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Mr. Liddy's complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.
Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated.
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was."
Milan Kundera, The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting.
This quote opens the second chapter of Robert Bevan's timely and original book The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. As Bevan says, the destruction of symbolic buildings and the physical fabric of cities and civilisations is not merely collateral damage, but a deliberate intention by the attacker, to "dominate, divide, terrorise, and eliminate" the memory, history and identity of the opposing side. Cultural cleansing is inextricably linked to ethnic cleansing, genocide and holocausts.
Arranged thematically more than chronologically, the book shows the political forces at work that led to targeted destruction beyond military requirements, from the Roman erasure of Carthage in 146 BC, the elimination of the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and their cities, to the "murdering" of aristocrats' houses during the French Revolution. But it is the 20th century leading into the 21st that is examined with forensic insight. From Guernica to Dresden, China's continuing "Sinification" of Tibet, Cambodia and the Yugoslav war, few countries escape the culpability of physical and cultural genocide.
They've been heralded as the future of building and the solution to housing shortages, yet prefabs have failed to take off. Elaine Knutt asks whether they still have a future
The Prefabulous London exhibition running at New London Architecture is based on an ABC of prefab and modular construction. Considering that prefab has been on the architectural agenda for the best part of a decade, most architects with an interest in housing could probably recite this alphabet unaided: A is for affordable, B is for bricklayers (or lack thereof), C is for container, D is for demountable, E is for engineered, F is for factory….
But there is another prefab alphabet, one the exhibition organisers might not be so keen on: C is for Challenge Fund, the Housing Corporation's funding programme that was undersubcribed after not enough prefab projects came forward; M is for Piercy Connor's Microflat, never built because land costs in central London put the product out of price range for young professionals; and P is for Peabody Trust, a prefab pioneer that found the promised cost savings never materialised.
Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses
December 8 - March 26, 2006
Medtronic Gallery / Walker Arts Center
Today’s prefab movement has captured the spirit and imagination of a new generation of architects and home buyers, who together have championed a variety of modern modular dwellings that challenge preconceptions about “prefab” homes as cheap, cookie-cutter structures of last resort. This exhibition presents a variety of approaches to prefab—from houses owners can build from a kit of parts, such as Rocio Romero’s LVL House, to those that arrive fully assembled like the diminutive one-room version of weeHouse by St. Paul-based Alchemy Architects. Among the featured projects are the glimmering sculptural metallic Turbulence House by Steven Holl; Black Barn, a pitched-roof, modern adaptation of a Viking longhouse designed and produced by Pinc House of Sweden; and the playful system of Lazor FlatPak by Lazor Office of Minneapolis. Whether Michelle Kaufmann’s Sunset Breezehouse, which adopts a variety of ecological approaches to living and building, or the precision and craft of Marmol Radziner’s Desert House or the customizable configurations of Resolution: 4 Architecture, such houses better parallel the lifestyles of their owners, who desire more flexible living spaces and want to speed the pace of the building process without sacrificing the quality of materials or construction. For more and more people, prefab meets the conditions that make the dream of owning a modern home a reality.
la concha project / vegas
the c word and 9/11
[Republican] Christie Whitman, when she led the Environmental Protection Agency, made "misleading statements of safety" about the air quality near the World Trade Center in the days after the Sept. 11 attack and may have put the public in danger, a federal judge found yesterday.
The pointed criticism of Mrs. Whitman came in a ruling by the judge, Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan, in a 2004 class action lawsuit on behalf of residents and schoolchildren from downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn who say they were exposed to air contamination inside buildings near the trade center.
The suit, against Mrs. Whitman, other former and current E.P.A. officials and the agency itself, charges that they failed to warn people of dangerous materials in the air and then failed to carry out an adequate cleanup. The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages and want the judge to order a thorough cleaning.
In her ruling, Judge Batts decided not to dismiss the case against Mrs. Whitman, who is being sued both as former administrator of the E.P.A. and as an individual.
As a legal matter, the ruling established that the suit's charges were well-documented and troubling enough to meet a legal standard to go forward. But Judge Batts also criticized Mrs. Whitman's performance in the days after the collapse of the towers unleashed, by the E.P.A.'s estimates, one million tons of dust on lower Manhattan and beyond.
"The allegations in this case of Whitman's reassuring and misleading statements of safety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks are without question conscience-shocking,"Judge Batts said.
Calls to the Whitman Strategy Group, Mrs. Whitman's current business, and to Glenn S. Greene, the Justice Department lawyer who is representing her and the E.P.A. in the case, were not immediately returned. Mrs. Whitman, a former New Jersey governor, was administrator of the E.P.A. from 2001 to 2003.
Mrs. Whitman knew that the towers' destruction had released huge amounts of hazardous emissions, Judge Batts found. But as early as Sept. 13, Mrs. Whitman and the agency put out press releases saying that the air near ground zero was relatively safe and that there were "no significant levels" of asbestos dust in the air. They gave a green light for residents to return to their homes near the trade center site.
"By these actions," Judge Batts wrote, Mrs. Whitman "increased, and may have in fact created, the danger"to people living and working near the trade center. Judge Batts said that Mrs. Whitman was not entitled to immunity because she was a public official. Judge Batts allowed the suit to proceed on some counts against the E.P.A. She dismissed claims against Marianne L. Horinko, an assistant administrator of the E.P.A. at the time.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs were "very gratified that the court has recognized that the E.P.A. failed in its obligation to protect the residents of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn," said Justin Blitz, a lead lawyer on the case.
In a statement yesterday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called the E.P.A.'s conduct "outrageous."
"New Yorkers were depending on the federal government to provide them with accurate information about the air they were breathing," she said. "I continue to believe that the White House owes New Yorkers an explanation."
About 2,000 tons of asbestos and 424,000 tons of concrete were used to build the towers, and when they came crashing down they released dust laden with toxins. After an expert panel failed last year to settle on a method for organizing an E.P.A. cleanup, the agency said it would proceed anyway with limited testing and cleaning of apartments in downtown Manhattan below Canal Street.
project 009 concept tree house - Conceptual research project in rural areas of England such as Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. In partnership with local planning authorities and property developers we aim to develop a modular tree house concept. This could, with a flexible planning arrangement, encourage a more organic approach to country living.via zoller
Architecturally, the design direction evolves from the underside, to the interior and then outwards concentrating on views and aspects above the tree horizon. The ‘belly’ of the tree house accommodates undulating kinetic baffles that utilise wind power to generate electricity. The plan form also meanders to the extent that modular sections can be prefabricated so that the overall size can vary from a single bedroom house up to a five bedroom model. The prefabricated design can be installed on site within two weeks, is extremely lightweight, uses many recycled products, is part self-sustainable and low on maintenance.
concrete canvas
viazars