Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Most of old nightclub to be razed

L.A. Unified, which is building a school on the site, says the Cocoanut Grove is too structurally weak to preserve whole. Conservancy objects.
By Evelyn Larrubia, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 26, 2007

Delivering yet another blow to historical preservationists, the Los Angeles Board of Education decided Tuesday to tear down most of the structure of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub at the former Ambassador Hotel as part of its plans to build a school there. Officials said testing determined that the structure was too weak to withstand an earthquake.

Neighborhood activists, who have been waiting for the K-12 campus for years, applauded after the speedy 7-0 vote, which followed very little discussion by board members.


“It’s been such a long process to get to where we are. We’re talking years and years and years,” said Sherly Chavarria, director of education and technology programs for the Central American Resource Center, who appeared at Tuesday’s meeting to support the changes. “The fear was that perhaps time would be taken to revise the plan, to analyze other options for the Cocoanut Grove.”

But the Los Angeles Conservancy, one of a number of groups that were embroiled in a failed legal battle against the district to block the hotel’s destruction, said the board broke its promise to the community.

“In my mind, this issue is really probably more about accountability for LAUSD — that if you say you’re going to do something, you do it — than the nitty-gritty of what are the issues of preservation of the Cocoanut Grove,” said Linda Dishman, executive director of the conservancy. “We’ll be talking to our lawyers.”

In the meantime, the district will move ahead with its $341-million plan to build an elementary, middle and high school that will house 4,240 students on the 24-acre property. Demolition of the three-quarters of the Cocoanut Grove is slated for next month. Current plans call for completion of the K-3 building in 2009 and the remainder in 2010.

The district bought the site of the fabled 1921 hotel — where presidents and politicians rubbed elbows with Hollywood celebrities — in bankruptcy court in 2001 with grand plans to build a sprawling campus. By then, the hotel was dilapidated, having been closed for more than a decade.

In a state-mandated environmental impact report, the district acknowledged that the property was historically significant. To mitigate the impact of tearing most of it down, L.A. Unified said it would preserve the pantry where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 and keep the Cocoanut Grove, turning it into a high school auditorium.

In public statements and during court proceedings, the district said it would cut out the pantry and preserve it whole. Officials said those plans were based on a review of blueprints and visual inspection of the site.

But under current plans, only the east wall, the circular entry and a portion of the glass west wall of the nightclub and historic Paul Williams cafeteria will not be destroyed, along with some interior features that were removed and will be incorporated into the design. As for the pantry, L.A. Unified decided in 2005 that the district would collect 29 items from it — mostly doors, electrical items and an ice machine — put them in storage, and tear down the rest of it.

“Maybe it’s not the ending everyone would have hoped for, but it’s the ending that we’re at because of the poor structural condition,” said John Kuprenas, a consultant overseeing the construction of the school. “We had to change our plan.”

According to a supplemental environmental impact report approved by the board Tuesday, testing found that the concrete connections were inadequate and the cement content and strength of the concrete were too low in most of the Cocoanut Grove.

Shoring the walls would take up so much space that ceilings would be low and hallways too narrow for the area to be functional, said Jim Cowell, the outgoing head of new construction for the district. Instead, the district will tear down the concrete walls and build new ones in the same place, move the stage and slope the floor, so the nightclub can work as an auditorium. The east wing was stronger than the rest of the building, so the structural elements there will be maintained.

The cost will remain the same, according to the district.

Dishman disputed that the decision was based on significantly new information, arguing that the district knew the concrete was weak years ago and that’s why it said it had to tear down the hotel. She also accused the board of failing to follow state law when it decided not to reopen the environmental review, voting to keep only portions of the pantry, rather than the whole room, as initially promised.

“They’re saying: We don’t want to do this. We want to replicate it. Our concern about replication is that it’s not historic preservation. It’s not a mitigation measure for mitigation of a historic resource,” she said.

Kevin Reed, the district’s general counsel, said that because the pantry was still being preserved, a change in the method of doing so was not enough to trigger further environmental review. As far as the nightclub is concerned, he said that was a deviation from the plan, and the board’s action Tuesday was the proper way to handle it.

“The district adhered to the process,” Reed said.

But one board member, Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, expressed concerns about the accusations.

“Very serious allegations have been made about the district regarding its credibility,” she said, asking Reed to explain whether the district was going back on its promises to preservationists.

Reed replied that keeping the Cocoanut Grove intact was a “hope,” not a promise.

Kuprenas, the project manager, said that not all the news was bad after workers tore open the building during demolition. The original pylon sign was discovered under a 1970s version, allowing the district to re-create the entrance to the hotel.

Posted by M at 15:55:39 | Permalink | No Comments »

Sun-powered homes defy a cool housing market

Builders say buyers are seeking them out, and solar industry officials say growth is going through the roof.
By Elizabeth Douglass, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer  September 25, 2007
With foreclosures rising and home prices diving, there is a bright spot in California’s residential real estate market: Solar-powered homes are starting to outsell traditionally electrified new homes in several markets, and developers are stepping up their use of the technology.

Perhaps it’s only fitting for a state that so openly celebrates its sunshine. Still, the growing popularity of household solar power is an encouraging sign for the thousands of solar enthusiasts and vendors gathering in Long Beach this week.

Tops

“Those builders are seeing that they’ll get more buyers coming to their developments when they have solar. They sell like hot cakes,” said Bernadette del Chiaro, energy specialist at the advocacy group Environment California.

Julie Blumden, a vice president at SunPower Corp., a San Jose-based manufacturer of solar roof tiles, said builders using solar were selling homes faster than nonsolar competitors — an important factor in a slow market. “The increase in sales velocity is actually paying for the solar systems,” she said.

SunPower, which sells its solar tiles to builders including Lennar Homes and Grupe Co., said it had orders to provide solar systems for 3,000 new homes in California in the coming years.

“The last time we saw interest in solar that was anything close to this was back in the 1980s, the first time there were federal tax credits for solar energy,” said Julia Judd Hamm, executive director of the Solar Electric Power Assn. and co-chair of the Solar Power 2007 conference underway at the Long Beach Convention Center. “But the numbers then aren’t even comparable to what we’re seeing now.”

Solar power is hotter than ever, helped by California’s ambitious Million Solar Roofs rebate program, federal tax credits and growing public and political support for renewable power of all kinds. The U.S. solar industry saw record growth last year, with California the largest market by far, according to a study by the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development. And 2007 is shaping up to be another big year, industry officials say.

The boom also has swelled the community of solar products and pitchmen.

Both will be on display at the solar conference and expo, which is expected to draw more than 11,000 attendees in Long Beach, up from 8,500 at last year’s event in San Jose, organizers say. Tonight, the show is free to the public from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Exhibitors will be hawking photovoltaic solar panels in all forms, with some companies showing off systems that embed the technology in carports, roofing tiles and other structures. Some will be targeting individual homeowners, while others will be angling for business with utilities that want to boost their use of renewable power.

California’s largest electric utilities, including Edison International’s Southern California Edison Co., PG&E Corp.’s Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric Co., have signed deals to build power-plant-sized solar facilities in and around the Mojave Desert or negotiated contracts with companies putting up such plants.

“Obviously, there are a nearly unlimited number of rooftops available in California and across the country” for individual solar power production, Hamm said. “At the same time, the whole concept of utility-scale plants is really just starting to gain momentum. So it’s going to be a combination of the two.”

California’s $3.3-billion Million Solar Roofs program is based on the notion that businesses and homeowners would install solar systems faster if the cost was partially offset by rebates and incentives. The goal is to create 3,000 megawatts of new solar power in California by 2017 and to build solar power systems into half of all new homes by 2015.

