the-sheet.com Your Architecture Resource

Japanese architect and artist whose challenging designs tilted at mortality

The Japanese architect and artist Shusaku Arakawa believed that it was immoral for people to have to die. With his wife, Madeline Gins, he designed houses and public spaces that were supposed to help stop us from ageing. His death, at the age of 73, is a flaw in his philosophy of transhumanism, or reversible destiny. "This mortality thing is bad news," Gins said after he died, adding that she would now increase her efforts to prove that "ageing can be outlawed".

For Arakawa and Gins, the ideal form of a house was one that kept residents in a "perpetually tentative relationship with their surroundings". The more our homes challenge us, architecturally, the more likely we are to stay young, grappling with their complexities and, in the case of Arakawa and Gins's flats and houses, their sheer oddity – even perversity.

Their most extreme design, the Bioscleave house (2008), in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, took eight years to build and cost the couple $2m of their own money. Before this colourful and bewildering home was finished, Arakawa and Gins lost the small fortune that they had accumulated since the early 1960s. They had invested money through Bernard Madoff, the American conman they had met at an art exhibition in New York, and the resulting loss led them to close their office in Manhattan.

The Bioscleave house boasted at least three dozen shades of paint. The building features sloping floors in the guise of cartoon-like sand dunes, windows placed where no window is normally placed, level changes aimed at conveying a feeling of being in two places at once, no doors, no privacy, curiously shaped rooms and any number of other surrealist tricks.

The house was designed to keep residents and visitors on their toes – they are hard pushed to even remain vertical. A number of floor-to-ceiling poles were provided, which can be grasped if the inevitable sense of disorientation gets a bit too much.

These curious devices were intended to stimulate us in ways conventional homes do not. A state of comfort, according to Arakawa and Gins, creates anxiety because, although cosseting, it can only ever be finite – and thus shortens rather than prolongs life.

Arakawa rarely used his first name. He was born in Nagoya, studied maths and medicine at the University of Tokyo and attended Musashino art school in Tokyo, where he made surrealist prints. He set off for New York in 1961 with, he claimed, just $14 and the artist Marcel Duchamp's phone number in his pockets. He took a course at Brooklyn Museum art school where, in 1962, he met and married Gins, a fellow student. In 1987 they started the Containers of Mind Foundation together, which later evolved into the Architectural Body Research Foundation. These were the hard-to-place philosophical stepping-stones of their lifelong attempt to create buildings that would enable us to defy death.

They began to paint a series of 83 large paintings on the theme of the mechanism of meaning which were exhibited around the world and, over the years, paid for Arakawa and Gins' architectural experiments. To date, these are a project for a city of reversible destiny on 75 acres of Tokyo wasteland (it never happened); the Bioscleave house; and nine reversible destiny lofts in Mitaka, Tokyo, completed in 2005 at a total cost of around $6m.

The reversible destiny lofts boast colourful rooms in the form of cylinders, cubes and spheres and are known for being interesting and challenging, rather than comfortable, to live in. They are dedicated to the memory of Helen Keller, the American author and political activist who lost her sight and hearing as a child. Keller was a role model for Arakawa and Gins because by relearning how to communicate, she somehow proved that reversible destiny was possible.

The pair believed that the ideal residents of their homes should, following the same principle, be blank slates so that their experience of architecture was continually novel. In this way, explained Arakawa, they would forget that they had to die.

Arakawa had exhibitions of his work around the world, including at the Angela Flowers Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also wrote poetry, animated by such thought-provoking sentiments as "when I am away from you, I feel like a watermelon seed", and "he is elegant between his toes".

He published several tantalising books with Gins, notably The Mechanism of Meaning (1971), Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die (1997) and Making Dying Illegal (2006).

Gins survives him.

