Live from Austin!

I just discovered something interesting. Under US law, buildings constructed after 1990 are copyrighted. That means our house is subject to copyright, and as legal owner I can demand licensing fees from anyone who wants to take pictures of the street that happen to include our house.

The more corporate interests force ever-stronger copyright laws on us, the more I find myself questioning copyright. For example, the RIAA lawsuits against MP3 downloaders have made me wonder: why should artists continue to get money every time someone plays a recording of their music? I don’t get extra money every time someone looks at a web site I created; the very idea is laughable. Yet web sites are copyrighted too.

I first visited the USA in 1990, travelling with a Japanese friend. We wanted to visit New York and Boston. Most people would have stayed in New York, and travelled to Boston; but I remember having a hunch that things would be better the other way around. So we spent more time in Boston, and reduced the New York visit to a long weekend.

Perhaps my problems with New York stem from the fact that we were politely relieved of our excess cash by a gentleman who had taken it upon himself to introduce visiting tourists to the city. I don’t think that was the real problem, though; I’ve had worse experiences in other cities that I still like. No, I think my real problem with New York was one of expectations.

I’ve been to Birmingham, and I don’t feel the need to speak out about how awful it is because, well, nobody really expects any different. But New York gets fetishized as the ultimate city, the place everybody secretly wants to be, the cultural center of the universe. If I’d merely been expecting a large, seedy, run-down looking city with a bunch of art galleries, I would have been OK—but I had been lead to expect so much more.

Still, it has some impressively tall buildings.

I took some photos from the top of the World Trade Center, but it was pretty dull up there. You couldn’t look down, because there was a fence to keep you away from the edge, and anyway the edge just leads to a wide safety ledge a few meters below. You could look out across the city, but the street level was mostly shrouded in a brown haze of smog. Ultimately the whole thing was like a lot of the art in the city—the most impressive part of the experience was the concept.

No, the best place to experience the World Trade Center was from the bottom, looking upwards.

This is the Hancock Tower in Boston’s back bay. It’s easily my favorite building in the city. It was designed by I.M.Pei’s firm of architects—but not, I believe, by I.M. Pei himself. Most long-time Boston residents remember that when it was first constructed, the large sheets of glass in the windows began to rain down on the streets below. Sheets of plywood were used to replace the missing windows, and there was a long and expensive lawsuit. Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of people’s knowledge ends. They shake their heads at the impracticality of architects’ designs, and mentally file it as another example of ego over substance.

The truth is somewhat different. It turned out that the construction company had not followed the structural engineers’ designs to the letter. Under pressure to cut costs, they had used thinner and cheaper glass for the windows. As a result, when winds blew past the building and caused a partial vacuum, the windows would bend outwards until they broke free of their frames. Once all the glass was replaced with the kind specified in the design, the problem went away.

Today the tower stands at peace. It almost resembles the monolith from “2001″—sleek, dark and its inner workings mysterious. You can’t see in the picture, but the western side has a darker colored stripe or slot near the top, which reminds me of a Cylon warrior’s eye slit or KITT’s light strip in “Knight Rider”. It almost seems as if the monolith is sitting watching the city beneath it, aloof and mysterious.

On summer evenings, the side of the building is perfectly angled to catch the sunset and reflect it back at you as you walk along the back bay. The front is carefully angled to reflect the Trinity Church in Copley Place. It’s a masterful piece of design—stark minimalism that fits perfectly in context.