Q: What will cities look like in the future? Do we even need such downtown areas?

Koolhaas: The old contrast between downtown and suburban areas is outdated.

Q: Wait a minute, isn’t the current trend moving away from suburbia and back to the city?

Koolhaas: Yes, for now. And do you know what’s so ironic about that? The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety — dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull.

Formally, centripetal tower designs always risk being too inward-focused to relate to their context (think David Childs’s Freedom Tower). The Gherkin answers this criticism the best, through its clever natural ventilation strategy that takes in fresh air and uses the rotational form to cycle it through the building. What would make the building too inward-focused if understood purely in formal terms actually helps integrate the building with the environment through an ingenious technical system.

On the other hand, when rotation is used as a mere “sculptural” gimmick - as it seems to be in Calatrava’s Corkscrew - it becomes an architectural one-liner, and a worn-out one at that. I don’t disagree with the developer’s description of the project as “tall, slender and elegant”; but a great skyscraper can be so much more than that.

Part of what makes cities work is the anonymity conferred by large crowds. One of the reasons why people move to New York from Smalltown is that in Smalltown, everybody knew where they were and what they were doing at all times. Here, you can walk down the streets wearing nothing but an inflatable crocodile, and no one will care. Gawker Stalker Maps is an exercise in taking those comfortingly anonymous crowds and turning them into a million-eyed intelligent beast, collating and organising information on hundreds of individuals unlucky enough to be recognisable in public.

Update: Miss Representation contends that “celebrity stalking is a self-regulating process. As long as Paris Hilton is trying to get our attention, people will respond in kind.”

Suddenly, the whole panoply of human endeavour raises its mighty yearning edifice before you with its intolerable cruelties, its inexplicable greatness, imagination’s parallel universe moulding itself through the sculpture whose stairs you descend towards home. Mahler and Shakespeare are echoing in the shells, lithe limbs reaching apotheosis in the Rose Adagio, cheering, waves of applause, first visits and last glimpses. Before you, above you, around you, is the winged victory of human aspiration made visible in concrete, steel and tile.

[Via City of Sound]

Restoration…means the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed.

John Ruskin

The avant garde should be working for the rich, building in the Garden District, or wherever the rich live, have lots and want avant garde experimentation. The New Urbanists should be working for the middle class and the poor.

Even Aaron Betsky seems willing to give up “everyday” residential architecture in his article in Artforum:

The provision of adequate dwellings for the displaced is not an activity in which architecture can play a role beyond making sure those houses are safe and sound and more or less aesthetically pleasing. Where the housing will be, how much of it there will be, how much it is likely to cost, and who will live there is currently being decided by politicians and, no doubt, real-estate interests.

This perceived split between the avant-garde and the New Urbanists is a far cry from the early modern movement in Europe, which had an program of social improvement through up-to-date design and eagerly sought to use new technologies and materials to improve the lives of ordinary people. American modernism was never as explicitly political, but the belief that innovative design can better peoples’ lives is still very much a part of the practice of architecture.

The goal of the six conceptual proposals is not to be built “as is,” but to stimulate the kind of creative thinking - even if on a smaller scale - that will build a better city. New Urbanists sometimes defend their work as sticking to “tried and true” methods and forms. Using this line of reasoning to argue against innovation seems wrongheaded at the best of times, but it is particularly problematic in a city where the traditional way of building has so conspicuously failed. Of course the city needs more than shiny new icons. But anything beyond a superficial look at the American and Dutch designs will find highly innovative concepts that have a lot to offer New Orleans.

We don’t want to feel that art is orderly. We want to feel that things are orderly. We want to feel that art does not make order but shows it.

Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets

An exhibition of designs has been launched, however, in the Netherlands of all places. Among the proposals are a landscaped ziggurat-skyscraper from UN Studio; a dense, pedestrian-oriented urban scheme by Morphosis; and an ecologically performative City Park that will purify the soil of harmful salt left by the flood. (Includes images)
[Via Archinect.]

Update: Artforum is publishing the exhibition. See the article by curators Reed Kroloff and Aaron Betsky.

If Mozart were alive today, he’d be dead. If you really want to celebrate Mozart’s world, Mozart’s culture, Mozart’s life, you would ignore the man himself and listen to music by a living composer. If you’re not in the habit of doing so, I’d urge you to pay a little heed to contemporary music over the next few days or weeks… And, oh yeah, happy birthday, Wolfie. You don’t look a day over 175.

– Alex Ross