The Metropolis Observed
exploration
underworld
Never mind the luge police. One intrepid reporter enters the skunnel of love and hopes for a possum-free ride.
by Bill Donahue
At two in the morning, Greg Small, a scraggly cook with an Einstein-like tangle of hair, is traipsing through the suburban streets of Ventura, California, and talking (God knows why) about the collective unconscious. "It's weird to think about," the 24-year-old muses. "I mean, the whole idea that urban myths and stuff stem from the imagination of, like, so many people."
Small reaches a weedy culvert and hops in. Then, as a large dog hails him, barking and bashing against a high cyclone fence, he sinks into the ground. He disappears within a tubular storm drain, lies down feet-first on a makeshift long skateboard, and starts to roll. The sound of his wheels roars in the pipe, and ahead of him, way beyond the puny range of his headlamp, there is human noise--the haunting, echoey laughter and shouts of a friend careening along at 20 miles per hour.
Ah, skunneling! The very word--a mutation of "skateboarding in tunnels" and a phonic cousin of the slur "scum"-- captures the ancient punk heritage of America's newest way to shatter your collarbone. Skunneling, which has been flourishing in Ventura for the past couple years, is one more pastime invented by scrappy malcontents determined to milk joy out of concrete.
The conquest of urban-jungle-as-sport arguably began in the tunnels, in the Fifties, when surf legend Greg Knoll first piloted his Flexible Flyer sled through California's smooth storm drains. Knoll's wave-riding descendants popularized "street style" skateboarding, so now kids everywhere are hurling themselves at parking blocks, stairways, and curbs. There is even a California sneaker company, Soaps, that puts a slippery, Teflon-like slab on its outsoles, so that wearers can hop up onto railings and, teetering on no more board than their own skinny feet, glide down like a favorite skate star.
Meanwhile, under the ground, an analogous form of skull-duggery is blossoming. "Tunneling," skunneling's more mild elder, involves trespassing on foot. Practitioners wend through subterranean passages, down ladders, and along hot, clacking pipes as the threat of being busted looms. Many colleges are underlaid by tunnels; it's a popular freshman activity to skulk through them. But such pranks are far beneath the radar of the two-year-old Toronto-based zine that is galvanizing tunnelmania. In a recent issue, Infiltration celebrates the "Holy Grail" of Minneapolis, a "block-sized natural cave attached to the storm drains under 50-story skyscrapers." There's also an article about Stéphane, a Parisian who has computer-mapped six levels of his city's catacombs, and a how-to on exploring subways, by Infiltration's editor, Ninjalicious. "There is little danger of electrocution," Ninj advises, "but don't quote me on that if you die."
If Infiltration boasts some crackle and wit, the skunnel scene seems, in contrast, a few notches lower on the brain stem--Beavis and Butt-head to the Simpsons of Ninj's publication. Skunnel boards are, for starters, an unholy sight. These are not the graceful, longboards that are now the rage among older, surf-inspired skateboarders. No, the skunnel craft is actually three Seventies-era skis bolted together. Or a battered water ski affixed with wheels and a footrest (a chrome tube snagged at Goodwill). The things are ungainly and top-heavy, but who cares?
Greg Small lives in a low-slung Ventura ranch house bedecked, year-round, with Christmas lights. The living room is a hellhole of beer bottles, CDs, Playboys, and cheese-slimy pizza boxes. On the wall, I read a proudly scrawled, multiple-authored list of "One Million Reasons to Be a Bachelor." (Number 16: "Dusting is done with a putty knife.") A voice cries, "Let's roll!" and then Small and three disciples and I pile into somebody's father's Land Cruiser and begin winding through the hills of Ventura, toward a naturalist's nightmare.
William Fulton, author of Reluctant Metropolis: Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (1997), considers Ventura's myriad storm drains "a metaphor for how the engineers have triumphed in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, there's a trend toward green urban planning--toward, say, letting water flow naturally and seep into the ground. Here, the creek beds are concrete chutes, and everything--skateboarders, rainwater, the oil from cars--flows right to the ocean, quickly."
