If all goes well for Jean Nouvel, this:
Will be the beautiful Arabic skin for this:

A future office building in Doha in Qatar.

I went to a public hearing of the Century 21 Committee to report on their vision quest for how to actually turn the Seattle Center into "Seattle's living room." (Now it's more like Seattle's mud room, a place you have to tromp through, but never linger in, on your way to the Rep, the opera, a stoner laser show at the Science Center, etc.)

There were a few different proposals (knock down Memorial Stadium, replace it with underground parking and a lawn on top). There were a few quibbles from the audience. (Most comically from a guy who thought altering Memorial Stadium would insult the veterans. Look, pal: It's an ugly-ass stadium. Leaving it up is an insult to the veterans.)

All the proposals mentioned renovating the bejesus out of the Center House (which has one feature worth keeping—the art-deco north wall, making the Center more "porous" and "green," leaving Key Arena as-is, and razing the fun forest.

Happily, one of the proposals featured a ferris wheel—the only part of the Fun Forest worth fixing and keeping.

This is the Robertson Tunnel on the MAX Blue Line in Portlandia:
The train enters the 3-mile tunnel after the Goose Hollow stop and exits it shortly before the Sunset Transit Center. What is significant about this tunnel, what constitutes its monstrous power, is that it transports the riders from the city above to the city below.

The train leaves the sunshine of the city's center and takes passengers down to its underworld, its suburb. Indeed, while in the rushing train, which has one stop in the tunnel (Washington Park Station), you can hear a thousand witches screaming from, and scratching with metal nails the concrete walls of, hell.

The haunting experience brings to mind a passage in Diana George's short story Park and Ride Home: Greater Redmond 2099:

Formed in horror of the city, the suburb carries the city’s ghostly imprint... The word suburb, meaning “there where there is no place else,” is often thought to derive from the name for “lesser city.” In truth, the suburb was never the lesser city but that which had always slumbered or festered or shimmered beneath the city. This underside of the city retains its hold on us today, in the suburban buildings we drift in and out of in a state of inattention.

The basic and mythical movement from city to "lesser city" is, nevertheless, powerfully felt in the Robertson Tunnel, and it will take years, a new generation of city beings, a Copernican revolution of experiencing urban space, to weaken or eradicate the structure of this feeling. A Copernican revolution of urban space is precisely Mathew Stadler's present mission. And it's curious that the city he picked for this revolution has such a stable and convincing distinction between above-city, Portland, and below-city, Beaverton.

The King County Court House:

By John Ruskin:

The architect is not bound to exhibit structure; nor are we to complain of him for concealing it, any more than we should regret that the outer surfaces of the human frame conceal much of anatomy; nevertheless, that building will generally be noblest, which to an intelligent eye discovers the great secrets of its structure, as an animal form does, although from a careless observer they may be concealed.

Comment One: Before arriving at the core of Artwalk activity, I passed the King County Courthouse building and again felt myself pulled into the debate that has been with us since the century that experienced a tremendous transformation in building materials, the 19th century: Is architecture that hides the actual structure of a building being dishonest? And if so, is this a bad thing? For me, the answer for both questions is a solid yes. And King County Courthouse is one such example of this dishonesty. From top to bottom, the building speaks not a single truth. It's engaged Ionian columns, the useless balconnets, and, worst of all, the massive Palladian windows which make the top two floors look like one floor (the lower, long columns play a similar trick on the ground floor).

What you see on the surface has no relationship with the internal system. The surface doesn't express or articulate the actual structure. The two are divided. If this bulk had some unity, then the King County Courthouse would look more like this. It's a shame that a building whose function is the administration of justice has an architecture that does nothing but tell lies.

In Freeway Park:

From the "Desire Issue":

My Lover’s Window. On another June night, we were underneath the monstrous Freeway Park, on a street called something like Bubble Place. The involved traffic roared around us. Not far from where we stood and kissed and groped, was a strange window (maybe the strangest window in all of Seattle) which, from the park’s artificial waterfall, one can see the traffic on I-5 rush by. Looking into this window is like watching your sleeping lover’s dream from a discovered window under her hair. The thing that dreams in Freeway Park’s window — which is yellow, cracked in certain parts, and situated in a small recess over which water flows like transparent waves of hair — is the city itself. The city dreams of traffic streams.

