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Long Secret, Ancient Ruins Are Revealed in Utah
Archaeologists pulled aside a curtain on Wednesday to reveal what can only be called a secret garden: the pristinely preserved ruins of an ancient civilization that was long ago lost to the mists of time in the remote cliffs of eastern Utah, then resolutely protected over the last 50 years by a stubborn local rancher who kept mum about what he knew.
UPDATE: I am so delighted and astonished by the approach described below that I am putting this post back near the top so no one will miss it.
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This article titled We need a new city planner has a spellbinding passage which seems to suggest that someone has long-ago preceded me and has taken The Three Rules and set them in code and said "That's it. Now go build."
On the advice of Jacobs and Toronto planner Ken Greenberg, Bedford did that in 1996 ago in the King-Spadina area by getting rid of all the zoning rules but two: new buildings could not be set back from the street, and the height of new buildings had to be no greater than existing buildings. The rules would not dictate how buildings could be used or how many square feet they could be: if the height was right and the building came out to the sidewalk, everything else was up to the owner. (italics added -DS)To push all those zoning controls aside and allow decisions to be made not by planners and politicians but owners and the market was extraordinary, and these innovations have been terrific for the King-Spadina area. The place is humming with development.
Did they really boil down the code to such a simple formula? Is that really what they've done? If so, Terrific! And there's my libertarian land use planning: set the fewest possible rules and get out of the way.
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Luke Franci also thinks its cool.
Felix Salmon writes about Solar energy in California and offered this (largely paranthetical) statement:
...but the problem is that most of the wealth being created by rising housing prices is going to property developers, while none is going to the state.
Well I wonder if Felix is factoring in the profits which accrue to people who already own a house? I would think that such an increase in value vastly oustrips the profits to builders from increase in value which happen every now and again in very hot markets (i.e. between the time they initiate a project and when they bring it to market.)
In either case such increase in value is reflected in transfer taxes at closing. (I assume that California has some sort of transfer tax.) Plus of course there is a higher base from which the annual Property Tax is figured on all houses. (I am not clear on the reach of Prop 13(?) which fixed property taxes but I think it ends at the sale of a property. No?)
So the State does gain, which if you think that's a good thing, then there you are.
Moreover, there is a larger point that rising house values are to some degree a creation of public policy. One may agree or disagree with growth-management restrictions but I think it's accurate to pin a signficant part of the increase in housing to a general sense of scarcity -- which benefits almost everyone except those people who do not have any property. So one can argue that the State should not be in a position to directly profit from a scarcity which it has a large role in creating. Why give government policy makers an incentive to let prices float higher by giving them a larger share of such increase?
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Miss Representation also comments (oh so gently) on Solar energy in California:
I'm going to set a fire in Postel's kitchen and see if she calls the fire department. Fucking libertarians. What about the inherent facism of building codes? Shouldn't the market determine how much or little insulation is necessary? Or the inclusion of a vapor barrier? And what about requiring specific 7 and 28 day load bearing capabilities for concrete? Dictatorship!
Nice. Play nice now. Unless it makes you "feel better."
Qubec Urbain dit:
8e dition de l'open de photographie citadineC'est le retour de l'open Qubec urbain de photographie citadine, version amliore! Les ditions prcdentes n'taient qu'une prsentation des photos reues. Cette fois, il s'agit bel et bien d'un concours avec juge et prix.
Que pourrez-vous gagner? Le plus qu'intressant livre de David Sucher : City Comforts, how to build an urban village (ISBN 0-9642680-1-9). L'ouvrage sera sign par l'auteur. Il s'agit d'un prix d'une valeur d'environ 35 $.
One reader left a comment at Harry's Place on a post titled Where are the eloquent insults of yesteryear?.
My own response was as follows:
You don't get it, do you? It's obviously not the saying of "fuck yourself" which is the issue. It's the shallow absurdity of a man excusing himself (from what even a "forceful" Republican must see is an embarrassng faux pas) because it made him "feel better." What unintentional hilarity. His Party claims to be all about -- very explicitly -- the very opposite: duty, self-control, honor and much other cant. (Of course it's only cant if you can't and can't even admit it.) Yet Cheney's staff excuses his vulgarity because it made him "feel better." If the guy wasn't a VP I'd think he was applying for job as Vice-Chief Buffooon.
Cheney's comment came up several times this weekend at the beach and the consensus was that since our V-P has given us license to express ourselves -- especially those of us who can claim to be "forceful" persons -- it would seem to be quite healthy for anyone who choses to write to the Veep to express themselves in any manner -- even using a crude vulgarity including the "F" word. Such an expression of sentiment is, following our Vice-President, to be excused, maybe even lauded, if it makes you "feel better."
Just to make it crystal clear: the correct standard for human behavior is not that it makes you "feel better." The very idea is sickeningly adolescent. And if it were so, a whole of things which even Republicans claim to find despicable -- bestiality, for example -- would be not only legal but laudatory.
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I am assured that I have mis-understood the commenter. I don't think I did, but if that is so, I apologize. And of course the basic issue is not what she did or did not mean or what David Sucher did or did not misunderstand.
