The Architect Newswire is an aggregation of news from media outlets around the world, intended to keep you abreast of all of the industry’s important developments. The stories we feature are not reported, edited, or fact-checked by Architect’s staff.
USA TODAY
New York’s 9/11 Memorial Museum stalled, says Bloomberg
The construction of a planned museum at the site of the World Trade Center has ground to a halt due to a dispute over its financing, and according to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, there is no way the building will be open by its target date of Sep. 11, 2012. David B. Caruso writes that work on the underground museum stalled after a row between the Port Authority of New York City and New Jersey and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum foundation over infrastructure costs. The Port Authority claims it is owed $300 million by the Memorial & Museum foundation, which counters that the amount in question is $180 million. "I'm sure we are going to work something out with the Port Authority," Bloomberg said. "They've got a difficult budget situation. I'm sympathetic to that." Despite the ongoing construction, the memorial site, which opened on Sep. 11, 2011, has already received more than 1 million visitors.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Looking back on 200 years of the Manhattan grid
An exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, "The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of the City of New York," celebrates the bicentennial of one of the great feats of urban planning. Writing in The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman looks back at the gridding of Manhattan, entrusted to Simeon De Witt, Gouverneur Morris and John Rutherfurd in 1811, when the booming city “huddled mostly south of Canal Street.” Their plan to expand the city from Houston St. north to 155th St. in Harlem was both subversive in its appropriation of private land and lifeless in its lack of parks, plazas, and avenues. Yet it also “gave the island a kind of monumentality and order,” Kimmelman writes. Though “Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces,” he reflects, the tightness and logic of the borough’s grid has engendered sociability, density, ecological efficiency, and, perhaps most significantly, a navigability that makes an outsider feel at home.
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LA TIMES
Three books on L.A.’s built environment
In the last post of his “Reading L.A.” series, Christopher Hawthorne reflects on three books. William David Estrada’s 2008 Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space traces the architectural origins of L.A. to a particular corner of downtown that was “dedicated in 1781, designed according to Spanish empire-building principles and relocated after the Los Angeles River flooded in 1815,” and once served as the gateway to the city for immigrants. An even broader historical perspective informs Making TIme: Essays on the Nature of Los Angeles, William L. Fox's 2007 look at the delicate balance between urbanism, industry, and the natural world. Delving into similar territory is Robert Gottlieb's Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City, which focuses on the L.A. River, the city’s freeways, and immigration.
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RUSTWIRE.COM
Can ruin porn help urban blight?
We’ve all checked out “ruin porn”: photos reveling in the post-industrial blight of cities like Detroit. Finding gratification in these downtrodden urban scenes seems both condescending to locals and counterproductive for their locales. Yet for Rustwire’s Richey Piiparinen, appreciating these images is the crucial first step in the long process of urban revitalization. “Ruin Porn exposed the failure and decay, thus clearing the secrecy, the shame, and leaving perceptual room to see less emptiness and more space,” he writes. For Piiparinen, the wreckage is all potential, a tabula rasa to be repurposed. He quotes Alex Krieger, chairman of the department of urban planning and design at Harvard, who tells Forbes that the most innovative ideas for the 21st century city will come from older, decaying cities like Detroit, which have become “kind of empty containers.” But the question remains: will basking in their emptiness help us envision what they might contain?
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ST. LOUIS POST DISPATCH
Bold St. Louis Arch redesign may be scaled back
A year after announcing a $600 million plan to rework the grounds of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, the monument’s superintendent stated in a press conference that the project would be scaled back. According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Nicolas J. Pistor, the revelation came at a conference announcing that the project had received a $20 million grant. “You're going to see a scaled down, leaner project,” said Tom Bradley, the superintendent of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar interjected to say that the project would be completed as initially planned, despite the high cost. “I'm not talking about anything being scaled back,” Salazar said. “There's no reason why this can't get done.” When asked about the discrepancy in their statements, Bradley replied, “I shouldn’t have said it.” He did emphasize that a new plan would be released in January detailing what elements of the project could be expected to be completed by 2015, the arch’s 50th anniversary and the renovation’s original deadline. Michael Van Valkenburgh, the project’s lead architect, had previously said that 2015 was an unrealistic deadline for some of the more ambitious designs, such as the proposed aerial gondolas over the Mississippi River.
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THE ATLANTIC CITIES
Paying for our Infrastructure
“I-banks” are one potential source of funding for America’s foundering transportation infrastructure, writes Yonah Freemark on The Atlantic Cities. Not the investment banks that helped precipitate the 2008 financial crash, but state infrastructure banks—government agencies kick-started with public funds that solicit investments from the private sector. These banks lend cities and states funds for transit projects to be repaid through taxes, user fees, and public-private partnerships. They’ve been around since 1995, when state banks were first authorized to accept federal loans, yet they tend to focus on highways rather than multimodal transit and on projects smaller in scope. More ambitious plans are now in the works, ranging from the White House’s 2011 proposal to allocate $10 billion to a national bank run by the U.S. Department of Transportation to a bill introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that would endow each state with $1 billion to set up its own infrastructure bank. In this post, Freemark surveys the successes and pitfalls of five such banks, and contemplates whether they are indeed the answer to our transit woes.
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THE GUARDIAN
Renzo Piano’s Shard Tower
Looming above London Bridge is the Shard of Glass, a 1,070-ft. Renzo Piano, FAIA–designed mixed use tower that will become Europe’s tallest building when it officially opens in June. The Guardian’s Robert Booth reports that “From the cavernous double-height living room more than 200 metres up in the air …. the London Eye becomes a fairground attraction and HMS Belfast a model boat.” The project, which includes 27 floors of office space, three floors of restaurants, and 18-floor, five-star Shangri-La hotel, was bankrolled largely by Qatari investors, who pumped $2.3 billion into the project in 2008. The building, which is expected to have two floor-spanning apartments for the Qatari royal family, has become "tower of power and riches" in a depressed part of town, according to Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics. Renzo Piano counters that argument, telling Booth, “The building is not about arrogance and power but about increasing the intensity of city life.”
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THE YALE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
“Is Drawing Dead?”
An upcoming symposium from Feb. 9 – 11 at the Yale School of Architecture asks the bold question on many an old-school mind: in the age of ever-more sophisticated digital designing, is drawing a lost art? The three-day event includes roundtable discussions, lectures by visiting professors Massimo Scolari and Stanislaus von Moos, and a keynote address by Sir Peter Cook, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts London. The symposium, located in the school’s Paul Rudolph Hall, is free and open to the public, though preregistration is required.
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