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This blog covers everything except sports and gardening, unless we find a really good link about using dead professional bowlers for mulch. The author is a StarTribune columnist, has been passing off fiction and hyperbole as insight since 1997, has run his own website since the Jurassic era of AOL, and was online when today’s college sophomores were a year away from being born. So get off his lawn.
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Posts about Architecture
Another World's Tallest Building
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: December 27, 2012 - 12:56 PM
Today’s appliance term you never knew until it breaks: Actuator. I’ll explain later.
#HASHTAG The worst social-media “fails” of the year. We used to have another word for these things - mistakes, failures - but “Fail” is apparently sufficient these days. Even though it sounds so 2010. Somehow I missed this one, which came out in the aftermath of the Aurora movie-theater shooting:
Yikes.
GEEK Shocker! Peter Parker is dead! But his consciousness survives in the mind of Dr. Octopus, who will now be Spider-Man.
That’ll last. Can’t see them coming back with Spider-Man in accustomed Parker form. I mean, he’s dead! They can’t do anything about that! I give it a year before someone grows Peter from some DNA they find on a comb, or they restart everything by going back to the origin story and starting again. That’ll be interesting. If there’s anything people are eager to see retold, it’s Spider-Man’s origin story - which, in the original, I believe, consisted of two panels. Or three? Checking . . . .
Yes, that’s about it. In related news: Jack Kirby is still regarded as one of the greatest comic artists, so it’s a bit odd to find out he did the comic version of Disney’s sci-fi misfire, “The Black Hole.” Regardez! (It’s in French.)
ARCHITECTURE Here’s a new museum in San Francisco, named as “one of the buildings to watch in 2013.” It’s an interesting thing that appears to be pre-collapsed for your convenience:
That will be a nice view for the hundred or so people who see it. Most people will see it from the street, where the building gives everyone a blank wall punctuated with a few windows.
The underwhelming One World Trade Center is another building to watch, although I’ve no idea why; is it scheduled to do something interesting, like shed its skin and reveal a beautiful structure that’s been hiding all along?
And then there’s Sky City. It will be the tallest building in the world. Built in China.
It will be constructed in three months.
Two hundred and twenty stories.
It has the massing of traditional 30s skyscrapers with none of the grace. Also, it’s a conceptual failure, says Christian Sottile, SCAD Dean of the School of Building Arts:
if you look at the outcome of this endeavor urbanistically, it is at best a folly, and at worst, madness. The proposition that a city can be contained within one building is unnatural and devastating to the human spirit. This project would, however, not be the first to propose such an end. It follows a long tradition of audacious architecture attempting to rethink the city. But in the end, the city always wins. I am speaking of the evolved city of over 7,000 years of transcultural human history — cities that honor the human being, as well as the art, craft, culture and resources of places.
Other than that, it’s a home run. If I lived on top of a 220-story building, I wouldn’t exactly be reassured that its builders were trying set a world record for fast construction.
As for other new structures that try to push the boundaries of architecture, tell me this doesn’t look like it will disgorge a billion bees some day.
This one just looks embarrassed for itself.
THE ACTUATOR EXPLANATION It’s the thing that makes the ice come out of the front of a refrigerator. The one I had was made of plastic - wise choice, Electrolux, for something people shove six or seven times a day with a hard object! Because the electrician had to disconnect the power, and because he wanted to cut the power at the fuse box, and because he didn’t know which fuse was the right one, he cut power to my home office, and when the computer came back on the fans were blowing in full panic mode, and haven’t stopped. All because of a cheap piece of plastic.
Well, as the philosophers say, everything is connected.
UPDATE: Infant-snatching eagle was faked
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: December 19, 2012 - 1:44 PMLate and short, that’s me. Okay:
TIS THE SEASON ETC The sad life of a Novelty Christmas Wreath.
ART This is, perhaps, the golden age of beer label design.
YIKES Eagle tries to snatch a child. Video has swearing, so the usual rules apply against embedding. It’s here. Thanks, uploader, but “Chariots of Fire” was not the wisest soundtrack choice.
By the way: this is not a repeat from 1907, as they say on Fark. Except it is.
UPDATE: that was fast. Fakery revealed, here.
ARCHITECTURE We were talking about architecture the other day. Well, I was. Here's another new project, the Velo - it will no doubt be nice to live in, with Amenties and things, but lacks pizzazz:
The rain has passed, it’s twilight, and everyone’s home.
Got a press release on this one, down in the Mill district on the English side of the river. Starting to see a pattern?