“We were at 1% in 2004, and we’re probably only at about 5% of all new homes right now,” said Del Chiaro of Environment California. “It’s good growth, but we’re going to have to ramp up quite significantly to get to that 50% mark.”

The solar power industry is drawing its share of star power.

Cable television mogul Ted Turner, who will deliver one of the keynote speeches launching the show today, teamed up this year with New Jersey solar developer Dome-Tech Solar to form a venture called DT Solar. Turner, chairman of Turner Enterprises Inc., said the renamed solar company would continue its focus on designing and installing large-scale projects and was expanding into California and other U.S. markets.

“Clean alternative energy is going to be a huge market because it’s going to be done all over the world and it’s got to be done right away. We’re out of time,” Turner said.

“Solar has probably the most potential because the sun is everywhere.”

Hamm and others are encouraged by the explosion of start-up companies and new products in the solar industry, as well as by the technology’s growing popularity with the public. But she knows solar is still a small fry in the electricity world.

“I don’t think anybody in the solar industry thinks that solar is the answer and is eventually going to take over,” she said. “Right now, solar electricity is about one-tenth to two-tenths of a percent of the entire U.S. energy mix. It’s barely even a dot on the radar screen.”

Posted by M at 04:54:15 | Permalink | No Comments »

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Bilbao, 10 Years Later

Denis Doyle for The New York Times

The Guggenheim Bilbao along the banks of the Nervión River. The river was once polluted by industrial waste.

By DENNY LEE Published: September 23, 2007

A LIGHT patter bounced off the titanium fish scales of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as a tour bus pulled up beside “Puppy,” Jeff Koons’s 43-foot-tall topiary terrier made of freshly potted pansies. A stream of tourists fanned out across the crisp limestone plaza, tripping over each other as they rushed to capture the moment on camera. After the frisson of excitement dimmed, they made their way down a gently sloping stairway and into the belly of the museum, paying 10.50 euros to see the work of an artist that most had never heard of.

The Bilbao Effect

It was a ritual that repeated itself several times an hour, like a well-run multiplex. And if Anselm Kiefer, the controversial post-war German artist, was eclipsed by the metallic blob that held a retrospective of his work, consider how Bilbao, a rusty port city on the northern coast of Spain, stacked up to the very museum that put it on the cultural map.

“We don’t know anything about Bilbao besides the Guggenheim,” said Luigi Fattore, 28, a financial analyst from Paris, who was taking pictures of his girlfriend under the puppy. As if to underscore the point, they showed up at the museum’s doorstep with their suitcase in tow. “We’ve arrived half an hour ago,” he said, “and went straight to the Guggenheim. Aside from the museum, we don’t have any plans.”

Such is the staying power of Frank O. Gehry’s architectural showstopper, 10 years after it crash-landed on the public psyche like a new Hollywood starlet. The iridescent structure wasn’t just a new building; it was a cultural extravaganza.

No less an authority than Philip Johnson deemed it “the greatest building of our time.” The swooping form began showing up everywhere, from car ads to MTV rap videos, like architectural bling. And in certain artistic and architectural social circles, a pilgrimage to Bilbao became de rigueur, with the question “Have you been to Bilbao?” a kind of cocktail party game that marked someone either as a culture vulture or a clueless rube.

“No one had heard of Bilbao or knew where it was,” said Terence Riley, director of the Miami Art Museum and a former architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Nobody knew how to spell it.”

The Guggenheim changed that overnight. Microsoft Word, Mr. Riley noted, added “Bilbao” to its spell checker. And as word of the Guggenheim spread, tourists of all stripes began converging onto the small industrial city — the Pittsburgh of Spain — just to check it off their list.

“I’ve been down there four times,” Mr. Riley added proudly. “That’s probably more than most.”

Even for those who couldn’t spell “Bilbao,” let alone pronounce it (bill-BAH-o), the city became synonymous with the ensuing worldwide rush by urbanists to erect trophy buildings, in the hopes of turning second-tier cities into tourist magnets. The so-called Bilbao Effect was studied in universities throughout the world as a textbook example of how to repackage cities with “wow-factor” architecture. And as cities from Denver to Dubai followed in Bilbao’s footsteps, Mr. Gehry and his fellow starchitects were elevated to the role of urban messiahs.

But what has the Bilbao Effect meant for Bilbao?

I first visited Bilbao in 1999, a lone, wide-eyed tourist who had read about the “Miracle in Bilbao” on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, in which the paper’s architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, likened the “voluptuous” museum to “the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” And on that cold and dark March afternoon, when the lush green folds of the region’s coastal mountains were shrouded behind a gray veil, the Guggenheim indeed glinted like a blonde metallic bombshell.

After loading my 35-millimeter camera, I took pictures of the museum’s sinuous curves, surreptitiously ran my fingers across the titanium shingles and marveled at the galleries’ lack of right angles. Oh, there was art, too: Jenny Holzer’s soaring L.E.D. columns, a collection of sketches from Albrecht Dürer to Robert Rauschenberg and — caged behind a chain-link fence in a parking lot — one of Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses” for a future exhibition.

But the thing that struck me most, more than the dazzling architecture or cool art, was the horrible smell. Here was this magnificent museum, the most celebrated piece of architecture in a generation, and yet the river beside it was as brown as sludge and as putrid as a sewer — a world-class museum swimming in third-world biohazard.

The Guggenheim, I later learned, was built on a former shipyard, and the Nervión River, which snakes through Bilbao to the Bay of Biscay, was the nexus of Spain’s Industrial Revolution. Blessed with iron-rich mountains, railroads and an excellent port, Bilbao blossomed in the late 19th century with metalworks and shipbuilding. But a century of belching factories turned the mighty Nervión into a toxic cesspool, earning the city the unflattering nickname “El Botxo,” the Basque word for hole.

But the iron mines eventually gave out; shipbuilding moved to Asia. And when the Guggenheim opened its doors in October 1997, what remained was a Dickensian waterfront of rusting cargo rigs and hollow warehouses. Farther up the river, grease-coated factories croaked along its lifeless banks, like a cemetery for the Industrial Age.

The rest of the city hadn’t fared much better. The boulevards radiating from the Guggenheim may have evoked grandeur with their neo-Baroque facades and monumentality, but they were caked in soot and sadly devoid of street life. Sure, there were other signs of design — the caterpillar-like entrances by Norman Foster for a new metro system, a sweeping footbridge by Santiago Calatrava — but they only made the city seem dingier, like a polished fork in a tray of dirty silverware.

But if Bilbao wasn’t exactly ready for its tourist spotlight, the gray industrial air gave the city a raw authenticity and gritty undercurrent that was charmingly provincial. In the Casco Viejo quarter, on the other side of the river, the urine-soaked cobblestones and graffiti-covered walls (mostly in support of the Basque separatist group E.T.A.) may have needed a good scrub. But it felt like a real neighborhood, warts and all, that was proudly oblivious, bordering on rude, to tourists.

In the morning, stumpy grandmothers waited in line for fresh bread and Bayonne ham at antiquated shops. By noon, old men sat in dingy pintxos bars drinking txakoli, a semi-sparkling white wine. And when the weekend rolled around, the dark alleyways vibrated with roving bands of Basque youths stumbling between pubs and drinking kalimotxos, a local concoction made from cheap wine and cola. The futuristic Guggenheim seemed to be in another city, far removed from the grubby fish markets and well-tended flower boxes that gave old Bilbao its character.

