Minutes after closing my eyes last night, a city and a television tower appeared.

The television tower had babies crawling up and down it.

The babies were naked.

Th babies had holes for faces.

Just before my finger entered a hole, I awoke. A long and loaded train was rattling on the tracks.

My dream has a debt. That debt is owed to Christin Clatterbuck.

We see that the best buildings have in their design no humans in mind. All the better if the work is alien, monstrous, indifferent--anything more other than what we are already. A work that strives for the inhuman strives to be closer to the truth, which consistently turns out to be inhuman.

La Defense is an office-building that lies in a small business-park and is partly surrounded by houses. The outline of the building follows the capricious borders of the parcel. The ground-plan of La Defense contains two volumes which are different in length and height.

The image, just the image:

Jeanne Dekkers, a Dutch architect, is the designer of what is pictured...

...the Department of Geotechnology, Delft University of Technology. It's a sexual and muscular coupling of two buildings--raw concrete mounting scintillating glass--two periods of time, two very distinct modes and languages. What the work reveals is the contradiction at that core of any sexual unification: the whole is realized by a rupture, a crack, a break.

To see more of Dekker's work (which for the most part is not erotic but almost always powerful), go here. As for the heart of her design philosophy, it is this:

The quality of the end result as a whole intends to be greater than the sum of its parts; the design expresses the nature of the commission and simultaneously anticipates, as a cultural manifestation, the future. Using a building brings life to its emptiness.

Why?
Why show you this house in Leytron, Switzerland? Because you need a good laugh. Not sure if that was the designer's intention, but the result (the ultimate matter) of the effort/concept/vision is funny.

Set for construction in Dubai this fall: the world's first rotating, self-powering, park-your-car-inside-your-condo skyscraper.

It's not a building, it's an action-thriller blockbuster!

Despite all of its utopian talk about "the future society," "society of knowledge," "communities [being] organized structures," and the "dynamic development of our society," Arcspace's article failed to recognize the real inspiration of the tower for Coop Himmelb(l)au's Central Los Angeles Area High School #9:

The Tatlin Tower:

On overcast days, the top of the Tatlin Tower, which never made it into the world (in 1917, the Soviet Union had the desire but not the resources to make it real), was to project international news, important information, empowering slogans on the belly of passing clouds. That is the stuff of my dreams.

To see the point in history that marks the birth place of our society, control society, we should look here, at city planning:

But let's take a step back.

In his short essay "Society of Control," Gilles Deleuze separated this older order of society, one that's under discipline:

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."

From the current order, one under control:

The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.

In the older form of society, management of the population was direct and rigid; in the present one, it is fluid and soft. And the end of control is you managing you, you schooling you, you doctoring you, you hiring you, you punishing you. In an environment that has you doing everything, self-help books thrive.

But control society has an origin. It's in 19th century urban projects like Trafalgar Square and Haussmannization. What it is that dislocates these projects from their moment, disciplinary society, is that the management of the poor comes with real benefits. In the case of Trafalgar Square, fountains, art, an open space for leisure and also political activities; with Haussmannization, improved sanitation, the beautification of the city, and so on. But as open as they might be, both the square in London and the boulevards of Paris have as their essence the control of the poor with the visible benefits of life and the obscured threats of death--exposure to fresh air and sunshine comes with the exposure to cannon balls. From these open spaces issues a society that will obscure state power and replace it with the visibility (or simulacrum) of self-empowerment. In disciplinary society, your factory boss is your worst enemy; in control society, you are your own worst enemy.

It's nice to see black flâneurie sprouting in Seattle.

As I have written before, whites tend to be coded as flâneurs, city strollers, those who have the time and freedom to move about and absorb city scenes. Blacks, on the other hand, are coded as loiterers, those who hang out on a street corner or in front of a convenience store watching the city go by. Even if the urban practice of loitering has hardened into a custom, a cultural fact, much of it crumbles when more and more of the city opens up, when one is free to move about, when one can go and see this and that scene.

My introduction to the importance of emergency design (architecture for those have been displaced by war or a natural disaster) was Rachael Cavallo's installation at Cornish College of the Arts's Art & Design BFA Show 2008. Its concern was developing "a flexible, cheap, and modern architecture for refugees who follow the path and laws of Islam."

