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February 25, 2005
Linkage
image credit: 40h.net
--NYPost reporting IOC wants stadium ok.
--Curbed on battle for 2 Columbus Circle.
--NYTimes on new Penn Station designs.
--BBC on recent world population estimates.
--Slatin Report on the brilliant CalTran building in LA.
--Resource Center on Urban Agriculture.
--A+T new issue on materiality.
--Nintendo Cartoon Hour
--Miss Representation is back and hitting homers.
--Ariel Pink's strange new video & beautiful song.
Posted by jmarston at 12:19 PM | Comments (1)
Malcontent Over Marriott on 6th Ave
The frightful beast began taking shape this fall, but hope still held tight to the lowly rebar popping from the site. A new building on this strip of 6th could begin to reshape what has always been M&J Trimming's block. Yet slowly, the new Residence Inn by Marriott rose with gut aching prominence. So much worse then a yawn, Nobutaka Ashihara Associate's 436-ft zit leaves us cold and bitter.
These 43 floors have more junk bonds then Mike Milken's white cube up the block. Check the finishing, windows, and chunk skin applications.
No excuse for these materials, but even more importantly, the half square cutting up each corner. Reminds me of another hunk we've covered.
Posted by jmarston at 11:50 AM | Comments (1)
February 24, 2005
Updated = Downgraded
Why, why we cry, would one think mixing the banalities of painted metal and the pseudofuturism of steel tubing be the proper REskin or route to Upscaling?
Especially with highly finished stone work & well proportioned carvings, right above it? Another backfire on a building, coming off like a cheap skirt and a dirty pair of Sketchers.
This is one of those double categories, Skins and Hatin'.
Posted by jmarston at 03:02 PM
Linkage
image credit: lightening field
--Economist does a huge Survey: New York City
--BoxTank reports Wal-Mart shelving New York store for now, pump your fist.
--Chicago Tribune flowing some heavy hatin' on the architecture of banks
--NYTimes gives it up for interesting landscape reappropriations
--ArchitectureWeek covers the 1970's pre-new urbanist suburb of Village Homes
--UrbanCartography links Nikos Salingaros essay on math modeling cities.
Posted by jmarston at 10:16 AM
February 23, 2005
IOC in NYC
I wrote this last year while putting together an article on why the Olympics were a helluva shitty idea for New York. In celebration of the IOC's current stay at the Plaza in New York, I've highlighted my paragraphs on the IOC here. I imagine the myriad reasons why NYC2012's plan is a terrible decision for the city is common knowledge since the rail yards deal exploded in their face last week. But TIF scandals, Manhattan stadiums, and sweetheart deals aside, the decision will come down this July, heres to hoping for Paris2012.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was first established in 1894 at an international athletics conference convened by Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The IOC was given the sole deciding responsibility for where the Olympics were to be hosted and to whom sponsorship and endorsement rights are given. The committee currently operates under the jurisdiction of Swiss law, where it is administratively based. IOC members are chosen by the IOC president, and an 11-member executive board, there are no formal democratic procedures for election or removal from the board. Those who are selected serve until the age of 80. It has been this way since, and in spite of Congressional hearings after an elaborate system of bribery and vote buyouts surfaced around the 1996 Salt Lake City games. These investigations ended up demonstrating an integrated and elaborate system of payoffs from candidate cities’ bid committees, to IOC officials. Votes indeed are for sale, was the hymn of the IOC – and Congressional officials uncovered that bid committees vying for the Olympic, joined in the chorus. Even in the jetsam following the investigations, many host committees’s cried ‘fair game’, for most Olympic bid committees – not cities – looked to make millions off being chosen to host – from tourism, construction, food services, and real estate. Or so the hope was.
Clearly, allegations were not restricted to the Salt Lake bid, even though US investigators started there. In January of 1999, about the same time as the hearings were taking place on Capital Hill, the Toronto bid committee published a 26-page report on their bid for the ’96 games. It exhaustively documented that in 1991, while showing Olympic delegates various sporting locales, IOC officials demanded money and jewelry. Amusingly, 18 of the 69 IOC members turned in their first class tickets to visit Toronto, for cash. There were also numerous documented complaints from organizers for requests by IOC officials for extremely extravagant special favors – scholarships to Toronto schools, extraneous vacation money, four-star accommodations, etc. As the reports from the Congressional hearings into the Atlanta bid, on the heels of the abhorrent conduct of officials and bid committees in Salt Lake, the facts took on nearly comedic scales. Tales of plastic surgery, lavish trips, and 5th Ave. shopping sprees fanned out on almost all IOC members, some much more flagrant than others.
