A visit to the Lexington house constructed from discarded Big Dig materials, now under new ownership.
Boston architects Moskow Linn are looking for your old watches. They think the time of the watch is at an end as people turn to cell phones and other devices for their timekeeping needs. So to mark the end of the wristwatch era they want to collect 1,000 watches to send to the Smithsonian. They project is up to about 350 watches so far. You can see a couple of the donated watches below.
Do you remember the pocket watch? With the advent of cell phones (the
pocket watch of the new millennium) wrist watches are dying a slow
death. But it is difficult (if not impossible) to throw out your old
wrist watch even if it is broken. Is that because when it was worn it
was almost an integral part of the body? Or does it represent an
important moment in one’s life?
Our goal is to create a 1000 watch commemorative collection of old,
discarded wrist watches. Each watch will receive an epitaph written by
the owner and can be visited in our on line gallery:
www.MoskowLinn.com/TKWP
When the collection is complete it will be donated to the
Smithsonian Gallery in Washington DC as an illustrative display of this
moment in time.
To add your watch to the collection, send it to Moskow Linn
Architects with a 10 word epitaph including your name. The watch will
be cataloged, numbered and put away for posterity.
An interesting look at places that embody neighborhoods or city quirkiness in an age of chain stores. The article touches on streetscapes you might never have considered like Bromfield Street as well as trying to find examples of the old Harvard Square and South Boston. Development is likely to slow down considerably which may make some of these spots under less threat of vanishing.
Of course, some change is good: consider the Institute of Contemporary Art's striking new waterfront digs. But the implications of urban change are different from what they used to be. In years past, there was at least a chance that unique new establishments might replace unique old ones. Today, flux tends to homogenize: hence, the Kenmore Square of the Rat and Mr. Butch (RIP) and Super Socks having given way, in less than a decade, to the Kenmore Square of Bertucci's and Kinko's and Qdoba. This dynamic is pernicious enough if you live in Houston or Phoenix. But it's especially galling here in Boston, where the streets carry the accumulated history of (almost) four centuries.
Once you've recognized this reality, there are basically two ways to go. You can accept it passively, dispassionately, maturely, and get on with your business. Or, you can recognize the slow death of urban uniqueness as the tragedy that it is — and then commit yourself to savoring every last exception to this rule while they still exist.
Jane Holz Kay''s Lost Boston is the guide to what has already disappeared over Boston's long history.
You can learn about the challenges of preserving a 300-year old building in the center of a modern city as the Bostonian Society offers a program on their recent tower renovation: No Reservation about Preservation: Preserving the Old State House.
Time: Tuesday, September 16, 6:30 p.m.
Location: The Old State House Museum, 206 Washington St., Boston, MA
Cost: Free and open to the public
(Image: Bostonian Society)
Boston is turning off the lights in its skyscrapers in an environmental stunt that will be of help to migrating birds that can be confused by city lights.
"We have an incredible array of birds that migrate along the East Coast, and it's clear the bright lights confuse them and cause them to circle or run into buildings," said Laura Johnson, president of Mass Audubon. "A lot of species are threatened, so if we can do anything to help them along the way, then we should do it."
Preserve Mass Barns works to preserve one of the most evocative symbols of Massachusetts' agricultural past, its barns.
"A barn is an expression of the people who built it. When we lose one, we’ve lost a part of our history, a part of ourselves."
Alex Dragulescu, the MIT Media Lab researcher whose visualizations of computer viruses we featured earlier this year, is using spam as the basis for architectural constructions.
"The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures." (via Boing Boing)
How do you maintain a 103-year-old mansion perched a few feet above sea level on a tiny island in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island? By keeping expectations moderated and depending on the kindness and help of friends and pretty much anyone who can contribute.
"[Henry Wood] and a crew of family and friends who share his passion for the place’s “deep bohemian funk,” as Nicholas Benson, a stone carver from Newport, put it, have dedicated their time and skills (plumbing and wiring experience are always particularly welcome) to keeping the place from slipping into the water forever."
"Every spring for a decade or so after the sale, Mr. Wood said, he cursed “this albatross,” his roofless, windowless, floorless, powerless, waterless house. Wrangling what had been a rich man’s plaything, attended by servants and even its own shipyard, into a working couple’s weekend getaway turned out to be much more than a working couple could handle. Eventually, though, as the Woods mustered the talents of their friends, Clingstone and its maintenance evolved into a communal lifestyle, and ultimately a kind of religion."
