Category Archives: New Utopia

Dear Jake,

My tween niece is planning a trip to NYC for NYE and is BEGGING me to take her to Times Square for the Ball Drop. I've tried to explain to her all the reasons this is a bad idea, but her and her mother insist I must escort them into the heart of darkness. What do I do???

Desperately,

Uncle Hates Fun

Dear UHF,

Times Square on New Year's Eve combines so many enjoyable things the thrill of being penned in like livestock for seven or eight hours, the challenge of not peeing on yourself, the fumes wafting out of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, all set against the dulcet tones of Mariah Carey lip-syncing her Christmas Album. How could you take a pass on something like that?

Like all Natives, I've long despised Midtown, and these feelings are based on many terrible experiences there, including multiple New Year's Eves spent in the belly of the beast. Back in the late-90s, before the War on Terror, you could still roll in 35 minutes before the ball drop, if you knew which exits from the 42nd Street Station had the fewest NYPD cops standing outside. I was barely 18 and so of course I was rolling fully loaded with a fifth of the only alcohol I could afford: Southern Comfort, from the one sketch liquor store in the South Slope that sold to minors. After about a half hour of shivering, I'd consumed most of it, and at a solid 120lbs, I straight up passed out and face-planted in the middle of 7th Avenue. None of my friends noticed, and I didn't come to until the ball had come down and the crowd had started to move, at which point I had the unique perspective of watching the festivities as dozens of feet stepped on my face.

After that I avoided the neighborhood like the plague, except during those unlucky years when various jobs forced me to work there. For one 18 month stretch I was pushing paper at the IBM Building on Madison and 57th, and feeling pretty depressed about the life choices that brought me to that point. To cheer myself up I used to go take walks in Central Park during lunch, and sometimes I'd find myself over by the Zoo, where even the animals seem unhappy about having to be in Midtown. I got lucky after that, and found work mostly downtown or in Brooklyn, but a few years ago, an improbable series of events led us to move the Gothamist office to 53rd and 7th, and the next 8 months or so were so miserable that it likely soured me on the neighborhood for the rest of my life.

Things at the office were going south pretty quick that year, so once again I found myself taking long walks at lunch. I was struck by the sad state of street life in that part of Midtown desperate vendors trying to con tourists into overpriced tour bus rides, finance guys literally stepping over the homeless outside the 53rd Street B train station, the few sickly trees dying from the delivery truck exhaust. One particularly miserable day, choking down my roast beef sandwich from one of the three Prets on the block, I actually saw them loading Robert Indiana's Hope sculpture into the back of a truck and driving it away. That seemed like a metaphor. A few weeks later the company's new owner shut us down.

I didn't spend much time there again until a couple weeks ago, when Jen Carlson asked me to get some photos for her Midtownaissance project, and I spent the day knocking off a punch-list of locations, from Grand Central to MoMA to Bryant Park to Penn Station to Billymark's West on 29th and 9th. In between I had plenty of time to contemplate my relationship with the neighborhood, and I came to the conclusion that while it was still awful, I'd misjudged the cause of its awfulness. It wasn't the crowds, lack of light and trees, general filth, or the tourists that was all a symptom of the root disease, which is that Midtown is currently organized around a traffic scheme which prioritizes cars and trucks above people.

Crowds? That's because three-quarters of the quite wide avenues and streets are reserves for environment-destroying vehicles mainly used by the wealthy, while the common man is forced onto narrow sidewalks. No trees? That's because there's no room for them because of the crowds. Filth? Well, you try running a street-cleaner down one of those streets when they're occupied by 50 gridlocked cars. Even the tourists would be more bearable if they weren't so penned in. Think about it: what really annoys you about them is how they stop to look around at their phone maps or to admire the store windows, right in the middle of the sidewalk while you're trying to get through. If the sidewalk was twice as wide, you probably wouldn't notice them at all.

That would leave you more time to consider the good parts of Midtown that generally get drowned out by the chaos. The museums, all the holiday store windows, the Broadway shows, ice-skating rinks, a million bars from the old Irish places that are still hanging on, to the swanky cocktail bars like The Campbell. Hell, even Rockefeller Plaza has some stuff to recommend inside the Lego Store has a great mini-model of the neighborhood, and the concourse underground has a surprisingly wide variety of affordable lunch places. The other week I found myself on the Empire State Building observation deck at dawn, looking northwest as the sunrise reflected off all the skyscrapers in the neighborhood. And you know what? Above all the bullshit it was beautiful.

Midtown would be nice all the time if we got rid of most of the traffic. The right move would be to ban all private cars from the neighborhood, with very few exceptions for the elderly, handicapped, and others who could show an actual need for piloting a five thousand pound hunk of metal into the busiest part of the city. Cabs and buses would still be let through, in designated lanes which would be mostly free from traffic. The rest of the space, probably 50% or more on most blocks, we'd give back to people, to walk, bike, or just hang around in new pedestrian plazas, complete with actual trees. We know this would work: think how much nicer Times Square is since we choked back some of the traffic there during the Bloomberg administration.

We'll get a taste of this utopia soon: today Mayor Bill de Blasio announced "a major temporary expansion of pedestrian space on the streets around Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall." Starting on Black Friday, partial closures of 49th and 50th Streets, 5th and 6th Avenues will give tourists more room to walk, and is such a manifestly obvious and necessary first step towards solving some of the neighborhood's problems that the only people who could possibly oppose it are die-hard car lovers and anti-pedestrian dead-enders.

A map we saw at the NYPL from the 1970s proposes a pedestrian mall on Madison Avenue Jake Dobkin / Gothamist

Anyway, I probably still won't be spending much time in Midtown this might sound crazy, but whenever I'm walking around there I have this major anxiety that a nuclear bomb might just go off at any time, and it doesn't really abate until I'm a few stops away on the train, headed towards Brooklyn. But the neighborhood does have its selling points, and for the rest of you, a few of these small changes could actually make it a decent place to hang out. Until then, try to avoid it unless you're forced to go there by visiting relatives. Do it for them, while meditating on the fact that to truly love New York, you need to love every part of it, even those spots like Times Square on New Years Eve that are manifestly insane and inhumane. Maybe that will help you pass the time waiting for the ball to drop but I'd pack a pair of Depends just in case.

In solidarity,

Jake

N.B. if you want to see the whole neighborhood at once, the Empire State Building is a good option, especially given the recent renovation, but the better choice is still Top of the Rock, where you can photograph the Empire State Building against the south Manhattan skyscrapers, and also get a close up view of the new Billionaires Row monstrosities against the backdrop of Central Park.

