Ghosts

Tater the terrier.

My husband and I adopted a dog from a local shelter in May and the little guy likes to walk. A lot. So twice a day I traverse the half mile from my home to Druid Hill Park, where we climb the switchback paths through the wooded terrain. What an amazing place. The forest smothers the sounds of the city and suddenly you are surrounded by the hum of nature. The park is 745 acres. It was purchased in 1860 from a landowner named George Buchanan, and developed into this lustrous playground of streams, lakes, playfields, and a zoo. Druid Hill Lake, built in 1863, is the largest earthen damned lake in the country.

Today, many of the features of the original park are overgrown and forgotten. Three Sisters Lane leads you past a deep, sunken section where kudzu and grapevine cover everything, including what once was a section of landscaped park with three manmade ponds. This was where sea lions would play. The effect of all that overgrowth is ethereal, like a house that's been closed up and its possessions shrouded with sheets. I have yet to master taking pictures while controlling a puppy, so I turn to another photographer...Here are some images taken from the Web site Monumental City.



Stairs to nowhere.


Some kind of a well?


A fence surrounds one of the ponds




The "Forgotten Fountain"

Street Art

Paused to snap some shots of Gaia's street art along Franklin Street in Baltimore. He put work onto one of my favorite facades, The White Coffee Pot. (Photos taken with my phone, so excuse the quality.)





Also on the White Coffee Pot Building, this beautiful silhouette. Don't know who did it:



On the corner of Park and Franklin, another Gaia piece:






Around the corner on Park, remnants of Baltimore's former Chinatown district.



And these images I snapped because I liked them.


Metal rods cover a broken window.


What a gorgeous wall, framed at the top by dripping paint.

For more images of Gaia's work, click here for his Web site and here for his Flickr site.

And on the graffiti front, a new work appeared a few months back under the 83 near my home. This is on the corner of Clipper Mill and Falls Roads in Hampden.

Baltimore Design Convo Comes to Artscape

(Click on image for a larger version.)

This Saturday D:Center Baltimore brings the latest installment of the Baltimore Design Conversation to Artscape.

Please join us for Design Conversation 21: FESTIVALS


Saturday July 17th 2010
Charles Street Garage (across from the Charles Theatre) - 1714 N Charles Street
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Beer and wine will be available for sale.


Design Conversation 21 will feature Karin Bacon. Bacon began her career as Festival Director for the City of New York, where she originated citywide celebrations such as the New Year’s Eve fireworks in Central Park and July 4th in Lower Manhattan. She went on to produce celebrations, parties, and promotions for audiences as diverse kids at the Bronx Zoo and celebrities at Studio 54. Since forming her own company in 1981, Bacon has created a broad range of events for clients from the worlds of fashion, architecture, finance, media, retail, entertainment, and real estate, known for their theatricality, imagination, and high production values.

Design Conversations are open to the public and are loosely curated by volunteers around a series of topics related to design, art, architecture, and cities. They are made possible by the support of the Baltimore Community Foundation and D:center Baltimore.


Questions? ben.stone@gmail.com | www.dcenterbaltimore.com

The Great Humanitarian Design Debate

VS.




It's getting heated on the Fast Company Design Blog. Writer Bruce Nussbaum wrote a piece on July 7th that asked: Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?

His answer: Yes. Nussbaum called out organizations like Project H Design and One Laptop Per Child for being pie-eyed, misdirected, and crass to the needs of local populations. He compares this new direction in design to the Peace Corps:

"Are designers helping the 'Little Brown Brothers?' Are designers the new anthropologists or missionaries, come to poke into village life, 'understand; it and make it better—their 'modern' way?"

Emily Pilloton (who I interviewed on this site) is founder of Project H Design and she took exception to the piece, particularly the part where Nussbaum criticizes American-based humanitarian designers for going abroad when so many issues face them at home. Ironic in light of Pilloton's latest move. Read her response here.

And if this topic interests you, check out the blog post I wrote this spring for Metropolis about the humanitarian design debate.

ADDED LATER:

Nussbaum RESPONDS to Pilloton.

Susan Szenasy of Metropolis JOINS the debate.

And Change Observer follows the many posts the resulted from Nussbaum's original inquiry.

Is it Soup Yet?

A postcard of Paris's Les Halles, circa 1920.