Comment Two: On Wednesday I went to Freeway Park to look at my favorite opening in all of Seattle. The opening looks down at the traffic rushing by on I-5. Because of the artificial light in the echoic tunnel, and also the blend of the artificial waterfall's sound with the sound of the traffic, the scene looks unreal. I wanted to see this unreality again but couldn't because of a resident madman. In the image above, the madman is just beyond the concrete block, pacing back and forth, talking to himself about things that only himself can understand. I left the park without looking into my magic opening.

From volute O, "Prostitution, Gambling":

"If it is the belief in mystery that makes believers, then there are more believing gamblers in the world than believing worshipers." Carl Gustav Jochmann.

Comment Three: I found this abandoned poker set on a bench that's separated from Chapel of St. Ignatius by a parking lot. Gambling and God? But the chapel, is not really about God, it's about design and distortion. Like the King County Courthouse, the chapel is dishonest, and in the space of that dishonesty--the dishonesty of what it is really about, as well as a dishonesty between surface and the structure--we shall find the marked card of the architect.

This house...

... which belonged to the Wu family, Chinese media heroes, agitators against property developers and cultural authoritarianism in general, as well as cover-artists of these accidental earthworks...

... has been destroyed.

The best part? Mr. Wu defiantly stayed in the house until its late-night demolition. Mrs. Wu, when told the house had been demolished, said: "Oh well."

One gets the sense that something more than a house has been destroyed.

I heard about this on the BBC as I was falling asleep last night (including a Native American woman speaking about how it is a desecration of a burial ground and its existence felt like knives poking into her very body). One may walk out in this thing and look down BETWEEN ONE'S FEET to the floor of the Grand Canyon FOUR THOUSAND FUCKING FEET BELOW. Nightmares ensued.

These are new homes near the corner of 21 and Alder. They are not great but certainly much more interesting than the most of the new townhomes that are under construction or recently completed in the Central District.

But check out this new home in Tabiago, Italy.

How sad even this decent local effort seems when compared to actual architecture.

...the world awaits your architectural exegesis.

If there is to be hope for the future, one of the three popular toys that should be abolished is the dollhouse. What a girl/boy should have instead for play is a residential tower. A dollhouse, like a toy car, weakens, rather than strengthens, the social instincts in a child. And as experience shows, social instincts, unlike selfish ones, take time, effort, an education to develop. With a tower as a toy, the habit of living with others in dense locations is introduced at an early age. The dollhouse encourages the complete opposite habit--the habit of homeownership. And the consequence of the American dream of homeownership has been this unsustainable trend:

In 2005, there were 1.4 million single-family homes built and only 160,000 units in buildings with more than 20 units.

In short, we must revive the themes and goals of modernism, which, as a new book, From a Cause to a Style, by the sociologist Nathan Glazer points out, has failed in America. A recent reviewer of that book, Edward Glaeser, agrees with all of the reasons Glazer provides for the failure of modernism in America but one, the "scale problem." Glaeser writes near the end of the review:

If there is one area where Mr. Glazer and I disagree it is his view that "scale is a problem." The resurgence of New York, London, and Chicago, and the great, growing cities of Asia remind us of how valuable scale can be. Scale is not for everyone, but great towers enable vast numbers of people to reap the economic and social benefits from physical proximity. New York's skyscrapers are the infrastructure that enables the city's flow of ideas...

So, for the sake of increasing the social benefits that come naturally with increased social instincts in individuals, we must mass manufacture models of these for girls and boys:

From Tricky's post-Fanon reverie "Feed Me": "I love you/But still nothing is clear/I think of you when I found you/You keep on singing while Im drowning/Down into that two-tone vision/Ive been raised in this place/And now concrete is my religion." Yes, concrete is the only religion. Cement is God, crushed rock is Jesus, and the water that mixes is John the Baptist.

Where we worship concrete:
(Central Library)

Concrete rises to perfection, to heaven:
(the extention of the Sheraton Hotel)

Concrete paradise:
(Freeway Park)

My dusky Mies:
Like a star that has no warmth.

Fnarf, the Humian, sent me a vision of hell:
Designed by Arakawa and Gins, built by Takenaka Corp, located in Tokyo, and called the Reversible Destiny Lofts, the pictured crazy looking apartment building has this purpose: to simulate and invigorate its residents.