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Ask A Native New Yorker: Help, My Niece Wants Me To Take Her To Times Square For NYE - Gothamist

The live business grew by leaps and bounds over the course of the past decade as the concert industry became a thriving multi-billion-dollar international juggernaut. This while generating massive revenues, expanding international and domestic markets and creatively redefining the parameters of what a live performance could be both for artists and billions of fans alike. Along the way, this wildly dynamic industry embraced rampant technological innovation, developed fresh approaches to production, sponsorship, marketing and festivals and collected robust data strategically used in ways never before seen while driving the live industry to stratospheric heights.

The growth of the live business between 2010 and 2019 was precipitous by every available metric. According to Pollstar Boxoffice reports, the average gross per show on Pollstars Top 100 Worldwide Tours chart between 2010 and 2019* was up a whopping 87% from roughly $674,000 to an estimated $1.26 million. Total gross was up 57% from $3.2 billion to some $5.1 billion, average tickets sold per show were up 36% from 9,585 to some 12,994 and average ticket price grew 38% from $70.33 to $96.86.

The top worldwide tour in 2010, AC/DCs Black Ice World Tour, grossed nearly $194 million and sold more than two million tickets. In 2018, the last available fully reported year, Ed Sheerans record-setting Divide Tour grossed $432.4 million, 123% more than Black Ice, while performing before 4.8 million fans, a 135% jump. While the combined grosses of the top ten worldwide tours in 2010 was $1.04 billion, the combined grosses of the top ten worldwide tours in 2018, a record-setting year, was some $2.06 billion a 98% rise.

So whats the manifestation of all this? Take a look around. Right now, you could see a slew of incredible, possibly life-changing performances by a huge range of artists across the globe. This week included David Byrnes envelope-busting American Utopia on Broadway; Wonderfront, a massive new independent festival with top talent launching in San Diego; the legendary Madonna at Los Angeles Wiltern; the cast of acclaimed TV show Schitts Creek at Brooklyns Kings Theatre; Aerosmiths Deuces Are Wild at Las Vegas MGM Park Theater; country breakthrough artist Midland at Vicar Street in Dublin, Ireland; Kanye Wests Sunday Service at Joel Osteens Houston church; Ariana Grande at Nashvilles Bridgestone Arena; Bad Bunny at San Franciscos new multi-billion-dollar Chase Center; Latin Grammy-winning Spanish artist Rosala at Paris Salle Pleyel concert hall; New York house legend Louie Vega at Tokyos ageHa; singer-songwriter Passenger at Johannesburgs Ticketpro Dome; and Shawn Mendes at Sao Paulos Allianz Parque among so much else. Exhale. Ten years ago, much of this couldnt have happened.

In this context, then, it is not surprising the live concert business filled the void recorded music left artists needed revenue labels couldnt provide. At the same time, live often offers unrivaled peak life experiences, and the entertainment business is traditionally one of the few inelastic industries during economic downturns. (Much like the film business in the 1930s we all need to escape, especially in tough times.) Add to that the growth of social media and robust data that faciliated fan engagement and community building and allowed the industry to pinpoint fans in new ways, and it makes all the sense in the world that the live industry kicked into high gear during the 2010s.

Coinciding with the live markets explosive decade of growth: consolidation. In February 2010, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, two of the biggest entities in the music business, officially merged, with the blessing of the U.S. Department of Justice (presaging Universal Musics acquisition of EMI in 2012) to form the biggest live music company on the planet. Then, according to Live Nations yearly earnings report, Live Nation events drew more than 47 million fans to over 21,000 events for over 2,300 artists in 2010 and sold nearly 120 million tickets, and its revenue was $3.4 billion. Globally, Live Nation owned, operated or had booking rights for and/or has an equity interest in 128 venues.

Near the end of the decade, according to Live Nations 2018 annual report, Live Nation would increase its market share, reporting 35,000 shows (66% increase from 2010), a record 93 million fans (98% increase) around the world attending Live Nation events and some $10.9 billion in revenue (229% increase) with 237 venues (85% increase) in operation, along with 100 festivals in 40 countries.

Throughout the decade, Live Nation partnered with or outright acquired a number of prized assets including Voodoo Fest and Insomniac (2013), C3 Presents (2014), Bonnaroo and Germanys Marek Lieberberg Konzertagentur (2015), Governors Ball promoter Founders Entertainment (2016) AC Entertainment (2016), BottleRock (2017), Frank Productions and Rock in Rio (2018) and last year L.As Spaceland Presents and, most recently, major Mexican promoter OCESA.

Say what you will about consolidation over the decade, but in an estimated $22 billion global concert market, Live Nation claims a roughly 28% share; and in the global ticketing market worth an estimated $100 billion, Ticketmaster has a roughly 30% share, leaving the rest of the live industry ample room to compete.

The worlds second-biggest promoter AEG Presents, a private company that doesnt disclose financials, still owns the largest standalone festival on the planet, Goldenvoices Coachella, and the decades highest-grossing venue, The O2 Arena. (See the current cover story of Pollstars sister publication

VenuesNow which features the Venues of the Decade.) AEG is also partners with two of the biggest promoters in Messina Touring Group and Concerts West. And this year, AEG Facilities merged with SMG, the largest facilities management company, to form ASM Global.

Corporate consolidation hasnt stifled independent entrepreneurship, either. This year, Seth Hurwitzs I.M.P., which testified against the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger in 2009, began leasing its Washington, D.C. area assets, including The Anthem, I.M.P.s lauded new venue opened in 2017, and Merriweather Post Pavilion to Live Nation.

The festival market, in broad terms, has gone from mega-festivals, many of which are still thriving, to a preponderance of boutique festivals and artist-curated festivals. Danny Wimmer Presents, after a legal tussle with former partner AEG, is fully independent and promotes major rock festivals throughout the U.S.; the aforementioned Wonderfront Festival launched this week; and worldwide Ultra Music Festival returned to Miami after resolving municipal conflicts.

Meanwhile, the growing hip-hop promoter Rolling Loud, led by young 30-somethings, is thriving with global ambitions, while artist festivals, specifically hip-hop festivals including Tyler, The Creators Camp Flog Gnaw, Travis Scotts Astroworld and Post Malones Posty Fest continue to thrive, with artists and their teams having more direct hands in their events.

On the agency side of the business, UTAs attempted merger with Paradigm in June nearly created a third music agency that couldve gone toe-to-toe with market leaders WME and CAA. This followed UTAs acquisitions of The Agency Group in 2015 and Circle Talent in 2018. Ex-UTA and Agency Group staffers led the spin-offs of two boutique rock-focused agencies in Sound Talent Group and 33 & West. Paradigm, meanwhile, acquired agencies Windish and AM Only in 2017 after partnering with them in 2012 and 2015, respectively. And this decade, AGI remained a small but focused powerhouse with Metallica, Billy Joel, Neil Young and Def Leppard, among other massive clients.

