It’s the story that won’t die: Michael Cannell’s January article for the Times, titled “Design Loves a Depression”, has become the Cuisinart to the apricot fondue of design discourse, and it’s stirring up debate once more with Allsion Arieff’s latest dispatch for the Times’ By Design blog.

Allison’s first maneuver is to rip off, however unknowing, our blanket coverage of l’affaire Cannell, recapping the whole business with only somewhat less flair and wit. To review: Cannell’s original piece put a lit match to “frivolous” design and called for architects to rally around the flag of social responsibility, as (he claimed) they inevitably must following an economic crisis as severe as the present Pigfu*!k. Design-monger Murray Moss struck back in Design Observer, to the effect that he would always lurve him some white gold lobster forks and all y’all haters should go back to Cuba. And then Pilar Viladas and Philippe Starck weighed in for (PV) and against (PS) Moss’ argument; feelings were hurt, lives were destroyed, and the whole thing ended in a hail of bullets.

So what could Allison Arieff possibly have to add to this discussion?

Apologies we’re a little late to this one; we’ve been a bit distracted lately from the typical Nicky Ouroussoff hunt by our own good hunting. (Today’s BSG reference omg we just saw the last episode it was so totally crazy and out there and we would like them to make a movie of the series pls thankyou, check.) But he was there, swinging bats, throwing balls, and skidding into first base. We speak metaphorically of course, and of his latest review for the august New York Times newspaper publication, for which he is the architecture critic. It’s a double review, taking on both the new Yankees and the new Mets (called Citi Field) stadia but it’s a single hand as both are designed by Populous (clearly proven by now not to be an elaborate April Fool’s joke, unless it’s simply so elaborate that even the Gray Lady got taken in). And it appears that what we have is a case of architecture-as-literal-metaphor. Which is always one of our favorites.

Each stadium subtly reflects the character of the franchises that built them. Yankee Stadium is the kind of stoic, self-conscious monument to history that befits the most successful franchise in American sports. The new home of the Mets, meanwhile, is scrappier and more lighthearted. It plays with history fast and loose, as if it were just another form of entertainment.

We like this review. Nicky does what he always does best, which is to describe what he’s seeing and noticing, as a way of both explaining his more top-down critique, and of gently encouraging even the layperson to be their own critic, demonstrating that all you really have to do is look. Of course, it couldn’t all be good, so he has to end on this little twist of a knife:

Even so, most serious architects today strive to create buildings that reflect the values of their own era, not a nostalgic vision of the past, no matter how open they may be toward their surroundings. And in that regard both stadiums will be a disappointment to students of architecture. For us, the buildings are just another reminder of the enormous gap that remains between high design and popular taste.

We have to say, that gap’s getting smaller. And it could get even tinier, if reasonable writing would just keep getting got.

Two New Baseball Palaces, One Stoic, One Scrappy [New York Times]

We would like to take this opportunity to announce that, since reading her piece on “Reinventing Innovation,” we would like nothing more than to interface with Alice Rawsthorn. Her New York Times-published drill-down examination of the various rubrics of linguistic convolution particularly in re: the word “innovation” is a vision in brainstorming, particularly in light of her utilization of cross-team synergies. Thinking outside the box, Rawsthorn delves into the current critical mass surrounding the empty semantics that foster non-positive interventions between words and ideas, and addresses the current resource challenges that could prove a career-limiting move if given the wrong visibility. The key takeaways, as we envisioned them, involved a escalated and breakout understanding of the base-touching necessities of pinging a deep data dive.

It is, of course, strategic.

Reinventing Innovation [New York Times]

Ada Louise Huxtable, secondary Edificial mascot and writer of all that is (sometimes) true, appeared on Charlie Rose last week to talk about her book, On Architecture. Highlights were her calling postmodernism “a pretty silly movement — in architecture,” and these essays a coherent narrative of architectural history of the twentieth century. True to all narrative-memory-what-is-truth? form, Huxtable made the always-salient point that “things that were terribly important, or seemed important at the time, really didn’t matter.”