The obvious to me issue is that we have a buffoon of a bully as Vice President who doesn't have advisiors with presence of mind sufficient to recognize that it is not good for the country for our near-president to be (and to be seen to be as) a man who puts his own personal feelings ahead of the welfare of the nation. It made him "feel better." How stupid. How funny.
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Alan Sullivan also takes note of the problem of Mr. Cheney and civility. I don't think I could possibly agree with his conclusion but his is an interesting mind with which to disagree.
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John Massengale weighs in sensibly about Vice-President Dick Cheney & the F-Word and elevates the discussion.
Very pleasant and stimulating company; now off to a Wild Beach Party (that's the party, not the beach) for the rest of the weekend. Will try to post my thoughts on what I/we saw early next week.
UPDATE: Don't miss Scott Neilson's Downtown Seattle Public Library Walkthrough.
UPDATE 2: I can see that the difficulty is going to be to discipline myself to sit down and spend time with (by wrting) a building and architect that really don't interest me. I mean life is short and Scott Neilson's photos remind me that the Library is essentially a bore, a whole lot of OK corporate architecture dressed up in pretentious, obsurantist "design theory." I was reminded of nothing more than a the atrium of a Hyatt Hotel or the cold, hard, grand spaces of an airport; all very well and good but not the cozy, intimacy I like in a place where I want to sit down and focus my attention on a book. And not even remotely inspiring. Koolhaas' architecture reminds me in this instance of the saying that "marketing trumps talent, skill, inspiration and hard work."
Bottom line and I will get it out now before I systematically explain in a future post:
• the exterior --- about as bad as I 've seen by way of contributing to city life;
• the interior -- OK. Just OK. Nothing gross, nothing special. A few nice touches here and there. But mostly (if one knows the cost and hoopla surrounding the structure) a sad and overblown story.
One small anecdote -- and maybe some one out there can help me with further research -- but when I first looked into Koolhaas and his Office for Metrolpolitan Architecture (OMA) several years ago I discovered readily that OMA was a wholly-owned division of an enormous Dutch engineering firm....some group which appeared to me to be on the scale of a Bechtel, though I may have gotten that wrong. Needless to say I was surprised. Koolhaas and his firm present themselves as if they are some street guerrilla architects with a take on the world so fresh and radical that it could only exist at the margins of society. But actually a division of huge engineering firm? Well I have lost the URL to the engineering firm and the OMA site makes no mention (surprise!) of the parent. Anyone have any information? Thanks.
And now I get how OMA might very well exist within such an organization in a rain-making "look how artistic we are beneath our green-eyeshades" manner. The Library is corporate architecture at its most mediocre: Vain, expensive, pretentious and in some aspects very very stupid. More later. And don't miss Scott's photos.
UPDATE 3: David White's comment (below) sums it up nicely: the Library is not at all intuitive i.e. as a new user one does not sense naturally and comfortably how the building is organized. You know how it is in a restaurant? You can always know (if the place is designed typically) where to find the wash rooms? That's what I call intutive design -- there are enough queues and clues so that one knows how to use the space without ever having been there before. The Seattle Public Library is not, to my senses, like that at all.
UPDATE 4: Don't miss Matthew Amster-Burton's remarks on the field trip.
I never understood that the Republicans were actually the party of me-ism in which one's feelings are the central criterion for human behavior. How wrong I was, as Vice President Cheney demontrates:
By historical standards, Vice President Cheney's grunted command this week on the floor of the Senate for Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to contort himself into an impossible sexual position was most economical. And, he told Fox News yesterday, "I felt better after I said it."
When will we finally get the adults back in the White House?
Seriously, I think the boys and girls in the White House are going off the deep-end. We all say thoughtless and dumb things on ocassion; and the pressure in the White House at this time of national acknowledgement of major misjudgment must be extraordinary; so I have a bit of sympathy that a man, even a holder of high office, could let loose with a rudeness.
But that he is so clumsy and inept to think that it reflects well on him and the Office and his party to wear his vulagrity as a badge of "It felt good so it's OK" is impossible to grasp. Does he realize he stupid that sounds? How silly? Where are you now, Bill Bennett, finger-wagging hypocrite, when the Republicans really need you?
"Brutal" Architecture. And don't miss the comments.
Project for Public Spaces offers An Open Letter to the New York Times
In finding a replacement for architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, you have the unique chance to broaden coverage of the design world in a way that reflects many new currents erupting in the field. Just as Mr. Muschamp himself reinvented architecture criticism with stylish writing that wove intellectual and cultural strands from many disciplines into passionate statements about particular works, the Times' next critic could push the boundaries of what design is and, even more boldly, explore its deepest purpose. The New York Times is the most powerful voice in architecture today, read and referred to by influential people in all corners of the country. The urban landscape in Tampa, Tacoma, and Toledo is shaped in part by opinions disseminated in the Sunday edition of your newspaper. The distinguishing feature of this new direction in design is the subtle but significant shift from the "project" to the "place."Both inside and outside the formal boundaries of architecture there is today a tremendous energy being devoted to rethinking how buildings, streets, and green spaces shape our lives, our communities, our economy, our democracy, and our sense of ourselves. The distinguishing feature of this new direction in design is the subtle but significant shift from the "project" to the "place." This small recalibration in focus delivers an enormous change in results. When creating a place becomes the goal, then important questions about what happens all around and throughout the building or development move to the forefront. It's a step away from the 20th Century vision of the architect's work as an isolated triumph of aesthetic devotion (even fetishism) to a more inclusive 21st Century idea of the designer as part of a vibrant, messy, exhilarating process of creating a living, breathing community.
