Showing posts with label washington. Show all posts
Showing posts with label washington. Show all posts

Sunday, November 15, 2009

The World's Ugliest Buildings

Different people have different criteria for what makes a structure unappealing. “The ugliest buildings are the anonymous ones,” says Christopher Bonanos, who edits architecture criticism at New York magazine. “Even if an experimental, high-profile building doesn’t quite deliver, at least the architect is trying something. A boring building is a warehouse in the middle of New Jersey.”

For Jason Fifield, an associate at Ankrom Moisan Architects in Portland, what makes a building ugly “is when the design isn’t generated by real reasons but rather by arbitrariness, just for the sake of creating an image.”

To compile our list of the world’s ugliest structures, we consulted with architects and design experts as well as the general public. Pretty much everybody had something to say. For instance, there aren’t many admirers of the spherical houses on long pole “stems” planted, like so many mushrooms, in the Netherlands. (The architect was given free rein courtesy of a Dutch subsidy for experimental housing.) Then there’s the midwestern corporate headquarters that takes the form of a huge picnic basket. Sure, it’s funny from the outside, but probably not for the employees of Longaberger, in Newark, OH, who have to go work in a hamper every day.

1. Harold Washington Library,Chicago



If buildings came with footnotes, this one, named for a beloved former mayor who deserved better, would have pages worth of citations. Neoclassical references collide with a glass-and-steel Mannerist roof; throw in some red brick, granite, and aluminum—and a bad sense of scale—and you’ve got way too much architecture class for one day.

The Ugly Truth: Opened in 1991 and designed by the firm Hammond, Beeby, and Babka, the Chicago public library has a helter-skelter application of motifs and styles that’s “locked in the postmodern era,” says Peter Koliopoulos of Circle West Architects in Scottsdale, Ariz.

2.Longaberger Home Office,Newark, Ohio


If you worked here, you’d be conducting business in a 9,000-ton copy of a woven-wood basket. Its stucco-over-steel construction was an award-winning feat, apparently; the synthetic plaster received a prize. But it’s as if, in 1997, a giant-size Little Red Riding Hood set down her seven-story hamper on a flat section of Ohio.

The Ugly Truth: True, the company purveys handcrafted baskets. And founder Dave Longaberger’s dream headquarters was a replica of his favorite basket. But hey, Crate & Barrel employees don’t schedule meetings in a 10-story sofa.

3. The Ideal Palace,Hauterives, France


Cinderella’s dream digs it’s not, but Le Palais Idéal does bring to mind a fairy tale — the kind one might have visions of after dropping acid. Gargoyles peer out at grottoes with Hindu temples, and tiny mosque-motifs adorn squiggly stone pillars.

The Ugly Truth: In the mid-1800s, Ferdinand Cheval tripped over a stone while delivering mail and was seized with inspiration—his life’s work would be to build a stone château. Over the next three decades, he marked stones while covering his route, returning in the evening with a wheelbarrow to collect them.

4. The Portland Building,Portland, Ore.



Let’s break out the government-building checklist. Small, boring windows? Check. Humdrum off-white masonry? Yes. Terracotta pilasters and shiny blue glass? That, too. The first three levels of the squat, 15-story municipal-services structure are covered in dark green tiles, adding to the bewildering gaudy-meets-tedious tone.

The Ugly Truth: Michael Graves won a competition to design the building in 1982. Postmodernism was all the rage in the ’80s, which explains the randomly-stuck-on historical motifs. “Many buildings from that decade look fake,” says architect Stephen R. Connors, who has his own firm in Warwick, NY.

5. Bolwoningen Houses,Hertogenbosch, Netherlands


If Lewis Carroll’s Alice wandered into a 1960s sci-fi flick, she might have come across something like these bulbous houses. The residents live inside bizarre-looking bubbles (small ones, at 18 feet across) with UFO-like windows.