Greg Small has been touring this un-ecological underground on foot for six years, and often when he's drunk he forays into the pipes to play "Cleansers of the Damned," smiting make-believe demons. "The tunnels," he says, "are like my neighborhood." But much of Ventura's labyrinth, built to send flash floods out to sea, is unskatable--made of corrugated metal, for instance--so we search for new skunnel paths. We plunge into a four-foot-high tube and start hiking on wet sand. "Possum," says Small, noticing some fresh animal tracks. "Have you ever been cornered by a possum? They go crazy. They'll tear you apart."
We push on, our backs stooped, our sneakers splashing in puddles. Soon we hear flowing water--irrigation runoff trickling in from the orange groves above. It is not clear, really, whether the stream might gush at us. Sagely, Small's housemate, Nathan Paul, finds a tiny chamber topped by a manhole and advises, "Knock the spider webs off of that thing and crawl out."
"There's a road over us," quavers a neophyte named Dave, "You want to die?"
Nathan pushes the lid up himself and scrambles out. Quiet, no cars: We are fine, and, in fact, none of the 15 or so Ventura worthies who've skunneled has ever broken a bone. "Once," Small says, shrugging, "I went over this jump in a pipe and slammed into the wall, hard." I inquire about the police. "How're they gonna catch us?" he asks. "Luge cops with lights on the front of their heads?"
We hit a parking garage so that Dave can learn how to brake by dragging his heels and gloved hands on the pavement. Dave crashes. He does a somersault, actually, and gets up laughing in that hearty way of someone who's been embarrassingly wounded. I am not inspired. But then we drive back to the hills and, in the darkness, Nathan hands me something--the water ski. My vehicle and I enter the underworld.
"Go!" someone screams, and I go so I can feel the seams in the concrete jolt up into my shoulders. The board keeps listing right, up onto the elliptical wall, and all I can see is a sliver of light. The tunnel twists. It gets steeper and my board goes faster and my shirt gets snarled up in the wheels and it rips and I keep going until eventually one idea, Zen and blissful, fills my mind. I think, "Bro, this pavement is smooth!"
But after a mile, the ride spills into a long, flat landing. My wheels stop, and then, all around me, I hear the dogs again, the dogs driven crazy by a weird rumbling under the earth. They are howling at us, snarling and leaping. They think we are ridiculous and uncivil. And as I skitter away, across the last lawn toward the car, I know this: The dogs are right. |
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sports
grandstanding
A scrimmage over plans for the Razorbacks' stadium makes Peter Eisenman an enemy of the state.
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by Erica Werner
The days when Peter Eisenman wore his Razorbacks jacket on the streets of Manhattan and spoke fondly of Arkansas to bemused urbanite friends came to an ignoble end recently.
Publicly persecuted by a state agency and feeling "used" by once-fawning university officials, architecture's famously hotheaded intellectual quit his visiting professorship at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in mid-November, vowing to eliminate "any trace of my influence in Arkansas." Eisenman's plan to expand the school's football stadium with flame-red ramps curling into space got an enthusiastic reception for a while--and then it went down to a scheme by Atlanta's Heery International, producer of standard-issue sports arenas all over the South.
Eisenman had created the design partly at the urging of Frank Broyles, the university athletic director whose proficiency at building a nationally competitive sports program once prompted Bill Clinton to say of him, "He could run General Motors."
Perhaps it's not surprising then that Broyles ultimately chose a no-frills football factory over one that could suggest to good ol' boy donors and alumni a normal stadium that went to sleep with its hair wet. "We just didn't think it was in the best interest of the Razorback program to do anything controversial," he says. But Broyles spent the months before he canned the design flaunting it to donors, business groups, and even the governor, leading Eisenman to assume he would be building the Razorbacks' new pen. When he heard he wasn't, he felt that the university had exploited his name and his design for publicity. So he walked, his New York sarcasm intact. "Is the athletic director a very smart cookie? You bet," Eisenman says. "Am I a dumb cookie? You bet."
Eisenman's colleagues at Fayetteville, where he taught for four years, are distressed that they won't get to watch home games in an architecturally significant setting, but they're devastated at losing their department's star. "It's heartache for me. It's absolute heartache," says Dan Bennett, dean of the School of Architecture.