Mill & Main. Great views, judging from the website It uses materials common to the area, which is nice, but suffers from the blocky sameness that affects the genre these days. The large windows are nice, and I’m not saying they should all wear an oversized Mansard roof like the craptacular apartments of the late 60s and early 70s, but would it kill you to put a cornice on one of these guys? Back in college a bartender at the restaurant where I worked was an architecture major, and delighted in telling me how he shocked his teachers by putting “An (expletive) hipped roof” on a house for an assignment. So bourgeoise! That’s what it took to be a rebel: make your house look like a 1962 rambler.
Obviously you’re going to want the most floor-space the plot permits. But these designs seem to defeat the possibility of ornamentation - anything tacked on the severe surfaces would just look, well, tacked on, like an I-Beam welded to the side of the Seagrams Building to impart the idea of Miesian purity.
Still, the Seagrams is a pretty handsome building.
Back to column work; see you around.
The Sloooow Internet
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: December 17, 2012 - 12:20 PMWhen it rained this weekend I found myself thinking A) finally, and B) stop it. the rain beat down the snow, and you have the sinking suspicion that last week’s storm was the sole ration we’ll get before Christmas. We need a fresh coat.
The drizzle also slickified (warning: not a word) the sidewalks, so every step was a potential cocyxx-shattering event unless the homeowner has strewn some grit. Which I did. That was my weekend accomplishment. Grit-strewing. Anyway:
MEANWHILE IN PUERTO RICO This . . .
. . . said something controversial about a local publicist who was killed in a dodgy part of town. As the New York Times put it: “The outrage was in part because of fears over a growing crime wave on the island and a reaction to La Comay, a puppet version of the television program “TMZ” with gossipy segments about celebrities, politics and crime.”
I mention this only because the words “a puppet version of ‘TMZ’ ought to give everyone pause. It’s only a matter of time before it happens here.
WEB The internet moves too quickly and people who have to post all the time to juice the traffic burn out. Sometimes they move to Hawaii and start something else. Ah, but how do you get noticed? How do you cut through the blinding blizzard of PR chaff? Have the right friends. From the New York Times:
With friends — including Brian X. Chen, who now works at The New York Times — he came up with his own version of a gadget site. But instead of chasing down every tidbit of tech news, he built The Wirecutter, a recommendation site that posts six to 12 updates a month — not a day — and began publishing in partnership with The Awl, a federation of blogs founded by two other veterans of Gawker Media, Choire Sicha and Alex Balk.
That’ll help.
“Brian’s insight is that in a world of loudest and fastest, he has turned it down, doing it slow and doing it right,” Mr. Sicha said. “And by being consumer facing, he doesn’t have to have monster numbers. The people come ready to buy.”
Wasn’t Choire Sicha the person who used to make fun of people who said things like “consumer facing”? Anyway, Digg’s subhead is “Savoring the Slow Web,” so you know that’s going to be a thing. Slow web. Ahhh. Like slipping into a warm bath after a day in the frothy jacuzzi of work internet, which has pirhanas. We have Slow Food, Slow Reading, all kinds of Slow things that are better - deeper, more spiritual somehow - for being Slow.
In case you’re curious, here’s one of those pages that makes one (1) recommendation. It makes about 30. There’s also a gift guide, with this humble apology on the site’s front page:
Sorry this is late. I sat around playing video games for a week instead of doing this gift guide. Here it is. It's so-so. BUT feel free to email me for gift ideas. Instead of making you rely on a generic list of stuff, I'll do custom recommendations for you if you just tell me your budget and something about your gift recipient.
That’s certainly the personal touch. If that’s the Slow Web, then yes, that’s great. Seems rather labor-intensive, though. If Amazon took the approach instead of having its massive cybernetic brain toss up recommendations based on clicks, it would have to hire hundreds of thousands of people.
There! Unemployment solved.
FASHION Finally, the opportunity to look like a Disney character. It’s easy for men to be Donald; just put on a hat and shirt and skip the pants. Different for the Princess line-up, though Just in time for Christmas, Harrods is here to help.
That’s about $81,000 Yank money. If you're wondering when the culture will get tired of revisiting the Disney Princesses, the answer is Never.
ART If you’re an architect or interested in buildings, this may strike a chord.
Writing about modern architecture and modern photography for the Photographers' Gallery website, Hatherley says sites like Dezeen and Archdaily "provide little but glossy images of buildings that you will never visit, lovingly formed into photoshopped, freeze-dried glimmers of non-orthogonal perfection, in locations where the sun, of course, is always shining."
