Here are two images of the unfinished Museum of Image & Sound in Rio de Janeiro by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
The building sits across from Copacabana’s famed beach and tiled boardwalk. The street you’re looking at is Avenida Atlântica.
The idea behind the architecture was to create a kind of “vertical boulevard” on the building’s beachside facade. Clever.
It is particularly impactful when you see it within the context of Copacabana’s delightfully formidable streetwall and curving promenade.
But it is unclear when the building will ultimately be finished. Construction started in 2010 and it first stalled in 2012. Too bad.
I just learned about the ongoing legal dispute on Martin’s Beach (south of San Francisco) through this New York Times article.
To briefly sum it up, tech billionaire Vinod Khosla bought a 53-acre beachside village known as Martin’s Beach in 2008. On the land is about 47 beach houses, a shop that sold ice cream at one point in its life, and a road that provides the only access to the beach. The road is private, but over the years and before Khosla purchased the property, it provided both parking for and access to the beach.
After acquiring the property, the county told Khosla that he had 2 options with respect to the road:
(1) Keep it open (there’s a gate that controls access). And charge no more than $2 a car for parking, which was the rate charged in 1972.
(2) Apply for a Coastal Development Permit to change how the access works.
Khosla opted to do neither and in turn the residents of Martin’s Beach sued him. He’s been in a legal battle ever since. But according to the New York Times, he has about $3 billion sitting in his war chest. For him it is both a matter of principle and a matter of protecting property rights.
Not surprisingly, tech billionaire fighting to keep people off a public beach makes for a sensational headline in the media. The NY Times argued that every generation has some sort of rich Californian fighting to privatize the waterfront. Khosla is this generation’s “beach villain”.
But beneath the headlines lies a fascinating legal debate that you can read more about through a blog post that Khosla published earlier this year. For you property lawyers out there, I would be curious to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.
It’s going to take a generation to build it out, but one of the most exciting revitalization projects in Toronto is going to be the Port Lands area. However, before that can really start happening and new communities can be built, the entire area needs to be flood protected. Currently about 290 hectares (717 acres) in this part of the city are prone to flooding.
One component of the flood protection program is the Cherry Street Lakefilling Project. Below is a plan of what that means (from Waterfront Toronto). The area in purple is new land that will be created as part of the process. Supposedly this is important for a few reasons. For one, it will allow the Cherry Street bridge to be relocated, which, in its current location, is creating a pinch point during floods.
I am mentioning all of this today because I am personally excited about this revitalization project. Hopefully I’ll see it complete in my lifetime. And maybe I’ll be fortunate enough to work on some of the buildings when that time comes. I also really wanted to share the below video with you all, showing the lakefilling in action. I bet many of you aren’t aware that this is happening.
If you can’t see the video below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0q_Wvn91zE?rel=0&w=560&h=315]