Graffiti on 45-47 Park Place,  former Burlington Coat Factory, future home of Park 51.

Got home from the beach yesterday and took a walk past the site of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.”  Tried, while on vacation,  to ignore the pageant of  xenophobic noise-making that the proposed Islamic cultural center inspired.  I could go on  about how the center, with its planned  performing arts space, basketball courts, and meeting rooms, is not intended to “stab hearts” (Palin)  but rather as a  gesture of healing, one that should, in theory, demonstrate that Muslims, like Catholics, Jews, and Hindus and everyone else, contribute to this city’s rich  fabric.  Seems obvious.

Here’s the thing:   the 16 acres bounded by Vesey, Liberty, Church and West Streets should be hallowed ground.  No argument.   But if we really meant it, if we really took the sanctity of the place seriously, there’d be nothing under construction there except a memorial. And maybe not even that.  One of these days, however, there will be four office towers, a transit hub and retail concourse on the site.  Ground Zero will not be a shrine; it will be a vital, living urban place.

So what are we going to do, scrutinize every potential WTC office tenant  for their ideological leanings and financial backers?    If a Muslim organization can’t build a cultural center on Park Place, two blocks north of Ground Zero,  can, say, Emirates Airlines open an office in the new WTC complex?    What about Barneys?  Isn’t it currently owned by Dubai World?  Can a fashion department store owned by Muslims lease space in the WTC’s retail mall?  Are Muslims allowed on (or near) hallowed ground as long as they don’t pray there?

Like, once you start, where do you stop?

And, not that Si Newhouse is a Muslim, but what would the culture warriors  of Park Place make of the fact that  Conde Nast publications is planning to take up a lot of prime space in the building formerly known as the Freedom Tower?    Is it appropriate to publish Vogue, GQ, or The New Yorker on hallowed ground?  Will Conde Nast be forced to change its plans as the Drawing Center did in 2005, when it was booted off the WTC site because some of the artwork exhibited there might “denigrate America.”  (Pataki)  Given half a chance and I could work up a pretty good argument against publishing Self magazine on hallowed ground.  Protest anyone?

P.S.  I thought this piece from the Tribeca Trib did a good job on the neighborhood perspective.  Also see: Imam Rauf on  moderates of all faiths  vs. radicals of all faiths.

The log flume ride at Seattle’s now defunct Fun Forest, with Frank Gehry’s second worst building* in the background.

In this morning’s email came something that looked a lot like spam.  It was from one Lorna Jordan — sounds like someone who might contact me about penis enlargement, right? — and it invited me to visit a vaguely suspect web address.  But I didn’t delete it because it  mentioned Seattle Center, the  patch of land at the very north end of downtown Seattle that’s home to a motley assemblage of 1962 World’s Fair leftovers –most notably the Space Needle — and more recent additions like the Experience Music Project (and Science Fiction Museum).

I have a soft spot for Seattle Center.  It was at an  mid-1970s writing workshop in one of the Center’s meeting rooms –  in a building that was then known as the Food Circus — that I decided I should become a writer when I grew up.   Also, in the early 1980s, I  lived across the street and would cut  through Seattle Center almost every day on my way to work at the Rocket offices in  Belltown and  marvel at the Center’s fairyland-gone-to-seed quality.

So I followed up on Jordan’s email and learned a bit more about  “Open Platform,”   an arts oriented outdoor space that a group of Seattle activists are proposing as a replacement for Seattle Center’s now defunct**amusement park.  After the city of Seattle dislodged the old Fun Forest last year,  the Space Needle owners signed a deal to fill the site with a museum dedicated to the work of  glass artist Dale Chihuly.  On one hand,   there’s a certain logic to this move: Chihuly, like Jimi Hendrix or Starbucks, is a genuine product of the greater Seattle area.  He was, for a time, the King of Pilchuck, the renowned local glass blowing school.  And like those other breakout acts, he’s ubiquitous now, installing major works in hotel lobbies, casinos and airports.  A Chihuly museum would surely be a draw.