UNITED STATES COMMEMORATIVE POSTAGE STAMP TO HONOR R. BUCKMINSTER FULLERFifty years ago, R. Buckminster Fuller obtained the patent for his most famous invention - the geodesic dome, and next month the U.S. Postal Service will issue a commemorative postage stamp honoring the legendary American inventor, architect, engineer, designer, geometrician, cartographer and philosopher.
Michael Blowhard says:
.......I notice that Kunstler's June Eyesore of the Month award (here) goes to the very speedy new Rem Koolhaas-designed library in Seattle. Kunstler makes some good jokes at the place's expense. David Sucher tours the library this Saturday and will blog about it soon after. I'm eager to read David's observations and verdict.
(Click to enlarge.)
Download Page 19.pdf
This opinion is funny:
Yet even Mr. Muschamp's enemies will grudgingly admit that he is one of the most intelligent critics out there. And it's not just his accumulated knowledge of the field of architecture -- he is virtually alone in his ability to draw together seemingly divergent cultural threads, reaching into philosophy, fashion and history. "He's a really keen intellect," said fellow critic James Russell, "because he knows what's going on at every aesthetic level better than anyone else writing."
Sound like bunk to me. Based on reading Muschamp for a number of years. I can't remember ever reading a column of his that was anything more than babble. Oh, well, Russell is surely just being kind; he couldn't actually believe what he is saying, or maybe the reporter didn't include the full thought. Muschamp knows more about "every aestehtic level" (whatever that means) than "anyone else writing"? Give me a break.
UPDATE: I'd go so far as to say that even within his own context -- adulation of Very Large Scale Sculpture (aka the Precious Object Building), Muschamp's criticism was boring and banal, totally conventional and without spark. Actually, I too like precious objects, the surprise of the unexpected. But even on his own terms, the fellow was a yawner.
For example, I have no problem with such a goofy structure as The Vortex --
-- about which Brian Micklethwait enthuses here. Such building can be fun and within bounds, pleasantly startling. But they present urbanistic issues which while easily solved can only be solved if one is aware of the problem. But Muschamp never wrote about starchitecture in anything but a breathless, adolescent and ultimately trivializing way. Boring, too, after the first 50 such columns.
As Muschamp Goes, Angry Adversaries Ready for Revenge
Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times' architecture critic, is stepping down from his post much as he attained it: surrounded by applause. Twelve years ago, he was called the country's next great critic; today, his army of detractors is all too happy to see him leave.
But will his replacement be any better? From the little I have read of the guy's work so far, I am skeptical.
UPDATE: Sorry but I guess I should have mentioned that L.A. Observed rumors (is that a verb?) as follows:
New York magazine's Intelligencer reports that L.A. Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff is close to replacing Herbert Muschamp as the lead architecture writer for the New York Times. It's based on sources, since the NYT denies a decision has been made and the two principals aren't talking, but the magazine says that Muschamp will move over to write mainly for the New York Times Magazine and that Ouroussoff was his recommendation for a replacement. L.A. Times newsroom gossip seems to believe that Ouroussoff -- a Pulitzer finalist in criticism each of the last two years -- is gone.
James S. Russell of STICKS & STONES seems to have bought the anti-monorail ticket full-bore while not being sure where the line is going:
The transportation-planning establishment finds the idea almost completely cockeyed (and the local engineer that started the latest battle was questioning some of the technical and engineering assumptions) but the buffs defend the concept with near-cultlike commitment, even as the project threatens to sink under exactly the same interest-group infighting that made a mess of the light rail. They all but ran the engineer out of town on a monorail. I can’t speak to the technical issues, but this is the most bizarre transportation spectacle I have seen played out in living memory.
And so on and so on.
I wish Russell had looked into the history, routes, technical issues -- (in fact how can one even opine on a transport system without being able to "speak to the technical issues" ?-- in large part, that's what the system is!) -- a little more as it would have been nice to have had his strong critical intelligence consider the monorail based on a sound footing of facts rather than the bubbles of innaccuracy which burble up in every sentence; I don't think there is a sentence in the piece which should not be challenged as to simple accuracy and/or emphasis.
For example, isn't it rather important that the eminent engineer mentioned above (who by no plausible account "started the latest battle") is a structural engineer with no experience in transportation planning? Sure he has a right to speak out -- but as a citizen, and I am not sure that he even votes in Seattle, and this project was a Seattle-only project. But for him to present himself as an expert on transport because he is a structural engineer is misrepresentation. And he was hardly run out of town; the very idea is misleading as this guy's opposition to the monorail only advances his public stature among the significant number of people who shares Russell's view while of course being panned by those who support the monorail. I think that's the way it works: you speak out on a public issue and some people like it, some people don't.
