REFERENCE
concertgoing footprints
For a clickable version go to www.metropolismag.com.
architecture as writing
saddled dinosaurs
“Everybody in West Hollywood
is gay.”
52 Making Waves
Last year, UNESCO added a large
swath of Bordeaux, France,
to its World Heritage list
( www.whc.unesco.org; click
on “The List”), citing its
“world-famous wine production” and
the historical importance of its port. Doesn’t Bordeaux have
more to recommend it than pirates and booze? Not so, to
judge by its tourism bureau, www.bordeaux-tourisme.com.
About half of the advertised activities involve wine—wine
and cheese tastings, the opening of a wine bar, a chateau
and terroir tour—and the other half are events like golf
outings, swing dancing, and battle reenactments. Architecturally, Bordeaux is a much more complicated city, with
a dominant classical and neoclassical aesthetic, eclipsed
some by medieval remnants and dashes of modern design.
Seeko’o ( www.seekoo-hotel.com), which opened last year,
is only the latest in a string of unconventional contemporary
buildings that include an OMA-designed private residence
carved into a hillside ( www.oma.eu; select “projects” and
“Maison à Bordeaux”) and Richard Rogers’s Bordeaux Law
Courts, a gigantic glass box adorned with seven vatlike
cedar pods that riff on the city’s greatest cultural draw: wine.
(Search “Bordeaux” at www.richardrogers.co.uk for images.)
wrought. Sarkis, of course, is all about natural ventilation
and sensitivity to his audience. Moreover, he thinks and
speaks with a kind of writerly understanding of the building-as-plot; he describes creating “private moments” somewhere between the “massive gesture” of a framing structure
and the “expression of the individual” within it. It’s well
deserved, then, that the Boston Society of Architects just
gave him an Honor Award for Design Excellence for his
housing project in southern Lebanon: www.architects.org/
awards. So, Q.E.D.: Sarkis is Tyre’s premier author—and,
dare we say, its most progressive. Shakespeare never had
a Web site as sleek as this: www.hashimsarkis.com.
henchmen”). For more on obscenely loaded men and the
architects who love them, see Deyan Sudjic’s The Edifice
Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World
(Penguin Press, 2005), or wait until November 19, when
MIPIM Asia gets underway: www.mipimasia.com.
66 Rock-and-Roll History
Disclaimer: We are big
Radiohead fans. The
band’s official Web site,
www.radiohead.com,
remains true to the
delightfully arcane nature
of its creative output. Click on “the most gigantic flying
mouth” for a blog to which the tour’s production manager
posts updates on initiatives to reduce its environmental
impact. You can also calculate your own concertgoing footprint by selecting the show you attended and inputting your
means of travel. Considering that incandescent lightbulbs
could be banned in the United States within the next ten
years, Radiohead’s conversion to LEDs may put it way ahead
of the curve. But could the entertainment industry be exempt from the proposed law? Read “Incandescent’s Not-So-Dim Future” (February 2008) at www.plsn.com.
74 Fast Train Coming (Slowly)
People have long been captivated by trains, perhaps none
more than Darius McCollum,
an obsessive train enthusiast
who has been arrested 23 times for such offenses as impersonating a New York City transit worker. “Trains are always
going to be my first love,” he told Harper’s ( www.harpers.org)
in 2002, after spending some 800 days in prison for what
was effectively a victimless, nonviolent crime. (Read about
his latest arrest by searching for his name at www.nytimes
.com.) Why not give the man a job? Maybe McCollum would
be more welcome at Amtrak ( www.amtrak.com), the cash-strapped company that has survived mismanagement, bad
service, and weak political support since 1971. In New
Departures: Rethinking Rail Passenger Policy in the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Kentucky, 2002), Anthony
Perl argues for a systemic overhaul in which streamlined
bureaucracy, legislation, and updated design lay the tracks
for a viable national rail system. California, of course, has
its own ideas. Governor Schwarzenegger’s pet high-speed,
high-tech passenger rail line ( www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov)
would link urban areas statewide for a mere $40 billion.
