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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

book review : Shadow Hills

After discovering her sister Athena was plagued by similar nightmares before her death, Persephone “Phe” Archer decides to attend the boarding school in Shadow Hills, Massachusetts Athena applied to. Once she gets there, Phe finds herself investigating the town’s haunting past and how she might fit into it.

Despite a tentative beginning (I might have groaned a bit when the novel started with a dream), I was hooked by the end of chapter 1 with an electrifying meet-cute in a graveyard between Phe and her “dream” guy Zach. Their palpable chemistry is a main attraction in this fresh, thrilling take on the paranormal romance genre.


Phe is inquisitive and spunky, and though she tells us she’s broken inside, I didn’t really get that vibe from her. If anything, she felt too put together and self-possessed to be a 15 year old mourning her sister’s death. Zach is your typical brooding hottie hiding a paranormal secret, but he’s surprisingly gentlemanly and non-possessive. These two seem destined to be together…too bad Zach’s sister Corinne is dead-set on keeping them away from each other “for their own protection”.

And just why they'd be better off apart despite their undeniable, magnetic attraction is part of the mystery. The more secrets about the townspeople, their strange genetic make-up, and her own seemingly mythological part in the whole affair Phe uncovers, the more the more danger she puts herself in. Though we get enough answers and teases in this installment to get a good sense of what might be going on, I have a feeling we haven’t seen the end of Shadow Hills. And that’s fine by me – because I want more!

book review -- Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture

Paul Goldberger is the Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic for The New Yorker and Building Up is a collection of his pieces from that publication since he started in 1997.  Coincidently that year was the beginning of the last great architecture boom, which as of the Great Recession, is now a relic of the past.  In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao by Frank O. Gehry opened to the public and it brought with it the Bilbao Effect.  The architecture landscape following the Bilbao Effect is dotted with works by Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaus, Steven Holl, Zaha Hadid to mention just a few of these so-called starchitects.  Fittingly the works of all these architects appear in the book.
The book does a great job categorizing the Age of Architecture through its chapters.  The books starts with Buildings that Matter.  And love ‘em or hate ‘em the buildings that show up in this chapter certainly had a lasting effect on the field of architecture.  From Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Koolhaus’ Seattle Public Library to the 2008 Beijing Olympics architecture of Herzog and de Meuron’s “Bird’s Nest” and PTW’s “Water Cube” these buildings epitomize the innovation and excess of the time.
From there we take a look at some of the movers and shakers in Places and People. The role of these people in various aspects of the built environment are evident even today.  The Eames.  Mies van der Rohe.  Louis Kahn.  Robert Moses.  Daniel Burnham.  Try to teach an architectural history lesson without those guys.  It would be impossible.  Goldberger does a great job of telling a story while weaving in a lot of lesser known information.
Then there’s a chapter on New York.  From fashion to finance to design, New York City is always a leader.  With so many buildings in the city that never sleeps there are a lot of good and a lot of bad.  Goldberger is fair in his kudos and criticism.  And maybe more than any point in the book, Goldberger has a lot of critical things to say about things going on in New York.  Considering its the place he calls home, one may be surprised with his assessment of the city’s built environment.
While I enjoyed the book, my favorite chapter may have been Past and Present. Being a historic preservationist I take great interest in not only the protection of historic structures but also the way the past is represented and how new construction interacts with the existing fabric.  With examples from China and how’s they are dressing up commercial enterprises as traditional Chinese buildings and the true genius of Washington’s Mount Vernon (which he thinks is at least equal to Jefferson’s Monticello) Goldberger gives the past a fair shake (which isn’t always the case in the always super progressive world of starchitecture).  Furthermore he looks at the World War II Memorial on the nation’s Mall and the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial and how we build to memorialize the past.
And finally he ends the book with two fitting chapters, Museums and Ways of Living.  If any building will come to stand as the icon of the Age of Architecture it will certainly be the museum.  The building that started it all is, in fact, a museum- Bilbao.  Plus, we have to look no further than the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, as case in point as to which building is the choice of architects.  This chapter includes, not surprisingly, pieces on: Bilbao, the British Museum (Norman Foster), Milwaukee Art Museum (Santiago Calatrava), Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth (Tado Ando), Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati (Zaha Hadid), Denver Art Museum (Daniel Libeskind) to name most of them.
The most poignant piece for me is the second to last entry.  And its seems about as far from architecture as a piece in an architecture book can be, but then again, maybe its as close to architecture as any other article comprised in this book.  This particular piece is actually fromMetropolis and is titled, Disconnected Urbanism. The article is essentially about the cell phone.  But the heart of the matter is that with the cell phone there is now a “blurring of distinctions between different kinds of places.”  New York is Miami is Los Angles is Houston is Boise.  As much as we architects like to think buildings matter, we may be over selling ourselves.  To the general public there is little distinction between what is happening on the streets of New York versus what is happening on the streets of Seattle.  We’re oblivious to it.
So it looks like its time to engage the public.  And once the shine wears off, it’s not going to be the large swooping titanium curves that does it.

