Following up on yesterday's post about the changes being required to Santiago Calatrava's contribution to the World Trade Center building project, a reader was kind enough to pass along world of Calatrava's reaction. It's nothing all that telling, as it tows the company line pretty well, but if anything, it shows that this particularly starchitect knows when to pick his battles and when he should be gentle and go along with a super high-profile project. Here's his quote:

"We strongly support the Port Authority's efforts to ensure that the World Trade Center Transportation Hub is built, and we are continuing to work collaboratively to find potential changes that will save time and money while preserving the integrity of the original design. The recent simplification of the mechanism for the opening and closing of the roof is just the latest example of many changes we have recommended to accomplish that goal."

Zaragoza isn't just a lot of fun to say, it's also the Spanish host town of the world's largest water festival, Expo Zaragoza, which through September 14 immerses visitors in an astounding number of water-themed events with the help of "Fluvi" (at left), a hydrophilic mascot who looks like a cross between E.T. and a loquacious blue hammer. As part of the festival, Zaragoza has acquired a new architectural landmark, the pedestrian bridge pavilion (pictured above) designed by Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher. Organized around four "pods" that both distribute the bridge's weight and enclose separate exhibition spaces, Hadid's Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion is her firm's first completed bridge project.

While leaders of Expo Zaragoza describe the 853-foot-long and 98-foot-wide bridge as "gladiolus-shaped," Hadid emphasizes the project's structural ambition, fluidity, and dynamic nature. The pavilion houses an interactive exhibition "Water, A Unique Resource" designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, and the structure was created with an eye to the sustainability issues the show and the broader Expo address. "We designed an envelope for the Bridge Pavilion that encloses the exhibition spaces yet can be permeated by natural elements. The internal micro-environment varies with the external climate and requires minimal cooling or heating infrastructure," says Hadid. "In particular, we considered the local Cierzo wind when designing the Bridge Pavilion's skin. A variety of openings convey and direct air into the building's interior—cooling visitors in the heat of the summer."

Proof that the reconstruction behind the new World Trade Center site is like architecture's version of the Martin Luther King Memorial troubles, it was announced late yesterday that Santiago Calatrava's contribution to the site are being scaled back, thus adding to the many changes involved with nearly everyone involved with the project. In an effort to bring the project back within more feasible budget ranges (by dropping the building cost by a reported hundreds of millions of dollars), the city has decided to ax Calatrava's ideas to include a retractable roof to the building, one that "would open each Sept. 11 at the time of the terrorist attack." Fortunately, most of the officials being talked to about the cutbacks sounded pretty upset by the big change, that it just wasn't in the cards to spend that much, no matter how important the structures, but it does make sense that, when bringing in that many starchitects to help rebuild the area, ultimately you're going to have to pull back on the reigns a bit.

Architecture Studio has a few more details on the much-talked about, oft-linked Dynamic Architecture project (you'll recall that we were talking about the rotating buildings in Dubai last year). They'd even linked up a new teaser video of the project, which you'll find below. The only strange thing is that they're referring to the creator/architect behind the whole thing, David Fisher, as "Dr. Fisher." Last we remember, Fisher's credentials were highly suspect -- and now he has a PhD in something? Interesting.

Unbelievable Moving Skyscrapers - video powered by Metacafe

One more and then we'll lay off, we promise. You'll recall we spent some time passing you along to various links when Daniel Libeskind's Contemporary Jewish Museum opened in San Francisco. Although those were terrific, a vast majority were filled with a lot of "Isn't this building just the bees knees?!" and didn't give a very good tour of the place. Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal's David D'Arcy took a trip to the new museum and offers up a great tour of both the building and the artwork therein. It's a swell piece, with lost of detail about nearly everything, for all you Libeskind buffs or fans of contemporary Jewish things. Here's a bit about working within the building and the limitations learned from Libeskind's other museum projects:

Past the CJM's gift shop with Libeskindian angularity and jagged windows that double as product displays, and up a shimmering white staircase that will test the nimbleness of aged donors, the feel gets lighter. Underneath the upward pointing tip of the tilted cube is what the museum calls the yud space -- named for the Hebrew letter it resembles. Inside, the white conical volume's 36 diamond-shaped windows are arrayed like stars in a mythological sky. Their shadow-play on the sloping walls as light passes through is beguiling. "Flat objects" -- CJM talk for painting and sculpture -- will not be exhibited there. It's a wise decision, given the struggles in Mr. Libeskind's Denver Art Museum and his Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to show paintings in galleries built with his branded tilt. So far, the yud space will be used for readings and sound installations and for rental events.

