A Playground for Cars

The Tower Place Garage is an outrageous modernist object lost amidst a core building stock of historically relevant commercial architecture. The 1967 building was constructed with the mission to attract an increasingly large suburban demographic to return downtown to support commercial activity.

Formally, the garage is an extension of the city's streets, actually appropriating pedestrian sidewalks for ramps which feed into the garage. This decision, paired with a continued lack of maintenance (and lack of funds stemming from poor sales) threatens the future of the garage. What was once a by-product of technological efficiency - a key player towards the understanding of the city as a machine for creating wealth - has been relegated by the public as a stereotypical example of ugly modernist urban renewal contributing to, rather than saving, the continued decline of the city.

Nevertheless, moving through Tower Place Garage is a delightful experience. It's perimeter is lined with delicately sloping ramps, rising one story for every pass. This arrangement allows ample space for an interior courtyard, a surprising and rarely seen element of parking garages today. The opening is bisected by a series of stacked, orderly walkways-in-the-sky feeding into a bunker-like staircase which returns the driver to the wilderness of the city sans car.

Typically walking is the best way to observe your surroundings, but the verticality of this garage, in tandem with it's repetitive structural bays and required slow speed limit generates a fantastic cinematic experience for the driver. The city unfolds behind the safety of the windshield: slow and steady, building by building, floor by floor. Oh how I wish it was possible to experience all cities this way!

Upon reaching the top of the garage, the concrete frame concludes with a simple curvature. The city below has disappeared.  All that remains is a strangely quiet space of vast expanse. It is cheaper to park on the roof.

The circular ramp represented in Google Map's cartoon-stylized plan as a simple cylinder. 

The most spectacular exit discharge sequence occurs through the core of the garage by means of a 9 story continuous spiral ramp.  Pleasantly designed to the turning radius of an average car, minimal turning is required. Such a design begs the driver into a speedy descent. This radical infrastructure requires it's own set of rules. Signs are plastered throughout the descent: 5 M.P.H., NO Pedestrians Allowed on Ramp, CAUTION, Merging Traffic! Hundreds of scrapes of every possible automobile color add a touch of unexpected decoration to an otherwise no-nonsense concrete playground for cars.  

Before you know it, you are ramping back into the city. I wanted to immediately return and drive down the ramp again, a feeling I'm sure is shared by many first-timers to the garage. Never mind that stop sign I ran towards the end. I was inflicted with a euphoric high rarely inflicted by an architectural experience. 

Ironically, contempt for the garage continues despite the fact that it's existence has allowed adjacent Tower Place mall to continue operating throughout year after year of depressing sales: “The only reason [Tower Place] hasn’t folded is because of its parking asset [...] It’s a revenue generator, and it’s been keeping the mall afloat.”

Juxtaposed against the lovingly soft pink painted concrete and unabashedly optimistic prancing of the ramps over the sidewalk (Morris Lapidus would be proud), the garage is looking more and more like some unresolved, unachieved bit of utopianism (autopianism?): a Jetson-ian vision of the city where the freedom of technologically sophisticated speeding autos trump boring, slow-paced pedestrianism.

Nevertheless, the garage is showing depressing signs of decay, while the 70,000 S.F. adjacent mall sits nearly completely vacant (foreclosure is pending for both). Things are not looking well. Rusting pipes and cracking concrete signal the end may be near for Plaza Tower Garage. To destroy this place would tremendously impact a piece of Cincinnati's history. Ugly or beautiful, the city needs places like this to remind us how the city was once used. Homogeneity is bad. Monsters are good. Buildings are to Cities as Rings are to Trees. 

Slide the Slides for Free!

Chester Park was a late 19th century/early 20th century amusement park in Cincinnati, Ohio.  It featured a variety of spectacles ranging from a large man-made watering hole, horse racing tracks, and large victorian pavilions. Pictured below is a miniature railroad uncomfortably packed with eager pleasure-seekers.  Circling a large lake, the mini-train would pass by a replica of the Statue of Liberty (note its un-oxidized copper hue color). Ironically the park closed due to an unpaid water bill, and is now the site of the city's public water department (sadly, the miniature train no longer exists).