It’s a literary take on a world so frequently seen through asbestos-covered glasses, and it’s one that we’ve needed. “I picked pieces that I hadn’t put into other collections because they told a different story,” Huxtable tells Rose. Architectural history is every so often seen as somewhat immutable, maybe because it has to do with buildings—concrete signifying the ultimate commitment—or maybe because architects are more self-conscious about the permanence of their world stamps than, say, writers or poets, but it’s just as all-over-the-place and context-driven as the most lucidly literary interpretations of the past. (ahem, Julian Barnes.)

It’s a few minutes long, but it’s worth watching, if for Ada’s pitch-perfect clarity on a few still-debated questions. “Architects love theory,” Huxtable says. “A lot of it was stolen second-hand from the French.”

It was. And it’s time to give it back, in favor of a little thought. Consider this our official offer to trade you a thousand Deleuzes for, um, anything else.

A Conversation with Architecture Critic Ada Louise Huxtable [Charlie Rose]
On Ada [Edificial]

Please help us welcome into the arena of the alleged blogosphere a criticizer we weren’t so sure would ever leap to the mat of movable type. Andrew Blum, Wired and Metropolis contributor, critical wonderer, and Slow Thinker, is blogging over at WNYC this week as part of their April Cityscapes series. As we mentioned earlier, Brian Lehrer will be featuring the dulcet and thoughtful tones of one Paul Goldberger every Wednesday. And every whenever (get ready, Andrew, it’s always), Blum will be “here providing context, drawing connections, soliciting comments, and making statements you might disagree with.” He comes bang out of the gate:

I—and a bunch of us who write about architecture for a living—have recently been feeling especially disillusioned, not merely by the financial houses of cards built by Wall Street, but also by the literal houses of glass and steel we heralded, which in retrospect can seem as empty as a subprime mortgage-backed security. Is the New Museum on the Bowery, for example, a cosmopolitan addition to the cityscape, a witty comment on zoning and background buildings, a triumph of the city’s ongoing devotion to art and culture? Or a dirty blank façade that mocks us—along with the soup kitchen next door—for paying more attention to luxury than humanity?

We’ve always loved the New Museum—we’re bonkers for anything to do with zoning and the spareness of those slipped-in boxes just gets us right where we want it to—but Blum’s opening up a very necessary though slightly sleepy can of worms with this mention of our disillusionment. There is the sense—and we hope we’re included in this bunch who write about architecture for (some semblance of) a living—that we just got out of the Slip-‘n-Slide that has been the architecture world in the last few years and we’re all sort of awkwardly taking stock. All of us wrote about these big shiny glass and steel buildings, and most of us commended them in some way. Partially, this is because we were caught up in it all, and partially it’s because that in order to survive as a freelance writer about architecture, you occasionally find yourself assigned a story on a building that you might not have picked on your own. And partially, it’s because we loved the fact that architecture—strange, confusing, random architecture, a field and a subject that we can’t find the nexus of and certainly can’t explain—was getting enough attention that we might one day be able to all, collectively, figure out what’s going on with it.

We were, we think, so full steam ahead, and so absolutely crazed with possibility and excitement and enthusiasm about the big shiny empty towers, because thinking so publicly about them allowed us to start thinking about the really interesting stuff: what architecture is, where it is, and why it matters.

And now that the house of cards has fallen, all of a sudden it’s even more relevant than ever. Godspeed, Andrew. We’re with you all the way.

Welcome, Creative Destruction, and Climate Change [WNYC]
WNYC’s New Segment With New Yorker Critic: For Your Listening Pleasure [Edificial]
In Praise of In Praise of Slowness [Edificial]

Critic and author Michael Cannell is out to take designers down a peg. A noble mission, but one fraught with danger: Having declared in the Times that “design loves a depression”, Cannell now finds himself obliged to prove it, and therefore must set about finding examples of downsized, downturned and otherwise recession-inflected architecture. You could accuse him of cherry picking, but there’s a hell of a lot of cherries out there right now.

