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Coke, adding to all those slogans, must now be the only soft drink in the world with its own shrine: a tabernacle for the faithful, constructed by its creator. I can’t compare the New World of Coca-Cola — as this 92,000-square-foot, $97 million museum calls itself — with the old (which opened in 1990 and closed in April, a month before this resurrection). But if you want to have a Coke and a smile, and you don’t mind being engulfed by an enormous commercial (at $15 for adults), this museum offers its own puzzles and pleasures.
It stands in Atlanta’s once-blighted downtown, on a 22-acre plot that the company purchased in the early 1990s. Coke donated nine of those acres for construction of the Georgia Aquarium, which opened next door in late 2005. Then, in October, the company announced it would donate 2.5 acres to the City of Atlanta for a civil- and human-rights museum. Nearby CNN offers tours of its headquarters. Media, liberty, fish and Coke. Maybe only fish spoils the composite image.
MARSEILLES, FRANCE — It was called "Unité d'Habitation," but this massive apartment block overlooking the lavender-strewn hills of Provence and the glinting Mediterranean does not prompt a unity of opinion, even sixty years after it first opened — least of all amongst its own inhabitants.
Upon the 1952 opening of this rough-textured concrete high rise slab — home to 1,600 residents — the never-shy Marseillaises dubbed it "La Maison du Fada" —Provençal dialect for "Crazy House," or even better, "Cuckoo Coop."
There were reasons for these sentiments, as Unité d'Habitation was bigger than any other single apartment block in France. In a tour-de-force of architectural ingenuity, Le Corbusier designed no less than 24 different unit types, accommodating everyone from single seniors to families with 8 children in a demonstration project that was duplicated in five other European cities, including Firminy to the north and Berlin.
With technical assistance from the Getty Conservation Institute and funded in part by a $2.5-million, five-year matching grant from the Getty Foundation, "SurveyL.A.: Los Angeles Historical Resources Survey Project" is an ambitious effort to identify, catalog and ultimately protect not just its physical "built history" but to provide a sharper portrait of Los Angeles and how it came to be.
Of course, L.A. has history — a distinct if not variegated one. But its "City of the Future" moniker has, over time, done more ill than good in bolstering a civic sense of self, leaving Los Angeles ambivalent about its connection to the past and its complex evolution. "There's been a growing sense that the city is going to change and with that a growing realization that there is importance in historic preservation," says Ken Bernstein, manager of the city's Office of Historic Preservation. "It's part of a natural maturing of the city — or coming of age of the city. And it's become important to catalog what makes Los Angeles Los Angeles."
He was the poet of the skyscraper, the coiner of the phrase "form follows function," the man his draftsman Frank Lloyd Wright called "beloved master." The late, great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan soared to the heights of his profession at the turn of the last century, but died penniless and without work. Last year, as Chicago celebrated the 150th anniversary of his birth, three of his buildings in the city were destroyed or severely damaged by fire.
So there is something profoundly satisfying, even healing, about the just-completed restoration and reinvention of the last building Sullivan designed before his death in 1924, the Krause Music Store, 4611 N. Lincoln Ave. It's a beloved little building with an over-the-top facade of pale green terra cotta -- and a dark past, its new owners believe, that has finally been exorcised with the help of some unorthodox rituals.
A few years after the building opened in 1922, its namesake owner killed himself in his second-floor apartment. For decades afterward, the architectural gem muddled through life as a funeral home. Bodies were embalmed in the basement, then hoisted up to the first floor chapel by a special casket elevator.
To follow the Tiger Stadium debate (or the drawn-out fights over the old Madison-Lenox Hotel in 2005 and the vanished Hudson's store in the '90s), one might think that preservation is an ugly and divisive process that pits building huggers against cold-hearted developers and city officials.
In reality, preservation is bankable, realistic, widely accepted -- and key to the revival of Detroit.
Preservation of older buildings accounts for almost all of the revival in Detroit's Midtown and a good deal of the downtown revival.
The trend toward downtown loft living? That's almost entirely focused on renovating older office buildings for modern residential use.
Nearly two years after Katrina, New Orleans is still floundering. Enter Edward J. Blakely, the veteran planner named as the city’s executive director of recovery management in January. It’s the job of a lifetime, but one fraught with political peril and hindered by entrenched ways of doing business that predate the disaster. Nevertheless, Blakely moved quickly after his appointment, unveiling a recovery plan two months later that concentrates on developing 17 economic clusters around the city.
The blunt 69-year-old seems uniquely qualified for this rather thankless job. Currently on a leave of absence from his position as chair of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Sydney to lead a 17-member team in New Orleans, Blakely guided recovery efforts in Oakland following the 1989 earthquake and later ran for mayor, narrowly losing to Jerry Brown. Recently, executive editor Martin C. Pedersen spoke to the native Californian about the future of the Big Easy, his role in shaping it, and the pitfalls of business as usual.
Inside a rock-solid Bronx warehouse, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres walk quickly through a darkened maze of rooms crammed with file boxes, wooden crates and plastic-wrapped furniture that was last called modern 40 years ago. They stop at a partly hidden door, turn the key and push it open with an appropriately spooky creak.
The room is filled with bodies.
