Wonderment >> How to See the Secret, Abandoned City Hall Subway Station

This is soo From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basel E. Frankweiler!  

New Yorkers, you know how the 6 train ends at Brooklyn Bridge, and they say "Last stop, Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall"?  Well that stop is really only Brooklyn Bridge, and is not the original City Hall stop, and the original City Hall stop is actually this beautiful, magical place you see above, by far the most beautiful New York subway station ever made.  

But the City Hall station was closed decades ago, for reasons you can read about here, never to be seen by passengers again...  

 UNLESS.

If you stay on the 6 train after they say last stop at Brooklyn Bridge (which you ordinarily would never do, because if for some reason you did want to just head right back up town, you would cross the platform to the uptown side), the 6 has to pass through the City Hall station to turn around and head back uptown!  So if you just stay on for a few extra minutes, you can see the lost station!

How cool is that???  I feel like a little kid.  I'm dying to do it.

Cause-Related >> New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward:

An interesting article from GOOD Magazine on Brad Pitt's Make It Right organization working to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward.  Here, a few excerpts:

"Their vision is more ambitious than those of the other nonprofit organizations and government agencies that came to town after Katrina. Most were hoping to shelter homeless families; Make It Right wants to model a new paradigm of sustainable low-income homeownership."

...

"It's a surreal scene: a hyper-modern housing development in the middle of nowhere that answers some of New Orleans's oldest building challenges even as it clashes with the city's traditional patina."

...

"'People who lost everything, they want their memories to come alive again," says Carol McMichael Reese, an architecture historian. "And so in that way, I think the clients of Make It Right have been very brave, really, because they've sort of embraced the future.'

She was talking about the modern design of the homes themselves. But there's something even braver about moving into a modern home that's one of, for now, just a few residences in an expanse of empty lots."

You can read the rest of the article here.

Make It Right website here.

Interiors >> MUJI Pre-Fab

Japanese minimalist brand MUJI, whose full name roughly translates to "no-name quality goods," purveyors of well-designed simple products with little packaging and no branding, has entered the pre-fab home market in Japan.  I find the development of modern forms of pre-fab homes seriously encouraging for what it could do for green building, affordable housing, etc., so this is pretty cool!

They offer a few different designs, starting at about $200,000.  A pretty good deal for a good-looking modern home! 

Click through for more images...

Toes in the Sand >> Casa Areia

Portuguese firm Aires Mateus unveiled these sand-floored houses at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale.  This is one of those where your first thought is, "How has no one thought of this before?  How fun to have a beach house with sand floors!"

My next thought was, "Except, you would ALWAYS have sand in your bed... Ick."  Not to fear, they have put the bedrooms in separate little structures (in above photo, white buildings are bedrooms, thatched is living room) that look beyond tidy and sand-less, although I don't know how you'd keep it that way.

But my doubts continued and my next thought was, "How does electrical and plumbing work in this building??  How is the foundation solid??  Doesn't the old proverb start, 'Do not build your house on the sand?'"  

Then I decided not to look a gift-horse in the mouth...  

...I'd rather keep the daydream alive of one day having a sand-floored beach house.

[Aires Mateus]
[Dezeen]

Typography + Architecture >> Colosseo

I just couldn't end the day with that creepy pageant post, and it was actually really hard to find something to follow that, because all of a sudden, knowing that those images would follow whatever I put up next, they started tainting everything!

So anyway... I've had this in the vault for a while and thought, ok, there's no way the pageant pics could have any kind of dialogue with something with almost no allusions or connotations, something that is just purely graphicly, visually interesting.

After a 10-year anniversary trip to Rome with his wife, designer Cameron Moll decided to make the Colosseum his next artistic subject.  Using 16th century calligrapher M. Giovambattista Palatino's work as his inspiration (see bottom), he then spent over 250 hours creating this piece, character by character, using the Goudy Trajan Bembo Pro typefaces.

[Available as a print here.]

For the Library >> Taschen's Modern Architecture A-Z

Although I'm really not crazy about the cover design (at all) (why does it look like an Encyclopedia WorldBook layout from 1987???) (so out of character for Taschen!), I still would love to get my hands on their new comprehensive look at architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries, which includes essays giving the buildings historical context and bios on the architects. 

It's bound to include quite an educational experience (pun on "bound" not intended, but amazing how that worked out.)

[Curated.]

Pre-Fab for Old Folks >> MEDcottage

I am fascinated by small-space dwellings and creative housing solutions (like cool new pre-fab designs after Katrina), so I loved this article in the Washington Post that I came across in researching potential ideas for a project we're working on.  

The issue of aging parents in our country is such a sensitive one, and so far I don't think we've figured out a solution that really suits both parents and the caretaking kids.  This idea thinks outside-the-box, compared to current solutions, by putting a self-contained "nursing home," ironically, inside of a box.  Could this be the answer for many people?

 

Here is the intro: 

"The Rev. Kenneth Dupin, who leads a small Methodist church here, has a vision: As America grows older, its aging adults could avoid a jarring move to the nursing home by living in small, specially equipped, temporary shelters close to relatives.  So he invented the MEDcottage, a portable high-tech dwelling that could be trucked to a family's back yard and used to shelter a loved one in need of special care."

My own grandfather lived with us from age 96-99, and my mom's grandfather lived in a house on their property when she was growing up, which I think is so special, but it seems the most doable solution in our country for aging parents, given monetary restrictions and lifestyles, is nursing homes, which is often not what the parents themselves would prefer.  

This seems like a great solution that could fit culturally for Americans-- both the parents and caretaking kids have their own space, but they are in close proximity.  Plus, this concept has provisions for the safety associated with a nursing home due to its clever added features like the medicine reminder and ankle-height camera monitors that feed into the caretaker's house.  Even if it's not this exact design, this model could hold promise for further development of this idea.

Virginia has approved a new zoning law to allow for these structures-- hope the rest of the country will follow suit!

When you can't believe no one thought of that before...

Also in my Stellenbosch-inspiration search, I discovered architect Tom Kundig, and I am fascinated. I don't necessarily love everything he does, but I do love how absolutely outside the box he is. He comes up with such creative means of having his buildings respond to their surroundings, whether in protecting them from the elements or exploiting views.





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