One of the most quirky attractions, pictured below, was a rather squat cylindrical building with a comparatively small stick-framed windmill attached purely for decorative pleasure.  Wrapping around this curious building was a two-story metal slide. The purpose of the building - aside from being an elaborate armature for a playground slide - is unclear.  

People + Buildings = Personitecture: An Attempt to Love our Hated Buildings

We all have a favorite mascot – whether it’s that crazy Philly Phanatic, the creepy guy dressed in a chicken suit on Main Street, or the Sears Tower Dressed in Sears Clothing. Wait...what!?

Today I want to talk about a new term I’m calling “Personitecture,” or rather, people dressed as buildings a.k.a. building mascots a.k.a. the personification of our most identifiable buildings. Architecture has a rich and intricately woven history with fashion design that seems to be ignored in academia and practice today - or at least not as celebrated as it should be. Specifically, I'm talking about the traditional "costume ball" which is popularly coined the Beaux Arts Ball after the annual celebrations held at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

The traditional Beaux Arts Ball is a fashion show that has been abused and contorted - a bit of American Idol mixed with America's Next Top Model mixed with America’s Got Talent: absurdity, elaborately contrived imagery, and a judges panel!

Wikipedia tells us: "'It is a riot, a revival of paganism, known elsewhere only in Italy. It is also, in its way, a hymn to beauty, a living explosion of the senses and the emotions,' wrote E. Berry Wall in Neither Pest Nor Puritan. Its reputation for fabulously designed nudity, louche antics, cross-dressing and high style encouraged imitators in American cities. In 1931, in New York, famous architects dressed up as their buildings and today, many American architecture schools hold similar costume balls."

Those 1931 NYC architects, in dressing up as the buildings they had designed, embraces the

spirit and personality of their buildings. Where one ornate tower was matched with precisely trimmed facial hair and added “flair,” another building lacking upper floor observation decks was matched with a costume lacking eyeholes. People and buildings became one that night. To this day the tradition of the Beaux Arts Ball and costume wearing lives on, but rarely has it ever again reached the brilliantly humorous quality of the 1931 playful parody.

Most notable recent attempts were Phillip Johnson’s 1984 Vogue Magazine cover shot wearing a hat of his own building (in tribute to NYC’s 1931 architects). Also the 2000’s Conan O’Brien mascot characters fit this category of people-buildings. Memorable appearances include a mud-wrestling match between the Seattle Space Needle and the Toronto CN Tower, and the Sears (now Willis) Tower dressed in Sears Clothing (pictured above).

We also (rarely) see people-telephone booths, people-monuments, and building-people. To this date, it seems logical to say all of personitecture has been purely focused on structures that are widely loved - exhibiting nostalgic and/or place-defining characteristics - and continue to define our society today. Well, at Mockitecture, we question all of the rest of the world’s buildings. The iconographic buildings that are HATED by the people forced to pass by them daily. The anti-buildings, or non-uments of our day could be typified by the hastily made suburban McMansion home, or the billboard looming over the sidewalk on your walk to work. Add to this category brutalist concrete behemoths (my apologies, Owen), underwhelming mobile homes, and vacant/blighted factories and you’ve got a wonderful opportunity to rebrand the city – to make popular the very objects which are so hated by the public. These underwhelming buildings can be celebrated as personable follies of our time, encouraging the public to change their hatred into envy.

The other month, I constructed a replica of

Cincinnati’s infamous Crosley Tower. This is a massive brutalist tower/skyscraper – the first of its kind that I know of - is a monument to the brutalism movement of modern architecture. My building-mascot personifies the giant concrete building as a droopy-eyed, clumsy character unable to fit through most regular-sized walkways.

My very own building-mascot ran in a famed “Mascot Race” (borrowed from Milwaukee’s famous Sausage-themed Mascot Race) during an annual architecture event at the University of Cincinnati. The performance was an attempt to regain the spirit of the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball, and to engage the public in a dialogue regarding their (unexceptional) built environment.