Take his latest vendange, appearing in Fast Company. Under the provocative title “Do We Really Need Architects?”, Cannell explores the phenomenon, apparently gaining traction, of off-the-rack blueprints for private homes. He’s especially enthused by one plan recently acquired by the online vendor houseplans.com for an “environmentally sensitive” house by Bay Area architect William Turnbull (above, in period-appropriate sepia). Spare, wooden, and weathered as the faces in any Walker Evans photograph, the houses are depression design that’s literally made-to-order.

But that said, does Cannell’s article merit its title? Dial-a-plan doesn’t obviate architects, it merely keeps them in the office turning out plans. And as for Turnbull, it’s not immediately evident what makes his houses particularly suitable to a depressed economy: the costs, financial and ecological, of building one’s own detached home in woody isolation more than offset the thrift of skimping on a hoity-toity architect. Is this legit depression-loving design? or is Cannell just shoehorning the facts to fit his hypothesis?

Do We Really Needs Architects? [Fast Company]

Hey there, sports fans! Did you know that starting in April, you can enjoy the dulcet tones of Paul Goldberger as you wash the dishes, fix lunch, put lard on the cat’s boils etc.? It’s true!

During the last construction boom the New York cityscape changed radically… but now that financing and fear has paused the cranes, WNYC is going to explore just how much the city has changed in the last decade and where it’s heading now.

Join us on the radio. Every Wednesday this April, the Brian Lehrer Show will be hosting a conversation with the New Yorker’s architecture critic Paul Goldberger about the changing city.

Catch it online, or at 93.9 on your FM dial. Let the discourse begin.

Introducing Cityscapes: A New Project from WNYC Culture [Flickr]

Steam rises from the fissures, and from within the Pythian cave comes the latest pronouncement of the Oracle of Ouroussoff. In the Sunday Times, Nicky takes on the urban infrastructure meme; to complain that he comes to it belatedly would be less an indictment of him (though it’s true) than of ourselves, as we should have noted ere now that of all the mainstream critics Nicky was one of the few who had failed to address the topic at length. But he’s making up for lost time.

Ouroussoff’s focus is on four cities: New Orleans, Los Angeles, the Bronx, and Buffalo. Each is gravely afflicted (though none more so than the first and last), and each could benefit from a major intervention on the part of the federal government. Nothing new here; about the most Ouroussoff can hope to do is convince some of the Times’ aging readership to put more of their retirement money into municipal bonds. The only stand-out passage in the body of the story (and one of the rare insights into the private life of Nicky O.) is a description of cruising down Wilshire Boulevard beside Frank Gehry in the early 90’s, with the latter showing Nicky the sites and dreaming of a revived commercial corridor that would at last give LA a proper “center.” Oh, to have hidden in the backseat during that drive…

But Nicky does make one interesting point in his conclusion. He endorses the idea of a National Infrastructure Bank, modeled roughly on the World Bank, that could help finance urban improvement projects nationwide. Fine idea: it beats the cuddly WPA-worship that’s been emanating from other quarters, and investors, especially overseas investors, are going to be looking for some place to stash their money besides the now-shaky US equities market. Hey Nicky! How about making that argument? Somebody’s gotta start selling this infrastructure movement to self-interested money men, not just altruistic urbanists.