Proof of how timely Cavallo's work is can be found in an article published yesterday in NYT Magazine. Here are three important passages:

Until recently, camp design focused less on shelter and more on food, water, security and medical care, in part because people can live without a roof longer than they can live without a meal and in part because shelter tends to fall into a gray area between aid, which is immediate, and development, which is longer term and therefore financed differently. There are hundreds of humanitarian organizations now operating throughout the world, but only a handful are devoted to dwelling, and they have sprung up in the last few years. The most recent edition of the U.N.’s “Handbook for Emergencies,” the vade mecum of relief planning, is 569 pages long. It includes everything from specifications about communications equipment to vehicle log sheets to minimum nutrition standards, but only 19 pages of it is devoted to shelter.

And:

Still, the structure of camps is imperfect. For one thing, the fundamental unit — four to six people under one tarp — assumes that the nuclear family is the basic unit of settlement worldwide, as it is in the Western countries from which most aid workers come. But in many communities, people live among their extended families, their tribes or their clans. And the grid arrangement, too, replicates European notions of the rational city; it works quite well on the island of Manhattan, but it may not serve those cultures that originally organized themselves along more fluid lines. By the same token, Western notions of democratic space — each unit of housing equivalent to the next — may fit our own notions of fairness but prove disruptive to communities that are structured around an implicit or explicit ranking in honor, say, of town elders.

And, finally, the passage that speaks in the language of Mike Davis:

Refugee crises are usually seen as a stark example of the more general problem of disaster relief, which is similarly urgent though in crucial ways different. (Hurricanes, earthquakes and the like are usually over quickly, the affected population remains near home and rebuilding can begin almost immediately.) But it may be more useful to see them in the context of the enormous new tide of urban migration, a trend that has created at least 26 cities worldwide with a population greater than 10 million.

This has created an ongoing housing emergency: megaslums, shantytowns, favelas, squatter’s colonies. There are 80,000 people living on top of a garbage dump in Manila; a population of indeterminate size — perhaps as many as a million — who sleep every night in the cemeteries of Cairo; homeless encampments in San Francisco, Atlanta and Houston; guest workers camped beside the towers of the Persian Gulf; migrant workers in the San Fernando Valley. They are all displaced people.

The future of refugees cannot be separated from the future of slums on our planet.

Keith of Green Housing Collaborative recently sent me a link to this post on hugeasscity:

Dan Bertolet writes:

How unfortunate that we all don’t have a stash of whatever it was that Charles Mudede was smoking when he wrote this Stranger piece on the new Four Seasons building on 1st Ave between Union and University. How fun it would be to look up at a stark, rectilinear glass and concrete tower that forms a massive barrier to sun, mountains, and water, and interpret it as profound connection to the natural world, a form that casts shadows like those from pristine alpine peaks because it is painted the color of mud.

First: I'm not a pot smoker. If you have to know, wine is my prime (and almost only) poison. Second: The poster's leading criticism does not connect with what I attempted to explain in the article. Dan is concerned with pedestrian matters:

Back here on earth, on the ground, what I see is a building that fails to embrace the street. As you can see in the photo above, roughly half of what the passing pedestrian encounters at eye level while walking along the building on 1st Ave is concrete wall.

I couldn't care less about the street and what the building is doing to it. My leading concern was (and still is) the coding of the work. To my eyes, the Four Seasons is less a building and more of a book. And here I'm referring, of course, to the second chapter of Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, “This Will Kill That.” Because everyone has read this novel, everyone knows that the chapter is about architecture as a form of writing:

Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the same moment, on the surface of the entire world.”

What everyone might not know is that this chapter inspired Frank Lloyd Wright to become an architect--verification of this claim can be found in Edward R. Ford's The Details of Modern Architecture: 1928 to 1988.

This is what I read in the Four Seasons: It tells the story of Seattle's self-imagined relationship with its natural surroundings. For this reason, its story/coding is less related to the international green movement in architecture and more related (if not totally related) to the mural of the orca whales on Seattle Steam, a building that the Four Season faces and echoes. Indeed, to walk down Western Ave is to walk in a forest of correspondences.

