Posted: 05 Mar 2010 06:30 PM PST

During a Friday afternoon gathering at SCI-Arc's Arts District campus, Abraham was remembered chiefly for his refusal to bend his designs to meet client demands, architectural fashion or popular taste. "Raimund was pure," architect and former SCI-Arc Director Michael Rotondi said at the event.

In the last few years Abraham had been splitting his time among New York, Los Angeles and Mazunte, a small beach town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca where he lived in a house he designed for himself. His other recent projects include the JingYa Ocean Entertainment Center in Beijing and a small, circular concrete music hall in Hombroich, Germany, that is under construction.

Reached by phone Friday in Vienna, Una Abraham, the architect's daughter and only surviving relative, said work on the music hall would continue. "We're going to make sure it gets finished," she said.

Raimund Johann Abraham was born July 23, 1933, in the Austrian mountain town of Lienz, and grew up in a house overlooking the Dolomites. The experience of living through World War II as a child left an indelible mark on him.

"I had horrifying experiences that shaped my aesthetics," he once told an interviewer. "I saw buildings disappear that were supposed to be permanent. I saw the entire sky covered with airplanes. But do you have any idea what a beautiful sight that is - an iron sky? It was magnificent."

After studying architecture in Graz he moved to Vienna, where he worked as an architect and industrial designer from 1959 to 1964, part of a circle of creative talents that included artists, poets and filmmakers.

No project better encapsulated Abraham's approach than the Austrian Cultural Forum, which squeezes a 280-foot-high tower onto a midtown Manhattan site just 25 feet wide. In winning a competition for the building, he beat out 225 other architects, all of them fellow Austrians. His design called for a tightly compressed set of fire stairs scissoring up the rear of the building - no other entrant, the competition jurors said, thought to place the stairs there - and a sharply angled, almost menacing front facade of precisely mitered steel and sheets of glass.

Abraham compared the front of the building to the falling blade of a guillotine, and indeed much of his work was suffused with a sense of foreboding. The Forum opened just months after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, and perhaps more than any other piece of architecture of the period it seemed to capture the heavy, fragmented and fragile mood of New York City and fix it permanently in architectural space.

It is also a stunning example of architectural execution, a tough, complex aesthetic vision translated into thrilling built form. "Considering that he presents himself as the ultimate bohemian type - the artist, the provocateur, the poet - there are two aspects of Raimund that astonish: the impeccable working drawings and his capacity to work out every nut and bolt and carry it to the nth degree," Kenneth Frampton, an architectural historian who served on the Forum jury, told Architectural Record in 2002.

But getting it built to Abraham's demanding standards was a struggle that consumed a full decade of the architect's life. Delays and worries about budget overruns plagued the project; in 1996, Abraham was called to defend the building before the Austrian parliament.

"Building is the most difficult form of architecture," Abraham once said. "It engages you completely. You have to become a street fighter, a lawyer and a detective to succeed."

Just before the building was completed in early 2002, Abraham, frustrated at the direction of his country's politics - in particular the rise of the rightist politician Jorg Haider - renounced his Austrian citizenship.

Throughout his career, Abraham expressed impatience with the idea that drawing didn't count as authentic architecture, or that it was simply a preliminary step on the path to construction. Ultimately, he said, meaningful architecture "is based on an idea. I don't need a building to verify my idea."

He returned to that theme in the lecture Wednesday evening at SCI-Arc, arguing that drawing is architecture's fundamental act.

"You don't have to become a slave in a corporate office or a groupie of a celebrity architect," he said. "All you need is a piece of paper, a pencil and the desire to make architecture."

(Hawthorne is the Los Angeles Times' architecture critic.)

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Apology offered in black cultural center incident that roiled Missouri ... - Los Angeles Times

Posted: 05 Mar 2010 03:53 PM PST

In this undated photo provided by the Boone County Sheriff's Department via the Columbia Daily Tribune, Sean Fitzgerald is shown. Sean Fitzgerald and a fellow student were arrested March 1, 2010 on suspicion of a hate crime after allegedly dropping cotton balls outside the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Mo. Charges have not been filed. (AP Photo/Boone County Sheriff's Department via The Columbia Daily Tribune) (Boone County Sheriff's Department, AP / March 5, 2010)

Bullfighting debate in Spain takes political turn - YAHOO!