Reinventing America’s Cities [Times]
Image [J. Emilio Flores]

Speaking of the rare and beautiful Newspaperus criticus architecturae… Has anybody picked up Architecture Now! 6, the latest jewel in Philip Jodidio’s increasingly glittery crown? It was released two weeks back and some of us were not favored with an advance copy. (Hint, hint, Taschen.) John King of the San Francisco Chronicle has seen it, and is he ever nonplussed. “A stroll down memory lane… Speaks to an age of cultural excess… Cloying example of excess…” You get the point—and John certainly does have one. The go-go spirit of Jodidio’s series seems more “then” than “now”, now. Of course, ever since Jodidio started this racket, he’s been vulnerable to the criticism that he was always capturing, not the present moment, but the one just before it. It’s only because the current “now” is so unlike its immediate predecessor that Jodidio’s latest effort seems so much less au courant.

‘Architecture Now!’ [Chronicle]

Inga Saffron, architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer and among the last of the staff writer mastodons, had an interesting piece in the paper on Friday. It began by remarking something that we’ve largely failed to note about the City of Brotherly Sandwiches.

In Philadelphia, the default material has always been brick… While Philadelphians were willing to work in glass towers, they preferred to come home to brick and stone.

She’s right: how many curtain wall residential building are there in P-town? Well, there’s more of them now, and Inga is glad that Philly has finally caught up. She’s gladdest of all to see the Murano, a 42-story condominium tower in City Center designed by the Chicago firm of Solomon Cordwell Buenz. The Murano’s strength, writes Saffron, “is the way its architects avoided the placelessness inherent in many glass towers.” The Chicago Tribune’s Blair Kamin appreciated the endorsement of his hometown troupe, and talked up Saffron’s article on his Skyline blog. It’s a vicious cycle!

The most interesting thing about Saffron’s article, however, is her split decision on the relative virtue of glass in the urban environment. Plainly she recognizes that the glass tower can be “placeless” as well as “sleek”, but she speaks warmly of certain of New York’s recent vitreomaniacal buildings—even as many in New York have started to wonder if, in the end, glass is really all it’s cracked up to be. How long before Chicago wonders the same thing?

Brick City Accepts Glass [Inquirer]
Chicago Architects Get a Thumb’s Up in Philly [Tribune]

Nicky’s back times two! Just a few short days ago we called him out—by name!—for the slightly nonsensical review of a few Swedish competition proposals that ran after over a month’s absence, the Times critic appears with a wander through London’s Smithsons-designed Robin Hood Gardens. Today we’re feeling a little softer. It might be the snow, it might be the fact that it’s Friday, or it might be the fact that the Big O tackles a subject near and dear to our hearts. That’s right. Let’s give it up for urban reconstruction in a postwar context.

Let’s also give it up for the school of experientially micro-contextual architectural criticism, otherwise known as Nicky Takes a Walk. After taking a train, which breaks down, leading him to take a bus and two trains and his feet all the way to this sprawling and brutalist housing complex, designed in the ‘60’s by Alison and Peter Smithson. Suffice to say he was grumpy. Then he got a little less grumpy. And by the end, he was so exhilarated by the various architectures that he was proposing a DiScoFro-on-Alice-Tully-style intervention, a way of blending old and new without destroying the DNA of either.

Yet an equally important issue is how we treat the cities we inherit and the memories they hold. Condemning an entire historical movement can be a symptom of intellectual laziness. It can also be a way to avoid difficult truths.

Memories? Laziness? Truth avoidance? What’s happening here? Is this a conscience I see before me, handle towards my hand? Come, Nicky, let’s do this together. You fight for the expression of collective memory in the New York Times. We’ll fight for remembering our collective expressions here. Your serve.

Rethinking Postwar Design in London [New York Times]

Over at Metropolis, as one of the many brilliant essays that make up their “What is Good Design?” issue, columnist Bruce Sterling breaks our day-after-tomorrow-ness down into a series of references to 99-cent iPhone apps, Alessi’s Bettina set, and Obama-friendly wifi. It’s a full essay, one of those densely-packed full-of-imagery stories that sort of exhausts our linguistic sensorium without making us long for the days of white boxes filled with brown-ish ones. Rather, it makes us think that the multi-packed multi-story worlds of the Gibsonian Tokyo-Marts might be, if not fun, at least more than survivable. Read it, along with Hockenberry’s Within the Context of No Context riff, and Official Edificial Top-Five-to-Seven criticizer Karrie Jacobs’ ode to the Kindle, and you’ll be good to go. To the future, and beyond.

