Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Diigo Bookmarks 07/18/2008 (a.m.)

• architecture for hertzian space | varnelis.net - Annotated

  Fascinating essay by Kazys Varnelis, which takes as its jumping off point the potential discrepancy between designing for “hard” stuff (whether factories, industrial production, or …architecture/buildings) vs. designing for networked stuff and software and mobile technologies. After this initial set-up, Varnelis then quickly goes into describing some very specific site- and urban-intervention type projects that subvert the “hard” aspects of planning & building via software/ new technologies. The former points are not that difficult to address, using predictable interventions and affordances (see my notes/ annotations), but the latter are mind-blowing and difficult to contain within predictability.

  tags: varnelis.net, futurismo, architecture, urban_design, portals

The April 2008 FOCUS Magazine article is up

Scribd works like a charm — it’s just I who am slow in getting these print articles scanned and then formatted into a single document for uploading!

Without further ado (but a bow to Richard Florida for title inspiration), here’s my April 2008 FOCUS Magazine article, Who’s your heritage?, which argues that even for heritage architecture, buildings need to earn their keep, not just look pretty.

Diigo Bookmarks 07/09/2008 (p.m.)

• Looming Debate, by Veronique Vienne (Metropolis Magazine) - Annotated

  Interesting article (with some inaccuracies, too), focused chiefly on Bertrand Delanoe, the “Situationist”-inspired left-leaning, assassination attempt survivor and openly gay mayor of Paris, who gets blind-sided by Nikolas Sarkozy, the pro-business president of France, who wants Paris to be a bit more get-go-ish. Delanoe is on the side of the human-scale advocates who want to preserve its “charms,” whereas Sarkozy doesn’t mind a tall building or two. The article is interesting because it’s one of the clearest outlines I’ve seen so far on making political linkages between certain attitudes toward modernization and height in Paris, vs preservation (and rejuvenation) of what that city’s status quo as well as historical “essence” (at least mid-19th century onward) is.

  tags: paris, metropolis_magazine, high_rise, urbanism, urbanplanning, bertrand_delanoe

Midsummer night fantasy for Victoria BC’s Janion Building

Scanning through my RSS feeds this afternoon, I came across Regine Debatty’s 6/30/08 blog post, Interactivos? workshop: Augment(o)scope, which included a photo of Madrid’s CaixaForum, as redone by Herzog & de Meuron.

I had come across the image months ago, but today it clicked with the problem of the Janion Hotel (or Janion Building), an old (heritage) building in downtown Victoria.

What if, I thought, we had the resources to do something like this with the Janion?

As it stands, the building underutilizes its site.  It’s only 3 stories tall and sited on its parcel in such a way as to make additions tricky.

What Herzog & de Meuron did with Madrid’s former converted 1899 power station, “one of the city’s few remaining examples of historically significant industrial architecture,” is an inspiration.  The ground floor was practically dug out — and in the case of the Janion, a significantly smaller building, I’m thinking lift the building up an entire floor to create a similar ground floor space.  An expanded basement, plus a deliberately modern (yet somehow traditional-looking) addition, give the new hybrid structure in Madrid the square footage it needs to be a useful participant in a modern city’s economy.

Of course it is a total pipe dream — a midsummer night’s dream — to think that something like this could happen for Victoria’s Janion Building, because there isn’t anyone here with pockets deep enough to pay for such a project.

But just imagine…

For more words (and some pictures) on the Janion, see Robert Randall’s blog entries here.   For pictures, see flickreeno Professional Recreationalist’s set here (really click through to his photos, which are powerful, and quirkily staged — he uses plastic dolls and photographs them against their backdrops to make them appear life-sized).

Here’s one of his photos, showing the Janion’s north-west (back) sides:

If you’re thinking, “what a hunk of junk,” take a look at the front of the building, which is a bit more interesting, as seen on Triviaqueen’s blog, and a great front facade detail on one-eyed man’s site.

The reason I find this particular photo of the Janion by Professional Recreationalist of interest is because it shows the drop in grade, from the front of the building to its back.  Removed, as in Madrid’s CaixaForum, that fieldstone foundation would open up a grand, useful space, especially if that removal included lifting the building up a few feet.

The grade changes here are not dissimilar to CaixaForum’s grade changes, which Herzog & de Meuron exploited to create an open, airy ground floor.

Here’s a photo of the Madrid building before Herzog & de Meuron transformed it — it was as similarly deficient in allure as the Janion now appears to be:

Note the stolid foundation/ basement stones, now entirely removed.

For an idea of what you might be able to create in a newly “lightened” ground floor, see this photo of CaixaForum’s cafeteria:

The addition built on top of CaixaForum is daring — it would probably freak people here out.  But it gave the building the additional space it needed, and a completely new lease on life.

