Letters From Here

[Image: “One hundred men worked to raise the church, one-half inch at a time, for 35 days. Once the correct height was reached, a new concrete foundation was poured.” Image courtesy of the Galveston County Museum, Galveston, Texas, via Science Friday].

Following the catastrophic hurricane of 1900, the city of Galveston, Texas, was vertically raised up to 17 feet from its original ground level using “hand-cranked janks and mules,” NPR’s Science Friday explained last week.

In order to “protect itself from future storms,” Dwayne Jones of the Galveston Historical Foundation told the radio program, the city set about constructing a defensive seawall. “And the city began to be raised behind it,” he adds, “so everything was lifted up… Houses, out-houses, sidewalks, fences—everything was raised.”

(via BLDGBLOG: On the Rise)

For the unfamiliar, or those lacking enough hate in their hearts for these things, the Juliet Balcony is essentially as good as a mirage, giving one the feeling that there is usable outdoor space in an apartment, but not actually delivering any.

(via Juliet Balconies: The Worst Architectural Design In History: Gothamist)

Like ghosts of a future that never arrived, the United States is littered with space age relics that landed in the 1940s to 1960s in the form of diners, banks, motels, and other commercial architecture. While the futuristic style definitely made its mark on the big coastal cities, like with Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center in New York and Los Angeles International Airport’s Theme Building, it was also popular in a much more unexpected locale: on the Mars-like red earth of Oklahoma. Despite being a rather conservative place, the state fostered some pretty wild architecture, and you can still see its remnants as quiet oddities in the cityscapes. Oklahoma City especially has wonderful examples of this retrofuture trend, known as “Googie” architecture.

via Space-Age Architecture in an Unexpected Place)

The defining aspect of narquitectura is paranoia. Walls or gates are a must. Many gangster cribs have few windows and resemble command centers as much as homes, including business-like meeting rooms and advanced security systems. Drug cartels have even carried over some of the tacky luxury into death with elaborate bulletproof tombs. Narquitectura estates often turn out to be lifelong investments — no matter how short those lives are.

(via Narquitectura: Inside the Fortified Palaces of Mexico’s Drug Lords | Danger Room | Wired.com)

sanfrancisko:

(Salva López)

(via architectureofdoom)

Like many people, I was—and remain—devastated to have learned that architect Lebbeus Woods passed away last night, just as the hurricane was moving out of New York City and as his very neighborhood, Lower Manhattan, had temporarily become part of the Atlantic seabed, floodwaters pouring into nearby subway tunnels and knocking out power to nearly every building south of 34th Street, an event seemingly predicted, or forewarned, by Lebbeus’s own work.

I can’t pretend to have been a confidant of his, let alone a professional colleague, but Lebbeus’s influence over my own interest in architecture is impossible to exaggerate and his kindness and generosity as a friend to me here in New York City was an emotionally and professionally reassuring thing to receive—to a degree that I am perhaps only now fully realizing. I say this, of course, while referring to someone whose New Year’s toast a few years ago to a room full of friends gathered down at his loft near the Financial District—in an otherwise anonymous building whose only remarkable feature, if I remember correctly, was that huge paintings by Lebbeus himself were hanging in the corridors—was that we should all have, as he phrased it, a “difficult New Year.” That is, we should all look forward to, even seek out or purposefully engineer, a new year filled with the kinds of challenges Lebbeus felt, rightly or not, that we deserved to face, fight, and, in all cases, overcome—the genuine and endless difficulty of pursuing our own ideas and commitments, absurd goals no one else might share or even be interested in. 

(via BLDGBLOG: Lebbeus Woods, 1940-2012)

More at PopSci, and from Mark Lamster on Design Observer.

I love that sentiment about difficulty.

theartofgooglebooks:

Hybrid architecture (duplicated around the gutter). 

From The Coffee-Planter: or, An Essay on the Cultivation and Manufacturing that Article of West-India Produce by John Lowandes (1807). Original from Harvard University. Digitized May 19, 2008.