• Shusaku Arakawa, artist and architect, born 6 July 1936; died 18 May 2010

The quiz returns with 20th-century architecture (okay, modernist architecture, which squeezes in the late 19th). Why architecture? Well, because it's cool. Because I know a little something about it, and we're starting to run out of things I know a little something about. And because, like film, architecture is one of those things that as I was growing up it seemed to me that generally informed people took the time and trouble to learn something about.

For example, when I moved to New York, I noticed that everybody had this book and spent time walking around the city studying the architecture. And New York isn't even America's greatest architecture city (horrors! New York isn't the greatest?). Chicago is, by a mile.

I wonder now if this passion is an American thing, since so much of the exciting architecture of the century past was American. I guess we're about to find out.

1. Daniel Burnham and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are associated with what urban movement, which dates to the unveiling of the "White City" at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and influenced the design of the National Mall in Washington, DC?
a. The neoclassical movement
b. The city beautiful movement
c. The new republican movement

2. This famous architect was killed by a jealous husband on the roof of the second Madison Square Garden in New York, which he had designed. For extra credit, name the wife whom the architect was fooling around with, and the jealous husband.
a. Calvert Vaux
b. Stanford White
c. Othmar Ammann

3. The arts and crafts movement started in England and spread to the US. What American city is especially known for having followed arts and crafts precepts in its planning and civic architecture?
a. Pasadena, California
b. Seattle, Washington
c. Newark, New Jersey

4. This Chicago architect is the father of modern architecture and coiner of the famous phrase "form follows function"; highly filigreed facades, such as on the Chicago Stock Exchange building, were a trademark of his.
a. Paul Goldberger
b. Herbert Mitgang
c. Louis Sullivan

5. Architecture and ideology have been closely linked throughout human history. At the time of the Russian revolution, the architect Vladimir Tatlin presented an audacious design for a Monument to the Third International to celebrate the new workers' state. It was never built; why?
a. It was 55 stories and he refused on principle to put in elevators, which he considered bourgeois
b. Lenin, after initial enthusiasm, decided that the design reflected obscurantist tendencies and had him shot
c. There wasn't enough steel in all of Russia to build it

6. What famous architect headed the Bauhaus?
a. Otto Dix
b. Walter Gropius
c. Viktor Lutze

7. Which of the following did Frank Lloyd Wright not design?
a. The UN headquarters
b. The Guggenheim Museum
c. Fallingwater

8. What movement, from Europe and America, is best known for flat glass or glass-and-steel facades – no setbacks or tiers, no adornment whatsoever?
a. One Worldism
b. International Style
c. Neocubism

9. Deconstructivism is the name for a more recent movement of architects (some of whom don't like the term) who are known for playfully altering buildings' skin and shapes, seeming to defy geometry, making twisting skyscrapers and public buildings whose parts seem to have emanated out from one another as if by spontaneous combustion. Which of these architects is not fairly associated with this movement?
a. Robert A.M. Stern
b. Frank Gehry
c. Rem Koolhaus

10. According to the website greatbuildings.com, what was the most visited building in the world for the week ending June 5, 2010?
a. The Taj Mahal
b. The Statue of Liberty
c. The Roman Colosseum

Nice last question, eh? Thanks. Okay, let's go below the fold.

Answers: 1-b; 2-b; 3-a; 4-c; 5-c; 6-b; 7-a; 8-b; 9-a; 10-c.

I would have known all but the last one, on which, incidentally, the list is here and is really fascinating. Re 2, the cuckolded hubby was Harry K. Thaw, and the red lady was Evelyn Nesbitt. My best fake answers this week were on 5, although some of you may have chuckled at 4 a and b.

Innovative architect whose skyscrapers marked city skylines around the world

Few architects can legitimately lay claim to having shaped the urban landscape of several cities in their lifetimes, but Bruce Graham, the leading partner of the US design firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), who has died aged 84 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, certainly can. With an iron fist and an all-consuming passion, Graham ruled one of the most influential architectural practices of the late 20th century from Chicago, the city that synthesises the visual energy, technical inventiveness and economic clout of 20th-century modernism in architecture.