Globally, the market exploded in the 2010s as worldwide tours regularly ran through territories that 10 years ago were uncharted waters. Witness Ed Sheerans all-time record-breaking tour, which ran from March 2017 to August 2019 and grossed an unheard-of $775.7 million while hitting territories all-time tour runner-up U2 hadnt a decade earlier on its 360 Tour. From Mumbai, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur to Bogot, Lima and Santiago to Reykjavk, Riga to Bucharest, Sheerans Divide Tour set the bar in uniting the globe, playing before 8.9 million fans.

Sheeran, now age 28, is a product of the 2010s. Starting his career at the beginning of the decade, he, more than any other artist, is emblematic of how far the music business has come and how it will continue to grow. That he could galvanize and connect his fans across the globe, set the ticket prices he wanted for fans, play multiple nights at stadiums across the globe, control the secondary market, dispense with VIP sections and do it all as a one-man band while working with veteran touring professionals including CAA, Paradigm, Kilimanjaro, Messina Touring Group, Frontier Touring, AEG, FKP Scorpio, DHP Family to raise the bar to incredible heights shows all of the industry what is possible.

When asked about the pivotal live moment of Sheerans amazing decade, his shrewd manager Stuart Camp points to one particular show. Glastonbury 2017 was probably the moment from a live perspective, he says. Huge crowd, not necessarily an Ed crowd, that we never took for granted i.e. we spent the day worrying if anyone would turn up. And boy did they ever.

*Based on estimates as 2019 final numbers

havent been fully tabulated. s

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POPPIN' OFF Live Music Biz EXPLODES In The 2010s - Pollstar

The post David Byrne performs Road to Nowhere with cast of American Utopia Broadway on Fallon: Watch appeared first on Consequence of Sound.

Supporting his acclaimed Broadway productionAmerican Utopia, David Byrneappeared as a guest on TheTonight Showon Tuesday night. In addition to talking with Jimmy Fallon about the show, he and his Broadway cast performed Road to Nowhere off 1985sLittle Creatures.

Having previously delivered a show-stopping performance of One Fine Day on Kimmel last month, Byrne continued to showcase the overallAmerica Utopia experience onFallon. This reworked rendition of Road to Nowhere began with Byrne and a few other musicians singing in the dark. As the lights went up, out marched a much bigger group of performers, tramping right over to Fallons desk. Eventually, The Roots joined in, building to a big chain of happiness dancing around the studio.

For the interview segment, Byrne actually biked onstage to greet Fallon. He then sat down to discuss adapting his touring show for Broadway and how the audiences have reacted to it. He even taught the host how to do a dance from the musical. Watch a replay of the chat and performance below.

(Read: Top 25 Tours of the 2010s)

David Byrnes American Utopia on Broadway was recently extended through February 16th at the Hudson Theater in New York City. After watching his Fallon performance below, dont be surprised if you find yourself dying to see him do it all again live. Get tickets to the production here.

Byrne previously appeared on This Must Be the Gig, where he talked with our own Lior Philips about his production on the American Utopia tour. Revisit the episode below:

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David Byrne performs Road to Nowhere with cast of American Utopia Broadway on Fallon: WatchNina Corcoran

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David Byrne performs Road to Nowhere with cast of American Utopia Broadway on Fallon: Watch - Yahoo Entertainment

LANGUAGEis fluid, certainly in the English-speaking world. The meanings of words change through the ages, driven by cultural change, necessity and commerce. The word Jordan has reverted to referring to the Hashemite kingdom bordering Israel after being appropriated for a couple of decades by a surgically altered and highly pneumatic media personality. However, the word momentum describing the physical property of an object that has been subject to a force has been hijacked by communists. Here are some other words that have found new uses, and not for the better:

Problematic:The word could be used for a device in a Robert Sheckley science-fiction story,set in a future of comfort and luxury, designed to provide otherwise indolent citizens of an automated utopia with personal challenges to overcome lest they get too bored.Why it has come to replace the words causing a problem is not clear, except that it does appeal to unashamedsesquipedalians even though it uses one syllable fewer than the words it replaces.The definition of a problematic idea is no longer restricted to the thoughts and expressions of unreformed National Socialists and their ilk, but has been extended to other heretical ideas, such as a woman being an adult female who was born with female genitalia and a womb, and that transwomen do not need tampons or smear tests for cervical cancer.This new meaning is already widely known. A person who expresses problematic ideas is socially deviant beyond the limits of acceptable diversity, pitchforks-and-firebrands-burn-them-at-the-stake kind of stuff. Any problematic expressions made by such a person will be career-limiting. If the expresser of problematic ideas is a public speaker, he or she will be banned from speaking in public at liberal institutions for ever, no matter how liberal their previous public speaking career. It is interesting to note that while National Socialist ideas are always defined as problematic, Soviet Socialist ideas never are, not even those expressed by overt and covert Stalinists. This explains why Jeremy Corbyn has had such an easy ride in interviews on broadcast television. Or it may be that any editorial decision to challenge Corbyn on live television runs the risk of being exceptionally problematic for all involved after the General Election, should Corbyn win somehow.

Committed:To do the precise opposite, as in the Labour Party is committed to rooting out anti-Semitism. Being committed to do something does not mean actually doing it in socialist-speak. A person with a 20-a-day high-tar cigarette habit may well be committed to giving up, but it does not mean binning the Capstan Full Strength right at that moment, if ever. When the BBCsPanoramaexposed Labours inner workings over anti-Semitism, Labour could have pointed out case studies where these workings actually worked and anti-Semites were purged in a timely and efficient manner. They didnt because they couldnt. But they remain committed to doing so, which means doing absolutely nothing, if not tacitly or covertly encouraging anti-Semitism in the party. More recently, Nia Griffith, the shadow defence secretary (which I guess you did not already know), stated on Sky News that Labour were committed to retaining the Trident nuclear deterrent, which obviously means that Day 1 of a Corbyn government will see all the missile-carrying submarines recalled to base, where they will be disarmed and sold for scrap. Labour did not, for example, say they were committed to providing free broadband, they said they were flat-out going to do it if elected, and showed how it would be done by destroying the British telecommunications industry. No bandying around the word committed there for the comrades.

