The corner of Canal and Rampart Streets in 1954.

I’d been driving past the long abandoned Woolworth’s store on the corner of Canal and North Rampart Streets since I moved to New Orleans in July. And every time past I thought, in my typical New York naiveté (if such a thing exists), “That site desperately needs a building—the bigger, the better!” Later I learned that a somewhat controversial project was  in fact awaiting approval: a 190-foot, mixed-use residential tower.  Urbanistically speaking, this is just what the doctor ordered. The right building here on the upper edge of the French Quarter could act as a kind of gateway to both the quarter to the east and the downtown business district.

The historic preservationists in town almost reflexively opposed the project, citing its excessive height (seventy feet taller than current zoning). The truth is, preservationists here have a longstanding aversion to both tall buildings and (or should we say especially?) modern ones. This proposed tower, pushed by the local developer Praveen Kailas and designed by Harry Baker Smith Architects, was clearly a duel offender.

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© Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz / David Chipperfield Architects,
Photo: Jörg von Bruchhausen

On June 20, British architect Sir David Chipperfield took center stage at a ceremony in Barcelona to officially receive the much-coveted European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. Aside from having the longest name imaginable—henceforth shortened by this author to “Mies Prize”—it is also regarded as Europe’s most prestigious architecture honor.

Sir David has been having a good time of it these past two years. He was knighted in 2010 and was the recipient of this year’s RIBA Royal Gold Medal. He has been winning so much that people mistakenly assume he has also won a Pritzker Prize. To set the record straight, no, he has not. Not yet, anyway. There is always the possibility of a Chipperfield trifecta next year.

Why all the acclaim? What is so special about Sir David’s architecture? Read more…

The Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust Company building at 510 Fifth Avenue, New York. The lower levels are being renovated.

The ancient Egyptians were the ur-preservationists, but I have always thought that there was something perverse about their method of immortalizing dead kings. The first part of the process, carried out by skilled professionals, was to extract all the internal organs of the Pharoah’s body—all the parts that we call “vital” for good reason, that enabled the man to walk, talk, eat, and think. These the embalmers put away in sealed jars. They then went to great lengths to swathe the hollow shell of a body so we can go stare at it in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Much like the Egyptian mummifiers, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) of New York gave the Manufaturer’s Hanover Trust Company building landmark status in 1997, but protected only its exterior. Read more…

Photo: Matthew Hinton/The Times-Picayune.

Not even a month after we wrote about the impending demolition of the Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School, the battle over one of New Orleans’s last standing mid-century modernist schools has come to an abrupt but decisive conclusion. On Friday, bulldozers began their work on the dilapidated structure, two months before anyone had any reason to expect them. Read more…

Since 1988, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has been compiling a list of national treasures, sites of architectural and cultural significance that are facing demolition or serious decay. Each year, one-of-a-kind historical places are added, cataloguing American architectural history and raising awareness of endangered cultural gems. While some of these sites are threatened by new development and projects, others are simply left to deteriorate due to lack of preservation and financial resource. This year’s selection of 11 places facing a ruinous fate includes:

Bear Butte, Meade County, South Dakota
Named for the 4,426-foot mountain called Mato Paha that is shaped like a bear sleeping on its side, Native American tribal people and international visitors have been using this land for pilgrimages and spiritual renewal. This sacred praying ground for many Native American tribes has been continually threatened by proposals to develop wind and oil energy. If wind installations and oil fields are built, the cultural landscape and rituals of Bear Butte will be irreparably damaged.

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Photo: Benoit Pailley, courtesy the New Museum.

Rem Koolhaas has a knack for coining words, a skill evident in the name of his and his architecture firm OMA’s current show at New York City’s New Museum:  “Cronocaos”. Catchy and primitive at once, the title drops the “h” from “chronos” and “chaos” respectively.  It’s a classic Koolhaasian move, visually and viscerally dramatizing the notion of a world confused about the relation of past to present and what this means for architecture—particularly for preservation.  “Architects—we who change the world—have been oblivious or hostile to the manifestations of preservation,” Koolhaas writes.  The result, he argues, is that an already large and ever-increasing part of the globe displays the same bad sort of preservation:  commoditized, sanitized, and individualized.  In turn, buildings and the life they sustain suffer, even as “preservation does not quite know what to do with its new empire.” 