Diigo Bookmarks 05/27/2008 (a.m.)

• Prefab-ulous: New Development in England Goes Up Green — and Fast

  Brief article by Andrew Blum about Oxley Woods, a development of “90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres.” The key aspect? They’re all pre-fab, relatively cheap to build, can be built quickly, and have in-built green features.

  If Canada had a federal housing plan/ strategy, this would be something the Feds (and the Province) could take a closer look at. It sounds like it could be a reasonable (if partial) solution to our affordable housing crisis.

  tags: andrew_blum, wired_magazine, prefab, green_buildings, green_technologies, oxley_woods, affordable_housing

• “L.A. vision: a towering sign,” by David Zahniser (LA Times) - Astani Enterprises Inc - Annotated

  File this under “life imitates art”? There’s a fascinating battle happening in LA over whether or not Sonny Astani, businessman and developer, should be permitted to install a new kind of LED-generated image, 12 stories above the street and 14 stories tall, on the side of his 33-story condo building currently under construction in downtown LA.

  The inspiration? Opening scenes in Blade Runner of downtown LA, showing “a skyscraper-sized advertisement portraying a Japanese woman smiling before popping a snack into her mouth. Astani says an image, such as that of a flying sea gull, could now even travel from one building to the next.”

  I have to admit this sounds really cool, but I can see why many factions in LA would oppose this, too. We’re all familiar with the really bright illuminated advertisements — even Victoria has a small version of one, installed outside the arena on Blanshard at Caledonia. It’s bright, too bright. But Astani proposes a much more modulated, artistic, and dimmed level of lighting. If the images could look as subtle — yet powerful — as Blade Runner’s, it could work, but there’s no garantee, that if permitted, subsequent developers would follow in that “artistic” style.

  Another aspect is this: the proposal, if it’s art, also calls into question just how intrusive public art should be in public space. Does it have a right to be so intrusive as to be impossible to ignore? Can I, as a citizen, be obliged to register public art — and admittedly, it would be impossible not to register this project?

  Is part of what captures my attention/ imagination regarding this project its uncanny fusion of subtlety and assault, packaged as visual stimulus?

  Another question: is this an art form that expresses a corporate and anti-pedestrian city (”…neighborhood anchored by Staples Center and L.A. Live, the hotel and entertainment complex that includes the recently opened Nokia Theatre”), fitting for LA where people don’t walk anyway (but just wait: it’ll show up soon enough on the very very pedestrian-friendly Las Vegas Strip)? I’m thinking of this in terms of Christopher Hume’s writings on Toronto, and the Leslie big box/ corporate redevelopment plans, which he has characterized (rightly, imo) as being anti-pedestrian and therefore anti-urban, too. But could anyone argue that LA is in any way anti-urban? No. So is this visual art / visual stimulus for a different kind of urbanity?

  tags: astani, advertising, billboards, outdoor_installations, public_art, public_space, los_angeles

• “The Web and Beyond: Mobility (1) - Adam Greenfield” - The Mobile City » Blog Archive » - Annotated

  Michiel de Lange reports on the CHI conference “The Web and Beyond: Mobility” in Amsterdam on 5/22/08, featuring Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia). In this post, he focuses on Greenfield’s presentation. A key aspect that struck me was this observation by Greenfield: that ubicom / ubiquitous computing creates a new level of “ambient informatics,” and “information processing dissolves into behavior.” Greenfield’s example is the seemingly choreographed swish of a public transit user who swings her purse in front of the transit card reader, never skipping a beat, but shaped indelibly by the technology into certain movements.

  tags: adam_greenfield, mobile_city, ubiquitous, ubicom, technology

Diigo Bookmarks 05/24/2008 (a.m.)

• Transmaterial 2: To Redefine Our Physical Environment - PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” - Annotated

  PingMag interview with Blaine Brownell, architect and sustainable materials researcher, whose focus is on green building.

  “From repurposed materials that act as surrogates, to recombinant ones that fuse several materials into a hybrid, making them stronger and more effective — Blaine points us to products that might shape our physical environment in the future.”

  Materials discussed include self-healing polymers inspired by biological systems, which can automatically heal cracks in buildings, for example.

  The article includes many other photographs / examples with descriptions of weird and wonderful bioneered and sustainable building materials.

  tags: pingmag, transmaterial, bioneering, biomimicry, architecture, technology, blaine_brownell, sustainable_materials

Hypnotized: I think I need a vacation…

Musical interlude for this holiday Monday….

I realize that Hypnotized by Fleetwood Mac (here on YouTube) is about something as stupid as UFOs & paranormal shit, but …oh man, I just LURVE this song (words & music)…

I can still remember where I first heard this song: in somebody’s suite (bed-sit) somewhere in Fairfield, a mostly empty living room with nowhere to sit, some arts & crafts-inspired dark-wood-wall-paneled and depressing cave of a room.

