One-Way Street

As the Tower Turns

David Fisher has evidently given up on erecting the world's first whirligig building in Chicago. He will instead build his rotating tower in that magpie of cities, Dubai. The concept is simple: a seventy-eight story building, with each floor rotating 360 degrees at the whim of the unit owner, or nature, or the state of the oil futures markets, whichever. The promotional video is portentous, but it's vague on details. In Fisher's New York press conference he declared, "Today's   life is dynamic, so the space we are living in should be dynamic as well. Buildings will follow rhythms of nature. They will change   direction and shape from spring to summer, from sunrise to sunset, and   adjust themselves to the weather. In other words, buildings will be alive." But in the video says each floor will be fully controlled by its owner--presumably one per floor--even as the building rotates with drill team coordination. If the rotating tower has a practical application other than testing for motion sickness, it would be avoiding having to look out on the workers' slums on the outskirts of Dubai.

The rotating tower is a gimmick, of course, but a harmless one. We've been building static structures for several thousand years, so by now technology should allow us to construct dynamic buildings. Then again, it's not really clear why we would want our buildings to morph into shapes that signify nothing other than their ability to pull off the same trick indefinitely. We already have buildings that change form--stadiums and convention centers, for instance--so Fisher's idea isn't so revolutionary. He's created a new set of architectural tropes, and some interesting marketing material, but it will take an architect of greater imagination to make something more out of the dynamic building idea. Otherwise, it's a dead end. 

Towards an Ethical Architecture

Is it okay for an architect to design a building in a country ruled by an autocratic government? "It's complicated," Thom Mayne says. And indeed, it is. Daniel Libeskind recently denounced his fellow architects for working in China, and others have complained about Western architects aiding and abetting Dubai's building frenzy. If there's a conclusion to the debate outlined in Robin Pogrebin's New York Times article, it's that architects can accept commissions from autocratic countries if the end product expresses a popular longing for democracy. The building should not endorse or reflect the values of the autocratic regime itself.

All kinds of ambiguities emerge from this position, so it's worth consulting Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, a book I discussed at length earlier. Badiou argues that we only have an ethical obligation to the truth. He rejects ethical positions founded in adherence to abstract ethical law or respect for otherness as conformist at best and nihilistic at worst. Conventional ethics, Badiou says, merely flatter our own beliefs and preconceptions while treating the victims of evil with condensation, even contempt. You can see these attitudes in many recent discussions of the tremendous growth of developing world cities: essays on the new urban hypermasses are full of terrifying statistics and hand-wringing pity. "We're all in this together!" is the general refrain, but the squalor is always somewhere else, in less well-managed--and less virtuous--portions of the world. Meanwhile, in the West we're keeping our part of the planet tidy. We're buying hybrid SUVs; why can't they show the same self-restraint?

The essential divisiveness of conventional ethics is exactly what Badiou attacks. An ethics of truth involves compiling the concepts that speak to and for everyone, regardless of their interest, privilege, or national identity. In order for something to be true, it must be true for everyone. But preconceptions like the universality of human rights must also be put aside. The ideal of universal human rights, Badiou claims, begins with the assumption that people are victims. Life doesn't produce anything affirmative or new; it's merely the postponement of death.

Once we bracket human rights, respect for otherness and all the other idealist baggage, we can see our situation clearly as something unique. Badiou wants us to have fidelity to a situation and to its supplement, the event, which Badiou defines as a break with the past.  The event, Badiou writes, "punches a hole" in conventional knowledge. Not only does the true event disintegrate our preconceptions, it also creates us as subjects. We're no longer just bodies huddling under the protection of human rights. The ethical subject follows Lacan's injunction to keep going, to never give up on one's desire. This does not, however, mean a desire for a elegantly-designed building in some Asian generic city. Because Lacan argues that desire is something we can't ever fully know, consistency means never giving up on what one doesn't know about oneself.  One must leave behind one's own interests, which are shaped by our cultures, and give oneself up to future consequences.

What does this mean for an ethical architecture? After reading Badiou I would argue that simply holding oneself above mere politics is evasive. A more ethically truthful practice, one that's more oriented toward the real, is to consider each project as an event with unforeseen consequences. Jacques Herzog is closer to this position when he argues that his Olympic stadium in Beijing, designed with Pierre de Meuron, "will change radically — transform — the society." He asserts, "Engagement is the best way of moving in the right direction."

Herzog and de Meuron earned a lot of money ($13 million, or thereabouts) for their Beijing stadium, and they had to undergo some humiliations to land the commission, so their position could be dismissed as a rationalization. And yet, by simply categorically refusing to build in countries that do not conform to some undefined standard of governmental behavior is to leave change to others, which is the same as denying that it will happen at all. Herzog makes an extravagant claim when he says  single building will radically transform a country of nearly a billion and a half souls. But drop a giant bird's nest in the ancient imperial capital and something is bound to happen, even if the result doesn't fully conform to the norms of universal human rights. Without engagement, nothing will change.

The Triumph of Brutalism

The Yale School of Architecture is finally remodeling its irascible building and renaming it after its original architect, Paul Rudolph. The remodeling project includes an annex designed by Yale alum Charles Gwathmey.

Brutalist buildings like the Yale arts complex look like they will last for ever, which is a blessing or a curse, depending on how you feel about them. And yet, they need upkeep like any other building--maybe more, since they are rarely the objects of loving attention. Even though it's located on the campus of one of the wealthiest universities on the planet, the Rudolph building has suffered neglect, some half-hearted remodeling efforts, and an arson attack.

All will be well, however, once Gwathmey applies his light touch to Rudolph's confrontational building, infusing it with a post-industrial cool that the expressionist original lacked--and never wanted. The project is more than just a gentle corrective measure, though. It also marks how much architecture in the academy has changed since the Yale building was completed in 1964. At that time Rudolph was the architect-rebel imposing his vision on a disorderly and hostile world. He's been succeeded by Gwathmey, the starchitect burnishing the Yale brand.

When Rudolph was dean of the Yale School of Architecture in the late 1950s and early 1960s, architecture was still in the process of professionalizing. Like the legal profession before it, architecture was moving from an apprentice system to a professional training one. Brutalism fit perfectly into this transformation. It was counter-intuitive--there was beauty, or at least dignity, in concrete--in the same was physics had been since Einstein. Architecture in the academy acquired the same cutting-edge mystique as the hard sciences and, as a result, assured its own place in the university.

Charles Gwathmey is the product of that transformation, but the transformation itself is complete. Because he's designing for a self-confident institution, Gwathmey's architecture is much more experiential and sensual. It offers a tour of all the pleasures high-end architecture now offers. So with the remodeling, Rudolph Hall will change from an emphatic statement to a historical narrative.