But go read it as it's always startling to see what the press says about an event where one has been an eye-witness. Understandably but sadly, the reporter usually, as here, get it wrong on even the basics.
Now just to repeat what I have written before on this blog: reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of the monorail but my expectation is that they will do so reasonably and based on some depth of knowledge and perhaps even conversation with these monorail "buffs!"
Here is a stimulating passage from Blogjack on Ski Bums and immigrants: more quintile analysis
More on ski bums: America is so rich that middle-class-or-better americans have the luxury of being able to take a year or more off to write a novel, get a degree, travel around the world, "find themselves", start a business or what have you, living off savings for a while, relying on family, friends, loans and perhaps the possibility of an emergency backup job for support. Followup point: The richer we get, the more Americans will be financially secure enough to do this. If you know you're employable at a job with salary to spare or have sufficient savings, there's less downside in taking time off to do something fun or experimental. The ideal american economy as far as I'm concerned would be one where nobody is poor involuntarily but many are poor by choice for a while because they like being a ski bum or pursuing a phd or whatever. But that society would show up as "bad" to the sort of person who does quintile comparisons.More on immigrants: Every immigrant who comes here from central america to work in our fields and restaurants and dry cleaning establishments, starts out with a miserable standard of living but one that is vastly better than what they had in, say, Mexico. They are experiencing upward mobility moving from "poor in Mexico" to "poor in the US", and that's only the beginning. Any effort to prevent such people from showing up in our poverty statistics via redistribution would probably generate a huge political backlash against immigration in general. We'd close the borders tighter than they already are, making all the new immigrants WORSE off than they are by denying them the option of coming here and improving their life. Far better to allow open immigration, and allow them to be "poor" by our standards for a while, even if it does makes our numbers look worse than those of Finland for a while. It's worth it.
As I said in one of the comments, I have no strong opinion about immigration. But I am impressed with the way the author works with the reasons behind our statistics (assuming that the author has the basic facts right on how these income statistics are developed)
Download Page 18.pdf
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And sorry about missing yesterday. It just slipped my mind; I was very busy and I had no sense that anyone was even reading the pages from the book, so posting them was not high on my horizon.
...by Laurence Aurbach at Common Monkeyflower on New Urbanism about which I posted a few days ago here:
Courrges has chosen to demonize NU as a villain that's out to get our money and steal our freedom to live the way we want to. Any land use regulation he doesn't like, he calls new urbanism. It's just surprising that a so-called "research fellow" is a) focusing on new urbanism (which after all represents a tiny portion of U.S. land development and regulations) when there are so many coercive laws and subsidies associated with conventional development that have unjust and harmful impacts, and b) goes for cheap exaggerations, guilt-by-association, distortions, and outright falsities, when there are a number of real philosophical differences that libertarians could profitably debate. For instance, new urbanists have had a hand in reforming public housing guidelines and have been closely associated with HOPE VI projects. Libertarians might criticize this as a coercive and wasteful use of public funds.
Where Chess Is King and the People Are the Pawns
Back in the days of the Silk Road caravans, this is what people might have called a mirage - a huge glass dome, surrounded by a California-style housing development, rising from the parched brown steppe.That shimmering vision has been brought to life here in Elista, the capital of the Russian republic of Kalmykia, a monument to the power of ego over nature, not to mention common sense and even reason. Its name is Chess City.
Continue reading ""No taxation without representation" -- Not a bad idea everywhere" »
How not to sound like an idiot
Terrific hints. Thanks, Terry.
11 AM
Saturday
June 26, 2004
All welcome.
And just to clarify, I am not conducting a tour. I am taking a tour. The purpose of the Tour is to start to assess the building as a piece of urbanism and whether/how it works/doesn't work to make Seattle a more comfortable place. And I thought it would be fun to pay my first visit to this piece of supposed "world-class architecture" in the company of other people concerned with buildings and cities. We'll start by walking around the Library to see how it meets the sidewalk, then enter and start to use it; there are some particular books I'd like to borrow.
UPDATE: Where to meet? The sidewalks surrounding the structure seem pretty bereft of people (I had to drive by on an errand so I got some vague sense of the "hum" around it). So there is probbaly not much problem with simply not specifying a meeting spot, just as one would not bother to specify too-exact a spot if one were meeting in an empty outdoor parking lot at 2AM.
But for the sake of the order, let's say the southwest corner of the building. I will be arriving by car so that will have the opportunity fo trying out the parking garage
It's premature to pile-on -- hey! the field trip is next Saturday at 11AM and I haven't even really given the building a glance yet -- but this is discouraging:
Acclaimed library disappoints disabled, but corrections promised To a person in a wheelchair, a mother pushing a baby carriage or a blind woman with a guide dog, the $165.5 million marvel looming over Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle is more about style and less about movement and accessibility than what the disabled community has come to expect from its public buildings.While the library management asked people with disabilities for their comments on the library design, several who were on that committee said their suggestions were not incorporated.
