Reference Page: April 2005

The Art of War
The county government of Kinmen Island, in Taiwan, has an excellent English-language Web site for prospective visitors www.kinmen.gov.tw/eng/eng.htm. There you’ll find all the expected information regarding transportation, accommodations, recreation, and so forth. Interestingly the Chinese-language site has an entirely different Flash interface that juxtaposes maps and fearsome military imagery with photos of brightly colored birds and tourist attractions www.kinmen.gov.tw/default.aspx. If you can’t take a plane to Kinmen Island at the moment, then you should consider taking the information superhighway to Cai Guo-Qiang’s Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) Web page: www.caiguoqiang.com/bmoca. It’s a wealth of information on the artists along with fabulous images of their work.

This Old House
The University of Chicago’s Special Collection Research Center has digitized hundreds of vintage pamphlets from the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition, which can be downloaded as crisp, beautiful PDFs from century.lib.uchicago.edu. Every imaginable style of pre-war domestic futurism can be seen in its original packaging. Looking through this treasure trove, it’s hard not to slip into that lovely mid-1990s utopianism (“The Internet will be our salvation!”). Click on the subject “Home and Industrial Arts Group” and you’ll find original promotional material for “The House of Tomorrow” as well as for Howard T. Fisher’s General Houses. If you like what you see and you’re getting this issue hot off the presses, then you might be in time to save the Bowers House. Interested parties should contact Vincent J. Panico, Esq., (617) 876-2020 or e-mail vjpatty@veriomail.com. To browse listings for other endangered buildings, see www.nationaltrust.org/Magazine/advertise/realestate.htm.

Good Shelter
An installation of Unplugged: 99% Air, Alexis Rochas’s full- scale inflatable housing prototype, will be exhibited in June at SCI-Arc, www.sciarc.edu. Rochas is currently conducting a design/build workshop to enhance the common areas of a low-income housing complex in Los Angeles. He can be reached at alexis_rochas@sciarc.edu or (323) 350-6380.

Marine Subtext
Fabrique, the design agency that renovated a waterfront building for City Ports Rotterdam, has a token English-language page for Anglos on its Web site, www.fabrique.nl, but finding images of the building shouldn’t be too difficult even for non-Dutch speakers: Click on “Portfolio,” “Ruimtelijk,” and then “Stadshavens Rotterdam.” Too Blessed to be Depressed (010 Publishers, 2002) is the Crimson Architectural Historians’ essential, politically engaged guide to the postwar evolution of Rotterdam.

Bush to Cities: Drop Dead!
Concerned citizens will find a wealth of causes for alarm in President George W. Bush’s 2006 budget—see www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2006—which includes his proposal for yet another Orwellian program, the “Strengthening America’s Communities Initiative,” combining 18 different congressionally mandated programs into one single, radically underfunded program. For details, such as they are, click on “Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2006, Appendix.” Scroll down to page 8 of the Department of Commerce’s budget estimate. HUD’s press officer informs us, however, that the initiative would require additional legislation—even less likely to get through Congress than the budget itself. Ironically Al Gore gave a keynote address at the Brookings Institution in 1998 with an identical title www.brook.edu/comm/transcripts/19980902a.htm—it sounds almost quaint in contemporary political terms.

An Open Letter to the Dean
If you liked this month’s “Far Corner” and think it could have gone even further, we highly recommend Mark Stevens’s New York Times Op-Ed “Form Follows Fascism” (January 31, 2005) on the extent of Philip Johnson’s fascist sympathies. Stevens reports Johnson tried to start a fascist party in the United States, and after visiting the Polish front in 1939, wrote in a letter, “The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy.”

Project: Play
See more of Koning Eizenberg Architecture’s work on the firm’s Web site, www.kearch.com, or check out William Mitchell’s book Koning Eizenberg: Buildings and Projects (Rizzoli, 1996). If you’re in Southern California swing by their award-winning P.S. 1 elementary school at 1454 Euclid Street in Santa Monica. The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is open seven days a week. For visitor info go to www.pittsburghkids.org or call (412) 322-5058. You can learn more about the museum’s historic neighbor, the Buhl Planetarium, at www.buhlplanetarium.org. Ned Kahn has completed some two dozen public-art commissions in the last 14 years, the bulk of which are in California. If you’re in New York City, you can see his work Infalling Cloud at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in the American Museum of Natural History. To learn more about this very busy bee, go to www.nedkahn.com. Check out Paul Rosenblatt’s design work at www.springboarddesign.net.

Instant City
New Songdo City’s Web site, www.new-songdocity.co.kr, invites you to “Meet the Future,” billing the project as a “Global Destination” city and as the “Gateway to Northeast Asia” above a rendering of the architectural massing that makes the World Trade Center master plan look like child’s play. The Gale Company has somewhat less inviting construction photos on www.thegalecompany.com. But the project merits only brief mention on www.kpf.com, the site for Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, which ranked 95th last year on McGraw-Hill’s list of top-grossing international design firms (see enr.construction.com).

Desktop Comet
A mostly visual overview of the designer’s career, Richard Sapper (Chronicle Books, 2002) has an introductory essay by Michael Webb that includes an almost hard-boiled description of Sapper as “lean and lanky, with a hawklike profile, penetrating eyes, and a fringe of silver hair.” For all you lamp fetishists, 1000 Lights, Volume 1 (2005) is the latest release from Taschen, the publisher with the foresight to combine art, architecture, and sex in its catalog, anticipating the emerging genre of design pornography.

Italy’s New Wave
The Web sites for Cliostraat, IaN+, and Metrogramma— www.cliostraat.com, www.ianplus.it, www.metrogramma.com—are worth a look, though the Metrogramma site is only in Italian. To learn more about Stalker, go to www.stalkerlab.it. Very little of the text is in English, but the group’s poetic attitude is evident even to the Italian-impaired. You might also want to check out the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, which continues to serve as the young nomads’ muse. Another great influence was the Situationist International movement. You can access reams of documents (books, articles, excerpts) on the movement at www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline and www.nothingness.org/SI. Curator Luca Molinari has published an impressive number of books and articles that help demystify the theoretical free-for-all that descended upon the postwar Italian architecture scene. His staggering breadth of knowledge on the subject somehow fails to dampen his childlike enthusiasm for it. Titles that are available in English include Gregotti Associati: Fragments of Construction (Skira, 2002) and the forthcoming Massimiliano Fuksas: 1995-2005 (Skira, November 2005). He is also the author of North American Architecture Trends: 1990-2000 (Skira, 2001) and Santiago Calatrava (Skira, 1999).

Second Story
Richard Neutra’s son Dion, project architect for the Hammerman House, still has an active architectural studio www.neutra.org—he expressed regret at not receiving the commission to renovate the house but approves of the results—and is currently compiling an online gallery of the studio’s work. The 12-pound volume Neutra: Complete Works (Taschen, 2000) from the publisher’s Jumbo Series is available through Amazon.com at a deep discount from its $200 sticker price.