With that in mind, Arakawa and Gins designed a building of nine apartments known as Reversible Destiny Lofts. Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall.

In response to the recently published AIA list of 150 favorite works of American architecture, Modern Art Notes has enjoined bloggers to put together our own top 5s. Mine are in no particular order.

1. The Egg, Albany, NY

I choose this in part, as I choose these all, for sentimental reasons. I grew up outside of Albany, and this is the first piece of architecture I remember noticing as architecture. It also, of course, is a giant sculpture. Designed by Wallace Harrison in 1966, the Egg--which houses two theaters, is made of poured concrete, and has virtually no right angles inside it--was completed in 1978. It is an early example of curvaceous, iconic architecture, and as the perfect foil to the bullyish towers across the way in the Empire State Plaza, it is is wildly underappreciated.

2. The Chrysler Building, NY, NY

I am simply a sucker for this sparkling thing. It is so naked in its ambition, so hopeful and yet so Darwinian, and so frozen in its moment, with its hood ornament eagles and radiator cap corners. I visit it every single time I am in New York, and every time, I can hardly believe it exists.

3. The First Congregational Church of Bennington, Bennington, VT

There are older churches and more grandiose statements by this same architect, but the delicacy and modest size of this creaky church, and the way its slightly-too-wide facade recalls a barn structure, always seem to me the purest distillation of the early protestant American spirit. Carpenter Lavius Fillmore designed and built this simple church in 1805-06, deriving it from an 18th-century American builder's handbook adapting the designs of Sir Christopher Wren. Inside, it still has box pews, and its small, adjacent cemetery was full long, long ago.

4. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX


Whenever I see a show I love installed in a so-so space, I think, imagine this art at the Kimbell. This museum of cast-concrete vaulted forms, designed by Louis Kahn and completed in 1972, is the ideal museum, and the reason why is simple. It excels both in light and in form. Many museums can do one or the other, and certain rooms in certain museums can do both. But I've never experienced another museum so uniformly pleasing, giving such generous light and such nurturing form, inside and out, upstairs and down.

5. Seattle Public Library, Seattle, WA

I realize this is an obvious choice. But every time I tried to boot it off this list, it kept coming back. This place is alive. It makes you feel you're in on something, and not something that began recently and will fade away, but the electricity of long-term knowledge-gathering. I am surprised that a library should feel so electric. I am surprised that a building this glamorous should feel so substantial and loving. I knew I could trust this building when, after a death in my family, all I wanted to do was to ride up to its top floor, lean my head back, and look at the sky through the diamonds.

Designed nearly decade ago by MVRDV, this building in Amsterdam is called WoZoCo's Apartments:

and...

A fine/interesting enough building. There is, however, one strange thing about WoZoCo's Apartments: it only houses elderly people. Why is this strange? Because the spirit of the architecture is youthful, enthusiastic, and even experimental--the very last things that constitute the spirit of much that has to do with old age. This building lacks death. It's too optimistic, like an irridenscent coffin, or a coffin shaped in some deconstructivist manner. Old people must live in grim structures; buildings that point not to this world of positive things but to the underworld of negative, annihilating forces. As being young is about leaving birth, being old is about going to death.

Also, when you look at WoZoCo's Apartments you get the sense that it is very uncomfortable and too surprising. All of this leaping out, zigzagging, sudden balconies, profusion of colors--it's just a bit much for an old bag of bones. The pull of gravity on granny and grandpa is heavy enough as it is. People of their age just want a place that offers as much peace as possible. What the authorities should do is turn this building over to those whose lives would make better sense of its architecture: the spirited youth.

And it just don't stop. Dubai is throwing money at big names to design buildings that have had no other home but in their dreams. Hadid gets to do this:

Gehry gets to do this:

Tadao gets to do this:

Of the three, Tadao Ando's dream is the only one worth realizing. (Then again, when has Tadao ever gone wrong?) As for Hadid and Gehry, there is nothing impressive about their designs outside of the fact that they were commissioned by religious Arabs.

Big-time Irish rockers Bono and the Edge have now become big-time Irish developers. The duo's first project is this wavy, shiny Dublin hotel:

Dublin's Clarence Hotel is an upscale establishment that is about to undergo a 21st century renovation. The Clarence is being redeveloped by the project's owners, U2's Bono and the Edge, to be one of the "most spectacular hotels in Europe".

