5 Underwater Habitats. The flashiest, unsurprisingly, is in development in Dubai. Anyone want to run off to Maldives with me, and dine alongside the stingrays?

The web is full of dazzling architectural renderings (many unlikely to ever get made) but I cannot stop thinking about Herzog & de Meuron’s Le Project Triangle. The triangular building will not cast a shadow on adjacent buildings once construction is completed in Paris in 2014. Citylife is defined by its noise and perpetual darkness. I can’t help but dream of a future where every building is like this. A utopian cure to seasonal affective disorder.

Chicago-area buildings endangered, a photoset by the Chicago Tribune, (whose own iconic tower will be condos, should Sam Zell get his way.) Aggressive plans for energy efficiency and poor upkeep have put many remarkable structures like Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Hospital and Elgin Mental Health Center, and even a Frank Lloyd Wright home at risk. More from the Sun-Times. Stop Smiling gets a “sinking feeling,” as would anyone lucky enough to have spent time in the city.

“Why I FFFFFing Hate FFFFound” at greg.org. See also Things Magazine on “novelty and invention” and a456 on the “(Un)compromising War on Whimsy,” referring to Things again.

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of Katrina. Check out what happened during Banksy’s NOLA visit. And here’s Life Without Buildings on preserving Modernism in New Orleans.

Here’s a rendering of the UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. (via.)

Sam Zell wants to sell the Chicago Tribune tower — my former place of employment — and turn it into condos. The paper has tried a number of bottom-up cost cutting measures (requesting we bring our own coffee filters and paper towels to work and other Office Space-like oddities.) Sale of the tower always seemed inevitable, seeing as there is a larger office far from the pricey Miracle Mile. Says the Sun-Times, “Such an owner could use it as a Gothic ornament for new construction on the parking lot.” The building just neighboring the Tribune Tower, Marina City really is a glorified parking lot. The entire lower half of the apartment complex is an exposed spiral parking ramp. I remember eating my lunch outside thinking that these few hundred cars had a better view of the city than most Chicago office workers, myself included. Simon Henley made the same observation in the very wonderful book, “The Architecture of Parking.”

Lisa Selin Davis has a story in Salon about the couple who lived in the Providence Mall (It was covered extensively on the blogs last year. See Ballardian and the artists’ website here.) The couple Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto crafted a secret apartment inside the massive Rt 95 eyesore. “The mall adventure was to last a week; it went on for four years. If Townsend hadn’t been nabbed by security and charged with criminal trespassing last October, they’d still be camping out there today.” Davis smartly compares their experience to the $1m+ Natick Mall luxury condos just a few miles north in suburban Boston (I’ve been meaning to write a post about the hilarious pseudo-poshness of the “Natick Collection” — its ant farm like freeway chaos and American-travels-the-Continent decor. Eventually.) Of course JG Ballard and Romero allusions can be made, but what I think is interesting is that most science fiction visions of futuristic architecture tend to imagine a massive space — a city or multiple cities — enclosed. (Usually for the purpose of some nuclear disaster or space colony.) Is this a subconscious projection of the shopping mall of the future by the authors? A claustrophobic vision or one of a comforting incubator?

NYTBR on Steven Heller’s “Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalarian State.” The art and design of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Stalinism, and Mao’s China are examined. I’m right now reading a book giving similar examples in architecture, The Edifice Complex. While Nazi iconography is forbidden in contemporary culture, the hammer-and-sickle is a frequent image in the hipster ironic t-shirt business — especially in the the former Eastern Block. It’s not quite clear whether this is airbrushing the past, laughing at it, or both. Last month, Jed Perl accused Chinese artists of glamorizing Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

Suburban Ruins and The Ethics of House Flipping

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People turn to the past because they are looking for something that they don’t find in the present — comfort and well-being… Only the wealthy or the very poor can live in the past; only the former do so by choice.

- Witold Rybczynski, Home

Although her home has been on the market for several years now, my aunt (by marriage) isn’t stalling because buyers are asking too low. She’s hesitating due to emotional attachment to the property — it’s the house her father designed and built, and the home she grew up in. I lived there briefly myself when I was going to college nearby. Recently, she was to close on a deal with a young married couple, but then she looked up the wife on the internet and discovered the woman is well known as an area “house flipper.”