Meanwhile, the private California-Nevada Interstate Maglev
Project and its rival, the DesertXpress ( www.desertxpress
.com), plan to cart old ladies with big change purses and
bigger bouffants to Las Vegas for less than $100 each way.
109 Green Architecture’s
Grand Experiment
Given the bizarre Creation
Museum, a creationist
“natural history museum”
that opened in Petersburg,
Kentucky, last year (www
. creationmuseum.org)—
Adam and Eve supplant
Lucy’s skeleton as the earliest examples of a hominid, and
fully evolved humans ride saddled dinosaurs—it’s refreshing
to see someplace in the United States pouring a little money
into legitimate science. The new $488 million California
Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, is a feat of structural engineering, environmental design, and sui generis
landscaping, but one of its biggest challenges had nothing
to do with the building: How to move more than 20 million
specimens? Penguins made the four-mile trip from a temporary downtown facility in pet carriers; snakes in canvas
sacks; and snapping turtles in slings and rolling carts—with
great care taken to avoid their bone-crushing jaws: www
. calacademy.org/academy/building/behind_the_scenes
.php. The long move hasn’t distracted scientists from their
research, however, the fruits of which can be heard on
podcasts at www.calacademy.org/podcasts/index.php.
68 In from the Sea
Recently, Philippe Sollers and Christian de
Portzamparc theorized in Writing and
Seeing in Architecture (University
of Minnesota Press, 2008)
that writers are fundamentally architects. In the office,
we tested this hypothesis by
drawing Philip Johnson’s Coke-bottle glasses on
Marcel Proust’s face. (Go to www.metropolismag.com/pov
and scroll down to July 28.) So far, so good. But the experiment didn’t entirely convince us. Does the metaphor swing
both ways? What about Hashim Sarkis as Shakespeare?
Around 1608, Shakespeare wrote Pericles, Prince of Tyre,
widely dismissed by scholars as suffocating and over-
102 And the Band Played On
Each year, thousands of architects, developers, and hangers-on descend upon Cannes,
France, and broker deals
that determine the fate of
cities worldwide. The MIPIM
real estate conference ( www.mipim.com) has been a nexus
of power for nearly two decades, but this year one man dominated the proceedings: Sir Norman Foster. His Motherland
projects are so over-the-top ( www.fosterandpartners.com;
click “Projects,” “By Location,” “Europe,” then “Russia”) that
some industry-observers are starting to wonder: Is Foster,
you know, connected? Sean Griffiths, a blogger at Building
Design, notes that at the conference Foster was “
[s]ur-rounded by Eastern European men with pony tails and
suits of the sort who always seem to play the villain in films
like The Bourne Supremacy and TV shows like 24” (www
. bdonline.co.uk; search “Norman Foster” and “Russian
168 Murray Moss
Mossonline.com is a fun Web shop
that features a new “extraordinarily
fabulous item” each weekday, such
as a $3,700 Bol Seine de la Laiterie
de Rambouillet—a tasting bowl said
to have been molded from a queen’s
breast (search “July 16, 2008” in the “Daily New” archives).
Visiting a Moss store in person is even more fun, of course;
it’s like stepping into a ritzy dime museum with crystal
skulls, porcelain monkeys, a $5,200 cowhide chair, a stuffed-animal seat and—descending further into questionable
taste—a series of disaster-site miniatures (the World Trade
Center, Chernobyl) cast in nickel or 24-karat gold. This
winter, Moss’s two existing stores, in New York and West
Hollywood, are to be joined by a third at Philippe Starck’s
SLS Hotel, in Beverly Hills ( www.slshotels.com), which might
come as a surprise to anyone who read the Moss partner
Franklin Getchell’s New York Times guest blog last year,
a hilarious account of his first foray into Los Angeles retail:
www. themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nytgetchell.
“Everybody in West Hollywood is gay,” Getchell complained.
“Our contractor was gay. The plumber was gay. Architect?
Gay. Landlord? City Hall? Mayor? Gay, gay, gay. ...How much
work do you really think gets done?”
See articles for photo credits
Compiled by Suzanne LaBarre, Jessica Mizrachi,
and Marya Spence