Anti-fascist: Anti-Semite. Most people in the UK are anti-fascist in the classical version of the term. We do not want a corporatist state based on the leadership principle that leans towards sadism. Goose-stepping and jackboots have an unhealthy continental quality about them. However the use of the word fascist has become rather flexible in the last four decades, and now refers to any mode of political or economic thought or action that deviates from the notions of a planned command-based economy where interests are represented by, well, corporatist elements, rather like the way that affiliated organisations are involved in the decision-making process in the Labour Party. This does not mean that the Labour Party practise fascism, well, not openly, so far, touch wood. However the modern use of anti-fascist refers to a person who broadcasts his or her anti-fascism, with all its modern flexibility, all the live-long day to anyone who will listen and to many more who do not want to. Since these loud anti-fascists also hate the State of Israel, which they probably regard as fascist, they see it acceptable to hate Jewish people by extension, finding the kind of fascist anti-Semitic tropes acceptable, but without appreciating the irony. Real, proper, decent people are inherently anti-fascist, and do not need to tell everybody about it, still less to demand of people to state whether or not they are anti-fascist. Overt anti-fascism is seen by its practitioners as virtuous. Ordinary people see it as little different from fascism.

Anti-racist: Anti-Semite. As above, most people in the UK find racism unpleasant and boorish, and do not feel the need to march though the streets behind gaudy banners to advertise this in the manner of a loud anti-racist. The irony of these socially redundant vocal protesters is that they believe that expressing directed hate is a good way to combat racism. As with the anti-fascists above, their definition of racism is rather widely drawn, and as such their hatred is also as broad. Vocal anti-racism of the kind trumpeted by the Left contributed to the persistence of a culture of organised gang rape. Unable to recognise the consequence of their rhetoric, these loud anti-racists have never acknowledged their part in ruining the lives of hundreds of vulnerable girls who were violated thousands of times in numerous provincial towns. The vocal anti-racist typically also exhibits antipathy towards Israel, and thus also Jewish people by extension. Anti-racists do not regard anti-Semitism as racism, seeing it instead as part of the struggle to promote the interests of terrorist groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel and its people, a dedication which for some reason they do not see as problematic (qv). Apart from being very loud about their anti-racism, it is not clear precisely what most noisy anti-racists have achieved apart from inhibiting the state from performing its prime function to protect Her Majestys subjects from harm. Anything other than a complete open-door immigration policy is seen by these people as racist.

While the Oxford English Dictionary continuously updates the use of language, it probably will not use the above definitions. But that does not stop them from being true. I hope the above clarifications will make listening to socialists being interviewed more understandable when they talk in their code.

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Socialist-speak your updated guide - The Conservative Woman

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Newthink by Micha Kacprzyk (Poland)

Community-based architecture platform SkyCity recently announced the winners of their biannual SkyCity Challenge, which garnered over 180 entries from more than 50 countries for its 2019 edition. Established in 2016 in BROAD Town, China, SkyCity aims to confront today's pressing issues in housing.

Entrants were tasked with creating a build-system proposal for Broad Group, which is currently investigating their new material called BCORE. Entrants were challenged to design a modular home that can be dismantled after a period of time and used again. According to SkyCity, the prefabricated pieces of the home had to be easily transportable using traditional shipping containers which, when flat-packed, can be assembled by a small crew with equipment anywhere on the planet.

The jury highly valued proposals that explored BCORE directly and experimented with it, in both its structural capabilities and aesthetics. Scroll down for a look at the prize-winning entries and honorable mentions.

First Prize: COLLECTIVE GEOMETRIES by Manuel Lopes, Raphaelle Paire, Olga Litwa, Maya Iwdal (Sweden)

First Prize: COLLECTIVE GEOMETRIES by Manuel Lopes, Raphaelle Paire, Olga Litwa, Maya Iwdal (Sweden)

Project description: Facing future housing shortages will require simple, fast produced systems with the capacity to adapt and respond to a great array of complex scenarios and demands. Instead of trying to imagine and predict how humans will live in the future, Collective Geometries aim to become a system that can flexibly face a great number of the potential range of future scenarios, from isolated off-grid cabins to dense collective housing arrangements. The whole project is represented by a few simple elements capable of being combined into smarter collective entities. The housing unit's size and weight are kept within a two-man handling scale and they are joint together mechanically. The assembly and disassembly are designed to be done by simple users, except for bigger constructions where the size of a collective structure requires heavy machinery and implemented safety and work protocols. The segregation into simple pieces allows the projects to easily enlarge and shrink, trying to adapt to the end-user's changing needs and thus extending the lifecycle of individual systems.

Second Prize: CELL HOUSE by Daniel Marin Parra, Juan Martin Arias Cardona (Colombia)

Second Prize: CELL HOUSE by Daniel Marin Parra, Juan Martin Arias Cardona (Colombia)

The Cell House is aimed to be a completely self-sufficient housing unit, being able to provide a simple home in places that may not be the most convenient to inhabit. In order to make this home function off-grid, photovoltaic panels are positioned on the roof that is inclined towards the sun, ensuring the highest energy collection. The house will also be equipped with a rainwater collection and purification system. The collected water will be then stored in tanks located in the base compartment of the unit and a part of it will be available for daily use, while the other part will be heated through vacuum tube - solar collectors, later stored in specially insulated tanks to conserve the temperature of the water.

Third Prize: GRASSROOTS ECO-HOME by Soraya Somarathne, (Hong-Kong)

Third Prize: GRASSROOTS ECO-HOME by Soraya Somarathne, (Hong-Kong)

When sustainability is no longer enough, we need to rebuild and re-grow. A low carbon footprint home which is also a garden in its entirety, would enable us to achieve both dreams, whilst providing new-age possibilities for rural and remote eco-living. The home is composed of standard but also two special modified BCORE slabs. The first, custom made slab, acts as a cladding system for vertical greening and the second slab operates as a semi-transparent window facade. The design intent is to pack soil behind the fine steel mesh to enable plant life such as grass to grow across the facades of the building. The core tubes could be plugged with transparent cylinders or covered with a glass finish to enable light to penetrate space, whilst providing views out.

Fourth Prize: ELASTIC HOME by Quynh Nghi Nguyen, Tan Dat Le, Que Ly Tran, Tan Thang Nguyen (Vietnam)

Fourth Prize: ELASTIC HOME by Quynh Nghi Nguyen, Tan Dat Le, Que Ly Tran, Tan Thang Nguyen (Vietnam)

Can a BCORE house be like water? Formless, shapeless or formed by the shape it is filled into? Can a space be big, small, opened or closed whenever it needs to? Unifying the cuts of a standard BCORE panel into four 2x3m panels, we minimize the complexity of fabrication and maximize its flexibility. Each wall (3x2m) can either rotate or slide on the 2m-offset, contour-like grid track attached to the ceiling, thus freeing floor space from joints and brackets. By rotating and sliding, the structure can enlarge or shrink, open or close, be triangular or rectangular; reflecting its owner personality.