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This neighborhood eschews miles and miles of Washington, DC suburban sprawl with its vestiges of pedestrian life: it is a 10 minute walk to the West Falls Church metro, and 5 minutes to a main street with a coffee shop, dry cleaner, TJ Maxx, a good balance of chains and small businesses. A bike trail is nearby.

Because of its conveniences and location, the land is pricey. Buyers willing to pay for West Falls Church real estate generally want several bedrooms and five baths. Over the years, my aunt has complained about the trasformation of modest homes — 70s-style “post-and-beam extravaganzas” as this article in Residential Architect puts it — into regurgitated palatial fantasies. Soon hers will be the only non McMansion on the block.

And gross remodeling may be its inevitable second life. For now, she’s still waiting for someone who will respect the design of the place. This isn’t some kind of a penance — the house is really beautiful. There are few places I’ve felt quite as cozy in, as I have reading a book on the back porch looking out at the garden. The use of the space, the way the windows are shaped, so much of my idea of a perfect house comes from living there that year in 2003.

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A few years ago, I was guiltily obsessed with A&E and TLC house flipping programs and marveled at how often the flipper blatantly conned people out of their property. The worst of them was Armando Montelongo, a San Antonio flipper who is half as likeable as Roger Clemens, just a little less weird than that plastic surgeon on Dr 90210, an internet scam artist, and known for habitually neglecting to pay his contractors.

“Mondo” does a lot of objectionable things on the show, from piggish to illegal. He once had his wife and sister-in-law dress in beekeeper costumes to exterminate a colony of bees, so he could save $300 on a professional beekeeper. He watched them from a lawnchair, beer in hand. Then there’s something about him hiring children of illegal aliens for a demolition project. Now he’s dealing with several lawsuits — facing jailtime — not paying one contractor, owing backtaxes, and the 20 or so properties of his that went into foreclosure. The guy is a crook and A&E should have known better.

But I most despised him when he’d make false promises to whomever he’s buying the house from: that he’d never strip the Victorian wallpaper. That he likes the bar in the kitchen their father made. That he’ll keep the structure the same way, but just clean it up a little bit. A widow or widower passes, and the descendants can’t afford to keep up the house. All they want is to know someone is enjoying the home as grandpa made it. Money isn’t a main issue at a time like that. So he pretend to agrees, taking the bargain, and soon after breaks his word — neglecting the family’s wishes on TV! It’s not just knucklehead-ed behavior, it’s usually aesthetically disappointing: ironing out everything that made the home unique in order to appeal to the most buyers. A hardwood floor and granite countertop sacrificial rape of a property.

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Now, my politics are more freemarket than most: I don’t believe in rent control for the reason of economic scarcity, but sale of a home has so much more at stake than most financial transactions. A price that is agreed to with the understanding the buyer will preserve without excessively altering the property, can be a binding agreement. But does this ever happen? I’m right now trying to find examples of this in real estate cases. I guess this is more of a post I’m writing as I’m thinking about it, rather than a clear statement of any kind. And any books readers might recommend on the subject are much appreciated.

Like with the Neutra Kaufmann House house that just sold in Christie’s auction. Is it only a tacit understanding that the buyer isn’t going to tear down a wing to build a gnome garden?

Here’s an example of preservation gone to an unpleasant extreme:

Richard Lucas has been trying to win permission to cut through his elderly, infirm parents’ front porch so they can get from their living quarters onto the street without climbing stairs. And for more than a year, the D.C. historic preservation authorities have found reasons to say no to a ramp.

After all, as the city’s architectural historian put it, “repeating porches of similar height and depth create a notable pattern and rhythm” along the Lucas family’s Mount Pleasant street, and the District wouldn’t want to let that rhythm be broken just to accommodate a couple of old folks who have lived in their house for 47 years.

