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."

Apart from chocolate rivers (particularly those with an appetite for chubby, evocatively named German youths), waterfalls are surely the most mesmerizing of nature's wonders, even if they are not so much natural as the spirited creations of a Danish/Icelandic artist and stop running at the stroke of 10 p.m. every night. Today saw the launch of Olafur Eliasson's monumental, multi-site public art project, "The New York City Waterfalls," four cascades rising as high as 120 feet out of New York Harbor. Announced in January, the Public Art Fund project was realized in eco-friendly collaboration with Tishman Construction Corporation and a team of nearly 200 designers, engineers, and construction workers.

In the press release issued today from his office, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the waterfalls "a beautiful symbol of the energy and vitality that we are bringing back to our waterfront." Meanwhile, Eliasson says, "they will give people the possibility to reconsider their relationship to the spectacular surroundings...and evoke experiences that are both individual and enhance a sense of collectivity." But our favorite description comes from New York Times art critic Roberta Smith. "They could almost fool King Kong into thinking he is back home," she writes in her review published today. "They are the remnants of a primordial Eden, beautiful, uncanny signs of a natural nonurban past that the city never had." The watery paradise lasts through October 13.

Like we saw in this post just yesterday, it seems like we've all been talking about if famous architects should be working in China, what's being said when they take these commissions, and how it will later effect their careers. But it seems that rare is the day we read about how the Chinese people are responding to all of these Westerners coming in, razing their houses, and building insane things in their (former) backyards. Granted, some of this is the whole unfree media, but some of it must also be a little bias on our behalf. So it's nice to see a piece like Paul Goldberger's in the New Yorker, "Forbidden Cities," which talks to Beijing natives and reports on their thoughts about the whole thing, all of which was a refreshing change from the usual. Our favorite part was learning what they call Koolhaas' new CCTV headquarters:

The novelty of the form -- some Beijingers have taken to calling it Big Shorts -- takes time to comprehend; the building seems to change as you pass it. "It comes across sometimes as big and sometimes as small, and from some angles it is strong and from others weak," [Ole Scheeren] said. "It no longer portrays a single image."

For the past little while, you might recall that we've been reporting on both fronts of the issues surrounding the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania, with Alec Rawls and his people trying to get a complete redesign, saying that the whole thing looks too similar to an Islamic symbol, to the other debate over whether or not Paul Murdoch borrowed some of his ideas from other designers who were submitting concepts during the initial stages (you'll recall that this has just recently been making some headlines again). Two of the people involved with the later issue, Lisa Austin and Madis Pihlak, were kind enough to write in to us and offer us a synopsis of their recent presentation at a National Parks Service-sponsored conference about park planning and design, held at the University of Virginia. As we're always keen to share both sides of the story, allowing you to make up your own mind, so you'll find the synopsis, which we found pretty interesting, below and continued on to a second page:

Idea-drift is the inadvertent migration of design elements from one proposal to another that occurs with some frequency in 2-phase competitions. The phase-1 section is open to anyone who registers. Submissions are usually exhibited in a gallery and, in larger competitions, on a website. In phase-2, a few finalists are paid to expand their ideas, and a winner is selected.

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We've mused on what a Lever House-themed fragrance might smell like ("a mesmerizing murmur of fresh lemongrass and tea"), but what's with those naked fellows now milling about the lobby, where the Hirstian animal carcasses wintered? Well, for starters, the men are made out of polyurethane and based on the body of artist Richard Dupont. Each has been manipulated and subtly distorted so that a complete figure can only be seen from a single vantage point. "The viewer walks around the figures and gets all these different perspectives as the surfaces change," Dupont told Daniel Kunitz of The Village Voice recently. "A lot of people see them and think they're flat, then realize they're objects--that's a hard thing for the brain to process immediately. But it's not just retinal, it's also physiological: There's a queasiness, an anxiety caused by the brain not being able to understand the two things at once."

The exhibition, entitled "Terminal Stage" and on view through May 3, is Dupont's first public art piece. He created it specifically for Lever House, which in recent years has made its glass-enclosed lobby gallery a 24-hour showplace for intriguing installations by the likes of Hirst, E.V. Day, and Barnaby Furnas. The cool kids over at Cool Hunting have just posted a video interview (below) with the gallery's curator, Richard Marshall, who mentions plans to organize an international traveling exhibition of the Lever House art collection and publish a book about it. As for the Dupont work, Marshall notes, "You don't often see nine naked men standing in a lobby."