The Instant City

Nicolai Ouroussoff's contribution to the New York Times' Magazine special issue on building the "next city" focuses on the design challenges posed by cities today. His point of departure is Rem Koolhaas's concept of the generic city. He begins with something that Koolhaas told him 20 years ago. "Don't tell anyone," Koolhaas said while driving through Manhattan, "but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it."   Indeed, reading through recently published discussions about the future of the city one is struck by how irrelevant premier 20th-century cities like New York and Paris have become.  The focus is now on the boom cities of Asia and Africa. Ouroussoff looks at Shenzhen (photograph above, taken by Sze Tsung Leong for the New York Times) and Dubai, two cities that look like they just came out of a microwave oven: dry and gray, with a faintly noxious smoke emanating from them.

Architects are flummoxed about how to design for these places, leaving one to wonder how one actually lives in these instant cities.  The situation architects face at the beginning of the 21st century recalls the situation architects faced during the 19th century.  At that time, architects were also designing for instant cities on the edge of nowhere such as Chicago and St. Louis.  Furthermore, a loss of faith in Renaissance humanism and 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism led to an aesthetic crisis as one form of historical revivalism competed with another.  The crisis was exacerbated by new building types that had no clear historical precedent.  Most notable among these new building types were the railroad station and the skyscraper, neither of which the Romans built.  Finally, there was new money in town: rich industrialists commissioned buildings that glorified the source of their wealth.  The dehumanizing aspects of the Industrial Revolution led to a humanist counter-reformation led by William Morris and John Ruskin, each of whom espoused an historical revivalism of one kind or another--leading architects right back to the place at which they began.

Similarly, contemporary architects have no clear model about how to deal with the brute fact of the enormous size of the 21st-century generic cities.  With no clear hierarchy between center and margin -- they are equally dense everywhere -- it's difficult to know where to begin: should I build a downtown modernist tower or pre-Modernist garden suburb?  The grand gestures of Modernist urbanism are lost when everything is big, when a city contains a dozen Rockefeller Centers. "We are in a condition we don't understand yet," Koolhaas remarks.

But if modernism clearly isn't the perfect model for these new urban conditions, postmodernism has nothing to contribute.  What possible meaning could playful historicism have in Shenzhen, a city barely a generation old?  Architectural postmodernism, for all practical purposes, is dead.

Perhaps the most interesting observation in the article comes from Steven Holl, a New York architect with several large projects in China, including Linked Hybrid, a series of modernist slabs linked by pedestrian bridges, something movies have long been telling us is on the way, but has never arrived in American cities. He tells Ouroussoff,

In America, I could never do work like I do here. We've become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look new. This is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century their century. For some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think we somehow lost our nerve.

A loss of nerve in the West and giddy optimism in the East pretty much sums up the current state of the global economy--band, to a significant degree, the current state of architecture in the United States.

In the Future, We’re All Going to Be Dutch

I'm still making my way through the New York Times Magazine's "The Next City" issue after a wild weather weekend, but here are some notes on what I've read so far.

The first full-length story, "Face Value," looks at an interesting subspecialty in architecture: façade design. The subject of the story is an engineering firm called Front, as if the firm were a high-end restaurant. The technical challenges of cladding a library in glass is interesting--I wonder who had to tell Rem Koolhaas he couldn't make the exterior walls of the Seattle Public Library structural--but while the Front engineers are ingenious, they don't really have much to tell us about how cities will be built in the twenty-first century.

Note to editors: I know it's the end of the year and everybody is rushing to get their projects in before the summer, but a little context-setting would have helped here.

Next up is Darcy Frey's look at a Dutch whiz-kid architecture firm called MVRDV that designs unusual boxes. They're severely theoretical--one of them once worked for Koolhaas--and they like to keep their interlocutors off balance with questions like "Can you imagine if we grew our tomatoes 10 kilometers high?" They think a lot about cities, gathering their thoughts in books like KM3: Excursions on Capacities, which is largely a paean to data, "huge, pure data."  Their conceptual masterwork is something called Datatown, a SimCities-like experiment that crams every American into Georgia--one gigantic Atlanta. The architects then ran a software program to answer questions that I guarantee you wouldn't be uppermost on Americans' minds if we all had to live in Georgia:

What if all the residents of Datatown wanted to live in detached houses? What if they preferred urban blocks? What could be done with the waste? (Build 561 ski resorts.) What kind of city park would be needed? (A million Central Parks stacked up over 3,884 floors.) "The seas, the oceans (rising as a result of global warming) the polar icecaps, all represent a reduction in the territory available for the megacity. Does that mean that we must colonize the Sahel, the oceans or even the moon to fulfill our need for air and space, to survive? Or can we find an intelligent way to expand the capacities of what already exists?"

The buildings that emerge from MVRDV's obsession with data are a combination of Silicon Valley data mining, Dutch pragmatism, and Middle America big-box retail design. A representative building is the Mirador, built in a drab corner of Madrid (image above, from the NYT article). MVRDV's apartment block is a preening swan among ugly ducklings, but it's part of the flock nevertheless. Evidently, the numbers still say pack people up in boxes surrounded by bleak wastelands, just as the numbers indicated in the 1950s. The cutout terrace is an attractive novelty, but it's an incomplete solution to the problem of integrating nature into the urban.

Maybe in the future, when we're all living in megacities, the closest we'll ever get to nature is a wind-swept container park, at which point it will be tempting to give up on the whole idea of bringing nature into the city as just a lot of bother. Connecting to nature will be one of those outmoded ideologies we need to prepare ourselves to abandon.

Or maybe we will discover that a small green terrace will do quite nicely, especially at a time when global warming is changing our relationship to nature. If the Dutch, stranded between an implacable sea and the continental hypermasses, can teach us anything, it's that the city of the future isn't going to conform to current notions of ideal urban space. The next city isn't going to be a cross between Tribeca and Walden Pond; it's going to be completely unpredictable and unmanageable, vulnerable to the heightened forces of nature and global economy.  As Winy Maas, the "M" in MVRDV says, "There is this beautiful German word, Trost. It means empathy, or solace, or maybe consolation. I think that is what our building meant to express. You know, if the waters are going to come, let them come. Let's do it. Let's just turn and face it." In other words, in the future we're all going to be Dutch.

Where I Would Go, What I Would Read

Where I would go if I lived in New York City and had a viable babysitting option: the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. From the (admittedly) limited selection of Italian films I've seen over the past few years, it's been my impression that the Italian cinema is in something of a creative slump; Gianni Amelio's L'America was the last great Italian film I saw. But GreenCine's James Van Maanen has an enthusiastic dispatch from the Open Roads festival.

Where I will be if I can manage to stay up past 10:00 on a weekday, which doesn't happen much lately: The DVD release party for David Kraus's film Musician on June 11 at the Hideout. Details at right, in the "Keep in Mind" section.