Houses in communities respond to the changes in houses all around them, which is why I fear my aunt’s beautiful house will eventually go all Stepford. Even if they did find buyers to fall in love with it, there is the risk that given time they might give in to the status-conscious vibe of the neighborhood and build additions.

eggleston_gun.jpgOne of the best articles, one of the most linked-to essays this year, The Next Slum? by Christopher B Leinberger for The Atlantic, so immediately struck at the hearts of most of us, the unfortunate truth that the wealthy really are taking over our cities. Sure crime is down, but you try to live in Brooklyn on an artist’s salary.

One vacant home, means the depreciation of an entire neighborhood. And down like dominos the foreclosure crisis, which may likely “stay with us well into the next decade,” as Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com says in Bloomberg, puts pressure on all the neighboring homes until they too eventually tip.

It’s easier to erect a new house than it is to change an entire landscape. Recently, I learned there’s a “ghost cloverleaf” in Canton, MA, just several miles from me. Eventually I’ll check it out and post about it, until then, here’s this write up on Xconomy:

[It] was constructed between 1962 and 1968, and is the northern half of what was originally intended to be a fully working interchange between I-95, aka the Southwest Expressway, and I-93, aka Route 128, aka the Yankee Division Highway.

From here, the state’s highway blueprints called for the Southwest Expressway to continue about 10 miles north into Boston. It would have barreled through farmland and residential neighborhoods in Milton and joined up with the American Legion Highway, which would have been converted into an expressway running along the eastern edge of Franklin Park. From there, the expressway would have turned Blue Hill Avenue into a six-lane gash through Roxbury and Dorchester, eventually connecting with I-695 near the present-day intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street (which happens to be about four blocks from where I live in the South End).

Never heard of I-695? That’s because it was never built, either. Also called the Inner Belt, it was part of a scheme laid out in 1948 to help interstate drivers and truckers avoid the congestion in downtown Boston by circling through outer Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville. Perhaps it was a good idea at one time. But had this 7-mile loop been constructed, the Boston cityscape would be immeasurably different today.

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“We do not pine for period cuisine,” Rybczynski wrote, paraphrasing Adolf Loos’ point that nostalgia is absent in most other aspects of our everyday lives. And most houses, just out of practicality due to changes in energy usage, really should be remodeled. But there are reasons we might value those floors that no matter how many times you sweep, will never seem clean. Reviewing Flipping Out, the only remaining house flipping TV show on the air today, Heather Havrilesky cleverly compares two of her neighborhood cafes. One where “tables are the wrong height for the chairs, the chairs are uncomfortable, the walls are covered in bad art, the bad stereo system blares the worst of Journey and Lionel Richie, the breakfast sandwich features over-buttered bread and that fake-smoke-flavor ham, the room is too hot or freezing cold, the teenage cashiers are friendly but inattentive, and a herd of middle-of-the-room flies circles endlessly in the sparsely populated dining area,” another a, “more corporate place nearby where everything is right. The tables and chairs are made of smooth wood and are perfectly placed, the menu is tastefully designed, the lighting makes everyone look like models at a photo shoot, classical music soothes patrons from a safe distance, cool breezes blow in the open French doors, and the small cup of gazpacho they serve has little slices of melon and a dab of pesto in it. Delightful! But it’s always crowded with people who have expensive haircuts and alarmingly nice shoes.”

As repellent and deeply wrong as the local cafe is, the overpriced, meticulously designed corporate eatery seems certain to transform you, slowly but surely, into the kind of person who pays too much for haircuts and shoes, the kind of person who experiences gazpacho that doesn’t have a little dab of pesto in it the way the rest of us experience a herd of middle-of-the-room flies. And therein lies the paradox of American upward mobility: The higher you climb, the thinner the air gets, until you can barely breathe.

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Nostalgic or not, my aunt’s house as a standing protest against the McMansion-ization of suburban DC, and a call for the better days. If anyone is looking for such a property, please get in touch.

Images by William Eggleston.

Previously:

Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip
A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post Facebook
The World’s Strangest Housing Communities

Related links:

Posted by Joanne on Jul 16, 2008 | Link