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Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.


ARTS & DESIGN
Architecture Review, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
A Translucent and Radiant Partner With the Past

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: June 6, 2007/font>


Roland Halbe/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Steven Holl's addition, left, to this institution in Kansas City, Mo., is a crystalline counterpart to its Beaux-Arts predecessor.

KANSAS CITY, Mo., May 31 — Working on theoretical proposals and the occasional house commission, Steven Holl emerged as a rare, original talent in the 1980s. The strength of his vision was rooted in a desire to reconnect architecture to the physical world — the shifting nature of light, the reflective surfaces of water, the texture of materials — and an atavistic love of craft.

He went on to design plenty of good buildings, like Simmons Hall, with its porous steel-grid facade, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the angular forms of the art school at the University of Iowa. But missing was the kind of project that cements an architect's place in the pantheon: a building in which his special gifts, the full support of a client and the qualities of a site magically fuse into a near-perfect work.



Roland Halbe/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The exterior of the new Bloch Building Lobby Lens at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. The New York architect Steven Holl designed the Bloch addition and renovated the museum for $200 million. The museum will open on June 9, 2007.

The waiting is over. Mr. Holl's breathtaking addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, opening here on June 9, is his most mature work to date, a perfect synthesis of ideas that he has been refining for more than a decade. By subtly interweaving his building with the museum's historic fabric and the surrounding landscape, he has produced a work of haunting power.

For the art world, the addition, known as the Bloch Building, should reaffirm that art and architecture can happily coexist. The rest of us can draw comfort from the fact that public works of our own day and age can equal or surpass the grand achievements of past generations.

The imposing south facade of the old Nelson-Atkins Museum is a testament to the scale of America's civic ambitions in the 1930s, when the effects of the City Beautiful movement could still be felt. Overlooking a series of terraces that step down to meet a gently sloping lawn, its colonnade of Ionic columns suggests a great temple to art, distant and unapproachable.



Roland Halbe/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The interior of the new Bloch Building Lobby Lens.

The result is a building that doesn't challenge the past so much as suggest an alternate worldview that is in constant shift. Seen from the north plaza, the addition's main entrance gently defers to the old building, the crystalline form suggesting a ghostlike echo of the austere stone facade. From there, the eye is drawn to the distinct yet interconnected translucent blocks, which are partly buried in the landscape.

Mr. Holl refers to the blocks as "lenses" that draw light into the galleries. To understand their beauty, you must experience them over the course of a day, or preferably through the shifting seasons. When I first saw them from the park at dusk, they radiated light, and in their own way seemed as imposing as the limestone facade of the old 1930s building.

The next morning, the glass forms had picked up the moodiness of the passing clouds. Depending on the angle from which they were viewed, their surfaces shimmered or turned a cool blue, so that they seemed to fade into the sky.

But as beautiful as the lenses are, there is more at work here than visual games. The lenses are only the most visible part of a rambling underground world that is enveloped by the park. The south park actually rises up over the roof of the galleries, helping to frame a series of small sculpture courts between the glass boxes. People can stroll freely onto the rooftop courtyards, wander back down into the galleries, or navigate a staircase between the old and new buildings to the upper plaza.



Roland Halbe/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art The exterior of the Bloch Building at night.By subtly interweaving his building with the museum's historic fabric and the surrounding landscape, Mr. Holl has produced a work of haunting power.

This freedom of movement adds to the sense of discovery, and it is reinforced by the museum's policy of free admission, uncommon among the nation's ever hungrier art institutions. This allowed Mr. Holl to create various entrance points into the building. The relaxed ease of entering fosters a sense that the museum and the artworks inside it belong to everyone, not to a privileged set of connoisseurs. (New York museums, take note.)

The flow of bodies moving through the rooms is balanced with moments of stillness. The main lobby, for example, a long, narrow, three-story atrium crisscrossed by ramps that lead down into the galleries, prompts visitors to reflect on their choices. As you descend, you can follow a slow-paced sequence through the galleries or proceed down a long, shifting ramp with carefully framed views of the park and the old museum building. You can bypass some galleries and re-enter the sequence at any time without sacrificing a sense of clarity.