What I would not be reading even if I read German, and won't read when it gets translated into English: Charlotte Roche's novel Feuchtgebiete (Wetlands). The debate in Germany about the novel says more about the uneven political development of that country that the topic ostensibly examined by the novel: women's sexual empowerment as a feminist practice.  These discussions invariably go nowhere--remember when Madonna tried to do something with the topic back in the Nineties, only to come across as annoying and self-serving? Or the embarrassing academic debate about Annie Sprinkle around the same time?

Where I would go if I still lived in Philadelphia: The newly opened Center for Architecture, created by the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Tourists go to Philly for the colonial-era landmarks, but it's really a nineteenth-century city. Modern architecture is a mixed bag, to say the least, mostly because Philadelphians don't really like it. They're lustily booing the recently-built Kimmel Center, which doesn't deserve all the abuse it's been getting. (Local architects, including Robert Venturi, produced lame designs for the new music hall, so out-out-town architects had to be brought in.) If you discount the twentieth century, though, the city's architecture is beautiful.

Where I would go if I had money to burn on a plane ticket to San Jose: No, not the WWDC08, although that would be cool, too. The 01SJ digital arts festival. The promoters are trying to create an American version of the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria.

What's coming to me whether I like it or not: NeoCon! I can hear the rumble of a hundred thousand Manolos already.

What I'm going to buy when I walk to Borders on my lunch hour because it's (finally) nice out: Not really sure yet.  Update, 12:32 PM: Aborted! It started to rain as soon as I stepped out of the building. I knew two consecutive hours of nice weather was too much to ask. I was going to look up a copy of Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New, based on Bud Parr's review in Chekhov's Mistress.   

Sick Supertalls

The Chicago Spire, 2,000 feet of twisting metal, has sold 30% of its units, developer Garrett Kelleher of the Shelbourne Development Group announced today. This is a significant announcement for two reasons: traditionally, lenders require 30% precompletion sales in order to fully fund a project; and the developer missed a property tax payment deadline earlier this year, prompting speculation that the Spire will never amount to anything but a hole in Streeterville.

Still, the Spire faces an uphill battle, so to speak. The market already has a condo unit for sale or near completion for every man, woman, child, and Labrador Retriever in the city. Another supertall building under construction in the city, Waterview Tower, will top out at the parking garage until lenders provide more money. As for the third new supertall under construction, Trump Tower--well, let's just say that it's no Sex and the City as far as unit sales are concerned.  The 30% precompletion sale figure is standard during a normal real estate market; this is not a normal market, leading some to speculate that lenders may want more sales before they start investing in the project. They may also want Kelleher to pony up more money. Thus far Kelleher has been vague about the finances of the project.

The Spire has one thing going for it, though: the crummy dollar. Half of the buyers are from overseas. Besides their enhanced buying power, I can see the attraction of Santiago Calatrava's immense tower for foreign buyers: if they have trouble arranging visas to enter the US, they can still see the building from across the ocean.

Britain's Best New Buildings

The Royal Institute of British Architects just named the best new buildings in Britain. Classicists throughout Britain are up in arms over the selection. Of the 92 buildings on the list, "there is not a doric column or a Tuscan pediment to be seen," according to the Guardian's Robert Booth. Quinlan Terry, Prince Charles's favorite architect (enough said there), calls the awards "a con" and accuses the RIBA of being "style fascists"--never mind actual fascists' love of classical architecture. Terry has protested the awards by refusing to submit an entry.

Whatever side you take depends, I guess, on how you define "new." Richard Rogers archly comments, "modernism has always been a shock and it seems some people are taking a rather long time to recover." The Royal Institute has sufficiently recovered, it seems. The RIBA claims that only architectural quality was considered, not style.

So not a single neo-classicist building is among the top 92 buildings built in the UK in the past year? That seems improbable. I'm a partisan on the side of modernism, but I wonder if 92 praise-worthy modernist buildings were built on the entire planet in the past year.

If their comments are any indication, the RIBA like their buildings large and just a touch peculiar. Heatherwick Studio's East Beach Cafe, designed to look like flotsam, is "both strange and captivating; weird but lovable." Ian Simpson's slab highrise in Manchester is a "landmark 50-storey tower" with "the excitement and bravura of the Manhattan tradition." David Chipperfield's BBC Scotland building in Glasgow, pictured above, is a  "singularly awe-inspiring volume." Maybe you have to be there; in the photo, it looks like a storage container.

Maybe ornamentation is a sin and monumentality is an eternal architectural value, but so are balance, harmony, and proportion. Modernist buildings, when they are good, have these properties. These are also neo-classical values. Either Britain's disgruntled classicists have forgotten these verities, or the RIBA has.

Changing Gears for Summer

For a while I've been thinking about making some adjustments to the form of this blog, and the summer is a good time to do it. I'm still enough of an academic to feel the pull of its seasonal rhythms, and the summer is when I used to search for new material about which to read and write. I would also explore new ways of presenting that material. Finally, the summer is when I would really get down to work on longer-term writing projects--or at least I vow to. I have a couple of those to finish, too, so I need to divert some time and energy to those projects.

So first I'd like to swipe an idea from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and present a "What I'm Reading" list, expanded to include what I'm listening to as well.

Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Reading Unforgiving Years has inspired me to read more from this neglected modernist. 

Charles Lloyd Quintet, Rabo de Nube. A live recording of one of the masters of avant-garde jazz. The quintet features Jason Moran, a personal favorite, on piano.

D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. A look at the digital future of the cinema from a major voice in film studies.

Rem Koolhaas, S M L XL. Actually, I'm re-reading this for an essay on the generic city. For the same project I'm also looking at Mutations.

Going Underground

In their recently completed Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago architects Krueck & Sexton demonstrated that they were adept at integrating modernist buildings into historic contexts. Krueck & Sexton are attempting to pull off the same trick with the Chicago Children's Museum. But instead of placing a museum in a procession of stately early modernist buildings along Michigan Avenue, Krueck & Sexton will be burying their Children's Museum beside the underground parking garages in Grant Park.

Underground buildings are now all the rage in Chicago. Helmut Jahn, for instance, recently released his design for an underground library at the University of Chicago. But for a building style that tries to be unobtrusive as possible, unless you're a mole, underground buildings are meeting with stiff resistance from locals. Mayor Daley has been pressing for a children's museum in Grant Park, but residents in the neighborhood, or whatever you want to call the cluster of highrises springing up at the north end of the park, are objecting, loudly, about the increased traffic and congestion the museum would bring to an already crowded corner of the park. Yesterday the Chicago City Council's zoning committee took a bold stand and ditched a vote on the Children's Museum because not enough aldermen showed up for the hearing, no doubt fearing getting whacked by the mayor if they voted against the proposal.