Graham's designs for SOM, which at their best possess these special qualities, mark the skylines of Chicago and London, but also Barcelona, Hong Kong and many other US cities. In Chicago, the city of skyscrapers, he authored its two most canonical structures – the delicately stacked volumes of the Sears Tower (for 24 years the world's tallest building, recently renamed the Willis Tower) and the tapering black Hancock Tower, with its distinctive criss-cross bracing disappearing into the Illinois sky.

In London, he gave shape to large parts of the 1980s building boom, designing nine buildings and the masterplan for the Broadgate office complex at Liverpool Street station and the Ludgate development near St Paul's Cathedral (for Stuart Lipton's development company, Rosehaugh Stanhope), as well as the initial plans for the Canary Wharf financial district in London's Docklands and the beautifully landscaped Stockley Park, near Heathrow. Outside London, he designed the restrained and elegant headquarters for Wills Tobacco (1971) in Bristol and the Boots Pure Drug Company headquarters, Nottingham (1968), both collaborations between SOM and the British architectural practice YRM.

Quick-witted, curious and always alert, Graham seemed to capture the spirit of the age from the mid-1970s to the 1990s. In a sense, he reinvented the role of the architect, recognising that the job is just as much about city-making and power-broking as it is about pure design talent, which Graham possessed in spades. His London client Lipton is adamant that Graham's understanding of how buildings are put together, how structure and form are integrated, and how any design must respond to its social context, changed the way commercial buildings have been made in the UK from the 1980s on.

Born in La Cumbre, Colombia, to a Peruvian mother and a Scottish banker father, Graham was brought up in Puerto Rico. As a child, he dreamed of building cities. As a teenager, he took pleasure in mapping the local slums, showing an early interest in the social and spatial politics of city life. He was educated in the US as an engineer and an architect and then joined the US navy during the second world war. "I thought I had landed in a dream," he noted in an interview in 1997, when reminiscing about his first impressions of Chicago and the midwest, where he saw his first building more than 10 storeys high. Two decades later, he was responsible for designing the tallest and third tallest buildings in the world.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Graham moved to Chicago and developed a fast-track career within SOM – one of the world's largest architectural practices – becoming a general partner in 1960 and leading the firm during the next two decades. In these early days, he forged links with Mies van der Rohe and other European modernist architects who had fled Nazi Germany, and was hugely influenced by their sparse, minimalist and technologically advanced design ethic.

But Graham never saw his projects at SOM as single pieces. They were part of a continuum of collaboration and experimentation that spanned his whole career, relying on the input from his trusted engineer Fazlur Khan ("the best in the world, who understood mathematics and architecture") and his fellow, equally talented design partners at SOM, such as Gordon Bunshaft and Myron Goldsmith.

From the inspired, minimalist designs for the Inland Steel building (1958) in Chicago (still regarded as one of the finest postwar US buildings) to the exposed structural arches of Exchange House (1990) that effortlessly span 80 metres above the railway tracks leading to Liverpool Street station in London, Graham's buildings reveal a desire to push forward the boundaries of experimentation in construction, technology and architectural expression. His design philosophy reflected a lifelong interest in collaboration – with engineers, artists, landscape designers, developers, clients and other architects – emphasising his belief that buildings do not stand alone, but always belong to a context.

But those of us who worked alongside Graham, as I did as an adviser to SOM and the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism in the late 1980s, recognised a generosity of spirit behind the aggressive "city-builder" who inherited the traditions and methods of Daniel Burnham, the great urban visionary who created the 1901 Plan of Chicago. Graham became chairman of the Chicago Central Area Plan in 1980 and worked closely with Mayor Richard Daley (father of the current incumbent) and Chicago's business community to bring about change at the heart of the city he loved.