That cultural schism, however, began to dissolve. In its first year, the Guggenheim was clocking about 100,000 visitors a month. And rather than drop off precipitously like a summer blockbuster, attendance rates have leveled off to “a cruising speed of around one million visitors a year,” said Juan Ignacio Vidarte, the Guggenheim’s director, adding that the vast majority were from outside the Basque region, and more than half from other countries. By the end of 2006, some nine million visitors had paid homage to Gehry’s miracle.

THE impact on this city of 354,000 was dramatic. Charmless business hotels and musty pensions were supplanted by trendy hotels like the Domine Bilbao and a Sheraton designed by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta. The rusty shipyards near the Guggenheim were razed for a manicured greenbelt of playgrounds, bicycle paths and riverside cafes. A lime-green tram was strung along the river, linking the Guggenheim to Casco Viejo and beyond.

And all across the city, a who’s who of architects added their marquee names to Bilbao’s work-in-progress skyline: Álvaro Siza (university building), Cesar Pelli (40-story office tower), Santiago Calatrava (airport terminal), Zaha Hadid (master plan), Philippe Starck (wine warehouse conversion), Robert A. M. Stern (shopping mall) and Rafael Moneo (library), to name just a few. It’s as if Bilbao went on a shopping spree, commissioning a trophy case of starchitects and Pritzker Architecture Prize winners.

A tangle of construction cranes today rises over the city’s terra-cotta rooftops, but the changes are already apparent at the street level. Bilbao, a muscular town of steelworkers and engineers, is slowly becoming a more effete city of hotel clerks and art collectors.

The city’s main artery, Gran Vía de Don Diego López de Haro, is no longer a soot-stained canyon of bank offices. In the tradition of the Champs-Élysées, the sidewalks were widened, curbside parking removed and stone buildings scrubbed. On a warm Friday last May, shoppers streamed out of countless Zara boutiques. Men in natty business suits sat on benches, smoking cigarettes and reading El País. In front of the opulent Hotel Carlton, a handsome couple was being married.

The beautification was echoed throughout the city. Traffic circles like Plazas Campuzano and Indauxtu had been transformed into piazza-like parks, with sculptural lampposts, ergonomic benches and ultramodern landscaping. In place of polluting cars, laughing children now use them as impromptu soccer fields.

Casco Viejo was almost unrecognizable. The graffiti had been erased. The stone facades sandblasted. And old butchers shared the sidewalk with H & M and Billabong.

At lunchtime, crowds converged on upscale pintxos bars like Sasibil, grazing on octopus and Iberian ham sandwiches, which were exhibited like jewelry under polished glass cases and halogen lights. After sundown, well-dressed couples strolled through the warren of alleyways and tunnels, now brightly illuminated by cheery shop windows and klieg-like streetlamps.

But the most striking metamorphosis wasn’t cosmetic: the Nervión River no longer stank. With the sludge-spewing factories gone and sewage treatment plants installed, the river began to heal itself. It may not be as blue as the Danube (the color today is more like a rusty green), but within an hour of my arrival, I spotted a lone sculler in a red jersey, gliding by a pair of cormorants.

The cleaner water, however, hasn’t necessarily brought more tourists upriver. Despite a host of tourist information centers, including a glass shed outside the Guggenheim staffed with professional guides and a rainbow of color brochures, Bilbao remains very much a one-attraction town.

On a cloudless Sunday morning, the Museo de Bellas Artes — with important works by El Greco, Francis Bacon and Eduardo Chillida — was nearly empty, despite a 2001 expansion and being just a quick stroll from the Guggenheim. Maybe that’s why the museum closes at 2 p.m. on Sundays. (At least it was open. The city — restaurants, grocery stores, cafes — shuts down on Sundays; everything, that is, except the Guggenheim.)

The Maritime Museum, which traces the city’s port and sailing history, was completely deserted, save for the bored-looking woman at the ticket counter. Even the Moyúa neighborhood next to the Guggenheim, which should have benefited from the Bilbao Effect most acutely, is far from tourist ready. There’s one postcard store across the street and a couple of hip restaurants nearby, but this residential district is otherwise filled with featureless stucco apartments, five-and-dimes and plain bodegas. A clutch of art galleries have sprung up along Calle Juan Ajuriaguerra, but its proximity to the Guggenheim is merely coincidental.

“There’s no art market in Bilboa,” said Javier Gimeno Martiñez-Sapiña, who owns the year-old photogallery20. “I don’t think the Guggenheim has helped. It’s still very hard for local artists to sell art here. They have to go to Madrid or Barcelona.”

No wonder many guidebooks still devote as many pages to the Guggenheim — reprinting floor plans, offering tips and expounding on the museum’s design — as they do the rest of Bilbao. On paper at least, Bilbao seems to have it all: world-class museum, fine Basque cuisine, a rollicking night life and lots of shopping. But like the new bike paths that were rarely used during my visit, the city lacks the critical mass of attractions to take it from a provincial post-industrial town, to a global cosmopolitan city. And in the meantime, it is losing the shabby edge that gave the city its earlier appeal.

The concentration of first-rate architecture is astounding, even without Gehry’s titanium masterpiece. But architecture alone does not a city make. Bilbao is all dressed-up, but hasn’t figured where to go.

“Our local culture still hasn’t integrated with the Guggenheim,” said Alfonso Martínez Cearra, the general manager of Bilbao Metropoli-30, a public-private partnership that is guiding the city’s revitalization. “This is still an industrial city.”

The disconnect between Bilbao the brand, and Bilbao the city was on display one Saturday night, when the narrow streets of Casco Viejo were once again packed with young bar-hoppers. The smell of marijuana wafted from a crowd outside a bar on Calle de Somera. In the group was Ikel, a 22-year-old studying to be an engineer, like his father.

“I’ve never been to the Guggenheim,” Ikel said between puffs, as mechanical street cleaners starting scrubbing beer and urine from the cobblestones. “It’s for tourists.”

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

Flights from New York to Bilbao, with stopovers in either Paris or Madrid, start at about $700 for travel next month on a number of airlines, including Iberia. From Bilbao airport, a taxi to the city center is about 25 euros ($35 at $1.40 to the euro).

Most attractions can be reached by foot, though the futuristic metro system is an attraction in itself. A BilbaoCard, for unlimited metro and tram rides, plus museum discounts, starts at 6 euros for a day and can be purchased on the city’s tourism Web site (www.bilbao.net/bilbaoturismo).

WHERE TO STAY

Iturrienea Ostatua (Santa Maria Kalea 14; 34-944-16-15-00; www.iturrieneaostatua.com) offers Old World charms and exposed oak beams in the heart of Casco Viejo, with rates staring at 60 euros. Ask for a room with a balcony overlooking the cobblestone street.

Gran Hotel Domine Bilbao (Alameda de Mazarredo 61; 34-94-425-33-00; www.granhoteldominebilbao.com) is across the street from the Guggenheim and has 145 modern rooms starting at 140 euros a night. The rooftop terrace offers great views of the museum and surrounding hills.

Hesperia Bilbao (Campo Volantín 28; 34-94-405-11-00; www.hesperia-bilbao.es) is a trendy newcomer, next to Santiago Calatrava’s footbridge over the Nervión River, and has 151 boutique-style rooms starting about 90 euros.

MUSEUMS

Guggenheim Bilbao (Abandoibarra 2, 34-94-435-90-80; www.guggenheim-bilbao.es). Open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day except Monday. Admission is 10.50 euros.

Museo de Bellas Artes (Museo Plaza 2, 34-94-439-60-60 www.museobilbao.com). Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m, Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Closed Mondays. Admission 5.50 euros.

DENNY LEE is a contributing writer to the Travel section.