There's an even more powerful figure opposed to the Grant Park site: Montgomery Ward. He's been dead now for 95 years, but he still has lawyers eager to enforce his wishes that Grant Park be free of buildings. Hence Krueck & Sexton's underground museum. The architects have had to throw a few more shovelfuls of dirt onto the building in order to comply with court orders. The entry pavilion, for instance, has been reduced to a quarter of its original size and moved to a spot that's technically outside the boundaries of the park. A sort of skylight pit has been reconfigured so that it's more of a terrace, partly to open it to the public, and partly to make it look less like a grave site.

Which leads to another problem with the site: the image of smiling children being led to an underground bunker. Blair Kamin is one of many people who have wondered about the effects of the museum on small children's psyches. "What would it be like for that child—a 3-year-old kid in a stroller, say—to be in a building that drops as far as 48 feet below street level, down where there is now a depressing, concrete-walled parking garage?" he asks. "Would it be inspiring or dreary? Uplifting or scary?" This is a valid question, but one that's hard to answer. My three-year-old son is convinced our finished basement is inhabited by dragons when the lights are off, but he likes to play down there when the lights are on. He also doesn't like the early morning sunlight filtering into our living room; he complains that it's too bright.

If Krueck & Sexton want to make the subterranean museum palatable to small children, they should place a large Hot Wheels track just inside the front door. That will get my son's approval, at least. I'm guessing nine out of ten three-year-olds will buy into the proposed museum site if the finished building has enough distractions inside. But getting to the museum is another matter: kids don't like crowds, and they don't like parents cranky about trying to find parking in Grant Park. Nor do they like to trudge across the Loop from the train stations. But Mayor Daley will be happy, and no one wants to be around when he's unhappy.

PS: Thanks to the Tribune for the photo of the proposed site in Grant Park.

Make New Plans

Next year is the 100th anniversary of the Burnham Plan for Chicago, created by Daniel Burnham with help from Edward Bennett, who couldn't up with a snappy slogan like Burnham's "Make no small plans,"so he's largely been forgotten. Bennett was probably a "devil in the details" kind of guy.

Anyway, next month the city will announce a big celebration for the plan, which, as every kid who grew up in the Chicago area knows, saved Chicago from becoming Gary, Indiana. According to Blair Kamin, rumors are the city will announce that two Pritzker Prize-winning architects will design buildings commemorating the plan. The buildings will be erected, for a while, in Grant Park, one of Burnham's legacies. But with Grant Park being readied for a new children's museum to be built underground, City of Lost Children style, the lakefront is getting pretty crowded.

But the Plan of Chicago of 1909 was supposed to create a Paris on the Prairies, not Miami Beach on Lake Michigan. Burnham envisioned a Chicago of broad boulevards connecting parks strategically placed throughout the city. Burnham had an eye for natural beauty and a firm belief in architecture as a vehicle for moral uplift. I wonder what he would think about the often discrepant state of some of the outlying parks, while Grant Park increasingly becomes a gleaming space reserved for corporate sponsorship. (Grant Park, incidentally, was as much Montgomery Ward's idea as it was Burnham's.) As a commenter on Kamin's blog points out,  Burnham's plan was for the entire city, not just the lakefront, and we're long overdue for a new plan for the city.

So here's a brief wish list for the June 24 announcement of the Burnham Plan anniversary.

1. If we have to have starchitects design some building sponsored by corporations not even based in Chicago, then place them in Garfield Park or Washington Park or some other neglected point in Burnham's plan.
2. Sponsor a contest to come up with a plan for the next 100 years. Or better yet, line up the appropriate people to implement a plan that has already been drawn up, such as UrbanLab's update of Burnham's plan for the green era, even going to so far to banish cars, just as Burnham ignored them.

Forget the 2016 Olympics--Mayor Daley prides himself on getting big projects done, but he needs to show that he can do something besides round up corporate donors for some short-term publicity event.  For their part, private industry needs to show some more civic leadership, just as the Progressive Era moguls did when they hired Burnham to redesign the city. But with more and more Chicago companies being bought out by out-of-town interests (bye bye Wrigley Gum Company), that seems unlikely.

The Meatpacking Whitney

The Whitney Museum of American Art has just released a preliminary design--mostly energetic jottings-- by the Italian architect Renzo Piano for its proposed second museum in the meatpacking district. The incongruity of the setting has apparently inspired Piano to abandon the repetition of light, airy forms that made him famous and to embrace a darker vision.

The recent history of the meatpacking district is emblematic of current trends in Manhattan as a whole: moving directly from brute force industrialism to the sale of some of the most useless goods ever devised, with only a brief period of dereliction in between. Put more crudely, the neighborhood went from the cutting up of bodies to the accessorizing of bodies. Unlike SoHo or Greenwich Village, there was no intervening period of creativity, no indigenous community-building.

This history may account for Piano's uncharacteristically barricaded exterior. Nicolai Ouroussoff describes Piano's design as "presenting a strange, even forbidding aura," with a "faceted surface [that] seems hewed from a massive block of stone." Nature can only reach the building from the top. There are terraces on the side facing downtown Manhattan, with a sculpture garden on the roof.  To the West Side Highway and the crowds of boutique shoppers--the invasive forces of urbanism--Piano's museum presents an unscalable wall. There's also a small, grudging public plaza in front of the building, about the size of a cab stand.

The interior design of the building is a little sketchier, but presumably it will make one forget the Alhambra-like exterior. Piano has given himself plenty of dappled sunlight to work with. The inorganic materials with which most contemporary artworks are made won't decay in direct sunlight, so he's OK there. All he has to do is make sure the donor base will fund the expensive glass ceilings. As the Spertus Institute demonstrates, soaring interior spaces are usually the first to go when the fundraising comes up short.

Ouroussoff also notes how Piano overtly manipulates bodily experience, another instance of a mildly coercive architecture. Upon entering the ground-floor lobby the weight of the building presses down like a giant carcass. Toward the rear of the lobby, though, the space suddenly opens up to the sculpture garden above and the building "suddenly lets you breathe again."

The site is haunted by more than the ghosts of countless dismembered bovines. There is, of course, Marcel Breuer's Madison Avenue Whitney, yet another carefully-scaled modernist building that can no longer accommodate the proliferation of goods years of tax cuts for the wealthy have made possible.  The Whitney has made several attempts to expand the Breuer building, but they have come to nothing, so the current plan is to reserve the Breuer for spillover exhibits from the meatpacking Whitney, which will become the institution's main exhibition space. The curators have finally escaped from Breuer's Brutalist box, only to find themselves in a more expansive, light-filled box in a rougher neighborhood.

In Praise of the Suburban Tower

Is there any architectural form more forlorn than the suburban tower? Typically, it's a free-standing slab set amongst parking lots and lawns full of Canadian goose crap. It's where you go to work. It's where you visit your proctologist. You never linger. You never look up. It's supposed to be integrated in a natural setting, but inside all traces of nature are rigorously neutralized: artificial plants thrive in a muted, unchanging light. Movement is tracked and controlled by security badges. About the best thing that can happen to you there is that you remembered where you parked your car.

