The Westin hotel  (top) at The Domain in Austin with the sign that inspired my current Metropolis column and (bottom) a view of SOL Austin from the development’s first two-story house.

I went to Austin in October to report a story for the New York Times “Home Section” that finally, finally,  ran in today’s paper.  And wound up staying in an Aloft hotel in the far northwest corner of the city, part of a development called the Domain.  So I got two things out of one trip, the Times story about SOL, an architecturally ambitious green subdivision, and a Metropolis column about The Domain and how the meaning of the word “urban” is changing.

Thinking about it now, I realize that both pieces tell roughly the same story, about how American cities and our ideas about what constitutes an urban place are changing as we move deeper into the 21st Century.  Developments are beginning to appear that are convincingly of this century, as opposed to being reheated 20th century concepts of what the future was supposed to look like.

I was reading the obits for architect Anne Tyng, who just died at the age of 91.  She was a theorist who is best known for having worked closely with the architect Louis Kahn, the father of her daughter,  Alexandra.

I read this paragraph in the New York Times obit:

Kahn broke with Oscar Stonorov in 1947, but Ms. Tyng continued as a member of Kahn’s staff until 1964, exerting critical influence on his work, including designs for the Yale Art Gallery and the Trenton Bath House. Buckminster Fuller, the architect and futurist, once called her “Kahn’s geometrical strategist.”

It me think about my visit to the newly restored Trenton Bath House in the summer of 2010,  how moved I was by the elemental geometry of the place, and especially by the way the sunlight  poured through the square hole in the center of each simple structure’s wooden roof.  The design was clearly the work of a geometrical strategist, but I’d assumed that strategist was Kahn.

Maybe it was, but he had help.  Inga Saffron framed it this way in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

During a 15-year relationship that was both professional and romantic, she helped him produce his pathbreaking early buildings, including the Trenton Bathhouse and the Yale Art Gallery. Yet until recently, she received little credit for those iconic projects.

“She was a victim of her time, being female, being beautiful. That was a pretty hard legacy to carry,” said Carter Wiseman, author of the biography Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style. “She was constantly swimming upstream.”

Most architecture is collaborative in nature and it’s rare that underlings are properly credited for their contributions.  But the story of Anne Tyng, her relationship with Kahn, and her unacknowledged influence on his work is particularly poignant.  I’m sorry I had to wait until her death to read it.

An Arquitectonica rendering of the proposed Aqueduct convention center and casino.

The proposal floated in Governor [Andrew] Cuomo’s state-of-the-state address yesterday to transplant NYC’s convention center to Queens strikes me, surprisingly, as the first good idea I’ve heard from my state government in a long, long time.  In short, the idea is to let a Malaysian company, the Genting Group, that built the “racino” at Aqueduct, bankroll a new convention center and exhibition hall on government-owned land nearby.  In short:  Queens goes Vegas.

The state could then sell or lease the Javits site to developers eager to participate in the westward expansion of midtown Manhattan. The Javits Center itself would be demolished and  the estimated $4 billion from the site could fund projects such as Moynihan Station.  And — wishful thinking– an upgrade of the A-train which will become the pivotal connector linking Manhattan, the new convention center, and JFK.

Now, I’m not convinced that I would willingly go all the way out to Aqueduct to attend, say, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair.  Although the subway ride out there wouldn’t be anymore arduous than the current cross-town haul to Javits.  And, yes,  it’s totally pathetic that Javits will be going away just as it gets its very own subway stop.   Certainly many observers don’t believe that it’s worth building a new convention center because the convention business is a “disaster.”  But, if that’s truly the case, why should a prime piece of Manhattan waterfront be monopolized by an awful building dedicated to a disastrous business?

Hostile Woolworth Building sign in its customary location, guarding the building’s Broadway entrance.

Above is the sign that used to stand at the Broadway entrance to the landmark Woolworth Building. I noticed it back in September when I attended an office warming party for architect Jim Biber who now works out of a creamy white minimalist space on the building’s 20th floor.  The party was great, but I thought the sign was obnoxious.  I find it sad that the ornate lobbies of lower Manhattan’s historic office towers have been lost to the public, pretty much since 9-11.

