Karrie Jacobs

0-14 by Reiser and Umemoto, Business Bay, Dubai 2008 (photo by kj)

Beekman Tower by Frank Gehry, Lower Manhattan, 2010 (photo by kj)

Have I ever mentioned how much I love construction photos?  Maybe this is because a lot of buildings are more interesting when under construction than they are when complete.  What they reveal in process is the strange marriage of highly refined design techniques to assembly strategies that still appear crude, messy and dangerous.  The finished piece of architecture, all shiny and swoopy, often looks as seamlessly abstract as the computer rendering from whence it came, but to see a building in process is to appreciate its undeniable physicality.

Which is why I love Stanley Greenberg’s new book, Architecture Under Construction.  Greenberg photographs a variety of notable buildings — Steven Holl’s MIT dorms,  Zaha Hadid’s Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art,  SANAA’s New Museum — in various stages of undress.  Greenberg, whose 2003 book Waterworks, about New York City’s water system is one of my favorites,  applies to the incomplete structures, and all the mess of construction,  the same formalism that  architectural photographers generally reserve for the completed buildings.  Because I’ve been finding excuses to visit construction sites (by invitation or not) most of my life,  I see Stanley’s collection of construction photos as the the first coffee table book for process geeks like me.

(Note that Greenberg shot lots of construction photos of Frank Gehry’s troubled  Stata Center at MIT [see below].  Now that the lawsuit about the leaks  has been ” amicably resolved,” Stanley’s photos — which could have served as evidence had there been a trial — can be enjoyed as souvenirs.)

Frank Gehry’s Stata Center (photo by Stanley Greenberg).

P.S.  Another favorite photographer,  Mark Luthringer, has published two new books, The Ridgemont Typologies, a study in the banality of banality,  and 40 Monuments to Progress.

New York, New York, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Stata Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Man, where have I been?  I haven’t posted since January.  I am a very bad blogger.  But then, blogging is so over.  I should be Tweeting, right?  But I’m not.  Nor am I on Facebook. My current status is unknown.  I am a failure at social networking.   Must mean I have a life.

I have been traveling a bit.  Boston. Montreal. Boston.  And working a lot.  But mostly the Itinerant Urbanist went dead for awhile because some evil hackers invaded the site and made it appear — most particularly  to Google  — that I was in the business of selling pain killers.  I’m not.  It took a while for Randy, my faithful web guy, and the most over-employed person in America, to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, I was left to ponder the dumbass Nihilism of hacking.

Anyway, I’m alive and well.  My April Metropolis column about rebuilding in Haiti went up on the website just in time for yet another horrific earthquake.  And over at the Travel + Leisure website, I’m doing my bit for architectural discourse with (yes!) the World’s Strangest Buildings.

More soon.  Really.

Steve Jobs as photographed by Jim Wilson of the New York Times.

“And it came to pass, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses’s hand…” Okay, it’s only one tablet in Steve Jobs’ hand, and its called the iPad, not the iTablet. And we don’t yet know whether it’s going to help the publishing industry save itself from itself.

I just want to point out that early last year, when I wrote about the unfortunate aspects of the Kindle (allegiance to Amazon, weird pointy corners) and my disappointment with the limitations of the E-Ink substrate (no color), I said a little prayer to Apple:

As I ride the slower Amtrak train home through a dark winter landscape, I’m feeling far less sanguine about technological magic. The paperback book I’m reading suddenly feels like a marvel of efficiency. For the Kindle, the Sony, the Plastic Logic, or any of the other iterations we’ll be seeing in the near future to supplant 600 years of habit, the challenge is to do what Apple has done: design a device for readers that is beautiful and functional enough to become a cultural totem, and ensure that it not only connects seamlessly to a brilliantly organized, bottomless market of written material but that it also allows access to every other market on the planet. Apple did it once. Per­haps it can do it again.

Has Apple answered my prayer? Maybe. My first impression: it looks a little big, a hardback, not a paperback. But it might big enough to properly display a glossy magazine layout. 1.5 pounds. $500 to $800. Hmmm.

An afterthought: Last year, when I went up to visit the E-Ink people in Cambridge, MA, I was entertaining an elaborate fantasy about producing a magazine for, if not the Kindle, then one of the larger format electronic readers like the iRex or the Plastic Logic. Then I learned that E-Ink doesn’t do color. So I was hoping that the Steve Jobs dog and pony show yesterday would feature a state of the art electronic magazine and even an iTunes store for magazines, or individual articles. Maybe the device could be used for those things, but it doesn’t seem like it’s at the top of anyone’s list of priorities out there in Cupertino. Too bad.

Haitian house at Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village, Americus, Georgia

I’ve been thinking a lot about Haiti which, beyond donating a little money to my NGO of choice, is really all I can do. I have visited a couple of places where natural disasters have erased entire towns, the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina and Greensburg, Kansas after the 2007 tornado, so I can envision wholesale destruction. But these were smallish towns in a big, wealthy country, not the capital city of a small, impoverished country. I keep looking at the pictures and reading the death toll estimates — 40,000, 100,000, 200,000 — and I can’t begin to comprehend what the numbers mean.

