HousingWatch

Cool NYC Condo Just $1,136!

Fred Bernstein — 2010-03-17T16:40:00 00:00

Filed under: Design, News

Once upon a time, owning a piece of 56 Leonard Street - a condo tower designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron - would have set you back at least $3.5 million.

Today, the building sold on-line for just over $1,000.

The item unloaded on eBay was a 20-inch model of the tower, "made as as a sales tool for brokers to help demonstrate the position of each unit" in the building, according to Richard Pandiscio, who handled marketing for Alexico, the developer of 56 Leonard. The models were made of 120 individually engraved Lucite pieces, which could be taken apart and then put back together.

But the building itself was never put together. These days, 56 Leonard is an empty lot.

And the Lucite models were gathering dust in brokers' offices.

The models were nominally part of an edition of 300, but Pandiscio doesn't think more than 100 were ever made. The seller was anonymous, as was the buyer, who paid $1,136 in a last-minute bid.

Herzog and de Meuron weren't the only starchitects to design ill-fated Manhattan condo buildings -- another one, by Rem Koolhaas, was supposed to rise on 23rd Street. It, too, is stalled. But all kinds of promotional materials - including, yes, plastic models - were made and distributed before the developer pulled the plug.

Don't be surprised if those models start turning up at auction, too.

In fact, these days, eBay may be the best place to see a condo bidding war.

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Fixing a Hole Left by Starchitect Calatrava

Fred Bernstein — 2010-02-18T12:44:00 00:00

Filed under: Design, Cities

What to do about Chicago's embarrassing Big Dig?

The Chicago Spire, a 150-story tower condo tower, was designed by Santiago Calatrava for a site overlooking Lake Michigan. The cocky, corkscrew shaped building was expected to cost more than $1 billion, which, even for Calatrava (whose projects have been known to go over budget), was a lot. But the developers ran out of money, and all they have to show for their efforts is a giant hole -- 76 feet deep and 110 feet in diameter -- in the ground. (Calatrava says he is owed more than $11 million for his design work.)

So what's to become of the hole, a literal architectural depression? The Chicago Architectural Club is asking architects (and architecture students) to put on their spire-shaped thinking caps. "Once the motor of real-estate speculation has stalled, what can we use to propel ourselves, and the discipline, forward?" asked the Club, announcing an international competition. Blair Kamin, a Chicago architecture critic, asked the same question on his blog last year, and the answers came pouring in. (Responses included: a scuba diving tank; "pudding"; the Obama presidential library)

The Club will accept entries until May 3, after which a panel of judges (including star Chicago architect Jeanne Gang, designer of a new and beloved condo tower called Aqua) will choose the winners.

The competition is named Mine the Gap, though they could have lifted a title from the Guggenheim Museum's current show, Contemplating the Void.

The first place winner will receive $3,500. No word yet on whether Calatrava plans to enter.

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I Want This House: Marfa Edition

Fred Bernstein — 2010-01-08T10:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Design, Cities

I want this house, for three reasons: Location, location, and location.

Or maybe I should just say: Marfa, Marfa, Marfa. I'm referring to the tiny town in West Texas that's hard to get to, and even harder to leave.

There's something about Marfa -- about the light, the air, the landscape -- that artists find irresistible (but also, sadly for those who haven't been there, indescribable). Donald Judd, the minimalist sculptor, arrived in 1971, and stayed. His works fill several large industrial buildings in the center of town, and hundreds of acres on the outskirts.

Every object Judd created has a stunning simplicity.

This house is listed for $180,000 -- about average for Marfa. (There aren't a lot of comparables in a town of just 2,100 people.) If I bought it, I would try to give it a Judd-ian simplicity. So it doesn't matter that I'm not crazy about the house's faux-colonial decor. I like its solidity, its symmetry. And what I don't like would be easy to remove.
I don't believe in tear-downs. This would be a tear-out.

I already know someone who could help me. Barbara Hill, a Houston interior designer, has a weekend house in Marfa. It used to be a dance hall; now it's a single, serene living space that feels uncluttered and elegant. Barbara stripped it down to bare essentials. (See below.)

Barbara estimated that it would cost $100,000 to gut the house, plaster its walls and ceilings, and install second-hand fixtures. (It's hard for her to be more specific about the price; because she never knows exactly what she'll find behind a wall or cabinet, her work involves a bit of improvisation.)

With Marfa's magic -- and a little bit of Barbara's -- this could be the house of my dreams.

In my mind, it already is.

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Architects See the Light

Fred Bernstein — 2010-01-01T09:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Design

Why does anyone become an architect? It's a terrible profession, even in good times. And these aren't good times.

But for some, they're God times. There's nothing new about architects creating to honor their creator. Antonio Gaudi called his Sagrada Familia in Barcelona the "last great sanctuary of Christendom," and became world-famous for his efforts to complete it.

Others toil in obscurity. But now a film director and a researcher have documented the lives of five men who feel compelled by God to build large structures.

Their film, God's Architects, profiles the Reverend H. D. Dennis, a 92-year-old World War II veteran who transformed his wife's small grocery store in Vicksburg, Mississippi, into a fantasia of towers and bridges. And Leonard Knight, who has turned a mountainside in Southern California into a kind of diorama -- including a three-story adobe igloo -- that renders God's mercy in three dimensions.