Graham was deeply critical of the negative impact of mid-20th-century planning, which devastated urban communities with the construction of freeways, the expansion of the suburbs and the emptying of city centres. His vision with the Chicago Central Area Plan was to reverse this trend, creating new downtown residential neighbourhoods, often bucking the market with radical ideas – such as the construction of the Hancock Tower in a fringe location – which brought investment to neglected areas of the city. Today, Chicago is seen as a US metropolitan success story, with more people moving back into the centre, as Graham had envisaged decades ago.

Graham possessed the raw intellect of a streetfighter, rather than the polished mannerisms of a design professional. He enjoyed spending time with mayors, developers and corporate clients, but was scornful of elitism. He often spoke frankly and harshly. Frank Lloyd Wright, the doyen of American architecture, was, in Graham's mind, "a mean old man". Many architects were simply "stupid". But he was equally generous with those he admired and went out of his way to help them, especially his old friend Frank Gehry.

Behind the hot-headed, hard-speaking facade was a softer, psychologically astute and socially engaged individual who cared passionately about the world. He had strong opinions on politics and delighted at the demise of imperialism, as he saw it. Dedicated to his family, he referred to his Austrian wife Jane, a distinguished interior architect, as his "No 1 critic". Graham's softer personality came out regularly. He often spoke Spanish, hugging a glass of whiskey among colleagues, grimacing or giggling at the stories of common friends and enemies. One of his favourite phrases was the basketball epithet "slam dunk". In many ways, Bruce's life was a slam dunk for urban architecture, and this is how he wished to be remembered.

Jane died in 2004. Bruce is survived by his son, George, and daughters, Lisa and Mara.

• Bruce John Graham, architect, born 1 December 1925; died 6 March 2010

From the Pyramide du Louvre to Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art, we look back at the daring and elegant designs that made architect IM Pei a household name

The winning design by KieranTimberlake architects reflects the US political process: nominally open to all, yet, in practice, tightly controlled

The new US embassy to the Court of St James's has been designed, says the US state department, to "reflect the values of the American people". Just as well, perhaps, that its architects, KieranTimberlake, aren't being asked to reflect the values of the British people, otherwise we'd probably end up with a building in the guise of a footballer-style Kentucky Fried Georgian luxury mansion with a Cabe-approved Tesco attached and the whole caboodle opened by Justin Timberlake.

Luckily for London, the American people are considerably more sophisticated and less populist than we are. Here in Nine Elms, the new embassy will adopt the form of a giant glass box on stilts rising from a Princess Diana-style memorial park, complete with a lake and what appears to be a ha-ha. Seriously.

KieranTimberlake have a well-established track record designing nicely resolved college campuses, including those of Yale and Cornell. Given that the London embassy will be a cross between a secure compound and a political and cultural complex, the Philadelphia practice may well prove to be a sound, if unexciting, choice.

Keen for the building not to be seen as a Bush-era bunker – the vast new US embassy in Baghdad is about as diplomatic as a "shock 'n' awe" strike by the military – the design makes extensive use of glass, although this will be protected by a blast-resistant polymer skin.

Cool, remote and superficially transparent, the winning design does reflect what we can divine of the US political process. Nominally open to all and yet, in practice, tightly controlled, the system of US government and its prevailing culture, aped bad-temperedly in Britain, does indeed inform the brief to KieranTimberlake and their response to it.

Embassies have, however, for good reasons, become an awkward building type today. The days of pottering about in the fine library of the Eero Saarinen-designed US embassy in Grosvenor Square are long gone. All foreigners are suspect. They should keep their distance in future just as this defensive embassy, surrounded by corporate-style office blocks, will from them and, sadly, central London itself.

Jonathan Glancey on the new US embassy for London

British jurors, including Richard Rogers, have argued the building is unfit to represent the US in Britain

With a billion dollar budget and a prime site on the banks of the Thames, the plans for the new US embassy in Britain were intended to cement Washington's "special relationship" with London for decades to come.

But tonight's long-awaited unveiling of designs by US ambassador Louis Susman for one of the most expensive embassies ever built threatened to be overshadowed by a high-level spat.

