Two young Aussies prove they're fit to design a Times Square icon.

With eight months to go until the real millennium begins, the winners of the tkts2k design competition have rolled out a very twenty-first-century red carpet for patrons of tkts, the Times Square discount-theater-ticket booth. First prize, announced by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in early February, went to young Australian architects John Choi and Tai Ropiha. The pair beat out big names and fancy proposals by answering the competition's fundamental question: How to get tiny, triangular Father Duffy Square, home to the booth and a beloved statue, noticed within Times Square's supersaturated visual field. The winners' crimson resin stairs create a canopy for the ticket sellers and an attention-getting public space. During the day, the red fights for primacy with the yellow of taxi cabs; at night the stairs are lit from within--a glowing podium vividly contrasting all that neon.

"It's generous to the city, and it's a subtle way of celebrating theatricality," says Raymond Gastil, head of the Van Alen Institute, which directed the competition. "Rather than trying to be a sign itself, it's a memorable urban stage." In addition, the stairs provide a backdrop for the 1937 bronze statue of the plot's namesake, Father Duffy, which Catholic groups feared was being overwhelmed by Broadway's booming business.

Like Choi and Ropiha, the majority of the 683 applicants attempted singular gestures, in a variety of quirky ways. "There was a tremendous response," says jury member Marion Weiss, of Weiss/Manfredi Architects. "What was so exciting was that the mandate of the competition was so very simple. It didn't ask for consultants, it didn't ask for cost estimates or fancy models. The possibilities for expression were extraordinary--and it's one of the most provocative settings in the world." Second prize went to local firms Thomas Phifer and Partners and Ove Arup & Partners. Their design would suspend a glass-and-steel canopy, jam-packed with climate-controlling technology, over the entire triangle. "A spectacular gesture," says Gastil, "though it would both cost a lot to do and be a maintenance headache."

The current structure, a high-Seven-ties scaffolding notable for its supergraphics, was built to be temporary--27 years ago. It took Times Square's renaissance to get the booth's owners, the Theatre Development Fund (TDF), to reinvent the Mayers & Schiff As-sociates design. Ironically, many of the entries made reference to the existing structure. Choi and Ropiha played up the red; others offered higher-tech scaffolding. One of two third prizes went to a Canadian scheme that boasted a collapsible stage on top of the ticket booth. Honorable mentions included a box-like booth decorated with huge rainbow letters--the de-signers politely referenced Robert Venturi in their statement--and a vampy scheme featuring a sweeping red aluminum curtain (with klieg-light signage, for the full starlet effect).

Gastil and Weiss believe the clever winner has a better-than-usual chance of being built, without getting watered down. "It didn't break the rules," Weiss says. "Any refinements would not undermine the strength of the scheme. The more complex a situation, the more likely it is to be eroded beyond recognition." Also key was the "enormous" 11-member jury, composed of designers, urban planners, theater producers, and the people who wait in line. "It would be wrongheaded just to have designers, who can wash their hands and leave," says Weiss. This way, no one can accuse the TDF of springing some esoteric redesign on them. The TDF, at least, needs no convincing that tkts deserves a radical face-lift. "The Theatre Development Fund has the resources to raise the money," Gastil adds. "They are willing to spend what it takes to build an icon." --Alexandra Lange

Dutch activists drive home the need for urban greenspace.

Behold the great American eyesore: a front yard overrun by defunct automobiles. Other nations can but marvel at such profligate land use--particularly the Dutch, who at 419 people per square kilometer enjoy the highest population density in the Western world. Inevitably, a pair of green-thumbed Dutch activists recently stood the American paradigm on its head. Last October, on a quiet residential street in Amsterdam, they parked a 1986 Toyota Corolla, sawed the roof off, dumped in a ton and a half of dirt, and created the Autotuin, or Car-Garden. It's a defunct automobile overrun by a front yard.

The duo, Bram Bos and Fokke van Katwijk, didn't actually have the American contrast in mind; they were thinking in strictly local terms. "Lots of public space is set aside for parking cars, and everyone thinks it's very natural. But we don't think it's very natural," says Bos, a member of GroenLinks, the Dutch green party. "More than 50 percent of people in Amsterdam don't own a car. But if you want to do anything else with that public space, you need to get a car and saw the roof off. This is the implicit politics of our parking policy."