Posted by M at 23:41:58 | Permalink | No Comments »

Friday, September 21, 2007

Pssst! Modernism hidden within

By Carol Lloyd, Special to SF Gate Friday, September 21, 2007

Three-level home plus office in Potrero designed by Neal ... Three-level home plus office in Potrero designed by Neal ... Owen Kennerly designed house in Noe Valley. Owners, Gus M... Exterior of Stanley Saitowitz designed warehouse home. Ph...

In San Francisco the concept of change carries great currency when it comes to food, technology, family and politics, but utter the word in the context of a peeling Victorian facade or a distressed brick warehouse, and people will begin muttering about “neighborhood character” and “the way it’s always been.”

Sure, we have the Federal Building and the de Young Museum expressing San Francisco’s newfound willingness to tiptoe into the 21st century, but these buildings ain’t where folks sleep. Over the years I’ve heard too many rants from architects to forget that getting permits for an innovative design can be an uphill battle — especially if the property lies in a “well-established” neighborhood (a.k.a. somewhere with historic homes occupied by middle-class home owners with time to organize neighborhood groups). When it comes to residential architecture, our fair city gives new meaning to the phrase “arch conservative.”

So when I saw that the American Institute of Architects’ San Francisco chapter was offering a weekend of home tours “showcasing modernism at its finest,” I was curious about how a new generation of residential buildings was fitting into our well-loved urban landscape.

 

What did these esteemed “state of the art” single-family homes and architect/developer multi-family buildings say about the place of modern architecture in San Francisco’s infamously protective neighborhoods? Which neighborhoods were more open to innovation amidst all the vintage Victorian, Edwardian, Mediterranean and mid-century? And while we’re at it, how had these architects managed to get permits for homes without bay windows?

The first thing I noticed is that the heart of modernism beats (if it beats anywhere) on the east side of the city. With the exception of one house in the outer Richmond, every showcased building was located in the South of Market or in easterly ‘hoods like Potrero Hill, Noe Valley, the Mission and Bernal Heights. The reasons for this are many: Bernal, for instance, though infamous for its neighborhood design groups, also has the most empty lots, which have attracted a generation of designers and architects. But all of these neighborhoods have areas with a surprising diversity of housing stock all cheek- and-jowl next to one another.

“It often depends how much diversity there is in the existing context,” says Neal Schwartz of Schwartz and Architecture, whose Potrero three-level home plus office was featured in the tour. “In Potrero, for instance, there’s an amazing diversity of styles, so it’s easier to do contemporary architecture in that context.”

Schwartz’s renovation embodies the other evident fact about these “new modernist buildings.” All but one of the single-family homes on the tour were not technically new construction but “additions,” “revitalizations” or “expansions.” In the logic of the city’s planning codes, it’s far easier to gut a home and add two extra floors than get permits to demolish an existing home and build something new. (Demolitions are possible, but the home must be sufficiently dilapidated to qualify.)

“The limitations against demolishing are a good thing in the sense that they prevent developers from mowing down a block and destroying the existing fabric,” says Andrew Sparks, an associate with Levy Art and Architecture, a firm that showcased a total renovation in Diamond Heights. “But when it’s applied to a single owner it’s very difficult. Getting a demolition permit can take two years alone. And though sometimes it’s cheaper and better to demolish the home, instead they have to renovate what they already have.”

“This is a renovation with a large extension,” Owen Kennerly of Kennerly Architecture and Planning told me from the rooftop deck of an extravagant stone and steel modernist dream house on 27th Street in Noe Valley. “We kept the front room, which was the living room.” Yet looking at the open spaces, massive staircases, and floor-to-ceiling windows of the three-floor home, it’s difficult to imagine where a single scrap of the old structure might have been. Kennerly says that this home — despite its larger- than-life modernist presence — got virtually no resistance from the neighbors.

So does this mean it’s actually easier to get approval for contemporary designs? It depends on who you ask.

“San Francisco prides itself on being the most liberal city on the planet,” says Ross Levy, founder of Levy Art and Architecture. “But until recently we’ve had a relatively homogeneous building stock. Other cities — like Barcelona, London, Madrid, which are more secure in their history, have embraced modern architecture. But it is getting easier and more acceptable. It’s also more in demand. People are realizing that these are fantastic places to live. Even here, when people buy Victorian homes, we gut them — because no one wants to live in those rooms.”

“It’s still a struggle,” says Sparks. “But it probably will always be a struggle to some extent. Because in doing contemporary architecture, you’re trying to do something new, you’re exploring new materials and exploring space, you’re trying to respond to people’s contemporary lifestyles.”

Other architects suggest that things are finally changing as the populace realizes modernism doesn’t mean cheapo boxes on the hill. “You have to make a good case for change with the planning department,” says Kennerly. “But they understand that with good use of materials, good design actually contributes to the neighborhood.”

David Baker, founder of David Baker + Partners, contends that even the neighborhood groups have changed: “If there’s a meeting and someone asks why the building doesn’t look like the Victorians next to it, then some other neighbor will stand up and say, ‘Because we’re not living in the 19th century.’”

Yet there are still institutional and community obstacles — obstacles which effect designs, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Currently all buildings over 50 years old can be subject to an historic designation which in turn triggers certain guidelines limiting any alteration of the facade. “Typically the facades of buildings with historical designations can’t be changed more than 25 percent,” explains Sparks, “So we have to work very strategically.”

Sometimes, altering a facade can actually help to unify the look of the neighborhood. Schwartz says that since his home remodel began as an “ugly” 1950s home which was far smaller than existing homes surrounding it, creating a larger facade was actually “healing the disruption.”

The outcome may be a taller profile — more or less equal to the buildings around it. But it’s also far from ostentatious: a simple stucco front with moderately sized windows in low-key earth tones. With a couple of exceptions, almost all the buildings on the tour — be they warehouses in SOMA or single family homes in residential neighborhoods — are so inconspicuous that they act as camouflage for the extravagance within.

This of course can be a sly design strategy: “I designed the facade so that someone not interested in design might walk by and not notice it,” says Schwartz, “But for someone into contemporary architecture, they might notice the mahogany windows or the bamboo on the third floor deck and think: Hey, something’s going on in there.”

But the low-key exterior functions as a survival strategy for concealing the secret and sometimes extravagant) modern design within. One warehouse on a scrappy street in the Mission which harbors 10,000 feet of ultra modern grooviness designed by Stanley Saitowitz of Natoma Architects Inc., exhibits no exterior signs of alteration, except for its flat, monochromatic black facade. Like a secret agent clad all in black, it seems to be whispering: Forget you ever saw me.

Posted by M at 23:57:05 | Permalink | No Comments »

Friday, September 14, 2007

Nice, but Can It Wash Itself?

Photographs by John Ellis for The New York Times

MR. CLEAN Thomas Ennis, who makes car-wash equipment, rides in the elevator of his glass house in Venice, Calif., above left; he is trying to figure out how to use technology from his business to clean the house, right.

By PAUL YOUNG Published: September 13, 2007 Venice, Calif.
John Ellis for The New York Times
Thomas Ennis’ house has glass walls that open to the exterior.

IT was a balmy Friday afternoon on the Southern California coast, and Thomas Ennis was in weekend mode, which means he was working on his house. Actually, he was trying to figure out how to make his house work for him.

 

“This is just temporary,” Mr. Ennis said, standing on the roof, looking down on a row of glass-and-stucco-sided houses hugging the shoreline three stories below. He was holding a 25-foot piece of PVC pipe, which he dipped over the side of the roof until it hung parallel to the house. “But it works pretty well at the moment.”