Investigators uncovered IOC executive board member Jean-Claude Ganga, who came out the biggest victor in Salt Lake’s attempt to secure the bid, Jennings notes, “…[He] was the boss of all of Africa’s national Olympic committees. $250,000 in cash, free medical treatment, scholarships for all 10 children, cosmetic surgery for his wife, knee replacement surgery for his mother-in-law and $75,000 worth of prime Utah land.” However, it wasn’t conjecture that the Salt Lake committee knew what each IOC member had a fondness for (Ganga was by no means alone is his prizes, perchance just the magnitude). Salt Lake bid officials had hired public relations guru Patricia Rosenbrock. Exposed for selling her PR services to bid committees worldwide, she had constructed a database on each IOC board member, cataloging their tastes and personalities in order for bid committees to backhander them with the ‘perfect’ accoutrements. The file, as it released, looked like a psychoanalytic chart – likes comments on her beauty, shopping sprees, and nice jewelry. He enjoys good land deals, first class eco-tours, and spending cash. She had done it successfully for Sydney and would end up doing it successfully for Salt Lake, getting them the bid they so coveted.
Marques de Samaranch, the former sports minister for General Franco of fascist Spain, was president of the IOC for 19 years, until he ultimately resigned following the Congressional investigations into the Salt Lake scandal. Samaranch had turned the IOC into an out-and-out gentlemen’s club of close associates – an ex-head of the South Korean CIA, a former member of the Stasi, and Boris Yeltsin’s former private tennis coach, Shamil Tarpishev. One of the most disquieting episodes that arose from further investigations into Samaranch’s unbecoming appointments was on one particular IOC member (in addition to being a executive member of the World Track and Field Committee), Bob Hasan (formerly Kian Seng) of Indonesia. For many IOC insiders it was common knowledge, notwithstanding closet knowledge, that President Samaranch had a soft spot for dictators. But it was his choice of Bob Hasan, under the gentle recommendation of General Suharto, which was too many, unequivocally reprehensible. Under the blood-spattered reign of Suharto, Bob Hasan was the Trade and Industry Minister, managing to amass over 3 billion dollars in personal fortune from a long list of ‘development schemes’, unsurprisingly in cahoots with a number of large American corporations.
In addition to stacking the board with questionable figures, Samaranch transformed the Olympics into a corporate cash cow, opening them in 1983 to company sponsorship, which was notably in opposition to his presidential predecessor’s wishes. Avery Brundage, IOC president previous Samaranch, had organized the ‘Protection of the Olympic Emblems’ to stop the games from being overly exploited by sponsorship and advertising. As Bill Shaikin notes, “The IOC itself earns money by marketing products with Olympic symbols world wide and pockets additional profits from the payments of television networks and corporate sponsors.” A veritable explosion of licensing and merchandising came back in the 80’s when Samaranch opened them up to endorsement and sponsorship, making the Olympic brand an absolute bonanza of big money. The current figures more than speak for themselves. For the Atlanta Games of 1996, the IOC gave Coca-Cola sole ownership of the flame and GM sponsorship for domestic trucks (huh?), with 30 luminous monsters rolling through the opening ceremony alone. In fact, to purchase space for a company logo on a medal stand in the 2002 or 2004 games, costs over $55 million – 10 times what it cost in 1984. In 1988 nine corporate sponsors paid $100 million for marketing rights, at the 1996 Atlanta games this cost $4 billion. NBC recently spent $3.5 billion, in a deal with the IOC, for broadcasting rights to all summer and winter games from 2000 to 2008.
Posted by jmarston at 06:42 PM | Comments (2)
February 18, 2005
Upscaling
Februrary figures put the average price for Class-A* office space in Lower Manhattan's Financial District at about $33 per square foot, and Class-A office space in the Midtown/Grand Central District of Manhattan at $57 a square foot. This hot-hot a-go-go real estate market has sparked alot of interesting (& nauseating) Skin and Entrance upscales on existing structures; with owners hoping to lure higher paying leasees while trying to compete with the explosion of new Class-A construction.
So let it be announced, Transfer begins another new era in architectural browbeating, Skins. They'll be some crossover heat with Hatin', but surely there will be equal measure of good and bad.
Architects Moed de Armas & Shannon are big at Reskinning and Retooling existing structures in the Midtown area to get higher paying tenants into older buildings. Big proponents of glass casing and transluscent accenting, with splashy entrances. Moed have made a mint modernizing elder 1940's stone behemoths and mid-1960's brick bores with slick casings and even glossier entrances.