So? In related news, wedding photography rarely consists of people in burlap sacks standing out in the rain. As for “buildings that you will never visit,” I believe this falls into the category of “most buildings everywhere,” since architectural photography is the only way one gets to see these things. I’m not sure what the point is. We continue:
He adds: "In art, this approach to reproduction is dubious enough, but in architecture – where both physical experience and location in an actual place are so important – it’s often utterly disastrous, a handmaiden to an architectural culture that no longer has an interest in anything but its own image."
Ah, that’s why I bookmarked it. Now it comes back to me. A culture that no longer has an interest in anything but its own image. What’s the difference between the great buildings of yore and the goofy exhibitionist architecture of today? The former were built to please the patron - the Church, the State, the Company. Today the patron flatters the architect, comes bowing and scraping: will you please deign to design something for us?
The flip side: overly cautious developer architecture. Going up soon downtown:
We already have that building about ten times over. It looks like the old Lutheran Brotherhood building trying to emerge from one of the Target structures. If you don’t know the old LB building, it was a gem:
That’s a building that knows what it is. Then there’s this:
We have one of those already. It’s the Skyscape.
Don't get me wrong: I'll take them. I just wish there was a compromise between Safe and Obnoxious.
Pepsi-flavor Chicken Chips
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: December 13, 2012 - 12:12 PMYUM Of course there’s Pepsi-flavr Chicken Chips. In China. As Ad Age puts it:
The launch, in August, was much bigger than for any previous Lay's flavor in China, which include such unusual flavors as lemon tea (subtle), cucumber (cloying) and hot-and-sour fish soup (fishy).
This should make you want a bag or two:
In related news:
GOOD LORD Today’s Chinese Ghost Town is in Angola. ANGOLA. It’s Pruitt-Igoe with a hipped roof and nice bright paint.
As is the case with Chinese Ghost Towns, it’s shiny and new and utterly empty, but since no doubt it’s built to those exacting Angolese building codes, it’ll stand for centuries.
APPS Now that Facebook has Instagram, and will possibly ruin it, what’s left? Flickr! It’s like Yahoo bumping out Google as your destination search engine . . . even more since Yahoo owns Flickr, and has earned the ire from old fans who were displayed by the wayYahoo let Flickr languish. Well, listen to this to this review:
THE NEW FLICKR IPHONE APP IS REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY MIND BLOWINGLY FANTASTIC
It’s called the first good Instagram competitor out there. Says the review:
EVEN BETTER. Tap tap = fave. Yep, Instagram gave us the first big fave inflation tool by allowing us to tap tap fave our way through life and Flickr now has adopted that protocol allowing you to tap tap fave photos by all your favorite photographers.What does this mean? It means that all of a sudden you are going to start noticing a ton more faves on your Flickr photos. Every time your friends have 10 minutes in line at the bakery they are going to be all up in your Flickrstream faving things like crazy.
If indeed it brings on a new era of faving like crazy, so be it. I just want to see Flickr look different, because it’s as dull a thing as you’ll find on the web. Even the home page admits as much, pushing the app instead of the site - and suggesting that Flickr’s app provides the world with a whole new way to experience strangers’ foot-selfies.
RETRO The Golden Globes gave the cold shoudler to Mad Men, but that’s okay. Now you can ”search the web Mad Men Style.”
What does that mean? Go right here to find out.
Off to finish a column; see you around.
Dee-luxe apartments in the sky
Posted by: James Lileks Updated: December 4, 2012 - 12:20 PMThis story on the Minneapolis building boom notes that it’s mostly residential. That seems telling. Usually you have a boom downtown, it’s office space - but now most of the construction is for living, not working. This isn’t unusual; the big new towers in NY and Chicago are residential as well. The 4th biggest project of the top five: The Soo Line Building. I wonder whether the lobby will have any historical information for tenants, or just pretend the building’s previous life didn’t matter. In case you’re curious, this stood on the site over a hundred years ago:
It was around for less than a decade. The occupant, the First National Bank, was feeling its oazt - and up went this.
A nice exmple of the old "Filedrawer" school of design. The reason we don't have another like this? New York got an example so enormous they changed the zoning laws to make sure buildings tapered at the top instead of going straight up for a mile, and blocking everyone's sunlight. Those zoning ordinances changed the way New York architects designed skyscrapers, and that changed the styles for everyone else.