Mr. Ennis, a tanned 65-year-old with closely cropped, graying hair and a serious gadget habit, turned on a valve. High-pressure water jets erupted from a series of nozzles lining the plastic tube. Pipe in hand, he walked his newfangled sprinkler around the perimeter of the house, and a week’s worth of saltwater deposits, bird droppings and dirt vanished.

“It won’t leave any water spots because all the water in the house is filtered to remove impurities,” he said with a slight Midwestern drawl. “That’s something I learned a long time ago.”

Mr. Ennis knows clean. He is the founder and chief executive of NS Wash Systems, a company based in Inglewood, Calif., that manufactures automated washing equipment for cars, trucks, trains and just about every municipal bus in New York City, Los Angeles and more. His own water filtering system is simply a small-scale version of what he developed for car washes years ago.

“I figured that if I knew how to wash buses, trucks and even army tanks, I should be able to figure out how to wash a house,” said Mr. Ennis, a divorced father of four who holds nearly two dozen patents, for things like vacuum-cleaning devices and mechanized brush systems. But he hasn’t yet, which is why he was dragging a pipe around his roof on a Friday afternoon instead of pressing a button and heading for the beach.

He has been working on it since 2003, when he bought a three-bedroom 1920s cottage here for $1.5 million and leveled it. “It wasn’t much to look at,” he said. “It was just another flophouse.” (A flophouse that was once home to Jim Morrison, Mr. Ennis said.)

To the dismay of local preservationists, who fondly recall a time when Venice Beach was the Coney Island of the Pacific (complete with gondola-lined canals, amusement park rides and aquariums), many of the properties in the area have followed a similar evolution: quaint cottage to hippy shack to multimillion-dollar minimansion.

But some of the new houses are examples of the experimental architecture for which the area is now known. There are buildings by the likes of Morphosis and Frank Gehry (whose take on the classic beach bungalow, the Norton house, is just a few blocks away), as well as emerging architects like David Hertz, who designed Mr. Ennis’s house.

At 3,500 square feet, the Ennis house is a four-bedroom, five-bath glass-and-steel playground for its owner’s active imagination. Mr. Hertz, 47, whose own house is a few blocks away, played yin to Mr. Ennis’s yang, yielding when necessary while keeping many of his more outlandish ideas in check (like weaving colored mood lighting throughout the house and installing human-size statues in the pond). Mr. Ennis, after all, wanted the quintessential James Bond-style house.

That explains the 9-by-15-foot window at the front of the house, produced at Mr. Ennis’s Inglewood plant, which operates the way a car window does. Press a button and the facade of the house drops into the floor, leaving the living room open to the beach. Mr. Ennis and his 10-year-old son, Jack, have taken to playing catch football there, with Mr. Ennis inside the house and Jack on the beach going long.

Mr. Hertz took advantage of having a client who had not only big ideas but a manufacturing plant with which to bring them to fruition. Push the button for the fire pit and flames leap out from a gas jet under a decorative bed of aluminum shavings on the living room floor, shavings that came from Mr. Ennis’s manufacturing plant.

He and his engineers also built a two-person aluminum elevator (open, no walls, just a platform and waist-high restraints). It runs from the five-car basement garage to the living room and kitchen on the first floor to a landing outside the bedrooms on the second floor to a terrace on the rooftop (with a swimming pool to come).

Not all of the elements are high-tech. Mr. Hertz said he approached the house as if it were “a miniskyscraper,” meaning he used a heavy metal frame and poured concrete flooring, which allowed him to do away with weight-bearing walls in the main living areas and to maximize views, which was one of Mr. Ennis’s primary concerns.

The house’s design reflects an almost obsessive attention to views and efficiency. A glass partition separates the family room from the dining, kitchen and living areas, allowing someone to sit in the most anterior corner of the house and still see the Pacific Ocean through the front windows 89 feet away.

Even the bedrooms have partial glass walls, which could have been a problem for Mr. Ennis’s 12-year-old daughter, Savannah. “I asked her about that,” he said. “But she said, ‘That’s O.K., Dad, because I can look through your room too.’ “

There is some privacy, thanks to a thick, reflective film on the exterior glass, designed to allow one-way peeping during the day: Mr. Ennis can see out, but people walking by cannot see in.

Built for about $1.2 million, the house insulates Mr. Ennis from the California sun with MeTecno-API Century Walls, lightweight, prefab panels of aluminum stuffed with urethane foam — more typical of a refrigerated building than a beach house — that snap into place in less than a day. (“They’ll keep ice frozen in the desert,” said Eric Jurus, MeTecno’s sales manager.)

The downside to such insulation is that when the house gets hot, it stays hot. Mr. Ennis insisted on air-conditioning, but his architect was resistant. Mr. Hertz built the house so that it channels rising heat through a staircase and out of a bank of skylights, which open automatically using temperature sensors.

A pair of floor-to-ceiling windows at the front of the house pivot open like revolving doors and work in concert with the house’s angled walls to funnel ocean breezes through the space and out a large sliding-glass door off the family room in back.

“Every architect knows how to open the front of the house,” Mr. Hertz said. “The trick is to build a larger volume at the back so that it works like a siphon: it pulls the air through.” (Mr. Ennis said that he still wanted air-conditioning and that he would content himself with two or three small units at the back of the house.)

Mr. Ennis is at work on a new version of the exterior washing system, which he hopes to install on a small track circling the house that makes it possible to wash the building in less than 15 minutes.

If it works, he will think about manufacturing it commercially. But first he has to finish his prototype for a car wash king’s ultimate cleaning system: a body-size, spinning roller in the master bath that will be covered by fur. “It’ll be an automated people washer,” he said, in all seriousness.

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Monday, September 10, 2007

The Restorers’ Art of the Invisible

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The Guggenheim, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is undergoing a renovation, with upgrades and updates.
By ROBIN POGREBIN Published: September 10, 2007

Visitors wandering through the Richard Pousette-Dart exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum seem oblivious to the scaffolding and hard hats in their midst. But for the people behind the scenes, the work unfolding within the museum’s curved white walls is as engrossing as the art displayed on them.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The museum has cracks in its facade, a decaying sidewalk and outdated mechanical systems
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Strips of carbon fiber are being used to reinforce the outer walls.

For the last three years a team of engineers, conservators and architects has been studying the guts of the Guggenheim, mapping out a thorough but respectful renovation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling building on Fifth Avenue, completed in 1959. Although it was clearly in serious need of renewal, with cracks in its facade, a decaying sidewalk and outdated mechanical systems, experts wanted to make a comprehensive diagnosis before determining the best course of treatment.

Now they have a plan — already in action — and the end is in sight. The work is expected to be completed by summer 2008. “It’s taken us three years to get to the point where we’re actually intervening,” said Pamela Jerome of Wasa Studio, the preservation architect on the project.

And on a recent walk through the museum, which will remain open throughout the renovation, the specialists involved talked about what they had discovered and strategies they have devised. Ms. Jerome has faced major renovation challenges before, including the sagging cantilevers and damaged stucco of Fallingwater, the residence designed by Wright in rural Mill Run, Pa.

But the Guggenheim’s structural complexities, she said, made this project more daunting. In addition to repairing the facade, the $29 million renovation involves upgrading the cooling systems and updating the elevators and bathrooms.

Perhaps the team’s most crucial realization was that workers in the 1950s had failed to provide continuous horizontal steel reinforcement in the walls on the sixth ramp, as they had on the lower ramp walls. The sixth is twice the height of the lower ones and leans outward at a different angle, the museum says.

The original building lacked insulation. In a 1992 project devised by the architect Charles Gwathmey, insulation was finally installed, improving the situation. But some gaps were left on the apron slab, where the floor meets the wall, creating condensation problems that are now being addressed. Strips of carbon fiber are being installed in the concrete walls to create a seamless, protective exterior envelope.