It seems like the house has become his life's work. Wood has owned the house since 1961 and he is now 79. The article has a lot of great details. It's like the stories of British families who feel compelled to maintain stately homes, except in this case Wood voluntarily took on the project.(Image: Erik Jakobs for the NY Times)
"Today, 17 years later, its exterior walls have deteriorated so
badly that Harvard says the only way to repair them would be to take
them off entirely and start over.
Yet this disaster was created by the best and the brightest.
The client was Harvard, or more specifically, its Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The architect was the firm Gwathmey Siegel, known for its superb 1992 addition to another museum, the Guggenheim in New York, among other buildings. The general contractor was Walsh Brothers, a Boston firm now in its fourth generation that has long been regarded as one of the region’s best.
***
"So what happened? What’s the diagnosis? To put it simply, the guys who worried about the museum’s art were not the guys who worried about the weather. It was a classic failure of communication. We'll call them the art guys and the weather guys."
In author Robert Campbell's terms, the art guys are the curators and museum officials (the clients) and the weather guys are the architects, engineers and builders.
Failure to communicate does seem clear but the article seems to come down more on the architects' side or at least that a failure to communicate means both sides are equally at fault. This seems strange given the unequal levels of knowledge about construction It seems like the architects, etc. are the ones who really have to communicate though. Clients can make their demands, suggestions, requests but the architects need to explain what is doable. The clients aren't going to know what the moisture effects are going to be.
There also seems to be a bit of a disconnect on the "weather guys'" side as to how buildings will be used. One expert Campbell talks to refers to problems at "the Davis Museum at Wellesley, a building by another Pritzker-winning architect, Rafael Moneo, the curators themselves caused problems. They ruptured the vapor barrier by drilling holes to hang artworks." But couldn't this action be anticipated by the fact that it is a museum?
It seems like Werner Otto Hall represents the product of a time when architects considered exteriors and use of space more than the actual use of the building. (Image: Harvard)
Twelve is an anthology with a film for each month set in and around Boston. June, Noah Lydiard's summer vacation adventure is above, and with the 11 others will be shown on Sunday.
"This eclectic but unified collection of short stories forms both a love
letter both to Boston and an impressive showcase for the area's
burgeoning indie filmmaking scene. Executive producer Scott Masterson
conceived an experimental collaborative project in which each film is
written and directed by a different filmmaker, while all of the artists
were required to contribute in some way to every other short in the
project. Knowing cohesion would allow the project to shine, he devised
a simple but inspired theme: each of the twelve films represents a
month of the year and was shot entirely in that month. The directors
simply had to capture the spirit of their month however they wished.
The
result is a smorgasbord of different genres: comedy, drama, ghost
story, crime melodrama, documentary, and even-quite
unexpectedly-musical. Together we meet a robot-sport inventor, a young
woman obsessed with following a stranger, several beekeepers, and a man
who hasn't slept in two years. What holds these variety of visions
together is its local flavor: TWELVE guides us from famous sightseeing
spots to familiar neighborhoods, beckoning us into Boston's bookstores,
bars, and candlepin bowling alleys, leading us along the Charles and
down Mass Ave. Part of the fun lies in spotting the different ways each
filmmaker incorporates a particular Public Garden tree and in
recognizing characters from one film when they pop up in another. It is
this combination of individual creation and collaborative inventiveness
that makes this film both unique in itself and distinctively Bostonian."
Sun, Apr 27, 07:00 PM at the Somerville Theatre.
The Greening of Southie documents the construction of the Macallen Building, the first sustainable condominiums in South Boston and shows over the weekend.
"The film covers everything from the pouring of the first concrete to
the arrival of the first tenant, acquainting us with each specially
chosen material and conscientiously designed energy system.
Accompanying the journey are a lively soundtrack by Force Theory, the
jovial banter of the construction crew, and a frequently updated tally
of points—toward the coveted Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design (LEED) gold rating.
Cheney's is a photographic
sensibility; he pinpoints and captures the latent beauty in a pile of
scrap metal, a smear of glue, a dusty steel girder. The result is a
kinetic and detailed exploration of this exciting experiment: the
values Macallen is intended to promote, the sometimes dubious attitudes
of workers and neighbors, even the unexpected and occasionally
embarrassing setbacks."
Sat, Apr 26, 01:00 PM at the Somerville Theatre
The Bostonian Society is blogging the renovation of their headquarters the Old State House in the Financial District.
"[O]ur team has been up on the scaffolding exploring the damage that has been caused by time and weather. The goal with our preservation project is to save as much historic material as possible, but replace when necessary. The top and bottom rails on the tower balustrades are badly deteriorated and in need of work."
