In other cities that bear the indelible mark of John Portman's futuristic, fortresslike structures--New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago--the architect's high-tech designs may amuse, confuse, alienate, or annoy. But in Detroit Portman left a much more damaging legacy. The Renaissance Center, a cluster of five dazzling glass-and-chrome silos, was erected on the city's waterfront in 1977 as a symbol of rebirth a decade after one of the worst riots in American history. But rather than invigorate the business district, the center sucked the life out of an already beleaguered downtown, drawing tenants away from depopulating Woodward Avenue and into its shellacked confines. The gleaming towers-four 39-story units surrounding a 73--story center--barred visitors from the water's edge, and gargantuan concrete berms along eight-lane Jefferson Avenue separated them from the rest of downtown. In the 1980s the city's second-biggest planning mistake--a three-mile, elevated People Mover--added insult to injury when a two-story stop was placed almost directly in front of the RenCen's entrance, creating another barrier between ground-level pedestrians and the building. In Cities Back from the Edge, journalist and critic Roberta Brandes Gratz calls the RenCen "the greatest urban tragedy of the country." Offering a twist on photographer Camilo José Vergara's call for an "urban ruins" park composed of Detroit's abandoned pre-Depression skyscrapers (which appeared in the April 1995 issue of Metropolis), Gratz suggests that the RenCen be emptied and left to the forces of nature, an homage to "this country's biggest project planning mistake."

Gratz's over-the-top proposal notwithstanding, an homage of sorts is in the works for the RenCen. The country's biggest planning mistake will indeed be commemorated, but in a way much more befitting the profession that spawned it--with more planning. Soon after the General Motors Corporation purchased the RenCen in 1996 for its new world headquarters, the company announced plans for a $500 million overhaul of the building. The new look, conceived by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), aims not just to update the building for the twenty-first century but to rectify the mistakes wrought in the twentieth. "Our intent is to humanize it," explains Leonard Marszalek, architect and manager of GM's Detroit Project Center, which is overseeing the renovation. This is not the first time architects and planners have attempted such a feat. The RenCen was less than 10 years old when its former owners undertook a $27 million renovation in an effort to breathe life into the bunker. All that project accomplished was to show that it would take several million more to make the building so much as navigable, let alone inviting. But with almost 20 times as much money and what appears to be genuine commitment to integrating its headquarters with its hometown, the automaker's plans suggests there may yet be hope for Portman's most spectacular failure.

In addition to updated office space, circulation corridors are planned to make the concrete-laden, mazelike interior less confusing. The center tower's Marriott hotel, which includes the landmark Summit revolving restaurant, is undergoing an interior overhaul as well, with both GM and Marriott contributing to those costs. Most important, however, are the exterior changes that, at least on paper, promise to realize what the previous renovation failed to deliver. At long last the RenCen is to become approachable, perhaps even downright attractive. The Jefferson Avenue entrance, currently set back from the street and fronted by a circular drive, will be brought to the streetfront with an open glass-and-steel foyer, and the People Mover station will be relocated. The front entrance will provide views straight through to the Winter Garden, a five-story glass atrium surrounded by shops and restaurants. The atrium will in turn lead visitors outside to a riverfront plaza and promenade, affording views of passing freighters and Windsor, Ontario, across the way. A below-grade thoroughfare, which runs directly behind the RenCen (and oddly enough, features the city's only designated bike path), is being raised to the level of the new rear entrance. Most significantly, the concrete berms in front of the building, which house the RenCen's heating and cooling system, will be removed. "The single most important thing I think we can do is take those berms down," says Marszalek. "If we could do only one thing here, that would be it."

In conjunction with the renovation, GM plans to create linked greenways along the riverfront so that, for the first time, Detroiters can fully partake of their city's greatest natural feature. A second phase of the project, aimed at private developers, calls for adjacent housing and retail development as well as additional greenway connections. GM has not consulted Portman on the redesign, but the architect's son, Jack, CEO of John Portman and Associates, says his firm has been keeping an eye on the project. The need for an overhaul is to be expected, the younger Portman stresses. "Real estate is something that needs to be rejuvenated quite regularly," he says. "Times change, fashions change, uses change. As cities evolve and grow, how buildings grow evolves within the context of the city." Not surprisingly, Portman also takes issue with the widespread criticism of the RenCen's design, arguing that the civic leaders who chose the site are responsible for the failings of his father's building. "There was no way anyone could have designed anything for that location that could have melded into the fabric of the city, either then or in the future, because of its isolation," he contends.

