Reference Page: July 2005

Where the Highway Ends
The city of San Francisco, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and the San Francisco County Transportation Authority came together to provide an exhaustive Web site for the Octavia Boulevard project: www.octaviacentral.org. Replete with maps and illustrations, the site also offers a backgrounder on the boulevard’s development, a construction timeline, and a short film about artifacts unearthed during excavation. In addition, the city provides basic information about the boulevard on its own site at www.sfgov.org/site/octavia_blvd_index.asp, which contains a page about the selection process for a permanent public art work to be installed within the new highway/park complex.

Turning the Tables
Alinea’s Web site, www.alinea-restaurant.com, has only a difficult-to-read phone number and an animation with examples of the alinea paragraph symbol on it—so far. The restaurant’s sculptural tableware designers, Crucial Detail, www.crucialdetail.com, offer only slightly more information plus a portfolio of the firm’s work.

Local Hero
John Burse can be reached at Mackey Mitchell Associates, www.mackeymitchell.com. Find contact information for the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group at www.stlouis.missouri.org/oldnorthstlouis along with a short history of the neighborhood and the background of the organization and its members. Lots of information about community services in St. Louis can be found on the Web site of the Grace Hill Settlement House, www.gracehill.org.

Changing Outlook
For more on Emme, contact Dieguez Fridman via e-mail: info@dieguezfridman.com.ar. Current projects include the design of a new 6,000-square-meter economics building for the University of Buenos Aires, a luxury apartment building in the fashionable Las Ca–itas neighborhood, and a single-family home in El Tigre.

Community Building
The reputation of Leipzig as a “little Paris” is often attributed to a passage in Faust in which Frosch tells Mephistopheles sarcastically, “Leipzig’s the place for me! ‘Tis quite a little Paris.” In keeping with common Prussian practice, the Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig has a German-only Web presence at www.mdbk.de. You can download a video of the mu-seum set to an appropriately ethereal and contemplative piano track there. The sparse Hufnagel Pütz Rafaelian site, www.hufnagelpuetzrafaelian.de, links to another site with nice external views and full credit information for the project, also in German.

Play It Again
The Web has no dearth of Eamesiana, thanks to the Eames Office’s detailed site at www.eamesoffice.org. Here the many works by design’s über-couple are catalogued and, often, illustrated. A clip from the 1955 film essay “House: After Five Years of Living”—which documents the construction of their seminal residence—and a flip-book tour of the house should keep fans of Eames architecture happy. Anything missed on the Office site can undoubtedly be found in Eames Demetrios’s Eames Primer (Universe, 2002), or at the book’s accompanying site, www.eamesprimer.com. For Eames products created under the auspices of Neenah Paper, try www.neenahpaper.com/eames. A listingof Neenah Paper merchants is available at www.neenahpaper.com/findadistributor.

Extreme Makeover
Check out Michael Young’s Web site, www.michael-young.com, for more photographs of plastic surgeon Dr. Jong Ming Chang’s office. Young works with Demos and Edward Chiang at DEM Inc., www.dem.com.tw, which has offices in Taipei and Shanghai. Recent projects include an MP3 player, scheduled for release this summer, and a watch and USB device.

Bridging the Divide
Annette Polan’s admirable Faces of the Fallen exhibit can be visited on the Web at www.facesofthefallen.org. The site includes a slide show of the paintings and a searchable database of the servicemen and women depicted. To learn more about the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, go to www.womensmemorial.org; one affecting feature of the site is a collection of oral history interviews telling the personal accounts of female veterans. The ban on photographs at Dover Air Force Base was recently dealt a blow: as reported in the Washington Post on April 29, University of Delaware professor Ralph Begleiter successfully sued for the release of more than 700 photographs of soldiers’ caskets. Those interested in learning more about the Freedom of Information Act—used by Begleiter to argue his case—can try www.onthemedia.org, the site for the National Public Radio show “On the Media,” which aired a discussion of the act and its function on May 8.

Drive-Thru Office
Zaha Hadid’s overdesigned Web site, www.zaha-hadid.com, presents plenty of obstacles to the easy retrieval of information, once again proving that “more” is quite often less. It might be easier to access information about the BMW Central Building on the humdrum Pritzker Prize site, which offers a PDF of the project while it was still under construction: www.pritzkerprize.com/2004/pdf/BMW.pdf. Go to www.bmw.com, for images of the BMW 3 Series produced in the Leipzig factory. The Central Building’s workspaces were customized by Austrian office consultants Bene, www.bene.com. The Machine that Changed the World (Scribner, 1990), MIT’s study of automobile production from the mid- to late 1980s, can be purchased at www.amazon.com.

Made in Hollywood
For all of your vacuforming needs, call the Warner Bros. staff shop at (818) 954-2269 and ask for Brian Surpernant. CTEK, www.ctek.us, and Spectrum 3D, www.spectrum3d.com, are also good resources for various forms of rapid prototyping. For more information on particular projects discussed in the article, visit the designers’ Web sites: Hernan Diaz Alonso, www.xefirotarch.com; David Erdman, www.s-e-r-v-o.com; Greg Lynn, www.glform.com; Jason Payne and Heather Roberge, www.gnuform.com; and Marcelo Spina, www.p-a-t-t-e-r-n-s.net. Servo and Greg Lynn will be a part of a group exhibition titled Gen(H)ome at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, www.makcenter.org, in January 2006.

The Long Approach
Work Architecture Company’s Web site, www.work.ac, opens with a Flash animation of a characterful stick figure rushing to his desk and leaning over to work. Click on the figures holding hands for biographies of the two principals; graphics at the bottom of the page link to the firm’s projects. Lee Angel’s site, www.leeangel.com, allows you to scroll through a selection of the company’s jewelry.

Private Lives
While the New Canaan Historical Society may no longer distribute maps of local Modernist homes, it still has resources for the midcentury-architecture enthusiast. “Philip Johnson in New Canaan,” a publication on Johnson and the New Canaan architectural scene is on sale at the Society’s library. According to the Society’s Web site, www.nchistory.org, the publication includes “reminiscences of two of Mr. Johnson’s early associates—Landis Gores and Richard Foster—both of whom played roles in the completion of the Glass House as well as later local Johnson-designed houses.” More on the Glass House can be found in Sydney LeBlanc’s book The Architecture Traveler (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), as well as a short history of the 1951 New Canaan residence designed (and later remodeled) by Bauhaus luminary Marcel Breuer. For further insights into Toshiko Mori’s renovation of John Black Lee’s house, go to www.tmarch.com; look under “selected projects” for an image and description of the beautifully redesigned home.