But that song! What else suited it? What else but Carlos Castaneda’s tall tales of Don Juan, for to my mind the song’s most enduring lines are “They say there’s a place down in Mexico where a man can fly over mountains and hills — he don’t need an airplane or some kind of engine, he never will…”

YouTube - Fleetwood Mac - Hypnotized

…

I certainly find this staircase …hypnotizing:

Found via Protein’s feed, which points us to an amazing article in Treehugger, Design for Deconstruction by Alberto Mozó.  This staircase, and the entire building it’s in, is deconstructable, meaning that it can be taken apart and reconstructed on a different site.  Why?  As Treehugger explains:

Zoning determines the value of land, and if your site is zoned for a twelve storey building you can be pretty sure that anything that is a lot smaller is not going to be around for long. You could build it cheap and fast (like they do in North America) or you could design for deconstruction, as Alberto Mozó did for BIP computers in Santiago, Chile. The entire structure is made from laminated timber and can be dismantled and reconstructed elsewhere.

So, if the land is zoned (or upzoned in future) for higher density, but present economics don’t allow maximizing that zone, then instead of building a cheap piece of tear-down, you could build something amazing like Alberto Mozó’s building for BIP, and when the time comes to upzone or increase density/ expand, you take the building apart and reconstruct someplace where it will be useful again.

Building taller buildings: in wood, not reinforced concrete

An article in today’s local media reports that British Columbia’s Premier Gordon Campbell is proposing changes to the province’s building code to allow wood-frame construction for buildings taller than 4 floors.

Going higher … using wood
Canwest News Service
Published: Tuesday, May 13, 2008

A plan by the province to raise the minimum height for wood-framed apartment buildings to encourage more use of the province’s timber is receiving strong support from builders.

Premier Gordon Campbell told mayors attending a Whistler convention he wants to support the province’s forest industry by allowing the construction of wood-framed condominiums above the current four-storey limit.

Housing Minister Rich Coleman told the Canadian Home Builders’ Association he wants to see wood-framed building up to six storeys high. Coleman said the necessary building code changes could be accomplished through regulatory change and could be in place by September.

B.C. is already pushing the limit under the National Building Code by going as high a four-storeys in wood, said architect Richard Kadulski, but going higher, is doable, he said. [Article here.]

Sean Holman of Public Eye Online asks, “So where did the Campbell administration get the inspiration for this plan?” And answers as follows:

Well, back in February, International Forest Products Ltd. vice president Ric Slaco attended a Campbell administration climate action meeting. And, at the meeting, Mr. Slaco delivered a PowerPoint presentation [*] urging the government to promote British Columbia wood products by making “BC’s Building Code and procurement policies wood-centric” and expanding the province’s wood first policy to private buildings. This, as part of an effort to increase wood product use in construction for both environmentally and economic reasons. Fancy that! [Article here.] [* note: the presentation links to a 30-page PDF, worth clicking through on.]

Hotly debated already are safety issues (fire, seismic issues) and feasibility of building “that high” using wood. But for those willing to brave a bit of German, here’s a link (via Architekturvideo.de) to a company in Berlin (E3 and Kaden + Klingbeil) that’s building the first 7-story building in wood in that city. It’s causing a stir there, too, because people just assume that stone is what endures, concrete is a decent second place, and wood just doesn’t rate — it rots. But if you watch the video, you’ll be convinced that it’s entirely possible. I have to admit that their construction techniques are spectacular, almost over-engineered, and I have no idea whether BC’s builders will be held to quite that sort of standard. If the buildings are to last, however, maybe BC builders and architects should check out the Kaden +Klingbeil video and pick up a few tricks.

Note that current building codes in Berlin allow for wood construction up to 5 stories, so this project (E3) is breaking that barrier.  Note also that it has to meet very stringent fire code regulations: if you watch the video, you’ll see that basically all the wood (except for some ceiling panels) is covered up with thick slabs of fire-blocking material, which is why the building doesn’t look like it’s made of wood.  The architect also talks about how energy efficient the building is, as well as the building method.  There’s a lot of carbon off-setting in this construction material (which is what the BC PDF emphasizes, too).  In addition, the architect mentions that this building took only one third of the time to build as opposed to concrete construction.  In other words, you can get people into housing faster using wood.

Diigo Bookmarks 05/01/2008 (p.m.)

• In Defense of Townhouses — Sightline Daily (formerly Tidepool)

  - great article by Eric de Place on why so many new TH developments are so ugly. As his lede says, “How parking laws make housing expensive. And ugly.”

  tags: sightline_daily, seattle, urban_design, urbanplanning, cars, parking, architecture