Mr. Holl compares the experience to reading a 17th-century Chinese scroll painting, a narrative that requires a constant shift in your perspective as the drawing unfolds. The subtle shifts in the relationship to the ground outside instill a sense of weightlessness, so that you are constantly reorienting yourself within the landscape.

But by creating alternate routes and slowing the pace through the galleries, Mr. Holl also prepares visitors for the encounter with art. Because you do not feel as if you are being herded through the galleries by an invisible hand, you tend to take your time in turning from one work to another. (The museum's holdings range from Chinese paintings, sculpture and ceramics to the Hallmark Photographic Collection.)




Roland Halbe/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Contemporary works by Richard Estes, Donald Judd and Alex Katz in Gallery L3 in the Bloch addition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum.

As you near the end of the sequence of galleries, you can turn and gaze back up through a window at the facade of the old building across the park, which has never looked more gorgeous. It's a generous gesture to the past, one that ingeniously punctuates the space.

But none of this would really matter, in the end, if it weren't for the quality of the light. This has long been a contentious issue in museum design. Despite recent advances in glass technology that block most of the harmful ultraviolet rays, most conservators remain leery about the damage that light can inflict on artworks. One result, more often than not, is a cautious evenness in exposure that can grow monotonous.




Roland Halbe/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The southernmost lenses of the Bloch Building illuminated at night

Mr. Holl solves this problem by varying the height of his galleries from 27 to 34 feet. This allows for architectural spaces enlivened by shifting natural light. Big, curved panels inside the lenses funnel a mix of northern and southern sunlight down into the galleries, so that you are aware of the passing of a cloud or a bit of thunder. A few carefully placed spotlights meanwhile focus attention on the paintings.

Mr. Holl has often talked about the desire to imbue his buildings with poetry. Here he has done something more: He has created a building that sensitizes visitors to the world all around them. It's an approach that should be studied by anyone who sets out to design a museum from this point forward.




Monday, June 4, 2007

Renovación urbana en "La Olla" newyorkina.


Fashion & Style
Lower East Side Is Under a Groove
By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: June 3, 2007


Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times
Sion Misrahi has revamped the Lower East Side, helping to transform old storefronts around Orchard Street into trendy businesses, but not everyone is impressed with the changes.

FOR decades, there was a discount men's suit shop at 183 Orchard Street.

Then, in 1995, came Kush, a stuccoed Moroccan-themed bar.

Then the bulldozers.

And now, the 18-story Thompson Lower East Side hotel is rising on the site, with rooms to start at $395.

That four-part history of one address — from shmattes to hipsters to bulldozers to tourists — is a summary of much of the recent evolution of the Lower East Side. On a Tuesday last month, Sion Misrahi, a real-estate dealmaker who has played a central and often contentious role in that history, stood in front of the hotel construction site and reflected on the moment, a dozen years ago, when he saw the future of the neighborhood.

To that point, Mr. Misrahi, who started his working life as a 14-year-old pants salesman at his father's men's wear shop on Orchard Street, had been hoping to resuscitate the bargain-shopping culture originated by Jewish immigrants by creating a historic district, a sort of old-time theme park with pushcarts.

Instead, he changed course, advertising to fill some 18 vacant storefronts on a one-block stretch of Orchard Street by promoting them to night-life businesses.

"We decided to rent to bars and restaurants who would bring in the hipsters and change the neighborhood," Mr. Misrahi, 57, said.

Since that "aha moment," when the bar Kush became his first night-life tenant, Mr. Misrahi has had a hand in scores of deals that have transformed the area, including the latest wave of hotels, condominium towers and boutiques. He is, in large part, responsible for the hipification (some may say the crassification) of the neighborhood, a district east of SoHo and south of the East Village.

As some of the early bohemian hangouts are being overwhelmed by a decidedly high-heeled and cologned crowd, and others give way to hotels and luxury rentals like the Ludlow, a 23-story brick-and-glass giant that looms over Katz's Delicatessen, Mr. Misrahi finds himself vilified by some longtime Lower East Side watchers (even though the Ludlow, the most visible symbol of gentrification, is one of the few projects he had nothing to do with).

