constructedenvironment

An exhibition critique from Felix Salmon at Architect Magazine (image credit: Studio Gang Architects)…

There’s no foreclosure crisis in Manhattan. Or, for that matter, in the vibrant hearts of Chicago, San Francisco, or Portland, Ore. But head outward from these cities, into the suburban and exurban tracts in which America grew up, and the economic devastation stretches out for mile upon desolate mile of strip malls and abandoned developments.

The housing boom that ended in 2006 saw home prices rise, making the economics of home building much more attractive. The arbitrage was easy, and developers across the country bought into it: buy up cheap suburban and exurban land, build as many huge houses on that land as possible, as quickly as possible, and then sell them at enormous prices to buyers with property-bubble fever. Never mind whether those buyers could actually afford that much house: so long as a bank would lend them the money, profit was assured. And of course the banks would lend anybody money, since they in turn could bundle and sell off their mortgages in the capital markets. But then the capital markets stopped buying (and offering) mortgages, leaving banks with huge amounts of bad debt and home builders with millions of unsold homes. More…

From Martin Filler at The New York Review of Books (Image credit: Pedro E. Guerrero)…

The ever growing recognition of mid-twentieth-century architectural photography has elevated the reputations of Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, and Balthazar Korab from that of workaday chroniclers of America’s postwar building boom to co-inventors of the High Modernist mystique. The strongly composed images of these three photographers—typified by such classics as Shulman’s crepuscular poolside view of Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, Stoller’s penetrating exploration of Eero Saarinen’s nautilus-like TWA Terminal at JFK airport, and Korab’s soaring evocations of Saarinen’s aerodynamic Dulles Airport near Washington, DC—have come to define a veritable school of photography. United in the emphasis on high-contrast clarity, bold graphic impact, and linear dynamism, these photographs were often superior to the buildings they glamorized.

Yet there is a fourth member of their generation whose remarkable work on modernism has been far less widely known: Pedro E. Guerrero, who will turn 95 later this year, and who for many years was Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorite lensman. He got the gist of the architect’s communal work ethic right off the bat, with an initial series of photos that depicted Taliesin Fellowship interns slaving away on desert construction sites like WPA-mural workers brought to life. And this Arizona-born photographer’s ability to mitigate the blinding daylight of Taliesin West, the architect’s winter base of operations in Scottsdale from 1937 onward, remains unparalleled. More…

Ryann Ford for The New York Times

From Karrie Jacobs at The New York Times…

Minnie J. Chappa, a 75-year-old great-grandmother and proud renter of a nearly new, minimalist-style, three-bedroom home here, said old neighbors from Haskell Street, a stretch of cottages just east of downtown where she spent nearly 50 years, regularly ask her, “Do you live over there in the matchbox houses?”

To describe SOL Austin, the five-and-a-half-acre development in which Ms. Chapa resides, as “the matchbox houses” is both accurate and unfair.

Yes, the houses are small by American standards (they range from 1,030 to 1,816 square feet), and the architectural style is decidedly rectilinear. But the boxiness is mediated by the skyward tilt of butterfly roofs, angled to hold photovoltaic arrays and channel rainwater into barrels.

SOL, an acronym for Solutions Oriented Living, is an ambitious attempt to upend the conventions of the American subdivision. It was developed by a partnership between Chris Krager, a 43-year-old architect who heads a firm called KRDB, and Russell M. Becker, 47, a civil engineer and general manager and owner of Beck-Reit & Sons Ltd., a construction company. More…

From The Economist…

Imagine that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?

The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why. There is no instruction to head in a specific direction (South Korea, where there is a campaign to get people to walk on the right, is an exception). There is no simple correlation with the side of the road on which people drive: Londoners funnel to the right on pavements, for example.

Instead, says Mehdi Moussaid of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, this is a behaviour brought about by probabilities. If two opposing people guess each other’s intentions correctly, each moving to one side and allowing the other past, then they are likely to choose to move the same way the next time they need to avoid a collision. The probability of a successful manoeuvre increases as more and more people adopt a bias in one direction, until the tendency sticks. Whether it’s right or left does not matter; what does is that it is the unspoken will of the majority. More…