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By JOAN LOWY
Scripps Howard News Service
December 28, 2004
- Bird lovers are worried that one of the world's most high profile construction projects - a 1,776-foot tall office tower being erected on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York - will turn out to be a giant death trap for birds.
The Freedom Tower is expected to be the world's tallest building when it opens in 2009. Plans call for the building to be enclosed in glass, wrapped on the outside with steel cables for support, and crowned with radio towers and wind turbines to supply electricity. Computer generated images on the Web site of the building's developer, Silverstein Properties, show a graceful, brightly illuminated skyscraper.
But scientists and bird enthusiasts say more than a billion birds are killed every year in the United States by slamming into windows or circling lights atop skyscrapers until they are so dazed and confused that they crash.
"Everything that could possibly be bad for birds about a building they are doing," said Rebecca Creshkoff, 47, an avid birdwatcher and member of New York City Audubon.
The Audubon Society and New York New Visions - a coalition of 21 architecture, planning, and design organizations that came together after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that destroyed the trade center to advise on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan - have warned the project's architects and Silverstein Properties that the new building could prove especially deadly for birds.
"We've made them aware of the problem," but developers "are not under any obligation" to adjust their projects for bird safety, said Margaret Helfand, an architect and founder of New York New Visions.
Janno Lieber, Silverstein Properties' project director, said the company has hired a bird consultant to assist in designing the tower.
"In addition to our broader environmental approach, we are investigating a number of strategies for making the new buildings at the World Trade Center bird-friendly," Lieber said in a brief statement supplied in response to an inquiry.
Construction of the project began this year. The first three years of work are expected to take place below ground.
The trade center towers, among the world's tallest buildings before their destruction, were also particularly dangerous for birds, Creshkoff said. After complaints from bird lovers, the Port Authority, which managed the buildings, helped reduce the problem by turning off lights atop the towers during spring and fall migrations, she said.
"I feel an obligation to do something because if you don't work to protect what you love, what meaning is there in life?" Creshkoff said.
On the Net: www.silversteinproperties.com
www.nycaudubon.org/home/
fmuers post top tens for two thousand and four
sound exchange (get yours)
death as metaphor
holy smokes bullwinkle! i got an air port connection waiting here at the ft lauderdale airport
Bisazza was established and maintains its headquarters in the northern Italian city of Vicenza, which Palladio also called home. Founded by Piero's father, Renato Bisazza, in 1956—a time when the fortuitous combination of craft tradition with postwar industrialization put Italy at the vanguard of contemporary design—the company developed mass-production processes that moved ancient Venetian glassmaking in the direction of a modern mosaic industry. In addition to classic glass mosaic mounted tesserae-style on paper or mesh, Bisazza produces specialty tiles like Oro, featuring 24-karat gold leaf sandwiched between vitreous layers, and Gemme, which incorporates avventurina, a synthetic stone developed in 17th-century Venice that creates a glittering, jewellike effect.
so-fla vernacular: trailer home w/ "florida room" addition
autopen
Dear a-matter reader: After exactly five years, a-matter is coming to an end as a successful project of Sedus Stoll AG. In concrete terms, this means that no new information will be published on this platform and that editorial work has stopped. a-matter, however, will continue to be available as a library. You will continue to be informed of architectural matters and projects concerning Sedus Stoll AG. The last update is given below.
"If you look back to the founding document of the 60's left, which was the Port Huron statement (also promulgated in Michigan), you will easily see that it was in essence a conservative manifesto. It spoke in vaguely Marxist terms of alienation, true, but it was reacting to bigness and anonymity and urbanization, and it betrayed a yearning for a lost agrarian simplicity. It forgot what Marx had said, about the dynamism of capitalism and ''the idiocy of rural life.'' Earlier 18th- and 19th-century American communards had often been fleeing or preparing for a coming Apocalypse, and their emulators in the 1960's and 1970's followed this trope as well, believing everything they read about the impending crash, or the exhaustion of the world's resources. The crazy lean-to of the Unabomber began to take dim shape at that period, even if many of the new pioneers were more affected by the work of the pacific Tolstoy or of C. Wright Mills (who used to recommend, if memory serves, that people should build their own cars as well as their own houses)."
im getting everybody free mp3s for christmas this year. so here, merry christmas. maybe start with ODB sussudio and come back to the rest for desert.
the six words dj tony coulter uses to describe the music he plays are : psychedelic, progressive, experimental, folk, sound collage. i could shorten that even further to : world-psyche. his is the type of musical sensibility that dug up "os mutantes" from brasilian obscurity a few years back. but thats just a starting place. he mines even rarer psych music from all over the world. check his playlists and listen to the archives.
"A theory that the ancient Mayans built their pyramids to act as giant resonators to produce strange and evocative echoes has been supported by a team of Belgian scientists"
Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960. Oil on canvas, 71 7/8 x 72 inches. RIP 12.16.2004
Refrigerator Heaven
"The velvety surface of the in-situ black concrete skin was glowing in the light rain at the Topping Out ceremony on December 8th. Ordrupgaard Director Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark thanked the construction crew for their teamwork and superb workmanship in the realization of Zaha Hadid’s visionary design. Minister of Culture Brian Mikkelsen led the list of speakers.
The topping out, an important tradition in construction projects, is when the uppermost steel beam is put into place, which means that the structure under construction has reached its highest point. A flag and evergreens are placed on top of the structure marking the final stretch in the building’s progress."
Freedom Tower Site Poised for a Game of Inches
"Yet the waves have to be 20 feet or higher for the contest to occur, and the competition has been held in only six of the past 16 seasons. With waves of about 30 feet breaking at Waimea this morning, the surf was high enough for the contest to start at about 8:30 a.m. local time, media director Jodi Young said by telephone on what she called ``an absolutely perfect day.''
``It's amazing,'' Young said. ``There's probably about 10,000 people here. It's definitely the most people this beach has ever seen. Really it's just an absolute spectacle. The waves that are coming through are just dwarfing the houses.''