Real estate more profitable than sex?

The landscape of Amsterdam is about to change. About a third of Amsterdam's red-lit windows for prostitutes will disappear from the city center as one of the main brothel owners is set to sell his empire to a real estate company for about 25 million euros ($35 million). A funny quote if ever I read one: "Mayor Job Cohen said he had no plans to rid Amsterdam of prostitution but the concentration of sex in the city center was too high."

I really enjoy exploring Zeeland through Google satellite maps, but the sight of this housing development actually makes me ill. No geographic image has evoked such a visceral reaction in me before. The thing looks like some sort of pox. It's clearly somebody's idea of a good time, residents and architects included. Perhaps on the ground it has its virtues. But all the identical roofs suggest identical houses. Just horrid.

In better image news, I've found the first online specimen for my safety card collection.

architectural social commentary

Dutch architects Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk manage social critique through their Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision while simultaneously preserving what they criticize in ghostly images. But they also subject those who visit and, more importantly, those who work in the building daily to what sounds like a rather harsh interpretation they've placed on media. The building, compared by this journalist to the Beinecke Library at Yale, looks gorgeous, but how will the inhabitants feel about it in ten years? Have the architects managed to balance usability with a flexible social critique?

The Belgians are getting taller and heavier. Not the most surprising news around the block. But Dutch men are the tallest Europeans, and Dutch women weigh the most in Europe, while Ireland has the biggest difference between the sexes. That's weird.

Can one but snicker at the fact that a well-known historical organ resides in Uithuizen, the Netherlands (i.e. Outhouses)?

There is an interesting photography display concerning American outhouses in the Center at High Falls. Most of the doors are labeled with a crescent moon.