February 2011
47 posts
January 2011
48 posts
The Interventionist's Toolkit: Places: Design Observer →
places.designobserver.com
Our current recession is inspiring its own strategies and tactics: It’s increasingly a catch-all for a host of urban interventions. This is a trend that I like to describe with a mouthful of a title: Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism. With this verbaciousness, I hope to capture the tactical multiplicity and inventive thinking that have cropped up in the vacuum of more conventional commissions. These days vacant lots offer sites for urban farming, mini-golf, and dumpster pools. Trash recycles into a speculative housing prototype (see the Tiny Pallet House). Whether it’s The Living’s Amphibious Architecture or Mark Shepard’s Serendipitor, the built environment speaks through mobile devices. Retail spaces hit by the recession are fodder for reinvention, as the art organization No Longer Empty transforms unleased storefronts into temporary galleries. Even the street itself is reclaimed. REBAR’s annual initiative, Park(ing) Day, urges global participants to use a pranksters wit to turn parking spaces into pocket parks, one quarter at a time.
China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people →
telegraph.co.uk
City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta. The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.
Movin' on Down →
thesmartset.com
Never mistake the small house for a totem of sacrifice or self-denial. A small house allows you to cultivate luxury and connoisseurship at an attainable price point and never settle for the second-rate. Like Apple over PC clones, like Chez Panisse over Olive Garden and Whole Foods over Safeway, the small house proposes less for more as the true path to consumer satisfaction
The Ethics of Slumming →
theatlantic.com
The hippies of the Haight were hardly the first victims of San Francisco’s tourist industry … . The city pioneered American slumming back in the 19th century, when tour operators started offering package deals on nocturnal Chinatown visits.
Yes There Are Grocery Stores in Detroit →
urbanophile.com
James Griffioen debunks a media myth.
Looking for Bold Ideas to Fix the City, New York Turns to Crowd Sourcing | Co.Design →
fastcodesign.com
As part of a larger sustainability-focused initiative, PlaNYC2030, “Give a Minute” New York, will ask citizens to contribute ideas on how to make their neighborhoods greener. Those ideas, which can be submitted via the Give a Minute Web site, Facebook, Twitter, or text (specific address TBA) will be funneled to organizers in city government who will connect people with similar ideas to action groups organized around potential solutions.
I’m really, really skeptical of this sort of thing. We’ll see.
Step right up to the Fraud Museum in Austin for memorabilia from Bernie Madoff, Enron and Ivan Boesky →
dallasnews.com
The Fraud Museum, an exhibit in an Austin office building, contains a Bernard Madoff engraved cigar box, given to clients as tokens of his appreciation; now-worthless stock certificates from Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia; and a canceled 1975 check from inside-trader Ivan Boesky.
Sidney Bechet's home, jazz landmark, razed in rebuilding push | NOLA.com →
nola.com
In the push to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina and eliminate eyesores, officials unwittingly approved the demolition of the childhood home of jazz great Sidney Bechet.
Siteseeing in Virtual Rome →
metafilter.com
Villanova University, who first made the VR Tour of the Sistine Chapel, have made more of the Vatican’s most sacred sites virtually available online: the basilicas of St. Peter, St. Paul, St. John Lateran, and St. Mary Major, as well as the Pauline Chapel. Bonus: smaller panoramas from other historic Roman sites, but you’ll have to deal with tourists.
On toppled monuments
The New Yorker has a great story about the famously broadcast toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue in the early days of the Iraq war. The piece is full of excellent material and highly worth reading in its entirety, but here is an interesting bit toward the end on the subject of monuments and statues knocked down to make symbolic statements during conflicts:
In a way, statue topplings are the banana peels of history that we often slip on. In 1991, when pro-democracy forces led by Boris Yeltsin stood up to a coup by Soviet hard-liners in Moscow, a crowd outside K.G.B. headquarters forced the removal of a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had led the K.G.B.’s notorious predecessor, the Cheka. The statue was lifted off its pedestal by a crane; its demise seemed to symbolize the end of Soviet-era oppression. Yet within a decade a K.G.B. functionary, Vladimir Putin, became Russia’s President, and former K.G.B. officials now hold key political and economic positions.
Throughout the nineteen-nineties, Svetlana Boym, a Soviet-born professor of comparative literature at Harvard, visited the Moscow park where Dzerzhinsky’s statue was left on its side, neglected and stained with urine. But over the years, as the power of the security state revived, the statue became the object of fond attention; eventually, Dzerzhinsky was raised to his feet and placed on a pedestal in the park. By studying a statue at not just a dramatic moment but during the course of its existence—construction, toppling, preservation—one can sometimes trace a nation’s political evolution, but it takes patience. In “The Future of Nostalgia,” Boym’s book on history and memory, she described Soviet-era monuments serving as “messengers of power … onto which anxieties and anger were projected.” The Princeton architectural historian Lucia Allais, who has examined the destruction of monuments during the Second World War, mentioned to me one of the most famous topplings ever—of the statue of King Louis XV in Paris, in 1792, during the French Revolution. The action was portrayed by its authors as a liberation from the power of the monarchy, but they put in its spot a symbol of a new sort of power: the guillotine. These monumental destructions “are usually acts of monumental replacement, which hide continuities of power … behind the image of rupture,” Allais wrote to me in an e-mail.
the Grumbler: Hipster vs. Bohemian →
thegrumbler.net
In 2009, the New School hosted a symposium entitled “What Was the Hipster?” (The companion book is now in print.) In 1955, the New School hosted a panel discussion tackling the question “Are There Any True Bohemians?” From the department of “The More Things Change…” comes this brief report from The Village Voice of 1955.
“In recent weeks, leaders from Detroit, Cleveland and other Midwest cities have traveled to Europe as part of a Cities in Transition exchange. One trip, which came after a visit to Turin, Italy, took leaders to Leipzig, Germany, and Manchester, England. All three cities are reversing decades of job losses and population decline.”
—Rust Belt cities look to Old World for new growth ideas - latimes.com