"My impression was that the designers went for the minimum as far as accessibility," said Julie Grant, who is with the University of Washington's DO-IT program for disabled students. "It's like someone pulled out a book with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) codes and did 'just' that, and nothing more."
A friend's mother is 100 (!) and in a wheel-chair. He has been curious about the book spiral and how people in chairs can negotiate it.
Welcome to the WhereProject weblog, an experiment in place-based blogging designed to help me explore the relationship between literacy, place, and the web.As a graduate student in Composition and Rhetoric, I am beginning a dissertation project I'm currently calling "Composition as Orientation: Place Literacy in a Networked World." As part of this project, I'm wrestling with the question, "Can the web help us develop a deeper sense of place?"
I don't know. But as Stewart Brand once put it, life is about "trying stuff." So go for it!
Btw, in a recent post I mentioned Woodward's Plan of Attack. I highly recommend it. If only for the following anecdote and nothing else it is worth the price of admission.
Do you realize that in the run-up to the war, Bush 2 did not consult -- not once -- with his father Bush 1 on whether we should attack Iraq? (Bush directly confirms that fact to Woodward.) Think about it. Events and one Supreme Court voter cast up the son to succeed the father and to be in position to wage war on the very same sociopath. Yet the junior did not think it worthwhile to seek counsel from the senior who, uniquely on the planet, held a responsibilty identical to his own.
Is W. so full of hubris that he felt he could learn nothing from Bush 1, a man for whom I did not vote but whom I can admire: as a young man in WW2 a genuine war hero and now at 80 still parachuting from a plane? And W felt that he had nothing to learn from him? It is just about for that fact alone that I suggest that Junior go back to the ranch.
There's lot of other sadly revealing anecdotes in the Woodward book, too. Read it.
What an odd idea. Building settlements oriented to some or other means of transport.
I would think -- no joke -- that it makes far more sense to design settlements around people.
Now I think I know what folks are trying to communicate when they talk about Transit-oriented development (TOD) and they probably like the same sort of places that I do. But I have never liked the phrase. Still don't. Puts, so to speak, the car before the horse. Similar to the grave mistake of setting-forth "densification" as a specific goal.
Howard Fineman of Newsweek has this pleasant thought:
Best Advice for Kerry: Be Invisible
Bush may self-destruct by the time November election occurs.June 16 - I’ve figured out what Sen. John Kerry needs to do to win the White House this November: wrap himself in Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak. If the Massachusetts senator can only stay out of sight for long enough, George W. Bush’s presidency may sink into the sands of Iraq.
Bush’s decision to go to Iraq is one of the most fateful calls any president has made—right up there with Harry Truman’s decision to send aid to Greece and Turkey, JFK’s secret agreement to pull American missiles out of Turkey to end the Cuban missile crisis, and Ronald Reagan’s deal with Gorbachev to begin winding down the cold war. Because Bush’s decision was so important—and because it was so clearly his own to make—it’s central to the campaign. The questions of the season are and will remain: was it worth so much blood and treasure? Did it make us safer?
The American public seems to be slowly but steadily coming to the conclusion that the answer is “no.”
Mind you, I like George Bush. But he rolled the dice on his Presidency (as well as our national interest) and at some point you have to put aside personal loyalty and make a judgment about whether he has the wisdom to keep the job. He doesn't. He has to go. My own analysis of the war in prospect was "It's a good idea if it works. It's a bad idea if it doesn't." Part of the definition of whether it's a good idea must include the reality of elections i.e. if a specific plan which 'bets the company' can't show some progress within an election cycle, the harsh reality is that a political leader cannot take it on. That's not my preference but merely an observation on the single-minded short-term self-interest of voters.
None of that means that dealing with a viscious psychopath like Saddam Hussein was/is not a necessary and worthwhile thing to do. But it means that a politicians must do so in a manner which allows his program to continue i.e. he's got to get re-elected. Bush had other ways to aggressively engage with Hussein short of outright war. He chose war. It was not a choice, judging from Bob Woodward's recent book Plan of Attack, based on much considered judgment. So Bush has got to go so someone else more competent can continue the struggle. Unlike many people, my issue with Bush is not that he offered an energetic, take-the-struggle-to-the-enemy approach but simply that he has not gone about such engagement shrewdly.
One of the most astute political bloggers, Matthew Yglesias, wrote recently -- and I am pretty sure that that was the gist but I can't find his specific post -- that if you look at the practical physical risks of terrorism to people outside New York City and Washington, DC and Los Angeles, it's actually pretty slight. The theory runs, I guess, that of course terrorists will attack the biggest urban centers, that's where the power is and the media, too, and the bonus is that they get to kill a lot of Jews, too.
Well that last reason is pretty persuasive but in the big picture, I think Matt is wrong on this one. In fact, I would think that the bad guys would try to attack the most white-bread bland prosaic WASPy places possible -- some place of absolutely no strategic value and limited economic importance. Some place like Riverside, California or Boise, Idaho, some town of 50,000 in the middle of North Carolina. (But also some place where "middle eastern looking" guys -- hey! that could even be me! -- would not be noticed all that much so it's not a town of 500 in Wyoming.) The lesson would be of course that "You bad Americans just can't hide." Remember, it's called "terrorism" and the idea is to spread fear and emotional upset everywhere. So why limit it to NYC and DC and LA?
