Nicolai Ourousoff is agreeing with Mudede this morning, in a piece on the odd duck Lebbeus Woods:

By abandoning fantasy for the more pragmatic aspects of building, the profession has lost some of its capacity for self-criticism, not to mention one of its most valuable imaginative tools.

I agree. More often than not I see buildings whose designs seem to be backwardly rationalized, by which I mean that the designs are more or less logistically driven, but then are gussied up to "mean" something. I'm not opposed to logistical motivations, but I'd like them to be admitted as such. (This is also a huge problem in art, where artists can't decide which of their choices to glorify after the fact, and it makes for some weirdly gap-filled conversations and artist talks.) I also am tired of buildings being discussed and classified in terms of modernism or postmodernism or neomodernism when, in truth, they are driven by practicalism. To me, this is the case with the new Seattle Art Museum.

The desire for the absolute substance:

It's wondrous stuff, - concrete infused with glass fibre. Truly beautiful. Imagine a building made of this?! The strength and exterior texture of concrete, but a lightness imbued by, well, light itself. At night, with lights on inside, shadowy projections of the inhabitants would be visible moving across the exterior of the building ... Sexy.

Experts from the University of Twente developed and tested the concrete paving stones which contain a titanium dioxide-based additive.

In laboratory conditions, the additive -- under the influence of sunlight -- binds the nitrogen oxide particles emitted by car exhausts and turns them into harmless nitrates.

"With one rain shower everything is washed clean," the institution said in a statement.

Nitrogen oxides, produced by industry and motor vehicles, are among the main air pollutants that lead to acid rain and smog.

Apart for their ability to clean the air and repel dirt from the road surface, there was no other difference between these new bricks and the old ones, the university said.

As for the incredible image, an image of the only possible paradise:

This is a ho(s?)tel in Austria, designed by art college graduate Andreas Strauss. Organized into clusters of threes, they nestle in green fields beside the Danube River. Facilities like shower, bar and cafeteria are in a central location. The hotel currently works on an honor system - you leave behind however much you think is fair for the duration of your stay.

It's your lucky day.

For example, in this project, FNP Architects took a 1768 pigsty and converted it, Russian doll-style, into a functioning house, adding a roof on the top.

In this one, architects Ali Ganjavian, Key and Maki Portilla-Kawamuram and artist Tadanori Yamaguchi created a free call center to Latin America in the center of the Plaza de Colon in Madrid--a nod to the fact that the plaza commemorates Columbus's journey to the Americas (Colon translates as Columbus).

An LA-based firm called Electroland created the Urban Nomad Shelter pictured below. According to their web site, the shelters were conceived as both art project and "humanitarian act," providing "a highly portable and inexpensive shelter to protect from cold, rain, and hard sidewalks." Pretty, isn't it?

But it probably won't surprise anyone to learn that my absolute favorite is this one, called Real Landscape/Real Mistake. By a German firm called Heri und Salli, it's a four-kilometer-long crosswalk that zigzags through the urban areas of Salzburg and adjoining forest of Salzburg.

In Seattle, the closest we've come to an event that repurposes car-oriented urban spaces for people is Park(ing) Day, a worldwide, one-day event in which people turn parking spaces into temporary installations. Although the original event in San Francisco turned a single parking space into a park to protest the city's relative lack of public spaces (see below), Park(ing) exhibits now include sidewalk cafes, banks of massage tables, croquet lawns, and lending libraries. I'll be out of town, which is a bummer, because I was really looking forward to setting up the People's Republic of 4329 Rainier Ave. South. If you're interested in participating, this handy guide will show you how.

[In 2000,] the Tacoma News Tribune published an article titled "Tacoma faces up to its darkest hour," which stated that Tacoma might have turned out differently had it not booted out its Chinese population. "First, it is the only [city on the West Coast] that doesn't have a large Chinese American population, [and the last] census figures suggest there are fewer people of Chinese descent in the city now than there were in 1885."

Tacoma, however, does have "mysterious Chinese tunnels":

Why?

72 years ago, a man named William Zimmerman sat down to tell a story about "mysterious Chinese tunnels" to the U.S. government. That interview was conducted as part of the Federal Writers' Project, and it can be read online in a series of typewritten documents hosted by the Library of Congress.
Zimmerman claims that "mysterious" tunnels honeycombed the ground beneath the city of Tacoma, Washington. These would soon become known as "Shanghai tunnels," because city dwellers were allegedly kidnapped via these underground routes – which always led west to the docks – only to be shipped off to Shanghai, an impossibly other world across the ocean. There, they'd be sold into slavery.

The whole mysterious business reminds me of a passage from a letter Goethe wrote to Lavater:

Like a big city, our moral and political world is undermined with subterranean roads, cellars, and sewers, about whose connection and dwelling conditions nobody seems to reflect or think; but those who know something of this will find it much more understandable if here or there, now or then, the earth crumbles away, smoke rises out of a crack, and strange voices are heard.

(Lee Pyne-Mercier sent the me the wonderful link.)

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.

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.

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.