"'It was kind of like 9/11,' said Steven Wullinger, 35, a German who saw the falling man."
Our age only has one memory. A Tacoma boy catches two flights to Texas sans ticket, sans detection, and what do we remember? A tower burns in Dubai, and what do we remember? Bush announces "the surge," and what do we remember?

Today, Steven Holl finally seduced me! I have never really had an ideal for a living space until I saw his new design for T-Husene (T-Houses) in Copenhagen.

Why here and nowhere else? It's not exactly the design, nor the fact that my middle name is Tonderai, but because T-Husene was "inspired by twilight and the Scandinavian sky."

The T-shaped buildings maximize high quality residential floor space with views to the horizon and sunset. Building downwards from the maximum height level, taking into consideration maximum view, each tower will contain 50 apartments in 22 different configurations ranging from 73 sq.m. to 135 sq.m.

A living space inspired by Scandinavian sky and twilight is the only living space for me. The first thing I will do when I move into that ideal in the twilight is hang this nice painting in the crepuscular living room:
Moi rudo dansk ("my love dusk"), happiness together at last.

Look closely at the top of this hospital and you will see a few of its patients:
Operated by Jains (pronounced "Janes") and located in New Delhi, India, this very special hospital accepts only birds (the limit is 60 a day), and is open roughly between 8 am and 8 pm. The hospital has an intensive care unit, an operating room, and a general ward. On Saturdays, its roof is opened and recovered birds (usually pigeons) fly out and back into the dangerous "urban jungle." Though all birds are welcome, "the hospital reluctantly [treats] non-vegetarian birds." (A bird doctor treating an injured hawk is much like a human doctor treating a gangster on the run from the law.) The hospital is busiest during the fall and winter months because, as a surgeon, Dr. Vijay Kumar, explained to Khaleej Times, "it’s the kite-flying season in New Delhi."

Each day we get scores of birds, mostly pigeons, whose limbs have been cut by kite strings in which the birds get entangled...

For Jain monks and nuns, life, no matter what form it takes, is of the greatest importance, and they do their best not to harm, hurt, or kill a single thing. Their commitment to this unusually high standard is so resolved, so extreme, that they travel with brushes and brooms to carefully remove insects from spots they might sit on. Though seeming to affirm life, this extraordinary care, this rejection of all death, is, ultimately, a rejection of the whole living world. Jainism is, as Nietzsche once wrote in an unrelated context, "a means and artifice for withdrawing from a bad game."

Under construction is the 25-story Seattle Sheraton Union Street Tower.

When completed in spring it will make the Sheraton the largest hotel in Washington, with a total of 1283 rooms and 18,000 square feet. But these are just dull facts. What's remarkable about this tower, which owes its design to the big and global Seattle-based firm Callison Architecture, is the amount of concrete used in its make up.

Callison Architecture calls it the "modern aesthetic," which may well be the case, but what's certain in our day and age is that corporate structures of this kind, and expense, $130 million, almost never allow concrete to dominate the design. The north face of the Seattle Sheraton Union Street Tower is entirely composed of pre-cast concrete. The south face has the usual aluminum and glass style that deliberately resembles One Convention Place, which stands just north of the hotel and was also designed by Callison. As far as I can tell, not since Freeway Park has concrete played such a large role in a work of big architecture. Just look at it--so dense, so brutal, so raw.

The greatest of all manmade stuffs is concrete. It is the very substance of a city. It is unforgiving and never stops getting harder. When we speak of reality, we rightly speak of it as being concrete.

At the delicate age of fourteen, I hit the real real-hard: The handle of my tennis racket got caught in the spokes of my bike, the front wheel jammed, my body flew over the handle bars, and my forehead crashed into the side of the street--it was a messy matter of blood, skull bone, and concrete. The pain was terrific--cranial thunder, screaming stars, brain bolts--but to this day I treasure the experience: a head-on collision with the no nonsense of concrete, the ur-stuff of civilization. I almost lost my eye to it.

Although Kentucky scored the actual building in Charles' post, Bangkok still wins the cool city contest by even contemplating naming the building the Hyperbuilding. What a marvelous name! Who wouldn't want to enter the Hyperbuilding and experience it? I have little to no respect for modern architecture, except when it comes with fabulous retro/futurist names like the Hyperbuilding!