They are not dead. Nor are they alive — though they live in vivid memory. They are life-size sculptures of real people from a Bronx that is long gone.
Dr. Melfi: "What are you afraid's going to happen?"
Tony: "I don't know! But something. I don't know!"
governors islands goings ons
Studio 320 is 320sf with a 16'x26' footprint; two 20' containers are slid past one another by 6 feet. It was built for a client who has a large farm property and uses it as a retreat. The foundation is pre-cast concrete footings, and the studio will have a green fern-based roof. It is designed to be off-grid, using propane and solar panels, and is fully insulated to international code.
My visit to Meier’s 173 – 176 Perry Street revealed just how exposing and unforgiving these glazed facades can be. While highly refined, with elegant shadow boxes and a dynamic play of solid and void between glass and thick whitened concrete floor plates, the Perry Street complex, in its aesthetic purity, suffers when the dwellings are actually occupied. One apartment, with its huge curtains left half open, revealed a mess of the spoils of interior refurbishment and not-so-chic furniture pushed out to the building’s transparent skin. It was as if someone had left his laundry out to dry. Meier has, however, attempted to prevent buyers of condos in his Charles Street complex from being messy: There, buyers are treated to Meier-designed interior finishes and can purchase “total design” services for interior furnishings to match the aesthetic spirit of the exterior.10from the current issue of harvard design magazine
These interiors, on view through the huge glass walls, require a hyper slickness devoid of any domestic clutter to match the minimalist chic of the exteriors. Such a minimalist aesthetic might best be described as ascetic, a word appropriate to the monastic, the poor, and adherents of early Modernist models of machine-like living.11 Yet this asceticism is minimal in material but maximal in the resources it gobbles to create and maintain this model of urban hipness. New minimalism — with its finely detailed, overtly refined, and yet empty spaces — as applied to residential inhabitation, requires that the least possible activity actually takes place within its bounds.12 Life must be pared down to the (highest end) essentials to maintain its spotless chic, its sober lightness. Thus, while most of these luxury buildings advertise endless lists of hotel services to augment the value gained at such high price tags, its users — and architects themselves — may not realize how necessary these services are to live stylishly within these spaces. An array of amenities — from concierges and in-house dining to twenty-four-hour child and pet care (to keep the messy creatures out of sight) to on-site fitness trainers, driving ranges, lap pools, wine cellars, movie theaters, stylists, personal chefs, and, of course maid and maintenance services — become a necessary extension of the activities and spaces of aestheticized living. (For the amazingly extensive list of services, see my endnotes.)
Richard Meier thoughtfully includes wall-long closets, so residents can hide their stuff in a mask of whitewashed poché, and he tucks large storage spaces for each apartment discreetly below grade, so that they can keep the bulk of their clutter out of his sparkling white-and-frosted-glass interiors.13 Like the servants’ quarters lurking at the base of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the amenities offered to the property residents become essential for the maintenance of an ascetic-chic lifestyle, spatialized in the sense that they contribute to how the dwellings look and function. The “effortless living” that nightclub owner turned hotelier turned real estate developer Ian Schrager promises with his list of amenities included with ownership in his projects with Herzog & de Meuron at Bond Street and John Pawson at Gramercy Park is a result of more than luxuries — these amenities are necessities for maintenance of the image, both literal and metaphorical, that these properties embody.14
One wonders, with this proliferation of Modernist-minimalist residential properties and the growing spate of shelter magazines promoting similar styles of living as well as a mass audience for now household-name architects,15 is Modernism just a new sign of hipness for the ultra rich and those that aspire to join the circle of real estate fashionistas? By branding minimalist-chic living in properties priced far beyond the reach of average homebuyers, are starchitect designers collaborating in the creation of a culture of good taste inseparable from social exclusion?
In 1919, Georg Simmel observed that fashion is, for the middle classes, tied inextricably to a need for belonging and is, for the upper classes, deeply fixed to a desire for distinction.16 Perhaps it is the exclusivity of maintaining truly minimalist conditions in one’s dwelling and the exclusivity that ownership of such rarities as these properties brings that secures the rich in the realm of distinction so desired by all hoarders of cultural capital. The painful question is: Are these social constructs in any way compatible with Modern architecture’s essentially utopian foundations, and are these starchitects — at least those truly capable of imagining new modes of living for all classes — creating and contributing to a lifestyle that they themselves admire?
detroit pictures
via jz
container #6
via jz
sandy hook
cape may
crumbling asbury park
Wildwood houses over 200 motels, built during the Doo-Wop era of the 1950s and 1960s. The motels are unique in appearance with Vegas-like neon signs, odd architecture, and an overall distinctive look which makes Wildwood one of the most interesting districts of its kind in the nation. [4] New construction in the area however has seen the demise of many older motels being demolished so bigger condominiums may take up residence. The Wildwood Doo Woop Preservation League has taken action to help save and restore these historic buildings but construction of far larger hotels may overtake the area in the next few years. A 50's Doo Wop museum has recently been built which contains property from demolished motels like neon signs and furniture. Neo-Doo Wop buildings in the area feature a neon lit Wawa, Subway Sandwich Shop, and a 1950's styled Acme Supermarket.
house by the sea, ocean grove nj