I’ve been thinking about Haiti and remembered this house. It was on display at Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village in Americus, Georgia. I saw it in 2003, when I was on my road trip for my book, The Perfect $100,000 House. It was the house that Habitat was supposedly building in Haiti and I thought it was one of the few architecturally distinctive things that the organization has ever done. I fell in love with it and praised it in my book, but I have no idea how many of them were actually built. The house was designed to be hurricane resistant, so the vaulted concrete roof is steel-reinforced, but I suspect the concrete block walls lack the rebar or added structure that would allow it to withstand an earthquake.

Anyway, do-gooders including Habitat, Architecture for Humanity, and Article 25 are gearing up for the rebuilding effort that will need to begin shortly. I have no doubt that these organizations will come up with inspiring prototypes for housing that is hardened against both earthquakes and hurricanes, but the real question here (as it was and still is in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast) is who will build? Who has the money and the will to rebuild hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of homes, mostly for desperately poor people, and do it properly? Are we talking about wholesale housing projects or is there a way to assemble a cheap kit of parts that would allow individual Haitians to rebuild their own modest dwellings but build them stronger?

P.S. I thought this LA Times piece about Haiti’s substandard construction was also worth reading along with the similar NY Times piece.

P.P.S. I’ve got a new Metropolis column up about the naked hotel, and a Travel + Leisure piece about CityCenter in Las Vegas. Plus a T+L web thing about the world’s most beautiful airports.

Obama in Bushwick.

1. Early in 2004, I began entertaining myself by sending goofy pictures from the White House website to a friend in Tokyo.

2. So I wound up writing my Metropolis column about the Bush administration’s use of its website, “A President And His Dog”, published in August 2004.

3. The column was included in Looking Closer Five: Critical Writings in Graphic Design, published in 2007.

4. For some reason, Gong Szeto, an old friend and a brilliant web designer, read that column in August of 2009.

5. And, in September, he suggested to Julie Lasky, editor of Change Observer, that she commission a sequel, an essay about the Obama administration’s website.

6. So I wrote one. In December. And it’s now up at Change Observer.

7. Not that I’m nostalgic or anything, but the Bush website made for a more amusing essay.

Engelbert Humperdinck meets Daniel Libeskind.

I keep thinking I should say something. I should list the highs and lows of the past decade or make predictions for the new one. And, yeah, I could cobble together a pretty good roster of momentous architectural events of the early 21st century and make a few guesses about what might happen in the near future. And I might just do that. Soon.

The photo above was taken in October, when I was in Las Vegas reporting a story about the recently opened CityCenter complex for the February issue of Travel + Leisure. And it seems like as good an illustration as any that the idea of progress, that human knowledge and skills move relentlessly forward, is not quite right.

The jaggy, future-ish building in the background is the Crystals shopping mall, with architecture by Daniel Libeskind and interiors by David Rockwell. In the foreground is the Strip, where every pop cultural moment that ever was lives on for all eternity. Engelbert Humperdinck is there, as are Donnie and Marie, Garth Brooks, Sha Na Na, and the Kingston Trio. Nothing and no one ever dies.

Crystals is actually Libeskind’s second shopping mall. His first is in Bern, Switzerland. As it turns out, the architect, famous for his museums and his highbrow blather, is very good at malls. And his showboat architectural style actually makes perfect sense on The Strip.

And, of course, Libeskind has done some conceptual thinking about the shopping mall. Here’s what he said when I asked him about museums versus malls:

A luxe mall with a Louis Vuitton store as its flagship was not what I would have anticipated a decade ago when I visited Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. I guess what I’m saying is that predictions, especially the ones that suppose that change is in any way linear, are generally wrong. The future — whether we’re talking a decade, or a century, or a millennium — is more like a cavalcade of lateral shifts. And, hey, maybe Libeskind is on to something; maybe the thing to look at is typological, rather than technological or stylistic, change.

More later.

p.s. Speaking of progress that isn’t progress, here’s a my Metropolis column about the Las Vegas Monorail.

p.p.s. Happy New Decade!!!

In early 2008, I was in Dubai on assignment for Travel + Leisure and found myself struggling with the logic of the place. People –architects, developers, publicists, taxi drivers — kept explaining to me that Dubai was building endless towers, theme parks, artificial islands, entire districts (like the Waterfront development with its projected population of 1.5 million) because it was going to emerge as the world’s leading financial center, displacing cities like London, New York and Hong Kong. A new planet would form with Dubai at its center and despite the fact that the population of actual Emiratees was quite small, moneyed people from someplace else would eagerly gobble up a stupefying number of condos and villas. Now, as Dubai seeks a bailout for the second time in a year, it seems increasingly clear that I could never quite grasp the logic of the boom there because there was no logic. It was, much like the housing bubble in this country, predicated on infinite demand for real estate that was only of any value in times of infinite demand.