Less emotional reasons drove members of the Arkansas State Board of Architects to reverse their position after charging Eisenman in November with illegally practicing architecture without a state license and threatening to fine him $1,000 a day for months of violations. In Arkansas, "practicing architecture" includes merely offering to provide designs for a building, and soon after news of Eisenman's stadium plans appeared in the press, board members started receiving anonymous tips about his lawlessness,
including an Eisenman sketch clipped from the New York Times and flagged with a stickie note: "Take a look at this!"
In most states, architects don't apply for a license until they've secured a contract, and Eisenman applied for his in September, when he was short-listed for the $50 to $60 million stadium expansion. Initially, that wasn't good enough for the board. "Do you have to obtain a license before you go fishing, or do you get it after you catch that 20-pound bass?" asked board president Herman Lee.
But when their pursuit of Eisenman met with public ridicule--including scathing editorials in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette denouncing it as a "jihad"--Lee and his board hastily regrouped. They set up a videoconference in early December, beamed Eisenman in from Manhattan, and blessed him with a state license on the spot. All smiles, Eisenman forgave the board that only weeks before had goaded him into sputtering indignation, and together they bonded against the common enemy: the university. "I'm convinced he was mistreated," Lee said. Asked to elaborate, however, he demurred. "Most of us on the board attended the university. It's like Mother, and we don't like to complain too much about Mother."
As with real-life moms, Eisenman may have just cause for anger, but that doesn't mean it's easy to say good-bye. In a letter to the board late last year, just after he lost the stadium project, the architect wistfully recalled the summer afternoon in 1995 when he delivered Fayetteville's commencement address and received a Steuben glass rendering of the tusked porcine mascot. "To this day, the Razorback sits proudly on my desk," he wrote. "In short, I was not just another architect, but a member of the university community."
Now that he's met with the business end of the Razorback, Eisenman prefers being just another architect. "If the trustees don't think I'm fit to do a building on campus, then I don't think I'm fit to teach," he says. "I got run out of the state. I'm gone." |
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renovation
the idle tower
After more than 30 years of awful histroy, a notorious University of Texas icon finally reopens. |
by Karen Olsson
In the center of the University of Texas at Austin campus stands the sand-colored limestone tower from which Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old engineering student, made himself--and his perch--infamous in 1966. For an hour and a half on August 1, Whitman shot at passersby from the tower's observation deck, killing 16 people and wounding 31 others, until he was gunned down by police.
The deck was sealed off following the murders. It reopened in 1967, only to become the site of another sort of horrible death: over the next seven years, four people committed suicide by leaping from the surrounding parapet. After a young clerical worker jumped in 1974, the university closed the deck again, and it has remained off-limits until this year.
There was a time when the tower served as a symbol of Lone Star pride, not tragedy. It forms part of the university's Main Building, which was completed in 1937 under the supervision of architect Paul Cret, who, in his master plan for the campus, fused Spanish elements to his Beaux-Arts style of civic architecture. U.T.'s regents, having been stiffed for years by a stingy state legislature, wanted to erect a building to rival the state capitol just to the south. For decades to follow, the U.T. tower and the pink granite capitol dome were the Austin skyline.
Students have introduced a number of proposals to reopen the tower's deck, all of which were denied until a year ago. In spring 1998, three students delivered a winner to U.T. president Larry Faulkner, who appointed a committee to review it. The committee recommended that the university install external safety barriers and make the tower wheelchair accessible, at an estimated cost of around a half-million dollars, plus $86,000 a year in operating expenses. The Board of Regents approved the final plan in November, and the deck is expected to open this May.
By the time it does, the deck will have been surrounded with steel grillwork, extending upward from the parapet to the interior wall. (Engineers at the university's Facilities and Campus Planning office also considered the
option of a Plexiglas enclosure, but because of the enormous wind pressure and the need for air-conditioning, that idea was quickly abandoned.) According to Steve Kraal, the assistant vice president for Facilities and Campus Planning who oversees the project, the aesthetic challenge of new safety measures will be to keep the deck from resembling a cage. "Our intent is to make it disappear," he says of the added metal. A mockup of the grillwork was put over the southeast corner of the deck last fall, and Kraal says it passed the test: It's barely visible from the capitol. |
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robotics
really rosie
One physicist proves that mechanical and electronic household help does exist with a vacuum.