The Ugly Truth: In the late 1970s, the Dutch government offered subsidies for experimental housing, and the architect—one Dries Kreijkamp—certainly complied with the directive. The 50 bolwoningen (bol = sphere, woningen = houses) sprouted up in a city that seems to infect artists with a fantastical streak; it’s the hometown of Hieronymus Bosch, the 15th-century painter known for his half-dream, half-nightmare-like renderings.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Elite School Sees Dark Side of Limelight


"Demonstrators from Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas protest across the street from Sidwell Friends; students hold a counter-protest.(Carol Guzy/the Washington Post)"

Its parent-teacher conferences made the evening news. So did cases of swine flu. And Sidwell Friends School has recently been the target of a few small protests that seem aimed at prominent parents, not students.

The school, long a favorite of Washington's leading families, is no stranger to presidential children. But in the months since Barack and Michelle Obama decided to send their daughters there, Sidwell has been pulled into the spotlight of a distinctly 21st-century culture -- one that is increasingly celebrity-obsessed and often shockingly unmannered.

Educators and others at Sidwell have portrayed this as what their most famous parent might call a "teachable moment."

When five anti-Obama, anti-gay protesters appeared in front of the school's Wisconsin Avenue NW entrance Monday morning, they were met by 150 Sidwell students waving signs ranging from "There is that of God in Everyone" to "I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It."

"I guess they think they can influence what we think because we're young and vulnerable," said Daniel Edminster, a Sidwell junior. "They can't."

The school, founded in 1883, taught children of three White House occupants before the Obamas: Theodore Roosevelt, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton. Vice President Biden's grandchildren go there, as did Al Gore's son while Gore was vice president.

But in the 1990s, when Chelsea Clinton attended, Twitter and Facebook didn't exist to amplify and extend conversations. (There have been more than 175 tweets about the protests in front of Sidwell since Monday.) Nor did the Internet function as a gathering place for the political fringe to the extent that it does today.

Administrators at Sidwell said they remembered two protests in the 4 1/2 years that Chelsea Clinton attended the school. This year, there have been two protests since mid-September.

The news media and the blogosphere have put the school under a microscope, too. GQ recently named the school's admissions director the 50th most powerful person in Washington. The Obama girls' first day of school merited a two-page spread in People. Its racial dynamics were analyzed on NPR. Its lunch menu is scrutinized by sustainable food advocates and doctors groups.

On the political front, pro-school-voucher activists invoke Sidwell again and again in their arguments for letting families use public money to send their kids to private schools.

Parents, students and educators say that the Quaker school's values of egalitarianism and thoughtfulness haven't changed under the spotlight but that expressions of students' views have become more visible to the public.

"I don't think anything in the culture has really changed," said Chris Dorval, whose daughter attends Sidwell's high school. But, he said, the attention has "kind of crystallized their culture in a way."

The school's former head said that even negative attention could, in the end, be valuable for the students. "In some ways, these kinds of experiences deeply enrich the education students get," said Bruce Stewart, who spent 11 years as head of Sidwell before he retired at the end of June. "You want to hear those voices, listen to them and make a judgment about it. That's an important thing for kids to learn . . . not acquiescing to it, not being duped by it, but hearing it."

Even at the lower school, where the five protesters chanted slogans that were not lower-school or family-newspaper appropriate at dismissal time Tuesday, parents said that they would try to use the demonstration as a teachable moment.

"My son is in kindergarten, and he won't really understand the content," said Amy Henderson, who was waiting with her preschool-age daughter in the car line. She could have stayed at home with her daughter and had someone else pick up her son, she said. But she said that she wanted to see the protest and talk about it with him. "We have too many same-sex couples as friends for it to be an issue," she said.

Not everyone at the school sees a big difference in public interest in the school between the Clinton and Obama eras.

"It's not really different between the mid-'90s and now," said Ellis Turner, associate head of the school. "This has happened now within a condensed period of time," he said of the protests, which he called "a low blow."

Turner said he didn't know whether protests would become a regular feature of school life. "We'll have to see," he said.

On Monday morning, an orderly counter-protest didn't prevent orderly learning.

"Guys, first-period class is getting ready to start," Turner told the massed students shortly before 8.

All but a few packed away their signs and headed into the school, leaving behind the five protesters on the other side of the street.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Analysis: 10 percent jobless is Obama's new world



WASHINGTON – For months he had warned it was coming but that didn't ease the political shockwaves for President Barack Obama when unemployment topped 10 percent.

