Veritas et Venustas

In a poll, over 23,000 people (11%) voted with the Homeowners Association!

Subdivision Bans Wreath With Peace Sign
Homeowner Defies Board, Faces About $1000 in Fines
By Robert Weller, AP

AP / Handout

DENVER (Nov. 26) - A homeowners association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan [emphasis added].

via AOL News

Heroes Fiddle While Home Burns

Post-Katrina New Orleans - Illustration © 2006 Tulane University Magazine

WE'RE coming up on 1 year and 3 months since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city that time forgot. Almost two-thirds of the former residents of the city still have not returned, and many areas of the city continue to lack services as fundamental as working traffic lights. Houses sit empty, because few house payments have been made by FEMA, Louisiana and the insurance companies.

The School of Architecture at Tulane University should be a center of the rebuilding of its great city. Instead, its Dean, who wrote a much-ridiculed article entitled Black Like Me (photo above), is on TV hosting a program designing "the future" of New York, a city so thriving that apartments routinely sell for more than $1,000 a square foot. Still to come are programs on Los Angeles and Chicago, two more cities overflowing with people so eager to be in them that the cities have rarely looked better or had better economies.

Of course Tulane does devote time to the present in New Orleans as well. You can see links to some of the efforts here, like Project New Orleans. But the current avant-garde ideologies of the architectural establishment make them ineffective and even counter productive. The Dean was so outspoken in his cries for avant garde solutions (and his disdain for those who disagreed, like Governor Blanco), that he was forced to resign his position on Mayor Nagin's Bring Back New Orleans Commission.

The Project New Orleans show of "all" student work doesn't include traditional designs from students at the University of Miami (where I'm teaching this semester) and Notre Dame (where I'm teaching next semester). And having been banished from the real work going on in New Orleans, the Dean organized an architectural think fest in Amsterdam (of all places) and ArtForum. In the public forum of New Orleans, the work sank like a stone.

The latest news is that Mayor Nagin, often criticized for moving too slowly and doing too little, has listened to the architects who say that what New Orleans needs in its year of crisis is more avant garde architecture. Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and other celebrities are being brought in to "reinvent the Crescent" and help make New Orleans safe for developers who want to build big glass boxes. The myth of the Howard-Roark-style architectural hero lives on, despite five decades of ego-driven invention making our cities worse places to live.

Will Starchitects be the salvation of New Orleans? Or are Modern architects squabbling about style instead of rebuilding the city?

Portland Picks Ugly & Cusato Crits Pitt

From the Portland Tribune:

Matthew Slick said it straight. The 56-year-old Slick, who works as a data processor for a Pearl District law firm, wrote a letter to the Portland Tribune in response to a recent story that surveyed local architects and city planners on the city’s ugliest and most beautiful buildings.

“All I can say is what planet are these architects on?” Smith wrote. “I was appalled to find that I hated almost everything that these architects said that they admired.”

Slick’s opening comment summed up the sentiments of a decided majority of the letter writers. Apparently, there’s a bit of a divide between what many of Portland’s architects like and what the general public prefers in buildings. 

Marianne Cusato writes:

I was on a panel with the winner of the Global Green Competition, Matthew Berman from Workshop/APD. I presented the Katrina Cottages as well as a house I designed at the UDA Treme/LaFitte charrette. In my talk I discussed the feedback we'd received from the residents of Treme/LaFitte. We heard from them that they liked the look of the Shotguns, but wanted the plans be adapted to modern living and they had to be practical and affordable.

After we each presented our work we had a Q&A with the audience. The members of the audience that were from New Orleans, passionately attacked the "award winning" Global Green design. They were outraged that this project had been selected. They were upset that it had no resemblance to the existing neighborhood, either with the architecture or the plan. One woman stood up and explained to the architect that the "Historic" buildings weren't old and out dated. They were REALLY well designed, NOT because of the balustrades, brackets and architectural details, but because of the tall ceilings, cross ventilation and the materials. She was great because she elevated the conversation away from style to practical common sense.

The residents in the room were disgusted that modern designs were being imposed on them. The architect admitted that the residents that he had spoken to didn't like the modern designs, but that didn't stop him from proceeding with his work. It seemed more about his personal design exploration, rather than a project based in reality or any form of practicality. The amazing thing about the day was that no one in the room, NOLA residents or even the SLC students, were buying it - or cutting him any slack.

Full text below.

Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY hosted a symposium this weekend on rebuilding and the future of New Orleans. The speakers included the winner of Brad Pitt's Global Green Competition, representatives from Acorn Housing, several others involved with planning efforts and a few displaced residents who had relocated to this area.

I was on a panel with the winner of the Global Green Competition, Matthew Berman from Workshop/APD. I presented the Katrina Cottages as well as a house I designed at the UDA Treme/LaFitte charrette. In my talk I discussed the feedback we'd received from the residents of Treme/LaFitte. We heard from them that they liked the look of the Shotguns, but wanted the plans be adapted to modern living and they had to be practical and affordable.

After we each presented our work we had a Q&A with the audience. The members of the audience that were from New Orleans, passionately attacked the "award winning" Global Green design. They were outraged that this project had been selected. They were upset that it had no resemblance to the existing neighborhood, either with the architecture or the plan. One woman stood up and explained to the architect that the "Historic" buildings weren't old and out dated. They were REALLY well designed, NOT because of the balustrades, brackets and architectural details, but because of the tall ceilings, cross ventilation and the materials. She was great because she elevated the conversation away from style to practical common sense.