Either way, no matter how much is spent and how innovative the renovation, nothing short of a wrecking ball can alter the imposing presence of the RenCen on a macro scale. Although this is undoubtedly an asset for GM, which will mount its ubiquitous block logo at the top of the center tower, it may not mean much for the rest of Detroit. "It is still a superscale. If you were doing the riverfront all over again, you would use a progressive scale," says Mary Margaret Jones, an architect and visiting critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design who led a Detroit riverfront design studio last fall. But Jones also sees some positive aspects to the building's colossal proportions. "If you can make it work at ground level, and if you can make it work well enough for occupants using it on daily basis, then as an icon it has some pluses," she says. "It's the same way people love to hate the Transamerica pyramid in San Francisco. It's immediately recognizable."

Richard Tomlinson, managing partner of SOM, says melding street-level allure and overhead imposition requires a different way of thinking about his craft. "It wasn't so much about architecture itself as an art as it was about solving problems artfully," he says. Of course, had that been achieved in the 1970s, Tomlinson would be out of a job. As it stands, he hopes the redesign will allow Detroiters to finally imbue the Renaissance Center with the symbolism its developers intended for it more than a quarter century ago. "Maybe when it was done there was a more defensive view of city," he says. "Maybe now there will be a more optimistic view of the future."--Kristin Palm

Can you remember what you ate for breakfast yesterday? Do you know what you'll be wearing tomorrow? At a time when memory is something to be bought and installed, and the future lasts only until the markets close, an organization based in San Francisco is trying to extend our notion of the past and future by 10,000 years in each direction.

Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, formed the Long Now Foundation in 1996 (or 01996, as its members write to guard against the technoscourge of the coming "decamillennium bug"). It is a registered, nonprofit group interested in the "deep future," as Brand puts it. The foundation's 11 board members include Brand; musician and producer Brian Eno; Danny Hillis, who created the concept of parallel computers and has designed theme-park rides for Disney; and Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine.

So far the foundation's activity has manifested itself in two ways: construction of an eight-foot-tall, prototypical 10,000-year clock and development of a 10K library to be stored on a three-inch nickel disk, dubbed the Rosetta Disk after the stone used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. The final clock, designed by Hillis, could be as tall as 100 feet and will tick once a year, bong once every 100 years, and cuckoo every millennium. Last year the Long Now Foundation purchased 180 acres in eastern Nevada, where eventually the group will house the clock among a forest of bristlecone pine trees, thought to be the world's oldest living things.

The foundation identifies 10,000 years ago as the time when agriculture and civilization as we've come to know them began. "If we go too much further back," says the foundation's 28-year-old executive director, Alexander Rose, "then humans can't really imagine themselves. Too much shorter, and it's not really pushing the bounds."

Plans for the Long Now clock have been developing since Hillis speculated on our collective relationship with the future in a Wired essay in 1995. "When I was a kid, three decades ago, the future was a long way off--so was the turn of the millennium," Hillis wrote in the article. "Dates like 1984 and 2001 were comfortably remote. But the funny thing is that, in all these years, the future that people think about has not moved past the millennium. It's as if the future has been shrinking one year, every year, for my entire life. The year 2005 is still too far away to plan for, and 2030 is too far away to even think about. Why bother making plans when everything will change?"

Inspired by Hillis's sentiment and by a line from a Laurie Anderson song asking, "What I really want to know is this / Are things getting better or are they getting worse?," Brand made plans.

"I claim that commerce moves, and should move, a great deal faster than either governance or culture," Brand, 62, told Metropolis in an e-mail. "When those two are forced to move at commercial speed, we get into trouble." Rose, who is also an industrial designer, says this claim gets at the foundation's central conceit. "Our main interest," he says, "is to provide a basis for asking new questions. So things that were once thought to be intractable, like hunger and education, become more tractable."

