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October 28, 2005
Dubaious Hype, Dog-shit Planning & Mad Landscape Love
We Need Answers People!!! The City Smells Like Maple Syrup and The People Are Talking About It!!! GET ME SOME ANSWERS!!!
Apologies to anyone who posted comments recently and had them deleted. In my endless battle against xanaxed, over-mortgaged, car loaning, penis power pills, I accidentally lost some comments. I'm sorry about that. Onward!
Paul Goldberger on Calatrava as king of the "latest architectural fashion: bespoke luxury-apartment towers." Although the praise is caked a bit thick, this most excellent point is made: "What is clear is that Calatrava—along with Richard Meier, whose glass towers in the far West Village went up in 2002—has helped create a more ambitious climate for apartment design in New York."
On the WTC site: "dog-shit planning," where each architect lays his piece, and the space left over is considered public space. --Danish urbanist and architect Jan Gehl.
This is a fantastic read of Berlin and New York, as cities, as routes towards being. Excellent illuminations and nuggets of observation. A small conversation she had with Rem Koolhaas about the Palast.
He said something like, "Let's turn this around. How did you feel when you first walked into the building?"
I faltered. I knew how it made me feel. The building made me want to cry.
"I never felt so...overcome by a building before," I said into my cell phone. I felt stupid as the words spilled out of my mouth, but I couldn't stop them from spilling. "The minute I walked in, I felt...I never felt a building's power like that before. I never felt so affected by a building before."
"Yes," he said. "That's exactly it. That's how architecture should make you feel."
I hereby refuse to speak any further about the furor in the desert, Dubai. This will be Transfer's 4th and final entry, marked by Fox News' jump into the fray that is Dubaious Hype. Using their trademark hard nose journalism, penning the Hippest City, it’s worth a click to their photo essay, which has some actual pictures of Dubai, and then some... Yet it makes perfect sense that Dubai has got to be Fox's favorite city, their hippest city, a totalitarian - seemingly moral government - building a fantastically unsustainable mirage of banality for the delight of the global elite on the backs of an international caste of guest workers and undocumented disposables. Oh yea, they keep their women in check too. Perfect! Fuck Dubai and Fuck Fox News.
"It is vital to remember that this American suspicion of state power goes back to the Revolution itself, which was anti-statist and libertarian in many important ways. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights both reflect deep anxieties about the potential tyranny of state power.
The conservative reaction against environmentalism in 1980s arguably flowed from this source. It represented not a failure to love the land, but a fear that the environmental laws and regulations of the 1970s at least potentially represented a new form of state tyranny.
The collapse of bipartisan support for environmentalism (which to my mind is among the greatest losses to our national politics in the past quarter century) was primarily a reaction not against nature, not against the environment, not against the American land, but against centralized government power and its feared abuse."
--- William Cronon. "Saving the Land We Love: Land Conservation and American Values" Keynote Address for the Land Trust Alliance Rally Madison , Wisconsin , October 17, 2005
Bloomberg, you've got to be fucking kidding me? I don't remember the last "ticket blitz" you delivered to the fat asses I see parked in the bus lanes on 42nd St - every single day. I don't remember the last speed trap I've seen on Hwy 9th Ave, shit, I can't remember the last car I've seen pulled over for blowing thru a red light. You threaten to ticket heavily for Blocked Boxes with your big white signs and crisscrossed paint jobs. Yet, Never, Ever, since I've lived in this city have I seen someone ticketed for blocking the box. No, you gave 'em thru streets instead. Yet, here you are, on a ticketing blitz against Bicycles? Sure, obnoxious law breaking bikers are just as that. And say what you will about critical mass, but you've intimidated, harassed, and unlawfully bullied that into the ground already anyway. Please, for fucks sake Bloomy, take a course at Transportation Alternatives. They've got a great short film about how much New Yorkers love some peace on the streets. They've also got a short film about how pissed off people are in the Bronx about traffic murder. Maybe Ferrer is polling so well up there because he even knows about it? Here is a nice neat colorful guide on how to make streets safer for pedestrians. Pass it onto your unresponsive DOT. You don't like TA? Well, how about this easy little audit you can do from the comforts of your new hirise. I'm looking for some coloring books it that’s a more efficient way to communicate these ideas.
Constructing Frank Lloyd Wright from five pencil drawings. A new building... An engineering mammoth, bringing Long Island trains into Grand Central Terminal.
Posted by jmarston at October 28, 2005 10:31 AM