As the work proceeds, the walls’ interiors are exposed, as they must have been when the building was under construction. “It’s the first time we’re seeing what Frank Lloyd Wright saw,” said Glenn Boornazian, president of Integrated Conservation Resources, who is the principal conservator on the project.

Wright is never far from anyone’s mind. Paramount goals are to make the work almost imperceptible and to adhere to the building’s original form to the greatest extent possible.

“From a preservation point of view, you don’t want to change the external appearance,” said Robert Silman, president of Robert Silman Associates, the project’s structural engineers.

When it came to the windows and skylights, then, the specialists wanted to improve them without replacing them. The windows, though, are not double-glazed and don’t provide adequate insulation. So the architects decided to replicate their form but substitute new glass with advanced thermal qualities that has been tested for water and air infiltration. (They have not yet undergone tests for pigeon-proofing, Ms. Jerome said).

Similarly the conservators tried to find repair materials — concrete patching compounds, acrylic crack fillers, expandable surface coatings — that “would be physically and aesthetically compatible,” Mr. Boornazian said. After identifying about 20 manufacturers that deal with concrete restoration, they narrowed the list to six and then subjected their materials to rigorous weather testing.

“Just as Frank Lloyd Wright was on the cutting edge of using materials, he forced us to think of solutions in unusual ways,” Mr. Boornazian said.

Wright was among the first to use gunite — sprayed concrete — on a large architectural scale, which allowed him to create his smooth unbroken curves, Mr. Boornazian said. To give the Guggenheim’s surface a monolithic appearance, he added, Wright left out expansion joints, which would have created visual vertical breaks.

Wright’s professional reputation has emerged intact, experts involved in the project say. The building’s flaws lay in its execution, not its conception. Exposed to high winds and extreme variations in temperature, the walls have continually expanded and contracted. They will still be flexible but will become more resilient, with concealed control joints that allow the gunite to expand and contract without cracking.

As part of its preparatory research the team studied the Guggenheim’s archives, including photographs taken during construction; written documentation of the building process; correspondence between Wright and the contractor; and original architectural and shop drawings.

The building was then stripped of as many as 11 layers of paint, and experts conducted a 17-month survey of thousands of cracks of varying magnitude in the facade. Using impact-echo technology, in which sound waves are sent into the concrete and the rebound is measured, the engineers located voids within the walls.

To map the geometry of the museum and determine its load-bearing capacity, the engineers relied on laser measuring, a fairly tricky matter given the building’s spiral and its sloping walls. “We think it’s the largest laser model ever constructed,” Mr. Silman said. “It took up the whole memory on the computer.”

They also submitted their findings to two peer review panels of experts in architectural restoration, materials conservation, structural engineering as well as an environmental envelope specialist.

“We all believe, when we finish, this building will be better than new,” said Marc H. Steglitz, the museum’s chief operating officer. “And we’ll get another 50 years out of it.”

Posted by M at 13:06:40 | Permalink | No Comments »

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Dark Spots Mar an Aging, Yet Exquisite, Face

Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

It Didn’t Age Well The splotchy look of the Woolworth Building, at Broadway and Park Place, comes from the dirt absorbed by precast concrete blocks that replaced the original terra cotta in the 1970s.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY Published: September 9, 2007

IT’S like a fungus that runs up and down the tower of the Woolworth Building, at Broadway and Park Place. From every angle the cream-colored surface has dirty, discolored patches, the unanticipated consequences of a major restoration project three decades ago.

The Architectural Record, 1913/Office for Metropolitan History

Frank Woolworth began accumulating his 5-and-10-cent store fortune in 1879, and by 1886 he opened a headquarters in New York City. He was a multimillionaire by 1900, when he built a lacy Gothic-style limestone house at Fifth Avenue and 80th Street, a building demolished in the 1920s.

It was designed by Charles P. H. Gilbert, a mansion specialist who worked up and down the avenue. He also designed the main building of the Jewish Museum, at 92nd Street.

In 1911, Woolworth announced plans for the tallest building in the world, to be constructed on Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street. Like his house, Woolworth’s new building was to be neo-Gothic and designed by a Gilbert — in this case, Cass Gilbert, who was not related to Charles but was instead an aggressive out-of-towner who had elbowed his way into New York City architecture.

In 1905, Gilbert had designed the boxy Gothic-style West Street Building, at West and Cedar Streets, one of many structures to use the new technology of glazed terra cotta to clad a tall building, and the architect used it as a model for the Woolworth Building.

For Woolworth, Gilbert doubled the size of the 23-story West Street building and then some, to 55 floors, with a pyramidal roof 792 feet high. That topped the 700-foot Metropolitan Life tower, built at Madison Avenue and 24th Street in 1909.

Paul Starrett was one of the contractors bidding on the Woolworth project, and in his 1938 book, “Changing the Skyline,” he recalled trying to persuade Woolworth to use more traditional materials.

“In stone it would be magnificent,” he said, but in terra cotta, “it would look like a 5-and-10-cent store proposition.”

He did not get the job.

The utility of terra cotta was irrefutable: each block of fired clay, usually hollowed out, was a fraction of the weight of brick or stone. The blocks were easily modeled in intricate forms and were protected by a glaze that shed dirt.

A 1912 ad by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company in The Real Estate Record and Guide boasted, “Cream color in another material would be dark and dirty after a few years’ exposure.”

Unlike many prior skyscrapers, the Woolworth Building was well received by the architectural intelligentsia. It had no raw blank side walls, and the Gothic-style detailing seemed an honest reflection of the new steel-frame technology.

Writing in The Architectural Record in 1913, Montgomery Schuyler particularly admired the way Gilbert adjusted the scale of the ornament. The finials, shields, crockets and other details were not simply giant-sized to look good from a distance but also held up to close view from neighboring buildings.

Compared with European models, “this brand-new American Gothic loses nothing,” Mr. Schuyler said.

But Mr. Starrett’s misgivings were well founded. In his 1938 book he recalled, apparently from years earlier, “the spectacle of the upper part of the Woolworth Building, wired up with metal mesh to catch the falling terra cotta.”

By 1962, The New York Times reported that riggers were repairing broken pieces all year round.

These problems only grew worse, and in the 1970s the Woolworth company retained Ezra D. Ehrenkrantz & Associates (now Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn) to examine every one of the 400,000 terra-cotta blocks. The architecture firm found that 25,000 of them needed complete replacement and selected precast concrete instead.

The concrete had a surface coating, meant to be renewed every five years, to shed soil and moisture, like the glaze on the terra-cotta blocks.

Timothy Allanbrook, now a senior consultant at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, an architecture and engineering firm in Northbrook, Ill., worked for Ehrenkrantz at the time and was on and off the scaffolds at the Woolworth Building for three years.

He says the prescription for periodic resealing has not been followed, so the porous concrete has been absorbing water and dirt for years. He suspects that the concrete has absorbed so much dirt that it cannot be cleaned sufficiently so that it matches the original terra cotta, which may leave another replacement as the only option.

Mr. Allanbrook said that 30 years ago, the terra-cotta industry was in decline, making concrete “the optimal choice in a narrow field of imperfect choices.”

Now, terra cotta has seen a resurgence, so the original material could be a reasonable replacement, Mr. Allanbrook said; so could newer materials like concrete reinforced with glass fiber.

Roy Suskin, a vice president of the Witkoff Group, the building’s owner, declined to discuss the problem and any plans for remedying it.

