After Corbu » places

Hiatus

Quixote — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 02:11:12 +0000

Posting from now until Friday the 24th will be irregular, as I’m traveling to see people I love more than you, my (possibly imagined) readers. In the meantime, read Green Mars. Don’t let the genre and cover art fool you, it’s an amazing piece of literature.

And if you’ve already read said masterpiece, check out the Demimonde and argue the merits of gift economies with the hardcore fans. Or just make fun of lesser SciFi authors.

Borg Architecture

Quixote — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:20:15 +0000

This is the U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco. Now I find Morphosis buildings very interesting (here’s another), and I’m sure they’re well designed…but the facade strikes me as something built by Star Trek villains. Which is to say, it’s uber-industrial, hostile, and screams “don’t come near me or I’ll cut cha; I swear I’ll cut cha!”

Clearly, though, the kind people at the Borg Institute of Technology are the ideal Morphosis clients.

Seals Now!

Quixote — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 17:02:53 +0000

I’ve given myself an allowance of one indulgent, self-involved post a day out of the hope that that means it will always be easy to scroll past my narcissism. However, the post doesn’t count against my total if there’s something redeeming in it.

Thus, the coolness that is Elephant Seals:

Picture provided by AmazingK. Thanks!

There’s a beach North of Cambria in the central coast of California where these ridiculous creatures congregate to…well mostly to lay on the sand and do nothing, but also to mate. Living nearby, I’ve been there many times in the last few years.

I’m effectively moving away on Thursday, and I’m getting preemptively nostalgic for my time in the strange hick/hippie county that is San Luis Obispo. It’s a neat place. You should visit. But not to eat the seals.

Ultimate Phallus*

Quixote — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 06:01:34 +0000

*Until they build Next Big Thing next year.

Above is the Burj Dubai, the biggest building in the world. I’m glad the profits of petroleum resource exploitation are being well spent. I mean, the tower’s obviously a bargain at $800 billion.

Of interest to me (if no one else), it appears to use a bundled tube structural system (think Sears tower), and they’re getting impressive mileage out of that old standby. There are newer systems (such as the Mega-Structure system used in the Shanghai World Financial Center (pdf link)), that many professionals believe will produce the biggest buildings in the next few decades. So, we’ll see what happens, maybe skyhooks aren’t that far off…

Le Corbusier

Quixote — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 07:58:19 +0000

Today I’m feeling a little guilty* about the fact that I named this blog after Le Corbusier and have yet to write about him (this smidgen in my very first post hardly counts). I’ve been trying to compose an epic that actually ties together modern architecture and radical politics, which is my (heretofore not manifested) blog motif, but no dice. Maybe one day I’ll b able to write that. For now, I will chip away at the topic in digestible, blog-sized chunks. Today, my hack-job on Corbu (not really):

What frustrates me about the man’s work is that the individual instances of his architecture are often great. But he repeatably attempts to move beyond his natural scale and mold whole cities. These latter efforts are disasters.

The first such effort was the 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris. From Peter Hall’s Cities of Tomorrow (pg 222):

“Its 18 uniform 700-foot-high towers would have entailed the demolition of most of historic Paris north of the Seine save for a few monuments, some of which would be moved; the Place Vendome, which he liked as symbol of order, would be kept. He was apparently quite unable to understand why the plan aroused such an outcry in the city council, where he was called a barbarian.”

You do have to hand it to him. It takes serious chutzpah to suggest Paris should be leveled.

Then Hall quotes Corbusier himself:

“Statistics show us that business is conducted in the centre. This means that wide avenues must be driven through the centres of our towns. Therefore the existing centres must come down. To save itself, every great city must rebuild its center.”

This was the first time this kind of redevelopment to accommodate the car was suggested (and it would later happen in a great number of cities). Ignored is the deleterious effect this would have on the environment and the lived experience of the city.

Worse, the design explicitly assigned space to people based on their perceived social importance. More Hall:

“At the center were the skyscrapers of Plan Voisin which, Corbusier emphasized, were intended as offices for the elite cadres: industrialists, scientists, and artists (including, presumably, architects and planners);”

The lesser professions are on the periphery, ordered hierarchically. Each class has specific housing types intended for it, of decreasing size and quality as you become less important. Of course, these are the exact orderings that happen in cities normally, so it’s not like Le Corbusier is trashing our egalitarian society. However, it’s abhorrent to use state planning to reinforce social castes and divisions. In fact, that’s the opposite of what they teach you to do in planning school.

