stay home, but stick to your routine.
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Exploring the interesting things that make our world work, and the people that make them happen.
Blog Archive • Questions?It’s about to be over, the idea that a car can runs free. Those days are about to close.
It’s a little like making a model of New York City at the turn of the last century and you’re modeling horse buggies everywere and then automobile is about to arrive. Something else is about to arrive.
This is a project that dramatically recreates the overwhelming experience lots of cars moving very quickly in a twisted, complicated infrastructure of roads, buildings and rails. All of the moving parts contribute to the sculpture’s “noise pollution,” mimicking the effects of real cars in the real world.
It was about trying to evoke the energy of the city.
And then the stillness that follows when the whole thing turns off.
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THE TWELVES are playing at Le Poission Rouge on Friday.
Get tix now if like having fun.
taking at a stab at “instagraming sans instagram”
bright spots.
Challenges of communicating a shipped project »
To start, this is the quote that offered the biggest insight for me:
A train track’s trajectory might, for example, set the angle of a bathroom urinal wall; but — regardless if the original alignment is visible or not — that wall experienced in place won’t necessarily bring a Johnny Cash rail song to mind while one is taking a leak.
Understanding architectural form has always been a huge challenge for me. Maybe that’s why I latched onto typography; typography offers such clear perspective on the “why” and “how” based on all of the various historical and cultural influences. But I still find myself grappling with questions about why things look the way they do, and how that those forms — fundamentally and experientially — relate to how the thing works, or where it is.
It’s the translation from diagram/landscape to building that still gets me, and this piece touches on that connection. How is the “influencing” landscape eventually affected by the structures that are built into it? Are those structures (and infrastructures) changing that landscape, and if so, is it in a way that feels integral to the origins?
I appreciate the disclaimer at the end of the essay where the author states that “architects are not required to be intellectually rigorous.” Practically speaking, there seem to be very few opportunities where are “real-life” architects — the ones not being displayed and discussed in essays like this — have a chance to be completely rigorous with their intellectual intentions. Compromises have to be made, and budgets are always a reality.
This is actually my biggest problem with the development of Manhattan’s Midtown West area. I would argue that most of NYC’s authenticity stems from lots of localized agendas being driven by people and organizations with good taste. Those individual interests help reinforce lots of different identities in a small space, without the feeling of a single tyrannical developer just putting up condos with the hope of selling units ASAP. Space is at a premium, and that tension seems to have worked well for Manhattan so far.
We’re now at a point where Midtown West — approximately between 23rd and 50th, west of 8th Ave. — is one of the few remaining spaces ripe for development on the island. We’re also at a point where a few major development companies (namely, Vornado) have lots of control that is mainly in the corporate interest. Do their architects have any interest in upholding that architectural/historical integrity when it comes to making the most of this space?
It seems like a lot of responsibility to give to these architects, and this is where this essay rings true. How much attention should be paid to uncovering and creating these forms that embody the “last frontier” of Manhattan? How practical is it to think that they’ll be able to overcome the “impossibility of common interpretation,” as the author calls it, when putting up these buildings? Manhattan is dripping with influential “landscape” that could easily inform a building, and I wonder how much effort will be spent into addressing those influences.
In the end, does it matter? I don’t say this with exasperation, but more with pragmatism in mind. Which concerns and powers get balanced in a project that involves so much money, in such an important city? Will the investors be lured by the tales of “landscape,” and if so, will that landscape even be legible, without explicit explanation?
That is, you cannot understand what generates the order by simple inhabitation. You have to be told.
Public legibility has always been incredibly important to me, and it has always felt like diagrams and history were a good place to start. From those roots (or, parameters), you can develop a project that feels right and makes sense. It upholds that responsibility to be “intellectually rigorous,” a burden that I hope many architects feel everyday. However, if the end result is just an illegible abstraction of those original seeds of intellect, how does the public actually understand the project?
These are questions and concerns addressed by architects throughout a project, and my intention isn’t to say that too much time is being put into justification, rather than end result. Instead, it’s an issue of communication between the origins of a project with the end result, especially as perceived by the public. I’m making some sweeping generalizations, even with the use of “public,” but this essay points to a very real problem I have always had with architectural communication: In the end, who cares? Who is the audience, and where does that connection to “landscape” become clear? For who? When? Importantly: why?
At the office, I do lots of “communication” work for the company. There is always this problem of distillation when it comes to communicating the final project, and much of it comes from suppressing the juicy details of process, and highlighting the eventual value proposition for the user. The end users don’t care about engineering challenges, they just want something that works.
I see this as very much the same problem. Even if your final product is directly influenced by something, and even if you make design decisions for very explicit reasons, how much of it matters in the end? Whether it be landscape, engineering resources, or time constraints, you have to ship something in the end. How that shipped or built project communicates the process is a tenuous issue.
