The Architect's Newspaper May 2019
www.archpaper.com
Francois Perrin, 1968–2019
Designing for America's fattest city page 16
page 13
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Technology and Urbanism page 22
Tech+ Expo Preview page 29
Welcome to Little Dubai
Float On?
OCEANIX and BIG unveil a framework for a floating city at the United Nations.
ICYMI Eavesdrop Highlights Marketplace
Made in Tokyo An exclusive first look at Atelier Bow-Wow’s exhibition opening in New York in October.
The Gulf-style managerial pop-up city boomerangs back to the West at New York's Hudson Yards.
COURTESY OCEANIX
The UN has just unveiled a floating city. Or, at least, a framework for how floating cities will be built. Throughout the 2010s, a certain set of statistics have found their way into every article about urbanism. You know them. They have said, for example, that according to a recent UN statistic, “68 percent of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050.” However, it’s barely the 2010s anymore! The new hot stat for the 2020s was used at the April 3rd launch by the UN to switch gears and justify exploring the possibility of building floating cities: “By 2030, approximately 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities that are exposed to grave economic, social, and environmental pressures. Further, approximately 90 percent of the largest global cities are vulnerable to rising sea levels. Out of the world’s 22 megacities with a population of more than 10 million, 15 are located along the ocean’s coasts.” Serious stuff, all discussed at the highlevel round table in New York on April 3 hosted by UN-Habitat, the UN’s coalition on affordable and sustainable housing, along with the MIT Center for Ocean Engineering, the Explorers Club, and OCEANIX, a group investing in floating cities on this new marine frontier. Bjarke Ingels of BIG—architects of the “Dryline” around Lower Manhattan— unveiled his design for a prototypical floating city today, which would be made out of mass timber and bamboo. This proposal would be “flood-proof, earthquake-proof, and tsunami-proof,” according to Marc Collins Chen, cofounder and CEO of OCEANIX. The renderings show a continued on page 14
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Continuing their influential body of work examining the city from fresh angles and novel frameworks, Atelier Bow-Wow’s Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto will cocurate Made In Tokyo: Architecture and Living 1964–2020 at New York’s Japan Society. The show, scheduled to open in October, will examine Tokyo in the period between the 1964 and the 2020 Olympics, both of which were hosted in the Japanese capital and marked shifts caused by enormous infrastructural investment. Made In Tokyo, a close examination of the flows of everyday life and urban institutions, will feature models, drawings, and photographs of a collection of architecture and art that developed around the city in this period of extraordinary change. AN executive editor Matt Shaw exchanged emails with the iconic duo as they prepare the exciting exhibition. continued on page 14
Wrecking Ball JACK MORLE Y/AN
In a recent review titled “The Case Against Hudson Yards Dining” on Eater, the inimitable food critic Ryan Sutton examined the food and beverage options at the mirage-like, instant Hudson Yards (henceforth Little Dubai), New York City’s newest neighborhood. The dining scene is not a pretty picture, and the food options are just part of the bigger picture, dovetailing with the urbanism to expose the ugliness of 21st-century development culture. As Sutton notes, Little Dubai “is a taxpayer-subsidized development that solidifies Manhattan’s slow transformation from one of the world’s most distinctive urban centers into a nondescript international mall for the wealthy.” His biggest gripe? Rather than representing the wonderful melange of cultures that thrive in New York, the food and beverage programming is a cynical commercialized selection that has no roots in the place where it resides. “The only place for pizza—New York’s
quintessentially affordable street food— will be a D.C.-based chain where a lunchtime Margherita starts at $11.50. The only Chinese-leaning restaurant will be an ‘East meets West’ spot run by a Dutch guy known for his competent Continental spots in airports, concert halls, and museums,” he laments. The condition Sutton describes could easily be seen in a number of cities around the world, where international flavors are imported wholesale and in no particular fashion or relationship to the place they now inhabit. This cultural importation is a new ideology: In an era where financial markets and soft power make national borders less and less important, it makes sense that a new type of immigrant cultural exchange would begin to take hold—one that no longer even requires physical, transnational immigration. Cultural exchange can now take place on airplanes, waves of capital, and wires of data in an age continued on page 12
Tower project pits Gehry against the father of the L.A. Conservancy.
COURTESY VISUALHOUSE
It’s not often that Los Angeles moves to demolish one of its 1,158 Historic-Cultural Monuments (HCM), a list of relics that includes Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, and three of the city’s majestic Moreton Bay Fig trees. But if developers Townscape Partners had their way, their Gehry Partners–designed 8150 Sunset project could do just that. continued on page 17
Facades
From innovative fabrics to new takes on age-old materials, get the latest in facades industry news in our annual facades special focus. See page 32. OSSIP VAN DUIVENBODE
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