25 harrison avenue

This building, located in the Chinatown district in Boston, has been the subject of two articles by the Boston Globe. I have a feeling it going to be the subject of several more, including an investigation into housing conditions in similar buildings. The story so far has centered around the evacuation and closure of the building following a response to a false alarm by the Fire Dept. Firefighters observed a potentially dangerous structural conditions in the basement among other problems. The building has been ordered closed pending a review by a structural engineer. Single rooms in the building were being rented out to Chinese immigrants who have been displaced by the incident. The owner has put them up in a local hotel at the moment, which was a charitable act, but I think that he is going to be in a certain amount of hot water.

Chinatown is the most densely populated part of Boston and has some its oldest and eclectic architecture. It is vibrant socially, but pretty rough around the edges, and its territory has been the target of developers who have been building high rise apartments for higher income tenants. 25 Harrison is not an exception, in my opinion.

and yet more st. louis

This picture is from a blog on St. Louis that I am very impressed by. This is the link: http://www.stlouiscitytalk.com/

This blog and Google maps have been allowing me to conduct a tour of the city. I feel like Tamburlaine standing over his maps, charting the formation of his empire. And all of this electronic information is worth less than the actual experience of standing on a street corner in the real place. That one fleeting moment creating the most profound and unique feeling and memory for all the senses. I may never go to St. Louis, and even if did, how many trips would it take, how many years, before I could claim to know the place?

finding the bottom

I'm trying to get excited about this Pruitt Igoe competition, and it's hard, because the part of St. Louis near the site looks like it got hit pretty hard by 20th century deurbanization. "Deurbanization"--now there's a concept. All statistics point to the increasing importance of cities in the modern age, but the high density, centralized, walkable city that forms the basis of architectural mythology seems to be the exception rather than the rule. People drive cars. Proximity becomes less of an absolute geographical condition and more of a function of road access, parking capacity, contemporary amenities and good reputation. That last feature seems to be the important quality. Once a place is perceived as being in decline it becomes hard to put the pieces back together. All this is old hat.

The libertarian in me says "Unleash the force of the free market." What seems to have happened, and what continues to happen, is that the market has spoken and it says: "We've moved out to the suburbs and that's where we want to stay."

hollow architecture

I wonder if we have hit the point of diminishing marginal returns for efficiency in material use in buildings? An old masonry structure like a cathedral might have as much as 30% of its floor area given over to structure. A modern box store might have as little as 10%. Given new standards for energy performance, we might start devoting a little more area to exterior walls to improve the quality of the thermal barrier. I'm in favor of that.

Also, I think that efficiency in architecture is a curious issue. The average office worker takes up about 8 sq. feet in a chair and gets another 12 s.f. for a desk. Conventional programming guidelines typically allocate 250+ gross s.f. for each worker to account for circulation, common spaces, structure and plain old elbow room. An ignorant bean counter might look to squeeze more productivity out of a building by limiting area per worker, but I doubt that such measure would realize improved workplace performance. I'm probably wrong about this and as punishment I'll be working in coffin sized cubicle next year.

at home-among other things

I'm reading Bill Bryson's book, At Home. It is an illuminating and disturbing experience, which is his intent. As an architect, I take many things for granted, but I'm occasionally responsible for explaining why things should be done in a certain way to clients, contractors, and other designers. Usually, these explanations don't go to the heart of the matter--like why do we need formal rooms in houses when we never use them? (Thorstein Veblen can explain that one better than any architect)

The history of domesticity makes me grateful for the way we live now, and I am allowing myself to be optimistic about some future state when we have shed some disturbing habits, or at least, replaced them with less wasteful and disturbing ones.

This is one of the most ridiculous private homes ever designed and built. By an Englishman, of course.

pruitt igoe - so help us

A photo to the entrance of the Pruitt-Igoe site in St. Louis, Missouri. There's a design competition to try to come up with ideas of what to do with the site which I'm thinking of entering. The fact that I know almost nothing about site design and master planning doesn't bother me. I could go off on a tear now about how this is another tired tale about the hollowing out of American cities, but I'm too tired to go into that.

What do we do with the empty spaces inside old American cities? Will they ever fill up again? I'm leaning away from traditional architecture on this issue. Where is the demand? What do people want? Holding onto property that may have some hypothetical value in the far distant future betrays the needs and desires of the present.

Final thought on the Manhattan grid. I should be more aggressive in pointing out that its geometric regularity has nothing to do with democratic values. Such comparisons reach too far. The substance of New York is inequality, which in the case of everyone striving for something better is not necessarily a bad thing. The layout of the streets has tended to reinforce inequality in a systemic way. The first one now may later be last, but I'm nor sure I'll live long enough to see it, especially there.

february is for frank lloyd wright

A house designed by Wright is for sale in Illinois. The job that would frighten me the most as an architect would involve having the responsibility for restoring or modifying a historic property like this one. The over-used note on drawings "Match Existing" simply wouldn't be enough for a situation like this.

This place doesn't look like it's in too bad a condition. Famous last words.