Fifth Prize: NOSTALGIA UTOPIA by Jiawei Liang, Tao Hong (China)

Fifth Prize: NOSTALGIA UTOPIA by Jiawei Liang, Tao Hong (China)

The project seeks to recover the memory of the inhabitants affected by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China. Due to this colossal development, many villages were flooded and this proposal tries to recover the social and private spaces on the shore and at the surface of the new artificial lake. The lightness and non-corrosiveness of BCORE suit the structure of the village. Each hexagonal module is inter-attached forming a giant floating platform. The entire first floor is a conjugated public area, while the floors above form housing. The entire floating system is equipped with fish farms, air and water purification.

Sixth Prize: b by Miguel Morillas Machetti, Elena Llcer Velert, Raquel Cullen La Rosa (Spain)

The L & I shaped cells grow in height and surface, repeating themselves in a chain and adapting to the terrain. The b-home allows building a temporary shelter quickly, covering the basic needs of the family for short or medium periods, enabling people to resume their normal lives rapidly. The pieces revalue the public space, for example, in urban areas which have been forgotten or temporarily create them. They can be used both in the suburbs and in urban centres during festivals, exhibitions or flea markets.

Seventh Prize: LIVING FORMULA by Jie Liu (Canada)

Seventh Prize: LIVING FORMULA by Jie Liu (Canada)

Life should be as easy as typing a formula. Finding a place you love, choosing the spaces that you need and changing them whenever you want. Four basic modules form the project; living room, bedroom, recreation and balcony. Each unit could be enlarged by one or more modules, based on peoples living preferences and financial conditions. The mobile app of Living Formula allows users to find and reserve the available space around the world to build their own space permanently or temporarily. Tenants this way regenerate their homes layout by exchanging or adding new modules to it thus creating a vivid and dynamic community.

Eighth Prize: SIMCITY 4.0 by Elizaveta Khaziakhmetova, Ilnar Akhtiamov, Rezeda Akhtiamova (Russia)

Eighth Prize: SIMCITY 4.0 by Elizaveta Khaziakhmetova, Ilnar Akhtiamov, Rezeda Akhtiamova (Russia)

The concept of this co-living space is a structure that allows different people to gather in one neighborhood. It combines various residential units and different public spaces for the interaction of their residents. The base is formed by a three-story stylobate with mixed functions, which nests home units of different sizes. There are five types of units; S, M, L, XL and XXL. All of them integrate into the structure just like a Tetris game.

Check out the Honorable Mentions in the gallery below.

SKYHIVE 2020 The Annual Bee Breeders Skyscraper Challenge

Register by Tue, Dec 17, 2019

Submit by Tue, Jun 2, 2020

Laka Competition 2020 "Architecture that Reacts"

Register by Sun, Dec 1, 2019

Submit by Fri, Dec 20, 2019

LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction 2019

Register/Submit by Tue, Feb 25, 2020

Essay Competition "What is Small-Scale Architecture?"

Register by Wed, Nov 20, 2019

Submit by Sun, Dec 1, 2019

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The winning ideas of SkyCity Challenge 19: The Future of Housing - Archinect

PUBLISHED: 15:07 21 November 2019 | UPDATED: 15:07 21 November 2019

Will Self

A Wartburg car next to a Trabant, possibly in East Germany, circa 1990. (Photo by Tom Stoddart/Getty Images)

2007 Getty Images

What a trip to East Germany in a Trabant taught WILL SELF about fate

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On September 7, 2016, I parked our hired Trabant car in the car park of the Hotel Kaiserhof, in Eisenach, Thuringia, and clambered out, together with my companions, Michael Shamash and Laurence Grissell. We were on a bizarre road trip: driving one of these peculiar plastic-bodied cars all the way from London to Zwickau, in Saxony, where they were originally manufactured during the communist era. The trip was my idea: My friend Michael is subject to ostalgie: Nostalgia for the vanished East German (ostdeutsch) culture, in all its enforced egalitarianism - and he'd expressed a desire to visit Zwickau. Laurence, a brilliant radio producer, had come along to record a series of programmes based on our odd odyssey.

Odd..? No, really utterly bizarre. There was the strangeness of Michael's ostalgie - a longing for a society he'd never known, and which he knew, objectively, to have been horribly oppressive - and the strangeness of the three of us, seemingly celebrating a terrible political divisiveness at the very moment in history when Europe was starting, once more, to put up its internal barriers. And then there was the car - I realised it was an utter clunker the second I saw it in the garage next to New Broadcasting House in central London. How the relevant BBC wonk had signed off on this one is beyond me - for one, it had no wing mirrors! This made the miserably underpowered vehicle seem yet more like a reification (good Marxist term, that) of our own destinies: There was no looking back - and no stopping either, for the brakes were so inefficient, that when travelling at the Trabi's top speed - a magisterial 60kph - it would take, I calculated, approximately 500 metres to make an emergency stop, while if we hit anything at all when doing over 40kph, my suspicion was the car would entirely disintegrate.

I realised all of this as I wrestled the flimsy yet unwieldy vehicle through the London traffic - but some crazed portion of my psyche allowed me to repress the imminence of my own death. (Which is fair enough, since that's what most of us do, most of the time.) But three days later, in Eisenach, I had an epiphany: I wanted to survive this journey forward into the dead past. Leaving Michael and Laurence to get us a table in the hotel restaurant, I walked up the wooded hill in the nearby Stadtpark. It was dusk, but to the southwest I could see the nearly 500m-high eminence on which sits the famous Wartburg Castle - Mad King Ludwig's inspiration for his own Medievalist fantasias, and the gaff where Martin Luther plotted up when he was translating the Bible into German.

Not that those were the associations uppermost in my mind - rather, I thought of the old tankie I'd shared a squat with in the early 1980s: So enamoured was this avant garde cineaste with the then still-extant DDR that he bought one of the vanishingly small number of Wartburg cars which were made available to buyers in the West. The Wartburg - which was manufactured in Eisenach, and took its name from the castle - was an upmarket version of the Trabant: my friend had the estate version of this woefully underpowered, 900cc car - called, suitably enough 'the Tourist'. Unlike the Trabi, Wartburgs were at least made from metal of some sort. At any rate, my friend's was virulent with rust as well as its engine being hopelessly unreliable. I well remember the frosty morning, when, enraged he ripped off the car's radio aerial and used it, Basil-Fawlty-like, to whip the recalcitrant vehicle.

