The New York Observer reflects on the great class war between Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station. Connecticut vs. Jersey and Long Island, Bon Jovi vs. Mozart, the Sopranos vs. Philip Johnson.
I, of course, am partial to the last stomping ground of Louis Kahn which after two months of commuting from Montclair to Columbia is beginning to make some sense to me.
If only a well-deserved August vacation was the reason that posts here were few and far between! Alas, we were unbelievably busy as we prepared for the move from Los Angeles to New York (or more precisely to New Jersey for my residence). But the opportunities for new projects at Columbia and in and around the city are immense, so I am certainly not complaining.
Having loosened itself from its geographic ties once and for all, One Wilshire is coming too.
At BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh interviews me about AUDC, the Columbia NetLab, architecture, urbanism and other matters. See The Logistics of Distance.
Why has this blog been so barren lately? Am I giving up on the Net? No! Far from it. I have, however, been a little busy lately. Now that the project is safely established, we can announce that…
AUDC Establishes Network Architecture Lab
@ Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Formed in 2001, AUDC [Architecture Urbanism Design Collaborative] specializes in research as a form of practice. The AUDC Network Architecture Lab is an experimental unit at Columbia University that embraces the studio and the seminar as venues for architectural analysis and speculation, exploring new forms of research through architecture, text, new media design, film production and environment design.
Specifically, the Network Architecture Lab investigates the impact of computation and communications on architecture and urbanism. What opportunities do programming, telematics, and new media offer architecture? How does the network city affect the building? Who is the subject and what is the object in a world of networked things and spaces? How do transformations in communications reflect and affect the broader socioeconomic milieu? The NetLab seeks to both document this emergent condition and to produce new sites of practice and innovative working methods for architecture in the twenty-first century. Using new media technologies, the lab aims to develop new interfaces to both physical and virtual space.
The NetLab is consciously understood as an interdisciplinary unit, establishing collaborative relationships with other centers both at Columbia and at other institutions.
The NetLab begins operations in September 2006.
From today’s Washington Post: America’s middle class city neighborhoods and suburbs are disappearing into a radically polarized landscape. City of Quartz? The whole country is following that model. See U.S. Losing Its Middle Class Neighborhoods
Just to prove that the real estate bubble is truly mad, Danvers State Hospital is being converted into condos, reports CNN. The infamous Octagon Tower, long a ruin on Roosevelt Island has been rebuilt and turned into an architectural feature for The Octagon Apartments.
Madhouses indeed.
I took this set of photographs back in the early 1990s—probably in 1993—while visiting a friend on Long Island. Shot in good old TRI-X, these images document the damage done by the The Great Nor’easter of December 11, 1992 and the subsequent Superstorm of March 13, 1993 to the homes on the Westhampton barrier island. You don’t need hurricanes to wreak havoc.
more here
Technorati Tags: architecture, disasters, photography, storm damage, west hampton
I wish I’d found this a week ago, but Christopher Gray has a brief piece on the spectacle of the 1931 Beaux-Arts ball in the New Year’s Day edition of the New York Times. Read here.
Technorati Tags: architecture, history