Rebuilding Notre Dame (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Notre Dame may take decades to fix. The first concerns are water and soot":

Two holes gape where Notre Dame’s vaulted stone ceiling has collapsed. The cathedral’s 19th century timber spire is gone, as is most of its roof. Portions of the interior walls were blackened by the intense heat of Paris’ most consequential fire in centuries.

As the world absorbs the magnitude of devastation wrought by Notre Dame’s inferno, architects and engineers anticipate a decades-long restoration process replete with unprecedented challenges. Designers will need to navigate complicated structural issues and delicate preservation debates to satisfy an array of stakeholders.

They will all be asking the same question: How do you revive an 850-year-old icon?

"The whole world is watching, and everybody has something to say about it,” said Marc Walton, director of Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts at Northwestern University. “It has to be built for the next 1,000 years. It’s going to be a different structure as a result, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

The first order of business is to dry the cathedral out, said John Fidler, who served as conservation director of English Heritage, a government agency that maintains England’s national monuments.

“There are millions of gallons of water poured into the structure that will seep down to the crypt, the basement,” Fidler said. Pumping out that water could take months, and years may pass before the entire building is completely dry.

“It’s easy to make the surface dry because there are large pores on the surface, but deeper in the stone, the pores grow narrower and it’s more difficult to suck that water out,” he said. “When the walls remain damp, you get mildew and mold and fungus and salt crystallization, which can rupture the pores in stone and cause it to deteriorate on the surface.”

Soot is also a particular concern because it’s so oily, said Rosa Lowinger, a conservator of buildings and sculpture based in Los Angeles.

“People’s first instinct is they want to wash it, but that’s the last thing you should do,” she said. The building’s limestone is porous, so soap and water would drive the soot into its pores. Instead, soot must be removed while dry. “The earliest decisions here — the protocols taken — will define how successful a project like this is.”

While conservators tackle those problems, other teams will get started on the greatest engineering challenge of the entire project: the assessment of the cathedral’s structural condition.

Most analysis methods are tailored toward modern buildings, not stone structures, so engineers may struggle to determine the stability of the damaged cathedral, said Matthew DeJong, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley who has worked on historic buildings in Europe.

But Notre Dame is surely damaged, said Frank Escher, an architect and preservationist with Escher GuneWardena Architecture in Los Angeles.

“A fire of this nature can weaken a stone structure. It’s too early to say whether it’s safe or not,” said Escher, who is currently restoring the century-old Church of the Epiphany, the oldest Episcopal church in L.A...

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Lunch Atop a Skyscraper (VIDEO)

Via Big Fur Hat, at iOWNTHEWORLD, "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper – The Story Behind It":

What I love about this video is the candor. A historian actually says that it was Rockefeller that put so many people to work during the great depression. How did this scholar slip through the cracks?

National September 11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center

Photographs, at the Big Picture, "The National September 11 Memorial Museum."

Also, an architectural review, from Christopher Hawthorne, at the Los Angeles Times, "Architecture review: At 9/11 Memorial Museum, a relentless literalism":

Many New Yorkers, still trying to make sense of the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, have had a single question as a museum was being built at ground zero: Too soon?

Now that the 9/11 Memorial Museum, as it's officially called, has opened to the public, they and others may find themselves asking something else: Too much?

The museum is an overstuffed answer to the appealing minimalism of the 9/11 memorial and its cascading pools, which opened in 2011.

It extends deep below the memorial in a series of cavernous, hangar-like rooms. Its galleries contain crushed fire trucks, mangled steel, multimedia displays, a torn seatbelt from one of the airplanes that hit the towers, clothing and bicycles covered with ash from their collapse, photographs, architectural models and literally thousands of other pieces of dark memorabilia.

The intensity, scope and sheer unrelenting literalism of this approach marks a significant change in how we choose to mark national trauma. No longer do we see memorials as capable of commemorating an entire war or attack on their own.

Keep reading.

Photographer Matthew Christopher Documents America's Decaying Architecture

An awesome photo-report, at London's Daily Mail, "Abandoned America: Haunting images of the crumbling schools, decaying churches and rusting prisons that have been lost to time."

The Architecture of the Republican National Convention

An art review, interestingly, from Christopher Hawthorne, at the Los Angeles Times, "Party Crasher: The GOP Drew Inspiration From Frank Lloyd Wright for Its Stage Design, but An Unintended Message Might Be Sent":

Barack Obama had his Greek columns. Mitt Romney is turning to Frank Lloyd Wright.

When the Republican National Convention begins Monday inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum, a 19,500-seat arena in Tampa, Fla., that's home during hockey season to the NHL's Lightning, the stage will be crowded with large video screens framed in wood. Actually the "wood" will be made of vinyl and various laminates, but it'll read on television as cherry, mahogany and walnut.

The inspiration for the set, said Jim Fenhagen, lead production designer for the convention, is Wright's residential architecture, which often featured long horizontal bands of wood-framed windows.

The Wright references, which Fenhagen said he pulled together after a couple of simple Google searches, are relatively faint. They draw from the architect's most approachable domestic designs — mostly the Prairie Style houses of his early career — rather than his most radical buildings. They're more Oak Park than Fallingwater, more Robie House than Guggenheim Museum.

Still, in the context of a national political convention, where every symbolic choice is sure to be scrutinized, there are more than a few risks in going with Frank Lloyd Wright as your architectural touchstone. And I wonder how many of them the Romney campaign has fully considered.

Continue reading.

The Shard of London

The Wall Street Journal has a slide show.

And at Telegraph UK, "The Shard opens with laser light show":

The Shard's inauguration ceremony was rounded off with a laser light show that lit up the capital.

More at the Daily Mail, "Flying high: Laser show lights up the sky in London as The Shard is officially unveiled."

Photo Essay: The Mike O'Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, at Los Angeles Times

It's from Michael Hiltzik, who I rarely read any more for obvious reasons, but check it out for the photography especially, by James Stillings: "High and Mighty."