Church of St Vladimir, Podporozhye, Arkhangelsk region (1757). Photo by Richard Davies
In 2007 Matilda Moreton and Richard Davies retraced the 1902 inspirational trip by the famous Russian artist and illustrator Ivan Bilibin. The result is this wonderful virtual exhibition.
When I was in the architecture school in Moscow in the summer students went on a month long trip to paint historic architecture. Some of my classmates went to Kizhi to paint and draw these wooden churches. I went to Kamenetzk-Podolsk to paint the old Turkish ruins and keep an eye for the rare sightings of the bearer of the good name. Those quash paintings are still on my walls.
Time to open a bucket list. Starting with the Monastic State of Meteora in Greece. The effort required in schlepping construction material by hand up the rock formation is unimaginable. And you can see that even in the 13th century, when Athanasios Koinovitis brought a splinter monastic group of followers from Mount Athos, Greeks haven’t lost their sense of architectural beauty.
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bibleplaces.com: “Expect a media frenzy with the timing of this story a few days ahead of Christmas. A minor sidenote: this discovery should put to rest the theory of at least person who has claimed that since Nazareth is mentioned in the first century only in the New Testament, the city did not exist at that time. It is true that Nazareth is not mentioned in Josephus and other contemporary sources, but that is only an indication of how insignificant the town was.”
Israel Antiquities Authority – A Residential Building from the Time of Jesus was Exposed in the Heart of Nazareth.More about the house in the AP Article, especially on the configuration of the house-grotto as a hiding place for the Jews from the Romans.
On the subject of New Aristocracy versus the Old Middle Class. There is an aspect of unionized blue color workforce that is effectively self destructive and is contributing to the general decline of the white and blue middle class in America. NYT has an article with a rather pedestrian plot but full of fascinating details around the story of Marshal Greenberg – A Whistle-Blower Says His Concerns About Safety Were Met With Scorn. This guy in his late 30s who never worked except for his father. Likely doesn’t even have a college education and just because his father is “a notorious figure in the demolition industry who has prior convictions for bribing an inspector and bid rigging” he gets a union job to pull a lever of construction elevator that pays $100K! If that was not enough he decided to play a law-abiding dork. What a country!
On the subject of Dubai’s debt default, most articles are missing the essential point. The question is not if the Sovereign is credit worthy but if Dubai can populate and lease the millions of square meters of the spare commercial real estate.
Dubai is a religious idea, promoted after the dotcom crash in USA, the belief that construction on easy credit is the catalysis for the broader economy. Dubai took this ethos to the extreme. Free from the American overregulation and environmental concerts, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum followed the Singapore model of the free market dictatorship and the ancient Egyptian model of the slave construction labor. All the land in Dubai belongs to the Sheik and he parceled it out for free with the explicit condition of the rapid development.
Let’s say magically tomorrow Dubai would lease or sell all its vast and unused office and commercial capacity. The country would immediately choke, even without the benefit of a sand storm. The infrastructure is lagging the building construction. Firstly it takes decades to develop an urban project, secondly this is the neglected area because no one has the ownership of the public desert and here the Sheiks inevitably revert to the good old socialist model.
The vast unused capacity would remain empty in the foreseeable future. This creates an urban cancer that is impossible to cure. Just go to the heavily foreclosed areas in America and observe the effect of empty houses of the neighborhoods. Even many American downtowns still have not fully recovered from the flight to the suburbia. But this problem is much more severe in Dubai. Essentially it doesn’t have a habitable climate. For months people never go outside but live in the hermetically sealed, air-conditioned structures. An empty building without a rental income becomes an energy money sink even when the energy is cheap (see my post What’s easier, to build or to destroy?). The question is not how soon Dubai will repay its debt but how soon will it become an international exotic park and a futuristic sand canyon.
Photos of the Dubai Sand Storm on July 21st, 2006 via flickr/jgavinha
Moscow apartment building near VDNH, 1994
When people say it is easier to destroy they mean to demolish, like blowing up a stadium or something. But obviously the original metaphor that claims an easy destruction is not intended for the case of complete destruction, at least not as it applies to our lives hopefully. The truth is, mechanically it is much more difficult to take a building apart, and this is the reason they blow up large structures despite negative environmental and urban impact.