There's a lot of interesting pictures of the work on the blog (like this one of the scaffolding being installed) and the examination of the tower that is usually inaccessible.
Light Boston, a group of local lighting designers, wants to bring innovative lighting design to a group of significant buildings around Boston as they have at the Old North Church and Old State House. They're calling the project to light the buildings the Diamond Necklace and hope to make the urban landscape more appealing at night.
Mixed Realities is a networked art exhibit and symposium at Emerson this weekend that will map and explore interactions between real cities like Boston and online communities.
" Mixed Reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects can co-exist and interact in real-time.Mixed Realities is an exhibition and symposium that explores the convergence—through cyberspace—of real and synthetic places made possible by computers and networks. Mixed Realities links and overlays the Huret & Spector Gallery (Boston), Turbulence.org, and Ars Virtua (Second Life). Audience members – who will be embodied as avatars in Second Life, browsing the works at turbulence.org, and/or be physically present in the gallery – will interact with the works and with one another. Thus, Mixed Realities will enable people who are distributed across multiple physical and virtual spaces to communicate with one another and share experiences in real time. "
There will also be an exhibit of works like John Craig Freeman's Imagining Beijing (above) and a symposium discussing topics like the virtual economy and the nature of place in virtual worlds.
Details:
Opening and Performance: February 7, 2008;
5-7 pm
Symposium:
February 8; 10 am - 5 pm
Workshop: February 9;
1-5 pm
Exhibition: February 7 - April 15, 2008
Free and Open to the Public
The Stata Center, MIT's landmark building designed by starchitect Frank Gehry, is the subject of a lawsuit brought by MIT over leaks, mold, and other issues. Now Joseph Lstiburek, the "Sherlock Holmes of construction" tries to sort out the issues by close examination of the building.
"Lstiburek (pronounced STEE-bu-rek), an engineer with a PhD, is a frequent expert witness in construction lawsuits and an international authority on leaks who gets paid tens of thousands of dollars to cut holes in the sides of buildings and inform the owners how theirs were built wrong. As an independent, unpaid, informal observer, he has had his eye on the Stata Center for several years: "It was obvious it wasn't going to work from watching it go up.""
The problems come down to construction issues rather than architecture, according to Lstiburek but that doesn't let Gehry off the hook.
"So who is to blame? Lstiburek posits that the architects should have done a better job of specifying materials and techniques. And the construction firm should have been more rigorous in its quality control. On both fronts, though, these are fundamental errors of craft, not design. In other words, Gehry's billowing sheets of metal and unexpected angles aren't at fault: It's how they were specced out and implemented." (Image: Patty Sampson MIT)
Teenage partiers trash archetypal New England poet Robert Frost's Vermont summer house Homer Noble Farm with vandals burning furniture for warmth:
"The intruders broke a window to get into the two-story wood frame
building — a furnished residence open in the summer — before destroying
tables and chairs, pictures, windows, light fixtures, and dishes.
Wicker furniture and dressers were smashed and thrown into a fireplace
and burned, apparently to provide heat in the unheated building.
Empty beer bottles and cans, plastic cups, and cellophane apparently used to hold
marijuana were also found, according to [Sgt. Lee] Hodsden. The vandals vomited in
the living room and discharged two fire extinguishers inside the
building, on a dead-end road off Route 125."
Weird hyperlinking aside: why does Yahoo News provide a link from the phrase "empty beer bottles" to a Yahoo search window? Do they think horrified poetry fans will need an explanation of these mysterious objects? (Image: Friends of Robert Frost)
What does the Islamic Society of Boston's new mosque say about architecture and Islam. One critic considers it "conservative twice over. Designed for a site in the Roxbury
neighborhood by Boston firm Steffian Bradley and Saudi Arabian
architect Sami Angawi, it is full of references to centuries-old
Islamic landmarks, including a row of peaked arches at street level and
a 140-foot-tall minaret. In classic New England style, it's also
wrapped entirely in red brick." With the development of new mosques facing controversy planners often opt for conservative designs to avoid raising an additional issue.
"Since funding for many new mosques comes from Saudi Arabia, their
architecture is based to a growing degree on Islamic architecture in
that country, the birthplace of the faith. (That is also the biggest
source of the controversy surrounding their construction, since Saudi
leaders have been accused of using mosques to advance a fundamentalist
form of Islam, known as Wahabbism, that many here see as stridently
anti-Western.) As a result, the diverse regional variation that once
marked the building type -- with mud-brick mosques in Mali looking
nothing like grand designs in Istanbul or filigreed ones in India --
has faded.
