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Checking out the goodies Okay. Enough of this self-righteous rant. What about the architecture? There is some marvelous work. Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada is striking at the scale of the cityscape, jutting appealingly just above its roofline context. The diamond-gridded structural wall, with its mix of bubbled and flush glass panels, is a lovely thing, and the interior is luminous and dramatic. Circulation is suave, carpet is white, clerks are impeccable in gray. At Tod’s down the row, Ito claims inspiration from the angularity of the branches of the trees out front and creates a facade of big, irregular

A few random field notes on Renzo Piano’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). I assumed RECORD would already have an article on the Broad in the works, but I’m told that no, because Piano is designing so many museums and has also just won the AIA Gold Medal, the magazine is going to hold off for a while. Photo © 2008 Museum Associates/LACMA Renzo Piano’s new Broad building at LACMA features a sawtooth roof of skylights (top) that bounce northern light into the top-floor galleries (above). I suppose the goal

City of dreams While in Los Angeles, I had a chance to revisit a very different museum, the Getty Villa—not the Richard Meier–designed white monastery on a hilltop, but the original Getty that was built in 1979 to hold the oilman’s art collection, and which then was greatly enlarged in 2006 by Boston architects Machado and Silvetti. Photo © Richard Ross (top); Bradley Johnson/Machado and Silvetti (above). At the Getty in Malibu, Machado and Silvetti built an amphitheater next to the villa (top) and treated the site as an archaeological dig where visitors descend through time (above). It’s often said

The noun want used to mean need. Want was life or death stuff, as in “the baby wants feeding.” Now, want has flipped 180 degrees to imply an arbitrary and even whimsical desire, unfettered by need, significance, or logic. At the same time, and perhaps even because our wanting has become so willful, human beings have grown insatiable. The more we get, it seems, the more we want, as though desire itself is the thing we cannot forgo. As though, even cocooned by layers of brimming superfluity, we must want or perish. Welcome to Blubberland. Photo © Alex S. Maclean

Now, however, Gaia, the Greek earth goddess, is offering us a chance. Gaia has brought us to the brink of crisis. Climate change, and all of its moving parts—from litter to light bulbs to deforestation—is more than a crisis of survival. It’s a crisis of significance, where we must grasp the essential connectedness of everything and reinvest in our source of meaning, or die. Photos © Alex S. Maclean Cul-de-sac housing under construction in Houston, 1999 (aerial photo, top). Leveling hills for a new housing development, Castro Valley, California, 1997 (aerial photo, above). In the past 40 years—since the baby

It may not have been cause and effect, but the 10th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao late last year coincided with the opening of several new museums that seem intent on being everything Frank Gehry’s Basque bombshell is not. Let’s call it the rise of the Quiet Museum. Among them is Rafael Moneo’s low-key addition to the Prado, which has earned praise for giving precedence to the works on display rather than upstaging them with architectural bravura. But one man’s deferential is another man’s dull. Art critics seem to like the Moneo wing more than their architectural counterparts, some

Today’s architectural post- traumatic-stress syndrome—call it Bilbao Fatigue—was brought on by a glut of increasingly outré museums calculated to attract media attention, rather than enhance understanding of art. Copious evidence confirms the folly of overspending spurred by the premise that extravagant museum expansions will pay for themselves with increased attendance and tourism revenues. It took years for the Basque government to recoup its enormous investment in the Bilbao Guggenheim, because the museum’s director, Thomas Krens, off-loaded almost all up-front expenses on the overeager franchisee. Photo © David Heald (top) The lobby of the Perelman building (top) connects old and new

New York’s powerful deputy mayor for economic development, Dan Doctoroff, recently resigned, something that had been rumored for a time. Doctoroff, who came to the city from a master-of-the-universe career as a private equity dealer, has left—with scarcely a murmur of disapproval—to become head of Bloomberg L.P., the Mayor’s very own multibillion-dollar financial reporting company. While there is apparently nothing illegal about this, it does affirm once again the degree of control of the city by an interlocking directorate of government, finance, and real estate–development interests, and the tendency of players to move seamlessly from one sector to another. This

Green camouflage In listening to one very well attended public presentation by the designers of the five schemes, I noticed another interesting form of misdirection. We are all greatly attuned to matters green nowadays, and each of the teams pressed that component to the fore, often with the landscape architect most prominently featured in making the case. (By the way, the Bloomberg administration has, under Doctoroff’s direction, produced what is, in many ways, a very impressive plan for the city’s sustainable growth, which is clearly having at least a rhetorical impact.) The evening was filled with talk of microclimates and

Six critics examine the state of American architecture from their hometowns. Taking the measure of American architecture depends on where you look. What’s generating buzz in Chicago might not resonate in L.A. And the issues driving design in Miami might not mean much in New York. Although big-name, international architects are working all over the United States—Renzo Piano, for example, has current or recently completed projects in New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, and Atlanta—smaller, domestic firms are playing important roles, too. This mix of big and small, global and regional is shaping the American architectural landscape. The projects shown