Strip malls are a symbol of everything that's bad about suburban architecture, but we've learned to live with them. Besides, Tyler Cohen has taught us that that's where the best ethnic restaurants are located. Downtown towers are symbols of corporate power, arrogance, the totemic force of the urban center, whatever. But what does its stubby cousin, the suburban office tower symbolize? The heroism of the regional sales office?

And yet, oftentimes they're not awful buildings. Here and there you can find a thoughtfully designed gem. Sometimes unimaginative developers and suburban planning commissions let a playful take on the vernacular of the form to slip through. One local example is the 3Com building in Schaumburg, Illinois, now looking for a primary tenant. A more specular example is Yansong Ma and Yosuke Hayano's residential tower in Mississauga, Ontario.

It's perhaps not an accident that a shapely tower is taking shape in suburban Toronto. ERA Architects of Toronto have initiated the Toronto Tower Renewal project, which is dedicated to restoring and updating the area's slab towers. The Toronto metropolitan area has North America's second highest concentration of towers. (New York has the highest.) As the project's blog tells us,

Next time you are in Chicago or Philadelphia try looking for an apartment tower neighbourhood outside the city core – the kind we have throughout Toronto. They're rare in North American cities but common in other Commonwealth countries, like Australia, and they are an even more significant force in many European cities, such as Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and especially Moscow. Aspects of Toronto suburbs display a remarkable similarly of what can be witnessed across the globe.

The Toronto Tower Renewal project battles against the neglect with which mid-century modernism currently suffers. It also reminds us that these buildings aren't just corporate work farms. They are worthwhile architectural objects in their own right, with their own history and design philosophy.

Teardown Fatigue

Winnetka, Illinois is fighting back against McMansions--and not having much success. Winnetka is an affluent suburb north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. As it happens, it's next to my home town of Wilmette, which is plagued by the same problem: massive and ungainly houses are being dropped into mid- and early-twentieth-century neighborhoods, disrupting the their cohesiveness, blocking out the sun, and generally sucking the soul out of mature bedroom communities. One endangered Winnetka house is a 1910 lakefront home built for John L. Hamilton, a partner of the Prairie School architect Dwight Perkins. Popular outcry probably won't be enough to save even this historical home from getting super sized.  North Shore residents are well known for their sense of entitlement--just ask any beleaguered waiter or school teacher or my wife--but their assertiveness stops at their neighbors' property lines.

Winnetka wants to gently persuade developers to take it easy on the "fake Palladian windows, bulging turrets and oversize stone balusters," according to a Tribune report. At least one Winnetka resident would like curtains on her neighbor's bedroom windows. But other suburbs that have proposed design guidelines have seen them largely ignored. Peter Wall, a North Shore realtor who maintains a hit list of homes ripe for teardowns, shrugs at the voluntary guidelines Winnetka's taste police have proposed. He says, "We look at what we can build on the property and what we could sell it for, and that dictates what happens to it." So there.

In addition to an exuberant "if it looks expensive, let's tack it on" exterior design aesthetic, McMansions offer spiffy kitchens and up-to-date wiring. The neighbors' smoldering resentment comes for free. Mid-century modern homes are especially vulnerable to teardowns because the large lot served as a kind of negative space complementing the clean, simplified, and carefully-scaled house. Modernist houses also date back to a time when the common belief was that the most important element in a house is the people who live in it. Now the most important elements are the things inside the house. The starting point for designing a McMansion is the owner's massive furniture and electronics. It takes a lot of square feet to enclose them and, more critically, a big roof to put a lid on years of high-income consumption. That's why McMansions tend to have crazy roofs with all sorts of bump outs and dormers and such. Otherwise, they'd look like the Metrodome.

How much room does a family need? I've heard 2400 square feet is plenty of space for a family of four. My family of four lives in a 2400 square foot house, and it seems like enough room, except when the Thomas the Tank Engine track pieces are scattered all over the place.  But one day our mid-century modern won't seem so sensible when we have two North Shore teenagers in it.  Maybe by then some of the McMansions will be ripe for teardowns.

Libeskind's Napkin

The latest issue of Condé Nast Traveler reminded Toronto of its buyer's remorse for the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum, designed by the perpetually off-kilter Daniel Libeskind. According to legend, Libeskind designed the museum on the back of a napkin during a wedding, and the building looks a bit like a starched napkin that's been set aside while the diner goes to the bathroom. There are even little bits of what looks like food on the building. The editors of Condé Nast Traveler chose the ROM addition one of the "New Seven Wonders of the World," along with other photo spread-ready buildings such as the monstrous Burj Dubai, the very cool New Museum in New York, and a whatchamacallit building in Denmark. The Seven Wonders buildings are all sharp-edged, high-contrast structures that stand out from their drab surroundings--a way of seeing derived from professional shallow-focus photography. Of that's how you see the world, then book your ticket for Toronto.

And when you get there, don't ask any of the locals about the ROM wing. Last year The Globe and Mail's architecture critic Lisa Rochon groused that the Crystal, as the ROM addition is known, represented the "exaltation of one architect, one man, one individual," i.e., Daniel Libeskind, who Rochon curses as "a marketer with a silver tongue"and, interestingly, as an "exile." For Rochon the Crystal isn't even one of the seven wonders of Toronto; she proclaims it's "the building most likely to come down in the next 20 years."

Is it really a throwaway building? Only a visit can tell for sure. The architect's renderings show lots of spikes in the sparkling Toronto sky--Toronto is perhaps the cleanest major city I've ever visited--and interiors that make one lean ever so slightly to one side. Perhaps that's why the image above shows a girl leaping into the air, no doubt exclaiming "Daniel!" The design itself doesn't seem to encourage much spontaneous movement. This may be precisely the point, though. Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, to take only two examples, have expressed an interest in architecture that effects the body in mildly coercive ways: ceilings drop down when one expects them to be high, corridors jut off into all directions, walls curve around an idea as much as a physical object. Frank Lloyd Wright was a coercive architect in that he created spaces intended to shape behavior rather than simply provide a backdrop to it. So did Christopher Wren.

Despite local opposition to Libeskind's kinetic geometry, Condé Nast Traveler reports that some people believe "the aggressively decontructionist addition is just the shock of the new that this slow-to-change city needs." For his part, ROM president William Thorsell points out that the design selection process was very public and nobody raised any objections to the design then. "Over time, I think it will prevail," he says, and he's probably right.

