Across America, recession-fueled foreclosures and plummeting home values have left countless properties abandoned and vulnerable to looting. As Scott Pelley reports, the problem has gotten so bad in Cleveland, Ohio, that county officials have demolished more than 1,000 homes this year – and plan to demolish 20,000 more – rather than let the blight spread and render nearby homes worthless.
Watch the entire segment from CBS 60 Minutes here.
Photo via Wired
Late last week, Iran celebrated its acquisition of a CIA-operated stealth drone that crashed in its territory. Photos and videos were released, showing a slick bat-shaped aircraft, grounded and jarringly out of place in a gymnasium-like setting in Tehran, its white, streamlined shell teeming with intelligence-revealing and reverse engineering possibilities. Moreover, the prized specimen was shown elevated on a podium, photographed against a colorful banner that reads “Death to America, Death to Israel, Death to England,” and in case those fighting words weren’t enough, another banner strung along the bottom of the podium reads, “America can’t do a damn thing,” reports Newsweek.
Photo via Newsweek
True, President Obama has already sent out a preliminary “can I have my drone back, please?” request, which was met with an expected negative response. Does this mean American really can’t do a damn thing? According to Wired, America has already done quite a few things, all of which rest in the drone’s design. Though Iran will probably enlist a fleet of scientists and engineers from equally curious sometime Iranian-allies China and Russia—both of whom have been known to routinely copy military hardware—aircraft designers in the U.S. are still quite hopeful that the drone dissection will reveal little more beyond the geometry of its seemingly Eero Saarinen-inspired, radar-evading airframe. Key components such as the alloys and non-metal composites in the undetectable exhaust ducting may be simple to identify but highly difficult to reproduce, reflecting decades of cutting-edge research. And the radar sensors, if in tact in the crashed drone, require foreign software to read—software that includes classified anti-tamper measures.
Simply put, the drone will require a great deal of work to reveal its inner workings, much more than a simple pry. It is, after all, an object crafted to embody the height of concealment and obscuration in an age when information is perhaps too readily available.
Speaking at the V&A last week, the former Foreign Office Architects partner said that she was “dubious” about volunteers who see working in these places as an “easy option”.
Moussavi, who teaches at Harvard and runs her own practice in London, said: “It’s quite telling that Harvard students, when they want to be activists, have to go to these areas of the world. It’s tougher to be an activist in America.
SOM, © Torkel Korling
Muchos ingenieros, científicos y otros trabajadores fueron reclutados en el lado este de Tennessee durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, para el desarrollo del Proyecto Manhattan. Debido a este crecimiento, SOM fue contratado para diseñar un plan maestro y diseños de casas para un sitio secreto previsto por el Gobierno Federal de los EE.UU.. El Plan Maestro para la nueva ciudad Oak Ridge se convertiría en una fundación para proyectos de diseño urbano, no sólo para SOM, sino que también para los estándares americanos.
SOM, © Torkel Korling
SOM utiliza una red de carreteras arteriales para ayudar a preservar el paisaje pintoresco de Oak Ridge. El plano de las calles se diseñó para ser lo más informativo posible para los usuarios. A las arterias principales se les dio el nombre de sacia, y las pequeñas calles que nacen a partir de estas, comienzan con la misma letra para validar las conexiones. Una “calle” se esperaba que fuera un callejón sin salida, mientras que un”camino” era una conexión con otra calle. Fue esta la configuración que hizo que los nuevos residentes de la ciudad se encontraran los unos a los otros con mayor facilidad.
Plan Maestro
La superficie utilizó casas modulares prefabricadas, departamentos y residencias. En la mayoría de las construcciones se utilizaron Paneles Cemesto, debido a su carácter durable y ligero, por lo tanto fácil de instalar. En dos años, Oak Ridge creció de 3.000 a 75.000 habitantes al año 1947.