The Guardian has learned that the only two British members of the seven-strong design jury "fought to the death" against their American counterparts in a failed bid to block a winning design which they argued was not world class and was unfit to represent the US in Britain. Lord Rogers, the architect of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and Lord Palumbo, the property developer and art collector, felt so strongly about the inadequacies of the winning design, they submitted a "minority report" setting out their case to the US state department in Washington, which commissioned the building.

As Susman unveiled the designs of the Philidephia-based firm of Kieran Timberlake – a 12-storey cube clad in a blastproof glass and plastic façade – it emerged the British jurors believe the Obama administration should have selected a rival design by a Californian designer, Thom Mayne, who won the Pritzker Prize, architecture's version of the Nobel, in 2005. They were overruled by the five Americans on the panel, including former ambassador Clyde Taylor.

Rogers and Palumbo are said to have thought the design was boring and "not good enough to represent one of the great nations in London", said sources familiar with the jury process. By contrast, they considered Mayne's design to be "touched by genius".

After the spat with two of the most prominent figures in British architecture, and both peers, a second diplomatic banana skin looms: the US government has yet to agree with HM Treasury about whether it will pay VAT on the building cost and the $1bn (£650m) price quoted yesterday did not include VAT. Susman said last night talks are continuing.

The embassy is set to become one of the most expensive in the world, cheaper only than America's fortress-like outposts in Baghdad and Islamabad.

In 2008 Washington announced a move out of the Mayfair building occupied since the beginning of the Kennedy era for security reasons. Attempts to fortify the building in such a built-up location proved difficult and the embassy's 1,000 staff had begun to outgrow the space.

But the decision to move to a new home on a vacant semi-industrial site in Wandsworth surrounded by a 30-metre blast zone, sparked fears that it planned a "fortress embassy" in south London. The UK government's own design advisers worried that early designs suggested a building that "turns its back" on the local area and lacks "a sufficiently civilising effect".

The designs unveiled yesterday suggest a medieval keep and even include a moat-like ditch along one side. James Timberlake, the lead architect, said that, inspired by European castles, he had tried to use the landscape to provide a defence against terror attacks and there would be "no fences and no walls".

"We hope the message everyone will see is that it is open and welcoming," he said. "It is a beacon of democracy – light filled and light emitting."

KieranTimberlake, little known outside the UK, was a surprise winner against three of America's most celebrated architects, all of whom have won the Pritzker.

Alongside Mayne were the firm of IM Pei, who designed the Louvre pyramid in Paris, and Richard Meier, who built the Getty Centre in Los Angeles. KieranTimberlake is best known for its buildings for Ivy League universities and environmentally-friendly design.

Contacted last night, Rogers declined to comment on his view of the building. "It was a very well-organised competition and I can't comment on the decision of the jury," he said. Palumbo could not be reached for comment.

Questioned about the row, Susman said simply: "The entire committee signed off on the project."

Paul Finch, the chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, which will advise on whether the building should be granted planning consent, said the designs appeared to be of a high quality.

"It is a sophisticated cube," he said. "The designers have given a lot of attention to the environmental controls. This will stand out in an area that is due for a huge wave of development."

The plans feature an attempt to integrate defences in a park landscape using grass berms, a man-made lake and even a moat. The most iconic part of the Mayfair building is likely to remain. There are plans to relocate the bronze eagle which sits on the roof of the current embassy as a statue in the gardens.

The Mayfair building is earmarked for development as luxury apartments and a hotel after it was bought for an estimated £350m by the Qatari government.

Expert view: Cool, remote and far from subtle

The new US embassy to the Court of St James's has been designed, says the US state department, to "reflect the values of the American people". Just as well, perhaps, that its architects, KieranTimberlake, aren't being asked to reflect the values of the British people, otherwise we'd probably end up with a building in the guise of a footballer-style Kentucky Fried Georgian luxury mansion with a Cabe-approved Tesco attached and the whole caboodle opened by Justin Timberlake.

