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Building on coastal land below sea level, no matter where, is fundamentally a bad idea. Soil subsidence, coupled with rising ocean levels and increased storm activity caused by global climate change, will make existing lowlands even lower and ever more vulnerable to storm-induced flooding in the future.

Building on coastal land subject to hurricanes and severe storm surges, at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, is a bad idea made worse. Constructing miles of levees at great expense to make low-lying coastal land habitable is yet more absurd. It only compounds our collective foolishness, as does providing flood insurance for properties in chronically flooded areas.
understood, but this guy fails to really address historic preservation and huge social issues in this essay. it makes you wonder if hes ever been down there. also sceptical of how houses on poles would withstand cat 4-5 hurricanes.


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going up

from here
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An Ithaca College dean is encouraging students to instead think small -- and she's offering a $5,000 prize to do it. The school has invited high school and college students across America to submit a 30-second movie shot entirely with a cell phone.

It may come off like a gimmick, but Dean Dianne Lynch has no doubts about the contest's academic value.

In today's media marketplace -- where cell phones can take pictures, play music and games and connect to Web sites -- it's all about thinking small and mobile.

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There are times when Norman Foster looks like two entirely different kinds of architect. Which one you get depends on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be. In London he has become a ubiquitous, monochrome presence, dressing everything from Wembley stadium to the Asprey jewellery store in the uniform of self-confident corporate modernism, like a reliable machine. But in New York, where he still has something to prove, and is operating at the top of his game, he is unbeatable as a brilliant architectural innovator.

In the city that perfected the skyscraper then repeated the formula endlessly, he is the European who has taken on the apparently impossible task of rescuing the high-rise from creative exhaustion. His just-completed new headquarters for the Hearst magazine empire, on Eighth Avenue, close to Central Park, succeeds in doing that, and deservedly is getting astonishingly enthusiastic coverage.

The New Yorker's architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, not normally overawed by Foster, calls him 'the Mozart of Modernism', and describes the tower as the most beautiful high-rise to be built in Manhattan since 1967. Goldberger is putting him in almost the same category as Mies van der Rohe and the Seagram tower, and he is right to do so. He is even more enthusiastic about the interior. He calls the lobby as much of a surprise as the spiral at the heart of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum.

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two columbus circle "recherché" - HM


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