Reference Page: January 2007

Local Color
Rios Clementi Hale Studios, the firm behind the California Endowment’s new headquarters, offers plenty of images of the colorful building and other projects at www.rchstudios.com. In addition to serving as the endowment’s headquarters, the building also contains the Center for Healthy Communities, a program designed to give community leaders and fledgling nonprofits the support they need to further their work in community health. The CHC page, www.calendow.org/chc, has a downloadable floor plan that allows organizations to scope out the best conference rooms and then reserve them online.

Soled Separately
If you’re still confused about how a “Skin” and a “Bone” make a shoe, go to the Skins Footwear Web site, www.skinsfootwear.com, where in addition to learning about the stock options you can watch a video of the hybrid shoe in action. Yeah, it’s a cool -concept and the shoe has an all-star design team, but will Skins really appeal to anyone other than novelty-crazed -metrosexuals?

Changing Venues
Thought an Austrian arts collective was above hounding celebrities? Alas, even Dy’na:mo, the group behind innovative performance space Fluc, www.fluc.at, wants a piece of Britney Spears’s action. Visitors looking for pictures of the space, part of which sits underground in a former train tunnel, were recently greeted by Britney’s crotch. Was Dy’na:mo merely poking fun at the pop star, or was there a deeper meaning to be found? Is Britney’s crotch a stand-in for Dy’na:mo’s liminal spaces of urban renewal? Artistic interest in the young mother peaked last year when sculptor Daniel Edwards created a nude Spears giving birth to son Sean Preston, www.caplakesting.com/2006_catalog/de/index.htm. Why has her celebrity skin become an artistic muse?

The Art of Compromise
The “My Very First Platinum LEED” series continues in this star-studded issue with the Portland Armory and the Interface showroom in Atlanta. For everything from pictures of the armory through the ages to a description of retail stores in the Brewery Blocks development, www.breweryblocks.com is your go-to Web site. The “Site Cams” button on the left side links to aerial views of the historic blocks in their current setting, but even better are the 1940s photographs of the old armory building (go to “Historical Perspective” and select “Historic Photos”). An image at the bottom of the page captures stoic workers bottling soda during the Prohibition years, and the last one, depicting three people burying a time capsule during the 1956 centennial celebration, makes us wonder if it survived the recent renovation.

Searching for the Future
It is not hard to see why the National Academy of Sciences, www.nasonline.org, would be interested in David Maisel, www.davidmaisel.com, whose photographs of environmentally devastated landscapes are discussed in this month’s “America” column. As Maisel explained recently by phone, “The Academy has a history of exhibiting photography that dovetails with scientific work,” such as that of the Starn twins, www.starnstudio.com, whose anatomical images of flora were displayed there in 2005. “The Academy is interested in provocative fine-art photography that is somehow looking at the natural world,” Maisel says. His eerie solo exhibition Black Maps includes work from “Oblivion,” aerial black-and-whites of Los Angeles; “The Lake Project,” documenting the ecological disaster of Owens Lake; and “Terminal Mirage,” a surreal depiction of the Great Salt Lake and its environs. Black Maps will appear at the Nevada Museum of Art, www.nevadaart.org, in the spring, and at the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C., from September to December 2007.

I &heart; IIT
If only there were an easy online guide to the comic-book adventures of “Far Corner” columnist Philip Nobel versus Rem Koolhaas. Alas, there is not, but you can read Philip’s article about OMA’s Prada store, titled “Waiting for Prada,” in the April 2001 issue of Interior Design; it inspired an angry phone call from the architect. Despite Koolhaas’s apparent character flaws, our writer still loved OMA’s IIT building in Chicago. A set of interior and exterior pictures can be found at www.arcspace.com by searching the site for “McCormick Tribune.” For those baser souls who squealed with delight upon finding out the size of Koolhaas’s tip, there’s www.stainedapron.com/celebs.htm, a waitstaff-run blog that dishes on who’s a restaurant saint and who’s scum. The site provides a stream of comments sent in by servers about their celebrity diners. Notably missing from the commentator group were guerilla reporters pouncing on leftover celebrity receipts.

Organic Barn Raising
San Francisco restaurant Lettüs (pronounced, abysmally, “letoos”) wants you to be healthy. So much so that in addition to its green food and decor, its Web site, www.lettusorganic.com, lists the benefits of making your culinary outings all-natural: click the “Organics” header on the main page and select “Menu” to tantalize your taste buds with images of Lemon Thyme Roasted Chicken or Breaded Pan-Fried Tempeh. Sorry meat-eaters, there are no bovine eatables to be found; for that you’ll have to visit one of CCS Architecture’s other restaurants. Scope out their designs at www.ccs-architecture.com; click on “Eats” in the upper right corner. If you don’t live close enough to Lettüs to benefit from its healthy dishes, a move to California may be justified—a recent study posted at www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/healthy.aspx lists five cities in the state among the top ten healthiest places to live in America (San Francisco is number three).

The Green Urban Office
Here at Metropolis we spend a good deal of time praising this or that sustainable project, but we sometimes neglect to mention the human concerns of a particular building and the people who will be served by it. On that note, in recognition of its 50th anniversary in 2005, the architectural firm HOK, www.hok.com/index.htm—one of last year’s winners of the IIDA/Metropolis Smart Environments Awards—took its sustainable building practices into the humanitarian-aid sector, funding the construction upgrades, outfitting, staffing, and launch of a solar-powered tuberculosis diagnostic and treatment center in rural southeastern Kenya. The new facility, run by Africa Infectious Disease Clinics Inc., www.aidvillage clinics.org/html/index.html, provides medical services to African village communities and will “minimize the need to refer patients to the nearest available diagnostic facility—a two-day walk—to undergo X-ray procedures that greatly enhance treatment options and outcomes.” While service-based projects like this may not be the sexiest in sustainable design, by fusing green building with humanitarian concerns they are no doubt among the most important.

Seminar in the Woods
When applying to college a decade or two ago, probably only the most eco-minded among us considered “sustainable campus” high on the list of desired features. But with the advent of the U.S. Green Building Council and LEED standards, prospective students now have the ability to judge a school not only by its academic and social merits, but by its commitment to the environment as well. The Evergreen State College, www.evergreen.edu—the school in Olympia, Wash-ington, that helped spawn grunge rock in the late-1980s—is at the forefront of the green movement in higher education, but there are hundreds of other colleges around the world making their campuses more environmentally friendly. The Sustainable Campus site, www.sustainablecampus.org, offers a list of schools that are building green and implementing green practices, as well as details on how to make your campus more ecologically savvy.