A few days ago, I ran into Biber at another party and he told me a story about leaving his office with some friends.  As they strolled out of the elevators and sauntered through the lobby,  he was pointing out  his favorite gargoyles.  “There’s Cass Gilbert…” he was saying when a guard yelled, “No unauthorized tours!”

Yesterday, I was walking down Broadway toward the new white hot center of the universe, Zuccotti Park and I noticed, as I passed the Woolworth Building, that the sign was gone.  Wow, I thought, maybe they’ve loosened up a little.  Maybe they’ve realized how wrong it is to keep the public out.  Then, while zig-zagging through the cacophonous jumble of  occupied Zuccotti Park, I discovered that the sign had been, um, liberated.  See below:

Hostile Woolworth Building sign in its new location in Zuccotti Park, somewhat out of focus.

Two streetscapes in IJBurg, the newly built section of Amsterdam.

My story about the city of the future, which wound up mostly being about Almere in the Netherlands, is  in the current issue of Travel + Leisure.  And while Almere,  founded in the 1970s,  is  an extraordinary open-air museum exhibiting successive decade’s visionary schemes, it leaves something to be desired as a city. In short, it lacks the easy sociability that is the hallmark of urbanity,  especially when compared to the newest bits of Amsterdam, just across the water.

In an early draft of the story, I wrote this:

It wasn’t until I took the train to Amsterdam and spent a day exploring that city’s newest neighborhoods,  that I began to understand some things about Almere.   From Amsterdam’s IJburg district, built on network of manmade islands,  you can actually see Almere’s wind turbines across the water (a bridge is in the long range plans).  IJburg’s streets and canals are lined with an amazing assortment of very up-to-date buildings including a large development, Waterbuurt, of houses that float; a response, both visionary and pragmatic,  to rising sea levels and a shortage of land. (Architect Jan Bentham recently abandoned his revolutionary glass house in Almere for a floating house of his own design in IJBurg and now enjoys swimming from his front dock.)

On IJburg’s streets, and in its friendly shops and cafes, I sense the emergence  of the kind of spirited urbanity that’s typical of historic Amsterdam, but that Almere lacks. At a popular local wine bar, the Design Café,  I meet urban planner Ton Schaap, a genial man who orchestrated the build-out of IJburg.  He  explains his effort to imbue an overtly new,  built-from-scratch place  with the essence of Amsterdam.  Some of it is about proportions: the close relationship between the front door and the street.  It’s also about creating  “conditions favorable to street life,” like making sure that buildings on side streets have ground floor spaces suitable for retail. But when Schaap delineates the difference between Almere and Amsterdam, he says this: “The main thing is that people like other people here.”

IJburg is probably the most credible 21st century slice of urbanity I’ve seen.  But there simply wasn’t room for it in the T+L piece.   I’ll likely write  about it. Maybe when I  take a look at New York City’s waterfront and the ways we’re thinking about rising sea water in a forthcoming Metropolis column.  Probably early next year.

Another thing that I’d hoped to shoehorn into the T+L story is the exhibition, Design with the Other 90%, that’s now on display free of charge at the United Nations.  During my research for the T+L story, the term “favela chic” came up a lot.  Shantytowns, unplanned, but often quite organized, are a favorite destination for globetrotting urbanists. And they are certainly home to many more people than planned cities.   This exhibition,  organized by Cynthia E. Smith, the Cooper Hewitt Museum’s curator of socially responsible design,  is a survey of solutions that have emerged from the worlds slums and shanty towns. This isn’t a survey of do-gooder proposals from US and European design student.   Instead, it’s a collection of much needed fixes, often collaborations between slum residents and local design professionals,   mostly implemented.   Impressive projects include the Community Cooker, a garbage-fueled communal stove where the women of Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, can prepare their meals and the Medellin Metrocable, a tramway that connects the city’s worst slum to the center of town.

Rather than glorifying shantytowns,  this exhibition looks at the ways that informal urban settlements can be improved by and for the people who live in them. It’s about how unplanned places can take on some of the stability of planned places. It would have made a nice counterpoint to Almere…if I could have squeezed it into that article. Very smart. Very interesting. And the fact that it’s on display at the UN (because the Cooper Hewitt is closed for renovation)  is a bonus. Go see it.