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Thursday, September 6, 2007

From Frontierland to your frontyard

 
Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times
A basket of petunias and ipomoea hangs outside of Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland.
Disneyland’s themed landscapes offer ideas for most any garden, whether it’s tropical, edible or even gothic.
By Tony Kienitz, Special to The Times September 6, 2007
HERE’S an interesting fact: Only 100 feet divides Adventureland from Frontierland. While one land drips with banyans and bromeliads, the other sizzles with cactus and sage.

It’s within this great divide that perceptive visitors can find their own garden inspiration — one of many masterfully conceived mini-landscapes at Disneyland whose design just might work at home.

The Gardens of Disneyland

That’s right. Now that the summertime crowds are starting to ebb, put on the mouse ears and head to Anaheim.

Aptly named horticulturist Karen Hedges, who oversees the day-to-day upkeep and artistry of the park’s gardens, provided a behind-the-scenes tour one recent morning, before the gates opened to the public. What she and her gang of nearly 150 gardeners pull off every day is nothing short of Herculean.

“It’s 6 a.m., and we just got through laying 10,000 square feet of new sod,” she notes cheerfully, adding that her crew deadheads the gardens of Disneyland, California Adventure, Downtown Disney and three Disney hotels every day.

Sure, most visitors don’t come for the landscape design, but take a look at that garden separating the entrances to Adventureland and Frontierland, and you’ll see a fantastic example of color usage, plant juxtapositions and water-wise design.

There beside a duck pond grows a deep spray of ruddy yellow rudbeckias, tawny yarrows, gaillardias, salvias, sunflowers and swaying golden fountain grasses. The sunset hues set a romantic tone, a Wild West where men crack bullwhips and madams snap garters. Some of these flowers are hot-weather annuals, whereas the grasses and sages will hold up for years to come.

In fact, using visually dynamic perennials as the bones of a garden is a classic design technique. Annual flowers can be shucked in and out as the seasons change (and they do change here, occasionally). Designing a garden with perennials first, annuals second, results in a landscape that’s almost always beautiful, easier to maintain and, because you’ll buy fewer plants as time goes by, kinder to your wallet.

The plants in this part of Disneyland are all distinctively shaped. Each one has a slightly different leaf and sends its own message to the eye. If you live in a Spanish-style bungalow or a California Craftsman, take a close look, me ‘earties, because the vibrant and expertly blended colors here are perfect for pirating.

NATURALLY, there’s more. This is Disneyland. Virtually every ride in the park comes with its own landscape look, a design that creatively overcomes the challenges of its space.

Perhaps you live in an apartment or condo, your only garden the hodgepodge selection of pots on a balcony or patio. A jaunt over to New Orleans Square provides some fine examples.

Throughout the narrow alleyways of the square are dozens upon dozens of beautifully rendered pots. Spilling and coiling from these urns are densely packed collections of begonias, variegated plectranthus, English ivies, coleus of all colors, azaleas, fuchsias and caladiums.

Each pot is a garden in its own right, abiding by a basic rule of landscape design: something spiky, something round, something dazzling, something subtle. Taken as a whole, no single pot is more dominant than another. Together, they speckle the dour, aged colors of New Orleans Square with bright, jazzy hues.

The trick to these pots is threefold: They’ve been stuffed full with fairly mature plants, they rely on the contours and colors of foliage rather than flowers to make their statement, and they grow simultaneously upward and downward, away from the confines of the pot.

There are more ideas to borrow over in Tomorrowland. As in all parts of the park, here Hedges’ crews perform the daily magic of “color call-outs,” deciding which annual flowers need to be replaced and what “instant landscaping” might be required. But it’s the people with Disney’s Imagineering unit who come up with the grand, big-picture ideas.

Imagineer Tony Baxter is credited with dreaming up Tomorrowland’s edible landscape, and if you’ve ever wondered how a hedgerow of clipped kumquats might look in your yard, this is where you’d find out. Stroll past Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters and you’ll see espaliered apples, cute rows of peppers, sheared rosemary, lavender and santolina.

Another twist and turn in the path reveals strawberries, artichokes, dwarf pomegranates and a perfectly sculpted persimmon tree.

“It took some time to figure out the best combinations in the edible gardens,” Hedges says. “Tomato plants, as any gardener knows, are not usually very ornamental. So we’ve substituted red peppers into Tony’s designs.”

Again, long-lived plants establish the structure of the garden, and annuals provide outbursts of colors and variations in plant dimensions.

It’s immensely useful to see an edible landscape in a finished form. Too often these gardens are photographed in bite-size pieces. In Tomorrowland, gardeners can appreciate the idea as a whole and more readily see how easily these plants can be incorporated at home.

The clean, French lines of the edible landscapes are also worth noting — something one doesn’t often see in Southern California vegetable gardens.

EVEN Disneyland gardens that are a bit themey and theatrical have ideas worth borrowing. The gothic garden of the Haunted Mansion takes advantage of new hybrid colors available for familiar plants. Here, just inside the moss-green wrought-iron fencing, low-growing heucheras sport leaves in unusual shades that could be best described as dried Grey Poupon mustard and day-old lox. They bob above dark tufts of black mondo grass.

Ground covers of black ajuga and vermilion ipomoea trail around headstones. Small weeping mulberries, contorted willows and shimmering coprosma serve as the garden’s midsize plants, while dappled sunlight falls through classic Southern magnolia trees arched overhead.

The Haunted Mansion’s garden may be one of the most cleverly planted arrangements you will see. If you were to swap the colors of the plants — say, trade the washed-out heucheras for ones in vibrant Cabernet colors, switch the ajugas to variegated pinks and greens, and change the ipomeas to purple and pinks — you would have created a garden that was traditionally beautiful. The color palette that visitors see here does create a forlorn sense of decay, but the shapes and combinations of leaf and branch are what make this garden worth studying.

The list of such lessons here is long. There are the tropical gardens in Adventureland, perfect for a poolside landscape.

Around the darker rides in Fantasyland, you’ll find wonderfully coifed boxwood hedges and thick plantings of traditional European annual flowers. Expansive succulent gardens emulate underwater seascapes near Ariel’s Grotto and the new Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. Nicely crafted gardens featuring California native plants await in Downtown Disney.

As Hedges’ morning tour stops at the animal topiaries crafted along the banks of It’s a Small World, one of the lead landscape gardeners, Mike Buhrmester, pauses to report that the blue lobelia he had been planting is rife with hookworm.

Hedges immediately asks which grower supplied the plants, and she and Buhrmester quickly figure out how to stretch their resources and still make the garden Disney-worthy. It takes all of a minute for them to devise a solution.

That, she says, is her wisest secret for creating a wonderful landscape. “We just try our best,” she says, leading the way to the next garden on the map. “It always seems to work out.”

In other words, relax. Don’t fuss. Have fun. That is the golden garden rule.

Tony Kienitz is author of “The Year I Ate My Yard.” Send comments to home@latimes.com

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Tuesday, September 4, 2007

A Ragtag Neighborhood’s Big, Blue Newcomer

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF Published: September 4, 2007

The high-design luxury residential towers marching across Manhattan pose a problem for an architecture critic. What if I should fancy one? Isn’t that just what its developer is hoping? A critic can’t help but feel a bit queasy, teetering on the edge of becoming a real estate promoter.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Bernard Tschumi’s new residential building at Norfolk and Delancey Streets.

Yet I can’t get the Blue Building out of my mind. Amid the old brick tenements of the Lower East Side, the glittering exterior of this structure, Bernard Tschumi’s latest building, will strike some as another step in downtown Manhattan’s relentless pace of gentrification.