Hopefully we’ll see more people dressed as buildings to come. After all, who can’t love a cheerful detached car garage shed, or a nuclear power plant man sporting sunglasses and bushy hair made of a cloud of pollution? The opportunities to celebrate and ritualize our ridiculously unexceptional buildings are endless. I'm sure Bad British Architecture would agree with me.

"The Freakiest Building on Earth"

Thanks to Mark Hogan, a.k.a. markasaurus for tweeting about the world's largest duck building. Brief story and more images can be found here: http://gizmodo.com/5314991/maybe-the-freakiest-building-on-earth

Local note of interest: if you're a local Cincinnatian and attended the Fei Wang lecture half a year ago hosted by Aaron Betsky and the Cincinnati Art Museum, this will be quite familiar to you...reminds me of many great buildings and interesting discussions from that lecture. Perhaps an upcoming post?

Political Mockitecture

More local political news has recently invaded the strange world of mockitecture (deeply sorry to all of our non-Ohio readers - but this will make you glad you don't live here, as if you actually need a reason to not want to live in the American Midwest). Desperately attempting to come up with a word for political mockitecture, but only getting the super-lame "mockilitics." Hopefully our intrepid readers can help with this.

So what's the big news!? Cincinnati's City Council members are getting in trouble for tweeting during city council meetings! Hah, that's right. It's like that time in fourth grade when you were passing secret notes around in the back of english class! A creative journalist came up with this catchy opening line to the article: "A fleet of tweets has Cincinnati City Council member Leslie Ghiz catching heat." What's even better is the end of the article: City Council won't address a call to ban tweeting during their meetings until after their summer vacation. What a joke of a city.

Reminds me of @Mockitecture's recent use of the phrase "sneak peek tweet." Oh...I totally forgot I was blogging, not tweeting. Sounds like social media is getting the best of us all. Twitter has officially trumped Tamagotchi as that hot new trend that everyone publicly hates (but secretly LOVES).

Non-Candidate for Mayor! Local Mockitect Invades the Political Arena

Hats off to non-candidate for mayor, Jason Haap, whose dropping out of the mayor's race saved Cincinnati, OH over $400k (with now two instead of three candidates for mayor, the city will not have to conduct an early and expensive mayoral primary).

In a move that seems fit for Urban Prankster, Haap presented the city with a large fake check for the money he saved them! ... oh, and by the way...he's running for the school board instead (all you mockitect-leaning voters).

Perhaps the city should build a Haap Memorial with the $$$ it saved? It's really the best way to thank him.

News Flash: NORTON Enters Tiger Naming Contest!

I, N O R T O N, hereby submit to the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, my proposal for the naming of their baby tiger cub, to be lovingly christened Norton.

Please support the cause and suggest Cincinnati's new tiger cub be named Norton!!!

Slutty Technology + A New Brutalism = ...

...A rant by N O R T O N

I was recently eStalking Sam Jacob via twitter (my apologies to Mr. Jacob for eStalking, and to everyone for mentioning Twitter) and came across an interesting article: The young generation with a new vision to build Britain, by Geraldine Bedell of The Observer.  You can read about it here.

Something that immediately caught my eye: a discussion of our generation's rejection of what I would call "technological puke" or what others call "bubble architecture"...and what Peter Lynch in the article identifies as the "idiot avant garde."

As a member of the generation Lynch is talking about, I find the subject is critically relevant, yet lacking significant discourse.  In school, for example, faculty were seemingly caught off guard by "thin" design where image and flashy computer graphics trumped "thick" design of drawing, thought, and decision-making.  We were not slapped in the face for presenting a building associated with the "idiot avant garde" -  the infamous building which was seemingly only designed around, or built for, that one night rendering produced in 3D Studio Max, V-Ray, et. al.

