A bit late

Masdar: So Many Questions

So Nicolai heads out of town in order to find a sustainable city, and returns questioning the nature of utopia, suburbia, and Manhattan.

And yet Masdar seems like the fulfillment of that idea. Ever since the notion that thoughtful planning could improve the lot of humankind died out, sometime in the 1970s, both the megarich and the educated middle classes have increasingly found solace by walling themselves off inside a variety of mini-utopias.

This has involved not only the proliferation of suburban gated communities, but also the transformation of city centers in places like Paris and New York into playgrounds for tourists and the rich. Masdar is the culmination of this trend: a self-sufficient society, lifted on a pedestal and outside the reach of most of the world’s citizens.

Masdar, IKYDK, is “the world’s first zero-carbon city” built on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi and designed by Foster & Partners. And Ouroussoff’s point is well-taken, though I question shoehorning in a critique of the current state of Paris and New York so casually, unless he intends to take up the populist urban cudgel later.

But (and you know there would be a but) so many other questions occurred to me as I read his critic’s notebook, questions that seem to pre-date whether or not this was just another gated community.

Like, how much carbon does it take to build a zero-carbon city, much less one in the desert? Aren’t there places on earth better suited to such efforts, if lacking in oil money? Is it carbon neutral if the gas we’ve been buying for the last 10 years paid for the wind towers and solar arrays?

From a design perspective, aren’t those gorgeous pierced screens, based on the traditional mashrabiya, a little too cute? They are made of concrete, tinted to match traditional terra cotta, and remind me excessively of the 1950s and 1960s modernist American embassies by Edward Durell Stone, Harry Weese, et. al. that wrapped your basic Bunshaft box in a concrete version of the traditional ornament. Meanwhile, the research buildings are as high tech, and placeless, as can be.

The slideshow shows Masdar to be a present and future architectural extravaganza. Are there any fabric buildings, or does it include every idea Foster wasn’t allowed to build elsewhere? Ouroussoff rightly notes the retro-futuristic nature of those electric cars. They hail from the same era as the screens, and an entirely different mindset than the ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene—“a super-strong translucent plastic”—facades.

The most casually chilling comment is probably Foster’s:

The result, Mr. Foster acknowledged, feels a bit like Disneyland. “Disneyland is attractive because all the service is below ground,” he said. “We do the same here — it is literally a walled city. Traditional cars are stopped at the edges.”

I would love to explore this a little more. Was Walt Disney the ruling urbanist for the 21st century? How different is the way Disneyland buries services underground than, say, Brooklyn? What else is buried here?

This is all a little too sci fi for me, a world split into new archi-cities in which service is soundless and carbon neutral and the messy realities we manufactured from 1851 to 2009 (pick your own dates). Does Foster really think he can plan so far ahead that Masdar will never have its own version of the Second Avenue Subway? Years in the planning, massive urban disruption, the unattractive innards rearing their head above the city’s skin. If H.G. Wells were writing today the Morlocks would be the systems that serve us. To push Ouroussoff’s critique to a spookier place, Masdar is a city apparently designed for Eloi.

Straw Men Redux

Compare. Nicolai Ouroussoff, May 5, 2010:

Change comes slowly, at least psychologically, to Greenwich Village, which, despite the double-decker tourist buses and the crowds (still) lining up for cupcakes in front of the Magnolia Bakery, persists in thinking of itself as a sleepy bohemian enclave.

So the design for the New School’s 365,000-square-foot University Center on Fifth Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, which was approved by the school’s trustees on Wednesday, may get more than a few people shaking their fists.

Contrast. Nicolai Ouroussoff, January 20, 2010:

More than a few eyebrows will likely be raised on Thursday when the Italian architect Renzo Piano unveils his design for the expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here.

The cultural watchdogs of Boston don’t take well to change. And the museum, whose collections haven’t moved since 1924, is one of the most beloved art institutions in this city. Its eclectic array of artworks from the Middle Ages to the early-20th century, displayed in a dazzling faux-Venetian palazzo, stands alongside those in the Frick Collection in Manhattan and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., as a rare — and intimate — expression of a single collector’s vision.

Well, the preservationists should put away their torches and pitchforks.

Just couldn’t resist.

Critical Mass

Not to be overly self-referential (except, isn’t that was blogs are for?) but I have to highlight this paragraph of Places editor Nancy Levinson’s response to the comments on her response to my Nicolai Ouroussoff piece.