On the other hand, Seattle arts activists reacted pretty much as you might expect to something this tidily packaged.   They’ve floated an  alternative proposal.  The basic idea is to turn the former Fun Forest into a sort of arts park, one that “embodies Seattle’s creative environmentalism, artistic innovation, and creative energy.”

The thing about Seattle Center is that, since the World’s Fair went away, it’s never had a terribly distinct purpose.   Its performance spaces have been well used for big events like Bumbershoot or the Folklife festival, but mostly the site seems to be a repository for oddities that can’t find a home elsewhere…like the Experience Music Project.  Arguably,  the Chihuly Museum, architecturally flamboyant, would be a natural companion to Gehry’s second worst building* and Seattle Center would be even more solidly established as  zone of tourist-friendly goofball-dom.

By contrast, the Open Platform proposal, as muzzy as it currently is,  suggests that Seattle Center could finally be a place that’s worthy of its name  — a true center — instead of a weird amalgam of leftovers and novelties.  It seems to me that a living space for arts production rather than a shrine to a single artist could make this  place more central to Seattle residents…and maybe to tourists, too.  (You can find more information here and a petition in favor of Open Platform here.)

*The Stata Center is worse, no?

**Actually, the bigger rides were dismantled at the end of last summer, but the kiddie rides remain open until Labor Day of this year.

P.S.  I went on a bus ride last week  to the suburbs of Trenton to see the restoration Louis Kahn’s Jewish Community Center bath house.  I was going to blog about it, but I think I’ll let Lamster do the heavy lifting.

P.P.S.  I’m grateful that New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission has cleared the way for the construction of Cordoba House in lower Manhattan.  As I’ve written elsewhere, I view terrorism as an attack on the heterogeneity and openness that are the hallmarks of urban life.  If you deny Muslims  the right to build a community center in the vicinity of the WTC site simply because they are Muslims, the terrorists win and urbanity loses.

A Neutra water fountain?

In late June, in preparation for a weekend workshop I was teaching at Otis College of Art and Design, I spent a couple of days driving around LA seeking out locations that were beautiful in unexpected ways.  I was assisted by my old friend Alisa N. Smith, an interior designer and artist who knows her way around that city’s more obscure historic landmarks.  She took me to the Eagle Rock Recreation Center, a 1953 basketball pavilion designed by Richard Neutra, with walls that open up and louvers that modulate sunlight.  It’s a simple neighborhood building, one that hasn’t exactly been treated as an architectural monument (although it was officially designated as one in 1991), and you now have to look hard to see the Neutra touches.

Outside the Eagle Rock gym, I noticed the water fountain above.  It was so simple and so clever — the steel structure and the drainage system are one and the same — that I thought perhaps it was part of the Neutra design package.  Wouldn’t that be cool, a Neutra drinking fountain?  Alas, I could find no mention of Neutra designing any such thing, and I began to notice the fountain bore a familial resemblance to other public drinking fountains I saw around LA.  Finally, this  op-ed piece in the  New York Times dashed  my hopes; illustrator Jon Han found the exact same type of fountain in Westwood Park.

Clearly, this  brilliant example of minimalism wasn’t Neutra’s doing. In truth,  it looks more like Donald Judd.   Most likely it was the work of some anonymous civil servant.

Anyway, I forgot all about the “Neutra” fountain until Monday, when I visited Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom in lovely Allentown, PA.   I was tagging along with a couple of teenagers, learning yet another lesson about what passes for amusement these days.  And it was very hot out, in the low 90s.  The first thing I wanted after my initial encounter with a state-of-the-art roller coaster — Jeeee-zuss!!! –  was water.  And the only place I could find it was a vending machine.  I bought a bottle, but really resented shelling out $3.50 for Aquafina.  As the day progressed, I sought out  public drinking fountains, and found a few tucked away near the restrooms.  The fountains worked, but they looked dusty, neglected, and uninviting.  The water vending machines, by contrast, were brightly lit, hugely appealing, and ubiquitous. But I was damned if I was going to pay anymore money for water. (Note that Wildwater Kingdom is a water park,  all water slides, fake rapids and wave machines.  But not a drip to drink.)