From Bedell's article: 

Patrick Lynch is actively hostile to what he sees as the inevitable decline of modernism into what he calls the "idiot avant garde, which means that all your work ultimately looks the same, whatever the climate". He claims that younger architects are disenchanted with "the idea that technological progress equals artistic progress equals moral progress equals virtue, which leads to the kind of thinking that it's OK to go and build for a completely unpalatable regime and fuck up the planet for money, because you're working in your signature style and it's an expression of individual creativity" (^interjection: isn't that what happened in China for last summer's olympic games???)

A couple of reasons for my personal hatred of slutty technology:  

1. The tradition of "making" is succumbing to the tradition of "picking" with a mouse (e.g. before: "that architect has a hot pencil." today: "that architect has a hot mouse.")
2. The building I was trained as an architect in (Mr. Eisenman's 1996 addition to D.A.A.P.) seemingly exists for the architect's pursuit of a singular, narrow-minded vision and (brutal)ly ignores the needs and uses of students and faculty.  Perhaps this is a new interpretation of brutalism - one of narrow and limited social objectives.  It seems fitting Eisenman's building is in the shadows of one of the largest continuously poured concrete structures in the world - a the brutalist tower/skyscraper named Crosley Tower. Images below:

(Link to evan.chakroff's photostream)

News Flash: Cartoonist Claims Suburbia Will Die!

Consider this a plug to all of our local fans and readers (I apologize to the rest of the eWorld)...Warning to those unfamiliar with the city of Cincinnati, Ohio: many references to local politics, locations, and landmarks. Reading between the lines will certainly reveal the crossroads American urbanism faces today...

My good friend Jim (Borgman) enjoys drawing cartoons. In fact, he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist for the Cincinnati Enquirer. His work can be found newspapers throughout the country and is even displayed in the White House. In the excerpt below (2002), he paints a very radical image of a Midwestern American city rebounding from it's more prosperous years of industrial growth. Watch out European cities...here we come:

"Suddenly everyone began streaming into the center city. Urban planners described it as the “donut-hole phenomenon”. The hotels filled to capacity as thousands of outsiders parked their SUVs and rode the Metro into the vibrancy of the urban maelstrom. “There was nothing left on the outer rings but stale crumbs,” explained a Downtown consultant."

Overnight, the inner city experienced a renaissance of retail, recreation and residency. Soon the lights were blinking out in shopping malls all around the beltway.

Strong-Mayor-For-Life Charlie Luken spent three days a week cutting ribbons at newly constructed high-rise homesteads, for which developers paid the city he fees for building rights. During much of the rest of the week, the mayor could be found on the Jack Nicklaus-designed Riverside Links – 18 holes of verdant perfection that hooked and sliced around the homes and businesses of the Banks.

Casino boats from Indiana steamed upriver, attempting to lure passengers on board at Cincinnati’s Public Landing with offers of free rides and chips. There were few takers. “Why bet on a long shot in Lawrenceburg when you’ve got a sure thing in Downtown Cincinnati?” asked one satisfied resident as she walked her Lhassa apso across the newly restored doggie green in Lytle Park.

Once the ordinance passed that prohibited automobiles from coming any closer in than the I-275 beltway, the skies cleared over the center city and D.C. (Downtown Cincinnati) became an international destination for health enthusiasts. “I come to bathe in the balm of the Ohio,” said a tourist from Tokyo, as he stood beneath the outstretched arms of the Genius of the Waters. The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Beach Patrol had to put on extra deputies during the warm weekends of summer when pilgrims seeking the rivers city’s reputed healing affects would line up for immersions along the Serpentine Wall.

Eventually the fortunate residents of Downtown began to complain at the injustice of having to pay subsidies to support the far-flung, fading suburbs. “I’m afraid to drive out there at night,” was one common complaint. “It’s eerily quiet and there are no lights to guide you but the stars and fireflies.” Others complained that the cost of maintaining miles of highways to far off points like Montgomery, Mason and Greater Deerfield Township, should be born by those who chose to live so far away from the comforting cluster of downtown humanity.

The City’s Motto: 'Why leave Downtown? Everything you could ever want is right here!' "

Early Sketch Reveals Interest in Mockitecture

A study recently pulled from Norton's archives reveals a rare glimpse into the mind of a budding mockitect.  Here are ten examples of how humor can be injected into YOUR renderings...

