongoing with opening day set for 9/11/11

9/11 Museum: Crews are currently working below memorial plaza. Estimated completion: Sometime in 2012

PATH Hub: Workers continue on as the costs are soaring, currently standing at $3.4 billion. Estimated completion Sometime in 2014

Source:  NYC-Tower

Clear Capital® Reports National Double Dip

U.S. home prices double dip as West, South and Northeast regions fall prey to the last grip of winter.

TRUCKEE, CA – May 5, 2011 – Clear Capital (www.clearcapital.com) today released its monthly Home Data Index™ (HDI) Market Report, and reports prices have double dipped nationally 0.7 percent below prior lows experienced in March 2009. This month’s HDI Market Report provides the most current (through April 2011) and relevant analysis of how local markets performed compared to the national trend in home prices.

Report highlights include:

• National quarterly home prices changed -4.9%; while year-over-year national price changes reached -5.0%.
• National home prices have fallen 11.5% over the previous nine-month period, a rate of decline not experienced since 2008.
• In a sign of the continued volatility and fragility of home prices, all the major Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) tracked in this month’s report showed quarter-over-quarter price declines.
• National REO saturation rate reaches 34.5%.

“The latest data through April shows a continued increase in the proportion of distressed sales that are taking hold in markets nationwide,” said Dr. Alex Villacorta, director of research and analytics at Clear Capital. “With more than one-third of national home sales being REO, market prices are being weighed down as many markets have not regained enough footing to withstand the strain of the high proportion of REO sales.

In light of the compounding effects of winter’s seasonal slowdown and increased distressed sale activity, the market now faces the true test of whether prices can rebound in the historically active spring season,” added Villacorta.

As national home prices reached new lows this past winter, hopes remain for a spring revival. Markets have entered uncharted territory, however, as this current home buying season will be the first since 2008 without any tax credit incentive. A note of caution to those looking for a strong end to 2011: The last time no incentives were in place and distressed inventories were this high, home prices fell sharply.

Home Price and REO Saturation Parallels to 2008

Past market reports have shown periods of stabilization. Movements of home prices certainly have been less dramatic than during the start of the downturn in 2006, and two years of mixed seasonal gains and losses have given the appearance that prices are stabilizing, or at least bouncing along a trough.

This assumption of stabilization also considers the last two years have marked a period of external stimulus in the form of tax credits. As an alternative and cautionary reference, below is a comparison between the housing market from spring 2008, through the end of the year; compared to the post tax credit period of late 2010 through April 2011.

National REO Saturation (2008 to 2011)

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