Reference Page: September 2008

Making Waves

Last year, UNESCO added a large swath of Bordeaux, France, to its World Heritage list (www.whc.unesco.org; click on “The List”), citing its “world-famous wine production” and the historical importance of its port. Doesn’t Bordeaux have more to recommend it than pirates and booze? Not so, to judge by its tourism bureau, www.bordeaux-tourisme.com. About half of the advertised activities involve wine—wine and cheese tastings, the opening of a wine bar, a chateau and terroir tour—and the other half are events like golf outings, swing dancing, and battle reenactments. Archi­tecturally, Bordeaux is a much more complicated city, with a dominant classical and neoclassical aesthetic, eclipsed some by medieval remnants and dashes of modern design. Seeko’o (www.seekoo-hotel.com), which opened last year, is only the latest in a string of unconventional contempor­ary buildings that include an OMA-designed private residence carved into a hillside (www.oma.eu; select “projects” and “Maison à Bordeaux”) and Richard Rogers’s Bordeaux Law Courts, a gigantic glass box adorned with seven vatlike cedar pods that riff on the city’s greatest cultural draw: wine. (Search “Bordeaux” at www.richardrogers.co.uk for images.)

Rock-and-Roll History

Disclaimer: We are big Radiohead fans. The band’s official Web site, www.radiohead.com, remains true to the delightfully arcane nature of its creative output. Click on “the most gigantic flying mouth” for a blog to which the tour’s production manager posts updates on initiatives to reduce its environmental impact. You can also calculate your own concertgoing footprint by selecting the show you attended and inputting your means of travel. Considering that incandescent lightbulbs could be banned in the United States within the next ten years, Radiohead’s conversion to LEDs may put it way ahead of the curve. But could the entertainment industry be ex-empt from the proposed law? Read “Incandescent’s Not-So-Dim Future” (February 2008) at www.plsn.com.

In from the Sea

Recently, Philippe Sollers and Christian de Portzamparc theorized in Writing and Seeing in Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) that writers are fundamentally architects. In the office, we tested this hypothesis by drawing Philip Johnson’s Coke-bottle glasses on Marcel Proust’s face. (Go to www.metropolismag.com/pov and scroll down to July 28.) So far, so good. But the experiment didn’t entirely convince us. Does the metaphor swing both ways? What about Hashim Sarkis as Shakespeare? Around 1608, Shakespeare wrote Pericles, Prince of Tyre, widely dismissed by scholars as suffocating and overwrought. Sarkis, of course, is all about natural ventilation and sensitivity to his audience. Moreover, he thinks and speaks with a kind of writerly understanding of the building-as-plot; he describes creating “private moments” somewhere between the “massive gesture” of a framing structure and the “expression of the individual” within it. It’s well deserved, then, that the Boston Society of Architects just gave him an Honor Award for Design Excellence for his housing project in southern Lebanon: www.architects.org/awards. So, Q.E.D.: Sarkis is Tyre’s premier author—and, dare we say, its most progressive. Shakespeare never had a Web site as sleek as this: www.hashimsarkis.com.

Fast Train Coming (Slowly)

People have long been captivated by trains, perhaps none more than Darius McCollum, an obsessive train enthusiast who has been arrested 23 times for such offenses as impersonating a New York City transit worker. “Trains are always going to be my first love,” he told Harper’s (www.harpers.org) in 2002, after spending some 800 days in prison for what was effectively a victimless, nonviolent crime. (Read about his latest arrest by searching for his name at www.nytimes.com.) Why not give the man a job? Maybe McCollum would be more welcome at Amtrak (www.amtrak.com), the cash-strapped company that has survived mismanagement, bad service, and weak political support since 1971. In New Departures: Rethinking Rail Passenger Policy in the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Kentucky, 2002), Anthony Perl argues for a systemic overhaul in which streamlined bureaucracy, legislation, and updated design lay the tracks for a viable national rail system. California, of course, has its own ideas. Governor Schwarzenegger’s pet high-speed, high-tech passenger rail line (www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov) would link urban areas statewide for a mere $40 billion. Meanwhile, the private California-Nevada Interstate Maglev Project and its rival, the DesertXpress (www.desertxpress.com), plan to cart old ladies with big change purses and bigger bouffants to Las Vegas for less than $100 each way.

And the Band Played On

Each year, thousands of architects, developers, and hangers-on descend upon Cannes, France, and broker deals that determine the fate of cities worldwide. The MIPIM real estate conference (www.mipim.com) has been a nexus of power for nearly two decades, but this year one man dominated the proceedings: Sir Norman Foster. His Motherland projects are so over-the-top (www.fosterandpartners.com; click “Projects,” “By Location,” “Europe,” then “Russia”) that some industry-observers are starting to wonder: Is Foster, you know, connected? Sean Griffiths, a blogger at Building Design, notes that at the conference Foster was “[s]ur­rounded by Eastern European men with pony tails and suits of the sort who always seem to play the villain in films like The Bourne Supremacy and TV shows like 24” (www.bdonline.co.uk; search “Norman Foster” and “Russian henchmen”). For more on obscenely loaded men and the architects who love them, see Deyan Sudjic’s The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World (Penguin Press, 2005), or wait until November 19, when MIPIM Asia gets underway: www.mipimasia.com.

Green Architecture’s Grand Experiment

Given the bizarre Creation Museum, a creationist “natural history museum” that opened in Petersburg, Kentucky, last year (www.creationmuseum.org)—Adam and Eve supplant Lucy’s skeleton as the earliest examples of a hominid, and fully evolved humans ride saddled dinosaurs—it’s refreshing to see someplace in the United States pouring a little money into legitimate science. The new $488 million California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, is a feat of structural engineering, environmental design, and sui generis landscaping, but one of its biggest challenges had nothing to do with the building: How to move more than 20 million specimens? Penguins made the four-mile trip from a temporary downtown facility in pet carriers; snakes in canvas sacks; and snapping turtles in slings and rolling carts—with great care taken to avoid their bone-crushing jaws: www.calacademy.org/academy/building/behind_the_scenes.php. The long move hasn’t distracted scientists from their research, however, the fruits of which can be heard on podcasts at www.calacademy.org/podcasts/index.php.

Murray Moss

Mossonline.com is a fun Web shop that features a new “extraordinarily fabulous item” each weekday, such as a $3,700 Bol Seine de la Laiterie de Rambouillet—a tasting bowl said to have been molded from a queen’s breast (search “July 16, 2008” in the “Daily New” archives). Visiting a Moss store in person is even more fun, of course; it’s like stepping into a ritzy dime museum with crystal skulls, porcelain monkeys, a $5,200 cowhide chair, a stuffed-animal seat and—descending further into questionable taste—a series of disaster-site miniatures (the World Trade Center, Chernobyl) cast in nickel or 24-karat gold. This winter, Moss’s two existing stores, in New York and West Holly­wood, are to be joined by a third at Philippe Starck’s SLS Hotel, in Beverly Hills (www.slshotels.com), which might come as a surprise to anyone who read the Moss partner Frank­lin Getchell’s New York Times guest blog last year, a hilarious account of his first foray into Los Angeles retail: www.themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nytgetchell. “Every­body in West Hollywood is gay,” Getchell complained. “Our contractor was gay. The plumber was gay. Architect? Gay. Landlord? City Hall? Mayor? Gay, gay, gay. …How much work do you really think gets done?”