Product Panic: 2009 [Metropolis]
Within the Product of No Product [Metropolis]
Rekindling the Book [Metropolis]

… when the first review Nicky writes in over a month is of a series of speculative competition entries in, um, Sweden. Which is lovely and all, and the land of our forefathers, but awfully far away and isn’t a competition sort of playtime? That’s kind of like a food critic disappearing for more than thirty days and then re-appearing with a paean to marsupial blood sausage, kind of like a music critic taking off for just a touch beyond four weeks and returning with a triumphant ode to a mechanical greeting card’s rendition of the Paper Planes remix, kind of like if we were to just stop blogging for twenty-eight (give or take a few) days and come back fully loaded with Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Book Proposal.

Just in case we weren’t clear: it’s a bad sign when the New York Times architecture critic doesn’t write anything about an existing building for quite some time, and then finally checks in with a round of imaginary criticism on five entirely imaginary projects. To be fair, the criticism is trenchant—Foster might not be as good a planner as he is an architect!—and timely—firms founded in the internet era are different from the behemoths of yore!—and vague—“the rest of the proposals fall somewhere between those extremes”—and so fully in the usual Ouroussoff ballpark, but the whole thing’s just a little weird.

The review’s got a few of those nice moments typical of Big Nick, where he takes a small detail like the corner of a building and writes about how it looks and what that means, and also does smashing-down lines like one where he calls a series of bridges “unimaginative.”

And then he just falls asleep. Seriously. All of that criticism, all of those years of thinking about architecture, all of that wielding of the position’s incredible power leads to… this:

But whatever you may think of the individual designs, the range of ideas presented here will be instructive for American urban planners entering an era of potential policy change. Government cash is nice. But we also need government to support fresh and innovative thinking about cities.

OMG! Stop! No! Shut the front door! No one (except for, er, everyone?) has said anything remotely like this! Are you suggesting, as you closing line, what we think you’re suggesting? That people should think about our totally insane situation in more innovative ways? That maybe our current approach to city-building isn’t working for us? We’re reeling here, incapable of imagining what might be coming next. Wait, wait, don’t tell us. We’re coming up with an over-under on a “Buildings are neat. Do them good.”

Bold Plans Prove That a City’s Future Needn’t Be Set in Concrete [New York Times]

Right now generally, and this afternoon in particular, we’ve been looking to first things: the existential challenges faced by designers everywhere because, oh boo and hoo! the economic sh*t has hit the architectural fan. The prevailing assumption of most informed persons (including us, by and large) is that the weird, the wacky, and the wild must be cut away as unpardonable frippery—that an aesthetics of modesty, and an ethic of service, should be the primary objectives for architecture in the present environment. Criticism, it follows, should play sheepdog, corralling the profession against the possibility of recidivist extravagance. Onward and upward with the arts, huzzah, huzzah.

We do not believe we have heard any opinion to the contrary from New York’s Justin Davidson. Last time we met him, you may recall, he was tooling around East New York looking at subsidized housing. But yesterday he broke ranks, albeit after a strange fashion: Clucking his tongue at the imminent demolition of St. Vincent Hospital’s cussedly bizarre O’Toole Building in Greenwich Village (above), Davidson laments in particular the loss to the city of its architectural “weirdness”. He even follows the thread straight to Gehry’s IAC, imagining that one day it, too, could go the way of the O’Toole, another victim to the ever-accelerating blandification of the Manhattan streetscape.

Davidson digs weird, alright—there’s no other word for this hypothetical scenario of his. The odds of anybody tearing down IAC at any time, even in the deep future, is nil, plus or minus zero. Meanwhile, why is Davidson talking up glass and funkiness when we’re all going to pieces over bricks and mortar? Is he telling us there’s room for sentiment amidst the crisis? for meditations in an emergency?