I, of course, shouted Comrade Stalin's epigram out from one of the squat's shattered windows: "Quantity has a quality all its own." After all, believing you can whip into life a duff car manufactured in a duff regime, seems analogous to Marxist ideology itself, which also figures human history as a bizarre collective 'hero's journey', progressed by a sort of mystical suspension of disbelief: The cut-and-shut car of capitalist society will nonetheless convey us towards the communist utopia. Anyway, up on the Hgel, looking towards the yet-higher one, it impinged on me that the second I'd seen the Trabant, I had indeed fallen victim to a form of false consciousness: Identifying my destiny with completing the radio series, rather than with the coming revolution.

It was a terrible contradiction to have to embrace: I returned immediately to the hotel, and over the flattest schnitzel I've ever eaten, told my companions we'd been metres from a fatal impact the whole way from London, and needed to think hard before we got back in that death trap of a car. Needless to say, the following morning we were back in it, and puttering further east. Perhaps the Marxists are right, and the future is historically determined - which would render ridiculous nostalgia for Great Britain, quite as much as for the German Democratic Republic, both being obviously oxymoronic.

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Will Self's Trabi travels | Latest Brexit news and top stories - The New European

Finally, Im definitely making a platter of her fancy canned cranberries, because its such a clever, chic idea: wit and deliciousness combined. To slice canned cranberry sauce as if it were a ripe tomato is top-drawer Alison. Its my favorite thing.

[See Alisons full Thanksgiving feast here.]

How about you? You can use our Thanksgiving menu planner to figure out some of what you want to cook at the end of the month, or you can browse through our turkey recipes, to see what appeals. (This mojo turkey is no joke.) It is absolutely the right time it is always the right time to think about pie.

As for dinner tonight? I was fishing east of the Breezy Point jetty over the weekend, maybe a mile out from the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, drifting quick on the tide. The water was sparkly and ocean clear, run through with striped bass sipping sand eels and the occasional late-season bonito beneath them. One of those grabbed my big Clouser fly, did some head-shaking runs and eventually came to the boat, and that was my dinner a few hours later, no recipe required.

I had thought to make poke. But one of the kids asked for sushi, and so sushi I made: the fillets of fish cut as carefully as I could manage, then placed onto thumbs of sushi rice and rolled into tubes of nori and finally eaten on its own, sashimi-style, when we ran out of rice. With soy sauce to cut the sweet fattiness of the meat, a little wasabi powder mixed with water for a fiery paste to do the same, and some of the dry Japanese seasoning known as furikake, but which my kids call shake, it all made for a simple dinner of incredible elegance, wild perfection, the best sort of way to honor the harvest. Try it with the best and freshest fish you can find at the market.

Or dont!

You might prefer quick-roasted chicken with tarragon, or perhaps a nice big bowl of pasta alla Norma sorta, from Colu Henry. Im not judging, either way.

Youll find thousands more ideas for what to cook on NYT Cooking. (Yes, you need a subscription to access them.)

You can find further inspiration on our Facebook page. Were on Instagram as well. And on YouTube, of course. Come visit!

And please write if anything goes sideways. Were here to help. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, its really nothing to do with cooking or eating, but if you can make it to David Byrnes American Utopia at the Hudson Theater on Broadway, I think youll find it a remarkable, uplifting, cheerful, strange and smart affair. I couldnt have imagined, way back when, that Byrne would someday take on the role Fred Rogers used to play, but here I am in the neighborhood again, feeling good about the future, despite all.

Speaking of which, please read Michael Schwirtz and Gaelle Borgia on Russias meddling in the election of the president of Madagascar, in The Times. The Kremlin wants whats in the ground in Africa so bad.

Finally, back on the subject of food, Ive been loving the strange explorations of Chinese cuisine brought forth by Flavorful Origins, on Netflix. Check it out. Ill see you on Friday.

See the rest here:

Alison Romans Big Thanksgiving - The New York Times

Byrne: So, how do you find the shows? Do you spend months going to Edinburgh Fringe and various festivals?

Binder: I think that Joe Melillo is superhuman. Hed be like, Oh its Tuesday, Im going to Paris. Ill be back on Thursday. Im not built that way. I tend to go in bigger groupings. So, this Wednesday, Im going to Zurich, Hamburg, the Netherlands, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and London in nine days. And then that will be it for about a month. But I always feel like the New York audience does feel idiosyncratic. Just because the show is working in those cities, I dont necessarily think it would here. David, how were the audiences different with American Utopia?

Byrne: Its pretty consistent, but occasionally wed get surprised. In Santiago, Chile, we did a festival, and I dont think this happened anywhere else: A large portion of the audience copied the choreography. So if we did some gesture, they would all start doing it back to us hundreds of people. Im going to guess its because Santiago has this tradition of mass movements. A number of years ago, they had these huge street protests. They were like performances. There was one where the entire group did the dance from Michael Jacksons Thriller.

Binder: Thats how I learned to produce. Seriously! Doing street demonstrations and actions in Act Up. One time, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS hired me to produce this action about Guantnamo Bay [where the United States quarantined Haitian refugees with H.I.V. in 1993]. We staged this giant thing in Rockefeller Center, with a Statue of Liberty wrapped up in chains. Jonathan Demme was there, and I remember having this conversation with him. He was like, I dont know if I should get arrested. Hes trying to work it out with me and Im, like, 25. And he decided he would, so he did.

T: Thats collaboration! American Utopia is also, in a sense, about the utopian world of collaboration. That seems to define both of your careers. Does it also help keep the work fresh?

Byrne: Oh yeah. It pushes me out of my comfort zone, the things I do by habit. I know that there are some artists who feel that collaboration betrays their vision as an artist. There are some who feel like, My personal vision is sacred. I dont want to dilute it. I find that to be riskier you have this danger of falling into the trap of only being inside yourself.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Excerpt from:

David Byrne and David Binder on Breaking Into the Mainstream - The New York Times

A year ago, the deadliest wildfire in Californias history started in Paradise, a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas; on the same day, in Southern California, the Woolsey Fire broke out, eventually leaping two highways, killing three people, and destroying more than five hundred structures. Paradise was essentially wiped off the map. Malibu, which was devastated by the Woolsey, is just beginning to recover.

In recent weeks, as millions of Californians sat in the dark, subject to planned power outagesa desperate, and ultimately failed, attempt to prevent fires caused by faulty electrical equipmentanother field of fires bloomed, forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes. The Kincade Fire, in Sonoma, burned seventy-seven thousand acres; chillingly, it reached the burn scar from the Tubbs Fire, which had devastated wine country in 2017, killing twenty-three people. In Los Angeles, the Getty Fire lit up the hills of Brentwood, prompting evacuations throughout the citys West Side. The Maria Fire, the Easy Fire, the Hillside Fire... With seemingly the entire state on high alert, literally waiting to see which way the wind would blow, the idea of the California Dream felt utterly exhausted, ironic, sayable only between air quotes.