Two current Moed projects presently taking shape in Midtown are the reskinning of the Hippodrome, and the newly completed entrance at 350 Madison Ave, which will include a reskinning as well.
This is the squat Hippodrome, this little tart in the process of its fierce reskinning.
Hippodrome getting reskinned 02/2005
Old and new skin.
New and old skin detail.
Moed de Armas & Shannon next project, of which only the entrance is complete, is an upscaling of 350 Madison, which looks like any other boring brown brick office building, remarkable in its unexceptional presence. Interestingly enough, the old tenant of 350 is Condé Nast, who headquartered there before they got their hot new digs at 4 Times Square. Fox and Fowle's awesome 48-story LEED masterpiece. So, doing what any good building owner would after losing your main money, they applied for an addition, a project by SOM to add 26 stories to the structure. Thakfully it was killed in 2001. SOM, proud whores to corporate philandering, are always utilizing the sorcery of their fallen angel, David Childs, to build Monstrosities all around town (and the planet). Nothing as bad as the hideous Worldwide Plaza on Manhattan's westside, mind you, or surely nothing as bad as Child's Bastardization of Libeskind's freedom tower, but I wouldn't put it past them to outperform themselves.
Corner of 46th and Madison.
From Madison.
The completed entrance modification is quite good. Has that whole smokey-glass translucent-slick-schtick going. Translucent is what mirrors were in the 70's, currently the most popular option (where available) in opening up small spaces.
Here you can see the flooring whose cubes glow your path right up, its a nice use of the small shaftway between the buildings where Graydon Carter probably used to park his vintage MG while Vanity Fair was still a tenant.
So be sure to back with Transfer's Skins category to keep up with all your upscaling gossip. We'll be sure to report ole 350's continuing presence on the reskin scene.
*Class “A” Space – The most prestigious buildings competing for premier office users with rents above average for the area. These buildings have high quality standard finishes, state of art systems, exceptional accessibility and a definite market presence. (Source: CB Richard Ellis)
Posted by jmarston at 03:05 PM
Fed Fixin' To Dramatically Raise Interest Rates?
We knew it would come, but how quick the tides or recession will rise, is anyones guess.
Core inflation: biggest gain in 6 years
"The sustained growth of consumption, itself dependent upon the growth of household debt, was the determining factor behind increases in gdp from 2000 onwards—in limiting the precipitous descent of the economy in 2001, in stabilizing it in the winter of 2001–02, and in stimulating the growth that has taken place since. In national accounting terms, the increase of personal consumption expenditures was responsible for almost all of the gdp increase that took place between 2000 and the first half of 2003."
...
"The Fed’s turn to ever-easier credit brought a semblance of order to the non-manufacturing economy, further rises in profitability for the construction industry and retail trade, and the continuation of an epoch-making expansion of the financial sector. But it did so, in large part, by means of—and at the cost of—inflating the value of financial assets across the board, far beyond the worth of the underlying assets that they represent. The ensuing bubbles have provided the collateral required to support ever-greater borrowing so as to keep consumption rising and the economy turning over. The outcome has been that us economic growth in the past three years has been driven by increases in demand generated by borrowing against the speculative appreciation of on-paper wealth, far more than in demand generated by increased investment and employment, driven by rising profits."
...
"As equity prices, from the mid-90s onwards, started to outrun underlying corporate profits and gdp, housing prices began to bubble up too. From 1975, when data first becomes available, through 1995, housing prices increased at an approximately similar rate to consumer prices, so remaining roughly steady in real terms. During the first half of the 1980s, the housing price index fell about 5–10 per cent behind the cpi, before catching up to it again by 1985; then, between 1985 and 1990, it rose about 13 per cent above the cpi, before falling back again to its level in 1995. Real housing prices in 1995 were thus the same as they had been in 1985 and 1979. But between 1995 and the first half of 2003, the rise in the home price index exceeded the increase in the cpi by more than 35 points—historically, an unheard-of rise in real housing costs."
...
