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But New Orleans' poor homeowners will lose even more if they rashly invest in fixing up homes that will later be deemed uninsurable or are in neighborhoods so sparsely populated they can't get police, water or electricity service. If these residents hold out only a few months more, they can make better decisions about what to do.
Local and federal government, on the other hand, must move fast to make sure the city is inhabitable for low-income citizens. The federal government urgently needs to craft a measure like the one proposed by Rep. Richard H. Baker, R-La. Baker's proposal would allow homeowners to sell their ruined homes to a state development corporation and help them move to safer areas.
President Bush, in a speech from New Orleans' then-deserted Jackson Square, promised the nation that New Orleans would be rebuilt, but the White House has inexplicably withheld its support for Baker's proposal. Does the president intend for the federal government to finance the replacement of every destroyed house where it stood? If not, how will the rebuilding of New Orleans be accomplished?
New Orleans, meanwhile, needs to gather information. How many displaced people wish to come home? How many would live elsewhere if their old neighborhoods are unlivable or dangerously situated? How might they rebuild social networks? Gathering answers to these questions will jump-start the city's ability to offer utilities where needed and make crucial decisions about rebuilding plans.
Every day the line snakes down a spartan corridor on the eighth floor of City Hall here, as hundreds of people clutch a piece of paper inscribed with a fateful percentage that could force them to abandon their home.
The number is always over 50, and it means a house was so damaged in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina — more than half-ruined — that it faces demolition, unless the owner can come up with tens of thousands of dollars to raise it several feet above the ground and any future floodwaters.
But there is a way out, and that is why so many people stand in line every day, collectively transforming this half-ruined city. "What you need to do is talk to a building inspector and get that lowered below 50 percent," a city worker calls out to the crowd. And at the end of the line, in a large open room down the hall, that is exactly what happens, nearly 90 percent of the time, New Orleans officials say.
By agreeing so often to these appeals — more than 6,000 over the last few months — city officials are in essence allowing random redevelopment to occur throughout the city, undermining a plan by Mayor C. Ray Nagin's rebuilding commission to hold off on building permits in damaged areas for several months until more careful planning can take place. That plan, greeted by widespread opposition, including from the mayor himself, is now essentially dead.
House by house, in devastated neighborhoods across the city, homeowners are bringing back their new-minted building permits and rebuilding New Orleans. As many as 500 such permits are issued every day, said Greg Meffert, the city official in charge of the rebuilding process.
And there is no particular rhyme or reason to who gets a permit, or consideration of whether their neighborhoods can really support its previous residents. One city building inspector, Devra Goldstein, called the proceedings on the eighth floor "really fly-by-night, chaotic, Wild West, get-what-you-want."
The floor, she said, represents "a plan by default."
It is also testament to the fierce desire of many displaced New Orleanians to re-establish themselves, no matter the odds.
hey joe!
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
craigs list starts charging $10 per rental listing.
who says whoa?
mit lab brush
via zars
rat rod report:
selling locally 1968 convertible vette. matching vins, recenlty rebuilt 327 350 hp. tru duel exaust ps pb no ac odometer showing 62k unverified milage. un restored interior, now dinged up daytona yellow but originally black. bidding started at $100.00 but im seeing it now at 7K with four days to go. similar cars going in the 20 - 25 k area. lets see where this one goes.
we went to the george nakashima woodworking compound in new hope yesterday. they have open house every saturday from 1 to 4:30 pm. we visited the three small cinderblock buildings that were open to the public. classic rocky hilly wooded bucks co landscape. a little bit opened up because of the leaves being off the trees. first stop is a show room (the closest thing to a gift shop) with books and a couple of small tripod endtable/stools (starter pieces at $550.00 that were looking pretty damn desirable) and nice larger pieces. then to a small woodworking building where we found a young aprentice hand sanding a detail on a restoration project. he told us that the set of six 40 year old captains chairs belonged to the rockefellers and needed work because they had been kept outside the whole time. some had fallen completely to pieces. but they had cleaned up real real nice considering and were almost ready to be returned back to the original owners. the small modern slightly industrial buildings all had oversized traditional japanese style windows. the plain unfinished grey cinderblock exterior and interior finishes did not have any dampness at all. the workshop windows were very large, some had pieces of cardboard in place to reduce the suns glare and drying effect on the stored wood. there is still a large inventory of wood on hand selected by the now deceased george. the last stop was the studio where two of georges children have kept the family craft trade going. mira is now considered the primary designer and she will hand select the wooden slabs with you and make you exactly what you want in a table, chair or cabinet. we spoke with the son kevin who sat in the middle of the room in a rocking chair. hell talk your ear of if you let him which is fine if your at all curious. we discussed the ben shahn prints on the wall. a very nice bs cats cradle print on japanese paper (two hands with a big mess of intertwined string laced through the fingers) looking like a take on pollock abstraction. warhol used that same funny pen and ink and stick drawing style in his early commercial work. kevin had his warhol story. firstly he recalled the famous cold fish hand shake. second warhol wanted to trade his work for a piece of furniture. george wouldnt have it (what am i going to do with one of those paintings?). eventually they chose the wood for a piece to be made but andy died before picking it up. they completed the piece anyway and its someplace.
i forgot my camera but next time im in bucks ill go back to take pictures and drool over those nice new mira nakashima $550.00 stools.