That's the question one of my editors asked when I was running late with an assignment. The implication: have all the research components for your article come together finally and transformed into an actual story? (The underlying implication: hurry the f*&k up).

Lately, I've been thinking about this magic moment of transmogrification when it comes to cities. When do the disparate ingredients of planning coalesce into something altogether different and whole? In a biography on James Beard, writer Robert Clark describes why Les Halles, that famous Parisian market, was so popular in the 1920's:

"Part of the wonder of Les Halles was the sense that it was less a collection of vendors than a full-blown organism whose life came not from any conscious effort but through the transcendent totality of its constituents."

Urban planning is a very conscious effort at changing place. Planners often apply ideas like recipes. Put a mixed-use development here, a highrise there, a new zoning overlay across the river; try to recreate the hub of New York city or the civic order of Portland. Like cooks, they can adhere to their favorite chef. Some cook from the book of Jane Jacobs, some from the book of Robert Moses, some from Andres Duany, others from Le Corbusier. etc. etc.

But what turns those urban planning ingredients into—as Clark so aptly describes it—a transcendent totality? In the case of Les Halles, it was the "constituents." The people. Les Halles symbolized the vibrancy of French culinary culture and it was imbued with the passion of the vendors sharing their livelihood and the customers who believed in those products. The people engaged in marketing at Les Halles believed in its value and as a result it became vital.

Interestingly, a similar public market in Portland, Oregon in the 1900's failed to achieve such success. Beard grew up in Portland and Clark describes how a thriving farmers' market was relocated into a civic structure at the prodding of political power brokers. The new market never achieved the same vibrancy as the original and it closed leaving Portland without a public market. They built it; the public did not come. The "constituents," many of whom were not aware of the political machinations that led to the market's move into a new building, sensed the place was off nonetheless and simply stopped going there. The most important consideration in the planning process—the end user—was not considered and the project failed.

That said, even some of the best intentioned plans can fall flat. It's hard to predict human behavior, to understand why a street with all the right ingredients comes alive with the "messy vitality" of urban life (a la Lewis Mumford) or does not. Some recipes sing, others are inedible. Why? I don't profess an answer. Any thoughts?

New on the Web

Yolande Daniels’s Tea Cozy on the grounds of the Evergreen Museum. Photo: Will Kirk

Two posts of mine went live on other sites yesterday.

First, there is my monthly Letter from Baltimore blog column on the Metropolis Web site. I write about an exceptional sculpture exhibition at Evergreen Museum & Library that invites architects to make site specific work. Read more here.


Herfra til Evigheden, translated as From Here to Eternity, is a Danish housing collective

The second is my first article for editor Julie Lasky at Change Observer. Titled "New Visions of Home," it is a continuation of my research into thoughtful, universal design for residential housing around the world, particularly as it relates to our needs as we age. Read more here.

Downfall

The casting call poster for Downfall.

Oh boy. And we thought the bad real estate news couldn't get any worse. ABC has taken it to a whole new level.

Tonight the network premiers its newest primetime game show: Downfall. Contestants compete on the roof of a 10-story building in downtown Los Angeles for up to $1 million in prizes. If they fail, those prizes are tossed from the roof to smash below:

"Fabricated facsimiles of all prizes will be placed on the largest conveyor belt ever seen on TV with a pile of cash at the end ranging from $5,000 to $1 million. In each round, players will try to answer all the questions before their prizes and cash go over the edge, off the roof, and sent crashing 100 feet to the street below."

Executive producer Scott St. John told The Hollywood Reporter: "Downfall is a new, hybrid, high-stakes field game show where fearless contestants have to fight and focus hard to keep their winnings from falling off the side of a building."

"Winnings" include people. Like your wife, who could also go over the side in a "controlled fall."



This works because stuff and people are expendable, right?

Considering our economy has taken the proverbial fall off the cliff—owing in large part to the uninformed, unregulated financial risks taken with our real estate—it seems perverse to air a show on a skyscraper that is centered around unmitigated greed and destruction. How about a game show where contestants save shit from the landfill instead?

The Rise and Fall (and Rebirth) of an Architecture Firm

My latest feature, out this month in Architect, is about CSD in Baltimore. The firm closed last fall after 62 years. The question the article hopes to answer: How could one of Baltimore's oldest and largest architecture firms suddenly collapse?