To pull off the stunt, Bos had to conduct some heavy-duty research into the minutiae of Amsterdam vehicular law. (The Autotuin fits the legal definition of a "motor vehicle," complete with valid inspection sticker and neighborhood parking license.) The Autotuin Web site, http://huizen.dds.nl/ ~autotuin/cargarden.html, is an instruc-tion manual for setting up your own car garden. Bos and van Katwijk are hoping their fellow citizens will take back the streets--or at least the portion in front of their houses--and reverse "the tragedy of the parking commons."

Transit-versus-nature issues are a hot topic of twenty-first-century politics, and the Dutch have more than their share. Conflicts have raged over planned expansions of Schiphol Air-port, the Port of Amsterdam, and the huge Betuwelijn freight-rail link. But the Dutch also have a characteristic eagerness to blend the natural and the built. Half a Jellied Pond, an unrealized landscape artwork conceived for Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek Park, involved filling an empty fish pond to the midpoint with jelly, creating a vertical wall of "water." The new library at Utrecht University and a new supermarket in downtown Amsterdam both incorporate sloping lawns into their roofs. And a recent planning sketch for Holland's national parks, carried out by the Netherlands Design Insti-tute, included playful ideas like drive-through forests. In this context, the Autotuin starts to look less radical.

But even if it fails to launch a green revolution, the Autotuin is quite fetching in its own right. Except for the driver's seat, the entire car is filled with soil; a snazzy bamboo retaining wall prevents it from spilling out the trunk. The front passenger area is covered in thick, grassy turf, graced by a pair of miniature plastic geese. In the rear seat and trunk, this gives way to a rather Japanese enclosure: an oval pool surrounded by flat rocks and shrubs, overseen by a tiny kabouter (lawn dwarf) carrying a fishing rod. Plantings of hedera helix, a white-tinged ivy, skirt the lip of the trunk. Even in mid-January, the garden looked to be thriving: Up by the dashboard, an evergreen called sempervivum was putting forth purple blooms, and on the pond's edge a pair of snowdrops were just rearing their tentative little heads.--Matt Steinglass

William "Upski" Wimsatt makes the sidewalk a soapbox for his
anti-prison message.

The sidewalk scrawl "No More Prisons" has been arresting walkers in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn since late October. In Fort Greene, Brook-lyn, for example, the graffiti occurs nearly every block along a five-block stretch of Fulton Street. It's reportedly equally prominent in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, two other cities frequented by William "Upski" Wimsatt, the unabashed graffiti artist and the author of a book called No More Prisons. Since initiating this unusual marketing campaign through his late-night spray painting and his Web site (www.nomoreprisons.net), Upski has received welcome reports of imitators in Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and even Berlin.

Despite his book's title, Upski didn't invent the phrase. No More Prisons is in fact an arm of the nonprofit Prison Moratorium Project (PMP), which is calling for a halt to new prison construction, a more than $7-billion-a-year industry. (The United States puts more people behind bars than any other country and has a rate of incarceration second only to Russia's.) No More Prisons is also the name of a record released in March by Raptivism Records, a small Brooklyn-based label run by Rishi Nath and Vincent Merry, who is also on the board of PMP.

Nath and Merry, both in their mid-twenties, grew up together in Boston. As kids, they admired activist rappers such as KRS-One, who mixed social issues into their music. Later, as a continuing-education math teacher in Chicago, Nath became increasingly frustrated that minor offenses were putting many of his students in prison for what seemed unjustly long periods. "It was hard for me to accept that my job was receiving interference from the justice system," says Nath. At the same time, he and Merry were working with PMP, which offered a sophisticated analysis of the prison-construction boom but wasn't reaching kids in cities, a key demographic of future inmates and activists, according to Nath. Through hip-hop, Nath and Merry think they can create more activists than inmates, hence the album and a yearlong, 40-college tour that the No More Prisons group--including Upski--embarked on in late November.

Nath and Merry had known Upski from the hip-hop scene in Chicago. "At some point," says Nath, "Upski called saying, eI'm writing my book and I want to do something with your record. I want to change the name of my book to No More Prisons.'" For Upski, an unconventional writer of politically minded straight-talk whose first book was Bomb the Suburbs, the title change "was making use of the fact that this book is about so many things, it doesn't matter what I call it," he says. "I may as well do something that advances a record and a political statement I believe in." He sees the graffiti, too, as a chance to reclaim space and use it for the creative marketing of both politics and product. Nath and Merry, meanwhile, disavow any concrete, so to speak, connection to the graffiti. "Our honest response is: It's not something we [at Raptivism] are doing," Merry says.