1. Sketchy van approaching the scene

2. Empty baby carriage

3. Two men following the mother very closely

4. A textbook "hot beef"

5. Old man walking a bike across the road

6. Man in trench coat in pursuit of handicapped citizen

7. Kid being knocked over by friend on horse

8. Reference to the endangered Smitty's store from Over-the-Rhine

9. Man walking quickly with briefcase

10. Old lady selling lemonade next to a gay man with a baby carriage

Cincinnati PARK(ing) Day

Cincinati PARK(ing) Day was held on Friday...

"“Cincinnati PARK[ing] Day” to be held Sept. 19, 2008 in parking spaces around Cincinnati. This is a one-day, global event in which artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform parking spots into public parks and alternative public spaces. Parking spaces show the fundamental elements of a good outdoor public space and may include seating, shade, and a place to watch people, exchange information, and view scenery. Each parking spot can be transformed into a park, playground, puppet show, or whatever you like."

A quick synopsis of how N_O_R_T_O_N's intervention went...

"three police cars and a bike cop showed up within 40 minutes of setting up. my location might have had something to do with it...i was on probably the busiest street in the city...Walnut between 4th and 5th adjacent to fountain square where they were scrambling to set up for octoberfest. the cops told me the radio dispatcher said there were "kids playing cornhole in the middle of the street" which naturally garnered a lot of attention. anyway, i was told i had to have a permit to be using a paid meter space for something other than storing a car which is complete bullshit. after they kicked me out i went to district 1 where they "couldn't find" a copy of the municipal code or parking ordiances for the city. this was also bullshit. how can they enforce the law when they don't even have a copy of it at their main station? wow. i was pissed. then i went to city hall,
where the law department told me the cops were the only ones who dealt with "permit issues" which is what they described my situation as. so i looked up the code, and nowhere does it specify that the ONLY use for a metered parking space is to store a vehicle. I'm pretty sure what i was doing was legal. anyway, they didn't give me a ticket because they couldn't figure out what to charge me with, then got nervous and told me to leave. the entire altercation was photographed thankfully. haven't seen the photos yet. heres a photo
of my park...it was pretty solid." [more...]

Son of Beast Housing Project

What if all the homeless people in Cincinnati were allocated to the Son of Beast? We could just use the existing structure and retrofit wooden shipping crates into the perfectly sized bays. How would this affect the park? Pretty badly. However, this could be useful in case of a big natural disaster. Then the trains could be used to transport people to their "homes."

A viable solution to Cincinnati's homeless problem, the Son of Beast Housing Project would be a low cost, quickly assembled place to put the most destitute of the city's residents. Son of a Beast!

 

Early Eclecticism: A Bizarre Bazaar

Credit the beginning of mockitecture to a mother in London from the 19th century named Frances Trollope. Leaving her children behind, she traveled to America, staying in Cincinnati, Ohio - a hub in the westward expansion of America during the Industrial Revolution. Ms. Trollope critically denounced Cincinnati as a city built of "architectural sameness." In response, an entertainment and shopping center was commissioned as a business venture for her son. This building was conceptualized by Trollope, and French painter, Auguste Hervieu, to be a "distinctive, light-hearted" building.

"The Bazaar was an amusing concoction of Moorish, Egyptian, and Gothic elements. It was one of the first examples of the spirit of Eclecticism - drawing upon historic styles from various exotic cultures - which came to dominate American building for the remainder of the century."

"Cincinnatians and visitors, who were accustomed in public buildings to the simplicity of the vernacular [...] delighted in attaching what they regarded as the tastelessness of the 'bizarre bazaar'."

The Trollopean Bazaar was designed by Seneca Palmer in 1829. He was one of Cincinnati's only architects (mockitects?) at the time and the designer of several significant architectural landmarks in the city. For more information, see Cincinnati the Queen City by Daniel Hurley (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1982). This article references excerpts from chapter 1 of that text.