That said, it happens all the time. Corbu was inspiration to a lot of people.

*This is largely because an actual, honest-to-god architecture blog linked to me today, and thus I feel the need to up my built environment street cred. Lists of phallic buildings wasn’t going to cut it.

More Phelps

Quixote — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 14:46:55 +0000

We all thought he was going to Minnesota…but apparently he had to make a quick stop somewhere else God hates:

Los Angeles!!!

Anyway, I wanted to pass on this fundraising letter from the LA Gay & Lesbian Center in response to Phelps hate.

HS Debate ’08

Quixote — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 22:48:01 +0000

So this year’s High School Policy Debate topic is:

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its public health assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa.

And I’ve been thinking about this off and on for the last few weeks. (Yes, this is where I brandish my true-nerd membership card and reveal my previous life as a (mediocre to moderately successful) debater. Note, though, that I continue to follow the ‘bater scene because my father is a coach, not because I can’t let go of my youth. So there.)

Now, it bothers me that most kid’s (or adult’s for that matter) exposure to Africa is limited to the “Save-A-Child!” commercials and news reports of famine, pandemic, or genocide. And that my geographer wife was once asked “So…is Africa a country…or a continent?” And that a fellow engineer couldn’t imagine what work they could find over there.

[internal roar] It’s a continent of nearly one billion people. They are rich and poor, healthy and sick, urban and rural, and yes, they do have buildings big enough to require an engineer. You Morons.

I wish depictions of Africa in the media and in school curriculum reflected the whole place. It might even help us with racial stereotypes in this country.

But, putting that criticism aside, I feel this topic is problematic, because, unless there’s a trade-off, of course public health assistance should increase. How is that arguable? I realize I’ve become a bad debater as I’ve become more set in my beliefs, but you have to have drunk A Lot of the Ayn Rand koolaid to convincingly argue against helping people. Sure, you can argue that the money should be better spent elsewhere, but it’s hard to treat money as zero-sum in a debate round where it requires no political capital to say “We’ll get the money from ending Ag subsidies and auctioning off Yellowstone.”

Anyway, some links that caught my eye regarding African public health:

Crooked Timber has a good summary of recent studies on using DDT to fight Malaria.
Matt Zeitlin argues for aid that saves lives rather than builds big impressive things.
How the Gag Rule also decresed condom availability, spreading HIV. (Thanks Bush!)
Africans forced to eat GM foods.
The trash of the west is dumped in Africa.
Fresh off its success it Latin America, the drug war is opening a franchise in Africa

Forget increasing health assistance. If the US and it’s buddies just stopped shitting on Africa, and made the aid we do provide more meaningful, the situation would improve a lot.

Riveting

Quixote — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 10:25:50 +0000

Money quote from today’s New York Times article about the Minnesota bridge collapse:

“Bolts are better,” Mr. Peterson said, “but we wouldn’t consider anything wrong with rivets.”

Yeah, except for the rivets not being strong enough, there wasn’t anything wrong with them at all…

Strange thing though: the NTSB let everyone know that something may have been wrong with the bridge gusset plate design (a conclusion they arrived at in record time), but didn’t say what the problem may actually be. This makes the announcement useless as a safety precaution, as the problem certainly can’t be fixed on other bridges if it’s unclear what’s wrong.

However, the announcement does work well as a political precaution, helping to deflect criticism of Republican infrastructure cuts. Funny how that worked out…

Garage Secret Societies

Quixote — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 04:47:51 +0000

At Kosmograd, there is this post featuring the garages of Murmansk, where one may have a room of one’s own, though you may need to commute to it. I’m curious what the “so much going on” actually is, as this could mean anything from watching sports to fight club. When next I make it to the city, I’ll investigate.

“God Hates Minnesota”

Quixote — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 04:28:14 +0000

Fred Phelps is an asshole, and while there is no law against being an asshole, there is one against protesting at funerals in Minnesota, thank God. I have little doubt that this kind of over-the-top nuttery pushes the country to be more accepting of gays and, in this case, Minnesotans, but that is cold comfort to victims of Phelps’s hate.