"What Sion and those people should realize is they've let greed run rampant," said David McWater, the chairman of Community Board 3, which is advocating zoning changes to limit building heights and retain the area's historical charm. "There have been no compromises. They let their greed decide rather than a combination of greed and conscience."




Daniel Barry for The New York Times
The Cake Shop.

Love or hate the new Lower East Side (dubbed "the Lower East Slide" recently by The New York Post and mocked in the current Time Out New York as home to "hipster zombies"), what is not debatable is that Mr. Misrahi's strategy of attracting bars and clubs, then vintage clothing stores and sex boutiques, has worked. By fostering an artsy culture, fertile ground was created for economic development, even if some of the original bohemian touchstones are gone. Collective Unconscious, a performance space, moved in 2003, shortly after Mr. Misrahi purchased the building.

The storefront that housed House of Candles, an avant-garde playhouse, is now the Stanton Social, where diners sit on lizard-skin banquettes. And Tonic, a club for live music that opened on Norfolk Street in 1998, closed last month around the time that Blue, a glass condominium tower next door, welcomed residents who paid $850,000 for one-bedroom apartments.

The demise of Tonic, whose owners explained on its Web site that "we simply can no longer afford the rent and all the other costs associated with doing business on the Lower East Side," brought out more than 100 protesters.

Rebecca Moore, one of the protesters, said that the "over-bar-ification" and gentrification has created unbearable nighttime noise, and a culture where landlords will use every trick of the housing code to drive out rent-stabilized tenants.

Despite the losses of some cultural capital, the perception of the neighborhood as cool by large developers — not often the most cutting edge of folk — is now firmly established.

"Lately there's been this real activity on the Lower East Side of great little restaurants, a great food scene, a really great bar scene," said Stephen Brandman, a co-owner of Thompson Hotels, a chain whose flagship is 60 Thompson in SoHo. "It's the next area for tastemakers to go."




Daniel Barry for The New York Times
Orchard restaurant

Those tastemakers will not find that everything funky is gone. A few doors from Mr. Brandman's hotel is Rockwood Music Hall, a bar where big-name musicians play on a tiny stage. On Ludlow Street, Pianos, which housed an experimental playhouse in the late 1990s, is now a thriving live-music hall and bar. A few doors south are two more popular music-performance spaces, the Living Room and the Cake Shop. Kush, displaced by the bulldozers, has moved to Chrystie Street, near the Box and a block south of a Whole Foods that opened in March.

The developers who have come to cash in on what Mr. Misrahi helped build should be viewed, he said, as saviors. "There are the creators and the nitpickers," he said. "After they create, the other ones nitpick."

Mr. Misrahi, whose roots are deep in the neighborhood, walks the streets daily, greeting shop owners he has installed and landlords who have long known him. On Orchard Street a few weeks ago, two young Hasidic men greeted him and gave him cream pastries to celebrate Shavuot before ducking into one of the street's few remaining fabric stores.




Daniel Barry for The New York Times
Tuts

It was 1956 when Mr. Misrahi's father, Jay Misrahi, moved his pregnant wife and the young Sion from Larissa, Greece, to the neighborhood with the aid of a Jewish charity. Jay Misrahi ran Daniel's Clothing at 122 Orchard Street, where Sion would work on Sundays. At the age of 26, the younger Mr. Misrahi opened his own shop at 125 Orchard Street, Breakaway Fashions.

But by the late 80s, the growth of national discount stores and the end of blue laws that had left the Lower East Side one of the only places in the city to shop on Sundays were draining customers from the area. Mr. Misrahi was a leader of local businessmen and in 1991, with the help of a development consultant, he formed a Business Improvement District, which proposed rebranding the neighborhood as the Historic Orchard Street Bargain District.

"What the South Street Seaport has tried to do," Mr. Misrahi told The New York Times in 1993, "we can do in a grittier, nonantiseptic manner."