Take Back the Memorial Launches Campaign to Claim Snohetta Building for an Above Ground 9/11 Museum
Governor Pataki’s promise that the 9/11 memorial quadrant at Ground Zero would be reserved for 9/11 exclusively following the withdrawal of the IFC and Drawing Center left people asking: “What will happen to the Snohetta building now that it has no tenants?” The prevailing logic was that Snohetta would not be built, primarily because fundraising for the memorial was in disarray. Earlier this month, however, Governor Pataki announced he would set aside $80 million dollars to build a smaller version of the Snohetta building. This is surprising considering that the Governor himself has yet to make a donation to the 9/11 memorial. Not that we blame him. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) has allowed the design process for the memorial and museum to run amok.
Saying, "We cannot allow the trade center to be a construction site for the next 15 years," Mr. Bloomberg proposed that the leaseholder, Larry Silverstein, give up control of two of the five building sites, in exchange for a reduction in his rent. (Mr. Silverstein holds a 99-year lease on the site, which is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.)
That would allow officials to seek other developers to build towers on the site while Mr. Silverstein focuses on developing the Freedom Tower.
"We need this now to advance our economy and pay tribute to those who died there," the mayor said, "not a decade and a half in the future when it fits a developer's financial plan."
Officials of the Port Authority have been pressuring Mr. Silverstein to accept a similar deal. In addition, the authority has signaled that it is amenable to the mayor's proposal that its headquarters, previously situated in the twin towers, be moved into one of the buildings Mr. Silverstein is being urged to relinquish, Towers 3 and 4.
Making JC more bicycle-friendly
The city has contemplated for a number of years a bikeway system that would encourage more bicycle use within the city and promote bike tourism.
The Planning Board approved at its Jan. 10 meeting the addition of a professionally-prepared Jersey City Bikeway System plan to the city's Master Plan. Bill Feldman, manager of bicycle and transportation for the RBA Group, the firm that prepared the bikeway plan, spoke at the meeting.
Under the bikeway system, the city would be broken up into five sections with signs pointing out various destinations within those sections. The five sections would be Downtown, The Heights, Journal Square, Lafayette-Greenville, and Liberty State Park.
The bikeway system would share public roadways and include route signage for bicyclists and warning signs for motorists.
Oonce signs are installed, a study will be conducted by the city's Department of Public Works to determine if the bikeway system could include actual bike lanes that would be placed in possible locations such as Mallory Avenue, Washington Boulevard, Washington Street, Christopher Columbus Drive, and Phillip Street.
There is also consideration to link the bikeway system to the East Coast Greenway, a 2,500-mile series of nature paths and roadways that runs from Maine to Florida.
Rebuilding waterfront park
The Planning Board also gave the city the go-ahead to start working on rehabbing the J. Owen Grundy Park. The waterfront park, located at the foot of Exchange Place, was built in 1985 and has seen a great deal of wear and tear in recent years.
Glenn Wrigley, the city's chief architect, spoke to the Planning Board about how parts of the park have deteriorated, such as the railings and plants around the park. Also, it had been determined that the seawall that protects the park from the Hudson River has been breaking down.
Wrigley said that the rehab project will replace the wooden decking on the pier, new tables and lights in the park, and the seawall.
Also, the performing stage at the end of the park will see a new cover and a new power system to facilitate performances.
"There are some very tough decisions that have to be made here, and no-one relishes making them," said Janet R Howard, chief executive of the Bureau of Governmental Research… "But to say that people should invest their money and invest their energies and put all their hope into rebuilding and then in a year we'll re-evaluate, that's no plan at all." In this sense, people's genuine fears of whether the city could cope with another flood, has combined with the general air of disquiet that New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt at all in that location - and is impacting on the authorities' ability to impose clear guidance up on some core issues. Even though the practical discussion amongst recovery workers and political agents is slightly confused, it is still qualitively different to the line that Lord May took in his Anniversary Address to the Royal Society in 2005. 'It is conceivable,' he said, 'that the Gulf Coast of the US could be effectively uninhabitable by the end of century.' As a word of advice, he advocates that we stop building on floodplains and recognise 'that some areas should, in effect, be given up.'
New Orleans could lose as much as 80 percent of its black population if its most damaged neighborhoods are not rebuilt and if there is not significant government assistance to help poor people return, a detailed analysis by Brown University has concluded.
C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans discussed the federal response to his city's disaster in a speech this week to fellow mayors, meeting in Washington.
Combining data from the 2000 census with federal damage assessment maps, the study provides a new level of specificity about Hurricane Katrina's effect on the city's worst-flooded areas, which were heavily populated by low-income black people.
Of the 354,000 people who lived in New Orleans neighborhoods where the subsequent damage was moderate to severe, 75 percent were black, 29 percent lived below the poverty line, more than 10 percent were unemployed, and more than half were renters, the study found.
The report's author, John R. Logan, concluded that as much as 80 percent of the city's black population might not return for several reasons: their neighborhoods would not be rebuilt, they would be unable to afford the relocation costs, or they would put down roots in other cities.
For similar reasons, as much as half of the city's white population might not return, Dr. Logan concluded.
"The continuing question about the hurricane is this: Whose city will be rebuilt?" Dr. Logan, a professor of sociology, writes in the report.
If the projections are realized, the New Orleans population will shrink to about 140,000 from its prehurricane level of 484,000, and the city, nearly 70 percent black before the storm, will become majority white.
fake bands - "Jake Austen's new book "TV-a-Go-Go" examines the fake but fascinating history of rock & roll on television. Jake drops by Music To Spazz By to discuss TV rock & rollers both historic and arcane. "
garbage scout
ust outta beta is Jim Nachlin's brilliant Google Maps mashup GarbageScout. Here's how it works: see something discarded on the streets of NYC; take a cameraphone shot then email it to GarbageScout; enjoy the detritus digitally from now until armageddon. And, in a touch residents of the Williamsburg waterfront might enjoy, the latest additions are represented by a flaming trash can. Awesome.from curbed