In light of the recent 2 week’s financial news I have been a little preoccupied with reading the news blogs and playing fake day-trader on updown.com and have not found many articles to write about. That being said, I would like to write an extra special post detailing how an economic collapse, or at least a shaky market, will affect the architecture world as we know it. Unfortunately I do not have the knowledge or research to make any grand predictions or explanations. Instead, i will just make my own observations. Here goes the list of things that we might see happen due to recent economic events: Due to a decrease in speculative lending, new construction loans will become harder to get, and many private commercial projects will be tabled. Because of the economic slow down there will be less capital and therefore less commercial growth, so the drop in commercial projects will be compounded by their being less demand. This may be beneficial to the projects that do seek financing, because there will be less fingers in the pie Less commercial growth, in turns creates less personal disposable income and reimbursable business expenses. This can translate to a slow [...]
A good friend of mine from architecture school who is involved in the process of building the new Charity Hospital sent me an update on the old building’s situation. Selections from her response below: [A]s I work at the firm that did the storm damage and the new packages to get the work done to fix the MYRIAD of problems just from the storm itself with FEMA I can pretty much tell you this: that building will never again be a hospital. According to the codes necessary for health care there is no way for that building to reach code for less than a couple more million than they’re going to spend on the new one. In addition the amount of asbestos and mold inherent in the HVAC and wall systems, due to the materials used last time they renovated that building, stack another couple to 30 mil on. It’s not a cheap building to fix for anything, especially for something as specific as a hospital. Which is why they are pouring 10.2 billion dollars (most likely plus) into the new LSU/Charity Hospital … [P]eople can make noise as much as they want about it being done faster with a [...]
This is a bit of really good news! Over at PreservationNation it seems that there is some discussion by RMJM Hillier about rehabilitating Charity Hospital in New Orleans. This 1938 Art Deco building always reminded me of a little bit of Gotham City in the heart of the Crescent. Besides its architectural good looks, I knew many a service industry worker without health care who were able to be treated here without having to worry about repayment, and quite a few LSU medical school students who trained here. In addition, I had a number of friends in the Tulane EMS squad, and they always told me that if I got shot, to ask the ambulance driver to bring me to charity, because they had the best gunshot trauma ward in town.
It remains to be seen if this will ever see the light of day, and in addition, if it does how preservation sensitive the rehabilitation will be.
Today I received an e-mail from The National Trust for Historic Preservation giving me an update on the condition of the Farnsworth House, a piece of seminal modern architecture by Mies van der Rohe. The flood waters have receded, but as you can see in the above photo, there is as expected water and mud damage. The glass windows/walls are intact, as are the travertine floors; the primavera wood panels from the living room were rescued, but much of the built in wood has suffered water damage. The extent of the restoration process is yet to be determined, but because of the large scale damage clean up operations in the area the process will be slow. The full story can be found at PreservationNation.
Due to unusually heavy rains and flooding caused by the remnants of Ike and Lowell, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House has 1 foot of standing water in it, according to the National Trust’s Blog PreservationNation. The house is built 5′ off of the ground, so that means there 6′ of flood water. Hopefully, when the water subsides, the damage will be able to be repaired.
Today is the opening of the 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. The major news agencies are all carrying the story and are depicting the whole emotional and nationalist side of this event. What interests me here is the architecture. The memorial consists of a field of trees with “light benches” folding out of the ground. These folded planes are each dedicated to a person who died in the pentagon and the plane that crashed there.
An unfished poured concrete column – It looks like a hand reaching towards the sky.
A brick ledge in a poured concrete wall – It looks like the wall has been shifted inward.