Speaking of Joshua Prince-Ramus, before leaving Koolhaas's firm, OMA, to form his own, REX, the architect managed Museum Plaza, a spectacular project that in 2010, at the cost of half a billion bucks, will stand on the banks of the Ohio River, dwarfing, dominating, defining Louisville's skyline.

The design is based on an earlier proposal, The Hyperbuilding, Koolhaas made for Bangkok, Thailand, but completely failed to make the all-important leap from fantasy to reality.

Koolhaas's "brief, titillating brush with sci-fi," as The Hyperbuilding was called, found a home in Kentucky.

The future woman over there in that white something-something, she's got back.

Early this morning, for the sake of impressing Jen Graves, I resolved to write at least one nice thing about Tacoma by the end of the day. I decided that this act of kindness would take the form of praise for its relatively new convention center, Tacoma Convention and Trade Center, which was designed by the Bellevue-based MulvannyG2 Architecture, a firm that's receiving a lot of work from China.

I looked and looked at the building but failed to find anything about it that moved me. All that seems to be there, all that I could see, is a building trying too hard not to be Tacoma. It keeps saying (no, yelling) this: If you thought Tacoma was about old buildings and its faded history, then look at me--I'm a slick future of sensual steel and glass... But let me stop right there. I shouldn't say something bad about Tacoma on the very day that I resolved to do the opposite.

Once you get into the business of remarking on the death of the American skyline, why, somebody will go and prove you wrong. Chicago's had its share of discussions about tall buildings lately, but that city is always on the architectural move. Now, San Francisco developers announce (thank you, as always, ArtsJournal) their plan to throw up towers taller than anything outside New York and Chicago, where the Sears Tower and the Empire State hold the No. 1 and 2 slots for highest American building:

The plan presented Thursday to the city's Planning Department envisions a cluster of thin towers rising from 2 acres at the northwest corner of First and Mission streets. The cluster would include two 1,200-foot towers, two 900-foot structures and a 600-foot companion.

This is the plan for the International Islamic Centre in London:

There are two things to laugh at here: One, the ridiculous design; two, the very idea that futuristic architecture can correct the backwardness of the religion (clearly the architect's intention). And Islam is backwards. Nothing about it is in the future. All of it is in the deep and dark past, which is why anti-Western Muslims are not revolutionaries--they are not after change but restoration, the return of an order that's much like the one T.S. Eliot longed for in his thick writings on Christianity and society.

Architecture, what are you thinking? Futuristic glass and steel shapes sheltering men in clothes suited for the ancient desert and praying to the desert? We cant help ourselves: we must hold our bellies and laugh the big, big laugh.

Under construction in Pittsburgh is The August Wilson Center for African American Culture, which when completed will look like this:

Designed by Perkins+Will, a Chicago-based firm, the two-story steel and aluminum building is not, as you can see, very interesting. Nor is it aesthetically black American. What makes this structure black? Nothing. But then again, can there be such a thing as black American architecture in the way there is, say, Japanese architecture? Those who believe such a distinction is possible will certainly turn to black American music to prove that a line can be drawn between black aesthetic practices and those derived from Japan or Europe. But is there an aesthetic correspondence between European music and architecture (something Goethe suggested)? Others have gone as far as to compare the scholastic summa with gothic architecture. But that comparison has more to do with complexity than with actual style. Reading a summa does not feel like walking through a cathedral. Summas are intellectual; cathedrals are cosmic.

In the plays of August Wilson, you can, for sure, hear the music of the blues; but not one blue note will exist in the August Wilson Center for African American Culture.

Iconic architecture is the desert of ideas, but even I failed to resist the greatness of this proposal, which, sadly, is only a joke:

Nicolai Ourousoff waxes poetic in this morning's New York Times about the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, which opened Oct. 26 in what used to be an abandoned car dealership.

The headline, "Seeing the Seediness, and Celebrating It," made me cringe for fear that the architect and the sophisticates involved in funding and organizing MOCAD were, well, making a show of slumming it, and that Ourousoff had jetted in from New York to jot down the charming phenomenon.

But Ourousoff's piece explores the links between contemporary art and urban cycles of creation and destruction as opposed to suburban fantasies of stasis. And check out the photographs.

