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First Aired - 09/15/2010 07:00PM
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This week's Burning Down the House is a potpourri of news and thought from across the spectrum of architecture and design. Curtis begins with a tribute to the late great structural engineer Ysrael Seinuk, who taught at Cooper Union, the alma mater of Curtis and fellow architect Jacob Alspector, our guest this week. Next Curtis and Jacob (alspectorarchitecture.com) discuss the ever changing skyline of NYC, touching on the history of the Empire State Building and the future of the Vornado Real Estate Trust building. The Plaza and Pennsylvania hotels plus (the original) Penn Station also come up in this discussion of buildings new and old, good and bad, within the fluctuating world of NYC's built environment. This episode was sponsored by Tekserve: your one stop shop for all things Mac.
Photo 1: Harry Weese's Given Institute, Photo 2: The planned Vornado Tower at 15 Penn Plaza, Photo 3: McKim Mead & White's Pennsylvania Station
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Burning Down The House Intro - Ysrael Seinuk and Harry Weese (13:42)
Tags:
Curtis B. Wayne, news, new listener, our friends in Scandanavia, friend of the show Jacob Alspector, CDANALYTICS.org, Ysrael Seinuk, Ysrael Seinuk's death, Cuban revolution, thin concrete, parabolic structures, taught structures at Cooper Union, Ricky Ricardo on meth, posing at the blackboard, a passion for building, Harry Weese, the Washington DC Metro, beautiful modernist building, University of Colorado School of Medicine, landmarking modern architecture, Docomomo International, preserve good works of modernist architecture, The Time Life Building in Chicago, sitting in the garden of Roberta's, Heritage Radio Network, drop by, the heritage radio stadium, the march of dollars accross the landscape, Harry Weese building demolition,The New York Way (17:15)
Tags:
Tekserve, your number one source for all things Apple, Jacob Alspector, the ever changing landscape, the ever changing Manhattan skyline, Penn Station, Madison Square Garden, Renzo Piano's New York Times Building, 12000 feet tall, desecration of New York's skyline, most prominent thing in Midtown, there is no more beautiful building than the Chrysler Building, Gail Fenske lecture 9/16/10, Spitzer School of Architecture, Woolworth Building, Chicago, writing about skyscrapers, first city and second city, why is architecture in Chicago so much better?, a conversation between Bob Stern and Stanley Tigerman, boom to the construction industry, the changing nature of urban life, tower will block Alspector's view, The Great Northern River, The Hudson River, Europeans living in New York since the 1620s, few remnants of dutch settlement, relics of New York ancestry, Brooklyn Museum, the oldest house in Manhattan, The Morris-Jumel House, traces of the previous cultures, Pot Cove in Queens, excavating architectural artifacts, the sunken ship found near Battery Park, family trip to Portugal, patterned stone work, irregularly cobbled toufa stone, driving on a 2 thousand year old road, Roman architecture, what architectural artifacts are we leaving behind, the kind of glass we didn't have 20 years ago, the New York of the early 60s, how things have changed, the post-Giuliani years, Vornado Realty Trust's new building, only a few blocks from the Empire State Building, Vornado Tower, the Lenni Lenape, Manhatta,Demolition Remorse (14:35)
Tags:
Dan Breindel, Love of Three Oranges, March of the Nights, Prokofiev, Hotel Pennsylvania being turned down, adaptive reuse, Giorgio Cavalieri, the originator of adaptive reuse, The Astor Library, learning to love old buildings, Mies, Phillip Johnson, articulation of different scales of structure, still studying architecture, The Vornado Project, what Norman Foster did for the Hearst Building, maintaining street scale, The Pennsylvania Hotel has seen better days, The Plaza hotel at it's peak was fewer than a thousand rooms, Pennsylvania Station, a huge disaster for New York, McKim Mead & White, Cooper Union Green Camp, straddling a pair of sculpted eagles, ornament and the passing fashions of what we live to see, developer's remorse, conservation of the beautiful things of our past, the thing that replaced Penn Station, the city in the 60s, the solution was screamingly modern, a terrible train station replacing a beautiful one, a time-bound ethos, Schinkel, 2200 rooms,Freedomland (11:35)
Tags:
exodus to the suburbs, CoOp City, Levittown, New York was the most elegant place to live in the 20s, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Jackie Onassis, Freedomland, the power of money in New York cannot be underestimated, Dutch trading post, three-way trade, the engines of real estate in New York, banks and borrowing, ORO properties, Vornado, The Empire State Building, Great Depression, The Empty State Building, built in 14 months, dirigible dock, Merrill Lynch, World Trade Center, Bear Sterns Building, the demands on the public infrastructure, circumcision of the Jean Nouvel Tower, ten million dollars for transit improvements, the new Penn Station, Union Station in Washington, filing tax returns, new monuments are not allowed to have front steps, The Met, ramps drive a different design aesthetic, masters of the ramp, The New York Exodus of the 1960s,To comment on this episode click here. There are currently Comments
