Category: Urban Planning

An expression of a physical reality – the new Newseum

The Newseum has always been a strange concept for me: a museum, an embodiment of the past, dedicated to the news, the embodiment of the present. Way back in 1999 I came to DC with my Highschool Government Class to participate in the “We the People” Competition as the New York State Champions. One of the many tourist-y things we did was visit the old Newseum in Rosslyn. At the time the museum was two years old and with its gleaming white ceramic sphere of a dome architecturally significant. I do not remember much – we were only there for an hour or so – but I do remember the rooftop garden and memorial, which was dedicated to journalists who died in pursuit of the news. It was a twisting spiral of glass plates engraved with the names of the fallen, a light and airy contrast (and tiny) to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial. I can not wonder, that in light of the Iraq Occupancy and the 127 journalists who have died there, if the new Museum was to have such a structure, how big would the spiral be? Would it start to approach the Vietnam Memorial in size?

An image of the Journalists Memorial in Freedom Park in Rosslyn, Va. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, some rights reserved.

[Image via Wikipedia via Wikimedia Commons some rights reserved.]

The Newseum has always been a strange concept for me: a museum, an embodiment of the past, dedicated to the news, the embodiment of the present. Way back in 1999 I came to DC with my Highschool Government Class to participate in the “We the People” Competition as the New York State Champions. One of the many touristy things we did was visit the old Newseum in Rosslyn. At the time the museum was two years old and with its gleaming white ceramic sphere of a dome architecturally significant. I do not remember much – we were only there for an hour or so – but I do remember the rooftop garden and memorial, which was dedicated to journalists who died in pursuit of the news. It was a twisting spiral of glass plates engraved with the names of the fallen, a light and airy contrast (and tiny) to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial. I can not wonder, that in light of the Iraq Occupancy and the 127 journalists who have died there, if the new Museum was to have such a structure, how big would the spiral be? Would it start to approach the Vietnam Memorial in size?

In the years since, the museum closed in 2002 and spent 5 years dormant while its new home in the district on Pennsylvania Ave, NW was constructed. For the past few months I’ve been driving into the city once a month and I’ve noticed the new building. Its new glass curtain wall façade easily mistakable for an office building if not for the giant stone panels engraved with the first amendment. The new building sits almost directly on the mall, just behind the national gallery of art. This is a fitting testament to the changed role of broadcast journalism in the last decade. Much like the museum, the media seems to have left its position as the fourth estate, the other, and become entrenched as a part of the federal system.

The new building performs a remarkable architectural feat. It simultaneously blends into the federal style fabric of the District while also fitting firmly in the vernaculr of the contemporary architectural mode. In the façade it is not hard to see watered down references to Morphosis’ Cal Trans building and the urban infill work of Coop Himmelb(l)au. Yet it is done in such a way that it offends no one, and by doing so, causes no one to embrace it either. It is hard not to compare the new Newseum to the I.M. Pei addition to the National Gallery across the street. Pei’s work proclaims “I am Modern, Love me or Hate me” yet does so without detracting from the original gallery next to it. Polshek Partnership Architects’ new Newseum seems to be saying “Move along folks, nothing to see here.” The New York Times’ review of the new building does a very accurate job of discussing the state of architecture in DC and the way that this building relates to it. Unlike me, the author of that article has been inside the new building and can discuss the interior as well as the skin.

Saturday, April 14th, the day after the Newseum opened to the public, I had the pleasure of seeing Ira Glass, host of This American Life at the GW Lisner Auditorium. One of the things he discussed in the question and answer session was the role of News in America today. He was concerned that by removing emotion from the News we have removed the Human element and in doing so changed the scale to one of giants instead of men. I have to wonder, has the Newseum done the same thing? By moving itself from Rosslyn, where the scale of the city is more human, its building was not so huge and it had a premier place as one of very few museums, to DC where, as I previously discussed, the city is a place out of scale and it has become one of many museums (but one of the very few that charge admission) has the Newseum also changed the language of its discourse?

Article: Reinventing the Cul-de-Sac

A proposed revision to suburbia using tessellating multi-family houses

[Image from Treehugger via tessellar]

The other day I was discussing the mortgage crisis and mentioned that I believe that we should be moving towards a more dense mass transit rich residential development model. Treehugger recently posted about a possible reinvetion of the the Cul-de-sac. This interesting article revisions suburbia as a series of duplexes, triplexes, quadruplexes, and sextuplexes which could be tessellated to efficiently fill space and allow for a maximum of residents on their own quiet cul-de-sacs.

While this is a great idea for land use and would provide increased environmental efficiency I fear that this would never happen in the US. Most people move to low rise suburbia to escape sharing walls and floors with their neighbors and while this adds to environmental efficiency by providing increased insulation it means less perceived privacy. I say perceived because the advancements in sound abatement technology which have occurred in the past few years have made it such that modern condos and duplexes are for all intents and purposes soundproof. In addition, this proposal while making efficient use of land, it would be a nightmare for traffic and road navigation. I have had a first hand experience with this, where I live none of the subdivisions connect, so all traffic must use main arteries. There are no secondary routes – and this system would just increase that problem.

Article: Real Estate Road Trips Scout Troubled Market

The Decadence of the American Housing Market

So I don’t know how I missed this, but apparently on Monday, March 31st The Washington Post ran an article about the new phenomenon of Foreclosure Tours in the DC/NOVA metro area (Click here for the article). This strikes a sore spot with me, it makes me think of the Katrina tours that sprung up in New Orleans once tourists started to return to the city. Now I know this is a different sort of animal; the article describes these tours as “foreclosure seminars on wheels” and they are intended to help fill in neighborhoods instead of to educate. Yet in the end, I wonder, aren’t they both ways of profitting off of the pain and suffering of others?

Now I know that this in and of itself is not really architecture or design related, but I feel as if the whole foreclosure mess stems from the modern architecture and urban development of the US. For the past century we have been spreading farther and farther from urban centers and the average american living space has ballooned, this has not only affected us mentally and physically, but it is also affecting us environmentally and monetarily. As we move farther from the cities we need to travel farther to reach our employment, have less mass transit available to us, and the larger properties get the more spread out they must be. Where a 1/4 acre of land was plenty large for each Levit house (and considered private in comparison to inner city living), a modern McMansion would hardly fit within the property lines and required setbacks of the same lot. Daily travel becomes more expensive — monetarily and environmentally — especially with a lack of decent regional rail systems. Add all of this into a market in the past few years where 0% ARM’s were a common thing and a mind set which said that ownership is always better than rental, and its easy to see how we got in this situation.

The thing that interests me is that no one is suggesting that as a solution to the housing crisis we start building rail lines or beefing up mass transit systems and encouraging urban and suburban densification. Condo and apartment living provides many environmental and economical advantages to single family home ownership — heating and cooling loads are lower and more averaged, water usage is decreased because there is less lawn/planting per person, and there is less land being used for housing which allows for more land being used for other needs. While I may have some design and business issues with the new urbanist town centers and mixed use developments I do believe that they are a long term plan for dealing with housing.