Are Some Buildings Too Ugly To Survive?

So I never got around to mentioning this series of opinion pieces which appeared in the New York Times several weeks ago. They're on the above-mentioned topic, and most present a reasoned argument; for instance, Aaron Renn argues that "the most important criterion" for whether or not mid-century Brutalist buildings should be saved is "how well the building fits its purpose and function." He acknowledges that many housing developments of this era have proven beyond rescue because they were "conceptually flawed" from the start, but many more buildings "where the architectural quality and ability to adapt to contemporary standards at a realistic price is high" should be preserved if at all possible.

Raksha Vasudevan, Sustainability Associate at the National League of Cities’ Center for Research and Innovation, takes the question of whether to demolish, renovate or preserve it a step further. She argues that:

What is needed is an acknowledgement of the multiple and hidden costs of our choices. For example, what are the costs of demolition for the earth? What happens to the tons of concrete that fills up landfills around the country? Apart from the fact that demolition in itself is financially costly for government, there are social and environmental costs of that we often ignore. And while preservation is not always the answer for a community, the path to determining what is “right” lies in honestly weighing the economic, social, and environmental costs of our actions.

David Brown of the National Trust for Historic Preservation reminds us that art deco once faced the wrecker's ball down in South Beach, and Allison Arieff laments that many of Paul Rudolph's mid-century civic structures are currently slated for demolition. New Criterion contributor Anthony M. Daniels' contribution is the lone dissenting opinion here, and it doesn't take him long to bring the crazy:

Buildings should be preserved for one of two reasons: they were the site of events of great historic importance, or they are of aesthetic merit. Buildings in the Brutalist style — which uses raw concrete or other materials to make art galleries look like fallout shelters — are certainly aesthetically outstanding: unfortunately, in an entirely negative sense. A single such building can ruin an entire townscape, and it is often difficult to believe that such ruination was not the intention of the architect. 

What's interesting is that his argument would probably be supported by a majority of people: it's ugly, so tear it down. Case closed. But think of the ecological catastrophe that could result if all our concrete structures were simultaneously torn down: the captured carbon alone is enough of an issue, let alone our landfills. It makes me think what was done at Bellevue Hospital on the Upper East Side, where they built a new ambulatory care center to incorporate the facade of the original hospital building.

A curtainwall was all it took to envelop the existing structure and expand the building's footprint. I'm not suggesting that the original facade is anything like a Brutalist example, but this is a method that we could easily explore to deal with renovating buildings deemed too "ugly" to be spared the wrecking ball.

Dubai to Build Underwater Hotel

Yes, you read that right. They say a picture is worth a thousand words -- well, I've got a couple anyway: because what better place to build an underwater hotel than in the middle of the desert? Because where else would you insist on defying the laws of nature? Because who needs water to live? Oh, wait...

Planned Obsolescence Be Damned

"An unemployed man, a retired pharmacist and an upholsterer" sounds like it might be the start of a pretty good interior design joke, but it's actually the start of a fascinating article in Wednesday's New York Times called An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time. It seems that in Amsterdam, where everyone already rides bicycles and recycles nearly everything and generally does good things for the planet, there now exists something called a "Repair Cafe" -- because they have a cafe for everything in the Netherlands, it seems -- where volunteers who "just like to fix things" will try to save your toaster from the landfill for the cost of, well, nothing:

Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus. Thirty groups have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters, as well as at least one electric organ, a washing machine and an orange juice press.

What's so great about this is that not only does it prevent people from having to throw things away (though the Dutch only put less than 3% of their municipal waste into landfills, which is remarkable), but it also provides both a physical place where people who might not otherwise afford to pay for a repair can go and, perhaps more importantly, a social place with a sense of community built around issues of ecology and sustainability. According to the article:

“It’s very much a sign of the times,” said Dr. Evelien Tonkens, a sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam, who noted that the Repair Cafe’s anti-consumerist, anti-market, do-it-ourselves ethos is part of a more general movement in the Netherlands to improve everyday conditions through grass-roots social activism. Marjanne van der Rhee, a Repair Cafe volunteer who hands out data collection forms and keeps the volunteers fortified with coffee, said: “Different people come in. With some, you think, maybe they come because they’re poor. Others look well-off, but they are aware of environmental concerns. Some seem a little bit crazy.”

Crazy in a good way, I hope.

Fox News Says Wind Farms Cause Global Warming

No, this isn't a headline from The Onion; unfortunately, according to Treehugger, it's all too real:

The network got word of a new report that noted nighttime temperatures rose slightly in areas around wind farms, and then ran a series of segments about how wind farms cause global warming. So, of course, did Rush Limbaugh and many other conservative-leaning outlets and pundits.

Here's a taste of how this works. Fox Nation runs a gigantic headline, 'New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming' over a Reuters wire piece that expressly states that the turbines affect only "local climates". But no matter: that the report shows wind farms cause 'warming' was an irony too delicious to be passed up, or to be dulled by inconvenient facts.

So the slapdash notion that wind turbines are somehow causing global warming was gleefully catapulted onto the airwaves, another grand opportunity to scoff at environmentalists and liberals. 

The scientists behind the study, for their part, have spoken up against their work's misrepresentation in the media. In an email to Media Matters, the study's lead author said that the coverage is "misleading." Here's MM:

The researchers, led by Liming Zhou, said it is "[v]ery likely" that "wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air's heat near the surface, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases." The turbines pull down warm air, increasing land surface temperatures, which already have "a larger day-night variation" than the surface air temperatures featured in daily weather reports.

But none of that made the narrative on Fox. No, the desire to land an ideological potshot once again trumped an effort to craft anything resembling a truthfully reported story. As it so often does.

It's Shop Your Values Week

Shop Your Values Week starts today. From their website:   

We are the Future  Today's consumers are the new brand managers for companies big and small. With the easy sharing and transparency of the digital age, what we say and think has the power to both carry and destroy the reputation of a brand.  

We are the Community  When we raise our voices we spur improvements in the world of business. Why not bring that power to bear on our community, and to the shops and restaurants we visit every day in our neighborhoods?   

We Live Our Values  When thousands of New Yorkers shop, eat, and live their values, we will send the message that sustainability is profitable, ethics is indispensable, and community comes first. The message will be impossible to ignore.

The website encourages you to take a pledge that you will shop your values and provides a map of participating businesses as well as featured specials. What do you think: a good idea, some skillful marketing, or possibly both?

Those People Look Like Ants From Up Here!

Just came across this article at Discovery News suggesting that recent research shows that human societies more closely resemble that of ants than any of our nearest evolutionary brethren. When you think about it, I suppose it's not too surprising. According to Mark Moffat, the author of the study in question:

With a maximum size of about 100, no chimpanzee group has to deal with issues of public health, infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies, mass transit problems, assembly lines and complex teamwork, agriculture and animal domestication, warfare and slavery. Ants have developed behaviors addressing all of these problems.

Some ant super-colonies number in the trillions, but that in itself isn't necessarily a problem. The real issue here, the article points out, is that "what makes such size and growth possible is that membership can be anonymous...[m]embers are not required to distinguish each other as individuals for a group to remain unified."

The same applies to human beings as well, though unlike ants -- who use primarily pheromones to bond into discrete societies -- we have language and symbols and cultural practice and behavior. Though I personally found the following conclusion quite chilling: "Anonymous membership means that both human and ant societies can grow as large as environmental conditions allow, although some researchers suggest that an ultra large society can implode."