This (the coding, the language, the correspondences) is the utter matter of my article.

From an email that concerned Leaves of Glass:

In reading your "Leaves of Glass" article on the new Four Seasons, I found myself somewhat perplexed. I read Alexandros Washburn’s quote about contemporary virtue “being a concern for nature” as referring not only to the aesthetic aspects of a building, which you celebrated, but also to the functional aspects of the building, which you omitted. I looked around online and found no mention of any "sustainable" features of the building and, assuming this is indeed the case, I would have to conclude that the building's cladding merely projects the image of being concerned with nature.

Before responding to this email, let's look at an image of Freeway Park by Leff:

This is the mistake I made in the article: I failed to clearly separate two discourses--one, The New Virtue, is which international; the other, Natural Seattle, which is local. The first has real environmental issues at its core; the other has no reality at its core--as from crust to core, it's all about coding, naming, saying something. In this instance, we must not confuse the discourses. They sound similar but are in fact not. NBBJ's Seattle Justice Center is not the same as NBBJ's Four Seasons Hotel. The Justice Center turns the artificial into the natural: The New Virtue (a real effect); the Four Seasons reiterates a feeling, a meaning, a local ideal: Natural Seattle (a sign effect). As of yet, there is not a single building or architectural work that is at once The New Virtue and Natural Seattle. The one is the one, and the other is the other.

The article Leaves of Glass needs a few words of explanation. Three things generate its meaning and course of thought. One, the semiotic theories of Roland Barthes. These days, few thinkers give semiotics much value. Marxists and Nietzschians continue to dominate continental criticism. Barthes, like Valery, has practically vanished from the indexes of major works of contemporary theory. But the labor of semiotics is not over; it has much to offer as a demystifying tool. The blending of Marxist sociology with Barthesian structuralism has in it the strength to penetrate the idealogical walls of our currently globalized society.

Now that we have mentioned globalization, we can move to the second of the three meaning makers of the article, which is this wonderful passage by the chief urban designer for New York City, Alexandros Washburn:

The Greeks may not have invented civic virtue, but they certainly branded the idea with architecture... [But] the Corinthian column no longer signifies virtue, civic or otherwise. There has been a paradigm shift away from architecture. What signifies virtue these days is a concern for nature... Just as two millennia ago, a sculptor transformed the biomass of the acanthus plant into a template for architecture, using its stalk, leaves and flower as a model for the shaft and volutes of the Corinthian column, we today must transform the rigidities of architecture into the adaptations of nature."

Two things from the passage. One, the globalization of the Mediterranean plant (the moldings of which can be found from Cape Town to Lima to Seattle) matches the globalization of The New Virtue--a concern for nature.

And two, the beauty of Washburn concept is that this:

...becomes this:

Art becomes life. But the art has not left the life. With the new virtue, art has no line that limits it.

The third meaning maker has to do with Seattle. The New Virtue is an international movement. It is simultaneous; it happens all at once; it has no center from which it radiates. With its green (living) roof, the new fire station, Station # 10, in Pioneer Square is a part of that international moment in architecture.

But Seattle has had its own nature/urban discourse. It's a discourse that is not tied to global issues of sustainability but, instead, to the local geography. Richard Rorty once spoke of "the mirror of philosophy," Seattle's architectural discourse is about "the mirror of architecture."

In the beginning, this discourse was blunt (if not stupid):

Freeway Park marked the point of its complication. The final goal of this local discourse is the eradication of the distinction between not just nature and urban but the outside and the inside. This discourse believes itself to be honest. It wants the movement between mountains and buildings to be uninterrupted. It wants the city to be a mirror of its surroundings.

At the top of this hospital in Amsterdam is a kinderstad, a “children’s town,” a "place where children between 4 and 18 years old being treated in the medical centre can meet with family and relax outside of the hospital environment." For reasons that I will not explore in this post, the high location of the glass and titanium structure, and its sad function, has echoes with this passage from Eliot's "Burnt Norton":

The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality.

South African architect Zenkaya designed these prefab homes.