It didn't work. Stores continued to close, including Mr. Misrahi's shop. In 1994, taking a new tack, he opened Misrahi Realty. "I changed," Mr. Misrahi said, sitting in his office at 88 Rivington Street, the first building he bought, in 1979, using clothing store profits. "Everyone changes."

Although Mr. Misrahi has had a hand in many deals — as a rental and property broker, and as an arranger of meetings between neighborhood movers and shakers — he does not own any of the new hotel or condominium towers. His neighborhood holdings are limited to eight tenement buildings, most of which he bought for less than $1 million (and could sell for eight times that). He is not a Donald Trump of the Lower East Side. But, arguably, his vision and relationships with landlords had more to do with the area's evolution than anyone else.

"He literally gentrified the neighborhood over many years," said Jason Kim, the managing director of a partnership that owns local buildings. "To do that, he carefully considered every tenant that he arranged with the building owners. Orchard Street had been a conservative shopping area, but now it has become more spicy."

Two of the businesses Mr. Misrahi persuaded Mr. Kim to take as tenants are Babeland, a sex-toy shop that opened in 1998, and Demask, a purveyor of leather and latex fetish wear, which opened on Orchard Street in 2006. Mr. Misrahi persuaded Mr. Kim to give both boutiques 10 percent discounts on their rent because he thought they would add to the spirit of the neighborhood.

Until the latest surge of building, the most obvious manifestation of Mr. Misrahi's vision was the Hotel on Rivington, the 21-story green-glass tower that opened on the block between Ludlow and Essex in 2004. While Mr. Misrahi is not an owner, he negotiated and collected a commission on the sale of air rights that allowed the hotel to rise 15 stories above nearly everything else within a half-mile radius. He also negotiated the deal with the commercial tenant in the previous building at the address to leave.

Mr. Misrahi has mostly abandoned his earlier vision of widely preserving the neighborhood to which millions of Americans can trace their immigrant roots. But to others, that dream — and not a vision of preserving the historical blip of a hipster Lower East Side — endures. With other neighborhood groups, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has asked the Landmarks Preservation Commission to establish a large historic district bordered by East Houston, Canal, Allen and Essex Streets.

Without the old buildings, said Ruth Abram, the museum president, "we risk losing conscience about what it is to be a stranger in the land."




James Estrin/The New York Times
Sion Misrahi has deep Lower East Side roots but he opposes landmarking.

While a gentrification that starts with bohemians and ends with bankers is not uncommon, Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, said the type of change that is happening on the Lower East Side is unusually reckless. He compared it to the meatpacking district, which has also been transformed into a night-life and hotel district, but where the shabby beauty of the low-lying buildings and rough cobblestone streets is largely intact.

"I worry about the neighborhood as we know the Lower East Side existing in five years in terms of the physical structure, the feeling of the area, the distinct sense of place you get from walking down the streets, from shopping in the stores," Mr. Bankoff said. "I'm worried it's going to become this twisty canyon of gleaming high rises with absolutely no sense of all the generations of New Yorkers who lived in the area."

Mr Misrahi opposes the landmarking, arguing that small landlords will not be able to afford to fix their buildings up to historical standards. The two blocks of Orchard Street south of Delancey near the museum, where a section of the street is made of newly installed cobblestone and pickles are sold from barrels streetside, are enough of a Lower East Side theme park to satisfy tourists, he said.

That said, there are some possible disruptions to the cultural landscape even Mr. Misrahi cannot stomach. The same day he visited the Thompson hotel site, he stopped into Katz's, the beloved 119-year-old purveyor of pastrami, where the owners say they have been listening to buyout offers from condominium developers. Mr. Misrahi does not want Katz's, which is a one-story structure, to leave.

"The soul of the Lower East Side will be ripped out," he said.

Standing at the counter, sampling a slice of pastrami, he chatted with a co-owner, Alan Dell, and set up a meeting. Many offers for Katz's have been received through Misrahi Realty, including one that would keep the restaurant running at street level while building a residential building above, Mr. Misrahi said. The potential buyer might also market a line of Katz's cold cuts.