Above, the Community Cooker, Kibera, Nairobi (photo from the Cooper Hewitt website) and the Medellin Metrocable (photo from the Medellin Travel Blog).

The view of Lower Manhattan from Fort Jay on Governors Island and the view of Ground Zero from the 46th floor of 7WTC.

Initially my interest in stillspotting nyc, a project by the Guggenheim Museum, was motivated by the research I’ve done for my book on silence.  My sense is that finding reservoirs of silence within the city is more essential than going off to some remote, uninhabited place in search of peace.  (In the interest of urban tranquility, I’ve  tried wandering around Manhattan wearing noise-canceling headphones.)  But the Manhattan edition of stillspotting, staged over the past two weekends was not about silence at all.  Rather it was about using the meditative music of Estonian composer Arvo Part and the spatial sense of the Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta to reframe the city and create a series of heart rate slowing urban moments.

Each location — the Labyrinth in Battery Park,   the Magazine and Overlook at Fort Jay on Governors Island, the lobby of the Woolworth Building, and the empty 46th floor of 7 WTC — had its own atmospheric Part composition.   For me, the most transformative experience was wandering around the empty floor of 7WTC with spare piano work “Hymn to a Great City” piped in.  I’ve been in that building many times before, but always for parties or crowded public events.  With only a handful of people up there, and the slow, insistent  music, I felt like I was seeing the view, not from a New York skyscraper, but from the top of some desert mesa.

In next stillspotting,  the architecture firm SO-IL will try to extract a little repose from   Jackson Heights, Queens early next year.

P.S.  I just finished writing about the 9-11 Memorial for the November issue of Metropolis. For the moment I’ll say this:  it’s a  peculiarly disorienting place.

P.P.S.  I’ll also have more to say about this  later, but my article about Almere in the Netherlands as a City of the Future is in the current issue of Travel + Leisure and up on the website.

Lower Manhattan, photographed by Ann Rhoney.

What I’ve noticed in recent days is that a lot of people have found my website by searching for 9-11 photos.  I don’t have any.  I prefer to commemorate the life of the World Trade Center, rather than its death.  I prefer to remember the Twin Towers as an out-sized architectural conceit that, by the time of its destruction, had finally begun to fit into the fabric of New York.  It was no longer the world’s tallest building.  It wasn’t a symbol of anything.  It was just a living, vital piece of our city.

My favorite visual account of the life and death of the Twin Towers be found on the website of photographer Kristine Larsen.  She lived a couple of blocks from the towers and routinely took pictures on the surrounding streets of people going about their business.  Always, in the background, there was this massive presence.  After 9-11 she took photos in the same streets, from the same angles.  In her series, Before and After, she’s paired the two sets of photos.

My favorite single portrait of the World Trade Center is the one above, by Ann Rhoney.  It was shot from Rockefeller Center and and the Towers are in the distance: small, far away, and fading with the light.  Most photos of the WTC show it looming, but Ann captured it looking soft and, if only in hindsight,  vulnerable.

the transfinite by Ryoji Ikeda at the Park Avenue Armory (top) and Rainbow City by Friends With You near the High Line (bottom).

In part because Travel + Leisure asked me to figure out what the term “city of the future” might mean at this juncture (see the upcoming October issue) and in part because Metropolis asked me to review Talk to Me at MoMA (in the September issue, online now) , I’ve been thinking a lot in recent months about how the world we think of as “real” and the world we used to think of as “virtual” have merged.

Most interesting to me are the meeting places between old and new, and between real and unreal.  For example, at this spring’s monumental installation by Ryoji Ikeda, inside the cavernous Park Avenue Armory, viewers entered the space, removed their shoes and sprawled out in front of a hypnotic, changing wall of electronic signal.  People stayed for hours, spellbound, and it was an unexpectedly lovely, relaxed environment, like an electronic beach.  Or at the north end of the High Line, in July, a Miami art collective called Friends With You installed Rainbow City, a goofy collection of giant inflatables that made a forgotten corner of Manhattan look like the inside of a Nintendo game.

Both were temporary changes to the texture of the city but they illustrate the ways that old, familiar places can be altered and renewed.  And the ways that technologically generated environments now insinuate themselves into the so-called real world.