Anyway, the FirstBank / Soo It stands today, and that's what they're making into apartments. As for that “Soo Line” name, a vestige of the signage was visible into the late 1990s, when I took this videocam grab:
Here's a 1950s shot of the old bank lobby, fro the StarTribune archives: Probably never occurred to those folk it would all be apartments upstairs some day.
Think of that the next time you go into the IDS. Apartments by 2065? Impossible! Or not.
POP CULTURE This hit the web today: seven whole seconds of shooting. Why are people excited about this?
It's Bioshock Infinite, that’s why. As i understand it, the game has nothing to do with Bioshock 1 or 2, inasmuch as it takes place in a city in the clouds in the “Steampunk” era (how I hate that term), not a city underwater in the post-war era. But the term “Bioshock,” applied to games, now implies a philosophical undergirding, a contest of ideas that gives the shoot-’em-up festival some intellectual heft. The first game played out in an Ayn Rand-inspired city; the second turned it upside down and made Altruism the corrupting idea. From what I gather, “Infinite” goes political - yay! More of that everywhere! - and pits nativist Optimates, to borrow a phrase from the Roman times, against radical egalitarians. Immigration might be an issue, although the idea of a “border fence” really seems moot when your civilization is floating several thousand feet over the surface of the earth.
From Trieste to Timbuktu, millions would instantly recognise Mickey Mouse. But if a business deal hadn't gone awry in the 1920s could Disney's most iconic character have turned out to be a rabbit called Oswald.
What’s the peg here? A review of “Epic Mickey II,” the Wii came that teams Mickey and Oswald again? The fact that Oswald is finally voiced in the game? Hard to tell. I’m guessing the reappearance of Oswald and the restoration of the rights to Disney came as news to some Beeb editor, so ergo it was news to all. The story hits all the usual points - callow Walt done in by devious businessman, Charles Mintz, who takes the character and leaves the Disney studio without a signature character. The article ends: “The motto of the story is surely that massive corporations still remember the ones that got away.” Oh, more than that. They not only remember, their descendants get their revenge. In “Up,” who’s the bad guy?
Right. Charles Muntz. Pixar's way of payback. Took eighty years, but revenge, best served cold, etc.
SCIENCE Also from the BBC, a story on paleobarometry. What was the weather like billions of years ago? We may know soon: scientists are using “the imprints of raindrops preserved in 2.7bn-year-old rock” to determine the thickness of the atmosphere.
This will probably an educated guess.
Interesting story - who knew that the an ancient raindrop’s imprint could be fossilized, let alone examined for clues? It’s like learning they’ve found fossilized snowflakes, and can tell whether they had White Christmases in the Jurassic Era.
ARCHEOLOGY Imperial splendor: say what you will about the ruthless leaders whose will to dominate upends society and remakes the culture in a backwash of disorder and disruption, they leave interesting houses for posterity. The Global Times reports:
The remains of a massive "imperial palace" have been uncovered at the mausoleum of China's fist emperor, Qinshihuang, archaeologists announced.Sun Weigang, an associate researcher at the Shaanxi provincial institute of archaeology, said that based on its foundations, the courtyard-style palace was estimated to be 690 meters long and 250 meters wide.
Covering an area of 170,000 cubic meters, the palace was nearly one fourth the size of the Forbidden City in Beijing, the imperial palace of China's last two feudal dynasties of Ming and Qing (1368-1911), Sun said.
It is the largest complex ever found at the cemetery of Qinshihuang, known as China's first emperor as he united the country, he said.
Okay, how much is 170,000 cubic meters in American? I can’t quite say. I think they mean square feet. In any case, it’s big. But Qin thought big. As the Minneapolis Institute of Arts put it: “Driven by an eagerness for immortality, the First Emperor began to plan his burial from the moment he ascended to the throne at age 13.” Well, everyone needs a hobby.
By the way, that’s a typo in the original news story up there: the Fist Emperor. They mean “first,” but if you’re the guy who got seven warring states to combine into one state, and founded a system that lasted for a couple thousand years, it’s safe to say there was a certain amount of Fist involved.
The reason the Institute has anything about Qin the Fist, of course, is this exhibit, still going on. Terra-cotta warriors on loan.
Those are copies from Epcot, but you get the idea. The guy on the right is al pumped for after-life defense; the one on the bottom right cannot BELIEVE he has to spend eternity listening to this guy yell.
(BTW, the outstate tag applies to this post because of China. If it's not Outstate, nothing is.)
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