After about five hours of unceasing excitement, we left the park, found a diner, and sat at a table gulping ice water until our food came.  I spend the rest of the day rehydrating. The next day, I did a Google search — pure curiosity –  trying to find out a little about the safety record of some of the scarier rides.  Dorney’s record seems pretty good, but what came up in my search was this:

“We found that many of the rider injury complaints regarding various rides at this amusement park – centered around rider’s who failed to properly hydrate.”

Right.  Failed to properly hydrate.  Very easy to do.  Note that park rules prohibit bringing “outside food” or  “beverage items other than factory sealed bottles of water.”  Meaning, no thermoses or reusable water bottles.

I was reminded of the lady in Concord, MA who, as part of her crusade against bottled water, “made a point of finding out how many public water fountains Concord has — 11 — and sharing their whereabouts in a letter to the local newspaper…” I’d take it a little further.  Design competitions for public drinking fountains, like the one they staged in Winona, Minnesota would  be a start.  Moreover, I think a positive regulatory approach — mandating  more and better drinking fountains in public places and places of public accommodation — would go a long way toward curbing our dependence on commercialized water.  Wouldn’t it be great if drinking fountains were as celebrated as dancing fountains?

Update: I just found this article about a town in Australia, Bundanoon,  that banned bottled water and install “bubblers” instead.  The bottled water industry isn’t pleased.

Dancing fountain, The Grove, Los Angeles.

P.S. My Metropolis column about the  the Cooper Hewitt Triennial is right here.

The wind turbines on Greenway Self-Park, Kinzie and Clark, Chicago

The Itinerant Urbanist has been strangely sedentary in recent months, but I just spent the past couple of days in Chicago. And it was a revelation.   In the 1990s and the early 2000s, I used to go to Chicago all the time.   Until this week, however,  I hadn’t been there  — except for a few overly long stretches at O’Hare — since 2003.  On this trip, I was amazed at how beautiful the city has become.  Yes, Millennium Park with Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion and the mighty Bean, are stunning, as is the interior of Renzo Piano’s Art Institute wing.  But today it seems as though the whole center of the city — especially the area along the Chicago River — just radiates well-being. (More on this later.)

So there I am, wandering the streets of Chicago, admiring its luster, when I’m stopped in my tracks by these strange, unicorn-horn-ish  wind turbines.  Pretty quickly I identify the building type.  Greenway, with its Ionic volutes gone wild, is actually my second green parking garage.

The first green parking garage of my acquaintance is in Santa Monica.  It was done by Moore Ruble Yudell, and is distinguished by its attention grabbing, multi-colored facade.  The Santa Monica, LEED-certified  garage features a whole menu of energy saving and pollution mitigating features:   solar panels on the rooftop shade structure, a filtering system to remove  oil from the storm-water runoff, recycled fly ash in the concrete,  free bike-storage lockers and outlets for electric cars.  Similarly, Greenway boasts local and  sustainable building materials, an efficient glass facade, a green roof (de rigueur in Chicago), cisterns to catch rain water, space for Zip Cars, etc.    All good.  All nice.

The philosophical problem, of course, is how green can a parking garage truly be.  When I asked this question of James Mary O’Connor, architect of the Santa Monica garage, he answered with a question: “Cars aren’t going to go away tomorrow, are they?”  Well, no.  Apparently they’re not.  And parking garages are arguably a better solution than street parking, especially as  we’re increasingly transforming parking lanes  into bike lanes.  And also because it’s been estimated that 30 percent of traffic congestion and car-related pollution in cities is caused by drivers circling in search of a spot.