Luckily for London, the American people are considerably more sophisticated and less populist than we are. Here in Nine Elms, the new embassy will adopt the form of a giant glass box on stilts rising from a Princess Diana-style memorial park, complete with a lake and what appears to be a ha-ha. Seriously.

KieranTimberlake have a well-established track record designing nicely resolved college campuses, including those of Yale and Cornell. Given that the London embassy will be a cross between a secure compound and a political and cultural complex, the Philadelphia practice may well prove to be a sound, if unexciting, choice.

Keen for the building not to be seen as a Bush-era bunker – the vast new US embassy in Baghdad is about as diplomatic as a "shock 'n' awe" strike by the military – the design makes extensive use of glass, although this will be protected by a blast-resistant polymer skin.

Cool, remote and superficially transparent, the winning design does reflect what we can divine of the US political process. Nominally open to all and yet, in practice, tightly controlled, the system of US government and its prevailing culture, aped bad-temperedly in Britain, does indeed inform the brief to KieranTimberlake and their response to it.

Embassies have, however, for good reasons, become an awkward building type today. The days of pottering about in the fine library of the Eero Saarinen-designed US embassy in Grosvenor Square are long gone. All foreigners are suspect. They should keep their distance in future just as this defensive embassy, surrounded by corporate-style office blocks, will from them and, sadly, central London itself.

Jonathan Glancey

Inventive Argentinian architect and teacher whose work was eye-openingly modern

When, in 1956, the Argentinian architect Eduardo Catalano, who has died aged 92, won House and Home magazine's House of the Decade award, even the hyper-critical Frank Lloyd Wright was impressed. He wrote a letter to the US monthly praising the radical design of the house Catalano had designed for himself in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Built in 1954, this was certainly some house: a feat of imagination, adventurous geometry and bravura structural engineering. Eye-openingly modern, it was also beautiful. Essentially a glazed pavilion with a free-flowing plan that wove interior and surrounding garden together, the Catalano House stood under a daring roof. Some compared this with a saddle, some to the wing of an aircraft and others, less kindly, to a potato crisp. The 4,000 sq ft roof warping over Catalano's three-bedroom family house was an 87ft-wide hyperbolic paraboloid, made from straight sections of timber, and held in unlikely place at two of its corners by concrete buttresses and steel tension cables passing underground between them. The square living area below, divided into elegant rooms, was sheathed entirely in glass.

Ever since, the Catalano House has been a staple of design magazines and books on the history of inventive 1950s homes, one of those charismatic modern houses pointing to a future form of design that the family home worldwide, let alone the US, had little intention of adopting. Even Catalano himself only lived here for a year. After several years of neglect, the house was demolished in 2001.

Catalano moved on, not just from the teaching post created for him in 1951 at the new School of Design at North Carolina State University, but also from the very form of design and structure that had made his name during his years in Raleigh. His later works, notably the various buildings, including the Stratton Student Centre, on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, and the new US embassy building in Buenos Aires, were formidable, even brutalist, concrete affairs. Rigorous? Yes. Powerful? Definitely. Mathematical? Without a shadow of doubt. Yet the spirit of sheer joy and creative lightness of the house in Raleigh seems to have been buried some time between Catalano's departure from Raleigh and his arrival at MIT in 1956.

He went on to become a revered teacher at MIT until his retirement in 1977 when he re-emerged as an architect-artist as if the years of heavy concrete had suddenly been lifted from him. In 2002, his Floralis Generica, an enormous aluminium and stainless steel flower that opens at dawn and folds at sunset, was built next to the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. Flamboyant and slightly bonkers, the 75ft high, 18-tonne sculpture was made, to exacting specifications, from materials supplied by Lockheed Martin Aircraft Argentina; here flora and aeronautics were grafted on to one another.