A few days into his grand experiment of eating all McDonald's, all the time, for 30 days straight, the New York film-maker Morgan Spurlock started complaining of headaches and other unpleasant side-effects: listlessness, depression, chest pains, shortness of breath, sexual dysfunction and more.
I've been curious for years that there is so little discussion, writing, conversation etc about real estate markets in other countries. As a participant in the real estate market -- as I guess, actually, is everyone else who exists in 4-dimensional space -- I have been curious about how it all happens in other countries. How does housing actually get built in Switzerland? What is the permit process like in Japan? How does one find an apartment in Rio? etc etc. and etc. And then finding so little discussion of the subject, I have been curious at the next level: why so little cross-cultural discussion? Is it simply too banal -- while at the same time drawing upon too much expertise -- to be available to most journalists?
Anyway, here's a discussion of Australian lesson for UK property, which, living as I do in a very hot market -- Seattle -- has resonance for me.
After taking off in 1996 the Australian housing market has boomed, much like ours, moving well above its long-term relationship with average earnings and undergoing a similar buy-to-let craze as Britain's.Their economy is growing, likes ours, and unemployment is at its lowest for decades while interest rates are still relatively low. One crucial difference: Australian house prices, without any obvious trigger, have started to fall and rather rapidly.
Government officials, who dread the prospect of a housing crash ahead of next year's election, prefer to point to the Netherlands and Ireland, where booms have not ended in tears and house prices have stopped going up, rather than started going down.
So they are hoping the Australian experience is one that won't sail round the world and lap up on Britain's shores.
Or Seattle's.
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UPDATE, from Alexandra in the Ukraine:
I don't know the *actual details* of real estate buying/selling/planning/building in Kyiv, but I can share some observations:
1. Lots of new construction in Kyiv--both downtown and in some outlying areas. I can see a half dozen construction cranes from my children's bedroom.
2. There is talk of building single-family homes with a "normal" mortgage set up. People would make payments to a certain bank account, and when 1/3 of the total price was in the account, construction would begin. Monthly mortgage financing/payments after that would be similar to the States, from what I understand. These would be in townhouse/duplex style homes in a bedroom community that's only about 20-30 minute metro ride from the center.
3. The apartment buildings I'm seeing finished right now, from the outside, look much prettier and less "communist" than the ones built even 5-10 years ago.
4. Investing in Ukraine is tricky. Great growth potential, but very complicated and risky.
5. There were no mall-type shopping complexes that I was aware of when we moved here 2 1/2 years ago. A few months ago I was searching for a particular item, and went to 5 in one day. (Two were underground.)
Just some observations you might find interesting. . .
...most heartily with Murph about shallow right-wingers who pretend to be both informed about the built environment, and about new urbanism in particular. I read the same article about which Murph posts and its disingenuous mis-reprsentations annoyed me also.
So I am glad that Murph takes on right-wingers who give conservativism about land use a bad name because they have such a limited basis in fact along with an unlimited imagination in applying ideology to the physical reality of the world. There is much to criticize in new urbanism but some folks are so ignorant that they don't even know what they are! That's the funny thing to me: reading the right-wing tripe about new urbanism and realizing that such critics don't understand NU well-enough to really understand its weak points. It's comical. And it wakes me up in the morning!
It's a Dirty Job, but They Do It, Secretly, in Iraq
It was an engineering success on the order of stringing the first cables for the Brooklyn Bridge or coaxing the first glimmer of starlight through some giant telescope to unravel the structure of the universe.But when it occurred late last month, the achievement remained cloaked in absolute secrecy, marked only by a quiet celebration among participants who may remain forever unknown to history.
Continue reading "It's difficult for me to get a clear sense of what is happening in Iraq" »
Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands
A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.
If nothing else, read this article.
Princeton Architectural Press announces The Storm and the Fall
By any measure, Lebbeus Woods is one of the most original architects working today. His body of theoretical work focuses on buildings of crisis, whether marred by major earthquakes, suffering the effects of economic embargo, or damaged by war. Since the destruction of the World Trade Center, his designs have taken on new meaning and significance. In The Storm and the Fall, Woods brings his visions to a new depth, moving them from feverishly rendered drawings to three-dimensional space. The book focuses on two recent Woods installations --- one at the Houghton Gallery at New York's Cooper Union, the other at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris --- that address the role of today's architecture. The Storm critiques the geometric box that rules most building designs and proposes instead a dynamic field of potential energy, represented by a complex array of vectors. The Fall crystallizes a built space in the midst of collapse, witnessing a moment too brief to inhabit --- except in imagination. Both pieces are explored in Woods's powerful sketches, renderings, models, and constructions, exposing the mutations that enable them to be.
"...critiques the geometric box that rules most building designs and proposes instead a dynamic field of potential energy, represented by a complex array of vectors."