Junking Up Atlantic Yards

This morning Nicolai Ouroussoff fired off an anguished response to the announcement that the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn may be gutted. Ouroussoff goes so far as to publicly urge Frank Gehry, the project's architect, to walk away from the project. The lessons of the aesthetic collapse of the Atlantic Yards project are manifold (that's assuming the reductions in project scope and budget go through), but one question worth asking is, When are these large-scale projects ever a good idea?

It's hard to tell if Ouroussoff is more upset because Frank Gehry's excellent design is being compromised, or because he's embarrassed that New York can no longer get big projects right. Well, join the club. Chicago has had its fair share of mediocre multi-building projects as well. The recently completed Lakeshore East project is an architectural junk heap. Developer Jerry Fogelson wants to cram 4 billion dollars' worth of unnecessary buildings into the South Loop, among them a 70-story office tower. At least New York has the Rockefeller Center, Ouroussoff's sole example of a multi-building project that succeeded aesthetically. Chicago is still stuck with the Illinois Center, a set of menacing black towers that exude a kind of spooky calm, like Darth Vader meditating. And speaking of outsized projects, Evanston has successfully executed multi-building projects before, but the 523-foot condo tower developers James Klutznick and Tim Anderson want to build seems, on paper at least, to be one step too far. Blair Kamin said the tower, twice as tall as any other building in Evanston and the tallest in the Chicago suburbs if completed, isn't entirely a bad idea in concept, but the design "lacks the élan of a comparable minimalist statement, Boston's John Hancock Tower."

Frank Gehry's design residential towers in Atlantic Yards had élan, but cost-cutting has drained the life out of the buildings, according to Ouroussoff. However, even the original design had some questionable elements.  Ouroussoff praises Gehry's original plan to integrate the 18,000-seat basketball stadium and the residential towers. However, bunching together a stadium and private residences may be a good marketing idea ("steps away from the Nets!"), but the arrangement seems unlikely to facilitate a productive and vital urban experience.

Gehry's design is so intricate, so polished and personal, that changing one element ruins the entire plan. But maybe that's the Atlantic Yards' true weakness. Maybe the problem lies in having one architect designing everything at once. Rockefeller Center was designed by a consortium of architects from three different firms, all supervised by Raymond Hood, who was more of a big-concept guy than a designer who would work out the details of restroom placement.  Another large-scale project that is better positioned for success is Enríque Norten's design for the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick. Rutgers can't raise all the money for its ambitious campus redesign at once, so Norten is going to come back to the project from time to time over the next decade, adapting it to changing circumstances, including, I would expect, the evolution of his own design aesthetic. Brooklyn is evolving rapidly--maybe too rapidly--so what may seem like a good idea in March 2008 might strike residents in March 2010 as a cumbersome piece of overdevelopment.

Professing Literature

Every so often I check in on my old life, and every time I do, it seems like not much has changed since I left university teaching in 1999. It's reassuring to know that I haven't missed out on some terrific new developments, but also it's troubling. 

Yale English professor William Deresiewicz reads the twentieth anniversary edition of Gerald Graft's famous Professing Literature and considers the current state of literary studies. It doesn't look good. The job market is pretty much the same as it was when I was looking for a teaching post, except there seems to be more film studies jobs. Post-colonial literature is still popular; I would have thought that theoretical zeal would have cooled in that area by now. Also still popular are the overstuffed backpack jobs. Exaggerating only a little, Deresiewicz gives some mock examples: "Asian American literature, cultural theory, or visual/performance studies"; "literature of the immigrant experience, environmental writing/ecocriticism, literature and technology, and material culture"; "visual culture; cultural studies and theory; writing and writing across the curriculum; ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies." I remember laughing with my fellow grad students over an MLA job listing looking for a post-modern medievalist. It was the only time we laughed during job search season.

Despite the strained optimism of job listings, English departments are dispirited places these days.  College students are abandoning English as a major, and universities are slowly starving English departments to death. Everyone seems to be going through the motions. Deresiewicz writes,

It's the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the eighteen years since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990. Nor has any major new star--a Butler, an Edward Said, a Harold Bloom--emerged since then to provide intellectual leadership, or even a sense of intellectual adventure. The job market's long-term depression has deepened the mood. Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.

It seems that literary studies' great experiment in combining esoteric theory with rabble-rousing populism is now over and nothing else has taken its place. What would seem to be an obvious solution--simply returning to close readings of great works of literature--isn't possible any more for a variety of complicated reasons, most of them to do with the current state of university education in the United States.

It's sad that the intellectual adventure really does seem to be over. That was one of the reasons why I left: I seemed to be stuck in place, and so did the whole profession. This isn't my fight any more, but I hope the profession solves its considerable intellectual and institutional problems.

One final note: I've wondered aloud if the architecture profession is now in the same condition literary studies was twenty years ago: dominated by stars, but having trouble translating cutting edge work into a popularly accessible medium. It seems like every week a startling new museum or skyscraper goes up, but private houses and small business facilities look pretty much the same way they did two decades ago. And once the starchitects start retiring, there's no guarantee that a new set of architects will have the clout to forge ahead with new design ideas.

The Generic City

Nicolai Ouroussoff reports on one of the most unlikely architectural commissions in recent memory. Rem Koolhaas has been hired to design a generic city in Dubai, a dreamless city within a dream city. Thus far Dubai has commissioned showy displays of starchitect whimsy, so, at first glance, it's surprising to see the city embrace the deliberately bland rationalism of Koolhaas's generic city. On second thought, though, it seems perfect for Dubai.

If the paradigmatic object of the nineteenth-century city was the railroad station, the twenty-first century generic city, Koolhaas argues in S, M, L, XL, is modeled after the airport. Koolhaas asks, "Is the contemporary city like an airport--'all the same'?" Like airports, which are all modern in exactly the same way, the generic city has no identity--no past, no future, no identity, no distinction. The identities of most cities may be located in their centers, but paradoxically, instead of being a fixed essence, the center of the city is the often subject of fretful debate about preserving and developing a city's identity. Meanwhile, outer neighborhoods muddle along, existing as nothing but themselves, but also nothing particularly essential. The generic city, by contrast, is nothingness writ large. The generic city has the desultory blandness of outer boroughs. The generic city, Koolhaas declares, is "a city without qualities," a condition that even vividly individualistic cities tend towards. Paris, for instance, has turned itself into a self-parody in an effort to remain Parisian, while London changes constantly, only to become more and more like any other city.  Eventually, Paris will turn into Las Vegas, and London will become Atlanta.

Atlanta itself will be packed up into skyscrapers, those stand alone objects that kill off street life--the very essence of urban life. "Urbanism doesn't exist," Koolhaas declares. "It is only an ideology in Marx's sense of the word." The paradigmatic urbanite will no longer be a latte-sipping hipster but the weary sales rep who never completely unpacks his suitcase. The generic city will be "unshapable." It will resist urban planning, beautification projects, and empowerment zones. No one will make a PBS special about its history. It will resist all nostalgia. It will be ruthlessly practical and eternally up-to-date. Generic cities "will work--that is all."