The residents in the room were disgusted that modern designs were being imposed on them. The architect admitted that the residents that he had spoken to didn't like the modern designs, but that didn't stop him from proceeding with his work. It seemed more about his personal design exploration, rather than a project based in reality or any form of practicality. The amazing thing about the day was that no one in the room, NOLA residents or even the SLC students, were buying it - or cutting him any slack.

One resident pointed out that the architecture could either support or destroy a community. From the planning of where buildings go to the interior plans of where the kitchen is located. He went on to tell the architect of the GG Design that his building would destroy the community and probably cause people to kill themselves.

The professor at the school that was moderating our panel tried to let the guy off the hook by asking the audience if they could set aside the site plan, which he admitted was really bad, but looked only at the buildings, would they be happier with the designs, the room spontaneously yelled out NO.

Then he went on to try and talk about the theory and academic approach of the modern design, I interrupted and challenged that this was a real world problem not an academic experiment, that it was the wrong approach to ignore the existing context and the desires of the people. Instead we needed to listen to what people are asking for and through design, build communities. The room erupted in applause. The professor went on to dismiss me by saying "Well yes, that might be the populous view, but...."

We have so many struggles in the work we are doing down on the coast, politics at every level, but after a day like today, hearing the passion in the voices of these residents, it was so clear how important it is that we are down there and working so hard.   The people want what we are doing.

Tom Wolfe Crits Historic Preservation in New York City

The (Naked) City and the Undead
The New York Times, Sunday November 26, 2006
By Tom Wolfe

CHIN up, tummy out, Aby Rosen, the 46-year-old German developer, owner of the Seagram Building and Lever House, was posing for pictures in front of 980 Madison Avenue barely one month ago when he grew so bold as to boast: “I have zero fear. Fear is not something I have.”

Easy for you to say, braveheart! The courage-crowing tycoon knows very well that in the current battle over 980 Madison, a five-story Art Moderne building stretching from 76th Street to 77th Street, the contest is already completely snookered in his favor.

On top of this block-long low-rise he intends to build one of his Aby Rosen jumbo glass boxes full of commercial space and condominiums, rising straight up a sheer 30 stories. His big problem — or, to be more accurate, “problem” — is that 980 Madison is in the heart of the Upper East Side Historic District, and it would be hard to dream up anything short of a Mobil station more out of place there than a Mondo Condo glass box by Aby Rosen.

The writer Tom Wolfe and other neighbors have taken to lobbing objections in the direction of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the city’s official watchdog for landmarked areas. The commission has already held a hearing and could stop Aby Rosen dead in his tracks at a moment’s notice, just like that.

But what, him worry? Like every major developer in town, he knows that the Landmarks Preservation Commission has been de facto defunct for going on 20 years. Today it is a bureau of the walking dead, tended by one Robert B. Tierney.

Mr. Tierney and the 10 members of his commission already have a hearty, comrades-in-arms, marching-along-together history with Aby Rosen. The commission was highly instrumental last November in clearing the way for him to build a zone-busting glass box full of condominiums on Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street in return for his guarantee, written into the deed, that the exterior of his Seagram Building, given landmark status in 1989, will be maintained in its original condition in perpetuity.

Mr. Tierney gushed — insofar as one can gush in a press release — that Aby Rosen was not only ensuring “the highest level of protection” for this historic building, he was also being so kind as to favor New York with “a landmark of the future,” namely, his glass box godzilla at Lexington and 53rd.

How generous! How civic-minded! Noblesse oblige! ... until one reminds oneself that Aby Rosen and every other owner of a landmarked building is required by law to maintain it in its original condition.

(followed by 4 more pages)

Got Rum?

YES, rum is made from sugar cane by-products. West Indian slaves discovered that the molasses left over from turning sugar cane into sugar could ferment and produce rum. New Englanders built rum distilleries and developed the triangular trade: sugar, molasses and slaves went from the West Indies to New England; rum went from New England to Africa; and more slaves went from Africa to the West Indies.

So if "the first pressing of virgin sugar cane" is fermented, can you call the result rum? Well, that's the new trend the last few years, the rum equivalent of single-malt whiskeys and small-batch bourbons.

Judging by the one I had, 10 Cane Rum, these sugar-cane rums taste the same but better than traditional molasses-based rums. 10 Cane Rum costs $35, and comes in a good-looking bottle, just like my favorite bourbon (Woodford Reserve).

The bottle and graphics were designed by Werner Design Werks. The "irreverently placed label" works well, and is orange, not red (the rum is a light gold).

The Chumscrubber

The Chumbscrubber may be the bleakest movie I've seen. If that's the way the writer / director Arie Posen sees the world, how does he get up in the morning?

Modern Times

For a few years, the London Times was the world's best looking newspaper. But after more than 200 years of publication, Rupert “Let's Go Lower” Murdoch started a simultaneous tabloid edition (see below). The newsstand near the London hotel where I was staying at the time would run out of the traditional "broadsheets" by 10, but had a pile of tabloids all day. The Times announced sales were up 4.5% and dropped the broadsheet edition. I don't know what the effect was on readership, but I know I lost interest.

I was interested to see that recently they redesigned Times Roman (made for the Times in 1931), and their masthead. (via DesignObserver)

The top half of the old broadsheet.

The new tabloid.