Here's the aptly glum facade of the building, decked out with Barry McGee's sardonic graffiti exhortation, the barely readable "AMAZE."

Here's a Kara Walker video showing in a typical exhibition space, which looks post-something, sort of bombed out and halfway to oblivion. (For better or worse, this is a place where you can barely imagine showing a painting.)

Here's a Nari Ward piece on the wall, but that burst of light you see in the background is near a ceiling space heater, which is the crude way that the place gets warmed up. (In Detroit!) In another gesture that isn't visible, the architect, Andrew Zago, housed the mechanical systems for the museum not in a side room or a hidden bubble on the roof but in the corner of a gallery, behind a chain-link fence.

The other architectural news this week (sorry about my absence, I've been away!) is that Brad Cloepfil's Portland-based Allied Works won the contract to design the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. It's a plum job, because a single-artist museum offers an architect something very, well, singular to bump against conceptually, and also because Still is a particularly intriguing character, he of the high-minded anti-commercial principles that gave Rothko such a heavy conscience.

Still was a classic modernist, the very height of the movement in all its piousness and surety. Jeff Jahn on PORT (which also has a great look at Thom Mayne's new courthouse in Eugene, although it glosses over Seattle artist Cris Bruch's contribution) writes that Cloepfil's earthy/heavy and light/airy sides are a perfect match for Still's dichotomous paintings. I don't know; the tidiness of Cloepfil (he of the Seattle Art Museum expansion downtown, among many other projects) would seem to deflate the oversized grandeur of Still. Stay tuned for the design.

My love of Zaha Hadid's work, and particularly her first built American project, Arts Center Cincinnati, which was completed just around the time America began shocking and awing the city of her birth, Baghdad.

This love has been weakened, if not entirely destroyed, by her proposed design for the Nuragic and Contemporary Art Museum in Cagliari, Italy.

The badness of this future building speaks for itself. I will, however, point out that the human imagination often reaches the peak of poshlost (cheesiness) when it turns to the sea for inspiration.

The Mikimoto was brought into existence by Toyo Ito and is located in Ginza, Tokyo.
This is architecture at its weakest, at its most embarrassing point. Embarrassing because it's so proud of itself, so happy to be so original, clever, challenging. But there is nothing in this work but imagination, which was free to play, free from the mind, free to do as it pleased.

Though recognizing the importance of truth, Nietzsche warned that we must rest from it occasionally otherwise we, the seekers of truth, become tiresome and boring. The same can be said about the admired and encouraged power of the imagination. With the Mikimoto, we can see in every window and building material that the designer did not take a breath of rest from the imagination; he gave that old whore (used and abused for centuries by the poets) everything that it begged for--money, fame, love, commitment. And the result? A building that is boring and tiresome. A building that is perpetually excited like a baby with bright plastic moons and stars twirling over its cot. The weak with weak knees submit, they say Yes! to this evident expression of (infantile) freedom; they say to themselves: "Boy, I wish I had imagination."

That's what Roberta Smith wrote in her takedown of the Taniguchi MoMA compared to the Tate Modern in yesterday's NYT.

What of this destiny, knitting together the fates of the Seattle Art Museum and Washington Mutual corporate?

I recently caught a glimpse of Cloepfil's tower at night (the museum opens May 5), and I noticed that the very top of the tallest side (the WaMU side) is translucent, so you can see right through it. The structure, which is light anyway despite is girth, disappears up high, in deference to the sky.

It's those kinds of details that make this office tower a minor triumph—as an office tower. Art museums are not office towers, so what does it mean to conflate the two? Well, first off, you've got to fend off suspicions that you're conflating the two. And secondly, there's a ton of pressure on the inside of this building—and the creative insiders in this building—to perform, given the standard towerishness of the architecture. Here's the latest video rendering of what the space will look like on the inside here.

And related: Modern Art Notes this morning declares City Beautiful thinking is back when it comes to art museums (Ando in Fort Worth, Herzog and de Meuron at the de Young, Miami—and hey, isn't this a return to the era when the now-neglected Seattle Asian Art Museum was built in Volunteer Park?).

Another related bit I love from MAN: Chicago mayor Daley says no to concrete. Outlawing an entire material is swinging cluelessly with a blunt instrument, but when has Nickels ever had an aesthetic bone to pick? Public figures expressing aesthetics?? Unheard of!! Fabulous!