Woza friday/
Friday my darling/
Woza friday/
Friday my sweetheart.

I'm not a big fan of Steven Holl...
...but I'm enchanted by the image. The work, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Henry Bloch Building, is in Kansas City.

Err, the engineer of certain human souls...

Steve Saroff.

"Les nuages ... les merveilleux nuages."

It's old news...

...but it's still a lovely work.

Erwin Wurm's "House attack" on the MUMOK says everything that needs to be said about that kind of house and the values it represents.

Last year, Seattle-based Mithun Architects designed the Center for Urban Agriculture, tailor made for a site on 9th Avenue and Olive Way downtown. “We wanted to demonstrate that a project of this type is feasible in a downtown setting,” says Mithun’s Bonnie Duncan. Behold, a vertical farm for the city.

Fantastic, is it not?

Each residential unit is retrofitted from a combination of two or three recycled shipping containers to create studio and one- and two-bedroom apartments. The CUA employs a “shelf system” within its superstructure to speed construction time through off-site assembly and crane erection techniques.

The CUA reintroduces 1.35 acres of native habitat, farmland and community gathering space to its urban environment. Birds, insects and native plants would inhabit the 22,000 square feet of planters and upper terraces. The use of native plants increases the variety of insects that support the food chain. For example, maple trees support 18 species of insects while native oaks support 1,800 species of insects. The goal is to increase biodiversity in the city that will begin to support broader species of birds. A 19,000 sq. ft. chicken farm operates on the CUA’s lower terrace.

Other than the fact that it relates poorly to the street (which could be easily remedied), here’s the problem: Nobody has stepped up to the plate to build the thing. “Every once in a while there are murmurings; we just have to find a developer who is up for it," says Duncan. “I could get a call from the Sheik of Dubai to say that he needs a 100-story high-rise farm--that could be where it happens first.”

Seattle, don't let Dubai show you up again.

I stayed at an almost-deserted Egyptian hotel at Abu Simbel on Lake Nasser last week that seemed to be forever hungover from some heyday 20 years gone. The dilapidated nightclub bore a giant "welcome to 2006" painted on the rusting roof. The rooms were mosquito infested and mouse turds hid under the bed.
Nefertari Hotel pool, then:

and now:

More on my trip to Egypt when I recover from the nasty bugs that hitched a ride home in my guts.

BLDGBLOG has a lovely, lovely post on photographs of five-star hotels abandoned on "Egypt's Sinai Peninsula."
A sample from the end of the post:

The hotels now look more like "architectonic sculptures" in the desert, the photographers claim, or derelict abstractions, as if some aging and half-crazed billionaire had constructed an eccentric sculpture park for himself amongst the dunes.

...The billionaire goes for long walks at night alone amongst the ruins, sweeping dust from recent sandstorms off windowsills and open doorways.
At night, when the stars come out, different constellations are framed by unglazed windows, as if justifying these concrete forms from above with the poetic force of celestial geometry.

The writing owes everything to Borges, and my post owes everything to Andrew Sullivan.

The lead story on Arcspace.com concerns this new building in Norway.
The work was designed by Snøhetta and opened on April 12th. The images of the interior are far more striking than those of the exterior. Judging from the images of the inside, will not this work displace its purpose? Its purpose being made secondary to itself as a work. Few operas have in them the power to match or overcome such a staggering wealth of colors and materials.

There’s a lot of talk about green design: why we need it, which developers are doing it, when elected officials set goals for it. This is all good. But under-recognized are the architects who actually figure out how to reduce a building’s environmental impact, while still creating structures that meet the traditional challenges of good design.

So three cheers to the Seattle chapter of the American Institute of Architects. For the past ten years it has encouraged architecture firms to submit designs for a “What Makes It Green” gallery. This year AIA Seattle received 57 entries from around the Pacific Northwest. And last week, before about 250 industry bigwigs at a forum called Regeneration, the top ten submissions won awards for the first time.

“We wanted to inspire designers and policy makers to think about the future of the built environment in creating sustainable design,” say Lisa Richmond, Executive Director of AIA Seattle. The awards give architecture firms the recognition they deserve.

