In the Spring 2009 issue of FORDHAM magazine, the University presented sketches of construction started on the Rose Hill campus, and planned for Lincoln Center (c.f. Curbed.)

I suppose that Sasaki has tried their best with the residence halls and McGinley replacement to reflect the Gothic Revival architecture that made Rose Hill so striking, but it doesn’t seem so from the pictures. They could still be an improvement over some of the more modern facilities, McGinley and Mulcahy in particular — or not.

I will not be contributing anything to the fund drive for this. But we might park in the college’s lot if we visit the Botanical Garden.

(By the way, I find it odd that Pei Cobb Freed & Partners chose music from The Mission for the promotional video for their Lincoln Center plans.)

It’s even uglier than I expected.

But what I find most amusing is that the glistening outer shell in the sales brochure architectural elevation drawings doesn’t glisten.

Before:

After:

Ha!

These videos from WABC and WCBS give a sense of being in the building.

Brian Ulrich photographs, among other things, empty retail stores. These ruins don’t hold up as well as, for example, those of Rome.

This video comparison of Barcelona in 1908 and in 2008 by Fotos de Barcelona is striking, and not just in the differences in the built environment. What I find most striking, and disturbing, is the sheer lack of people in 2008, as if they were filming a ghost town.

Architects these days. There are images of the interiors which are even more disturbing. This is an environment expected to be conducive to learning? I’m dizzy just looking at the pictures.

At least it seems to fit into the block. Thank God that [t]he zoning envelope proscribes the kind of exuberant challenge to the grid that the institutional personality of Cooper Union would seem to demand. The best thing I can say about the building is that it looks like it has the potential to engage the street. Why, I wonder, did the architect not echo the exterior of the Cooper Union if his whimsy was forced inward by the zoning code? Is it too much to ask for right angles?

[The owner of Vespa SoHo, Zachary] Schieffelin says he hopes this means New York will start to look more like London or Rome — the streets buzzing with as many scooters as cars.

Europe has had high fuel prices since the end of WWII. I would suspect that this has contributed as much to scooter use as have the older shapes of the cities — more like New York than Los Angeles — if not more so, particularly as the European cities have become more automobile-oriented.

Modernist buildings, whether clad in glass or not, simply aren’t built to age gracefully—not only because of the way they’re constructed, but also because they aren’t designed to be loved. They are either commercially expedient products of the consumer culture or, less often, expensively histrionic but ultimately ephemeral fashion statements of the sort that Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel concoct.

And that, my friends, is my main gripe with Modernist architecture. It’s ugly, and gets uglier.

It’s a wet, slushy day out today. I can understand that such weather might be unfamiliar at Google headquarters, though Google London might have some experience of it. I’m working at home today. What I’d like to know is what Google does in situations where the people can’t come to the Googleplex to work. I have no doubt that they have no software limitations on where they work, but it seems that locality is essential to the nature of Google.

Do y’all take a snow day?