This paragraph jumped out at me from yesterday’s New York Times:

While I have no doubt that Dubai’s troubles have the potential to further screw things up — for one thing, they own Barneys — I don’t believe that the mega-Emirate is typical of heavily indebted nations. We’re talking about a government that is the ultimate speculative real estate developer. When China builds a brand new city to house, say, 300,000, they are building it for a very real population.* Dubai, by contrast, builds at an unprecedented pace for market that, as it turns out, is imaginary.

The photo above is how the Dubai skyline looked from a boat a short distance off shore, murky, like a mirage. I snapped it while touring the The Palm, several clusters of artificial islands shaped like palm trees and The World, another cluster of islands shaped like the countries of the world. Below is a Palm frond, full of McMansions, “villas” in local parlance, squeezed together at Fire Island density. The World, as of March 2008, was utterly uninhabited. The next group of artificial islands was going to be called The Universe,but I’m guessing that current circumstances may have put a damper on those plans.

*Actually, China may also be building for an imaginary population.

The Buffalo Skyway

A piece I submitted to the New York Times op-ed section back in January just ran in today’s paper. It’s been updated somewhat, tied to the current unemployment situation, and condensed …a lot. Looking at the Interstate system and other roadways as a vast repository of land and infrastructure is something I’ve been doing for a while. An earlier and more nuanced take on the subject ran in Metropolis back in January.

The original, unedited version of the piece I wrote for the Times concluded like this:

The most significant thing about the Interstate system, however, is that it represents a huge quantity of land, about 40 acres per mile or 1.87 million acres. And untold quantities surrounding land have been scarred by proximity to the Interstate. Anyone who drives knows that the areas around interchanges, designed for maximum expedience, are among the least appealing landscapes in America. Instead of continuing to write-off the land adjacent to the highways, and the median strips, as an eternal no-man’s land, we should look at this acreage as a resource. And instead of decrying the development that gloms on to the interstate as sprawl, we should figure out a way to transform those land use patterns into something efficient, livable, and sustainable.

We no longer have a frontier, we’ve learned that open space is finite and can’t afford to throw away or squander land. If, in our cities, we are redeveloping what’s known as brownfield sites, disused industrial property, perhaps it’s time to reclaim land blighted by the highway system. If our interstate system is transformed so that it’s no longer just a ghetto for the internal combustion engine, and if enough of the people still driving are driving cars that pollute less – and, yes, trucks will have to evolve, too — and make less noise, the interchanges, sprawling mazes of Byzantine traffic patterns and massive parking lots can be transformed into urban hubs, where people might actually want to live or work, change trains or even go for a stroll. Instead of devoting tens of billions of dollars to repaving Eisenhower’s vision of the future, we should use that money and our ingenuity to establish a vision of our own.

The Barclays Center, hemmed in by ghost towers, courtesy of the New York Times.

Okay, I have a soft spot for Shop, a local architecture firm that is better than most at wedding innovative form to urbanistic function. And, unlike most people who are outraged by the Atlantic Yards debacle, I am basically okay with the idea of putting a basketball arena at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic. My okayness with the arena, however is predicated on a major upgrade for the nasty mess of a subway/railroad station below and serious amelioration of the monstrous traffic situation outside. And my okayness is tempered by the recent projection from the city’s Independent Budget Office that shows the city losing some 39 million on this deal over the next 30 years.

I think the Shop collaboration with Ellerbe Becket has produced the best renderings I’ve seen for the arena, better than all those Frank Gehry renderings. Having said that, I feel compelled to point out that they are just renderings and renderings, especially in this case, mean nothing. For one thing, I can’t help but notice the ghost buildings that appear in many of the elevations, place holders for the towers that will someday, perhaps, spring up. The potential out-sized badness of those undefined shadow buildings has the potential to undermine any niceness our talented friends at Shop can provide. The plan, I’m afraid, is still the problem.

P.S. Yes, I seem to have taken the summer off. Not planned. It just happened.

P.P.S. Check out this dialog on light that I moderated on Change Observer. And this story about historic tract houses for Met Home. And my take on parametric design in Metropolis. (And, any day now, there will be a Metropolis column on Frank Gehry which is now a bit dated. Oh well.)

P.P.P.S And here it is 9-11. It’s been a very long eight years, hasn’t it?

The Sears Tower “Ledge.” (Photo by Kichiro Sato for AP.) Courtesy of Archipreneur.

Oh, to be as open and trusting as five year old Anna Kane of Alton, Ill. I find that after many years of listening to architects and engineers talk about how they do the amazing things they do, I have less faith than I used to in their infallibility. Or maybe the infallibility of the design software upon which their professional reputations now rest. And there is something about the transparent overhang, whether we’re talking the Grand Canyon version, or the newly opened Sears Tower Ledge that spooks me.

Rationally speaking, I have no doubt that the bright boys at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and at MTH Industries, a glass and metal fabricator, know exactly what they’re doing. And that they’ve carefully calibrated the wind and tourist loads to over-engineer this under-engineered looking thingamajig. Irrationally speaking, I feel they’re tempting fate. Some primitive part of my brain is screaming, “No Anna! No!”

Oh, and the Sears Tower photo reminded me of that other picture of a girl floating in space:

Case Study House #22. (Photo by Julius Shulman. )