Here are two of the ten. The Bertschi School on north Capitol Hill, completed in April of last year, won the jury’s unanimous approval.

In addition groovy stuff like re-using rainwater and recycling building materials, the smart architects at The Miller|Hull Partnership were recognized for conserving energy.

The new project incorporates photovoltaic panels which will supply 6.1% of the school’s energy. … The gym has an integral natural ventilation scheme which uses fresh air coming in low at the roll up doors and the natural stack effect of hot air and vents high with operable louvers in the skylights tied to a thermostat. No CFCs or HCFCs are used in the mechanical units. The scale and proportion of the building enhance it’s ability to use daylight to illuminate the spaces. A daylighting study was used to optimize window and skylight size and placement for this use. Occupancy and daylight sensors are used to minimize the use of electric lighting.

Another winner--yet unbuilt--Portland City Storage will store 350 boats to reduce river contamination. It’s designed by MulvannyG2 Architecture and slated to be finished by 2010.

The project’s goal is to meet the USGBC LEED gold certification requirements and produce more power than it uses through alternative electrical power in the hopes of giving back to the Portland grid. The hybrid design will integrate a wind farm located at the top of the storage buildings and an innovative regenerative elevator system that feeds into the building system grid. … Using median average figures based on average wind speed for the Portland metropolitan area, the wind farm should produce approximately 800,000 KWH of usable system power output per year.

The full line-up of winners, including Seattle's Mosler Lofts by Mithun Architects, is over here.

Look closely at this skyline of the future and you find a tower designed by none other than Norman Robert Foster:
Yes, Seattle is on the way to possessing what must be Foster's only tower on the West Coast. The local company heading the project is Triad Development, and the location of the tower will be across the street from the west face of the horrible City Hall--between third and fourth. Shooting for a gold LEED rating, the tower, 520 feet high, will be one with the underground, the light rail station--apparently one of the main reasons Foster took an interest in the project. Also in the works is the production of a public space that could be what Westlake Center never became, a civic core. I'll write more about this project in next week's paper.

City Librarian Deborah Jacobs--who made the Seattle Public Library what it is, who has been written about a lot in the local dailies ("Whatever Deborah Jacobs wants, it sometimes seems, Deborah Jacobs gets through the sheer force of her will, drive and charisma"), who has been lauded as a genius in The Stranger, who has been praised by The New Yorker's architecture critic in this review of the downtown library in 2004 ("Deborah Jacobs seems to have been about as close to an ideal client as could be imagined, and she protected the architects from some of their worst instincts")--is leaving Seattle Public Library. She's accepted a job at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation leading their Global Libraries initiative. Her last day at SPL will be July 2.

"While I intended to stay at The Seattle Public Library until my retirement, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given me an opportunity to take the passion and values that guide my life to places where information is not as accessible as in Seattle," she says in the press release that went out today. I'll put the whole thing, with quotes from the mayor and stuff, after the jump.

Continue reading "Deborah Jacobs Is Leaving Seattle Public Library" »

Discovered this morning on this website is the current renovation of the tallest and strangest residential tower in Africa, Ponte City. Located in the Hillbrow neighborhood of Johannesburg, the core of the cylindrical building will leave its past...

(The cinema of Alien, Blade Runner, Robo Cop)

And enter its future...
(The cinema of Gattaca, Code 46, Sunshine)

The renovation has its cause in the 2010 World Cup, which will be hosted in Jozi, the most developed city in the most underdeveloped continent on the planet.

She and the house...
...are in Portugal. The architects are Nuno Grande and Pedro Gadanho. The home's defining feature is the suspended "baclony-terrace." The complication of the primary volume is the next significant feature. At the front of house, a large surface with a small round window looms over the glass door.

As for the woman. She is not old. She has a ponytail. She wears a black skirt. Her hand is on the wall. And her mind is elsewhere.

For those who don't know, Rem Koolhaas, the man behind our famous Central Library, wants build the Death Star in Dubai:

...Rem Koolhaas, of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, planning to build a a gargantuan 44-storey replica of the Death Star as a corner-piece for his planned city in Dubai. According to his office, the enormous sphere will be part of a masterplan for his concept of "the generic city", which has been described by the New York Times as a "sprawling metropolis of repetitive buildings centered on an airport and inhabited by a tribe of global nomads with few local loyalties".

