I spent last weekend at an openhouse at the School of Design at Penn. To be honest, Penn had been the school that I was least excited about, but I had a really great time. The facilities and the staff were awesome (the Planning Studio space is in Louis Kahn's old studio) and the quality of the students work was amazing. I also really liked Phily. I'd only spent a couple of days there before, and I only spent a few hours wandering around this time, but it's got a good vibe. A lot like Boston, but less stuck up.

I go back and forth between being freaked out that I won't get in anywhere and that I'm going to get in to to many schools and I won't be able to choose.

Anyway, my first application is due Dec 1st. I'm taking the GRE in 12 days. Ahhhhh.

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Photo Tour: Fallingwater

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Pittsburgh is not what you thought...

There's a certain west coast city (that I've never had the opportunity to visit) that everyone talks about like it's a mythical Valhalla for urbanists. "There is light rail transit! The housing is so dense! The natural setting is so beautiful!" Now, I don't want to rail on Portland. Like I said, I've never been there, but I have to wonder, after having spent a day now in Pittsburgh: why is Portland so admired and Pittsburgh so demeaned? It's almost exactly same size. Pittsburgh's got the light rail. It's denser then Portland (2,100 to 1640 people per square kilometer). It's got a super cool location. It's even got better universities (Carnegie Mellon is rated 23rd in the country, one worse then Berkeley and one better then Georgetown). So why doesn't anybody know that? Is it all just the way that cities market themselves? Or is it age? Do Americans prefer a newer city?

Anyways, I'm enjoying my time here. The city's got good neighborhoods. Personally I like things a little bit skeezy, which Pittsburgh definitely has down. One thing I really like is that it's the sort of place that can have total dive bars and designer clothing stores on the same block. There's a good mix of shops and people. The residential architecture is mostly little, fairly undistinguished, but nice, rowhouses.

One of the best things is the location. It's kind of perched on the sides of a bunch of littlish mountains (more then Duluth, but less then Hong Kong). So basically, people just plopped houses wherever they could find enough flat land. There are these blocks where people have a huge cliff as a back yard, which gives it a lot of character.

Oh, and I finally did find a part of town that smelled (for reference: worse then East St. Paul, better then Gary, Indiana).

Today I basically wandered around neighborhoods. I like the South Side Flats a lot and the Mexican War Streets. Downtown is pretty nice. Oakland was kind of generic. Station Square sucks. The gate for the Pirate's stadium was open, so I wondered in and looked around. It seems really nice.

I also went to the Andy Warhol museum. It was pretty impressive. Warhol's images are so common that I don't think I ever really appreciated them before. When you are right in front of them, you can't help but be struck by both the scale and coloring. Its all so vulgar but beguiling. They also had a cool exhibit of Bruce Nauman, who works entirely in neon lights. My eyes didn't go back to normal for quite a while, but it was pretty cool.

Tomorrow, I'm going to see Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

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First Impressions of Pittsburgh

1. It doesn't smell. I always imagined it smelled.

2. I have the distinctive feeling I'm not on a coast anymore. I don't know why.

3. It's layed out interestingly. Because of all the hills, it seems more like a bunch of little villages then a continuous urban space.

More later...

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We're Moving!!!

So, we've officially taken a new apartment. It's larger, and slightly closer to the center of the earth (which means we're keeping the same address, so no blog-name-change). Major pluses include a bedroom that's big enough for us to actually walk around the bed, a washer-dryer, a backyard, and enough space to have friends stay with us when they visit Boston (hint, hint). We're spending the next week or so painting and then moving slowly down.

In other news, ArchitectureBoston has an entire issue about Boston City Hall. Check it out. I especially like the article where several area architects reimagine how the building could be adapted for the future. My favorite is Moskow Architects design, which reminds me of my childhood idea of what Babylon's hanging gardens must have looked like.

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J and I are just back from TO.

We really liked it there... but then we stopped in Montréal for a day on our way back, so now I'm basically forcing myself to go back and justify why I liked it.

So, here are things I really liked about Toronto:

1. Streetcars. I really like subways, but having quiet, roomy streetcars running above ground is really awesome. I love being able to watch the city go by.

2. People. TO is all about the hipster (in a good way). People seem very political and activism driven. Just in the days we were there, there were protests for Native Treaty Rights and for a "don't ask, don't tell" policy in housing illegal immigrants. The demographics were really interesting. It seemed to be about 50% Asian.

3. Food.

4. Neighborhoods. TO has a lot of great neighborhoods. The Annex was very cool. Kensington Market was unlike anything I've ever seen in the first world (it reminded me a little of the neighborhoods in Berlin that had been taken over by Anarchists. The Islands were also really cool.