This sort of pragmatic absolutism extends to the generic city's government as well. Koolhaas notes with forlorn vagueness that generic cities are apolitical, even a bit authoritarian. The rule of law and the rationality of the democratic process are replaced by pure exchange. Everyone and everything will be a commodity and suffer under the vagaries of the marketplace. In short, the generic city is the physical embodiment of the principle of exchange value in the global economy.

Which makes it perfect for Dubai. Its wealth comes from oil, a commodity that is at once from the earth and placeless. Its authorities are anonymous, benevolent princelings trying to build a modern, world-class Arab city. It's telling, however, that this forward-looking city is separated off from any cultural or social reality of an actual Arab state by feudal moat. The city Koolhaas has designed for them resembles less a miniature Manhattan--the Coney Island of Koolhaas's Delirious New York--than an old Pentium Pro chip. There's only one vestige of old humanism, and that's the macabre eye on a corner of the island. The dour functionalism of the generic city has a collateral effect of tearing the old human subject apart, atomizing it into sensory apparatuses entirely dependent on the circuitry of the generic city to function. Among the historical detritus swept away by Koolhaas's generic city is urban experience itself. The Dubai minicity couldn't be further away from Baudelaire's ragpicker Paris.

Ouroussoff sees Koolhaas's Dubai project as a provocative, if flawed experiment in a new kid of urban space. This may be so only if the debate about urban space has reached a dead end. Generic cities already exist. Every Midwestern and Sunbelt city has at least one satellite city that's a sprawling nowhere. Schaumburg, Illinois is one local example. The city is so disconnected from nature and history that asphalt is practically an indigenous life form.  Koolhaas is one of our foremost thinkers, so any proposition he has about the future of the city should be taken seriously, but surely there must be something between New Urbanism and no urbanism at all.

Oligarchitecture

As a follow-up to my earlier post on socially-conscious architectural practices, here's a look at what's happening on the upper end of the architectural stratum. Last week in Dublin Daniel Libeskind went all "Spielberg," as Times' Tom Dyckhoff puts it, and declared "I won't work for totalitarian regimes. Architects should take a more ethical stance."

"That would be a first," Dyckhoff acidly comments. "Before Libeskind came along with his pinko views, Western architects had been making a perfectly decent killing building monuments for regimes that you definitely wouldn't want to bring home to meet the folks." Dyckhoff goes on to list some projects in which high-profile architects are working with some shady characters. Dyckhoff picks on Norman Foster in particular for his affinity with Russian oligarchs. He mentions Foster's Crystal Island project in Moscow, pictured above. Foster is also working on another project in Moscow. It's more modest than Crystal Island--merely redecorating Red Square--but it also evinces a totalitarian flair with its Haussmannization of the historic center of the Russian capital.

Dyckhoff goes on to skewer Rem Koolhaas's CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, ("just how many other one-party command economies have been magicked into multi-party democracies by one building?") and Zaha Hadid, the darling of London, for designing a monument to Heydar Aliyev, the brutal former strongman of Azerbaijan who learned his trade from the Soviets ("Maybe she misheard. It was KGB, Zaha, not D&G."). Dyckhoff doesn't mention Dubai, but one could shake one's head at the sight of A-list architects like Hadid, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando lining up to work for petrodollars.

Architects are generally on the side of power. But aren't we all?  My paycheck has some petrodollars in it somewhere. Most of us make comfortable livings for undemocratic, profit-driven enterprises. Furthermore, the entire tourist trade in Europe would dwindle to nothing without the continent's monuments to naked power. Walk through the Piazza Venezia in Rome and you'll see the balcony from which Mussolini did his chest thumping. Turn around and you'll see the huge and vulgar monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, built by Il Duce himself.

Or take a stroll down the elegant boulevards of Paris, built by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s. To construct the boulevards Haussmann tore up the old medieval heart of Paris, tossed the working classes to the city's fringes, and installed the bourgeoisie in its place--all at a handsome profit to himself and his cronies. As Walter Benjamin noted, the Parisian boulevards extended the phantasmagoric effect of commodities on display from the Paris Arcades and the world exhibitions to the streets of the city as a whole, further mystifying class relations in the city. The boulevards opened up the city to monumental vistas and facilitated the movement of security forces throughout the city. The boulevards were also designed to ensure the unruly masses couldn't throw up barricades during their periodic uprisings.

Castles? Monuments to feudal repression. Skyscrapers? Phallic assertions of trans-national corporate power. I could go on and on. Yes, it would be nice if architects would listen to their consciences more often, but I don't know who has the energy to clear every business transaction with Amnesty International. Is designing a media headquarters for the Chinese morally better or worse than buying a Thomas the Tank engine toy from the Chinese?  Who decides these types of questions? Until those questions are sorted out, rest easy: the starchitect-designed authoritarian monuments will some day make excellent Flickr slideshows.

The Architecture of Incremental Idealism

John King of the San Francisco Chronicle profiles architect John Peterson, founder of Public Architecture, an alternative architecture practice with a social conscience. Public Architecture has actually been around for a while--since 2002--but it's just now gaining traction. The basic precept of Public Architecture is to broaden the definition of a client to include everyone who uses a structure, not just the people who pay to construct it. This allows Peterson and his team to embark on what may be called the architecture of incremental idealism. Public Architecture fixes small problems that impact, however subtly, the fabric of urban life.   While cable TV shows conduct whirlwind transformation projects for tearfully grateful families, Public Architecture builds small shopping plazas in neighborhoods that are victims of poor city planning. Another project in the works will provide shelter for day workers as they wait to be hired. To encourage other architects to engage in socially-conscious projects, Peterson wants to institutionalize pro bono work in the profession by asking architects to devote 1% of their billable hours to pro bono projects, much like attorneys have done for years.

Although Public Architecture works mainly behind the scenes, it has engaged in one publicity stunt: the Scraphouse, a house made of computer keyboards and old telephone books and erected on the grounds of the San Francisco City Hall in 2005. King calls the project "a wry critique of the culture of disposability," but I think the Scraphouse, intentionally or not, was a comment on the difficulties and challenges of the type of socially-conscious architecture that Public Architecture advocates.

The Scraphouse's cobbled-together look recalls the improvised tin shacks that poor people in the developing world have constructed around major cities like Manila and Cairo. In the 1960s, when these vast labyrinths of desperate poverty and improvised building techniques first appeared, Western architects swooped in and initiated a number of well-meaning but generally unsuccessful public housing projects. Intellectuals like the Egytian Hassan Fathy looked askance at these condescending projects that totally ignored local conditions, although in some cases, including Fathy's, Western functionalism was replaced by post-colonial romanticism. But not all of the Western-influenced public housing projects were unsuccessful. The Barriada project in Peru, built in 1968, is an exception because the Western architects paid close attention to social practices that had emerged from the slums themselves.