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by Sarah Horowitz
"It's 1999. How come you can't get a home vacuum cleaner robot?" asks Mark W. Tilden, a 37-year-old staff physicist in Los Alamos National Laboratory's biophysics division. And he's not alone this spring cleaning season in his more-Mr.-Mom-than-Mr.-Roboto pique. After all, domestic help of the kind we were promised as kids--the Jetsons' Rosie, for example--isn't exactly available at Target. Instead, home robots inhabit academic research departments and esoteric factories. They are delicate, paranoid, temperamental, and expensive. They require endless programming, and even then, their performance is spotty.
Tilden should know. As a computer systems engineer in Canada a decade ago, he built an elaborate household robot that was supposed to keep his place clean. Instead, the Solarover 1.0 sucked down socks, inhaled rolls of toilet paper, and spun in circles, herded by Tilden's cat, Ninja.
Fed up with the Solarover's stubborn adherence to its programmed duties, Tilden began to build small insect-like robots with no computer components at all. Comprised of capacitors, transistors, resistors, and other mechanical and electronic parts, these machines were the first of Tilden's now-trademarked BEAM robots (Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics).
In 1991 Tilden made his first truly helpful household 'bot: Solarspinner 1.0. With a bungee cord, he attached its six- by two-inch body to the top of a window frame. Solar-powered, the robot sought light, so as the sun moved, it crawled across the glass, cleaning with lens brushes mounted on its underside. Tilden created more machines: a robot that captured flies and pushed them onto the floor, where tiny "dustbunny cowboys" shoveled the insects away; electric wallpaper; security blinkers; walking remote controls. At the height of Tilden's experimenting, more than 50 machines of 12 distinct "species" lived in his one-bedroom apartment. "This is the future of robots," Tilden declares of his brainless wonders. No programming necessary.
Nevertheless, computer-driven help is in the works. Electrolux has created a robot vacuum cleaner that's not yet on the market. But you can already buy a Solar Mower from Sweden's Husqvarna, and Robomow, made by the Israeli company Friendly Machines, is available in Britain for just under $2,000.
"Sounds good on TV but fails in reality," pronounces Tilden of these newest robo-domestics. "They'll be garage-sale fodder, because their care, brittleness, and complexity are always their downfall."
While not slaves to their computer complexity, Tilden's tiny machines aren't at home completing their chores either. They're currently on display in art galleries and museums around the world, or at the lab for presentations.
"So to promote the science," Tilden says ruefully, "I now have to do my own vacuuming."
For more on microprocessor-free maid service and complete details on this spring's BEAM Robot Games for students, visit the BEAM site at sst.lanl.gov/robot/.
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exhibition
nypd blueprint
A current show reveals that crime perception and prevention have long been a force in designing the city.
Before the mug shot, there was the rogue's gallery--the NYPD didn't begin photographing suspected criminals until 1917. From top to bottom: Mrs. LaTouche posed as a stockbroker and swindled you women out of investment money; Calandro Bettini led a crew of counterfeiters; Dutch Miller was a burglar killer, and member of the Bowery Lodging House Gang; Piggy Norton was generally notorious and the perpetrator of crimes "too numerous to mention."
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by Kristin Miller
When you walk into the New-York Historical Society these days, you walk into a narrow, dark space: an alleyway behind some tenements. A body is visible through a window, and a mangy cat--or a mugger--would be right-at-noir-home slinking behind the garbage pails. "We wanted each visitor to feel the danger of being a police officer on a dark city street," says Dorothy Hartman, curator of "New York's Finest: A History of the New York City Police Department," which runs through March 21. "It should also remind us of those times when we all wish there was a cop around." It works.
What exactly is it that makes us quiver at the Historical Society? As Dickens and everyone else chronicled, in the nineteenth century fear coalesced around three elements: cities, crime, and class. Not much has changed in this century (except that class probably goes by another name). It's still fear that shapes our cities--so much so that, according to police policy expert Jerome Skolnick of New York University, "The police force is the most expensive and important institution of urban government." It's fear that Mike Davis credits in his 1990 book City of Quartz for "merging urban design, architecture, and the police apparatus" and creating "fortress cities" of the future.
Crime as catalyst for modifying the urban landscape has an illustrious history. For example, Haussmann didn't plan the wide boulevards of Paris simply to boost the ego of Napoleon III--his design also let troops control the city with greater ease.