Of course it takes time and effort to design a building but construction is rather straightforward. Yet after you permanently connect building components, taking them apart is difficult. Things get cemented, glued to each other. Try taking two cemented bricks apart without damaging the bricks. In life we don’t destroy, we try to untangle first. After you build virtual structures taking them apart is close to impossible without a severe damage.
This is the reason a divorce is more complicated than marriage and leaving a culture, a country, or a job without tear wounds is so hard. This is also the reason why every sloppy, dysfunctional and poorly designed structure in the world is still standing. Indeed blowing things up is never a preferred option, but sometimes it might be the only option.
photo flickr/olgasch
Tyler Cowen skeptically quotes in Marginal Revolution from the new book by Chris Wickham – “The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000”:
“The other important feature of the Great Mosque was that, as a space, it was closed off to the outside. Roman cities were structured by wide streets leading to central forum areas, to which processions led and where public participation could be considerable, as continued to be the case in Constantinople for centuries. Amphitheatres (in the West), theatres and racetracks were other major venues for public activity, and the Hippodrome of Constantinople carried on this tradition for a long time. In the Islamic world, the mosque courtyard took over from all of these; major political events, like collective oaths of loyalty, took place there, not in any secular location. And the Arab states did not use processions as a major part of their political legitimization; the assembly in the mosque courtyard was sufficient for that. The need for wide boulevards ended; pre-Islamic Syrian and Palestinian colonnades were quite quickly filled in with shops in the eighth century, some of them commissioned as public amenities by caliphs. The narrow streets of Islamic cities resulted directly from this, for there was no public interest involved in keeping them clear from obstructions like vendors’ stalls, beyond a certain minimum (enough for two loaded pack animals to pass each other, later jurists said). Public display came to be focused on the mosque, and secondarily, rulers’ palaces and city gates, rather on the cityscape as a whole…The caliph and his advisers were nonetheless making a set of conscious symbolic and political points by organizing the Great Mosque as they did; and the way the public space in Islamic cities change, to focus so exclusively on mosques…would have seemed to them auspicious and fitting.”
I don’t know much about urban history of Rome or Greece. Someone in the comments there mentioned chariots, an interesting point worth looking into. But I can say with certainty that historic European capitals were as dense as the cities in the Middle East. Many European cities where build predominantly with wood and burned down. European cities were developed over the old dense grid. For example for military and aesthetic reasons Napoleon III commissioned Baron Haussmann to cut the famous boulevards through the historic maze of Paris. Many “modern” cities copied French boulevards rather literally. For example Commonwealth Ave. in Boston or Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, the latter comes complete with an arch.
It might as well be true that the classical Roman parades where not part of the Arabic culture but it would hardly excuse or explain the density. More interesting question is if Islam’s Mosque plagiarized from Judaism were designed to mirror the traditional urban role of the Jerusalem Temple?
Globes quotes Leviev:
“I like to concentrate on the future. What has happened has happened. But our main mistake was the investments in the US.”
My take on Leviev’s American mistake:
- Invested with a splash at the top of the bubble purchasing height profile = most overpriced properties.
- Instead of partnering with professional developers, partnered with a hustler like himself Boymelgreen, partnership went sour almost immediately.
- People who operate in Israel, Eastern Europe and Russia, where projects are built by greasing the approval process, often can’t operate in USA, lacking municipal and political connections.
- Design and approval process in America is much more expensive and much more protracted compared to the European construction. Design and approval in America can approach 15% of development costs (my guess only), a shock to the European developers.
- Any activity in America, especially urban development, is a subject to litigation. European developers never fully account for this risk, and litigation is inevitable for a large project, especially when the investment turns red and market collapses.
Sir Christopher Wren, The Monument Design, London
The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props is one of the chapters of Hugh’s new book Ignore Everybody. Hugh calls this a “Pillar Management”. The chapter resonates with me so strongly:
“Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.
Abraham Lincoln wrote The Gettysberg Address on the back of his paper lunch bag, sitting on a park bench.
James Joyce wrote with a simple pencil and notebook. Somebody else did the typing.
Van Gough never started a painting with more than six colors on his palette…”
And this poetic marvel brings me to the illustrative post in Entrepreneurs: Beware the curse of the new building by a former startup CEO Steve Blank. He describes that moving into a new fancy building was detrimental to his startup. Steve first outlines the reasons for the move:
“Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office.
We can’t bring customers to this rundown building. The new building needs to reflect that we’re a successful and established company.