"A high dollar in general, and East Asian purchases of dollar-denominated assets in particular, have been indispensable for the American recovery, such as it has been—allowing a hyper-expansionary us monetary policy without upward pressure on interest rates or prices. Should the dollar continue to fall, us equity and bond values will come directly under stress and inflation will increase. But if the price level rises, so will the cost of borrowing, threatening the low interest rates that have been the ultimate foundation for the cyclical upturn. Any significant rise in interest rates would put an end to the enormous wave of mortgage borrowing that has driven consumption. It would also make it more difficult for the government to finance its enormous—and growing—budgetary deficit without raising interest rates and thereby jeopardizing the recovery, while adding to the downward pressure on asset values. Indeed, given that the rest of the world owns $7.61 trillion worth of us assets—40 per cent of the us government’s tradeable debt, 26 per cent of us corporate bonds, and 13 per cent of us equities—a significant decline of the dollar has the potential to set off a rush to offload these, unleashing a violent downward spiral of currency and asset prices. If the Bush Administration gets its wish, in other words, it may regret ever having made it."
--- taken from the New Left Review 25, ROBERT BRENNER: NEW BOOM OR NEW BUBBLE?
Posted by jmarston at 10:16 AM
February 17, 2005
The Anti-Sit
'Do not Sit on the Stand Pipe', turned sadistic.
Posted by jmarston at 11:14 AM | Comments (8)
February 16, 2005
Shameless Self Promotion
I'm a new columnist on electronic music at Popmatters, here is the debut of Analog Days and Digital Nights.
BK
Posted by jmarston at 09:54 AM | Comments (9)
February 10, 2005
Rooftop Housing & Rooftop Gardens
Here at Transfer, its not always about Hatin' New York City's garbage architecture. There are in fact millions of things to love here in the dirty apple. Sometimes, yes, once in a while it even seems appropriate to talk about them, if only as a talking point to why there aren't enough examples of lovable architecture.
Take rooftop housing for instance. Here are two examples from the Transfer archive that demonstrate the kind of imaginative implementation of residential architecture so Uncommmon in these parts lately.
Of course everyone knows the Brilliant application of Rooftop architecture that is SHOP's Porter House in the meatpacking district...
Mayor Daley (yes a Daley is still in power) of Chicago has made it has hallmark to 'green' the city with LEED buildings and the like... But his most interesting, remarkable, and applaudable contribution has been his push for rooftop gardens. In perfect political grace, Daley put the first rooftop garden on a municpal building, by constructing one on top of City Hall. Hanging gardens of Babylon? Not yet...
In addition to the spatial and aesthetic benefits, the environmental impacts are lovable... "green roofs reduce stormwater runoff, insulate buildings leading to lower energy use, clean the air, and control local climate, lessening the formation of smog." According to a Chicago city official, "the city expects to save $4,000 per year in cooling and heating the building due to the insulating capability of a green roof." In addition, "Green roofs can last fifty to a hundred years as opposed to a fifteen-year roof,"
Here is the City of Chicago's Guide to Rooftop Gardening and Penn State Center for Green Roof Research.
Posted by jmarston at 10:15 AM | Comments (2)
February 09, 2005
80 South Street Tower
Curbed is reporting... APPROVED!
An exciting new chapter in residential architecture begins...
From the Calatrava site... "The building will be Mr. Calatrava's first residential project in the United States. The principal units of the building are 45-foot glazed cubes, each of which contains four floors of residential space. Twelve cubes are cantilevered, in steplike fashion, up the building's vertical core, which in plan is a slender concrete rectangle. The core contains the building plant, main elevators, service elevator, and emergency stair, so that usable space within the cubes is maximized. The structure as a whole rises from a 60,000 square foot base, approximately 80 to 90 feet high, which Mr. Sciame envisions as the home of a major cultural institution. The 80 South Street Tower as a whole is 835 feet high and will contain 175,000 square feet of space."
Posted by jmarston at 02:52 PM
NYC2012
Some quotes, fodder, in prep of the forthcoming short history of IOC bid city corruption I'm posting here at Transfer. A prep as IOC reps head to NYC for their final appraisal next month. The host city for the 2012 Olympics will be chosen in July of this year.
“Geography is too important to be left to geographers. But it is far too important to be left to generals, politicians, and corporate chiefs. Notions of ‘applied’ and ‘relevant’ geography pose questions of objectives and interests served. The selling of ourselves and the geography we make to the corporation is to participate directly in making their kind of geography, a human landscape riven with social inequality and seething geopolitical tensions.” –David Harvey
“The Atlanta boys had studied the Olympics blueprint. First, choose a neighborhood with no sports venues. Set up your committee of politicians and businessmen and announce your Olympic campaign, motivated by love of country and municipality… Talk a lot about Olympic Idealism…Pass dream laws giving yourself power to seize property for commercial redevelopment – in the public interest. Mix public and private money, divide up the contracts between your friends. Get rich.” -Andrew Jennings
The Olympics would “trigger a cataclysmic change in an area that’s essentially worthless”
-Daniel L. Doctoroff New York Times, November 3, 2002
“It’s a working class neighborhood and a service neighborhood. The fact that there are garages, carpentry shops or auto showrooms does not mean that they are expendable.”