The street scene at the museum could easily be from the notorious New York slum of Five Points, a dark warren where danger lurked around every corner and criminals were easily hidden. It's no coincidence that the alleys and tenements of Five Points today are covered with the massive edifices of One Police Plaza and the criminal courts of Foley Square.
But the clearing of slums and building of model neighborhoods didn't do the trick: Americans are still scared. Even providing an alternative to the skinny, dank passages of the city in the wide open spaces of Central Park hasn't retained the salutary effect on New Yorkers that nineteenth-century theorists had hoped for. Elizabeth Blackmar, author of The Park and the People (1992), notes, "The irony is that today, New Yorkers feel less secure in a open area than in an enclosed environment." Now it's crime in the park that makes big news. Either we're way too far from our prairie roots or hopelessly paranoid.
Skolnick's comparative studies in modern policing in U.S. cities, collected in The New Blue Line (1988) and Above the Law (1994), have shown that the way that officers feel about the city they patrol is crucial to the quality of policing. The sunny, low-slung streets of Southern California might lack New York's "mean intensity," but not the danger or capacity to impart fear to officers and citizens alike. In fact, as Davis shows, in Los Angeles, public space has eroded so much that wealthier neighborhoods are becoming the domain of high-tech private police forces. Skolnick notes that as the course of policing moves even further toward "zero tolerance" and "quality of life" crimes, urban design is bound to follow in the form of inner-city cleanups using both bulldozers and foot patrols.
Of course, the notion that police might have something to do with the design of the city comes as no surprise to present-day New Yorkers. Mickey Mouse dens have replaced the Kit Kat Club in Times Square, and citizens cross the streets just where the mayor wants them to--under the watchful eyes of the men and women in blue. |
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branding
brothers' keeper
With a new store, the (imperceptibly stylish) 180-year-old haberdasher Brooks pursues a racier image. |
by Ellen Barry
On March 1, when Brooks Brothers opens its store at 666 Fifth Avenue, Gatsbys and sons of Gatsbys will bow under the full weight of the modern age. That much was clear as soon as the teaser poster went up at the corner of 53rd Street, with its two-story head shot of nuzzling models looking for all the world like the cover of an enormous romance read.
Somewhere in the Yale Club in the sky, long-dispatched generations of Brooks brothers--the kind who responded to the cultural fomentation of the 1960s by widening ties to 3 1/8 inches from 2 7/8 inches--are looking down on Midtown Manhattan and wondering what, precisely, is going on.
Located just 10 blocks from Brooks Brothers' 83-year-old flagship location on Madison Avenue, the new branch was conceived by top executives as a "destination store," meant to attract customers both old and new out of pure curiosity. The Fifth Avenue location will replace Brooks' storied stable-boy-and-shaving-brush aesthetic with 23,000 feet of glossy space in the spirit of the Madison store's sixth floor, a glamorous modern showroom designed by Barbara Barry, who has also reworked the homes of various Hollywood stars.
The search for a better identity began shortly after the British retailer Marks & Spencer bought Brooks Brothers in 1988 for $750 million, only to realize that the company was losing money. Joe Gromek, CEO, then brought in a crack team of image people from his days at The Limited. Thus the looser look for the current catalogue, in which the Brooks Brothers man strikes such un-preppy postures as lolling on the sidewalk with a sexy moue. But the clearest message will issue from the new shop, which Brooks Brothers creative director Derek Ungless describes as "the place where you will experience the brand."
Although Ungless is veering away from the Niketown store-as-entertainment concept--"That's kind of played out," he says--it's clear when he talks about Fifth Avenue that every square inch is meaningful. He went through the same soul-searching for Madison's sixth floor. "That was the beginning of really trying to force a new retail design," he says. "The floor had to have a certain feel of luxury. I mean, you're buying a $2,000 suit, so you don't want to be walking around on concrete. We're not Prada. Our design can't be ironic; that's not the customer we have. Irony is not going to work at Brooks Brothers."
Indeed. Brooks Brothers is hardly the first retailer to turn its attention to branding--after all, nuzzling models are nothing novel to J. Crew and Banana Republic--but then, we're talking about Brooks Brothers, an institution whose philosophy of style was best put by Ashbel Wall, the great-great-great-grandson of founder Henry Sands Brooks: "We move," he was quoted in the New York Times in 1968, "but we move almost imperceptibly."