Still, it’s hard  to see the green garage as anything more than a perverse symbol of our current quandary.  Yes, we want to be better, but, no, we don’t want to stop driving.  It is a half measure, a way of making the existing infrastructure marginally more sustainable…and a hedge against genuine transformation.  The best thing about the Santa Monica and Chicago parking garages is the strong visual signal they send.  They’re powerful advertisements for change.  It’s just that, like lots of advertising, they don’t entirely deliver on their promise.

Greenway Self-Park as seen from Kinzie St., Chicago

The Santa Monica Civic Center Parking Structure.  (Photo by Noah Webb.)

P.S.  Check out my latest Metropolis column about using old industrial buildings for new industry.  And also, in the current issue of Dwell, I’ve got another piece about seeing the interstate highway system as infrastructure and land that could be used for more than just a single purpose.

The view from my table at the ESPN Zone.

Above is the way the world looks from a prime table at the Times Square ESPN Zone’s Screening Room.  For the uninitiated, this is a  bar and dining area that is wall-to-wall screen,  simultaneously showing every imaginable sporting event.  The screen in the foreground is actually a small one that sits directly on the dining table.

One night, I accompanied my sweetie there,  along with his teenage son, and his son’s best friend,   and I was overwhelmed.  By the end of our dinner in the Screening Room, my brain hurt. I didn’t have a headache.  Rather, I felt as if my optic and neural bits had been rubbed raw.  I felt as if I, like Alex  in  A Clockwork Orange, had been given the cure. The subway ride home, by comparison, was positively zenlike.  Afterward, I thought the obvious: I‘m going to come back and bring my SVA D-Crit students with me. Alas, that won’t be possible.

Now, the ESPN Zone, a major tourist draw and nirvana for local teenage boys with deep-pocketed dads, is closing. (Right in the middle of the World Cup!) Parent company Disney is shuttering the one in Times Square  along with outlets in Baltimore, Chicago, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C.  They’re no longer profitable, apparently.

Coincidentally, my most recent Metropolis column was a re-examination of screen-dominated environments like the ESPN Zone.  I wrote:

I think the age of the screen as an attention-hogging, room-filling, all-purpose information-device-cum-decorative-element may be nearing a close.

I would like to take the extreme downsizing of the ESPN Zone chain as evidence of my great prescience.   Rather, the  Zone has a couple of built-in  problems.  First, it’s a rip-off,  a business model based on heedless, free-spending tourists and overindulgent parents willing to pay for weirdly pricey arcade games and terrible food, poor value for money.  Not a dependable model these days.

And, as I pointed out in my column, there’s now no shortage of screen-intensive environments.  Neighborhood sports bars are almost as image- saturated as the ESPN Zone, and the drinks and food are likely to be better and cheaper, so why bother?

P.S. It’s the end of another era.  I just read ArchNewsNow and discovered that Bill Mitchell, former MIT dean of architecture and planning,  has died.  I haven”t spoken with him much since the 1990s, but back then a conversation with him was always a treat. Very smart man.   65 is way too young.

John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller in 1966, rethinking lower Manhattan,  in a Daily News photo, from the Museum of the City of New York’s online Lindsay exhibition.

I got so distracted by the Cooper Hewitt Triennial, that I forgot all about the Lindsay show uptown at the Museum of the City of New York. It’s one of those exhibitions about New York City’s history, rich with archival material, that  the MCNY does so well.  Mayor John Lindsay, elected in 1965, served two terms as mayor during the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s.  What I remembered about him before going to see this show is that he walked.  To commiserate with commuters stranded by the transit strike of 1966, he walked to work.  To calm the rage following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., he walked through Harlem.  What I didn’t remember — or never quite realized — is that Lindsay laid the groundwork for an approach to urbanism that seems, in some ways, very contemporary and familiar.

Lindsay was the one who closed the road through Central Park to traffic on the weekends and promoted bicycling in the park.  The original TKTS booth in Times Square was his administration’s baby.  And he had a number of schemes for pedestrianizing various Manhattan avenues and streets.