Or, as I wrote in Metropolis:

It’s not so much that we’re building new, high-tech physical environments, although sometimes we are. Or that we’re living more of our lives online, although we surely are. It’s that our lives in the physical world and our lives in the digital world have become increasingly interchangeable. The screen is still there, but it’s permeable. We’re already living in the city of the future, and it’s a retrofit of the city of the past.

The Korean New York Presbyterian Church of Queens.  (Photo by Archidose.)

Yesterday morning, I glanced at the weekly email newsletter from The Architect’s Newspaper and saw Doug Garofalo’s name.  Without really reading the headline, I clicked on the link and was stunned to find myself staring at his obituary.

Doug died young.  He was  about to turn 53.  It was a brain tumor that killed him.  He was diagnosed with it five years ago.  I had no idea.

I know a lot of architects.  During the years when I was editing Dwell it felt like I knew all of them.  But Doug was unusual, an original thinker, someone whose ideas inspired me, and who influenced the early development of  the magazine.

What I remembered is that we first met in 1998, when I was writing for New York Magazine about the blob-esque Korean church that he designed along with  collaborators Greg Lynn and Michael McInturf.  But my memory turns out to be wrong.   While I conducted a  interview with the architects over breakfast at the Paramount Hotel, Doug wasn’t there.  He was in Chicago. So we spoke on the phone.  He talked about the work he’d been doing, transforming dowdy suburban houses, “ranch burgers” he called them, into architectural statements.

He explained how lessons learned in his house transformations helped him realize that his outwardly conservative Korean clients might appreciate a wildly non-traditional building.

From New York Magazine, August 31, 1998:

“The church knew what kind of space it needed but had no mandate for how the building should look.  ‘They had ideas but not necessarily a vision,’ recalls Garofalo, who notes that many of the clients for his aggressive remodels of suburban homes are immigrants who don’t have an emotional stake in the American vernacular and are amenable to designs that undermine tradition.  ‘What was great about the client meetings,” Garofalo says about the Korean churchmen. ‘is the openness to ideas that we were throwing at them.’”

The idea that there were people living in suburbia, in the Midwest no less, that were willing to undermine tradition, stuck with me.  A year later, when I was chosen to edit Dwell, Doug’s observations  influenced the magazine’s drive to seek out unorthodox architecture in the vast swath of America that was routinely ignored by the established shelter magazines.

I  finally met Doug on a trip to Chicago in the early 2000s, and he generously spent an afternoon showing me around, not just his own projects, but his favorite neighborhoods and Mies’s IIT campus.

Doug  popped up in the magazine with some regularity.  The slow progress on a wild looking addition he’d designed for a house in Chicago’s Roscoe Village was documented in the magazine’s “Diary” section.  And we published the bathroom, a colorful crazy-quilt of mismatched tiles,  lovingly created by his wife Chris, a ceramicist, as a present for Doug’s 40th birthday.

While Dwell featured (and still features) an endless parade of architects, Doug was always more like part of the magazine’s extended family.  And, although I haven’t been in touch with him for years, that’s how his death makes me feel: like I’ve lost a member of the family.  My condolences to his real family, his colleagues, and his friends.

Happiness measured at West Broadway and Grand, NYC.

Just last week I attended the press preview of a new exhibition at MoMA called Talk To Me: Design and Communication between People and Objects. I’ve spent the past several days writing a column about it for the September issue of Metropolis.  Today, there’s a review of the show in the Times.

While  Talk to Me is a remarkably generous collection of pretty cool stuff, mostly electronic,  I kept thinking that the work on display that should be the most inventive — student work and designers’ prototypes — isn’t actually any more advanced than what you can see on the street.

As if to prove my point,  an advertising billboard just went up on Grand Street in Soho.  It’s not a very attractive object, certainly not by  MoMA’s aesthetic standards.   But it is, in its creepy way, very sophisticated.  Jello is monitoring the number of smiley face and frowny face emoticons used in Tweets.  And based on this tally, they are judging the mood of America.  The man on the billboard’s mouth turns up or down accordingly.    In the time it took for the light to change at West Broadway, America went from sad to happy.  Amazing.