Indeed,
the brief period in the second half of the 20th century when mosque
design was enriched by Modernist architecture and Western influence now
seems like the distant past. Few remember that Louis Kahn and Paolo
Portoghesi designed remarkable mosques. Highly inventive architects
such as Zlatko Ugljen, whose 1980 White Mosque in Bosnia-Herzegovina
has more in common with Frank Gehry's work than with Middle Eastern
precedents, have remained peripheral figures.
When mosque
architects in the West move away from reassuring traditionalism these
days, they risk becoming scapegoats for the inevitable ire such
buildings raise." (Image: Islamic Society of Boston)
MIT sues Frank Gehry over leaky Stata Center: That's $1.5 million worth of fixing according to the suit for the $300 million building (Gehry got $15 million to design it).
"Soon after its completion in spring 2004, the center's outdoor amphitheater began to crack due to drainage problems, the suit says. Snow and ice cascaded dangerously from window boxes and other projecting roof areas, blocking emergency exits and damaging other parts of the building, according to the suit. Mold grew on the center's brick exterior, the suit says, and there were persistent leaks throughout the building."
I guess they'll have to add another chapter to the book Building Stata or just call it Fixing Stata.
But there was nothing significant in the vacant museum building which is due to be replaced by another more extensive site (photo Adam Salsman).
Aside from the location, they include slow valets and perhaps the neighbors.
Occupancy at the Watertown Mall has decreased to the point it is half empty as consumers favor shopping "experiences" provided by more upscale stores over old-style malls.
Will you miss this building? Preservationists note with alarm plans to demolish influential modernist architect Paul Rudolph's 1960 Blue Cross/Blue Shield building at 133 Federal Street in the Financial District. The replacement an 80-story tower by another noted architect Renzo Piano (pictured left). While Mayor Menino favors the new tower admirers of modernist architecture are disturbed that the Rudolph building would be demolished joining a number of other recent alterations or demolitions of buildings of the period.
Now that Martin Scorsese has won his Oscar, tour operators like Boston Movie Tours are planning to capitalize on the film's popularity by adding locations from the movie to their tours. Pullquote, no great fan of the film, points out that Boston's State House becomes the Eiffel Tower of The Departed, visible from any place in the city so that will be an easy additional stop.
In other Boston monument news, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez's UN disparagement of Pres. Bush leads a Boston city counsellor to call for the dismantling of the CITGO sign near Fenway Park. Why? CITGO is a subsidiary of the Venezuelan state oil company currently empowering Chavez.
A detailed and entertaining history of the John Hancock building, currently for sale. The early history draws heavily on the building's architect Henry Cobb but the article doesn't shy away from the problems that made it a local joke for a long period, like its sway in the wind that sickened tenants and falling windows that imperilled passersby, before it became a landmark.
This short film takes us inside Steven Holl's Simmons Hall at MIT (via A Daily Dose) making comparisons to marine sponges and the designs of Le Corbusier and Moshe Safdie. The film doesn't mention Gaudi's designs for the Casa Batllo and Casa Mila whose interiors seem to have similar features in their marine imagery. Some interesting images in the film, showing lightwells and curving walls. The film includes a dissatisfied student, who seems to be representative of others, who considers the building poorly designed and difficult to move through.
The summer renovation of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto's design for the Woodbery Poetry Room in the Lamont Library at Harvard continues to stir up protests from members of the Design faculty and some alumni. The protestors claim the renovation will disrupt a work of "total design," and one of the four remaining examples of Aalto's work in the U.S. The protestors claim that Aalto's design was intended as a complete whole and will inevitably be ruined by renovation. Skeptics disagree noting that not every work is original and that certain aspects like the listening stations are out of date. Opinions pro and con here, although many are in annoying PDF format. Some of the renovation participants point out that numerous changes had been made over the years since the original creation. The renovation changes do sound rather limited; replacing chairs by Aalto that have worn out for example and I'm sure the students will appreciate the remedying of the asbestos issue.
I wonder how many students have eaten Doritos in there or written in pen on the tables and chairs without realizing they were desecrating an architectural masterpiece. Will universities or other institutions be less likely to commission works by the famous if they fear a preservation battle in the future. Also do preservationists of modernist architecture take their self-imposed mission, perhaps a bit too seriously because they think most people actively dislike modernist architecture?