Hmmm. Well I guess that's fine so long as those "dynamic fields of potential energy" engage successfully with the UBC (Uniform Building Code) and can hold up a matchstick. I have no knowledge of this man's work -- it might be wonderful -- but the publisher ought to hire someone to write blurbs who knows how to use small simple words. Of course maybe small simple words went out-the-door with the banal "geometric box."
Download Page 17.pdf
...but we need a new guy on the job and so maybe even corny things I would normally never do -- House Party for John Kerry -- are the order of the day.
Our first National House Party Day on May 22 was an amazing success. More than 40,000 people gathered at 2,000 homes in all 50 states, raising money and bringing thousands of new volunteers to the Kerry campaign. Grassroots fundraising, including house parties, allows us to keep up with the Bush-Cheney money machine. In addition, house parties help us build our volunteer base, which will be vital to winning in November.Hold your house party during our next National House Party Day on June 26th and take part in a live conference call with John Kerry and a special guest. The call will start at 7pm EDT, and to accommodate house parties on the West Coast, you can hear the call again by dialing in between 8pm and 11pm EDT.
I wrote about the phrase "went missing" on this blog last summer.
Now Arts & Letters Daily spotlights an article in titled American Idioms Have Gone Missing which discusses that very term:
What set the ball rolling, I believe, was use of the verb phrase "to go missing" to mean "disappear," as in a person or object that at one moment is available and visible and subsequently is nowhere to be found. "Disappear" doesn't perfectly convey this idea --it has too much of a Siegfried and Roy, presto-chango connotation --but, along with its slightly more melodramatic counterpart, "vanish," it had to do the job for a long time. "Go missing" is better, but it was resisted, probably for the very reason that it sounds so British. Along with variants "went missing" and "gone missing," it appeared in The New York Times not at all in 1983, and only twice in 1993.In 2001, however, the formulation was employed 24 times.
Download Page 16.pdf
OK. I've gotta go see it. It's my civic obligation. Who knows, maybe I'll like it.
If there are any readers in the Seattle area who would like to join me for a visit and coffee, please email to david at citycomforts.com and maybe we can figure out a time that works. I'm thinking of a weekend, of course. Black apparel advised.
Download Page 15.pdf
David Brooks, in a column titled Bitter at the Top writes:
This educated-class rivalry has muddied the role of economics in shaping the political landscape. Republicans still have an advantage the higher you go up the income scale, but the correlation between income and voting patterns is weaker. There is, for example, this large class of affluent professionals who are solidly Democratic. DataQuick Information Systems recently put out a list of 100 ZIP code areas where the median home price was above $500,000. By my count, at least 90 of these places --- from the Upper West Side to Santa Monica --- elect liberal Democrats.(italics added -- DS)
Does Brooks know how to count? I mean that literally. He seems to be saying that rich people vote predominantly liberal Democrat. Seems implausible, to put it mildly. But if it's so wouldn't it indicate something very positive for the Dems which they ought to be advertizing. I mean, isn't it generally accepted that rich people on average are smarter (not better or nicer, mind you) but simply smarter. I mean that's how by-and-large they got their money -- being smarter. So if the smarter people are liberal Democrats, isn't that instructive for the rest of us about how to vote? We try to follow the lead of rich people when it comes to buying cars, houses, clothes, vacations, schools for our kids, etc etc...Wouldn't the implication of Brooks' factoid (which, seriously, I tend to doubt as accurate) be that we should also follow their lead in politics?
No, bin Laden is quite sane -- but lately I have grown more worried that we are not.
It seems that I've heard the same dinner conversations as has had Hanson; and I too felt that deep-down fear for my country and for all civilzed things. I may differ with Hanson about whether we have the leadership in the White House to effectively pursue this effort, but I do hear the most distressing things from the urban intelligentsia.
UPDATE to comment #1: Well I do mention "urban intelligentsia" because that's who I spend my time with and so I can say with some expertise that I have heard the most appalling and unbelievable things -- along the lines of bin Laden just needing the chance to express his opinions -- honest! I heard that. And similar. It is NOT just one nut-case who thinks that all the evils of the world are due to American policy upon which I base this perspective. There is a most bizarre and troubling "blame US first" mentality amongst an awful lot of people I seem to meet.
Does that mean that I am a Bush-supporter and blame things on "liberals?" No. Puh-leeze. By-and-large I think that (along the lines set down by Bill Clinton) the sixties were a magnificent era and contributed profoundly (intellectually, morally, economically -- in every way) to our nation and the world. But Bush has totally squandered the political/moral authority offered to his Presidency to reshape the world as a result 9-11 and he needs to go; in general I have no use for the current crowd in power. And though while I will vote for Kerry (already donated money) I have not yet got a sense of what he would do. But I do believe that there is a war on and that the bad guys are trying to kill us and trying to understand their pain is irrelevant.
Austria's stain on Klimt beauty
Doesn't surprise me at all.
I'd say that the sentiments (third para below) about a new "cutting-edge" design in China -- A Glass Bubble That's Bringing Beijing to a Boil -- could well be applicable to Seattle.