Enter Koolhaas, who purports to stand outside this empire.  He takes aim at the preservation industry and its use of history, leading us on a tour of ideas that ultimately promotes the work of OMA instead.  Preservation done right is thus what Koolhaas claims to offer, and a “‘unified field’ theory” is where he says preservation should begin.  But as viewers wend their way through “Cronocaos” they are apt to find a manner of gallery prospectus that raises as many questions as it answers.  Whether Koolhaas operates apart from preservation’s “new empire” remains open to debate. Read more…

Image courtesy World Monuments Fund.

The Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School in New Orleans looks like no other school anywhere else. Designed and built in 1955 by the architect Charles Colbert specifically for the historic African-American neighborhood of Tremé/Lafitte, the now-decrepit modernist glass box appears to float above the ground. Colbert managed to set back the columns needed to hold the building above flooding levels, creating dramatically cantilevered class rooms and an empty common area for the kids underneath. Huge windows let in plenty of sunlight, and kept the building surprisingly cool in hot and humid New Orleans. The building was celebrated for these features at the time, but fifty years of neglect and a hurricane have taken their toll. In July last year, the Recovery School District (RSD)—which works to rehabilitate underperforming schools in Louisiana—finally decided to tear the dysfunctional building down, and build a new school in its place by 2013. Read more…

Buckminster Fuller with the Fly’s Eye dome and the Dymaxion Car in Snowmass Colorado, 1980.

Technologically complex yet sculpturally elegant, Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye dome was an iconic, mid-20th-century solution for mass-produced, low-cost housing. As the last dome scheme Fuller proposed in his lifetime, the prototype, fabricated in 1967, has been traveling around the nation for more than four decades. Over that time the fiberglass construction has suffered wear and tear. This Wednesday, May 25, will mark the unveiling of a historic restoration of the original 24-foot dome, completed by a high tech composite building company, Goetz Composites.

The dome house, which looks very much like an over-sized soccer ball, was designed to be an open house with 7 ft. circular holes, providing structure for doors, glass windows or solar collectors and wind-driven turbines. Constructed by hardware of the same shape, the inward curves in the dome’s exterior were intended to guide rainwater into its cistern system. Fuller envisioned a housing solution that would be highly efficient in energy and material usage but also capable of harvesting collected light and wind energy. Read more…

Stewart Brand wrote, “A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.” Jean Carroon’s book, Sustainable Preservation: Greening Existing Buildings (2010, John Wiley & Sons) cites this Brand quote (and a few others—his book How Buildings Learn continues to influence many). Clearly his words retain their power as we struggle to align values and value within our economic and social systems, such as they are.

Carroon has written a detailed and well-researched resource guide for those involved in preserving existing buildings, and aligning their work with sustainability strategies.  A principal at Goody Clancy, a multidisciplinary Boston firm, she has long been a passionate, articulate advocate for activity in this area, as her projects demonstrate—elegant and contemporary interventions that honor the historic fabric, whether it was built 100 years ago or 20. As our cities continue to grow and concerns about greenfield development and related infrastructure and mobility issues grow with them, we’ll need to pay more attention to our existing communities. Carroon’s book will no doubt help guide today’s practitioners and students. Recently I got to talk to the author and architect about her work, the book, and the fields of architecture and development.

Kira Gould: I prefer not to ask you to be reductive, but can you offer a brief definition of the intersection between historic/existing buildings and sustainability? What I’m really asking you is to define “sustainable preservation”, your book’s title.

Jean Carroon: I use the word “sustainable” to mean environmental sustainability. The title was driven by the publisher’s series about environmentally focused sustainability, but sustainability is really about holistic social, economic, and environmental stewardship; the stewardship of existing buildings and heritage are one part. The book addresses this and seeks to illuminate how much more we can and must do to decrease the environmental impacts of existing buildings. Read more…

Since we last heard from them two years ago, the Friends of Miami Marine Stadium have been making slow but steady progress.  In 2009, the volunteer group was still fighting to get local and national support for preserving this remarkable building on Miami’s Virginia Key Island. Since then, they’ve achieved something of a turnaround, with a new design proposal, partial funding, and most importantly, full commitment from Miami’s mayor Tomas Regalado. Their web site shows an optimistic visualization of the stadium’s glorious re-opening in December 2012 – flashing lights, boats on the water, and fireworks in the sky.

The city administration was the original bad guy in this story. Read more…