Borgo, rioni (neighborhood) di Roma, stands just outside S. Pietro and has been greatly altered throughout the ages. Borgo historically has acted as the forecourt to S. Pietro, even prior to the imposition of the Via della Conciliazione by Mussolini in 1936. It also has this awesome seal:
BQE at night, originally uploaded by Barry Yanowitz
Fixing Brooklyn-Queens Expressway: Ins and Outs Discussed at Meeting:
Last week, members of the state Department of Transportation met with members of the Transportation Committee of Community Board 6 and others to begin that “long process.”
It has been known for some time that much of this 1.5-mile stretch from Sands Street to Atlantic Avenue needed some attention and some rebuilding. Just exactly what will be required is not yet determined, another reason for the “long process.”
This seemingly short piece of highway is far from ordinary. It is the half moon-shaped section that touches on busy Downtown Brooklyn and is getting busier by the day. It also includes the 0.4-mile cantilever (a triple-decked structure supporting two lanes of the BQE and the Brooklyn Heights Promenade) that was built in lieu of tearing down most of Brooklyn Heights, which planner Robert Moses wanted to do.
Prediction: repair takes twice as long as planned and cost 2.5x the original budget. You’ve heard it here first!
See also: BQE Figure-Ground.
, originally uploaded by Noah K
Williamsburg’s Esquire Building, which used to sport the Save Domino sign, now supports voting for Barack Obama.
Hopefully Voting Obama works out better than Saving Domino.
S. Carlino, originally uploaded by el buitre
IT WAS in Borromini’s church, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, in Rome that Richard Serra first saw the light a decade ago. “I was standing in a side aisle, looking at the oval space on the floor and the same oval on the ceiling, called a Borromini ellipse. I thought they were at right angles to each other. When I moved to the central aisle, I realised I was wrong. But I kept on wondering: how can I create—how can I actually make—my misrepresentation?”
monuments of war – Grozny, originally uploaded by dziadek.mroz
Urban Renewal and Partial Amnesia in Chechnya:
This is the year, according to an order from a president whom few dare to disappoint, that the architectural scars of war in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, will be removed. That the order has nearly been fulfilled is a feat.
…
Grozny today is less a battlefield than the renovated seat of a new police state within Russia’s borders, led by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the republic’s young and exceptionally violent president. And Mr. Kadyrov, a Chechen who has professed loyalty to the same Kremlin that many of his fellow Chechens fought for more than a decade, has decreed that by Dec. 31 his capital will bear no more of the marks of war that made Grozny worthy of its name.
As the makeover nears completion, and at a pace recalling the fear-driven public works of Stalin’s time, Grozny’s new look summons questions. The ruins are vanishing. How will the city remember the forces that destroyed it?
It just happens that I’m working on a paper discussing issues congruent with rebuilding cities after crises. There are usually two main groups: the Rebuilders and the Memorialists. The Rebuilders want to rebuild the city as expeditiously as possible, no matter that the underlying cause of the destruction was while Memorialists want a lighter tough, believing that the destruction should remain a memorial to the crisis, a living testament to the horror. Generally, the larger the destruction, the greater chance the Rebuilders have of winning.
You can see examples of both sides throughout history following major destruction caused by war: New York City on September 11th, where rebuilding as a sign that the terrorists hadn’t won
and Dresden, Germany in World War Two where many historic buildings were rebuilt. Almost every great disaster which envelops major sections of the urban fabric are rebuilt (see Nagasaki or Hiroshima, Tokyo or Berlin). Where Memorialists generally are able to persuade the populace that less is more, is in smaller scale crises and destruction. The Oklahoma City National Memorial or Gettysburg National Military Park are an example of memorializing horror, instead of rebuilding.
Editorializing, in the case of Chechnya, it is clear that the rebuilding is being done to paper over the human rights violations against Chechens by Russian troops. This is perhaps the primary reason Rebuilders have their way: the victors generally want to write history, and buildings are lasting testaments to the victor’s glory.
Vote!, originally uploaded by plemeljr
Talking over pizza and beer last night, how un pro-American of us, my friend the foreign national asked why election day wasn’t a bank holiday to let people vote. No one in the room could figure out why, with all of the platitudes about voting being an American tradition, election day wasn’t a federal holiday to allow all Americans to vote.
This became clearer when I read today’s NY Times, Safety Concerns Eclipse Civic Lessons as Schools Cancel Classes on Election Day:
School officials and parents across the nation are turning an increasingly critical eye on the time-honored tradition of voters’ casting ballots in the gymnasiums and hallways of neighborhood school buildings while classes go on as usual just a few yards away.
Citing a litany of safety concerns, many officials are opting to keep youngsters home on Nov. 4, Election Day.
You would think that allowing everyone the day off to celebrate democracy would make sense. But as (I think) Big Media Matt had discussed, America’s right to vote stems not from a positivist position, but rather from a negative definition of who cannot vote (women, slaves, etc). The historical accident of allowing only white men who owned land voting rights has trickled down through the years into a rag-tag series of more inclusive and permissive voting rights; resulting in strange accident of pundits, the elite and conventional wisdom poo-poohing the lack of voter turnout every election when there are structural barriers to voting for large segments of the population.