Marc Mauer, assistant director of Washington, D.C., policy-reform group the Sentencing Project, thinks the record, book, and graffiti could be a very effective way to reach the un-der-30 crowd that No More Prisons targets. "Some of the methods we and others use might be less relevant," he explains, referring to research reports directed at the media and politicians. "Any creative method to encourage more young people to be involved is welcomed."

Though it's illegal, Upski says he doesn't think there's anything wrong with sidewalk graffiti. "I don't consider myself an outlaw," he says. "I consider myself a citizen who cares about his country and who has serious ethical objections to spending $30,000 a year to lock up a nonviolent first-time offender."
--Carly Berwick

In the ZERI Pavilion, roots injected with cement ,below, help the structure to withstand earthquakes. Bamboo beams support the roof, and concrete pilings, bottom, protect the wood from ground moisture.

Will a bamboo pavilion from Colombia stand up to
German building codes?

Gunter Pauli probably didn't know what he was signing up for when he accepted an invitation to build a pavilion for Expo2000 in Hannover, Germany. Now, $600,000 in inspection fees and tens of thousands of air miles later, Pauli has obtained a building permit for an innovative structure of bamboo and aliso wood that has put German building codes--and Pauli's patience--to nearly every conceivable test.

"Our design didn't follow any existing construction principles," says Pauli, the founder of the Geneva-based Zero Emissions Research Initiative (ZERI). "And the materials we were using had never been used in Germany before. In the end, we proposed to build a full-scale prototype in Colombia for the German authorities to inspect."

A ZERI pavilion was a good--one is tempted to say "natural"--fit with Expo2000. The theme of the fair is "Humankind-Nature-Technology." Pauli's organization promotes ecologically sustainable manufacturing pro-cesses where waste from one industry becomes a resource for another. For the Expo2000 structure, Pauli rounded up a dream team of eco-designers for a retreat in Girardot, Colombia, in April 1997. Out of that weekend--and of the genius of Colombian architect Simon Velez--came the ZERI Pavilion. A 10-sided open structure with 20,000 square feet of floor space and an even larger cement-and-fiber roof, the ZERI Pavilion resembles both a pernicious mushroom and an archetypal spacecraft. The structure's principal materials--guadua angustifolia and chusque (two kinds of bamboo), arboloco (a type of sunflower) and aliso (a lightweight, fast-growing tree)--were all harvested from farms, not forests, in Colombia. Velez's design calls for several structural innovations, including injecting cement into chambers of the bamboo to increase strength, outward-pitched columns to support the oversize roof, and a wood-smoking technique that protects the bamboo lengths from decay.

But would it stand? The ZERI prototype, which Pauli and his colleagues built in Manizales, Colombia, between January and August 1999, failed a first stability study conducted with Amer-ican software. The Hannover authorities, who Pauli says were vigilant yet also enthusiastic enough about the structure to look for a loophole in their regulations, suggested that ZERI hire the fair's official structural specialist, Professor Klaus Steffens of Bremen University. Steffens is the author of a novel structural-stability software program, which he applied to Norman Foster's designs for the renovation of the Reichstag in Berlin. Initially skeptical upon his arrival in Colom-bia, Steffens grew increasingly im-pressed with the pavilion and its ability to withstand extraordinary winds, rain, and even earthquakes. "It was unbelievably interesting," says Steffens, "a merger of extremely sophisticated design with materials and techniques that could have come out of the Stone Age." His conditional approval even stipulated that the construction of the Hannover pavilion be done with the same Colombian workers who had erected the original structure in Manizales.

In December, Pauli and his colleagues shipped ten 40-foot-long containers with the materials for ZERI Pavilion II off to Hannover. He hoped, weather permitting, to have the second exemplar completed by the end of April (Expo2000 opens June 1). The materials for the pavilion still must pass a battery of tests even more rigorous than those executed in Manizales before it is declared safe for the tens of thousands of visitors expected at the expo each day. "Security is not something you can hope for," says Steffens, who will execute the final round of tests. "It is something that I have to prove conclusively."--Ken Shulman

Tschumi's Alfred Lerner Student Center at Columbia University is a glass-and-steel atrium set between two brick boxes. Students have compared its central feature to an ant farm.

Philip Nobel on how Bernard Tschumi's star status undermined his
first American building.

