Reference Page: June 2008

44 Nuclear Family
Almost half of Americans live within ten miles of a toxic-waste site, according to the Center for Public Integrity . To find out how close you are to an eco-disaster waiting to happen, consult the Environ­mental Protection Agency map. In her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, Kelly McMasters writes critically about growing up near the Superfund-designated Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island. For a preview, read her 2006 op-ed in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com; search for “Nuclear Neighborhood”). Unsurprisingly, the lab’s press office isn’t too thrilled with the memoir. See the response at www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/stewardship.

64 Sticks and Stones
In Villanueva, Colombia, a group of young architects (www.migueltorresarquitecto.com) designed a public library as part of a national effort to promote culture in underserved areas. Medellín, once known as the most dangerous city on earth, is also experiencing a revival. The town’s long-haired, jeans-wearing mayor bet on well-designed public spaces to curb drug trafficking and violence. The result: new parks, five libraries…and a feature in the New York Times! Especially thrilling is Botero Plaza (www.museodeantioquia.org/paginas/mus_07.html), where locals stroll around tubby statues of cats, horses, and women.

88 Normalizing Ground Zero
Will $2.5 billion be enough for Santiago Calatrava’s dovelike PATH station (www.calatrava.com)? Recent news reports suggest that the bird is shrinking (search www.nytimes.com for “Cala­trava” and “compromise”). Avian-inspired architecture can be attractive, but glass buildings are a major cause of death for our feathered friends. More than a billion birds fly into windows in the United States every year, according to the nonprofit Birds & Buildings (www.birdsandbuildings.org). Calatrava, whom the New York Review of Books recently dubbed “The Bird Man,” is using a special type of glass that’s visible to birds in the Chicago Spire (archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/080110feathers.asp). Jeanne Gang (www.studiogang.net), also featured in this month’s Metropolis, designed the Ford Calumet Environmental Center with a porch to protect birds from nasty collisions.

94 Spaced Out
Ooh, happy hippies! Alastair Gordon’s Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties (Rizzoli, 2008) is lousy with them: Timothy Leary exiled to the Boston suburbs, dropping acid in an old manse with Allen Ginsberg and Peggy Hitchcock; Ken Kesey holed up in La Honda, California, amid fluorescent-painted redwood trees and a lean-to known as the Screw Shack. The shack makes a cameo in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), the superbly written tale of Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. Sadly, the old digs have mostly dis­appeared, but the Prankster History Project (www.pranksterweb.org) has loads of archival photos and a recent shot of the Perry Lane cottage, where Kesey famously served guests LSD-laced venison chili.

106 Custom Filtering
We always assumed that air purifiers appealed to a select few—namely,
germophobes and Home Shopping Net­work enthusiasts—and with good reason: “There’s little medical evidence that air cleaners alone reduce the effects of indoor pollutants,” according to a Consumer Reports article from last year. (Go to www.consumerreports.org and click on “appliances,” then “air purifiers.”) Still, for a certain segment of the population—industrial designers and marketing execs among them—scrubbed air is a noble pursuit, and there’s no lack of scary facts to rattle skeptics. (See www.epa.gov/iaq for a sampling.) Of course, numbers are only a small part of a complex story, as Mark Jackson describes it in Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (Reaktion Books, 2006). The book “traces how ‘allergy’ became the archetypal ‘disease of civilization,’” the dust jacket says, “generating global political concerns about the relationship between health and the environment and stimulating anxieties about the detrimental effects of modern living.” It’s a fascinating study. Unfortunately, Jackson’s prose makes Judith Butler sound like a Family Circus cartoon. For a clearer account, see Gregg Mit­man’s Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007). If you’re still convinced that dust mites kill, you know where to go: www.hsn.com (search for “air purifier”).

152 Looming Debate
When Parisians started riding the new fleet of Vélib’ bikes (Patrick Jouin designed the docking terminals and suggested the signature pearly gray;
www.patrickjouin.com), they quickly realized that cycling went hand in glove with flirting. Just listen to 23-year-old Florian: “You exchange glances waiting at a light, you help her dock the bike back on to its stand and one thing leads to another.” (Visit www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2532554.ece
for the rest of the article.) Too shy to chat with the locals? Try www.en.velib.paris.fr for bicycle instructions in English (click on “How Does It Work?”). Once you’re in the saddle, ride over the new Simone de Beauvoir bridge (www.feichtingerarchitectes.com; select “bridges”). Christened after the feminist author of The Second Sex (Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), the passerelle is the city’s 37th span, and the first to be both curvy and named for a woman.

166 Brilliant, Engaging, but Modest It’s Not
It seems that Stefan Sagmeister’s true calling isn’t carving lecture notes into his torso or inking sex on Lou Reed’s face—it’s spreading life lessons.
“Low expectations are a good strategy,” “Worrying solves nothing,” “Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses”: nuggets of wisdom abound in Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far (Abrams, 2008) and continue unabated at www.thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com. The site even encourages visitors to post their own maxims, Sagmeister’s sole rule being “Please do write it down beautifully.” Entries range from sweet (an 80-year-old great-grandfather holds a sleeping baby over the caption “Children make you young”) to clever (sprouts swell from the ground, spelling “i Plant design”). But enough about other people! Sagmeister has more personal thoughts to share. At www.sagmeister.com, he answers design students’ pressing questions. (Student: “Have you ever had doubts…?” Sagmeister: “Yes…”) As a New York Times guest blogger last February, he opined on everything from his new MacBook to lunching with Lou (themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nytsagmeister). Sadly, the blog spans a mere five posts. Cat got his tongue? “I have always avoided blogs, partly because writing is difficult for me,” he writes, “(that’s why I became a designer).”

196 Leni Schwendinger
In 2006 the New York City Parks Depart­ment commissioned Leni Schwen­dinger (www.lightprojectsltd.com) to glam up Coney Island’s Parachute Jump, an inoperable amusement-park ride once optimistically called the Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn. Schwendinger studded the 250-foot-plus-tall steel tower with 17 lamps and more than 100 light fixtures—enough wattage, you’d think, to destroy Brooklyn’s moth population. (See a photo at
www.brooklynrecord.com/archives/27jump.jpg.) Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz disagreed. In recent months, he publicly criticized the design for being too “artsy” and in need of some “blinging up.” (Google “parachute jump” and “New York Post.”) What else do you expect from a man whose office resembles “Santa’s workshop” (www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/04/25/050425fa_fact)? Schwendinger’s next big project, illuminating Manhattan’s grim central bus station, is slated for completion this summer. Here’s to hoping that the city’s brass keeps the bling where it belongs: on Wall Street.