St. Anywhere [New York]

Our brother-from-another-mother (and -geographical location and -home base and -approach to architecture) Jonathan Glancey takes on, once and for all, the long-simmering “is the recession a) good or b) bad for architecture?” question. We have to admit that we took a while to reel ourselves over to the Guardian in order to read what we imagined might be yet another epic (which isn’t to say unwelcome) tract on how true innovation happens when we’re all starving (debatable: we’re so check-bouncing we can’t see straight) and how this is all a necessary break from a world in which creativity seemed to be about designers out-ludicrousness-ing one another (less debatable: we’re looking forward to objects and architecture helping people love and live), but once we focused our vertiginous energies on Mr. Glancey’s excellent prose, we were hooked. For one, he’s another fan of the one-word sentence. Of the pre-Y2K economic boom-provoked skyscrapers? “Bigger. Faster. Stronger. Shinier.” Of what we can look forward to? “Schools. Hospitals. Colleges. Training Centres.”

Lest that quick one-to-one comparison make the fast reader think that’s all the change is about—from exciting to boring—Glancey’s piece is actually a fascinating condensation of the push-pull of architecture and economics. We’re generally loath to get too into that relationship—we’re sort of purists in that way, interested in architecture itself and how it makes people feel about being inside or near it—but the upswings and downswings and pendulum-swings that Johnny charts suddenly make the entire seemingly nonsensical architectural history of the last few memorable (and earlier, as he gets into Venturi) years entirely sensical. People got rich, buildings got more dramatic, people got poorer, buildings got more conceptual, people got rich again, buildings became gesture, and now people are getting poorer again. Which, Glancey’s guessing, is going to give rise to the kind of architecture we’ve been seeing get attention lately—subtle boxes by SANAA, handmade-and-laid bricks by Roman & Williams—and then, once that’s over (and this is what we’re really waiting for), a Modesty Blaze, created by those out of work now, by the crush of bright young things trading in their assistant-ships for a stab at school. And who’s going to be teaching them? Those very same architects who, just a moment ago, were the bright young things before them. We’re thinking one below the Lindy Roy, Dan Wood, Galia Solomonoff generation. We’re thinking it’ll be curious to see what happens with architects like Chris Lasch, Ben Aranda, Front Studio. Then again.

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

The architecture of recession [The Guardian]
We Don’t Need No Thought Control: 211 Elizabeth Pondered! [Edificial]

Where did Paul Goldberger unearth the episode between Frank Lloyd Wright and Daniel Burnham that he recounts in his article on the latter in the (nearly non-) current issue of The New Yorker? In it, Goldberger tells the tale of Wright being offered a paid fellowship to Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts courtesy of Burnham, but declining out of a commitment to a “modern approach [of] open spaces and horizontal lines” over the architectural frou-frou of contemporary French design of which Burnham was a lifelong devotee. It’s a great story, but where does it come from?

More partic’larly, what is Goldberger getting at in his brief rumination on the life and work of Chicago’s famous planner-architect? The article is ostensibly in recognition of the 100th anniversary of Burnham’s plan for the city, but interestingly, Goldberger doesn’t talk too much about the book that actually contained the plan. It’s a real doozy: a work of sociology, urban history and aesthetics all wrapped up in a schoolboy’s civics textbook. It’s the weirdest plan ever written, but Goldberger is chiefly preoccupied with the missed opportunities of the visionary City Beautiful as rendered in Jules Guerin’s luminous watercolors (above).