That was particularly true when it came to publicity. For the first 170 years of its existence, Brooks Brothers regarded the entire practice of marketing with a distaste that other companies might reserve for steak-knife premiums. Early advertising copy is so ponderous, so peppered with commas and semicolons, that it seems to have been issued straight from the office of Henry James. One 1918 sales pitch ran: "That it is an achievement to have completed 100 years of upright, well-rewarded merchandising; for a family to have built up, maintained and retained control for four generations of a business, such as this, few, we think, will deny."
The company managed to sustain this absence of spin through the late 1960s, deigning to advertise regularly only in the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. And as recently as 1992, Brooks Brothers' then-president, William V. Roberti, told the New York Times that the company was devoting very little money to marketing. "Don't believe in it," he said tersely.
You don't have to spend much time with Ungless to realize that Brooks Brothers has changed its mind. "In retail, there's always that sort of hazy line: Is the brand the clothes, or is it something else?" ponders Ungless, who is originally from London and has a buzz cut. "With Brooks, the brand was blue and gray suits. The brand and the product were the same thing."
The 49-year-old Ungless was not educated in business or fashion, but in illustration; he says one of his great influences was Julian Allen, who pioneered the noir comic strip and described himself as a "creative anarchist." After working as art director of Rolling Stone and creative director at Details, Ungless was ushered into haberdashery seven years ago as vice president for marketing at The Limited. All of which has made him a believer in the art of the brand who condemns the Robertian dismissal of marketing. "He's not here anymore," Ungless says, pointedly, of Roberti. "It's awfully pompous. I mean, it's a pompous way of doing business. You have to get your message out."
From the moment Gromek took over, the message has been generated systematically. Paris-based image-burnishers Desgrippes Gobé--which has also done branding for The Limited, Abercrombie & Fitch, Sears, and Long John Silver--put Brooks Brothers' executives through a procedure known as BrandFOCUS, in which in-house arbiters were asked to identify a "Brooks Brothers flower" or a "Brooks Brothers car" from a field of flowers or cars.
Out of this was born a brand position made up of seven words, some of which, like "Correct," pretty well fit the Brooks Brothers archetype, and some of which, like "Eclectic," suggest that Ungless will be earning his keep. The transition has not exactly been headlong. For example, Desgrippes Gobé recommended that the typeface on the label be changed from cursive to block letters, until Ungless arrived and decided that the font proposal had "gone too far." That whole debate lasted two and a half years; the new labels were not printed.
A brand is never finished, of course, but the Fifth Avenue opening should be some kind of barometer for the Brooks Brothers image team. Meanwhile, Ungless watches and waits, feeling hard-won satisfaction when the people in the store resemble the people in his advertisements. "You can kind of smell it when it's happening," he says, optimistically. "Tommy smelled it when it was happening to him."
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music
dancing to architecture
Turns out that buildings can carry a tune.
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by Carly Berwick
When U&I Software released Metasynth 2.0 in 1997, architect Nicholas Grimshaw had little idea that his 1993 Waterloo Terminal in London would become intimately connected with this digital music software. Thanks to a program that mathematically converts images into sound--and the efforts of ambient music pioneer Tetsu Inoue--Grimshaw's blueprints for Waterloo are sonically available on CD.
The second in New York--based Caipirinha Productions' Architettura series,
the Waterloo Terminal CD was released in November. The first CD, released in January 1998, by Savvas Ysatis and Taylor Deupree, was based on Toyo Ito's Tower of Winds; the third CD, by David Toop, was inspired by Itsuko Hasegawa's Museum of Fruit and is due out this February. Each musician has chosen interpretive approaches particularly suited to each building. The Museum of Fruit, for instance, evokes natural forms, such as seeds or insects, so Toop favors more basic, less synthetic mixing.
