Monthly Archive for January, 2011

Haunting Images Of Detroit’s Decline

Published on January 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Nicole Hardesty, The Huffington Post

A new book called Ruins of Detroit displays Detroit’s downtown landmarks in decay: Abandoned hotels, houses and schools line the streets as a reminder of the city’s economic downfall over the past century. The devastation takes on an eerie beauty, as captured by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

The photographs show once-lively structures of an American city, now remembered by its remains.

While Detroit’s official unemployment rate has rebounded to 12 percent from a high of 15.7 percent in October of 2009, the state’s economy is nowhere near healed. As the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, the state’s jobless rate is falling at the fastest pace in the nation — but that doesn’t equate to job growth. A state agency told the WSJ the decline “primarily reflected a reduction in the number of unemployed individuals seeking jobs.”

The entire collection of photos can be found in the Ruins of Detroit book, or at Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre Photography

To see the Pictures….

Garden Party: The City’s New Nature

Published on January 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Stefany Anne Golberg, The Smart Set

A magnificent thing has been happening outside my window in Brooklyn. This past summer, I noticed vegetable gardens and fruit trees overwhelming the once-empty hull of yard behind my building. The paved patios have been blasted up and turned into thriving miniature farms. Gardens are being grown on the rusty fire escapes and tended by my young, overall-clad neighbors. Everything is getting greener, and leafier. Everything seems more… alive. A month ago, before the present frost hit, a gaggle of speckled birds I have never seen were casually tearing at the round fruits of a new tree. I’ve lived in my Brooklyn apartment for 14 years, long enough to turn from tenant to witness, so you’ll believe me when I tell you the change is considerable.

The results of the urban gardeners’ efforts are delightful and alluring. Even I — who managed to murder a prepackaged Chia herb garden I once received as a gift — am finding myself walking along New York’s streets with an overwhelming urge to plant. Green walls, green floors, moss-covered chairs, bathtub vegetable plots, milk carton pots.

It isn’t just in Brooklyn. There’s a Frenchman named Patrick Blanc who has been designing vertical gardens that loop up hotel walls and germinate across shopping mall interiors in Paris, Kuwait, Bangkok, and Gdansk. From his headquarters in Sweden, Folke Günther developed a vertical growing wall to promote more efficient and ecologically sound urban farming. He has named it the “Folkewall,” after himself, but vertical gardens are also being called “growing walls” and “living walls.” (I like “breathing walls” myself). Arbo-architects Ferdinand Ludwig, Oliver Storz and Hannes Schwertfeger call their work “building botany.” They make building structures that are a fusion of trees and steel pipes. The two intertwine such that organic and inorganic become a single being. Essentially, they want to make living, breathing, growing houses.

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The Rigging Crew

Published on January 19, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

From Paul Clemens, n +1

Though the rigging crew comprised a rotating cast, the characters ran to form. Mostly, the crew was made up of men who had banged around a bit and who had landed, however briefly, at Budd—ex-UAW guys, roofers, plumbers, electricians, a vending machine deliveryman, a repo man, an Iraq war veteran, a Bosnian immigrant, a strip club bouncer, assorted jacks-of-all-trades. The collection called to mind a critic’s description of the crew of the Pequod—men who had “come sulking away, address unknown, from howling creditors, accusing wives, alert policemen, beggary on shore.” They almost all drove trucks; after a time, I’d identify guys by their Dodge Ram, Ford Ranger XLT, Chevy 1500, or Ford Custom F-150. These trucks tended to be dilapidated but basically dependable. Bumper stickers memorialized Dale Earnhardt. Some guys greeted me the same way, day after day. Switching their cigarettes to their left hand, they’d extend their right, then quickly retract it, inspect it for grease and grime, and—after succeeding in wiping away none of it on their work pants or plaid flannel—re-extend the hand with a shrug, to say: your call. Beards, mustaches, and stubble of various stages were near universal. A clean shave would have clashed with the surroundings.

For a short time, the crew had two black workers, one of whom was also the crew’s only female worker, a young black woman whom everyone liked and called Z. Such exceptions aside, an entirely male and predominantly white crew took apart a plant in an almost entirely black city. The relative lack of blacks in the plant had less impact, behaviorally, than did the almost complete absence of female observation and oversight. You didn’t need to shave, shower, brush your teeth, or wash your clothes before work; you didn’t need to worry about your beer breath, your BO, your black eye, your smoking, your burping, your farting, your constant fucking cursing. Pretty much anything your body could do, you could do with impunity in the plant, which made its own sounds and smells, masking yours. The plant felt like a frat house, but of a peculiar, contradictory kind—one for men who had never set foot on a college campus.

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