Manhattan Memorious from Reiser + Umemoto on Vimeo.

“You may be amused,” intones the narrator of Reiser + Umemoto‘s new short film ‘Manhattan Memorious’, “that yesterday’s wonders, worlds of tomorrow, have been delivered, have become our everyday.” The wonders to which the film refers are the ghosts, here reconstituted, of Manhattan’s past speculative futures, those of the daringly polemic (or conversely, as the narrator suggests, silly) masterplans and megastructures that would have cut through the weathered urban fabric with a sublimity and terror that embody the polarizing conditions of the city itself.

The film, Reiser + Umemoto’s contribution to the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, recasts post-war Manhattan as the site of massive building boom and urban renewal. In the hands of Robert Moses, who is seen speaking at the beginning, New York was submitted to unprecedented change, which, when backed by legislative clout and funding, proved capable of implementing the radical visions that would pave the way for the city’s future. Of course, not all–many, in fact–of these proposals ever made it off the drafting board.Yet, here is Midtown under the shroud of Buckminster Fuller’s colossal geodesic dome; there, the bottom quarter of the island’s tenement housing encaged by Paul Rudolph’s hulking LOMEX. Koolhaas’s City of the Captive Globe finds the grid it was always looking for, while the architects quietly sneak in more contemporary, less ideological offerings like Morphosis’ West Side Yard complex and their own Easter River Corridor plans. In the duo’s own words, this is a “phantasmagorical Manhattan where the visionary meets the everyday – the absurd and the sublime. The island as we know it is but a pale reflection of a city designed by visionaries – a city of mad, incongruous utopias.”

The Empire State Building under Bucky Fuller’s Geodesic Dome

Paul Rudolph’s LOMEX

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Image courtesy of Novacem

Earlier this year, Material ConneXion, a global materials consultancy, awarded Material of the Year to London-based company Novacem’s “carbon negative” cement. What looks like an assortment of homemade marshmallows above is actually a construction material slated to change the world of concrete when it hits the market in 2014. Click to learn more.

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The NYBILLBOARD by prechteck

Death to the megastructure! Long live the megastructure! As cities grow in number and in density, we are confronted with the problem of responsible development. With the majority of the world’s population moving into cities, problems of resource management and housing—not to mention cultural issues such as preservation—weigh heavily. Do we feebly return to nostalgic notions of urbanity or do we decide to think big (er, BIG)?

Click through to see more of the project.

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Big news this morning: Peter Zumthor has been tapped to design next year’s Serpentine Pavilion. Given the ephemeral nature of the project (and previous Pavilion), we imagine he will go all out. Zumthor’s revered brand of “material sublime” has made him somewhat a mystical figure in the profession – check out his thermal baths in Vals, Switzerland, and the Bruder Klaus chapel photographed here. [via Architect's Journal]

One of the more inflammatory unbuilt projects ever proposed, LOMEX (Lower Manhattan Expressway), gets its own show this week at the Cooper Union. In collaboration with the Drawing Center, they’ve put together a massive model of the project, which would have turned Soho into an 8-lane highway lined with apartment blocks. New Yorkers will shudder, but we wonder what life is like in whatever alternate universe where things like “Soho” don’t exist. The sheer dystopianism of the project is something to be reckoned with, along with the fact that it was a major actor in a longstanding dialog about urban gentrification, transportation, and the notion of ‘progress’ that still hasn’t ended. [via WSJ]

Paul Goldberger has an interesting comment in The New Yorker regarding Las Vegas’ CityCenter development, meant to be a ‘counterpoint’ to the ‘garish’ kitsch that characterizes the rest of the city. Goldberger wonders: does CityCenter bring architectural refinement to Vegas, or has starchitecture found its most approrpriate home? [via the New Yorker]

Lisbon’s Architecture Triennale is going on right now, and the A/N Newspaper has coverage. Possibly the most exciting development: a recreation of Alison and Peter Smithson’s plastic House of the Future projects from 1956, which was intended to be assembled during manufacturing rather than on site. There’s also a Peter Cook-curated show about new Scandinavian architecture, and a show on urbanism in Africa and Brazil. The Triennale deals with housing, so we’ll be keeping a close watch this week! [via the A/N Blog]

The eternal real estate game: where should you buy and where are you better off renting? Luckily, there’s an index for that. Columbus, Ohio, and Detroit (surprise surprise) are buyer’s markets while Seattle and Omaha are ripe for renting. Despite an average monthly rent of $3,742, Manhattan is still considered a rental market. [via CNN Money]

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