The dream, in a sentence, is that California, with its perfect weather, provides an idyllic backdrop for a better way of life. Since statehood, California has pitched itself to the nation as a place of reinvention, prosperity, health, and progressivisma utopia on the individual and collective scale. Its still going on: during the East Coasts bitter winter of 2018, the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Boards Everyone is Welcome campaign ran ads in the New York subway which showed people hiking in the sun with the slug The Morning Commute.

The problem with the dream is that it is one, founded on a lie. As the wildfire historian Stephen Pyne said, not long ago, California is built to burn. And its built to burn explosively. That trail in the ad campaign? Chances are that its in the Santa Monica Mountains national park, eighty-six per cent of which burned in the Woolsey Fire. For many, the past couple of years have been a rude awakening, oftentimes to a red sky, an ash rain, and the smell of wood smoke. Californians live in a supposed Eden that looks increasingly hellish.

Until recently, it was possible to repress a sneaking awareness of the weather fallacy, stuff it in the back of the closet, alongside the earthquake kit, and tell oneself that all was well in paradise. But, more so than earthquakes, fire is sensitive to human behavior. The demand for housing in Californiabelievers in the dream need a place to sleep at nighthas pushed development deeper into the mountain foothills and wild spaces, where the ecology depends on fire. (One firefighter I met last week told me, Fire belongs in the mountains. Its healthy. The one thing that doesnt belong here is us.) When the climate grows warmer and drier, as it has in California, catastrophic fires can be an annual, or even more frequent, event. Jerry Brown, the states former governor, called this condition the new abnormal. A cigarette butt, a backfire, a sparktrivial energy, added to dry brush, in the presence of a strong Santa Ana wind, can cause incalculable loss.

In the last week of October, the Getty Fire destroyed twelve houses in Brentwood, a number of them in an architecturally-controlled community called Crestwood Hills. (Luckily, there were no casualties.) Founded as a coperative, in 1946, the community was a response to the severe housing crisis in postwar Los Angeles: at one point, five thousand service members and their families lived in Quonset huts and tents in Griffith Park. Four studio musicians, one of whom had performed summer concerts as part of a string quartet at Frank Lloyd Wrights Taliesin West, had the idea to pool their money and buy a plot of land for four houses and a shared common area; they never followed through on the plan, but their group soon grew to five hundred members, and they bought a hillside instead.

The community, left-leaning and intellectual, was designed to be a middle-class utopia, with affordable Modernist houses and shared resources, such as a coperative nursery school, and, at the center, a park for sports and picnics. The houses are small, by the current standards of the Zip Code; most of them are an elegant twelve hundred square feet or sono flab. This was primarily Jewish population, very progressive, left-wing, almost commie pinko, Cory Buckner, an architect and historian, who wrote a book on Crestwood Hills, told me. Anyone coming in had to be acceptable politically. According to Buckner, people joked that the areas disproportionate number of obstetricians and psychiatrists made Crestwood Hills a great place to have a baby or a nervous breakdown.

The originators hired A. Quincy Jones and Whitney R. Smith as the lead architects in a joint venture with the structural engineer Edgardo Contini, and encouraged the members to study Tomorrows House, a Modern-house how-to, to get acquainted with the wonders of industrially manufactured materials, post-and-beam construction, and indoor-outdoor living. Later, other Modernists, such as Richard Neutra, Rodney Walker, Ray Kappe, and Craig Ellwooda self-invented architect without a degree, who had been the cost estimator on the Eames Housebuilt houses in the community. Simultaneous with the Case Study Program, and sharing both architects and an architectural language, Crestwood Hills quietly became a laboratory for a specific shared vision of postwar life.

While the firefighters were still stamping out the embers of the Getty Fire, I visited the neighborhood with my friend Barton Jahncke, who specializes in restoring Ellwood houses. We passed through a police checkpoint (concern about looters is high in high-end evacuated neighborhoods) and headed to the nosebleed stretch of Tigertail Road. (Celebritieswhose natural-disaster stories grip us with the false sense that weather comes equally for alltend to live on lower Tigertail.) The street was a ghost town, with fire engines. One house, a glass box, had vanished from the hillside; all that was left was the hull of what looked to be a vintage sportscar, with the asphalt roof of the car port fused to its caved-in top, an evil magic trick. We arrived at the Zack House, a 1952 post-and-beam Ellwood house where Jahncke had been hired to work on a small addition, scheduled to begin in a couple of weeks. The house, which was built the same year Ellwood built Case Study House #16, and was originally listed for $119,500, was photographed by Julius Shulman. For decades, it has been in the family of the owner, Melanie Miller Regberg, who lives there with her two children. In the early hours of the Getty Fire, the Zack House was engulfed in flames.

We passed through caution tape into an enchanted forest of collapsed metal beams and posts turned to silvery soft charcoal. The view side of the house, facing the Getty Museum and a now-ashen hillside, was torched. Jahncke kicked through the broken shards of what had been a huge single-pane glass slider, looking for salvageable handles and other original elements, which would be hard to reproduce. He found none. In the kitchen, the cabinets had burned right off the brick walls. Under a pile of wood and metal, there was a sky-blue Le Creuset dutch oven, an insistent reminder of the family that had fled in the night. Jahncke teared up when we passed the younger childs room, imagining how scared he must have felt.

The Zack House had already survived a huge firethe 1961 Bel Air Fire, which wiped out half of the original homes in Crestwood Hills, including A. Quincy Joness own home. The buried memory of that disasterand a famous photo of Richard Nixon standing on the wood-shingled roof of his rental house, spraying it down with a hoseresurfaced during the Getty Fire, invoked by Mayor Eric Garcetti as he signalled the potential for damage. This time, the fire came right up to the guest quarters of another A. Quincy Jones house, where Cory Buckner, the neighborhood historian, has lived for twenty years. On the morning of the fire, Buckner told me, she was awakened by the smell of smoke. When she saw ash raining from the sky, she got out as quickly as she could. I met her there the day after the evacuation was lifted. She showed me her bedroom, a glass-walled promontory that seems to float among treetops, over the park. Every morning, waking up in this house is just a delight, she said. Especially this morning, I thought, Oh, my God, Im still here!

I asked Buckner if the vision of California that gave rise to Crestwood Hills was still valid, in the time of the new abnormal. She didnt answer directly. She told me that she had lost a house in Malibu in 1993; she rebuilt it, only to lose it again, in the Woolsey Fire. (An experimental studio she built below the house, using metal siding, survived.) Her book on Crestwood Hills is subtitled The Chronicle of a Modern Utopia. A utopia is a good or ideal place. Was it still apt? Buckner got a wry look on her face. My daughter lives in New York, she said. She wants to have a serious talk when she comes back in December.