Bike Snob NYC: The Indignity of Commuting by Bicycle: The Power of One »
On how that one idiot biker that cut you off that one time (“Nü-Fred”) is ruining it for everyone:
Basically then, a single hapless Nü-Fred (though I suppose calling a Nü-Fred “hapless” is redundant, since the haplessness is implied) has the power to turn five New Yorkers against cyclists every single block. This means that, in the course of a 20 block journey during peak hours, one (1) Nü-Fred will make one hundred (100) New Yorkers hate cyclists. (If you’d like, we can refer to this 20-block 100-person figure as one (1) “Nü-Fred Bike Hate Unit,” or NFBHU.)
Of course, while bad bikers aren’t lethal, they are really, really annoying:
On the other hand, even if the evil bike-hating mastermind were to unleash 80,000 Nü-Freds upon the unsuspecting populace of New York City, while they’d make the entire population hate cycling, they’d be highly unlikely to actually kill anybody. Bad cyclists are mostly just annoying, but bad drivers are deadly.
From all of this, I can only draw one conclusion, which is that New Yorkers have zero tolerance for annoyance, but they’re perfectly fine with death.
Above Grade: New York City's High Line: Places: Design Observer »
Great read that covers the history and significance of the High Line park in Manhattan. Noteworthy bits and pieces follow.
City in motion:
Manhattan is a place where loitering in one place is done at your peril. Paris has boulevard cafes for cooling one’s heels, Rome comes to a rest at fountains and piazzas, but in Manhattan you keep moving forward. Well and good: I approve.
New York City digging into its past:
The fact that this new amenity sprang from older industrial infrastructure says a lot about the current moment in New York’s evolution. A city that had once pioneered so many technological and urban planning solutions, that had dazzled the world with its public works, its skyscrapers, bridges, subways, water-delivery system, its Central Park, palatial train stations, libraries and museums, appears unable to undertake any innovative construction on a grand scale, and is now consigned to cannibalizing its past and retrofitting it to function as an image, a consumable spectacle. Productivity has given way to narcissism; or, to put it more charitably, work has yielded to leisure.
Why the Highline isn’t over the street:
One unique aspect of the High Line is that it was built in the middle of the block. At the time it went up, the public was already turning against elevated structures, such as “El” trains, on the grounds that their shadows gloomed the adjoining streets. It was therefore sensibly proposed that the project be erected mid-block, and run through buildings of such massive industrial nature as could absorb a rail line in their midst and profit from its freight deliveries.
Elevated trains are less dangerous:
Before it was constructed, the New York Central Railroad had operated a rail freight line at grade, or street level, along Tenth Avenue, and men on horseback (“West Side cowboys”) had ridden ahead of the train with red flags or lanterns to warn pedestrians of its coming; yet even with this picturesque alarm system, so many careless, inebriated or simply unlucky citizens had gotten run over that the street acquired the notorious name “Death Avenue.”
Railroads couldn’t compete:
What did happen was that trucks and airplanes cut so significantly into the rail freight business that by the 1960s the railroad line was operating deeply in the red.
The High Line will bring in new real estate opportunities.
Here we face a paradox: the Friends of the High Line have defended the expense of constructing and maintaining a free elevated promenade by saying that there is no need for this public space to pay for itself; its costs will be more than offset by the increased real estate values of properties abutting the new amenity.
A view you didn’t have before:
Much of the High Line’s present magic stems from its passing though an historic industrial cityscape roughly the same age as the viaduct, supplemented by private tenement backyards and the poetic grunge of taxi garages. It would make a huge difference if High Line walkers were to feel trapped in a canyon of spanking new high-rise condos, providing antlike visual entertainment for one’s financial betters lolling on balconies. The High Line exemplifies a preservation conundrum: how do you protect not only the older structure itself, through intelligent adaptive re-use, but also retain the flavor of its original surrounding context?
What if it was a railroad again?
I’ve sometimes thought the best, most radical use of the High Line would have been to restore it to its original function. New York, alone among major American cities, has no freight rail delivery system, making it overly dependent on trucks, which pollute the environment and raise local asthma rates alarmingly. A rail freight tunnel under New York Harbor has been sensibly proposed, and never built, for close to a century. So the High Line was hardly redundant. CSX, shortly after it took over the line, did a study to see if it made financial sense to employ the elevated structure again for moving freight, and decided in the negative.
Opportunities to marvel at the engineering:
Some of the entrances are designed to deliver the public from the street to mid-promenade in a rather gradual manner, through stairs and ramps which offer a chance to inspect the undersides of the elevated structure, its steel girders and hand-hammered rivets, and appreciate its engineering sophistication, while preparing visitors for the amble above ground.
