New course description for first-year studio found scribbled on Rand Hall blackboard today:

We designed and built a loft bed that morphed into a bunk bed (don’t ask why). Here’s everything you might want to know about the process, including detailed instruction manuals.

I had earlier written about my visit to the Barnes Foundation in Merion, PA, and about the music video that resulted. Well, the move of the Barnes from Merion to Philadelphia has been accomplished and the usual critical infrastructure has dutifully provided their predicable and specious arguments to justify this travesty. Do all these critics read and copy from each other, or have they all been given the same talking points by the very political and corporate powers that engineered the move? For those of you who may wish to be art critics someday, pay attention. This is what a critical review consists of: It could have been terrible, but—Wow!—it really turned out to be wonderful! Paul Goldberger (Vanity Fair) writes: “It… could have been stifling… But that is not what Philadelphia has gotten.” Ada Louise Huxtable (Wall Street Journal) writes: “The ‘new’ Barnes that contains the ‘old’ Barnes shouldn’t work, but it does.” Roberta Smith (NY TImes) writes: “Others, myself included… felt that faithfully reproducing the old Barnes in the new space… was a terrible idea… And yet the new Barnes proves all of us wrong.” Peter Schjendahl (The New Yorker) writes: “I couldn’t imagine that the integrity of the collection—effectively a site-specific, installational work of art, avant la lettre—would survive. But it does, magnificently.”

In reaction to this woeful display of critical subservience, I have created a parody of Paul Goldberger’s blog post (it appeared in Vanity Fair earlier this month): only the names and places have been changed (along with some necessary textual revisions to keep the story self-consistent). And of course the images were “photoshopped” just a bit. You can find my parody here.

Cornell is promoting its NYC Tech Campus “core” as a net-zero energy building: “The main educational building, a home for the Cornell and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology partnership, is being planned to harvest as much energy from the campus site as it consumes: In the parlance of energy experts, it will be ‘net-zero energy.'” [Cornell Chronicle Online, “Cornell’s planned NYC Tech Campus drives for a sustainable ‘net-zero energy’ core,” Oct. 24, 2011]

How the relatively small 150,000 square-foot academic building actually achieves this alleged net-zero energy status is really quite clever, but not because of its advanced technology, or its environmental strategies: rather, it relies on a devious slight of hand. As the first building on what will be a much larger campus, it covers multiple acres of the 10-acre site with arrays of photovoltaic solar panels, and similarly covers multiple acres of the site with geothermal bore holes. The collectors placed over the now-undeveloped site will ultimately be re-attached on the south-facing roofs of future buildings; while the site area staked out for geothermal will be unavailable for geothermal use by other buildings on the site.

In other words, the building only reaches its net-zero status by preventing all the other future buildings on the campus from achieving the same level of self-sufficiency, since these future building sites have been designated for the provision of PV-generated electricity and geothermal energy only for this first, relatively small, academic building.

It’s like arbitrarily drawing a line around all the useful renewable resources in your neighborhood and claiming them all for yourself — one neighbor’s solar collector; another’s wind turbine; someone else’s geothermal system, and so on — and all for the sole purpose of proclaiming that you’ve reached the illusive net-zero mark.

Cornell should rightly take credit for expending a great deal of resources on renewable energy for the Tech Campus. But calling this a net-zero energy building is misleading and disingenuous.