So Goldberger’s is a weepy nostalgia piece, albeit tempered with political consciousness. (Burnham, it’s discovered, advocated “housing for the poor”, and we all know what planning and Chicago signify right now.) And it’s got that hallmark Goldberger historicism: “If Theodore Roosevelt were an architect, he would have been Daniel Burnham.” Right—and if H.H. Richardson had been a president, he’d have been Ulysses S. Grant. But there’s still the question of that Wright anecdote: did Wright have a full-on commitment to “horizontal lines” et al. as early as the mid-1890’s? We always just assumed he skipped the École because he was a willful, impetuous demagogue who couldn’t bear the thought of a bunch of smock-wearing featherweights telling him what to do. Isn’t that reason enough?

Toddlin’ Town [New Yorker]

The extravagantly named Sebastian Smee, art critic at the Boston Globe, has a laugh-your-pipig-off article this week about eccentric millionaire art lover Horace Brock (right), a portion of whose collection of drawings and decorative doodads is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s a nice stash, no question—da guy’s got class. But ol’ Horace (Woody, to his friends) isn’t into just buying art. Nuh-uh. He’s got a whole theory going, see? Like, about how good design and crap is all based on math.

Brock’s theory, which is clearly laid out in a succinct and fascinating essay included in the show’s catalog, comes with a two-page appendix, replete with a graph, equations, and multiple axioms…

In truth, it’s satisfyingly simple. Designed objects, Brock writes, can be broken down into “themes” and “transformations.” A theme is a motif, such as an S-curve; a transformation might see that curve appear elsewhere in the design, but stretched, rotated 90 degrees, mirrored, or otherwise reworked.

Aesthetic satisfaction comes from an apprehension of how those themes and transformations relate to each other…

In the words of Chris Matthews, “Oh, God.” The funny thing about Smee’s article is that he actually debunks at length this squaring-the-circle horse manure with a rather thoughtful, expansive disquisition on the history of aesthetic theory. It’s worth it for design-minded intellectuals (or intellectually-minded designers) just to see Gaston Bachelard quoted in a mainstream newspaper.

Not that Woody’s buyin’ it, of course. Kant, Schiller, Hume: “I think all those people were fuzzy-wuzzy.” You said it, pal! Screw ‘dose guys—it’s all about charts and graphs and creative calculus-based derivatives. That’s why America is number one!

? = Beauty [Boston Globe]

Liz Arnold is not a homebody. Or she wasn’t, until recently. She was—she remains—one of the bestest design and lifestyle writers around, a regular contributor to everything and a recently minted contributing editor at Surface. Liz’s peregrinations have taken her from her native Michigan to Los Angeles and now New York, with intervals in Australia and excursions to everywhere else. Arnold is no shut-in.

But she has, for all her travels, managed to develop a taste for the domestic sphere. Not surprising, perhaps, given her interest in classy interiors—but her latest project doesn’t have anything to do with Viking stoves or private wine cellars or any of the usual glossy gear. Liz has just launched a blog, Homebodies, dedicated to the lifestyles of the not particularly wealthy and largely anonymous. It’s a simple idea: In whatever town she happens to be in, she waltzes into the home of a certain acquaintance, takes a few digital snapshots, whips up some text, and voila! Found fabulousness.

This project appeals for two reasons. First, it acts as a mordant satire of cutesy interiors chronicle The Selby, giving us a look at creative homes without all the airbrushed bourgey pretense. (It’s about time.) Two, it has a conceptual component which is kind of thrilling: What happens when a lifestyle journalist turns her attention to the lives of ordinary people? The blog is a weird gloss to Arnold’s mainstream career, a parallel universe of interior design writing.

Which got us thinking: What if we started a second blog as an evil twin of this one? Post for post, the other blog would either comment on this one explicitly, or else present stories or viewpoints diametrically opposed to those featured here. There’s your thought experiment for the day. We can’t think about it anymore. It exacerbates our collective vertigo.

Image [Tara Derr Webb]

Ever been to East New York? It’s kind of incredible—like a loading dock for the whole city, a tangle of rail lines, on-ramps, and warehouses dispersed here and there across a landscape of low-rise residential buildings. It’s just the kind of place you might expect to find New York’s infrastructure-mad Justin Davidson—and sure enough, there he is.