By now we all know that Bernard Tschumi's Alfred Lerner Student Center at Columbia University, open since late August, is a dud. If you have not yet laid eyes on it yourself--a glass box bookended by two brick boxes notched into the southwest corner of the Columbia quad--then you may have read one of the reviews in which the building was soft-pedaled (see the fashion spread in the November Architectural Record) or softly panned, as in a review by Herbert Muschamp in the New York Times. Students are nonplussed. One recently likened its central feature, a pile of glassed-in ramps, to an ant farm. A lounging sophomore said, "It's just a place to get your mail." But this is old news. When Lerner's Flemish-bond brick skin first appeared, aping adjacent classical buildings, all of New York architecture whispered in unison: "This is going to be a big embarrassment for Bernard."

Why should this be? There is nothing inherently wrong with meeting your neighbors halfway, and Lord knows we need models for background buildings as much as we need direction for the next blockbuster. The problem is in the terms that Tschumi has set for his career. After the juggernaut that brought him from star-teacher status at the Architectural Association in London in the 1970s to his appointment as star dean of the Columbia Architecture School in 1988--via star turns in several glamorous overseas projects, most notably his folie-dotted 1983 plan for the Parc de la Villette in Paris--there were big expectations for his first American building.

Tschumi absolutely had to put in a magical performance at Lerner, and the architectural press, to which he is so attuned, expected nothing less. But from the start Lerner did not lend itself to such a grand debut. The program for the 225,000-square-foot building (a complex laundry list of auditoriums, meeting spaces, cafeterias, retail, and student services) demanded more planning ingenuity than designerly flair. And its situation on the edge of Columbia's hallowed McKim, Mead & White campus--rubbing elbows with James Gamble Rogers' 1934 Butler Library but looking out over Broadway to a process-savvy, development-wary community--guaranteed the kind of preservation involvement that rarely encourages invention. Tschumi knew this (he is no stranger to Columbia politics) and perhaps we should applaud his bravery in fighting the good fight against the forces of architectural stagnation. But to do so would also be to celebrate the manner in which he fought the realities of the project to meet the demands of his place in the star system. He chose to crusade for the opportunity to pull off the sort of flourish that made his name, but then, nagged by the complexity of the project, he went only partway. He at-tempted the classic Russian defense, falling back toward Moscow until winter comes to freeze the enemy advance. Winter came, but for Tschumi there was no spring thaw. He just ceded the edges of the building to what he would later try to justify, borrowing an idea in vogue at his school, as an exploration in the possibilities of a "normative" architecture. The result is a sort of star-system im-plosion, a messy, fizzled supernova.

If Lerner were just another building--and perhaps it should have been--it would not have earned much attention. But as the product of an architect who is also a prominent educator, it is aching for some corrective spin. While a student at the Columbia Architecture School, I learned that Tschumi, despite his Swiss birth, is all French: He controls with a smile, but he controls. And just as it sometimes seems that France exists only to support Paris and keep it beautiful, there was always a lingering sense among students that Tschumi was using the school as a means to advance his career, not as a platform for teaching. Under Tschumi, Columbia has become a machine for pumping out star architects: not problem-solving thinkers, but posturers; this season's splash and the next's flash in the pan. The trouble Tschumi got into at Lerner has its roots right there. He had to make that glass box, just as he now has to disown the rest of the building.

One look at Lerner tells you that something is wrong. Viewed from anywhere on the Columbia campus--including Tschumi's Avery Hall corner office--it is not one building but three: a low, clumsily detailed masonry block next to the library; the techno glass-and-steel extravaganza of the ramping atrium ("The Hub," as Tschumi calls it); and a higher but equally awkward block fronting Broadway. It is clear that an undue amount of Tschumi's energies, and by extension the project's budget and manpower, went into realizing the structural overindulgence of the atrium. It is a nice-enough space--the first interior on the campus that might rival the Low Library steps as a place to see and be seen--but not so nice that one would not trade it for a less conflicted building. One designer at Gruzen-Samton Architects, the bread-and-butter New York firm that Columbia retained to coauthor the building, says that Tschumi's focus on the atrium "sucked all the life out of the project."

