Schwarz
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you would think they could just grab their slide-rules and sort this out in advance!
What’s up with Los Angeles architects and their sun problems? First, there was Frank Gehry; the polished stainless steel that clads part of his Walt Disney Concert Hall has produced so much heat and glare that it’s having to get sandblasted as we speak. And now Thom Mayne’s much-praised Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in downtown L.A. is also proving to be solar-challenged. As reported in The Los Angeles Times, some Caltrans employees are complaining that the new 13-story building not only has too few water fountains and toilets (oops), but that the perforated and louvered metal screens that shield much of the glass structure, and that are among its most distinctive design elements, aren’t always doing their job. Apparently, the sunlight still gets so bothersome inside that a source now tells us up to 900 new MechoShade blinds, joining an existing 200 to 300, will need to be installed at a likely cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Mayne’s rep tells us that only a few areas of the building have glare issues, and only at certain times of the day and year. However, extra shades are being installed for visual continuity.) In any case, this seems to make Mayne’s secondary metal skin somewhat redundant. At least it still looks cool.
Earlier this month, a sharp-eyed reporter for the New York Times noticed that the performing arts center planned for Ground Zero will be excluded from the $500 million fundraising campaign for the World Trade Center site memorial. Instead, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation told Robin Pogrebin of the Times that fundraising for the center will be part of a “second phase.” To architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, it is clear what this “second phase” really means -- the performing arts center will probably never be built.
And thus, Huxtable wrote with obvious fury two weeks later in the Wall Street Journal, the news of the center’s exclusion was “the final betrayal” in what has been a continuing “downgrading and evisceration of the cultural components” of Daniel Libeskind’s original plan -- thanks to those who lack “the courage, or conviction, to demand that the arts be restored to their proper place as one of the city’s greatest strengths and a source of its spiritual continuity.”
end of the century on 13 tonight