Davidson writes in the magazine about a new housing development going up in the way-out Brooklyn nabe, designed by Edifavorite Alexander Gorlin. The architect’s reserved yet refined prefab row houses (above) get high marks from Davidson, and rightly so: Gorlin makes real all that “citizen architect” stuff we keep hearing about. Davidson continues with a look at Susan Rodriguez’s Schermerhorn House for Polshek Partnership, a similarly public-minded housing development done with verve and intelligence.

No question, Davidson is on the side of the angels here. Who doesn’t like affordable housing? But the piece concludes on a slightly sour note:

Both these versions of affordable housing reject the utopian visions that once fueled modernists’ social zeal and scarred our cities with towers for the poor. Instead, in their quiet, pragmatic way, they prove what the marriage of philanthropy and government can achieve…

Yes, Gordon Bunshaft could make a mess of public housing, and no, we don’t want to go back to the bad old days of the Pruitt-Igoe Houses. But Davidson forgets that a project like Gorlin’s new Nehemiah Houses represents a triumph of modernist design principles over a conservative alternative: the original Nehemiah Houses in the Bronx, built though a public/private partnership in the early 90’s, had pitched roofs and quasi-Tudor detailing. Part of Gorlin’s success is that he proves we can do the job of low-cost housing within a progressive, 21st century design idiom. It’s important to separate baby from bathwater.

Low-Income? You’re Kidding! [New York]

It had been so many eons upon eons since Mr. O had graced our minds with his architectural witticisms that we’d just tiptoed to the verge of sending out another Where in the World…? when, this morning, our worries were allayed, our fears put to rest. Nicky O is back, and in love.

Looks like he and Paul are going to end up fighting for the affections of one Miss Alice Tully, as their public declarations—Paul’s in the New Yorker, Nicky’s in the Times—are almost equally ardent.

A lot of it has to do with context. Nicky walks it back, reminding us first of the multiple Lincoln Center proposals (Frank: cover it in glass!), next the short flame of Christian de Portzamparc’s New York City Opera proposal, and finally the fact that this seemingly-gigantic renovation is just part of a superblock overhaul to be finished in 2010.

And another lot of it has to do with architecture. The thing about the new Alice Tully is that it’s a strikingly subtle—surgically precise, Nicky argues—intervention that looks anything but. When Diller walked us through, she talked about DNA, about un-layering, about the removal of the complex’s and building’s defects rather than the simple addition of assets. Ouroussoff gets into the medical metaphor:

The freshness springs from the architects’ willingness to break with worn-out urban design strategies. They aren’t scornful of the building’s history; nor do they treat it with undue reverence. With the precision of surgeons, they cut out ugly tumors and open up clogged arteries. In doing so, they suggest a way forward for a city in which preservation is all too often a form of embalmment.

The new Tully is—Liz’s eerily perfect skin which we just have to mention aside—about anything but preservation and sticktuitiveness. It’s about bringing in visual grit from the street (via the sunken concrete step-plaza) while protecting a glowing cocoon of a moabi-veneered concert hall, about chopping up an old building to make a new, and about offering a new type of preservation for a city that likes to go bonkers over any kind of change just as soon as it’s been thought of (and not a second before.) Part of why Nicky loves Alice so much, it seems, is because of what Tully stands for:

Taken as a whole these interventions should create a lively tension between two very different philosophical approaches to the city. They may also silence some of those who think that being heartily engaged in the present rules out an appreciation for architectural history. In an enlightened society there is room for both.

Before enlightenment: chop wood, go to concerts. After enlightenment: chop wood, go to concerts. (Enlightened, and stripteased.)

Boxy to Bold: A Concert Hall Busts Out [New York Times]
Center Stage: The Sky Line [New Yorker]
DiScoFro High Five! [Edificial]
Image [Hiroko Masuike for the New York Times]