Some buildings are improved by time, while others, like the Beacon Hill Branch of The Seattle Public Library (completed in 2005), have an unfavorable relationship with time:

The week of Lawrence Halprin's timely death is also the week that his famous park, Freeway Park, appears in Police Beat.

What I wrote:

Despite the many dangers of Freeway Park, despite its eerie maziness, I still rate it as the most important and stimulating park in this city. No amount of crime will stop me from loving this strange and often dark place.

The image is from rutlo's photostream.

This photo, which is by jhenryrose and from the pool of Stranger images, returns me to my growing love for light rail:

The city of Detroit can't afford to demolish its dead duildings....

Some four dozen big buildings in the heart of Detroit are languishing, vacant, because demand for commercial and office space has dropped and money to demolish or renovate them has dried up.

These are among the most visible ghosts in a city of ghostly buildings — the harsh, physical evidence of a community that has lost 1 million people from its peak population of 1.8 million in the 1950s.

Some are in shocking condition: sidewalks cordoned off to protect pedestrians from falling chunks of facade; trees growing from roofs.

The city of Detroit can't afford to bury its dead people....

DETROIT (CNNMoney.com) — At 1300 E. Warren St., you can smell the plight of Detroit.

Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer.

Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the morgue, said he has never seen anything like it during his 13 years on the job. "Some people don't come forward even though they know the people are here," said the former Detroit cop. "They don't have the money."

I absolutely love this image of the Prada store in Tokyo—it was designed by Herzog and de Meuron.

This image from our photo pool...

As for me, I prefer my bridges to be dead.

Best thing about the new Olympic Javelin trains is exactly what some people do not like about them:

These trains are coolly stylish. Too cool, perhaps, for some. A number of those who have ridden on the Javelins say that their interiors are too stark: seats do not line up with windows, lighting is antiseptic. There is no provision for catering. The standard-class interiors have been designed to resemble efficient inter-city jet airliner cabins, making maximum use of space and with no concessions to design conceits. This is no-frills railway travel.

This picture is by Nick Taylor.

Aljazeera reports:

Iran's industry minister has been found guilty of fraud, dealing a fresh blow to his close ally Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president.

Ali Akbar Mehrabian was convicted by an Iranian court over claims by a researcher that he had stolen his idea for an "earthquake saferoom'' - a design for a fortified room in homes in case of disaster, local media reported on Monday.

An appeals court upheld that the design belonged to researcher Farzan Salimi and convicted Mehrabian of fraud but did not prescribe any punishment, according to Iranian newspapers.

The conviction is the latest embarrassment to Ahmadinejad, who has already been pressed to drop his choice of vice-president, had his intelligence minister fired on Sunday and had his culture minister quit on him on the same day.

This is the Capsule Tower in Tokyo:

Here are my fav passages from an NYT about the Capsule Tower, a building that is fast running out of time:

Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath.

Part of the design’s appeal is voyeuristic. The portholes evoke gigantic peepholes. Their enormous size, coupled with the small scale of the rooms, exposes the entire apartment to the city outside. Many of the midlevel units look directly onto an elevated freeway, so you are almost face to face with people in passing cars. (On my first visit there, a tenant told me that during rush hour, drivers stuck in traffic often point or wave at residents.)

But the project’s lasting importance has more to do with its structural innovations, and how they reflect the Metabolists’ views on the evolution of cities. Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.

In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.

The current residents of this building want it to be no more. They want something new. They want a building that has a future and not one that had a future. But how is it possible that a building with the most perfect idea of the future ("the idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society") could become outdated and hated? Our current thinking about architecture does not surpass the thinking that went into the Capsule Tower. And yet it's a building that's rejected by the very people it was designed to accommodate. The people of a tomorrow that is now.

The pics are by pict_u_re.

Yesterday in Chicago, the Sears Tower unveiled four retractable glass-bottom skydecks that jut out from the building's 103rd floor, and just looking at the photo posted on Towleroad almost made me pass out.

More photos here.

According to AFP, Vancouver is the softest city in the world

...and Harare is the hardest city in the world.

The rating system ranged from "zero (intolerable) to 100 percent (ideal)." Vancouver got 98 percent (the best), and Harare got 37.5 (the worst). However, the Harare in my memory (I have not been there since 1993) was not bad at all. It had its magic and moments. The Harare of today (the Harare that got such low marks) must be the zombie of the Harare in my memory. That Harare was much closer to Salisbury.

The photo of Vancouver is by photo Po Yang; the photo of Harare is by ctsnow.