The idea seems to be catching; the foundation had a busy year. In July a 10K Library conference was held on the campus of Stanford University. At the conference, the Rosetta Disk--containing the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis in 1,000 languages--was publicly displayed for the first time. Earlier in the summer the clock prototype--made of monel (a nickel-copper alloy), brass, and stainless steel, and built to tick every 60 seconds--was installed in London's Science Museum as part of an exhibit called Making the Modern World. The clock is the last piece museumgoers see before they leave the exhibit, which begins with a clock from 1780.

That's rapid progress for a group to whom a methodical pace is not just a virtue, but a calling. "If we complete the clock in a single lifetime, we'll have done it wrong," Rose says. "If we take all of the fun now, then there's nothing for future generations to do. By completing the clock quickly, we would be guilty of the same things we're trying to fight." --Mac Montandon

The subway trains on New York's 4, 5, and 6 lines are the city's worst. The interiors are dimly lit, the stop announcements are impossible to understand, and the screeching brakes are as strident and terrifying as the banshee's wail. So it was with great anticipation that green-line commuters this past June welcomed New York's first new subway cars in eight years. That month the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) began to replace the big red cars (built in the 1950s and '60s, and known as "redbirds" to transit aficionados) with new cars that have quieter brakes, bright interiors, clear recorded announcements, and an LED station map that tells you where you are and which stops are next. The new cars are so well appointed that straphangers might actually have trouble finding something to complain about.

The new R142 and R143 subway cars were designed by Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger of Antenna Design, in New York. For Antenna, which Udagawa founded in 1997, solving problems of noise and light was relatively easy: a matter of better equipment. Likewise the LED map was simply a use of superior technology. However, Udagawa and Moeslinger also faced the challenge of fighting, through good design, some of the subway's more intractable urban nuisances: overcrowding, litter, vandalism, and robbery.

To improve circulation, they widened the car doors from 50 to 54 inches to decrease the time it takes passengers to get on and off the train. Poles were added in the middle of the trains so that people won't cluster around the doorways, and a new ceiling rail down the center of each car means that a passenger can stand almost anywhere in the train and have something to hang on to.

Though it's seemingly impossible to prevent riders from dropping chicken bones and half-full bottles of soda onto the fioor, Antenna's new car has a rubber fioor with a graphic pattern that makes the dirt and grime easier to clean up and harder to see. The walls and ceiling are made of melamine, which hides "scratchiti," graffiti created with a key or knife. According to Udagawa, the new cars' windows have a "sacrificial layer" of epoxy that can be lifted off and replaced as soon as anyone scratches in their initials, nickname, or brand identity. Finally, slanted metal bars at the ends of the seats by the doors will make it harder for local felons to grab bags or necklaces and hop off the train as the doors close. Perhaps the MTA will no longer need posters warning passengers that "It's Chain-Snatching Season."

Every car also has eight fiip-up seats for wheelchair users; next to these seats are intercoms for calling the conductor in case of an emergency. In this respect the trains are far ahead of the stations, very few of which are wheelchair accessible.

Though the new trains are now running on the 6 line only every couple of hours, the MTA hopes to have replaced the redbirds on all numbered lines by the end of 2001. It's probably only a short time before New Yorkers will be talking about screeching brakes and dark, dirty, and dangerous cars in a misty-eyed nostalgic reverie. --Julien Devereux

Deepa Textiles, maker of custom fabric designs for the workplace, has launched an environmental branding program, Deepa 360°, which it believes can capture a company's cultural DNA. How appropriate, then, that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. was one of the program's early clients. To begin the design process, the Deepa team conducts an audit to uncover themes that represent the company's spirit, mission, core values, and history. The fabrics produced for Pfizer include patterns based on the cell structure of penicillin (the company was the first to mass-produce it), pill shapes including the Viagra diamond, and a gene-mapping sequence. "I think it's a good balance of where Pfizer has come from," says Craig Mitchell, director of employee resources for Pfizer in New York, "the products we sell today, and where the future for pharmaceuticals may lie." --Kristi Cameron

It was the home of that laughably bland clan on The Brady Bunch, and the butt of Frank and Moon Unit Zappa's teen-slamming song "Valley Girl." But as those embarrassments fade to become historic color, the San Fernando Valley acquires a patina of nostalgia, and the architecture that defined it enters landmark status.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is gathering in Southern California in early November, and this year's conference includes "How Modern Was My Valley?"--a driving tour of significant postwar architecture in the San Fernando Valley. Finally, the Valley's locus of identity will shift from the 1980 Sherman Oaks Galleria to tour stops like Wayne McAllister's landmarked Bob's Big Boy restaurant sign, the so-called First Church of Elroy Jetson (a Lutheran church with heavy space-age influences), and the endangered Woodland Hills Branch Library.

