Brooklyn Heights
nara in new york
at least she is still loved. in DUMBO, Brooklyn.
the largest zucchini in brooklyn is on baltic street in carroll gardens, just in case you wanted to know.
I’m teaching in the Spitzer School of Architecture’s new building at the City College of New York. Today my students and I wandered up to the roof to check out an otherwise invisible portion of Rafael Viñoly’s design: a bright yellow amphitheatre that tops the building and looks out onto the cityscape.
My students love the building’s design, but couldn’t say why (other than the fact that their new studios have views of the city). I like some things about the design, parts of which are clever, but I have some big issues with the way the building functions. From the fact that traffic flow is made impossibly confusing by a series of mezzanine levels and criss-crossing staircases around a central atrium, to the horrid plaza out front which is, as of now, particularly uninviting (maybe they’re not done landscaping??) to the fact that the amphitheatre which is supposed to make a spectacle out of the city à la the Highline has a giant lintel that actually blocks out the cityscape … there are some issues. My classroom is really long, narrow, echoey, and generally uncondusive to working with a group. The exterior of the building is a brilliant white concrete, which I doubt will weather well.
My students just appreciated that it was new and had nice furniture, and at a school with as limited a budget as CUNY’s, I admit that those do have to be considered major pluses.
west st., greenpoint, dusk
Mies never gets old. Especially when put to catchy rock music.
re: production, planning, ruins
The layout of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin, built in 1936 as the model camp for all others, is a huge triangle, enclosed by a thick cement outer wall. The shape was dictated partly by the topography, but it was also a perfectly appropriate symbol that combined the Nazi ideals of form and symmetry in its structural echo of the triangular patches its prisoners were forced to wear. The prison barracks, the entrance, and the watchtowers were all perfectly aligned along the central axis of the triangle, fanning out around a central parade ground and a tower equipped with a machine gun. The camp’s nomenclature mirrored the teleology of the camp: prisoners entered the camp through a gate in “Tower A,” which bore the standard phrase “Arbeit macht frei”; the name “Station Z,” the projected end of the trajectory of a prisoner’s life, designated the gas chambers. Between “A” and “Z,” the prisoners “had a central function in the realization of the monumental plans in Berlin.” To supply the building materials for the architecture of Albert Speer’s new capital city, brick and stone factories were integrated into the camp’s larger area, relying exclusively on prison labor for production. In the end, however, the factories produced only death:
In the brick factory the huge discrepancy between intention and reality shows itself, in other words, the mishandled planning of the SS and the GBI [the Generalbauinspektor, Albert Speer] becomes clear. The clay discovered nearby was of low quality and was hardly suited for producing bricks. Despite that they attempted to fire bricks out of it. Concurrently, they tried to implement a special method for firing. The bricks produced this way were, however, unusable. The result was that the first brick factory was torn down, at a heavy cost to finances and human life. But even its replacement, with modern tunnel firing ovens, was only marginally functional; according to prisoners’ accounts it could never be fully utilized because the delivery of raw materials dwindled due to disorganization. (Eduard Führ, “Morphologie und Topographie eines Konzentrationslagers” in Von der Errinnerung zum Monument, 56)
As the model camp, the designated origin of all other camps, and as the source of the materials that would create a new capital metropolis, Sachsenhausen was already in ruins from its very beginning. But whereas Hitler’s Berlin was truly built on top of, and out of, the buildings he had demolished to make way for Speer’s grand schemes, and thus was founded on the symbolic and real image of the ruin, Sachsenhausen masked its ruinous nature with the signs of productivity: “Arbeit macht frei.” What its factories overwhelmingly produced, however, were the dead bodies of its prisoners. And today the end of the original narrative of the camp, Station Z, exposes its ruinous status to the world: only its torn foundations remain, a ruin of a ruin that produced ruins.
The Columbia Law School building is what High Modernism was supposed to be. I like the new addition, too.
the life of a shadow
So, about a year ago I watched this documentary online, about a Brooklyn artist named Ellis G. who does chalk outlines of shadows. I thought his work was amazing … and the other day I was walking to the subway, and there they were!
Making something impermanent (light) into something semi-permanent but also evanescent in its own way (chalk) is just such a cool commentary on medium. Also a neat way to make people see things in a different way. I love shadows!
spring must be here ...
… because I saw a lady wearing flip flops today. Out with the Uggs, in with the new.
Please also note that I have never owned a pair of Uggs.