SOM, © Torkel Korling
Para las casas prefabricadas, se utilizó una serie de plantillas, tal como se señaló en una carta. Por ejemplo, una casa de un sólo dormitorio se caracterizaba por la letra “A”, mientras que una casa para una familia numerosa se designaba con una “F”. Este tipo de organización eficiente le entregó a la comunidad una estructura planificada específica que muestra sus raíces como un proyecto de gobierno.
SOM, © Torkel Korling
El Plan Maestro de SOM se convirtió en un paso importante para la evolución de la planificación urbana de América. Un suelo de materia orgánica también fue un agente catalizador para la oficina en su trabajo con otros proyectos gubernamentales.
Arquitectos: SOM
Ubicación: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Estados Unidos
Año Proyecto: 1942-1949
Área Proyecto: 8,960 Hectáreas
Referencias: SOM: Oak Ridge New Town Master Plan
Fotografías: Torkel Korling
Clásicos de Arquitectura: Plan Maestro para la Nueva Ciudad Oak Ridge / SOM originalmente publicado en Plataforma Arquitectura el 29 Nov 2011.
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David Bainbridge, founder of the Passive Solar Institute, recently sent us his book Passive Solar Architecture. The book is a great introduction for anyone interested in passive solar architecture. The content is kept simple and straightforward. It allows any novice to become familiar with the main concepts and techniques used in the field. The authors, Bainbridge and Ken Haggard, have also provided a free-downloadable lab manual that students can use to learn concepts and techniques through a hands-on approach.
“New buildings can be designed to be solar oriented, naturally heated and cooled, naturally lit and ventilated, and made with renewable, sustainable materials–no matter the location or climate. In this comprehensive overview of passive solar design, two of America’s solar pioneers give homeowners, architects, designers, and builders the keys to successfully harnessing the sun and maximizing climate resources for heating, cooling, ventilation, and daylighting.”
Contents
V Preface
ix About this Book
001 Sustainable Buildings
039 Passive Heating
085 Passive Cooling and Ventilation
135 Natural Lighting
163 Harvesting On-Site Resources
227 Essays on Integrated Design
261 Appendixes
289 Acknowledgments
290 Illustration Credits
291 Index
Passive Solar Architecture / David A. Bainbridge and Ken Haggard originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 01 Oct 2011.
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You know the cliches. Espresso, August off, the pasta, the rolling hills, the… modernist Finnish architecture!? Yes, Bologna has a few tricks up its sleeve. Though I was there for Cersaie, the huge tile show that brings together over a thousand exhibitors, I managed to slip away for a day to see the sites and investigate what this city had to offer – including one of Alvar Aalto’s masterworks. Read on!
Bologna is best known for several things: its towers, its miles of porticos and its pasta sauce. Being an architect, I skipped the obvious sites and bee-lined for the esoteric. I rented a car and made pilgrimage to the hill-top Alver Aalto church an hour south of the city.
I didn’t skip all of the obvious sights, though. On my way out of town, I swung by the largest church in the city, San Petronia Basilica. It was originally planned to be bigger than Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, until the Pope intervened in 1514. But don’t cry for the Bolognese – San Petronia can still fit 28,000 people. It’s HUGE! As interesting as the finished, front-facing facade is, the portion that really captured my imagination was at the rear of the building, where construction seems to have been abruptly halted 500 years ago. The city fabric marches right up to the building edge.
San Petronia Basilica, seen from the rear.
On my way to pick up the rental car – close to the train station – I passed this modernist gem tucked into city center’s historic fabric:
The relentless sun screen makes a unified facade.
Admittedly, it has seen better days.
Along the way to the church, make sure you stop at the Alma Business School, part of the Universita di Bologna, in the hills above the city (yes, they offer a Food and Wine MBA). I can’t vouch for the degree program, but if you are into seashell architecture, then you won’t want to miss this killer grotto reception room built in 1575 by Cardinal Filippo Guastavillani, nephew of Pope Gregorio XIII. There is something very Ledoux about the frozen water moments.