Ed Hord remembers Sunday, Sept. 6, 2009, as a particularly sunny day in Baltimore. The senior principal of design firm Hord Coplan Macht (HCM) was at home when he received a phone call from Tom Spies, then the senior vice president of CSD Architects. Hord and Spies were practically neighbors—in business and in life—with offices blocks from one another and homes in the same bucolic neighborhood north of the city. HCM and CSD were not exactly competitors, but they did share a healthy rivalry; over the years, Hord and Spies had developed a kinship in the small pond that is Baltimore architecture. When Spies said he needed to talk, Hord told him to come right over.

They sat outside under a Japanese Snowbell tree as Spies unloaded his news. CSD, he explained, was in deep trouble. Hord, like most of his peers, had had no idea just how bad things were at the 62-year-old firm, one of the largest in the region. He’d had an inkling that business was down. There were significant rounds of layoffs over the previous months—all cataloged in the Baltimore Business Journal—but who hadn’t had to jettison staff to survive the downturn? HCM itself had needed to lay off good people. Then there were the rumors about revenues. “We had heard that their ratios died, but we had heard that about a lot of firms,” Hord recalls.

The rumors turned out to be true. CSD’s cash flow had atrophied, leaving a seriously unbalanced ledger sheet. Revenue projections for 2009 were anemic—just $7 million, down from $15 million the year before—while fixed overhead remained high. The company was, to quote CSD president David Dillard, about to “hear the sound of metal on metal.” That could mean only one of three things: bankruptcy, a merger or acquisition, or something else altogether.

It was this third option that Spies wanted to discuss with Hord. READ MORE HERE.

Conflict Kitchen

A new restaurant in Pittsburgh will only serve food from regions of the world that are on the outs with the U.S. The first iteration of Conflict Kitchen is Iranian, with a facade designed by Pablo Garcia and graphics created by Brett Yasko (including the wrappers, pictured below).



The menu is Kubideh:


The facade, graphics, and menu will evolve with each country. Next up: Afghanistan.

Finding Language

I am reading a new book by Robert Richardson called First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. Richardson culled Emerson's lectures and journals to glean his thoughts on the writing life. Emerson never wrote a specific piece about writing, but his private journals offer a thoughtful commentary.

Emerson felt strongly about word choice, believing it to be the writer's job to tether new words together in order to explain life. He bemoaned lazy language and the mindless repetition of fashionable phrases (think today of overused words like "green" "eco" "innovative"). True writers, he said, "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things."

It was this passionate search for the right language that helped Emerson coin so many popular phrases. "Hitch your wagon to a star," for example. The origin was architectural, used to describe the moon-powered tide mills that were grinding meal near his home. The phrase is abstract, but accurate, and it requires the reader to draw his own conclusions.

"In good writing every word means something. In good writing words become one with things."


Emerson's home near Concord, Mass.

The same can be said for architectural language, which is expressed in form rather than words. The vocabulary of a building is constructed, decision by decision, much the way an essay grows, first in words, then in sentences, then in paragraphs. Each builds off the other to generate the whole. If one word is out of place, if the author takes liberties and wishes to hear himself expound rather than write to the truth, the work fails. How many times has a building read as "wrong?" Something about its composition just isn't legible. And then you see the fissures. The authorial hubris that demanded that fenestration; the meek mirroring of another great work; the appropriation of tradition now out of context.

It is this last item that particularly vexed Emerson. He points to religion as an example of lazy language that leans too much on the past.

"If I were called upon to charge a minister, I would say beware of Tradition: Tradition which embarrasses life and falsifies teaching. The sermons that I hear are all dead of that ail. The preacher is betrayed by his ear. He begins to inveigh against some real evils and falls unconsciously into formulas of speech which have been said and sung in the church some ages and have lost all life. They never had any but when freshly and with special conviction applied. But you must never lose sight of the purpose of helping a particular person in every word you say."

Emerson is also very generous. He believed in the contemporary writer's capacity to create prose "freshly and with special conviction" and reminded young writers that the masters they so admire were once like them:

"Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books."

Believe in your ideas, he tells us. Give them grounding and wed them to the appropriate language. Young architects today could learn a lot from Emerson.