-Simone Sindin, Chairwomen of Community Board 4 New York Times, November 3, 2002
“Neighborhood by neighborhood, land use vacancies and re-zoning are created to make more room for luxury housing and office space without forethought to the comprehensive impact on our cities total economic base” -Hell’s Kitchen South: Developing Strategies.
Posted by jmarston at 12:19 PM
Happy Chinese New Year
It appears as if we're screwed (i'm a '76 baby, 1976 that is) with Bush's newest illidea to pump the remaining shards of social security into the stock market. the last vestiges of the New Deal, collapsed by Rove-ing plutocrats. i thought this qoute was well on point...
“Market ideology assures us that human beings make a mess of it when they try to control their destinies and that we are fortunate in possessing an interpersonal mechanism – the market – which can substitute for human hubris and planning and replace human decisions altogether. We only need to keep it clean and well oiled, and it now – like the monarch so many centuries ago – will see to us and keep us in line.” – Fredric Jameson
Posted by jmarston at 11:26 AM
February 08, 2005
Philip Johnson
Philip Johnson died recently... Transfer doesnt much care to comment on his landmarked structures or reflect on his 98 years of life - but much love is doled out for the three triangular spikes at the Chrysler Trylons building - East 42nd St NYC. Varying from 57 to 73 feet tall, they were finished in late 2001. They now house a restaurant which is surely far and above Transfer's budget... Eloquent & distinct, they are a remarkable feature of 42nd st. Respect.
Posted by jmarston at 02:06 PM
February 07, 2005
Meth is Today's Crack
I'm glad that meth is getting its due course in the media lately. With a high profile murder of a 10 yr old, and a massive Sunday times article written by the father of a meth addict, coverage this week has been particularly good. Its never had the fiery criminalization that crack had during its terribly destructive reign, perhaps because the media has a much easier time criminalizing the criminalized, and this epidemic hits a little too close to home. Or maybe because our very own military gives its pilots "go pills" (meth) as recently documented as in the case of mistakenly bombed Canadians in Afghanistan.
Oregon's largely white, rural, low income population, hit hard by unemployement, has been particularly burdened by this epidemic. The Oregonian did an excellent 5 part series on the epidemic. About time. I've seen kids taken under by this drug. Whereas heroin has the reputation of being mind numbingly difficult to quit, meth still doesn't have the rep it should have, for how easily it can destroy lives.
UPDATE: Excellent NYTimes article on the killing of the 10 year old in IN over meth.
Posted by jmarston at 03:04 PM | Comments (1)
February 04, 2005
I Remember You Summer
Fire Island - New York
Posted by jmarston at 06:15 PM
Rising Up To The Challenge of Our Rival
Posted by jmarston at 04:08 PM
Headache Inducing Overhangs
Get ready for a Hatin' explosion. Transfer has been out on the streets as the weather eases up, & boy-oh-boy have we got some work to do. Here is a pair of despicable overhangs, clunky, unfriendly jerks, taking up our sidewatchout with Doctoroff like percision. The first one, in the car ghetto of Kips Bay and the other cheerfully residing in our hateable hunk of wannabe new urbanism, BPC, a true Fryday celebration!
Posted by jmarston at 10:55 AM
February 02, 2005
New York, Loving You Baby
From the Transfer archive...
Posted by jmarston at 05:37 PM
February 01, 2005
Reconnecting...
A sincere hello to blogland! Slowly getting the systems back online, with minor cosmetic changes and added links to the left <-- and to the right -->.
So much going on in the new year and so much bad architecture getting away with itself. Just feeling like so many goodies are begging for a decompression.
oh, thats a design idea,
DJ/Rupture absolutley threw down at Rothko on Fri night. Blazed, rinsed, amen. So looking forward to a continued presence of Shadek Soundsystem in the lacking nyc nightlife, seriously, a soundsystem presence is needed...
Speaking of BASS, things have really been erupting over at Bassnation & great music crit Dave Stelfox has a new blog w/ fantastic mixes and dancehall posts. Mr Trick hosts offbeat rhythm incursions and blogs it, while you can always get the serious dj mixes from the breaks/junglist massif label of the new year, Mashit
So much love for Mu's Paris Hilton video... Go ahead Grrrl.
10-4 rrrrclicksssssssshhhhhhhhhh...
Posted by jmarston at 01:42 PM | Comments (1)