Etymology

CCTV, aka the Big Underpants Building. The Chinese government, apparently, doesn’t get the joke. They suggest: Harmonious Gate, Happy Geometry, Peak of the Ages, New Angle, TV Magic Cube, TV Rubik’s Cube, or Future Window. It’s like when, to Greenpeace’s horror, on-line voters named that whale Mr. Splashy Pants. Nicknames help us connect to things that are otherwise too big, too complicated, too foreign to understand. Wolf Prix wants people to nickname his buildings. The unnamable scares us. Like a whale in the water, wrote Melville: unpaintable. Good architecture is photogenic, or photogenic architecture is good architecture, or so they say. But not for Rem. That’s probably why his books are so intimidating, and so hard to read.

Now that it’s almost complete, the way it functions becomes clear. It looks different from every angle, no matter where you stand. Foreground and background are constantly shifting. We didn’t create a single identity, but 400 identities. That was what we wanted: To create ambiguity and complexity, so as to escape the constraints of the explicit. [Rem via Der Spiegel]

Alone for 15 years

Titanic

The Devil and the deep blue sea

Empty space typography.

The space between things is the thing.

I learned long ago, from a very wise man, that “the only real work in creative endeavor is keeping things from falling together too soon.” A corollary to that notion would be that, having held the structural elements apart as long as possible, when they do come together, let them really clang. (Paul Metcalf)

This is Chatwin’s “value of absence.” Like Cezanne, like Hemmingway, the white space between the brushstrokes, the power of the unsaid.

In cities, that tension holds the world together. We move in the spaces between things physically, but also narratively, labeling what’s unlabeled, fleshing out the empty pockets in our heads, turning streets into journeys, apartments into homes. We do it in the present, and also through time. That Rhode Island story of locals telling newcomers to “turn left where the gas station used to be” makes absence a landmark. The spaces between buildings, and the spaces buildings leave behind.

You feel me?

In this vertigo of exhaustion, laughter must be guarded against like retching.
“Brother Andy, is you getting much?”
“No.” My stomach further obliges Sam with a last despairing heave. Oh Lord.
Later there seems to have come into my hand — and with it some instructions from Sam of which there is no more to be remembered than that they were delivered in the tone of one of my aunt’s grand therapeutic schemes — a squarish bottle, warmed by Sam’s body and known to my fingers through the ridge of glass left by the mold and the apothecary symbol oz or 3 or 3z. (Walker Percy)

Blackout!

New York scores a 9 on the 9-point Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, the association’s favored measure, along with other major cities like Houston and Las Vegas; a typical suburban sky ranks a 5, while Tucson, which has stringent outdoor lighting codes, is also a 5. (NYTimes)

“If you just turned everything off, you would lose a lot of the [urban] vibrancy,” he said. “If you weigh up the efficiencies you get by people working and living in a city, particularly a city that’s served by public transport, you can afford to be generous with some of the lighting.” (Trib)

Yes, Ferriss’s New York would die. Michael Wolf’s photos wouldn’t mean much. But what would we gain?

In Galileo’s time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid — our word “galaxy” comes from the Greek for milk — and it was so bright that it cast shadows on the ground (as did Jupiter and Venus). Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name. (New Yorker)

I wouldn’t live there if you paid me

But when encountering a place like Euclid Avenue, one thinks of the Mayan temples that were already being abandoned before Cortés even arrived. (David Byrne)

The Apocalypse is here, our cities are in ruins. Tomorrowland’s glass towers will stand on Cleveland’s unburied bones. Dubai is a mirage: not our future. We are not a blank page. “‘Everyone always assumes that the entire world would just explode and be rebuilt in this super-futuristic style.’ The big flaw in most depictions of the future, he says, ‘is that they always forget to leave in the past.’” (Cliff Bleszinski, Tom Bissell)

Why can’t we re-inhabit our temples? Not build, not rebuild, but fix.

Lincoln Center is a Moses-era superblock. The city was exploded and rebuilt. That was the ’60s. Now DS+R is fixing it — opening it up, they say, making it public, reanimating the skeletons. Foster says he’s doing the same thing at the NYPL. Look around: our Parthenons are already here. Bloomberg as a preservationist Pericles.

Well, we were great once. Can we not be great again? [...] There was a palace that was a city. It was a palace!
It was a palace and it can be a palace again.
(John Pappas)

Besides keeping the rain out…

The downpour fell with the heavy uninterrupted rush of a sweeping flood, with a sound of unchecked overwhelming fury that called to one’s mind the images of collapsing bridges, of uprooted trees, of undermined mountains. No man could breast the colossal and headlong stream that seemed to break and swirl against the dim stillness in which we were precariously sheltered as if on an island. The perforated pipe gurgled, choked, spat, and splashed in odious ridicule of a swimmer fighting for his life. ‘It is raining,’ I remonstrated. (Conrad)

Live from the 504

Everything I know about New Orleans I learned from Lil’ Wayne. Is that a problem?

On New Orleans radio, it seems like nearly every song features Lil Wayne. My kids sang his songs in class, in the hallways, before school, after school. I had a student who would rap a Lil Wayne line if he didn’t know the answer to a question.

An eighth grader wrote his Persuasive Essay on the topic “Lil Wayne is the best rapper alive.” Main ideas for three body paragraphs: Wayne has the most tracks and most hits, best metaphors and similes, competition is fake. (David Ramsey, Oxford American)

Di-sco is dead

It’s gonna make life easy for me
It’s gonna be easy to get things done

Iconic architecture is conceived and marketed as predigested, faintly hallucinatory new realities. (Independent UK)

Utopian pre-fab at MoMA, in Philly, and in Berlin. Archigram’s back, trying to make cities last by making them change. Walking, plugging in, dropping from the sky. This is Liz Diller’s architecture as special effects, gone city-wide.

The separation of the supporting structure from individual modules should enable the city to adapt without huge effort to its citizens’ individual wishes, as well as to the changing social and economic conditions. (Megastructure)

Architecture as icon vs. architecture as machine. Both promise better lives, one because it can change you, the other because you can change it. Architect as artist vs. architect as technician. It’s all in the word: master + builder.

Most of today’s so-called architectural icons represent only the iconic intentions of their designers, or commissioners. These buildings are iconic, but not actually icons in any potent sense. It doesn’t fully exist, or engage. (Independent UK)

We need built architecture, towers of brick not ideas. More craft, more tekton. Me, I just want a living room.