Since I first blogged about the rise of the super slender skyscrapers in New York, 432 Park Avenue has been growing into the sky. The inequality argument has picked up, and some have likened the building to one giant middle finger the super rich are showing to New Yorkers.
Yangon 2015
Happy New Year! This blog has become slightly inactive over the past months as the bulk of my writing takes place inside the manuscript for the forthcoming Yangon Architectural Guide. To wrap up the research for the book, I was in Burma for a few weeks in December.
New pedestrian overpass – Strand Road
Puzzling Yangon
Now that the writing process for our book is in full swing, I am dealing with some historical puzzles occasionally. Herewith two that I have shared with our Facebook readers recently. One is about a famous high school, the other about a beautiful yet dilapidated official building on Pansodan Street.
Raglan Squire
We are making good progress with our architectural guide to Yangon. With all the coverage on pre-independence heritage architecture (most recently on the occasion of President Obama’s visit to Yangon), I thought that post-war architecture could use a little more airtime, e.g. these two beautiful representatives.
Technical High School, Yangon (1956)
FIESP, Sao Paulo
I went on a short trip to Sao Paulo some while ago, and this building on Paulista Avenue caught my attention. It is the headquarters of FIESP – the Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo or Federation of Industries of the State of Sao Paulo.
Chennai book store
Much time has passed without any update. I hope the blog will resume normal operations now that the move to Washington, D.C. is fully completed. In lieu of a proper travelogue from Chennai (where I spent time in August this year), I post this photo of a bookshop taken in the beautiful T Nagar neighborhood.
Wall reflections
The 9th of November has passed by quickly, and with it the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a young East Berliner at the time, the event was of great importance to me, although the true extent would only reveal itself many years later.
TV Tower on a foggy day
Elusive Dharavi
Long overdue here are some notes from a walk we took through Dharavi last month. Dharavi is often referred to as Asia’s quintessential slum. What reminded me to put up this post was an article in the Architectural Review entitled “Enough Slum Porn: The Global North’s Fetishisation of Poverty Architecture Must End”.
Vertical Capital
Mexico City sits on doubly challenging terrain: First, it is situated on top of a dried lake and is sinking by several centimeters each year. Second, it is in earthquake-prone territory with the North American plate pushing against the Pacific plate here. Surprisingly, there is a lot of verticality in the city. And as the city famously chokes on brutal traffic, there are plans to build even higher into the sky, and deeper into the ground.
Mexico City – May 2014
WTC and NYC’s soul
The Guardian’s Jason Farago has written a beautiful long-form piece about Ground Zero thirteen years after the terrorist attack of 9/11. The struggle to rebuild this part of town is emblematic of the New York of the 21st century.
Model of WTC site as seen in Skyscraper Museum