It also sucked all the heat out of the building. To compensate for the expanses of glass, local code required the use of smaller windows elsewhere, resulting in uncomfortably tight, punched apertures in the two bookend blocks. The facades of these blocks, as every critic has noted, are the building's sorest points. With their cartoon take on the proportions of their classical neighbors, they are in a style that might be called "Boston Contextualism," in honor of the many mocking buildings that were built in that city during the Eighties boom. The formula? Pick a detail and blow it up. In Boston, architects such as Graham Gund gave us a plague of exaggerated bow fronts and overcooked cupolas. (Look out the window of Ally McBeal's office for a good example of the latter.) At Lerner, on the Broadway facade, Tschumi gave us a fat, glass-block bullnose--lined up oh-so-carefully with the lines of the building next door--and copper-toned attics and cornices that show just how lovely metalwork once was. The trouble with such two-faced contextualism is that it does nothing well: If you are trying to make a building fit in, why not fit it in proudly and fit it in well? Attempts to save face with tepid innovation, when the architect is so compelled, most often end in caricature. Or worse: Much campus speculation about the new building has focused on the detailing of a corner column above the main entrance, on the low block adjacent to Butler Library. It hangs, fat and simple, in a confusion of colliding curtain walls and mismatched masonry that came about by trying to sneak a corner entrance into an otherwise classicizing mass. It seems like a freshman mistake. In an interview, Tschumi said he wished it were even bigger, to help "turn the corner."

Last spring, when the strange column was first revealed, an insider in Tschumi's office said, "When we saw that column, we knew we had lost the war." The implication was that Gruzen-Samton had won it, but the firm tells a very different story. Gruzen-Samton had been involved with the project for several years--devising its own atrium schemes--before a decision was made to bring in an architect with an international reputation. The university then re-tained it to keep an eye on Tschumi, to help his office with everything from designing the facade--not something they teach at the Architectural Associ-ation, or Columbia, for that matter--to negotiating union politics and the tricky New York code. For the past year, the only thanks that Gruzen-Samton has received is the widespread assumption that it designed the boring parts of the building, leaving what glories there were to Tschumi. The best story so far comes from the editor of a French architecture magazine. When Tschumi showed him a picture of Lerner, he assumed that the bookends were existing construction, and he asked Tschumi about the difficulties of building within such a banal context. Tschumi didn't correct him. Why couldn't he have said, "Look, it was my first building in New York. It's difficult to build there. I like some things about the building and I don't like others. I'm moving on"? A rank-and-file architect might brave such a dignified retreat, but a star architect cannot afford to break with his own myth. --Philip Nobel

Knoll reshuffles a classic design

Originally produced by Knoll Ger-many in the 1960s, this colorful playing-card set has recently been reissued by Knoll International in celebration of the company's sixtieth birthday. The cards, featuring illustrations of classic Knoll furniture by designers such as Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, and Mies van der Rohe, can be used to play "Black Peter" and "Quartet," traditional German card games similar to Old Maid and Go Fish. Or better yet, use them to perfect your German in time for next year's Cologne Furniture Fair. A limited number of sets are available in North America from the Knoll factory store in East Greenville, Pennsylvania (215-679-7991). --Paul Makovsky

Three Dutch designers make the lavatory their laboratory with a
novel take on bathroom fixtures.

"Amused Modernist" might be the best term for current Dutch housewares design. There's Erik Jan Kwakkel's double teacup, used upside down as easily as right-side up; Arnout Visser's magnifying bonbon dish, which makes chocolates appear ridiculously large; and Peter van der Jagt's Bottoms Up doorbell, a chime that sounds with the clinking of actual wineglasses. When the Droog design collective set these three members loose in the household's most prosaic room, the result was hyperfunctional bathroom tile, a wry take on serviceable fixtures.

"Our starting point was something you could buy in a shop for do-it-yourself, at a low price," Visser says of the project that won Droog a 1999 Rotter-dam Design Prize. Home improvers could renovate their bathrooms cheaply in white industrial tiles, then splurge on Droog's great-looking func-tional accents. The 20 different tiles do things like hold bath towels and dispense toilet paper. You can write on the chalkboard tile, plug your electric shaver into the outlet tile, and post notes to yourself on the magnetic tile. Someday, if the prototype goes into production, you'll even be able to watch Good Morning America on a tile imbedded with a tiny television.

The latest release by the trio is a floor tile spattered with raindrops of melted glass. "The drip pattern is dictated by the glass," Visser says. "It's nice because we humans didn't have any influence on the design." The new tile, which functions simultaneously as a foot massager and anti-slip de-vice, is available by order from the Soho store Moss (212-226-2190).

Visser and Kwakkel are currently working on a design for Droog's entry at the Milan International Furniture Exhibition, April 11-16. "We're making a toilet and bidet," Visser says enthusiastically. "The outside is silicon--it's a bit soft--and the inside is porcelain." No doubt a magazine-rack tile is on its way. --Karen E. Steen