The Vardø project is an anomalous part of the Norwegian public roads administration’s admirable National Tourist Routes program, through which architecturally distinctive and environmentally sensitive structures are being erected to encourage visits to outposts of exceptional natural beauty, from spectacular snow-covered mountain ranges to vast tundra traversed by herds of reindeer. Dispersed in groups of two to five stops along eighteen separate stretches of highway on or near Norway’s 15,000-mile-long fjord-infiltrated coastline, nearly seventy such destinations have thus far been completed. This is by far the most exemplary public works initiative undertaken by any nation in recent memory.
These interventions range from scenic viewing platforms and bicycle storage shelters to rest stations and hiking paths. The vast majority of them are by young, largely unknown, but clearly talented Norwegians. In this case, however, the sponsors sought foreign artists of established reputation, who could meet the difficult challenge of conjuring a monument to strange, long-ago events that left no visible remains.
@ The New York Review of Books
Peter Zumthor is one of my favorite architects; his Brother Klaus Field Chapel was a touchstone while writing my novel. I hope I get a chance to see his work in person someday.
The psychogeography of ZAZEN is wrought out of cities like Portland and Seattle, but it is also the Mission District and Williamsburg, the Lower East Side and other places too. I’ve always had dreams of amalgamated cities. When I started writing ZAZEN the city showed up already built. I never said, “I’m going to put this here so that it works for this scene.” It was more like, “Man, I had no idea there was a boarded up International district over that hill, how do I use it?” I didn’t name the city because it was very, very important to me that it be a certain kind of archetypal city and not a solid location, but rather a location that emerged out of a constellation of certain ideas, more like a set of chemical reactions whose compound always contains the same properties. The Situationists Anthology may have marked me for life. I read it when I was eighteen. It was either that or PK Dick.
~ Vanessa Veselka @ The Faster Times
“We always wanted to do up this ruin,” Mrs. Maclean-Bristol said. “But we wanted to be honest to it, as the ruin itself was what we liked. People on Coll have incredibly personal relationships with ruins on the island, so we didn’t want to create the sense that it would be utterly destroyed forever, with a silly pastiche in its place.”
@ NY Times
Spending four days embedded with the New Urbanists is one long exercise is cognitive dissonance. Thirty years after Duany first formulated their basic principles, they have far outgrown their image as the advocates of quaint cottages (see: Seaside, Florida, Celebration, Florida) and are really in the business of finding spatial fixes to social challenges, whether public health, water scarcity, affording housing, disaster relief, or the future of good. What they can’t agree on is the scope of the problem — should they be making the best of suburban America’s bad situation, or building lifeboats for the end of the world? Nowhere was this cognitive dissonance more apparent than in the session introducing what Duany might as well call the the New New Urbanism: agrarian urbanism.
@ Fast Company (via The Vigorous North)
Today we must act again to transform our cities. The commercial real estate binge of the past decade and the growth of online shopping as an alternative to brick-and-mortar stores have left more than 200,000 acres of vacant retail, office and industrial space. Residential real estate is a massive problem as well. Distressed properties are a drag on our communities and the economy and threaten to topple even more banks that hold mortgages on these “toxic assets.”
We need to move these toxic assets off the banks’ books, reduce the surplus of commercial space and create jobs, all while revitalizing our cities. This brings us back to Olmsted.
Olmsted designed transformative parks, campuses and greenways; his firm completed an amazing 6,000 commissions and launched a green wave across 19th-century America. The same kind of wave could help resolve the 21st-century real estate mess.
We don’t have the luxury of vacant land that Olmsted often started with, so we must bulldoze underperforming and underused property, put people to work creating parks on some of the land and “bank” the rest until the economy recovers.
@ Washington Post
I’m reading JG Ballard’s Super-Cannes at the moment, but these days aren’t we all:
In the unforgiving light of the crash, these remade places looked even more desolate. The confidence trick appears to have failed, with the desired influx of wealthy residents from the suburbs into the inner city either a failure or a deeply ambiguous success, resulting in polarised spaces, gated communities and lots of private security. When I visited certain of these places, I was told that housing associations had been approached to buy up the new flats, but refused because they were far below Parker Morris standards.
There is a windswept bleakness about many of the new enclaves, but it’s a curious new kind of bleak. While the ruins of the postwar settlement’s architecture – the under-maintained estates, the yawningly wide plazas, the vertiginous new spaces of towers and walkways – elicited aesthetic responses in post-punk and electronic music that matched the starkness, power and modernity of their setting, how do you respond critically to something that is trying so desperately not to offend?
~ Owen Hatherley