Of course, the pedestrian malls he supported for Madison Avenue and (I think) 48th St. were the now-discredited 1970s variety: no cars, festive street furniture.  But Lindsay’s interests in creating a more pleasurable urban experience (Fun City!) foreshadow much of what’s happened under Bloomberg.  Yes, his spending was blamed for New York going broke shortly after he left office (Ford to City: Drop Dead).  But, arguably,  his passion for the urban experience sustained New York through a period in which America was abandoning its cities.

Go see the show if you can.  If you can’t,  check out the online version.

(Also, worth the trip: Cars, Culture and the City.)

Further reading:  James Sanders’ essay about Lindsay on Design Observer.

Willoughby St., May 26, 2010

Chicken Rings, as seen in the window of my neighborhood White Castle.  Could be worse.  Could be the latest from Dunkin’ Donuts.

A classic, redrawn by Steven Guarnaccia.

1.  First, from illustrator Steven Guarnaccia, comes an updated version of a classic story: The Three Little Pigs: An Architectural Tale. The pigs in this tale are strangely familiar looking.  One builds a house out of scraps.  One builds a house of glass.  And one builds a house out of concrete.  Predictably, Gehry-Pig and Johnson-Pig don’t fare too well against the the evil, motorcycle riding wolf — could it be Thomas Krens? — but Wright-Pig prevails.

2. Second, from the New York Times, arbiter of cuteness, comes this alarming story about Hello Kitty.  After 36 years of world dominance, Kitty’s star is fading:

In a closely watched ranking of Japan’s most popular characters, compiled each year using sales data by the Tokyo-based research firm Character Databank, Hello Kitty lost her long-held spot as Japan’s top-grossing character in 2002 and has never recovered.

In the latest survey, released this month, Kitty ranked a distant third, behind the leader, Anpanman, a character that is based on a Japanese jam-filled pastry and is produced by Nippon Television. The second spot is still held by the venerable game and animation brand Pokémon, owned by Nintendo.

Kitty has lost her dominance to a character based on a jam-filled pastry? What is the world coming to?  Apparently,  Kitty’s potential has — finally — been limited by a peculiarity of her anatomy.   Reports the Times:

These days, designers are also urged to make sure their characters work across multiple media — a lesson Sanrio learned the hard way with Hello Kitty. Because Kitty had no mouth, it was difficult for the cat to break into television animation, depriving Sanrio of a lucrative source of revenue.

When the company created a talking Kitty for a pilot cartoon series, it set off a fury among fans loyal to the cat’s mouthless look, Ms. Yamaguchi said.

Or, as Charlie Haas once wrote, “The Mona Lisa is a hundred times easier to divine: Her smile teases, sure but it is a smile.  Hello Kitty has no mouth.”

3.  Third, while it was not the most exhilarating year at ICFF,  my annual Design Boom Mart purchase was awfully cute.  Go here.  Click on “products.”  Then click on “Fairy Tale II: – The Land of Pigmies.”

4. Fourth…sort of.   The story about Ground Zero by Chris Bonanos in the current New York Magazine isn’t cute at all.  But it’s really good.  Check it out.

Z-20 Concentrated Solar Power System by Tarazi Studio, at the Cooper Hewitt Triennial.

“The commonest axiom of history is that every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”  So wrote Lewis Mumford in the opening paragraph of The Brown Decades, his book about arts in American in the decades following the Civil War.     I’m not sure that the generational back-skip entirely explains what’s going on at the National Design Triennial, at the Cooper Hewitt Museum starting tomorrow, but the title came to mind  the moment I walked into the first gallery.  The exhibition is designed by Tsang Seymour using “eco-safe materials, modular components…and simple mounting techniques.”  I wrote in my notebook: “Everything is brown.”  I felt as if I’d teleported to a Creative Playthings shop circa 1970.

Here’s my quandry: I’ve been advocating, for more years than I care to count, an approach to design that is about genuine problem solving rather than the proliferation of more shiny stuff.  Way back in 1992, at the Cooper Hewitt’s own Edge of the Millennium conference, Tibor Kalman and I gave a talk called “The End” in which we called for the end of design because “Design has become the profession os solving very small problems.  Larger problems are left unsolved because everybody is too busy designing.”