The lobby of the last building didn’t “represent” the company in a professional manner. Lets “do it right” and have a lobby and reception area that projects a professional image.
We had used, crummy and uncomfortable furniture. Lets get comfortable chairs and great new desks for everyone. None of this used stuff.
The last building has stained carpets and walls that haven’t been painted in years. Now we can pick out carpets that look good and feel good and we can have clean walls with great artwork and murals.
We didn’t have enough conference rooms. Lets make sure that we have plenty of conference rooms.
Everyone left the building for lunch. We need our own cafeteria so employees don’t have to leave the building.”
And then Steve list cultural problems brought about by the new building, this is your classic “pillar” problem:
“While offices for everyone sound good on paper, moving everyone out of cubicles destroyed a culture of tight-knit interaction and communication. Individuals within departments were isolated, and the size and scale of the building isolated departments from each other.
The new building telegraphed to our employees, “We’ve arrived. We’re no longer a small struggling startup. You can stop working like a startup and start working like a big company.”
We started to believe that the new building was a reflection of the company’s (and our own) success. We took our eye off the business. We thought that since we in such a fine building, we were geniuses, and the business would take care of itself.”
As this subject is somehow close my expertise I would say that there are two failures here, one is the “pillar problem” but another is the failure of the process of design and architecture that is irrevocably broken. Imagine if Apple would design and custom iPhone for every customer? The engineers would meet with a client and follow precise customer instruction in creating a tailored device. Everyone understands that not only it would be a monumental waste of time but the devices itself would be a disaster, the client doesn’t even know what he wants, can’t imagine the unexplored possibly of a new invention. In fact often architectural clients are griped by fear of making “cast in stone decisions” and they deliberately guide architects backwards. They don’t have mental tools to design an iPhone or a building. You get what you pay for and then you pay for what you get. So part of what failed Steve was the “pillar problem” but bigger part is the process of design. In fact if there was a mass produced modular “startup building” that people bought like they buy an iPhone, a sleek contemporary, efficient building, than most of the problems Steve Blank describes would go away and the transition to such a building would have been justified and smooth.
Curbed points out to the NYC building department spreadsheet that puts the number of “officially stalled buildings” at 409. Naturally the actual number must be higher, in addition to the vast number of stalled projects in various stages of design that haven’t been permitted with the DOB.
It normally takes 2.5 years to design a large scale project and it takes 1.5 years for construction. A projects cycle is about 5 years. If you just take a walk though Manhattan you would notice an amazing amount of housing that is either in the final stages of completion or just hit the market. All these projects were conceived and financed circa 2003 at the height of the boom. This is in addition to the officially stalled construction and housing coming on the market due to foreclosure by the banks.
The DOB numbers don’t differentiate between commercial and residential real estate. But the commercial real estate bubble is yet to burst as the vast number of commercial loans are coming up for refinancing before the end of the year. With commercial rental market at it’s softest and credit at it tightest one wonders how it will all play out.
Gaetano Brunetti, Decoration for the side of a sedan chair. 1758
Pure genius by Paul Graham – The trouble with the Segway. You need to read the whole thing but let me start (finish really) with this quote:
“The Segway hasn’t delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don’t want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork.”
And the anatomy of the “it”:
“Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they’d had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they’d have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I’m sure, but they didn’t have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.”
A side note about Sedans. Things often come in batches. There is a sedan chair that figures prominently in the Aguirre, the Wrath of God film, and then someone asked me about the name “Sedan” as it relates to automobiles and now Paul Graham compares Segway to a Sedan Chair. But I digress.
This is sort of the trouble with every modern building and especially the buildings designed by the so called Star-architects are Segways.
- People make erroneous conclusion about a building based on looks or even a photograph. There is no feedback in architecture. Instead of understanding how a building breaths, how does it interact with its neighbors, how the electrical system functions under a load, people reduce a complex structure to a photo taken on a sunny morning a week after completion.
- The inhabitants of the buildings are often reluctant to report the flaws associated with the biggest investments of their lives. It’s too late to report back anyway and frankly no one is interested.
- A Star-architect might be as big of a genius as Dean Kamen. But if there is no live testing, no data on how the structure interacts with the real environment, the genius is worthless.
- There is no substitute to trial and error. No trial – all of it is an error unless it’s a mad luck and that doesn’t happen too often.
Now you know.
Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