Posted: 05 Mar 2010 09:40 AM PST

MADRID (AFP) – A raging debate in Spain over bullfighting took a new turn Friday after two regional governments announced they would officially declare the practice part of their cultural heritage.

The parliament in Catalonia on Wednesday began several weeks of hearings on a motion to ban bullfighting in the northeastern region at the demand of activists who condemn the traditional spectacle as a form of torture.

If the motion is approved it would make Catalonia the first region in Spain, outside of the Canary Islands, to ban the practice.

But on Thursday the debate shifted from Catalonia to Madrid.

The head of the Madrid regional government, Esperanza Aguirre, said she planned to officially declare bullfighting part of the region's cultural heritage, which would give it some legal protection.

Bulls have been "part of Spanish and Mediterranean culture since time immemorial, have inspired the paintings of Goya and Picasso and the literature of Garcia Lorca," said Aguirre, a senior official in the conservative opposition Popular Party.

"What else of cultural interest is more important than the bulls? So that's why we decided to initiate procedures in this regard."

On Friday the government in the eastern region of Valencia also announced it planned to pass a similar measure.

They would be the first regions in Spain to take such a step.

The Spanish press Friday accused Aguirre, often mentioned a possible future leader of the PP, of exploiting the issue for political gain.

"The Spanish right is exploiting the Catalan debate on the bulls," said the centre-left Catalan daily El Periodico, accusing her of "putting Spain against Catalonia."

But the conservative newspaper ABC welcomed the plan as a move against "radical nationalism" in Catalonia, which wants to "eliminate any trace of common culture in Spain."

Representatives of different sections of society have already offered contrasting opinions to the Catalan parliament on the issue.

Christian Bourquin, a regional lawmaker from southern France, on Thursday said a ban would be "an attack on freedom, pluralism and tolerance."

But a Spanish philosopher, Jesus Mosterin, compared the bullfighting to female circumcision in Africa or violence against women.

Polls show rising disinterest in bullfighting throughout Spain, especially among the young, although arenas are regularly filled to capacity for the spectacle, which ends with the death of the bull from a well-placed sword.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

NATO Details Its Afghan Night Raids Policy - ABC News

Posted: 05 Mar 2010 09:22 PM PST

A new directive from NATO's top commander in Afghanistan orders coalition forces to avoid night raids when possible, but to bring Afghan troops with them if they must enter homes after dark.

The coalition released details of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's new policy Friday — changes that are meant to cut down on the storm of complaints from Afghan people.

Though McChrystal's order falls short of the complete ban on night raids sought by President Hamid Karzai, it does reflect new sensitivities by NATO at a time when the coalition is pursuing a strategy of gaining Afghan public trust in a bid to rout Taliban extremists.

McChrystal had issued the order in late January — as reported by The Associated Press last week — and portions of the classified directive were made public Friday by his headquarters. It follows the NATO commander's move to limit the use of airstrikes last year that were responsible for the bulk of civilian deaths.

"Despite their effectiveness and operational value, night raids come at a steep cost in terms of the perceptions of the Afghan people," according to excerpts of his directive.

"In the Afghan culture, a man's home is more than just his residence. ... Even when there is no damage or injuries, Afghans can feel deeply violated and dishonored, making winning their support that much more difficult," it said.

The directive tells troops "to explore all other feasible options before effecting a night raid."

However, if night raids are conducted, Afghan security forces "should be the first force seen and the first voices heard by the occupants of any compound entered."

The order requires that Afghan troops must be included in the planning and execution of all night raids, and that Afghan government representatives must be notified in advance. When possible, community elders also need to be consulted.

It also said that all searches during the raid must be led and accomplished primarily by Afghan forces, including the search of women by women. Compensation for property seized or damaged must also be made — reiterating a practice already in place.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Cultural

Friday, March 5, 2010

“Austrian-born architect Raimund Abraham, 76, dies in car accident - The Sun News” plus 3 more

“Austrian-born architect Raimund Abraham, 76, dies in car accident - The Sun News” plus 3 more

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