Tag: 11.06.06

Designing The Post-Apocalytic New York

“Whatever kind of place New Yorkers will inhabit a century from now, it will probably not look much like the hallucinations that went on display briefly in Grand Central Station on Thursday and will reappear on the History Channel’s Web site (history.com) sometime next month. Since incremental change is too difficult to conceive, most designers imagined a post-apocalyptic Manhattan half-drowned by rising oceans.”

Glassed In: High-Rise Living, Corporate Style

“In New York City, glass has long been considered a workplace material – honest, transparent and spare, as befits containers of capitalism. There’s rarely much to see: Accounts Payable in one skyscraper looks pretty much like Accounts Payable in another. But in the past few years, as the home and office have merged thanks to portable gadgetry, apartment buildings have come to look like corporate headquarters, with their floor-to-ceiling, column-to-column windows.”

Remembering Critic Dan Cariaga

Daniel Cariaga was a music critic for the LA Times for 34 years. “Criticism can be a profession for the insecure. But Danny was more secure than any critic I have ever known. He was not a moth attracted to the flame. For all his years at The Times, he held the No. 2 position and didn’t apply for the top slot when it opened. As a musician, he trained as an accompanist. I view this as a result of a higher calling than that of stoking the ego. He put music first. In his early years, he told me, he could only write if he put his typewriter on the piano.”

Roofs Reconsidered

“Thanks in part to the surging popularity of Google Earth and other Web-based programs, which give the public a bracingly new, if detached, way to interact with the built environment, rooftops are shedding their reputation as forgotten, wind-swept corners of the urban landscape and moving toward the center of architectural practice.”

The West (History W/O The Kitsch?)

The Museum of the American West (formerly the Autry Museum of Western Heritage) has reinvented the way it presents history of the West. “In the next few years it has the potential to map out a new form of historical museum in the United States, one that is neither an intoxicated celebration of Western fantasy — turning itself into another stage set in a fictionalized drama.”

Europe’s New Three-Year College Standard (And The US?)

Forty-five European nations have “pledged to make three years the standard time for their undergraduate degrees by 2010. Under ‘the Bologna Process,’ named for the Italian city where the agreement for “harmonizing” European higher education was signed in 1999, degrees are supposed to be sufficiently similar that they will be recognized from one country to the next, encouraging student mobility. What happens when some of that mobility involves graduate study in the United States?”