Reference Page: March 2006

Returning to Its Roots
The back story of the naming of Tanner Springs Park, formerly known as North Park Square, isn’t quite The Da Vinci Code, but it does provide some insight into the public’s role in city planning; visit Portland’s Parks & Recreation Department at www.portlandonline.com/parks and search for “Tanner Springs Park.” Info on Jamison Square, which is part of the same Peter Walker-planned Hoyt Street railyards project, can also be found through that site. Walker’s landscape-architecture firm, based in Berkeley, California, has worked on a number of important public and civic projects, among them the memorial at Ground Zero and a proposed redesign of the grounds of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the president’s residence. Photos and renderings are hosted at www.pwpla.com; click on the “Projects” tab.

The Road Not Taken
“Celebrity book cover designer” sounds like a contradiction in terms, but with a novel and a monograph to his name, Chip Kidd makes it almost plausible. (What other publishing slob do you know whose home has been featured in the New York Times?) Being the planet’s lone book-design star, it comes as no surprise that he has his own official Web site: www.goodisdead.com. Also not surprising—it is attractive and looks like a book. Fans will be pleased to find, under “Clippings,” an exhaustive collection of links to Kidd-related articles. Everyone else will note the disclaimer that the site “is, at present, merely a germ of what’s to come. A full site is in the works. We promise.” We’re holding you to it, Chip.

The Heart of Beirut
In 1998 the Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury, www.bernardkhoury.com, who is renovating the egg-shaped Beirut City Center Building, built an underground discotheque called B018 in a part of the city that had several times served as a refugee camp. Using a series of benches made to look like coffins, the grim design references the 1976 massacre of 1,000 Palestinians on the site. Images of the club’s bunkerlike interior can be found on the architect’s homepage and at www.b018.com.

Museum on the Mount
The Gerard L. Cafesjian Museum of Art may still be in the works, but it already boasts an impressive Web site: www.cmf.am. In addition to background on the project, there’s a nice interactive plan of the terraced hill leading up to the new building (click on “The Cascade”) and a gallery of artwork from the collection, including the lovable “Cat” by Fernando Botero. To understand more clearly why a museum of this stature is such an important development for Armenia, go to the site of the Armenian National Institute, www.armenian-genocide.org. It has an in-depth chronology of the Armenian geno-cide and an international list of memorials and monuments, including the one in Yerevan that architect David Hotson, www.hotson.net, has dramatized with his redesign of the cascade.

Hong Kong 1, New York 0
Read the U.S. Department of State’s page describing the “investment climate” of Hong Kong, state.gov/e/eb/ifd/2005/42057.htm, and the city sounds like a capitalist candy land. Among other words of optimism, the site states, “Hong Kong’s body of law and regulation recognizes the value of competition in economic endeavor.” Oh, the innocence. Go to articles in Architectural Record, archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/050301hongkong.asp, and the Hong Kong business paper The Standard, thestandard.com.hk/stdn/std/Metro/GG21Ak04.html, for reporting on the government’s initial plans to cede the entire West Kowloon Cultural District to a single developer. Readers may note that according to the latter piece, building costs for Foster and Partners’ domed extravaganza have also raised local dander. Suddenly we understand why a Foster representative told us they’d prefer we not mention the project at all.

East Meets West on the Champs-Elysées
We at Reference must tell the painful truth: our collective wardrobes contain nary an item from Louis Vuitton. Not the merest boot. But sometimes we like to imagine what it must be like to swan through the Champs-Elysées store, idly picking up monogrammed pochettes and complaining about the maid. The closest we’ve managed to come to this is to drop by louisvuitton.com, where the company has thoughtfully provided a dizzying little video tour of the mega-shop’s interior (go to “Stores,” and look for “Champs-Elysées Opening” on the right). It’s not interactive, but one gets the idea: endless acres of glossy luxury—and none of it for the likes of us, darling.

The Active Edge
If Michael Van Valkenburgh is the Alice Waters of landscape architecture, then Brooklyn Bridge Park just might be his Chez Panisse (where, fittingly, he prefers the relatively casual upstairs café over the reservations-only prix fixe downstairs). For information on getting a table at the Berkeley, California, landmark, point your browser to www.chezpanisse.com, and try not to drool on the computer screen. Van Valkenburgh’s own homepage, www.mvvainc.com, displays before and after shots of Allegheny Riverfront Park—another of the firm’s projects, besides Wellesley College, that have reworked an Olmsted-designed space. To create the bilevel park on the Pittsburgh waterfront, Van Valkenburgh and his team reconfigured the road system around the city’s downtown area, shifting the highway to allow spaces for plantings that are, alternately, carefully cultivated and deliberately wild.

Ship Shape
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson principal Peter Bohlin’s hefty résumé extends far beyond the Ballard branch library. In the early 1990s he and James Cutler built a fortress home on Lake Washington for Bill Gates—now the world’s richest person, but hardly a pauper back then. U.S. News & World Report’s Web site still hosts a 2001 interview with the Microsoft mogul, and it’s accompanied by a clickable digital map of the Gates estate: www.usnews.com/usnews/tech/billgate/gates.htm. Don’t miss the creepy Where’s Waldo? touch: a half-naked Gates lurking in the boathouse spa. If you can’t get 1835 73rd Ave. NE out of your head, bring it into your home. PaperToys.com offers a free paper model of the Medina manse at www.papertoys.com/gates.htm. Just print the page, cut out the diagram, and let the envy hit you like a stack of Windows 95 floppy disks.

Beyond Black + White
Multiple images of Philip Freelon-designed cultural institutions can be found on the Freelon Group’s site, www.freelon.com. To explore these destinations more fully, begin with the site for the Reginal F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, www.africanamericanculture.org, which provides a virtual tour (click on “Building”) of the splendid new structure. The online home of the Museum of the African Diaspora, www.moadsf.org, has an ingenious click-through gallery of the mosaic based on Chester Higgins Jr.’s powerful portrait of a young African girl that allows you to explore the individual photos. And at www.sitinmovement.org, the International Civil Rights Center & Museum offers up the history of the landmark sit-in that forms the museum’s curatorial focal point.

Empty Polemics
Since the summer of 2002, when Israel began constructing its so-called “security fence,” the barrier has become a flashpoint in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. At www.securityfence.mod.gov.il/pages/eng/default.htm, the Israeli Ministry of Defense lays out its argument supporting the barrier as an essential and temporary terrorist deterrent; a current path can be seen by clicking on “Route.” Stop the Wall, at www.stopthewall.org, offers an opposing view-point and links to Israel-divestment groups. Against the Wall contributor Slavoj Zizek, or the Giant of Ljubljana, as the Slovenian professor and author is affectionately known, has suggested that Alfred Hitchcock’s films are the perfect entrée to the abstruse works of French theorist Jacques Lacan. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (Verso, 1992), which Zizek edited, never really moves past the jokey title, but it remains a must-read for the post-structuralist, Marxist cinéaste set.