A year after his election Obama finds it increasingly difficult to blame the sour economy on George W. Bush or offer reassurances that jobless Americans will soon find work.

Never mind that the economy itself grew in the last quarter, that the recession, as measured by the precise formulas used by economists, is over and that the number of jobs lost in October was less than one-third the number of job losses at the start of his presidency.

Those claims about the recession's end do not convince most people, who remain painfully aware of the unemployment rate.

At 10.2 percent, October unemployment climbed to chart-topping heights unseen in more than a quarter century. The bottom line is that more than 15 million Americans are out of work and 3.5 million lost their jobs while Obama was president. Expected or not, this is Obama's new reality.

"I won't let up until the Americans who want to find work can find work, and until all Americans can earn enough to raise their families and keep their businesses open," the president declared Friday.

That's a hopeful promise but not very realistic.

And it shows that, for the time being, action to tackle record budget deficits will simply have to wait.

Obama, appearing at the White House Rose Garden on Friday three hours after the jobless numbers were made public, said his administration was looking at additional spending for roads and bridges and energy efficient buildings. Additional tax cuts for businesses and steps to increase credit for small businesses were also on the bill.

The new unemployment rate also came on the same day Obama signed a $24 billion bill to extend jobless benefits and spur homebuying

In a sign of Democratic thinking, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who heads Congress's Joint Economic committee, said Democrats would consider new aid to states, an "infrastructure bank" to increase construction jobs and small business tax credits.

"I think we're witnessing a political renaissance about concerns about jobs," Lawrence Mishel, president of the labor-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said approvingly. "It will put the deficit concerns into their appropriate context."

What all this amounts to is another stimulus for the economy. Though don't look for Democrats to call it that; Democrats have a tough enough time debating the merits of the $787 billion stimulus Congress passed earlier this year.

Republicans were quick to pounce on the proposals. Internal polling by the Republican National Committee after Republican gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia showed that Republican candidates could do well by arguing against additional spending while promoting job growth through tax cutting alone.

But in rhetoric and in deed, Obama is being forced to address an unemployment picture his economic team had long ago expected to avoid.

Many economists predict the jobless rate will rise again, peaking at 10.5 percent sometime next year before employment makes a turnaround in the spring. That still means unemployment will remain high for some time. The administration's own projections still see unemployment at 8 percent by the end of 2011.

Such lingering discomfort can have economic and political consequences.

Consumer spending likely won't increase rapidly. Foreclosures will continue to rise, hitting not just subprime borrowers, but prime mortgage holders as well. Commercial real estate lending, already teetering, could plunge in the face of rising vacancy and loan delinquency rates.

Politically, Democrats are staring at some damage — and the fear of unemployment — themselves. Exit polls Tuesday in the New Jersey and Virginia GOP victories showed that the economy was the top issue in the minds of voters. And national public opinion surveys show that a majority of the public doesn't believe Obama's economic policies are working.

Couple that with traditional losses by the president's party during midterm elections and Democrats have cause to worry about their own fate.

The unemployment number masks the fact that job losses slowed compared to past months — the work force went down by 190,000 in October compared to 219,000 in September. What's more, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said job losses in August and September had been overstated by 91,000.

In addition, the economy grew by 3.5 percent in the third quarter. And Christina Romer, a top Obama economic adviser, noted an increase in temporary service jobs. "That's often the first sign of firms kind of dipping their toe back into hiring people," she said in an interview with The Associated Press.

But since the start of the recession in December 2007, 7.3 million Americans have lost their jobs and key sectors — construction, manufacturing and retail trade — are still seeing significant declines.

The president has not been helped by reports of flaws in the administration's count of jobs created by the $787 billion stimulus.

Ten months into the job, Obama did not even try to lay the blame for the economy at Bush's feet, as he has in the past. His only criticism was implied.

"When we first came into office, our immediate goal was to stop the free fall that caused our economy to shrink at an alarming rate," he said. "We've succeeded in achieving that goal, as our economy grew last quarter for the first time in a year."

But Obama has already taken ownership of the economy.

Republicans, he noted wryly during a July speech in Michigan, were eager to blame him for the economy.

"That's fine," he added, "Give it to me!"

Four months later, it would be hard to give it back.