What made the Valley--a cultural wasteland in other respect--into a hotbed for Modernist architecture? "All the planets were aligned for midcentury Modern architecture," says Mary-Margaret Stratton, producer of the tour. GIs who had passed through Southern California during World War II liked the weather and stayed; the San Fernando Valley offered them jobs in two of the Cold War's biggest industries: defense and entertainment. The resulting population boom provided unlimited work for the architects of the day, including John Lautner, Richard Neutra, A. Quincy Jones, and Armet & Davis. "When the Modern bomb blew up," Stratton says, "it landed right square in the middle of the Valley."

Two weeks after the National Trust event, the driving tour will be opened to the public, with a guidebook and docent-led tours, including open houses in a Joseph Eichler development. California cruisers who want to embrace their kidney-shaped past at the November 18-19 event should order tickets in advance from the Los Angeles Conser-vancy at (213) 623-2489. --Karen E. Steen

The bathroom has always been the most clinical room of the house, but for the past several years the trendy WC has moved toward a kind of stainless-steel sterility that was once the preserve of operating theaters. Upping the ante, Agape introduces its "liquid soap dispenser in transparent EVA," an IV sack filled with soap. It hangs from the bathroom wall on a stainless-steel mount, included when you buy the soap bags. Although David Cronenberg--creepy in theory, the dispenser actually manages cuteness--it's filled with brightly colored orange, blue, or green soaps that in no way resemble a blood product. --Jonathan Ringen

Yugoslavia's fractured resistance movement has few means with which to protest the reign of president Slobodan Milosevic. But earlier this year a group of students calling themselves Otpor discovered that graphic design might be the most powerful weapon available to them. Otpor ("resistance" in Serbo-Croatian) is using T-shirts and graffiti--along with political actions and moral philosophy--to fight the country's war-criminal president. The group's symbol, a clenched fist in stark black and white, is the activist equivalent of a brand--except the only thing being sold is the courage to resist violent attacks by the government.

When police began arresting Otpor activists in massive numbers last May, wearing an Otpor T-shirt invited beatings, imprisonment, and "informative talks"--as interrogation is euphemized in the banal parlance of bureaucratic repression. Since then young Serbs, many of them still in high school, have prided themselves on the number of hours of interrogation they have endured. The total for May alone was 10,000 hours, according to Dejan Randjic, an Otpor founder and de facto director of the movement's graphics campaigns.

"The fist began as a salute that meant 'to be brave,'" says Randjic. "There were 15 or so of us who knew each other from the protests. Some were activists, some had been disappointed by the political opposition parties. We started spray-painting 'Resistance' on walls in Belgrade. Someone said, let's make an image of the fist." Soon friends were offering to design posters and T-shirts.

"There is no middle class in Serbia," Randjic says. "There is only rich and poor, opposition and government. That's the reason we use only black and white--there is only the government and us." Unlike the registered opposition parties, Otpor activists are not seeking political power or recognition for themselves. "We are fighting for our future," says Randjic. "That makes us more effective than other political leaders. Our philosophy is 'Live in the Resistance, Be the Resistance.'"

Indeed, despite a lack of formal leadership, the movement now counts at least 20,000 adherents throughout Yugoslavia, among them many prominent artists, actors, and musicians. Randjic estimates that Otpor has given away as many as 40,000 T-shirts, with the financial support of like-minded Serbs in and out of Yugoslavia.

Iliya Pavlovich coordinates the marketing of the T-shirts in the U.S. from his consulting business in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "This is a sort of cloak-and-dagger operation," he says. "People are getting beat up over these stupid T-shirts, but they're the only sign of public life we have right now."