What is this strange power that the Death Star exerts on our imagination? Is it the death drive of architecture? Is this the building that stands at the end of all architectural visions and missions? A planet that destroys planets is transformed into a building that destroys other buildings.

Which came first? The Crate & Barrel in the University Village...
...or Zaha Hadid's Cincinnati Art Museum?

The Eiffel Tower goes untouched.

When will this idea die?

In the comments thread of almost every Boom post I write, regardless of the development at hand, Will in Seattle remarks that what Seattle really needs are 100-story residential towers to provide affordable housing. He’s also suggested they should be surrounded by green space.

Sorry, Will, nothing personal, but towers surrounded by green space is one of the worst urban planning concepts ever conceived. Buildings 100 stories tall – parks or no parks – cost a ton of money. When subsidized to make low-income housing, towers have resulted in slums in the sky and urban decay on the ground—because people will choose to live in isolation when packed into dense artificial “communities.” Slog comment hero Fnarf, thankfully, has rebuked the notion again and again. I agree with Fnarf's indictment over here, and I really love this one (even though it’s kinda mean) over here. The old idea, pushed by French architect Le Corbusier, is now widely discredited.

But that doesn’t mean developers have stopped pushing towers in the park. New York’s MTA chose Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side railyards. The buildings aren’t quite 100 stories, but here's the towers-in-the-park proposal.

The NYT doesn’t mince words about the project today, in an article titled Profit and Public Good Clash in Grand Plans.

Like the ground zero and Atlantic Yards fiascos, its overblown scale and reliance on tired urban planning formulas should force a serious reappraisal of the public-private partnerships that shape development in the city today. And in many ways the West Side railyards is the most disturbing of the three. Because of its size and location — 12.4 million square feet on 26 acres in Midtown — it will have the most impact on the city’s identity. Yet unlike the other two developments, it lacks even the pretense of architectural ambition….

Rising on a vast platform to be built over the train tracks, the project is conceived as a series of soaring corporate and residential towers flanking the northern and southern ends of a narrow park running from 10th Avenue to the West Side Highway, between 30th and 33rd Streets....

Designed by Murphy/Jahn, the buildings are a throwback to the days when corporate Modernism was taking its dying breaths. Towering glass blocks, their most original features are a series of deep cantilevers that allow the developer to suspend buildings over the High Line, the public park being built on a stretch of abandoned elevated tracks in Chelsea….

The full article is over here.

The current negative response to Sterling Residence--which is on Queen Anne Avenue, and also at the center of this article--is apparently not as bad as the response another modernist house received when it was completed back in the early 90s:

The designer of the house, Larry Rouch, writes:

The back story on my Queen Anne House was much more dramatic than pB's [Sterling Residence]. I was accused of causing the death of a neighbor by building the house, and this by a Seattle cop in person, in uniform, son of the deceased! Also the neighborhood took up a petition against the house and a big stink was made about it in the QA community newspaper. Another neighbor physically accosted me and Steve Holl, who was along for a drive by, because the house had no fireplace and asked: "What's the matter with you, don't you believe in Santa Claus?!!" We literally had to drive away with her hanging on my car. Another neighbor, a realtor, asked to review the plans before construction started, then politely informed me that she wouldn't oppose the house if we would kindly remove the living room/study on the upper floor (the view side of the house). Yet another neighbor demanded that I review the house pans with his architect else he sue. The architect demanded a meeting and a copy of the plans. I told him to fuck himself.

The architectural hatred on Queen Anne is hardcore.

I know this is old news to some, maybe many of you. However, I am posting these in case there are people unfamiliar with these houses as we all once were.

I was amazed and intrigued when I found out there was a residence in the top pyramid of the Smith Tower.

Notwithstanding the decorations inside, I can think of no other place I'd rather live in Seattle.

Okay, maybe either of these places would suffice...

I am obsessed with houseboats. Unfortunately, I cannot even afford this one. Or the mud beneath it.