It’s very hard to have a sustained critical culture if you don’t have a network of people who are doing it professionally — whose work is supported by an employer and who thus can afford to take the time, week after week, to immerse themselves in the critical process, and whose work is published regularly. (And whose employment gives them critical independence, at least potentially.) It remains to be seen whether blogging — which depends upon personal initiative, interest, time — will produce a sustained body of criticism.

I’ve written on this blog a number of times about the importance of seeing architecture in the flesh, and the problem of the architecture blog: you can’t produce enough posts per day about things you have actually seen to make a popular, fast-moving blog. Hence, architecture blogs end up being mostly about the products of architects (films about them, renderings of their work, images of their work, exhibitions of their work) rather than the main event. If criticism moves from paid work to personal initiative, I fear it will become increasingly atomized, and lose any hope of having power to change.

I must confess I struggle with the problem of support every day: I am a freelancer, so every morning I have to decide whether to spend my work hours writing something or looking at something. At the moment people are barely paying me for the former, so I need to compress the latter into the minimum amount of time. I made up my own standards of professionalism, and try to stick to them. My hope now is the demise of print publications about design will lead to a rise in what might be called super-blogs: sites that can support a staff, and concentrate the kinds of long- and short-form criticism, slideshows and historical forays that are now happening on lots of excellent smaller sites. I think there would be strength in numbers and above all variety.

On DO: Why Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough

Well, it took me about six month to work up to this, but here goes: If the death of the architecture critic is nigh, we really need better ones occupying the top spots. My article was written before the reviews were out on the new American Embassy in London, but many of my Ouroussoff criticisms hold here, particularly his argument that different architects on his short list could have solved the problem.

Architecture criticism cannot simply be about what’s new because that leads precisely to the globe-trotting, star-gazing, architecture-as-sculpture approach we have now. What we need is criticism that treats renderings and buildings as different, since users are the ultimate critics. We need criticism that connects us to a building’s references, emotions and textures, not only its news value. We need criticism moored to place, and to the history of that place, so that the ways forward multiply (and don’t only involve building something curvy). Ouroussoff is not good enough because he reinforces the worst trends in architectural culture, never explains where he comes from and never explores the many different places we might go.

Please read the rest at Design Observer.

Size M

Isamu Noguchi, Red Cube; Francis Dzikowski/Esto

In that strange week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, in which work published hardly seems to have happened, the New York Times ran an article on Vin Cipolla, the semi-new head of the Municipal Art Society. All speakers, including Cipolla, seemed to agree that the MAS has slumped from its glory days defending Grand Central Terminal. Cipolla is quoted as saying: “We have a responsibility to our members and donors and to the citizens of New York to be a big voice on those subjects,” those subjects being big development and public architecture. (The MAS has done good work on advertecture, but that falls more into the category of civic nuisance than civic leadership.)

I have to agree that we need more voices on architecture—the shrinking of print journalism has meant, among many other losses, that minor arts like buildings and design are barely hanging on in the mass media—but I am not so sure they need to be big. Big voices can easily become divorced from the city, from politics, from the streets, talking about abstractions. What we need is more medium-size voices.

Three of the major contemporary American architecture critics live here in New York, and work for publications headquartered here, but in general they have become too big to pay attention to the small stuff. Yes, Nicolai Ouroussoff weighs in on Atlantic Yards once every 5 years or so, but his most passionate urban writing was about Paris. In the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger too, sometimes touches down on the Manhattan streets, but he has always written for history, and about architects. You can’t imagine him reviewing an automat (what would the modern equivalent be, the Shake Shack?) with the seriousness of Lewis Mumford. Ada Louise Huxtable, my hero and model for the size M review, now writes infrequently for the Wall Street Journal and generally from a much greater distance (psychically, physically) than she did in the 1960s. The image above represents my favorite mid-range review of hers, “Sometimes We Do It Right,” on SOM’s Marine Midland Building.

At the other end of the spectrum, blogs do a great job of keeping up with the small fits and starts of unfolding news stories (who else could have followed the Atlantic Yards designs, redesigns, lawsuits, replacements, warring blogs?). The best often call bullshit on the pontificators, but rarely offer a reasoned alternative. Much like community groups organizing against a large, shiny, moneyed foe, they throw stones but are hampered by an inability to imagine an alternative. It seems like a blog-institution like Curbed could spawn a critic, but I doubt that’s what Lockhart Steele is interested in. It probably wouldn’t pay in hits.

So we have the large and the small. What we need is the middle. Voices about architecture that feel like they live in our city, our reality, but know something other than the building before their eyes onscreen.