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January 28, 2006

World's 12 Best New Buildings; Keillor reviews 'American Vertigo'; Bit-Torrent how-to; 3D painted rooms

Not a cube: At Artinfo, ArchInfo: The World's 12 Best New Buildings. My favorite, hands down, is Barcelona's Agbar Tower, built to house the city's water company:

The tower was built at a cost of over 130 million euro to house Barcelona's water company, Agbar, with three levels containing plants. The unusual feature of the project is the slightly curved form of the façades, which begin converging toward the tip of the tower at the 25th floor. This is why the elevators do not go beyond the 25th floor. The space in the inner cylinder is occupied by stairways, plants and two elevators which go up to the 35th floor, while the space formed between the two rings contains no supporting elements and can therefore be used for a wide variety of purposes, from offices to restaurants...

Click on the photo to see it larger.

What is it about Barcelona and architecture? It's like Gaudi still lives there.

We are not our kitsch: Garrison Keillor, elegant storyteller and host of radio's Prairie Home Companion, reviews American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, by Bernard-Henri Levy in tomorrow's Times book section.

At 25, Alexis de Tocqueville wandered early America, and described what he saw. As a kid, I saw it through his eyes and 1831 became real to me.

Unfortunately, Levy seems drawn to cartoon America, what Keillor calls a "classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion." Levy visits modern America's junk and misses you and me and Keillor's baking-powder-biscuit-loving listeners . "...there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke....this is a book about the French," he writes.

He likes Savannah and gets delirious about Seattle, especially the Space Needle, which represents for him "everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel." O.K., fine. The Eiffel Tower is quite the deal, too.

But every 10 pages or so, Levy walks into a wall. About Old Glory, for example. Someone has told him (in Newport, apparently) about the rules for proper handling of the flag, and from these (the flag must not be allowed to touch the ground, must be disposed of by burning) he has invented an American flag fetish, a national obsession, a cult of flag worship. Somebody forgot to tell him that to those of us not currently enrolled in the Boy Scouts, these rules aren't a big part of everyday life.

de T began by sailing from Le Havre, France, to Newport, where,

". . . we wandered about the town. It has 16,000 inhabitants, a magnificent harbour, newly fortified, tiny houses modeled one would say on the kitchen of Beaumont-la-Chartre, but so clean they resemble opera scenery. They are all painted. There is also a church whose bell tower is in a rather remarkable architectural style. I sketched it on Jules' album. We had been told that the women of Newport were noteworthy for their beauty; we found them extraordinarily ugly. This new race of people we saw bears no clear mark of its origin (n'a aucun caratere original); it's neither English, nor French, nor German; it's mixture of all the nations. This race is entirely commercial. In the small city of Newport there are 4 or 5 banks; the same is true in all the cities in the Union. . . ."

Traveling America in the footsteps of de Tocqueville today would be a terrific book if Keillor wrote it, I suspect, but now Levy's gone and stepped on the title.

Here's de T's Democracy in America, the book that Levy bounces off; his itinerary. and the map route. (He never went to Vegas, which lay in the desert's future).

Second opinion: The Toronto Globe and Mail review starts off brushing Keillor's concerns aside, but then damns the book with, "Apparently no one edited this book, insuring that no one will understand it."

Here's the first chapter of Levy's American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. See what you think.

Primer for the rest of us: How to use Bit Torrent:

Many of my friends and co-workers have asked me how to get started on the non-stop bandwagon that is BitTorrent, without having to understand techie words like ’swarm’, ‘peer’, ’seed’ or ‘ratio’. So without further ado, I’d like to get to it.

Fixed-point art: 3D painted rooms: "These rooms are painted so that, when looked at right, optical illusions will appear."

I think the pairs of photos show how the rooms look from the "wrong angle" (odd) and the impressive illusions that can only be viewed from one spot. via digg.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:11 PM | Permalink