The Scraphouse is also a stand-alone structure, making it as much a piece of public sculpture as an exemplar of transformative architecture. The modernism of the 1930s,a period that saw some of the most intensely idealistic architecture in history, was more successful when it addressed the fabric of the city as a whole, or at least a significant portion of it, such as in the work of the brilliant Dutch architect Michel de Klerk.

It's this checkered history of committed architecture that the Scraphouse symbolizes, and what John Peterson and Public Architecture are trying to redress by engaging in unspectacular but well-contextualized projects. In place of grand utopian gestures, Public Architecture aims to improve one small thing at a time. And if mostly what Public Architecture has produced since its inception in 2002 is talk, that's okay, too. Peterson is trying to change the American architecture, a profession that needs to change.

The Rogue’s Gallery

Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reviews what he calls a "rogue's gallery" of awful buildings constructed in the city during its recent building boom. Chicago has built 160 high rises since 1998, more than many major cities have in their entire skyline.  This boom should have brought about a renaissance of the Chicago Style, but instead the building boom has revealed how shallow the architectural talent pool is in the city. To take one botched section of the city, the cluster of new residential towers along Columbus Drive, Kamin finds one excellent building, Jeanne Gang's Aqua Building, currently under construction, and a cluster of embarrassing neo-classical towers called Lakeshore East. Kamin notes,

Lakeshore East speaks to the quality gap between the profession's stars and its anonymous rank and file. It's like a baseball team that has a couple of power-hitting .300 hitters, but everybody else bats .100. You may get a home-run building here or there, but the overall quality of the architecture is anything but all-star.

I can attest to the horribleness of the buildings in Kamin's rogues gallery. River North, the city's art and design district, has some of the most mediocre architecture in the downtown area. Architects like Jim Loewenberg have looked beyond the River North's trendy design boutiques to the neighborhood's origins as a warehouse district by designing buildings that look like packing crates.  Further east, closer to the Magnificent Mile, there are some dogs, too, as the photo gallery shows.  The Antunovich Associates' Bernardin building, named for a modest cardinal, is supposed to resemble a Florentine palazzo, but in actuality it evokes a Filene's Basement.

Kamin focuses on the city's lakefront showcase spaces marred by architectural junk, but he could also have found another rogue's gallery sprouting around Wolf Point, where the Chicago River splits into its North and South branches. This is the oldest part of the city and it's never been served especially well by its buildings. On the plus side there's Kohn, Pedersen Fox's excellent 333 W. Wacker Drive building (built, incidentally, on the site of the hall where Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president in 1860), and slightly further down the South Branch is Perkins and Wills' underrated Boeing Building. The best known building on Wolf Point is the Merchandise Mart, where I work. It's a dignified building, but not a thing of beauty or grace. Conjoined to the Mart is the Holiday Inn, a blunt modernist structure that now houses the Sun-Times, after its cool 1955 Naess and Murphy headquarters was torn down to make room for the Trump Tower.  The Holiday Inn is almost East German in its ugliness, but at least t it has the excuse of being a chain hotel. Across the river from the Holiday Inn, right at the head of the river, is perhaps the grossest misuse of a prime location in the city: DeStefano and Partners' Riverbend Condominiums, built in 2002. It's not actually a horrible building. It would sparkle in a place like Duluth. But what a wasted opportunity.  It's a building meant to be looked out from rather than looked at. I've photographed it through a filthy Merchandise Mart window using my BlackBerry camera without bothering to retouch the photo, because the promo photos I found made it look a lot brighter and stately than it really is. (The Holiday Inn is at the right edge of the frame.) At night, the building is outlined in blue neon lights, the kind of decorative touch Las Vegas hotels outgrew a decade ago.

Fortunately, I think, there are plans to drop three Cesar Pelli-designed residential towers onto the Holiday Inn's parking lot (in the foreground of the photograph). The dirt is owned by the Kennedy family, and they're working with Hines Interests L.P., the developer of a 75-story Jean Nouvel building next to MoMA, to develop the site. However, as Kamin points out, shoe-horning in small buildings on tiny lots (the Holiday Inn lot is an irregular-shaped four acres) has led to some buildings with all the design panache of a lean-to addition. And by the way, once the Pelli residential towers are completed, the river bend views, Riverbend Condominiums' entire reason for being, will be permanently obscured.

Hadid in the Big 10

Every designer knows the phenomenon of the three proposals: the first is a radical one that the customer is too square to pick but shows off the designer's creative chops; the second is a watered-down--but more fully realized--version of the first that the customer is supposed to pick; and the third is the tamest, and lamest, design concocted mostly to prove that the customer has no taste whatsoever. Much to the dismay of the designer, as often as not the client usually chooses design number three. Sometimes design two is chosen, but the first design isn't even supposed to be picked because it's sketchy on the details of how the thing will be made.

But Michigan State University seems to have picked the first one.   Yesterday the university announced that it had chosen Zaha Hadid to design the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum on its campus in East Lansing. According to Eli Brand, who donated money for the project, Hadid was chosen because she presented the "most innovative design."

This explanation is just for a newspaper, so it doesn't fully reflect the thought process behind choosing Hadid's proposal. Nevertheless, the idea that a design should be chosen primarily because it was the most innovative raises some questions, especially considering the backlash against the starchitect phenomenon. Was her design chosen because it would look striking in a brochure?  Was it chosen because it was the architectural equivalent of the cinematic aesthetic of distraction, which tries to hold the attention of a distracted viewer through splashy special-effects and quick editing? Or was there something properly Kantian going on here?  Is her proposed building an object that is a sensuous idea, a harmonious object that is nevertheless irreducibly itself?

What's clear, however, is that the university was serious about commissioning a distinguished piece of architecture. It couldn't have been easy choosing one proposal from the likes of Hadid, Morphosis, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Kohn Pedersen Fox, and Randall Stout Architects.  Hadid is a brilliant architect, to be sure, and she's already produced one intriguing design for a university trying to raise its profile. Hadid has always seemed like she was designing the concept for a building, rather than an actual building.  This will lead to an embarrassingly bad building one day, but the Broad Art Museum isn't that design.  In any case, a highly conceptual architect like Hadid would've appealed to academics, who have a highly developed taste for the abstract. In her New York Times article Robin Pogrebin suggests that the cosmopolitan Zaha Hadid may seem out of place on the campus of a Big 10 university, but her selection makes a certain kind of sense.  Having attended a couple of universities that were similar in many ways to Michigan State, I wonder if the university saw itself in Hadid: someone whose ideas are bigger than her accomplishments. Yes, her selection reflects a certain insecurity, but it's the kind of insecurity that leads to innovation.

The King of the Nineteenth Century