After talking to Mr. Dell, Mr. Misrahi slid into a seat at a table, squirted mustard on his sandwich and said he preferred doing business by talking to people face to face.

"I'm sure Trump does the same thing," he said, shrugging. "Only over foie gras."


Sunday, June 3, 2007

Polémica por Street View de Google.


Technology
Google Zooms In Too Close for Some
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: June 1, 2007



Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Mary Kalin-Casey and her cat, Monty, at home in Oakland, Calif. A Google map service can zoom in so closely on buildings that it has caused Ms. Kalin-Casey and others to complain to the company and on blogs.

OAKLAND, Calif., May 31 —

For Mary Kalin-Casey, it was never about her cat.

Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google's map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment.

"The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people's lives," Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. "The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged."

Her husband quickly added, "It's like peeping."

Ms. Kalin-Casey first shared her concerns about the service in an e-mail message to the blog Boing Boing on Wednesday. Since then, the Web has been buzzing about the privacy implications of Street View — with varying degrees of seriousness. Several sites have been asking users to submit interesting images captured by the Google service, which offers panoramic views of miles of streets around San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.

On a Wired magazine blog, for instance, readers can vote on the "Best Urban Images" that others find in Street View. On Thursday afternoon, a picture of two young women sunbathing in their bikinis on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif., ranked near the top. Another showed a man scaling the front gate of an apartment building in San Francisco. The caption read, "Is he breaking in or has he just locked himself out?"

Google said in a statement that it takes privacy seriously and considered the privacy implications of its service before it was introduced on Tuesday. "Street View only features imagery taken on public property," the company said. "This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street."

Google said that it had consulted with public service organizations and considered their feedback in developing the service, which allows users to request that a photo be removed for privacy reasons. A Google spokeswoman said the company had received few such requests.

For instance, Google worked with the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which represents shelters for victims of domestic violence nationwide, to remove pictures of those shelters. "They reached out in advance to us so we could reach out to our network," said Cindy Southworth, founder and director of the organization.

Not everyone believes the service raises serious privacy concerns.



Monty the cat was visible in a photo showing a street in Oakland.

"You don't have a right to 'privacy' over what can be seen while driving the speed limit past your house," wrote a Boing Boing reader, identified as Rich Gibson, in response to Ms. Kalin-Casey's complaint. Others dismissed her as a crazy cat lady.

Edward A. Jurkevics, a principal at Chesapeake Analytics, a consulting firm specializing in mapping and imagery, said that courts have consistently ruled that people in public spaces can be photographed. "In terms of privacy, I doubt if there is much of a problem," Mr. Jurkevics said.

Still, the issues raised by the service, thorny or merely funny, were perfect blog fodder. The hunt was on for quirky or potentially embarrassing images that could be found by wandering the virtual streets of the service.

There was the picture of a clearly identifiable man standing in front of an establishment offering lap dances and other entertainment in San Francisco. The site LaudonTech.com showed an image of a man entering a pornographic bookstore in Oakland, but his face was not visible.

Others pointed to pictures of cars whose license plates were clearly readable. One pointed to images captured inside the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, a controversial location for photography in this high-security era. On Lombard Street in San Francisco, various tourists who had come to photograph the famously curvy street were photographed themselves.

Google said that the images had been captured by vehicles equipped with special cameras. The company took some of the photographs itself and purchased others from Immersive Media, a data provider.

"I think that this product illustrates a tension between our First Amendment right to document public spaces around us, and the privacy interests people have as they go about their day," said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. Mr. Bankston said Google could have avoided privacy concerns by blurring people's faces.

Back at her apartment, Ms. Kalin-Casey acknowledged that plenty of information about her — that she manages an apartment complex, that she was an editor at the film site Reel.com — is already easily accessible through Google and other search engines.

"People's jobs are pretty public," she said. "But that doesn't mean they want a shot of their sofa on Google." She has asked Google to remove the image of her building, which was still online as of Thursday evening.

When a reporter first arrived to interview her, Monty the cat was visible in the window.