In 2005, Emilie Taylor, then a graduate student at the Tulane School of Architecture, received a grant to study visionary builders -- the brick-and-mortar version of "outsider artists." After she shared her findings with the (aptly named) filmmaker Zachary Godshall, he began work on the documentary, which has been making the film festival circuit. Consider it a companion piece to the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, in which Milton Wexler, a prominent psychoanalyst who counted Gehry among his famous clients, pontificated about the roots of creativity.

Wexler's patients thought they, too, were speaking to a divine presence. Only their God passed away in 2007.

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Real Estate Is Going Great Guns

Fred Bernstein — 2009-12-24T11:45:00 00:00

Filed under: News

The challenge for realtors, in sluggish markets, is getting customers to pull the (proverbial) trigger.

But Ben Edsall, a Kansas City realtor, may have the solution: his "Buy a house, get a gun" promotion.

Edsall's firm, Turn-Key Properties LLC, is offering customers vouchers, worth $250, redeemable at The Olathe Gun Shop. (The offer is valid on sales of property in Kansas of $100,000 or more.)

"I love guns, I love real estate. I've found a way to combine them," Edsall told the Kansas City Real Estate Examiner.
Edsall had already been offering a 1% discount to NRA members, which he described as "a way to say thank you for being our client and maybe help along another part of our economy, the gun dealers." Now the part of our economy that needs the help is real estate. (Guns sales are at historic highs.)

According to his website, Edsall is a graduate of the Kansas City Crime-Free Drug-Free Multi-Housing Program and the Kansas City Citizens Police Academy.

If you list a rental property with him, he says, he'll use his law enforcement skills to screen out potential tenants who may be doing drugs. And if a tenant does make, sell, or use drugs, he says, his "testimony is usually all that is required" to have the tenant evicted, given his ability to pick up "the smell of narcotics in the unit."

But there's no indication he'll show up at the unit with his gun -- unless you count the sign in his office, which warns, "We don't dial 911."

Who said realtors don't mean business?

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The Roof of All Evils

Fred Bernstein — 2009-12-17T17:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Design

I hate to kick a man while he's down.

But Tiger Woods has made me really mad.

Not his accident/affairs--his roof.

One thing we know about Tiger (from all the photos of his house) is that he's got a lot of roof. Enough for a couple of big-box stores, with an elementary school or two thrown in.

And what isn't on those acres and acres of roof? A single solar panel, that's what.

Woods lives near Orlando, in the Sunshine State. Orlando's tourist site advertises that it gets 300 days of sunshine a year. All that sunlight could be turning Tiger's roof into a clean, silent, efficient power plant.

Compare this to a home by David Wilson, an architect who lives in Stinson Beach, near San Francisco. Wilson's house is only 1,400 square feet -- he has, at most, one-tenth as much roof as Tiger Woods. Plus, Stinson gets a lot of fog.

But Wilson installed about 400 feet of solar panels on his roof. (They're also known as PV, or photovoltaic, panels.)
Those panels provide enough electricity to run Wilson's entire house. "We're zeroed out," Wilson told me. Some days, he even sells electricity back to the power company.

The panels cost Wilson about $40,000, which is a lot of money. He figures it will take him 10 to 15 years to make back the cost of the panels.

Those up-front costs are a problem for some people -- but not for Tiger Woods (who has reportedly spent up to $100 million on real estate in the last few years).

Right now, there are no laws requiring solar panels. But when you've got that much roof, and not a single PV panel, it's a crying shame.

Frankly, I wish he'd hold a press conference about solar power.

What happened in his house is his business; what happens ON his house is everybody's business.

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Tiger's Tragic House?

Fred Bernstein — 2009-12-10T17:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Design, News

I don't know what drove Tiger Woods out of his house at 2:30 a.m. But I'm guessing the house was part of the problem.

Have you seen the bird's-eye photos of Tiger's lair? It's a behemoth -- there's enough roof for an airplane hangar -- except it has more angles than an origami caterpillar.

The man is known for fluidity, grace -- but his house is overbearing, overwrought. It's not a golfer; it's a linebacker (on steroids).

But it isn't the style of the house that may have sent Tiger fleeing. It's the agglomeration of space into a single volume. Everyone has been in one of these McMansions -- vast, but without the feeling that you can ever get away. Huge archways link every space to every other space. No room feels separate or enclosed.

Tiger, like lots of Americans, has plenty of square footage -- but no real room to breathe.

If he had lived in a compound house (shown below), he might have just slammed one door, then opened another, getting away (from whoever or whatever was bugging him) while staying off the road.

Compound houses are houses made of multiple small buildings. One building might have a living room and famly room. Another might contain the master bedroom. Still others, the kitchen and dining area, the children's bedrooms, media rooms. The parts of a compound house may be connected by covered walkways, or even enclosed walkways depending on climate. But despite the connectors, the pieces feel like discrete buildings.

The architectural impulse is centrifugal (the force that makes things spread out), not centripetal (the force that concentrates things in the middle). Think of it as a kind of family village.

Compound houses hark back to a time when women were in the main house, and men had shops or barns to work in.

If Tiger needed to slam a door, and leave the house -- so be it. But with a compound house, he could have slammed one door, then gone right ahead and opened another door. Without ever getting in his car.

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