Pavlovich takes orders for the shirts and relays them to Pedja Kostic in Boston, who manufactures and distributes the T-shirts throughout the U.S. "The symbol of the fist has brought a lot of attention to Otpor," Kostic says. "It represents resistance and persistence in the struggle. People are drawn to it because it's art as much as politics."

Threatened by Otpor's popularity, last December the government tried to counter the movement with its own propaganda by distributing posters of a German soldier carrying an SS flag marked with a fist instead of a swastika. Then, in August, Milosevic tried to pass a special antiterrorist act that targeted Otpor, in conjunction with efforts to portray the organization as a puppet of NATO. (At the last minute the parliament declined to bring the proposed law to vote.) Otpor responded with its own message: a poster featuring the Yugoslav president at the center of a target.

With the ruling party already controlling the print and broadcast media (and threatening to impose taxes on the Internet), T-shirts and other street-level graphic arts have become the last line of defense for Serbian democracy. (See page 165 for more information.) --Stephen Zacks

If this wall was outdoors, subject to Mayor Giuliani's draconian quality-of-life initiatives, it would have been sandblasted out of existence a long time ago. But protected inside Jeremy Hurley's apartment is a time capsule, capturing that brief moment when underground art came out of the subway and landed in the East Village. Situated in a narrow hallway between Hurley's bedroom and kitchen, it includes drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, along with a host of other artists constituting a veritable who's who of the graffiti art movement: Fab Five Freddy, futura, Haze, Lady Pink, Phase 2, Zepher, and many others. "Originally this entire wall was a huge futura mural," says Hurley, a graphic designer and independent music producer, "but in 1979 I painted it pink in a moment of new-wave pyschedelia."

At the time the East Village art scene was exploding. Located around the corner from Club 57, Hurley's apartment became an unofficial clubhouse for the b-boy set. "It was pretty much an open house," recalls futura, Hurley's roommate at the time. Inspired by the wall's vivid new shade, Hurley asked him to write a line from a Funkadelic song on it: "I'm pink therefore I'm Spam."

Once futura had tagged the wall, it became an instant work-in-progress. "Guys would come in and look at it and say, 'Hey, mind if I tag up?'" futura says. Haring added a row of babies along the base of the wall and two other drawings. Basquiat did a piece, which he signed "Samo," the tag he used as a graffiti artist in the late 1970s. "It became the thing to do--you had to write on the pink wall at Gerb's house," says Hurley, referring to his nickname. "In some places, it's almost like a yearbook with inside jokes and references."

By 1983 Haring and Basquiat were rising stars, and some of the other artists had major gallery representation. The lure of quick money had infected the scene. Drawing and writing on the wall stopped. "I think that's when they probably realized, 'Hey, I'm not going to draw anything on that wall, that's like giving away a canvas,'" Hurley says. Since then the wall has remained practically untouched (unfortunately, nearly all of the Haring babies have been worn away). Now it is a snapshot of a lost movement: a permanent record of a temporary art.

Since buying the apartment in the early 1980s, Hurley has renovated twice. "The first time we didn't even cover the wall," he says. "We were banging around with hammers and paint. It was a miracle nothing happened to it." During the second renovation in 1989 Hurley covered the wall with a drop cloth. By then a good deal of the scene's vitality was passing into history: Basquiat had died of a drug overdose a year earlier, and Haring, who would die in 1990, was battling AIDS.

In July Hurley sold at auction a bedroom door covered with graffiti by many of the same artists for $22,000. He says he was once offered $50,000 for the wall but turned it down. Ideally Hurley would like to see a museum buy the wall and put it up for the world to see. His former roommate futura, who has a book coming out this fall (futura, Booth-Clibborn Editions), takes a distinctly more philosophical view: "For me graffiti always had real-time value. It was about doing it in the moment. So maybe the wall just needs to be a wall again--at some point just slap a coat of paint on it."

Appraiser Barden Prisant, president of Telepraisal, does see potential for the wall. "It would be perfect for someone like Ian Schrager, who'd be willing to look past some of the problems that mainstream art dealers might have with the piece," he says. "I could definitely see this in a hotel or club, behind Plexiglas, as a kind of showpiece. For anyone who was part of that scene, the wall is iconic." --Martin C. Pedersen