For the glass-and-steel Waterloo Terminal, Inoue hit upon Metasynth as the most appropriate way to convert one modern, rigorously detailed structure into another. He scanned Grimshaw's schematics and photographs of the terminal and ran them through the program. Inoue, like Grimshaw, was particularly fascinated by the terminal's roof. Because of site limitations, the width of the roof had to taper from 164 feet to just under 100 feet as it passed east to west. While the eastern side is clad in stainless steel, Grimshaw ran all-glass cladding on the western side, making for much of the building's spectacular contradictions of lightness and solidity. When the roof's elaborate structure was translated into music, the effect, not surprisingly, was somewhat "random and out of control," says Inoue, and provided the sections most challenging for him to edit and shape.
Iara Lee, the founder and head of Caipirinha, sees both architecture and music as creatures of technology, and proclaims that "one doesn't need to be working in a single field anymore." She launched the series with Ito's Tower of Winds because she was attracted to its constantly changing appearance. Ito himself says he has long "been wanting to create an architectural space that is like the space of music."
For the Tower of Winds, Ysatis and Deupree offer a rhythmic, more intuitive rendering of a building with evanescent moods. Ito took a 70-foot tower in the middle of a train roundabout in Yokohama, Japan, and encased it in mirrored plates and an outer layer of aluminum. Computer-controlled floodlights between the two layers respond to exterior noises and wind speeds--and at night, they light the tower like a kaleidoscope. "Since the building was preexisting and transformed, we transformed preexisting sound," says Ysatis.
True to its subject, the third CD promises to be the most organic of all the collaborations. Hasegawa's Museum of Fruit consists of three pod-like steel shells with partially glazed domes in view of Mount Fuji. The suggestively earthy buildings are connected underground, as if by roots. Toop says that he sees both himself and the architect as concerned with "the creation of a second nature, using high-tech means." To this end, Toop used less computer sequencing and incorporated more recorded live music. "Music is a description of a place that doesn't exist but that you wished did," he says. "It comes close to architecture, which represents a local utopia."
The composer's affinity with the architect is uncanny. As Hasegawa has written, "Today, utopia can only be realized in a fictional form." |
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passings
albert frey (1903-1998)
A disciple of Le Corbusier, he made himself a great American Modernist. |
by Jennifer Golub
Albert Frey died in his sleep at home on Saturday, November 14, a month after he and I had completed a three-year collaboration on Albert Frey Houses 1 + 2 (Princeton Architectural Press). He was 95. A member of Le Corbusier's atelier, Albert was known for his detailing of the Villa Savoye. He came to the United States in 1930 and brought high Modernism to the desert outside Palm Springs, where he realized residences and civic structures that synthesized his passions for technology and nature into a romantic ideal of American Modernism--all unaffected sparseness and elegant thrift.
Albert documented the construction and completion of his proj-ects himself in photographs and 8mm films. His archive of photos, particularly of his travels across America, embody his lifelong fascination with the elegance and efficiency of modern materials and the intersection of the natural and manufactured worlds. But Albert was no futurist, despite the obvious morphological similarities. He continually looked to nature, asking how he could take its highest principles--economy, discipline, functionalism, beauty--and make them fundamental to his architecture.
He was still in touch with the colors, forms, and rhythms of nature in his nineties. Visitors to Albert's desert home in recent years stood under a serene blue ceiling that reflected ripples from the pool. The white cotton duck slipcovers were cool to the touch. Albert wore a yellow shirt. Or a peach one with white slacks. If you were there early, he might be feeding the quail. If you stayed toward noon, he placed vegetable bits on a rock for the squirrel and lizard who came daily. As the sun intensified, Albert would draw the yellow curtains and politely ask you to leave so that he could take his nap. |
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competition
very first federal
Giving the tilt a whirl, a San Francisco jury selects two unknown New Yorkers to save a government plaza. |
by Ron Nyren
Last fall, Andrew Bernheimer brought his father along on a site walk through the Philip Burton Federal Building Plaza in San Francisco, two blocks from City Hall. The old plaza had already been demolished. The new design, concocted by Bernheimer and Jared Della Valle, will tilt the entire 42,000-square-foot plaza so that it rises 10 feet off the ground at its highest corner. "I can't believe they're letting you do this," snickered father to son as they picked their way through the acre of rubble. "They're crazy."