Well, you can't please everybody and if you're Beijing, you have writer Jerry Guo concerned. In his interesting opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, "Second Thoughts on Beijing's New Olympic-Inspired Architecture," he worries out loud that this huge push to build fancy new show-off architecture is stripping the city of all that makes it unique. Everything is going modern, with very little focus on retaining its historic past. It's a nice essay and we certainly understand Guo's argument, but at the same time, we'd like to invite him to tour nearly every single city on the planet right now and see why Beijing is anything special in its loss of tradition. Here in the US, all but the few largest of the largest cities have been completely gutted and most neighborhoods look identical to one another. Granted, the US is a few years younger than China, but still, it's happening everywhere and, at this point, it seems like a good idea to thank the heavens that your city is at least investing in exciting new architecture in its city centers, instead of the depressing alternative of erasing then leaving those vacant patches alone.

Meanwhile, in another part of England, the decision has come down on who will be awarded the contract to design the landscapes for the 2012 Olympics. The winner is LDA Design, who, along with Hargreaves Associates, will start up next year in taking on building all the public spaces and parks, places that not only have to be finished and ready to impress three and a half years from now, but will stick around long after for the good of London. How's that for a pretty good, high-profile gig? Here's a bit:

In 2009 work will start on the parklands and public spaces that will help form part of the largest new urban park in London since the great Victorian era of park building.

After the Games the Park will be made up of different areas suiting a variety of needs including allotments and other food-growing areas, meadows, wetlands, wooded valleys, orchards, new wildlife habitats and facilities for sports such as canoeing, mountain biking and climbing.

More info from The Guardian, here.

The post office might pride itself on its ability to endure rain, sleet, snow, and wind, but public sculptures don't care much for the elements. Except if they're the work of artist Janet Echelman, a New York- and Boston-based sculptor who creates monumental public works out of diaphanous, flexible nets that are meant to move and change shape over time. On view through March 2 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge is a new exhibition of three of Echelman's recent projects, including her controversial commission for downtown Phoenix (that's a rendering of it above).

Echelman's goal is nothing short of reshaping urban airspace, and she prefers to work with sites that "are either unnoticed infrastructure that have faded from public memory, or iconic landmarks that have are so overexposed they become habitual background." Among the projects on view at the GSD, where Echelman is a Loeb fellow, are plans for the Richmond Skating Oval, a site for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games. She plans to create a riverfront water garden that remediates run-off water from the roof of an adjacent building and install bright red wooden footbridges that float beneath glowing "sky lanterns," which bob and twist in the wind.

For a closer look at Echelman's work, check out the below video of the only one of the projects in the exhibition that has been built: "She Changes," a 160-foot-tall fiber sculpture that was installed on the coast of Portugal in 2005 and resembles a giant jellyfish.

That's right, dear reader, if you guessed that today's UnBeige Secret Word is "ice," you may have won a lifetime supply of Creamsicles! Not to be outdone by its neighbors to the north, Chicago is gearing up for its own ice-themed public art project. Friday will usher in the Museum of Modern Ice (and doesn't its acronym, MoMI, sound like the name of a cuddly, diminutive polar creature?), a month-long outdoor festival in the city's Millennium Park. Among the highlights will be a 95-foot-long, 12-foot-tall wall of ice created by artist Gordon Halloran and located just behind the park's Anish Kapoor "Cloud Gate" sculpture.

Here's more about the ice wall from a press release:

One side, visible from Michigan Avenue, echoes the city's renowned skyline. The other side--full of color, complexity, and variety--is meant to be interactive and seen in close proximity. Inspired by a glacial wall in its final stages of movement toward the ocean, the installation will evolve over time with natural and planned changes, encouraging visitors to return frequently to observe the activity.

The "Museum" will also feature an abstract, multicolored ice painting by Halloran. Where? On the park's ice rink of course. And yes, visitors will be welcome to skate on it.

Frozen cars are nothing new in Houghton, the town on the western side of Michigan's Upper Peninsula that is home to Michigan Tech University. But even the most frigid conditions don't imprison autos in massive blocks of ice. For that, you need artists.

Enter Mary Carothers and Sue Wrbican, a couple of RISD graduates (now professors of photography at University of Louisville and George Mason University, respectively) who have collaborated on art projects since 1994. Next week on the Michigan Tech campus, they plan to unveil their latest project: a 1978 Chevy Nova frozen into a block of ice (a model is shown above). As the car thaws through the spring, Carothers and Wrbican will document its demise and interact with those who come to see the project.

Making a car popsicle in northern Michigan may sound easy, but it's quite an undertaking, as the artists' Frozen Car blog makes clear. After towing the gutted car to campus, they parked it in a car-sized container built by local high school students. The artists then began gradually filling the container with water, leaving it to freeze into icy layers.

"The frozen car points to the classic struggle of culture versus nature," says Wrbican, who also notes how the automobile has stood for freedom and power in American culture. And the artists' choice of model was deliberate--the '78 Chevy Nova being one of The Big Three's last true "gas guzzlers." On their website, Carothers and Wrbican also compare their project to another freezing scheme: "The act of freezing references 'cryonics,' a procedure which hypothetically preserves a diseased body until a cure is found."