But the 17-story building, which is to be finished later this month, avoids the ostentatious self-importance that infects the design of so many of the new luxury towers. Encased in a matrix of blue panels, its contorted form has a hypnotic appeal that is firmly rooted in the gritty disorder of its surroundings. It reminds us that beauty and good taste are not always the same thing.

This is partly because of Mr. Tschumi’s sensitivity to the neighborhood’s changing identity. Towers are sprouting all over downtown, and most of them are awful. The cheerless facade of the new Hotel on Rivington, decorated in bands of aqua-colored panels and glass, is visible a few blocks away. Just beyond it stand several generic brick residential towers, displaying the kind of superficial historicism that remains the norm among many mainstream developers.

By contrast Mr. Tschumi’s interests lie in an older vision of the neighborhood: the mix of old tenement buildings, public housing complexes and rusting infrastructure that extends down Delancey Street to the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Seen from a distance the Blue Building’s crystalline form seems to twist and bend as it rises. The exterior bulges out on one side so that its form leans over a lower commercial building next door. A big penthouse terrace is cut out of the west facade; the top of the east facade is sliced off at an angle.

These contortions are a sly expression of the various forces that this architect had to contend with while designing the building: the tight site, the restrictions imposed by the zoning envelope, the developer’s desire to squeeze out as much rentable space as possible.

But the effect also sets the entire composition wonderfully off balance. As the eye intuitively follows the lines of the building down to the ground, its tapered form gives the impression that the tower has been squeezed to fit into the site’s tight footprint, so that from certain angles the building appears to be on the verge of tipping over.

This sense of a building both rooted in and straining to escape from its context is reinforced by the quality of the exterior surfaces. A matrix of dark and pale blues, the window pattern evokes the shifting rhythms of Mondrian’s painted ode to New York, “Broadway Boogie Woogie.”

Much of the inspiration, however, comes as much from the gutter as from museum walls. The building’s milky blue colors bring to mind the cheap illuminated plastic signs still found on some old East Village storefronts. Air-conditioning units are punched through the facade. Flowered drapes hang in some of the windows.

I mean this as a compliment. Part of the problem with so many of the new luxury towers is that they look so self-consciously refined. “Look at me,” they seem to purr. “Aren’t I sooooo sophisticated?” Mr. Tschumi’s building is less self-conscious, more playful.

As you reach the upper floors, for example, the apartments get increasingly idiosyncratic. Exterior walls tilt backward or forward; rooms are tucked into what seem like leftover spaces. Big canted columns are set just inside the facade, as if bracing the rooms against some invisible force.

The tension between the tautness of the walls and the weight of the columns vaguely evokes the 1970s-era houses designed by Kazuo Shinohara, whose muscular concrete structures seemed to strain to preserve a tiny oasis of tranquillity amid the chaos of postwar Tokyo.

Unlike Shinohara’s houses, the Blue Building is not a major work of art. But it nonetheless captures an aspect of the city that is slowly fading from view: its role as a sanctuary for misfits and outcasts, a place full of dark corners and unexpected encounters. If only such people could afford the price tag.

Posted by M at 10:58:28 | Permalink | No Comments »

Friday, August 31, 2007

A City Defines Beautiful, but a Truck Owner and a Court Object

Alex Quesada for The New York Times

Lowell Kuvin has won a court round in his challenge to a limit on parking of pickup trucks.

By ABBY GOODNOUGH Published: August 31, 2007

CORAL GABLES, Fla., Aug. 30 — Newcomers to this resolutely lush and lovely city would do well to peruse its “Citizen’s Guide to Code Enforcement” before settling in. They will find that pet snakes are forbidden, houses must be painted a city-approved hue and residents cannot so much as screen in their pools without permits.

But last week, a state appeals court panel struck down one of this affluent city’s premier zoning requirements: a ban on parking pickup trucks in driveways and on residential streets at night.

 

Lowell Kuvin, an aspiring lawyer with an emerald-green Ford F150 pickup, sued Coral Gables in 2003 after being fined for parking on the street in front of his rented home. A trial court judge sided with the city, but a panel of the Third District Court of Appeal reversed his finding, ruling that Coral Gables had “unconstitutionally crossed the line” into an “impermissible interference with the personal rights of its residents.”

Practically speaking, the ruling mattered little for Mr. Kuvin, who moved last year to a waterside condominium in Miami Beach. But the implications could be big for Coral Gables, whose proud status in South Florida as the “City Beautiful” hinges on the strictly regulated look of its neighborhoods. Pickup trucks — even the Ford F150, the best-selling vehicle in the country last year — are a scourge on the city’s image, officials and many residents say.

“It’s an unusual law that would have no chance of passing in most cities,” said Robert Glazier, a lawyer in private practice who is representing Coral Gables in the case. “We’re not saying everyone should ban pickup trucks, but the decision of this city to do so is not irrational.”

Mr. Glazier said the city would ask the entire appeals court to reverse the panel’s decision. At stake, he said, is the right of local governments everywhere to impose zoning restrictions based on aesthetic criteria and thus to protect property values.

The ordinance affecting pickup trucks, enacted some three decades ago, is actually broader, banning all “trucks, trailers and commercial vehicles” from parking in residential areas at night unless in a garage. In his lawsuit, Mr. Kuvin accused the city of discriminating against an entire class of citizens, those who favor pickup trucks. He rented a house without a garage in Coral Gables, he said, and did not think it fair to have to park his truck outside the city limits every night.

“I have a problem with a city that has a very closed mind and narrow idea about how it should be run,” Mr. Kuvin, 44, said in an interview. “This is one of the most culturally diverse areas in the entire United States, and yet Coral Gables is telling certain people they can’t act out their cultural values.”

Judge Alan Schwartz of the Third District Court of Appeal, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, appeared to agree, strongly.

“Perhaps Coral Gables can require that all its houses be made of ticky-tacky and that they all look just the same,” Judge Schwartz wrote, “but it cannot mandate that its people are, or do. Our nation and way of life are based on a treasured diversity, but Coral Gables punishes it.”

Mayor Don Slesnick, who has been in office since 2001 and previously served on the city zoning board, said the city never implied it found truck owners distasteful — only trucks.

“That is ludicrous and absurd to me,” Mr. Slesnick said, adding that the five-member City Commission voted unanimously this week to keep fighting the case. “This isn’t a diversity issue; it’s a truck issue.”

Property values in Coral Gables have stayed relatively strong in the current real estate slump, Mr. Slesnick said, and he attributed that to the city’s aesthetic code. During his re-election campaign last year, he said, he polled residents on the truck ban and found that 71 percent supported it.

Outside his home in Coral Gables on Thursday, Guillermo Pernas, 75, said he was worried about the effect of the court ruling on his neighborhood.

“Look at this place — most of the people here are upper class,” said Mr. Pernas, who has lived here for 33 years. “One bad bean in the soup ruins the whole thing.”

Another resident, Tony Hernandez, recalled how he once asked the city’s permission to paint his home a dark shade of beige. The city said no. But Mr. Hernandez, a retired psychologist who has lived here for 30 years, said he did not mind the rigid rules.

“You want the neighborhood you live in to be as nice as it could be,” he said.

Mr. Kuvin, who just graduated from St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami and is waiting to learn whether he passed the bar exam, said he had heard from plenty of Coral Gables residents who seethe at the zoning rules — so many, he said, that he might make litigation against the city his specialty.

“I think it’s an area ripe for a lawyer who’s willing to take on cases that seem unwinnable and stand up for Joe Homeowner,” he said.

Mr. Kuvin will keep his F150 “forever” for sentimental reasons, he said. But he is not necessarily a pickup driver for life.

“You can put in there,” he said, “that Mercedes can send me a station wagon if they’d like.”

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