Anyways. In a lot of ways it reminded my of a really nice Minneapolis. You get a major sense that the whole city is in a major state of change right now. It'd be an interesting place to live.











We also stopped at Niagara:



And in Montréal:





And J got her nose pierced!

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Month and a half without a blog post, huh. I assume that's long enough to ensure that no one is reading this anymore.

My official excuse is that my computer was broken for a few months and I didn't have money to fix it. Unofficially, it seems like everyone is getting pretty lazy about their blogs lately. I'm thinking it's just that facebook is easier/faster then actually having to come up with something to write, which is kind of too bad. Technology allows us to communicate faster and easier, but it also homogenizes the sort of discourse that we have until all we do is update our status and put up a different picture once and a while and post on everyone's wall for their birthdays. (I'm ranting).

Anyways, I promise (well, maybe not promise, that's kind of a strong word) that I'll be writing a little more on here now that my computer is ok.

I’m FINALLY in my last semester of semi-full-time undergraduate studenthood (it’s looking like I may need one more elective next semester to completely finish). I’m looking forward to finally being done my degree so I can go on to grad school. I’m for sure applying to University of Toronto, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, University of British Colombia and UC Berkeley.

J and I are actually going out to Toronto this weekend to check out the city some (we’ve never been there before) so there should be some more posts and photos about that.

This wasn’t a very good post. I apologize. I’m rusty.

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mmmm. Crisitunity.

So, I've got to make this a pretty quick post, but I wanted to react to something that Driver 2165 said on his blog regarding the recent 35W bridge collapse in Mpls:
"Unfortunately they're going to rebuild it as a freeway. It's not like when the Embarcadero and the Central Freeway in San Francisco collapsed twenty years ago; they were able to scrap those unnecessary freeways and turn them into functional streets and public space."

Responding to that comment, Bill said:
"I love the freeway removal project in S.F. I was there this spring, and walking around down by the embarcadero is so lovely now. It's almost impossible to imagine a raised interstate existing there."
and I responded as well that if people are interested they should mobilize to do something different (like in SF, BOS, Portland, ect).

Ryan responded (and in some ways I agree with him):
"I don't think there's anything that can be done regarding the freeway. It's still freeway on both sides of the river, and you can't really connect that with with anything other than a freeway bridge. San Fran lost the whole highway, not just a 300 foot long bridge."

I did want to point out the other possibilities though. For example, what if 280 was renumbered 35W and widened slightly:

This would eliminate what seems to be a fairly redundant highway anyways. 35W from the south would still feed commuters to downtown, and from the north there is still 280 or 94. The major benefit would be the improved movement between neighborhoods like four corners and downtown and generally between the university and northeast and north mpls. And unlike the current alignment, which severs neighborhoods, 280 runs through mostly industrial land. It would also be a possibility to keep a little of the current 35W on the northside to serve that industrial park.

These are just thoughts of course, but I would hope that if this sort of thing is something that Minneapolitans want that they would speak up instead of being bullied by the status quo.

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So, awhile ago I wrote about my annoyance that the Guthrie Theater got torn down. As I see it, we are entering a pretty dangerous era for Modern Architecture. It’s just nearing the age at which it can be put on preservation lists but many people currently see it as being so common (or so ugly) that it really doesn’t matter. I think it does.

Anyway, I’m taking a grantwriting course this summer and had to pick a topic to write a fictional grant about. I decided to do a grant relating to the preservation of Boston City Hall. Well, after a bit of research, it’s come to my attention that there are no groups in Boston, and very few in the country, that are working on preservation issues relating to Modern Architecture. So here’s the deal: I’m thinking of actually starting one.



I figure that we could start by trying to learn the process using City Hall and then, if we’re successful there (or even if we aren’t) move on to identify other Modern buildings that should be put on lists and work to get them there.

I don’t want to do this alone, so I’m looking for people who are good with research, photography, graphic design, web design, handing out money, ect., who might be willing to partner with me on this. If anyone is interested, please pop me an e-mail.

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Half-past Fifty-Second Street

I'm not really much on repeating things from other people's blogs, but I found this on bldgblog and it seemed cool enough to repeat:

"As it happens, then, Manhattan's mathematically rational street grid is actually rotated 29º off the north-south axis – and this angle has interesting astronomical side-effects... because of the off-center orientation of Manhattan's street grid, you can only see the setting sun "down the middle of any crosstown street" on two specific days of the year: May 28 and July 13. July 13 is, of course, next week – so watch out for it."

This reminds me of both Aztec and Khmer city building, in which cities actually functioned as giant calenders.




If I were in New York, I think I'd throw some kind of party.

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