avoid NYT:>):>)
- Skinny 9-27-2001 6:02 pm [add a comment]

• me thinks your not trying hard enough (at all?) :
  
  Designers Look Beyond Debris By JULIE V. IOVINE A TIME TO CREATE A rendering of "Towers of Light" by John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda. Find additional information by selecting from the following topics.Buildings (Structures) Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Architectural League Municipal Art SocietyJoin a Discussion on Architecture N Tuesday night, an impressive sampling of New York architectural talent streamed into the Great Hall at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art to share grief, locate friends and discuss how not to be left out of the rebuilding process in downtown Manhattan. For these architects, engineers and design professors, Sept. 11 was both a tragedy and a call to take a creative stand. Some recounted fleeing office buildings near the World Trade Center that had caught fire or standing in the center's eerily quiet plaza watching falling debris. Others leaped ahead to new visions for the 16-acre plot now known as ground zero. The gathering, co-sponsored by the Architectural League and the Cooper Union, attracted a near-capacity crowd of about 700 designers. While the World Trade Center was the main theme, the 21 official speakers did not limit themselves to a discussion of whether to focus on building a memorial or new skyscrapers. The entire process of building in New York must be challenged, they said. With politicians, developers and business leaders already considering ways to fill the void, most speakers made passionate bids to slow down and rethink all assumptions about reshaping the site. "We do not dignify the dead nor fight the enemies of peace by denying that something has shifted, by rushing out to spend again, by fantasizing about 150-story towers that will take an additional hour to evacuate when the next disaster strikes," said Michael Sorkin, an architect and urban planner. There were some concrete suggestions. Diane Lewis, an architect and professor at the Cooper Union, proposed that the blasted site house an international institute against terrorism, possibly built with the rubble from the ruined towers. Another architect, Susana Torre, dismissed the idea of holding a design competition, as many expect, in favor of giving a commission outright to Frank Gehry to design a new "world arts center." Several architects voiced concern that in the rush to rebuild, due process ‹ especially community reviews and zoning ‹ would be swept away. On the other hand, Ms. Lewis said, the rebuilding process could promote "a new sobriety" that would lead to a more egalitarian urbanism and an architectural sensibility devoid of brash image-making. For now, any discussion about rebuilding is strictly speculative. And construction will have to wait for the removal of tons of debris from the site and surrounding blocks, a process that most estimates suggest will take about a year. In the meantime, New York's design institutions are developing their own ways to respond, interpret and offer salve in the aftermath of the attack. The Municipal Art Society, in conjunction with City Lore, has commissioned Martha Cooper, a photographer, to capture images of the memorials and tributes that have flowered across the city, from the American flags sprouting on the statue of George Washington in Union Square to the candlelit testaments to the missing along the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. The show of photographs will open at the society on Oct. 19. A period of mourning should precede any consideration of new plans for the site, said officials of several design institutions. "The first order of the day is to memorialize and to do things that recognize the loss," said Frank Sanchis, executive director of the Municipal Art Society. "We feel things are moving too fast. We're put off and frightened by all the announcements of commissions and building the towers back up. It just hasn't sunk in." The society does plan to support several memorial projects, including the so-called Towers of Light project by the architects Gustavo Bonevardi and John Bennett collaborating with the artists Paul Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere and the Creative Time arts organization, which will use light projections to recreate the twin towers as ghostly apparitions. The Skyscraper Museum, whose gallery space at 110 Maiden Lane has been taken over by the emergency headquarters of the Small Businesses Administration, is assembling two exhibitions on the history of the construction of the World Trade Center. The first will open in the next few weeks in a vacant ground floor space at 1 Battery Park Plaza. Designed to be viewed primarily from the street, the exhibition features an 18-minute film of the towers being built. In February, the museum will open a second show, at the New- York Historical Society. A lecture series on the World Trade Center that the Skyscraper Museum was developing to celebrate its acquisition of the center's archives will not take place: the archives were destroyed. Other design institutions are not altering their lineup of events but are considering subtle alterations and shifts of emphasis to shows already in the works. Some have taken on a grim relevance. At the Museum of Modern Art, Paola Antonelli, a design curator, was already at work for eight months on "Emergency," an exhibition of products, Ms. Antonelli said, designed to deal with crisis situations, from emergency room surgical instruments to firetrucks to safety instructions. "These are objects and graphic designs where there is absolutely no room for anything superfluous," Ms. Antonelli said, noting that there was as yet no date scheduled for the exhibition. "I want to show the public in some visceral way the importance of design in the real world," she said. The Van Alen Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes public architecture, plans to stage a show in December on how cities like Sarajevo, Oklahoma City, Berlin and Kobe, Japan, have rebuilt in the wake of both human-induced and natural disasters. Recent events have rendered parts of some exhibitions obsolete. At the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Donald Albrecht, a curator, is reconsidering some of the installations for a show on hotels that is scheduled to open in October 2002. A commission for Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote to design their vision of a hotel airbus will go ahead, but an artist's conceptual vision of a Japanese-style capsule hotel inserted into a scale model of an atomic bomb will not. "Some projects that seemed clever a few weeks ago now seem utterly inappropriate," Mr. Albrecht said. "People are going to become more sensitive to things that they perceive are irreverent or irrelevant." Architects and designers interviewed over the last few days anticipate a new mood of seriousness and a fuller social consciousness in their work and others. The new sobriety had begun to surface even before Sept. 11 as a deteriorating economy caused projects to shrink and become more tightly focused. "There's an intensity to a 3,000-square-foot job where you have to clarify and hone your skills," said Alan Wanzenberg, an architect. "It's kind of great." Mr. Wanzenberg, whose partner Jed Johnson died in TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996, said that he believed that in times of stress people looked for comfort in more formal, less abstract design solutions. "We may well start seeing people wanting more explicit, softer and more traditional images in design and art," Mr. Wanzenberg said. Karim Rashid, an industrial designer in New York, was not so much changing his tack in response to recent events as finding new applications. David Shearer, owner of the design store Totem, noted that a coming line of Mr. Rashid's disposable cardboard furniture would be easy to transport in case of emergency. And a new line of clothes designed with Pia Myrvold of Cybercouture, a fashion designer, will be made with an electroluminescent material that will make it easy to locate people in the dark. "Design should take the new world into consideration," Mr. Shearer said. "It needs to be stronger, more straightforward and utilitarian, not just decorative." Home | Back to Home and Garden | Search | Help Back to Top Finally--a "cure" for bad breath! Natural de-icer means you¹ll have to shovel less this winter Get instant warmth in the coldest conditions Record TV without the commercials
  - bill 9-28-2001 3:11 am [add a comment]




• bill maybe one more run very early saturday morning--what time is the wedding??
  - Skinny 9-28-2001 3:59 pm [add a comment]




• rain by 9 am manana it looks like, maybe a 10pm run tonight??
  - Skinny 9-28-2001 5:28 pm [add a comment]