Dad has good reason to be astonished. Fresh out of architecture school, New Yorkers Bernheimer, 30, and Della Valle, 27, don't have a built project to their name. And neither has ever lived in San Francisco. Nevertheless, their proposal for the plaza redesign was among three to tie for first place (from a pool of 119 entries) in the 1996 San Francisco Prize. Sponsored by the General Services Administration and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the competition was open to everyone, not just licensed designers. The GSA interviewed the three first-place and three second-place winners before awarding the $2 million commission to Della Valle + Bernheimer Design. (The duo's only previous collaboration was on a competition a few months earlier in Barcelona.) "We were just entering these to see if we could work together," Bernheimer says. "This is the kind of project we hoped and prayed we'd get by the age of 40."
The old plaza has been a problem since its construction in 1964. Often its two fountains treated passersby to a cold shower. Even after the fountains were shut off a decade ago, the area remained an unfriendly place for office workers to eat their lunches, as tall, slab-style buildings on either side form a wind tunnel for San Francisco's strong, chilly ocean breezes. Also, the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma raised fears of similar terrorist attacks. This prompted Mark Tortorich, project executive for the GSA in San Francisco, to call up SFMOMA and ask for assistance cosponsoring a competition. "We didn't want to make the building a fortress," he says. The resulting competition brief bore the title "The Poetics of Security."
Della Valle and Bernheimer's poetic decision was to turn the entire 400-foot-long site into a ramp. The continuous slope rises to the front of the building, as well as to the site's western edge. Folds in the surface of the tilted plane become benches and areas for grass, indigenous flowers, and concealed lighting. This elegantly simple solution addresses the plaza's three main problems--wind, accessibility, and security. The 10-foot-high western edge, fortified by six New Zealand Christmas trees, helps block the wind. The incline is gentle enough to satisfy ADA requirements, providing a single route for everyone approaching the building. And the folds--in addition to bollards and a handrail at the low southeast side and more trees along the front edge--serve as physical barriers to prevent anyone from driving a bomb up to the building's entrance. The tilt also enhances security by offering excellent lines of sight from the building.
"I was pleasantly surprised by the GSA selection," says Jim Chappell, president of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR). "For the federal government to choose this scheme took a lot of nerve. But then, all six finalists offered radical solutions. None of them were what a typical landscape architect would come up with."
Recently, San Francisco seems to have had more than its fair share of controversial public projects, from plans for replacing a span of the Bay Bridge to a proposal for a sculpture of a giant foot along the waterfront. The 1997 San Francisco Prize, for instance, generated much contention. Here the subject was Union Square, only 12 blocks from the Federal Building Plaza. The jury gave the grand prize to F.M. Design of New York, whose plan resembled a flattened pyramid or a big paper napkin, depending on who you talk to. Crowds rallied at a SPUR meeting to deride the grand prize decision, and in the end, city officials passed over the jury's top choice and awarded the commission to one of the more conservative entries, by Sausalito-based landscape architects April Philips and Michael Fotheringham. "There's a considerable historic preservation movement in San Francisco," says Chappell. "So there was pressure to make Union Square a historic landmark as is. Had the city selected a radical redesign, there would have been a great public outcry."
In contrast, Della Valle and Bernheimer's design has been a stealth project, inspiring no protests and garnering little mention in the local media. But then, the plaza is on federal, not civic, property. "It surprises me how these federal projects often go unnoticed," Tortorich says. In fact, Mark Horton, a San Francisco architect who hosts the AIASF's Community Critique and whose own plaza redesign received an honorable mention in the 1996 contest, was unaware that the GSA had actually chosen an architect and begun construction. Designs generated by these kinds of competitions "usually disappear into the ether," he says. The project "hasn't come up in conversation with other architects. But this one has a lot less public presence than Union Square. And it was a god-awful place to begin with."
Though thrilled to have a public space as their first project, Della Valle and Bernheimer had no idea what to expect from the federal government as a client. "They've been great, to our surprise," says Bernheimer. "Open-minded, informed, and critical."
And the GSA seems equally pleased with the tilt of its two young designers. "They're so excited," says Tortorich, "so anxious to develop new ideas and accommodate our goals." One can only hope that the citizens of San Francisco are as content when the project is completed this spring. The true test may be when construction equipment departs and brown-baggers emerge, pale from countless indoor lunches, to test the wind before tentatively spreading out sandwiches and napkins on the slopes of the new plaza. |
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