book review : On Private Property: Finding Common Ground on the Ownership of Land

Written by published author and Professor of Law Eric T. Freyfogle, On Private Property: Finding Common Ground in the Ownership of Land is a thoughtful look at the recurring dilemma of the private property debate. When is eminent domain justified, and when is urban sprawl too much? When should land be put in public trust to preserve natural life, and when should private property owners' rights prevail? Though Freyfogle acknowledges the concerns of the property-rights movement, he warns that the movement is at risk of distorting the institution of private ownership itself, by completely severing its connections to responsible community welfare. Criticizing the land conservation movement for its excessive and indiscriminate payments to landowners, allegedly to use their lands well, and stressing that the landowner's responsibility not to alter lands in ways that bring ecological decline should not be overlooked, Freyfogle suggests a Landowner Bill of Rights that is vastly different from current property-rights measures being debated. Packed cover to cover with well-reasoned arguments that take both public and private needs into account, On Private Party is a welcome contribution to an ongoing dispute. 

book review : The Architecture of Community


Leon Krier's The Architecture of Community is a primer on the fundamentals of the language of architecture and urbanism. In normal times, since time immemorial, one would know this language without being taught it. But in the Babel to which Modernism has today reduced these arts, we must be taught this forgotten language, and Krier's childlike drawings, distilled captions and hornbook-like aphorisms makes this the perfect textbook with which to begin reclaiming our lost literacy.
The book is a collection of essays, cartoons, drawings and photographs of proposed and built places and buildings from the author's lifetime of work, from Europe to America. It is a book of exceptional wit, wisdom and perceptiveness. The task this book lays before us is nothing less than a global ecological reconstruction. Accordingly, Krier addresses all the really pressing building issues of our times, from sustainability to the urban transect, from the nature of materials to the nature of man, from historic preservation to "architectural tuning," and so forth. This last term is a Krier invention that describes a process by which the kind of architecture that best suits the urbanism to make a beautiful city may be determined. To facilitate such aesthetic analysis, a number of potentially useful pictorial matrices are presented. This approach might well prove to be as helpful a design tool as Andrés Duany's urban transect, to which it bears a close resemblance.
But why did The Architecture of Community take the form of a children's book for adults? The reason, we discover in the book, lies in Mr. Krier's uncompromising rejection of the whole Modernist building process – from flawed aesthetic concepts to failing curtain wall construction. Thirty years ago, he famously declared, "I didn't build, because I am an architect," and "I can make true architecture because I do not build."
His way out of this impasse was to think, write and draw. And where better to begin than the beginning? So, he returned to first principles, and has made the rediscovery and explaining of these to a deaf, dumb and blind generation his life's work. The result is this book, which is perhaps the most important and oddest book about architecture ever written. It is important because it brilliantly reduces the vast and complex field of architecture and urbanism to its smallest, irreducible subatomic units. With these basic building blocks, cleansed of all dross and thus now comprehensible, we are enabled and beckoned to begin assembling an "authentic, traditional culture," to replace in toto the debased prevailing building culture.
This approach resulted in a book that is about architecture, but not of architecture. As an analogy, a human being reduced to atoms is no longer a recognizable person. Just so, Mr. Krier's buildings, reduced to the simplest of parts, seem more like built ideas than actual buildings. Should one attempt to construct a human out of atoms, without Intelligent Design and/or the infinite instructions from DNA at work through countless generations, a recognizable human could not be created. To create a human you start with a complete man and woman, and with a felicitous combination of genes and upbringing, you will produce a being like the parents, and perhaps even an improvement. The buildings that Krier has assembled from his subatomic units are of uncomfortably unpleasantly severe geometry, unsettling scales, blank unadorned surfaces, bizarre architectural devices and eerie mortuary allusions.
In short, comfortable buildings are best built from buildings, not diagrams. This book is invaluable, but not to provide models for actual buildings. The hazard of this book is that its ideas are so persuasive that it might be misused in this manner. Indeed, many a New Urbanist project boasts a building in the Krier manner, marked by what to my eyes is a characteristically awkward eccentricity.
Ironically, despite the book's condemnation of Modernism, to reduce traditions to some kind of essentials is arguably a Modernist project. The essay, "Why I Practice Classical Architecture and Traditional Building" perhaps points to the thinking behind this project. The author concludes: "I am not primarily interested in the history of traditional architectures and urbanisms but in their technology, in their modern practice," and, "The question of modernity can therefore no longer be one of period and style but one of persistent utility and quality."
I would counter that to reduce one's interest in traditional architecture and urbanism to the pragmatic concerns of technology and "their modern practice" is to fail to grasp their full art and humanity. Style, furthermore, defines the character of a building and marks its time period. How can architecture be fully human and ignore style and time, these twin inescapable realities of human life?
My admonition against the misuse of this book aside, it is imperative that we dig a bit at the roots of architecture, so that the rotted underpinnings of today's building culture might be cleared away, to release the new shoots of a vigorous renewal. For this reason, every serious architect and planner needs to spend time with this book, which James Howard Kunstler refers to in eloquent epilogue as "Mr. Krier's gift to the coming generations." With prophetic gravity, Kunstler concludes: "They are going to have to inhabit what remains of this planet … and Mr. Krier's heroic, often lonely labors have produced this indispensable beacon of principle and methodology to light their way home."
Those of us engaged with traditional architecture and urbanism know that the way back home is a long one. And on this journey, The Architecture of Community is the essential travel book. 

