The park where love goes fovever. "I said to myself, you must have been to a wonderland."

You know this city...

Paul's review of the movie advertised in the poster makes me want to see it. As for MIA, she is far from original.

The story comes down to this: Asia is growing; Europe is dying. But here is an interesting detail: Seattle stands at 12 in the list of the richest metropolitan economies (per-capita GDP) in the world. We do not have much more room to grow. We have reached the region of Utopia.

I do not know what is meant by "horizontal skyscraper." Nevertheless, Steven Holl's Horizontal Skyscraper Vanke Center in Shenzhen, China is stunning and stands is the architectural work that most impressed me in 2011.

What Bloomberg has to say about the new Seattle buildings:

Artifacts from many countries hang on the wall and strategically placed screens play videos of work being done, but they are background ambience, not front and center. The place is almost aggressively impersonal, as if any meaningful architectural gesture might offend someone or be read as colonialist bullying...

The default to blandness is a lost opportunity.

What NYT said about the new Shenzhen buildings:

Steven Holl, the center’s architect, is a major talent, with significant projects in Europe and America, but his most potent urban ideas have sat on shelves for decades.

In China he was given the chance to dust them off, and the results are extraordinary. Nicknamed the “Horizontal Skyscraper,” the Vanke Center is a surreal hybrid — part building, part landscape, part infrastructure. Its jagged form, propped up above a tropical park on piers up to 50 feet high, gives identity to a characterless landscape. It demonstrates what can happen when talented architects are allowed to practice their craft uninhibited by creative restrictions (or, to be fair, by the high labor costs of most developed societies).

It's all about this...
A good question for this architecture: How come Starbucks got so much cargo?

Critic at Bloomberg calls NBBJ's Gates Foundation building bland...

Artifacts from many countries hang on the wall and strategically placed screens play videos of work being done, but they are background ambience, not front and center. The place is almost aggressively impersonal, as if any meaningful architectural gesture might offend someone or be read as colonialist bullying.
A visitor center will open next year, but it’s conceived as a museum, and may feel like a defense against interested citizens rather than an invitation to them.

The default to blandness is a lost opportunity.

Yes, the people who own and live in this Barcelona property are stinking rich. Yes, the music for the video is horrible. But if you put those two things aside, you are left with something amazing: the renovation of the ruins of a cement factory.

It's also meaningful that the old cement factory looks a lot like an old cathedral. Cement is the god/substance of the city. The city is all human. And a human is a god to a human (Spinoza put this way: Man is a god to man).

A little brutalism in the hood...

That tower always centers me...

My mother was buried in a cemetery on a hill beyond Renton—coffin lowered into a dark hole, dirt thrown onto the coffin, people dressed in black, final words about how every life on earth will end ("ashes to ashes, dust to dust"), the crying aunts, the somber uncles, the immediate family dazed and failing to grasp the hard fact of the loss, the fact that their only mother was gone, was actually and irreversibly dead, a human who was now no more than a stone to us, a thing that could not speak, touch, or kiss. As we walked away from the Mexican grave-diggers—they (the muscles of America) appeared right after the ceremony and began filling the hole with earth, shovel by shovel, covering a woman whose body had been ravaged by a disease that never once relieved her of pain—and approached the cemetery's gate, there it appeared in the distance: the top part of the Columbia Center.

Io9.com:

The cities of the future will be huge and super-dense — but will they also be alive? Could the increasingly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence?

People have speculated before about the idea that the Internet might become self-aware and turn into the first "real" A.I., but could it be more likely to happen to cities, in which humans actually live and work and navigate, generating an even more chaotic system?

• Still From Blade Runner

It is now time for us to absorb a deep understanding of city streets. This is that understanding.

• NASA
• City Lights, France-Italy Border (NASA, International Space Station Science, 04/28/10)

The work is impressive (I'll give it that) but the timing is terrible...

Brian MacDonald:

Before reading the article, it looked like Abu Dhabi's tribute to the original Tacoma-Narrows Bridge.

With this YouTube video, you get two for one: a ride cross this unimpressive structure and four-to-the-floor Arabic disco.

The family room, the storage wall, and the Action Office—developed into the cubicle system—are all inventions of one George Nelson, whose furniture arrangements, dangling lamps, and cosmological clocks are all on display at Bellevue Arts Museum now, in an exhibition called George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher.

The show also includes full-scale reconstructions of environments, architectural models, and a video that demonstrates just what the Action Secretary needs ("dignity!").

It's all magnificently Mad Men, and just beneath the surface lurk the constructs and conflicts of mid-20th-century American life. Recommended. One of my favorite images from the show, on the jump, is Louis Sullivan meets corporate Teutonism.

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...What a little bamboo can do:

Autumn in Columbia City...

If you haven't seen this, you must do so right now:
Fucking amazing.

Thanks for the tip goes to Sgt. Doom

Near 17th and Jackson:

The big winners of the 2011 Honor Awards for Washington Architecture are Art Stable by Olson Kundig Architects...

• Image by Benjamin Benschneider and Used With Permission from Olson Kundig Architects

Vancouver Community Library by The Miller Hull Partnership. Jurors appreciated its “monumental presence” and felt the “public, semi-private, and private spaces worked well together.”
Wood Block Residence by chadbourne + doss architects. Jurors felt this remodel, building on a Fred Bassetti original, “made smart choices between original structure and new elements.”
LOTT Clean Water Alliance Regional Services Center by The Miller Hull Partnership. Juror’s were impressed that both client and project team succeeded in making a utilitarian project a “resolute work of architecture.”

If only the architecture were properly modernist...

There is a touch of Zimbabwe in this Beacon Hill house...

Another reason to love this building...

It's an oldie on King Street.

The horror...

And then the red appeared...

This one is next to Judkins Park...