We'd been following the recent flooding throughout Iowa pretty closely because we lived there for a couple of years not long ago. Because we were primarily concerned about the more personal things, like making sure our friends were okay and their homes were still above water, it hadn't even dawned on us that there was a design angle to the whole thing until we read this piece in Metropolis about all the flooded architectural landmarks in the state. Suddenly it got us remembering where all the famous buildings were located in Iowa City, where we'd lived. The new Steven Holl arts building that was just recently finished! The Frank Gehry over by the student center! All of it was in close proximity to the Iowa River and the piece painfully describes to what degree these places were affected by the rising waters. Here's to hoping everything gets successfully repaired and we don't lose any of what made Iowa that much more beautiful.

You might remember us talking about the Dynamic Architecture project, with its 80 story twisting buildings, around this time last year. We initially thought it was really cool and, unlike most of what gets built in Dubai, not entirely insane. But now that it's making the rounds again, circulating on nearly every available blog, we found it interesting that people are looking into the designer behind the project, one Mr. David Fisher. Turns out that he has something of a questionable past:

In a biography he had been distributing for months, he said he graduated from the University of Florence in 1976, came to New York in the mid-1980s and later developed hotels and ran a company that specialized in stone and prefabricated construction materials.

The biography also said he received an honorary doctorate from "The Prodeo Institute at Columbia University in New York." No such institution exists, however, and Columbia said it had never awarded Fisher an honorary degree.

In case you missed it, Robin Pogrebin had a really interesting piece in the NY Times entitled "Architects Debeate Building for Autocratic Clients." It concerns that growing wave of questions being thrust at starchitects (or those soon to be) about their doing work for places like China and Dubai -- in other words, places with some cash to throw around to build the kinds of crazy buildings these celebrity designers like to tinker with, but also making them deal with governments and countries whose human and civil rights histories might not be the greatest. So there's a lot of discussion about things like Koolhaas' CCTV building, which he's already caught some flak about. There's even a bit about Robert A.M. Stern winning the commission to design George W. Bush's presidential library in Texas, simply because of the pressures involved when you work in the US with an unpopular political figure. By and large, the lot of the starchitects defend themselves, offering up a whole slew of thoughts on why it's a good thing to build within a possibly damaged system (or for the unpopular), thus allowing them to keep on doing what they're doing. However, the other side of the argument doesn't agree so much:

William Menking, the founder and editor of Architect's Newspaper, wrote recently, "To suggest that providing high-quality design justifies working" in China "is slippery ethics."

"Albert Speer designing for Hitler might have said the same thing. His building itself is not political, but the act of building it, for a regime like that, is a political act."

Today must be "contentious restoration day" as here we find yet another story of building gone sour. This time around we look to France, where a big debate has begun over Renzo Piano's plans to design a parking lot and a new visitor's center for Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut chapel. Although Piano's plans leave the original, architectural masterpiece untouched and almost completely out of sight, the Fondation Le Corbusier thinks the whole thing is a travesty and "may permanently jeopardize the harmony and cohesion of the entire site." They've even started a petition to get the project blocked, adding big names like Richard Meier and Caesar Pelli to the fight against Piano, to which the starchitect and his side have started responding to quite viciously:

"I quite agree that the architecture must be defended, especially when you talk about the architecture of Le Corbusier and such beautiful and great places," says Piano. "The problem is that, in this case, the petition didn't tell the truth," he says, noting that it didn't mention who was responsible for the project, nor provide details of the design. "I don't understand the reason of all this resistance -- except maybe some religious intolerance."

Coming back to a story from a couple of weeks ago, it looks like another bit of Paul Rudolph's legacy is crumbling to the ground. The Sarasota School Board voted, 3 to 2, to tear down the architect's Riverview High School, much to the dismay of the students, faculty, and architecture preservationists who had been trying to save the building for the last few years and attended the Board meeting in droves. In the end, it all came down to money, and like every other education district in the country, the school was not in a financial position to completely restore the building. Sadly, nor were the architecture buffs able to raise the gigantic fees needed to make a convincing argument. So, very soon, Riverview will be brought down and a parking lot and ball fields will take its place.