Well, here it is 2010 and the Cooper Hewitt’s Triennial, entitled Why Design Now?, is pretty much the “the end of design” that  Tibor and I once demanded.   Almost everything on display is intended to solve environmental, health and social problems. Big problems.  Huge problems.  Almost nothing is very pretty.   In every single gallery, in each of the old Carnegie mansion’s nooks and crannies, the encroaching apocalypse being beaten back by designers.  Cool, right?

Well, yes and no.  In an exhibition where the only shiny object is a giant solar collector (see above), I find myself craving  eye candy.  In a show where everything is profound, I find myself desperate for the vapid.  Now, there are some truly innovative projects on display:  the water powered (don’t ask) H20tel by Dutch architect Thomas Rau,  the Swedish-designed Power Aware Cord, an electrical cable with moving lights to indicate power usage, Jorre van Ast’s very clever Jar Tops (see below) intended to turn old jars into new kitchenware.   But amid all this highly commendable world-saving, I found myself drawn to the rare items that were merely eye-catching. For instance, I loved the bright posters that Dutch designer  Mieke Gerritzen had hand-painted (rather than printed) in a Chinese factory and “furumai,” a device by Takram Design Engineering of Japan, created to allow water droplets to dance on a coated paper surface.

In truth,  I think the seriousness of the objects on display is  ill-served by seriousness of the exhibition design (see below).  So much of what’s on display is dun-colored, earth-toned,  aesthetically neutral, or even kind of ugly,  that the prevailing brownness — the pedestals, the museum walls — just swallows it all up.   The design on display is serious stuff;  but maybe it needs to party.

I guess  I’ll devote the next several decades to arguing the value of eye-candy.

Sigh.

JarTops by Jorre van Ast.

Cooper Hewitt Triennial exhibition design by Tsang Seymour.

Behold: the Public M bike.

Rob, I’ve known since the old days in San Francisco when I was editing Dwell and he was running Design Within Reach.  And I’ve been waiting for his post-DWR company to emerge.  At first it had something to do with wine, and he did some very thorough research on the subject.  And then a new idea emerged: bikes.  Specifically, Americans need their own version of the standard Dutch city bike, and moreover Americans need to learn to ride bikes as the Dutch do, in ordinary clothing, business attire even, free of scary spandex shorts with pillows in the crotches.

In true cargo-cult fashion,  I’ve been waiting for this Dutch-inspired bicycle to appear.  Lo and behold, it has.  Or it’s about to.  Rob is poised to launch Public at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair on Sunday with a ceremonial bike ride from the Javits Center to the Tretorn Store in Soho.

The website is up and the bikes are really lovely.  The question, speaking as a New Yorker is whether a $1200 bike is really something I’d want to own, just because I’d be scared to leave it on the street, even with the most fearsome lock.  A couple of years ago, after endless bike shopping, I bought a 3-speed, Austrian-made Steyr, circa 1970, from a guy in Gerritsen Beach.  Paid about $150 for it.  Thought that at that price it wouldn’t matter too much to me if it got stolen.  Then I fell in love with it and wound up spending almost as much dough on a state-of-the-art lock.  And leaving it outside, even anchored by 10 pounds of indestructible Kryptonite chain,  still makes me nervous.  Rob’s  new bikes, in their creamy colors,  may be too beautiful for this town.  Or, at least, too beautiful for my fretful nature.

What I’m most impressed with, however, is how well Rob’s DWR-honed  marketing chops serve him on the Public bikes website.  Because he’s not just selling bicycles.  He’s selling accessories: less-dorky-than-average helmets, pretty red bells, and a very cunning basket.  The whole thing, the perfectly curated bike lifestyle,  reminds me of — dare I say it? — Martha Stewart.  When are you launching the magazine,  Rob?