Hasta La Ideas

The good people of Buffalo, New York are once again slightly miffed about media coverage of their city. You’ll remember last year when NY Times‘ critic Nicolai Ouroussoff traveled there to talk in glowing terms all about their architecture. Then the issue was (rightly) raised that he’d completely forgotten about the contributions of Buffalo’s own Louise Bethune, the first American woman to set up a professional architecture office and the first female fellow of the American Institute of Architects. Now they have collectively come to rally against a recent piece in USA Today that also talks about how great Buffalo’s architecture is, but also how the city is crumbling and how it’s incredibly cold there (that’s the part they’re upset about). On their local news, they talk about the decision to fight back (check out the clip after the jump), for some reason showing all the television and movie productions being shot in the area right now as some sort of worthiness gauge. The plan also includes sending out copies of Mark Donnelly‘s photography book Frozen Assets to show how great the city is, even when it’s buried under 20 feet of snow.

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It might be wise to plan on just asking for frequent flier miles donations this holiday season, or outright plane tickets, instead of the usual stuff in wrapped boxes. You’ll have Seoul to visit next year as they serve as the World Design Capital for 2010. And now, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design have made their selection for the next city to host the biennial event: Helsinki, Finland. Probably also wise if you ask for extra money too, since the events go on year round in each of these selected capitals. Here’s a bit about Helsinki’s recent win of the designation:

The winner of the title must organize design-related events throughout the year. The title is expected to bring a number of design events to the Finnish capital throughout the year. Jussi Pajunen, the mayor of Helsinki, said the city council would begin preparations at once.

“Helsinki has not been in the global spotlight in such a way since the 1952 Olympics. The international design community will be paying attention to the city,” said Helsinki’s cultural director Pekka Timonen.

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With the downfall of the economy and all the hundreds of projects trimmed or cut this year because of it, there are a lot of empty lots out there, just sitting there reminding us of what could have been. And for those projects that got started and ran out of money, we have that favorite phrase of ours, “accidental architecture.” It was both these types of failed architecture that got Irene Cheng and her husband Brett Snyder thinking. Using funding from the Val Alen Institute‘s New York Prize Fellowship, the duo created an iPhone application called Museum of the Phantom City, which looks at all the various exciting projects that were planned for New York, but were never realized due to funding, contract failures, complete infeasibility, or any of the other million reasons that result in these ideas’ disappearances. Using GPS, you can use the app to wander around the streets of NY and absorb a little history about what never was as you come to it, along with some interactive bits surrounding these invisible sights. But besides being just something interesting to play with, the app also has value in realizing the steps a city takes on its road through history:

“If everything that gets proposed is the result of a familiar process, it will produce familiar results,” [City University of New York’s Michael Sorkin] said on Wednesday. “So radicalizing the discourse is a way to open up the debate.

“In the history of New York, projects that were not built were absolutely formative in the development of the city,” he added.

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Oh, dear readers, it seems as though we’ve been away from you for eons. We know how difficult it is to return to normal after a long break, so you’ll probably eager to kill a few minutes reading something of interest while you readjust. So we turn to this great piece by architect and firm founder David Marks in Building, “My Dubai Hell,” which talks about his experience working in the country. From the opening, Dubai for Marks is “a sort of surreal version of Las Vegas — the city that was one vast casino where everybody wins.” By then end, his firm hasn’t been paid for 15 months and is owed hundreds of thousands of pounds. We’ve all read about the rise and fall of Dubai, including the most recent report that they still plan to finish the world’s tallest building, but it’s incredibly fascinating to see how it all looked from the inside, painful as it may be (though, if anything, the country’s decline probably means many lives spared now that David Fisher‘s crackpot building likely won’t see the light of day).

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It’s a Friday at the tail end of summer and everyone we know is on vacation, including probably you (why are you reading blogs?!), so we turn to something fun. David Pierson from the LA Times has filed this report from Beijing on the IKEA (or “Yi Jia”) store located there. While the store has been incredibly popular since its opening a decade ago, which is no surprise given how all of their big boxes always seemed swamped, this location has become something of a destination that only happens to offer shopping. People sleep in the beds, kids jump on couches, and families come to spend the whole day (which, if you’re anything like us, that last one sounds like the worst form of torture ever devised). The store’s management doesn’t seem concerned at all, hoping that the people who treat the shop as a theme park will return to buy, as China’s per-household income continues to rise. It’s a great, very odd story, and perfect for a lazy morning such as this. We’re just full of regret that we hadn’t read the piece earlier, when we were in Beijing back in May. We did go to a Wal-Mart over there, but that was as dull as any of them over here. Next time.

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