Excerpt from:

Waking Up from the California Dream in the Age of Wildfires - The New Yorker

ROME French Bishop Philippe Jean-Charles Jourdan has some big shoes to fill: At the age of 45, in 2005, he was appointed as the apostolic administrator of the Church in Estonia and became only the second bishop in Estonia since the Protestant Reformation.

The Catholic Church in Estonia, a country Pope Francis visited last year, is a small minority where those who belong to an institutional church are a small minority themselves: an estimated 80 percent of the population describes themselves as non-believers.

When some foreigners visit, Jourdan told Crux they say that they feel like God has disappeared, from this nation that was under Soviet rule from the Second World War until 1991.

The Soviet Union saw Archbishop Eduard Profittlich, Jourdans predecessor and second Catholic bishop since the Reformation, as a threat. He was arrested during World War II and accused of spying for the Germans and inciting hatred against the USSR by appealing to the religious feelings of the masses. He was sentenced to execution by firing squad, but he died in a Gulag in Kirov, in the northeast of European Russia.

Today, Jourdan is leading the cause for his predecessor to be declared a martyr, as he was sentenced to death due to his faith.

Crux caught up with the bishop, a member of Opus Dei, while he was in Rome last week to ordain 29 new deacons to the personal prelature. Among other things, he discussed the rapid secularization in some quarters of western Europe, saying it is true that our experience of the religious situation in Estonia could be, and with some probability will be, the experience of western Europe in the next generation.

Jourdan also said that he doesnt agree with the proposal from some circles calling for Christians to live in small communities isolated from the dangers of a post-Christian society, saying instead that a dedicated presence in the world is necessary, based on a realistic, but also hopeful vision of the society, even of a secularized society.

I find that, perhaps because of difficult circumstances, there is a latent pessimism among Christians nowadays, sometimes leading to apathy and resignation, sometimes on the contrary to an activism mixed with bitterness, the so-called bitter zeal of the spiritual literature, he said.

Crux: A year ago, Pope Francis visited Estonia. What would you say was the impact, if any, of the visit to the country?

Jourdan: Certainly, the visit of Pope Francis had a great impact in our country. Firstly, for the local Catholic Church. We saw a greater number of persons asking to know better the Church and eventually being baptized and received in the Catholic Church.

But it had an impact in society at large too. Before, for the people of our country, the Catholic Church was something very far away, in space or in time. I would say that now the average Estonian perceives the Catholic Church, and especially the Holy Father, as something much closer.

We are much more a part of the religious and social landscape. For the future of the Church in Estonia, which is slowly but steadily growing, it is very important.

You minster in a country where a majority of the population 50 percent describe themselves as non-believers. What is this like?

I would be happy if I could say that half of the Estonian population are believers. But in fact, all the surveys made about religion in Estonia indicate far less, between 20 and 25 percent, 75 to 80 percent being without religion. For that reason, sometimes foreigners visiting Estonia said to me that, by comparison to other places, our country looks like as if God had disappeared, was nowhere to be seen.

Of course, it is also due to the fact that a foreigner never knows very well the country he is visiting and tends to judge only on some appearances. But there is certainly a truth in that. Nevertheless, you find also good people everywhere, looking for a sense in their life.

For instance, I was recently in Santiago of Compostela and was told that since the beginning of the year hundreds of Estonians have come as pilgrims to Santiago, the great majority of them being probably non-Catholics or non-Christians.

In some circles of the Church, theres a lot of concern over growing secularization, but youre in a country where, due to its history, this has been the case for a long time. What would your advice be for those who minister in some of these places, like for instance, most of western Europe?

If I had a recipe against secularization, I would have published it, and of course used it long ago! It is true that our experience of the religious situation in Estonia could be, and with some probability will be, the experience of western Europe in the next generation.

But I dont agree with an idea present in some Church circles that due to the growing secularization living as a Christian in the society becomes virtually impossible, and Christians should retire in small communities, a little bit like the monasteries of the first millennium, which were like well protected sources of light in a dark age.

I dont think this would be a solution. Certainly, each one of us needs, more than ever, the support of a fervent community of Christians where people help each other, on the material as well as spiritual level. It is especially clear in a situation like ours, where every Catholic is usually the only Catholic in his or her family, and often the only Christian.

But a dedicated presence in the world is necessary, based on a realistic, but also hopeful vision of the society, even of a secularized society. I find that, perhaps because of difficult circumstances, there is a latent pessimism among Christians nowadays, sometimes leading to apathy and resignation, sometimes on the contrary to an activism mixed with bitterness, the so called bitter zeal of the spiritual literature.

Both should be avoided.

We should find our model in the first Christians, not in a new utopia fueled by fear. Despite obvious attacks against the sanctity of life and family, a secularized world is not like a new Moloch, swallowing small children.

But living in a secularized world will be certainly a purifying experience, where our former Christian society and way of life will probably be reduced to the one necessary thing Jesus spoke of in Bethania. I think that Pope Francis, thanks to the divine Providence, is preparing us to such an experience. And in the purification are already the seeds of the resurrection!

So, we should not live in a nostalgia of better times. Our time is the time prepared for us by God, and it will also revealthe fruitfulness of the grace of God.

Earlier this year, you were in Rome to deliver to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints the documents of the diocesan phase of the process of beatification for your predecessor, Archbishop Eduard Profittlich, the first bishop of Estonia after the Lutheran Reformation. He could become Estonias first saint, a martyr. What impact could this official recognition have in the countrys small Catholic community? Have you heard anything about the cause, or have you been given a possible date for his beatification?

Of course, I have heard about the cause of Archbishop Profittlich: I have been and I am very directly involved in it! The first phase, the diocesan phase, is finished, and the cause is now in Rome and advancing well. We were given a founded hope that, if things go on well, the Beatification could take place when we celebrate the 80 years of the death of Archbishop Profittlich, in 2022.

But of course, sometimes things in Rome take a lot of time, and we cannot for sure give a date with certainty. It is of course important for our small Catholic community, but also for the whole Estonian society, because it will be also, in a certain way, a recognition by the universal Church of the tragic fate of the whole Estonian people in that dark period of our history.

In any case, I recommend to the readers of this article to ask many things through the intercession of Eduard Profittlich, who is helping many people!

What brought you to Rome this time around?

I am now in Rome to ordain deacons, more than 29 members of the Prelature of Opus Dei. It is certainly for me a great joy, both personally as a member of the Work, and as a bishop, [I am] happy to bring new workers to the vineyard of the Lord.

Follow Ins San Martn on Twitter:@inesanma

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Estonian bishop doesn't have 'a recipe against secularization' - Crux: Covering all things Catholic