book review : The BLDGBLOG Book

Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG is one of the most invigorating, subversive, visually engaging, and purely pleasurable outposts on the Net, and those qualities carry over into this beautifully written and designed book. The range of Manaugh's restless intellect is breathtaking, incorporating everything from urban design to climatology, music, astronomy, pop culture, and much more. Under the guise of writing a blog about architecture, Manaugh has crafted a tribute to the world-transforming power of imagination itself. Along the way, he wrestles with some of the most athletic and ambitious minds of our time, including the late novelist J.G. Ballard, classicist Mary Beard, architect Lebbeus Woods, and urban theorist Mike Davis, author of "City of Quartz" and "Planet of Slums." 

It's hard not to laugh out loud when reading "The BLDGBLOG Book," because Manaugh's own imagination is so astonishingly fertile and nearly child-like in its refusal to abide in comfortably deadening assumptions. Like a prodigious three-year old armed with a flaneur's comprehensive street-level knowledge of the way things work, Manaugh relentlessly interrogates everything we take for granted about the environments we create. The overall effect is to open new vistas in what appeared solid and settled, as if you'd suddenly discovered a secret passageway to the unknown in your own cramped apartment -- one of Manaugh's pet obsessions. 

For example, hearing about a collaboration between architects and sound engineers to create "sonic windows" in a house that bring the outside aural environment indoors, Manaugh imagines the resident of such a house -- built above a glacier -- nearly immobilized by awe and wonder. "Crystalline pressures of melting ice 3,000 feet below you suddenly break, sending cascades of sound shivering upward through the house's foundations," he writes, with a taut lyricism rarely found in books these days, much less on blogs. "Some days it's impossible to get out of bed, hypnotized by unearthly noises." 

What is this kind of writing -- science fiction? Magical hyper-realism? Who cares? Manaugh has succeeded in creating his own genre and remaking the world on his own terms. To him, the oncoming parade of catastrophes of economy, population, and climate are arguments for striving ever more boldly to refashion the world in accord with our innermost desires. 

One of the first people to recognize the author's young genius was Allen Ginsberg. Though Manaugh only elliptically refers to his teenage apprenticeship with the late author of "Howl" and other poems in this book, it's easy to see why Ginsberg was smitten. Manaugh is able to fuse abstract musing with concrete particulars in a way that is particularly suited to our historical moment, yet harkens back to the restless probing of reality embodied by Ginsberg's own poetic mentor, the pioneering 18th century multimedia poet William Blake. Even the modus operandi of this book -- the fervid "hyperlinking" between seemingly disparate realms of emotion, experience, and intellectual discipline -- feels appropriate for our densely networked, neurotically twittering era. But unlike other blog books, this volume will outlast our ever-accelerating Now, because it's so luminously written. It's easy to imagine a smart kid stumbling on scans of "The BLDGBLOG Book" in some pocket-sized Library of Congress on Mars 100 years from now and feeling energized to take up his or her own outrageous vocation.