The houseboats moored within 150 feet of the 1907 Lake Union shoreline are actually on owned real estate. Local legislators snuck a bill through the Legislature that required anyone owning property on Lake Union to buy the adjacent underwater property. The subsequent one million dollars funded the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition on the University of Washington campus.

The Chief Urban Designer for New York City, Alexandros Washburn, has a lovely little (and not too old) article on Metropolis.com that names nature (green) as the civic virtue for the 21th century.

Agreed, it's not a profound article. But because it's thinking the current against the ancient Greeks (one of the most productive ways to think or construct a path for a problematic--the Greeks need to return to the center of our eduction system), it generates exquisite passages like this:

To be a better city, we must build green, use mass transit, and restore purity to our water and air, with park access for all. This is a vision of a new type of city for the 21st century: at once more urbane and more natural. It is a marriage of building and landscape that is challenging every notion we have ever had about design.

The paradigm has shifted, and we must change our direction: just as two millennia ago, a sculptor transformed the biomass of the acanthus plant into a template for architecture, using its stalk, leaves and flower as a model for the shaft and volutes of the Corinthian column, we today must transform the rigidities of architecture into the adaptations of nature. The stone column crumbles and is replaced with the growing stalk. Networks of green signify community in ways that the architecture of the past no longer can. City-initiated rezonings center around new public spaces or streetscape improvements and each is crafted in consultation with the community it serves.

"The stone column crumbles and is replaced with the growing stalk." For me, at every read, a spinal jolt of joy from this terrific connection of words and imagery.

The longest remodeling project in the history that no one cares to remember...

...re-resumes.

Seattle's historic King Street Station will get a new green-tile roof and repairs to its clock tower in a new round of restorations, starting this year.

Mayor Greg Nickels announced this morning that the city has signed a deal to buy the station from Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway for $10. That deal allows $16.5 million in federal and state spending to go ahead, along with $10 million in city money from the voter-approved Bridging the Gap property-tax levy.

Within the next three years, a dingy false ceiling will be removed from the waiting room, to reveal the original ceiling and its frescoes. Some brick walls will be removed at the northwest corner so a granite-and-marble staircase can be widened and reopened to the outdoors. The building will also be strengthened against earthquakes.

When will this city take rail transportation seriously? More promises, more minor repairs, more broken promises. The King Street Station's regime of stupidity will never be defeated by the arrows of reason and criticism.

Fabrizio Troccol, a Perugian photographer, to me:

I met Amanda Knox. I used to own a gallery near the Piazza San Francesco. Paintings, pictures, that kind of thing. And she came to the gallery with a friend. Yes, I remember her because we talked about Seattle. She said she didn’t like it. Seattle did not have a center. Just a lot of houses that all looked the same. But no center to this place. Perugia is better, she said. It had a center and looked better. We talked about this for 30 minutes. She is an attractive woman. Don't you think?

Amanda Knox might be on to something. Seattle does not have a real center. It has neighborhoods, a downtown, club districts, but nothing that is clearly the center in the way that Piazza Novembre is the center of Perugia, Italy. The closet thing we have to a center is the Central Library, but a center should be open and not enclosed.

Note: At three today I will be on Northwest Afternoon talking about this Amanda Knox.

What Steven Spielberg will miss this August:
What should we do at the sight of such a building? Laugh a little or laugh a lot? How can we take it seriously? Water as a leading motive for a structure? You must be kidding me. You must be kids. A grownup does not play such childish games with architecture.

This 521-foot-high hotel is coming to Baku, Azerbaijan, either to host a bunch of Imperial forces or obliterate the local population with a giant death ray. They call it "Full Moon" but they are not fooling us: this is a fully armed, fully operational battle station.

What is the power of the Death Star? What gives its idea so much force in the constellation of our thoughts? The Death Star is our sun gone terribly wrong. Our sun in a state of madness. This madness is much like the one that seizes Ajax in Sophocle's tragedy. The tragedy of being for and not against the void. For the void to turn black the sun is the absolute negative.

This powerful image has its sonic equivalent in the sounds and dubs of Burial:
...It's all in that touch/dub/dab of blue in the tunnel.