Catalano studied architecture at Buenos Aires University and won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. He moved on to a postgraduate course at Harvard under Walter Gropius, founding director of the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany. Catalano's academic prowess was rewarded with a year's teaching at the Architectural Association in London, before he was headhunted for a professorship at North Carolina State University in 1951.

In Raleigh, the Catalano House provoked a mix of incredulity and bemusement. Catalano liked to tell the story of the day after a hurricane blasted Raleigh while the house was under construction. The roof structure had been fixed and, although the architect initially feared that it might be lifted like a kite in the storm, it flexed, but otherwise stood in place. "A very young man came," said Catalano, "delivering rolls of fibreglass sheets for use in roofing the shell. He saw the twisted roof, opened his eyes wide, and, as if trying to comfort me, placed one hand on my shoulder, sighing 'Oh, boy! You really got it!'"

In the late 1990s, Preservation North Carolina sought to buy the property and looked for $1m to rebuild it. Help never came, and so the house went. In 2005, Catalano offered to design and pay $1.5m for a pavilion on the campus of North Carolina State University in the guise of the roof of his demolished house. This, however, was seen as an intrusion on the landscape. All went quiet; nothing has happened since.

In New York, meanwhile, the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have been rebuilding the Juilliard school of music and the Alice Tully hall at Lincoln Center, designed by Catalano with Pietro Belluschi. The legacy of this inventive designer and inspired teacher may be in safe – or at least, imaginative – hands. The ghost of the Catalano House in Raleigh lives on to haunt the architectural imagination. Catalano is survived by a son and a daughter.

• Eduardo Fernando Catalano, architect, born 19 December 1917; died 28 January 2010

The roadside diners, motels and cinemas we've seen countless times in films are the stars of a new exhibition at the Fox Talbot Museum

Donors can 'adopt-a-building', including some of New York city's most well-known structures

Life is hard in the property market of New York City, where house prices are falling and offices stand empty. But nobody thought it would get as bucket cheap as this.

Manhattan apartments can now be bought for $50 (£36) each. Brooklyn brownstone family homes are available for $250, and anyone with $10,000 to spare can have the Chrysler or Empire State buildings.

To be fair, the deal is not a matter of bricks and mortar so much as balsa wood and plaster of Paris. It is the latest, and undoubtedly the most innovative, ruse on the part of an American cultural institution to raise funds amid the financial drought.

At the heart of the scheme is the Panorama, an exact scale model of the city circa 1992. Every house, every skyscraper, every bridge, sports stadium, park, cemetery, flyover and airport is lovingly reproduced, at a scale of 1 inch (2.5 centimetres) to 100 feet (30 metres).

Donors can "adopt-a-building" in return for a "personal deed" for the scale model. For $10,000, developers can opt to update their property to include new structures not shown in the model. In the first such case, the New York Mets baseball team this week paid to replace its recently demolished Shea stadium with the new 45,000-seater Citi Field - all six inches of it.

The response to the scheme has been huge, largely so far from private individuals wanting to "buy" their own homes. "We're in a real estate boom," said David Strauss of the Queens Museum that houses the Panorama.

The model was put together for the 1964 World's Fair, and last updated in 1992 when 60,000 new buildings were added. They included the Twin Towers, which still stand tall when visitors walk around the giant structure that sprawls over 9,335 sq ft (867 sq metres).

What began as a celebration of New York's vibrant culture is now a good example of the difficulties the city faces in keeping that culture alive.

Public subsidies to museums have been slashed as a result of New York's multibillion budget shortfall. Visitor numbers are down along with the decline in tourism. Even such institutional giants as the Metropolitan Museum last week announced it was cutting a tenth of its staff with the loss of 250 jobs amid falling revenue.

The World Trade Centre is not up for adoption under the new scheme, as the Queens Museum of Art has no desire to dig a hole into the model on the site of downtown Manhattan.

But it is hoping that the developers of the Freedom Tower, the 1,776-foot tall replacement for the Twin Towers, now going up, will pay for that to be replicated once the skyscraper is completed.