A step above the average university lecture room – Alma Business School, Bologna.
It’s all shells! And in 1575, you can bet there was no hot glue gun.
The drive to the Aalto church in Riola is equal parts highways (the type you would see in America) and rural roads, which hold a romantic fascination to tourists like myself. It was a gorgeous ride that ended at an equally fetching building.
Entry facade showing light scuppers.
Straight on elevation – no photoshop, I swear!
The interior. The experience is heightened by a forced perspective that is so subtle that I didn’t even notice it until I looked at an aerial picture. The light trays squeeze towards the altar.
Then the car told me it was time for coffee (look to the left of “park”).
We stopped in the little town of Vergato and had a delicious lunch at Il Ritrovo, where the two owners — brothers — served and cooked local truffels into an incredible risotto. Make sure to stop by if you’re ever in the area (051 910036).
It being Italy, there was an espresso machine company next door.
Back in Bologna, with the car safely tucked away, we grabbed some drinks in a bar with a decidedly backwards looking decor. A long debate revealed that the frescos were a recent application, but the bones of the place were older than than the whiskey we were drinking.
Some of us felt like getting into more trouble — and there is plenty of that in Bologna — at a gem off the beaten track.
Stay tuned – my third Bologna installation will come tomorrow, and spoiler alert! It includes a video of a dancing woman wearing only tiles.
For years now, Andrew Moore has been creating photographic portraits of iconic places, including Cuba, Abu Dhabi, and even a survey of Robert Moses’ landmarks. His most recent body of work, a series called Detroit Disassembled, is now on view at the Queens Art Museum. Printed on the scale of epic seventeenth-century history paintings, Moore’s photographs are sublime, heartrending images of the Motor City’s former glory. Click to see more photos.
Blown up to a monumental scale, Moore presents us with visions of a once great civilization, a Detroit akin to the Rome of Piranesi’s prints. Rusted factories, crumbling theaters, and dilapidated houses confront viewers with an America in ruins. The photographs undoubtedly draw from a long painterly tradition of dramatizing fallen empires. Without a blatant political undertone, these post-apocalyptic scenes are a plea for changes in lifestyle and in national policy, a beautifully tragic warning that history can repeat itself.
Le Pont du Jour Art Center by Éric Lapierre Experience, Cherbourg, France.
“Through the loss of the economic leadership, a new sobriety. An attempt to build cultural amenities without money,” writes Éric Lapierre of his 2010 Cherbourg gallery.
To look at the Le Pont du Jour Art Center is to peer into the future of a Europe — and America, for that matter — without the capital to indulge architects with luxury materials or superficial decoration. How does it look? Well, it looks like one of the more legit pieces of architecture we’ve seen in the last few years. There’s a thoughtful use of cheap materials, interesting lines, elegant proportions, and a refreshing lack of “high-end” (read: super wasteful) details normally stuffed into bespoke architecture, clanking like so many metaphorical bangles on the arm of a shopping addict. Read on.
Rather than building a super expensive institutional building amongst a village of big box stores and McDonalds (we call that particular move “ostrich architecture”) Lapierre says he wanted the gallery to speak directly to the cheap, non-permanent materiality of the buildings that surround it:
“To achieve this goal the building is built in concrete with outer insulation and wrapped in a poor and cheap material, which is normally used to make waterproof out of sight flat roofs : sheets of asphalt protected by a thin layer of aluminum.This materiality allows the building to find naturally its proper place in these outskirts, and makes it visible with its shinny look that reflects the ever changing color of this sea side city.
All materials are raw, without any transformation : tar on the ground floor to make it perceptible that exhibitions are free, because it is a public building that gets the same floor material as the pavement in front of it, plywood, concrete. It is plasterboard free construction, as plasterboard has been created to be used by badly payed workers without « savoir faire » and not allow beautiful, simple and solid detailing.”
This is really amazing work. You can read more about the project here.