China is treating the 2008 Olympics, to be held in Beijing, as an occasion to remake the capital. The government is razing old neighborhoods, laying hundreds of miles of roads and subway lines, and constructing monuments of modern architecture that the Communist Party hopes will stand as tributes to its leadership.But as billions of dollars of public money are spent on skyscrapers, stadiums and transportation facilities designed by the world's leading architects, local designers are complaining that many of the projects are overpriced and out of touch with Chinese history. Even in a place where challenges to the leadership's priorities are rarely permitted, voices of dissent are growing louder.
"We are a poor country, not a fancy country, and we should not be wasting our money on monstrosities," said Xiao Mo, an architectural historian at Qinghua University in Beijing who has campaigned against the theater project. "I believe it is an insult to the people of China."
This photograph appears to show something quite helpful, doesn't it? If I am looking catch a train to London, it explains to me how to get to Dorking railway station.
The reason for the sign is slightly more complicated than is obvious from the photo. Dorking is a town in London's commuter belt and a significant portion of the town's population travels regularly to London to work. Conversely, Dorking is in the middle of the Surrey Hills, and there is some beautiful scenery nearby, so many Londoners visit the area on the weekend (which was exactly what I was doing yesterday).
There are two separate railway lines running through the town. One of them is the line from London to Bognor Regis and other places on the south coast of England. The other is the line from Gatwick airport to Reading via Guildford. The two lines were presumably built by separate companies, and have separate stations. The station on the line to London is simply called Dorking station, and the vast majority of all rail traffic to the down goes to and from this station. The station on the line to Gatwick and Reading is Dorking (Deepdene) station, and relatively little traffic goes along this line. The stations are reasonably close together, being separated by about a five minute walk. This sign is actually directly outside Deepdene station.
So this is well and good. The sign is there to prevent people who do not realise that Dorking has two stations from coming across Deepdene and waiting there for a train to London that will never come. Presumably if I walk down the path that the sign is pointing to, I will reach the station with trains to London. Right?
Well, actually no. Following the direction of the sign, I will find myself on the platform of Deepdene station. You see, some vandal has gone to the trouble of rotating the sign 90 degrees, so that it now points directly to the wrong railway station. (No doubt the person who did this thought it would be a hilariously funny thing to do). Rather than helping people to find the right station, the sign now actually hinders this, and may reassure them that they are at the right station, even when they are at the wrong one. The situation is substantially worse than if there were no sign at all.
What is slghtly troubling about this is that the sign has clearly been in the wrong position for some time. Locals presumably know which station is which, but one would hope that someone from the police, the local government, one of the railway companies, or just a helpful citizen might have gone to the trouble of fixing the sign, which was after all put there in the first place to aid visitors from out of town. Death is of course too good for the person who rotated the sign in the first place, but one would hope there is enough civil society to fix it. But for now it appears there isn't.
-- Guest post by Michael Jennings of Michael Jennings.
In a very different context, (the death of Ronald Reagan), Tim Hulsey at
My Stupid Dog opines very thoughtfully on "greatness:"
Greatness doesn't sit well with individualism; greatness implies hierarchy and control, while individualism rejects them both. The problem of reconciling the two concepts has preoccupied Western thinkers for the past quarter of a millennium.(italics added - DS)
Hulsey has hit on something important; and in a different context it's one of the reasons that I so detest the boot-licking praise which so many people heap on guys like Koolhaas, Gehry, Wright etc etc. It's not just the substance of the assessment with which I disagree -- let's not confuse "talent" with :"godliness." It's the political overtone which repels -- what I see as an unbecoming and even scary need to raise up a talented practioner into a "great man." I'd call such simpering idolization "fascistic" if I were wanting to be overly-dramatic.
This whole train of thought was brought to mind (yet again!) by Michael Blowhard's post More on Frank Lloyd Wright (and don't forget to read the comments, many of which are interesting and some of which reflect an elevated degree of hero-worship). A leaky roof is defended as the reasonable result of leaving "an artwork out in the rain" by suggesting (in apparent seriousness) that "Only an architect of Wright's prodigious genius could (should) get away with saying -- brag about saying -- such a thing."
To me, such uncritical respect for "greatness" -- "If the great one does it, then it is OK" -- is related to a Presidency which could bring forth a memo suggesting that the power of torture is "inherent" in the President's office.
...such as Abandoned Cabling and specifically "Who Pays for Removing the Stuff?"
The 2002 National Electrical Code? (NEC) introduced a subtle and unheralded change that could prove to be a major deal killer,
Download Page 14.pdf
...to Rebuild the Twin Towers as they were on September 11, 2001.
The only problem is that the design -- from an urbanistic perspective at the very least --was so truly terrible.
I sympathize with the impulse to rebuild precisely as it existed as a gesture of defiance -- it was my own immediate reaction, in fact, on that terrible day-- but it would be a self-defeating gesture. The idea of inflicting a sterile plaza on ourselves as a monument to our steadfastness in the face of evil would be only playing into the hands of the bad guys.
Download Page 13.pdf
The new Seattle Public Library
What specifically don't I like about it? From the outside, the pompous, looming approach on 4th, in which the entry has all the appeal of a pore. Seattle doesn't need to shade its streets, and the high overhang won't protect that door from much rain. (Next visit, I'll star
