loud paper

a return to tiny

How to compose 5,500 acres into 500 words? This is what I ask myself as I write up a short piece on Atlanta's BeltLine—a massively ambitious, urban design and transit rethink. Which is why I am indebted to Itinerant Urbanist Karrie Jacob for bringing a miniscule moment to my screen and adding to my tiny collection. At work on the artist’s monograph, she describes Gary Panter’s mini-buildings, posting:

Unlike Philip Johnson's Glass House, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, the glass walls in Gary Panter's high-modernist masterpiece, the Meiji Almond House, are merely implied. Gary, who is well known as an underground cartoonist and painter has, for years, been building tiny houses and other sorts of structures, mostly from the scraps of packing material that tend to accumulate in his studio.

Pretty neat. I look forward to seeing more little structures in the forthcoming book. And now I need to return to the scale of regional infrastructure.

Farnsworth House meets flooded Fox River, more images in Steve's Basement.

transtructural

Amanda Hughen
Feastory (detail)
Ink, pencil, and acrylic paint on mylar
36 x 56 inches
2007

The drawings of San Francisco-based artist Amanda Hughen lie at the intersection of geometric and organic forms—at once biologic and crystalline. It is is easy to get lost in the worlds she creates. Describing the work as a “scientific experiment gone awry,” she continues:

The resulting form is ambiguous: is it an aberrant island viewed from above, a blossoming virus, a microscopic map of the brain, or a flower from some science-fiction realm?

Amanda creates each piece by layering freehand ink and pencil lines over screenprinted acrylic, using both sides of a Mylar sheet. The result is a richly-textured surface that reveals intricate patterns as you linger over the piece.

Since the work is best appreciated in person, check out Transtructural, opening this Thursday at Johansson Projects in Oakland, where she shares the bill with the surreal quazi-architectural stylings of Mike Meyers.

Regulated Concentration
ink, pencil, and acrylic paint on mylar
44 X 34.75 inches
2006

detail of Regulated Concentration

public spectacles

Last Saturday, I took my Fiction frames out for a late-summer spin. The weather was just perfect to go check out the Warm-Up dance party held at PS1. Each year, the museum invites young architects to compete in the design of the shade structure installed in the courtyard. That event in itself stirs up the architecture community—identifying hot, emergent offices and experimental design techniques. This year’s winner, Liquid Sky by Los Angeles-based Ball-Nogues, is a six-spire revival tent made out of Mylar panels. Sunlight filters through the petals giving everyone a healthy pink glow. People danced to an array of DJs and hipsters relaxed in hammock-like nets hung from telephone poles, a design that evoked a psychedelic, paramilitary crash pad. Apocalypse Wow?

I love how my glasses match the tent.

afterglow

I am excited to see that Michael Meredith of mos just posted a pic of the recently completed Ancram Studio.

Comissioned by artist Terry Winters, the parallelogram-shaped structure is the firm’s biggest project to date and it mixes up mos's twin obsessions with the natural world and digital experimentations.

The piece I wrote for July/August issue of Form Magazine about the collaborative office (which also gives a more in-depth discussion of the Ancram Studio) is now available online as a PFD.

resurrecting boring: RVs

Los Angeles architect and artist Jeremy Quinn of Rise Industries recently informed me that his ASCII-like mural California Pastoral was selected for exhibition at the California Design Biennial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, writing:

The mural, a 30' x 7' layout of vinyl text installed on a glass wall, was originally commissioned by United States Artists for their offices. United States Artists is an organization created to identify and support American artists, providing around 50 fellowships yearly. California Pastoral creates a large-scale image of lush foliage out of 1/2" tall text abbreviations of the 50 states. The work provides a layer of privacy to the USA offices, as well as a dramatic backdrop to the front workspaces.

The installation sounds great and images are up on flickr.

Jeremy’s email reminded me that RVs, another one of his projects, was lurking in my Boring folder, so I thought I'd share his drawings and analysis of these crusty urban nomads:

RVs
by Jeremy Quinn

I stepped out the door of my apartment in Culver City one morning to find someone’s home parked at the curb. A thirty-foot RV had materialized in the night, taking up three parking spaces, it snuggled right up to the bumper of my ’88 VW Fox. Stained, dented, dirty, and patched in places with anything from scrap aluminum to cloth bandanas, the rear bumper tied on with clothesline, the RV stayed with us for several weeks, moving only from one side of the street to the other to avoid parking tickets when the street-sweeper came, and taking up precious real estate in a neighborhood of apartments without off-street parking. It moved mysteriously, late at night. We never saw the occupant, though during its stay someone broke into my neighbor’s apartment just to use the bathroom. Little bits of trash built up around its door, evidence of a fast-food diet.

Then one day it was gone again. Parking got a little roomier, but now when I drive around Los Angeles, I always notice them—dozens lining Washington and Rose in Venice, along Riverside in Silverlake. There is usually a blue and white one across from El Cid on Sunset. They are a roving housing development, moving with the posted parking regulations and calls to the police from irritated new neighbors.

A nomadic, bungalow typology, the blunt, extruded sectional form of the late 70s Dodge Sportsman and the 1964 Chevy Outdoorsman repeats in neighborhoods all across Los Angeles. While they share major formal characteristics: the extruded form, bulbous corners, aluminum outer trim, passenger side door, slider windows, obtuse angles wheel wells, they all bear unique marks of the road. Custom details, little luxuries added on to the base model, hand-made repairs and improvements transform the sheet metal elevations into a custom home.

retro chic

Dream home with cloud motif. See Curbed for more on this Staten Island beauty.

mix, tape

Cousin Archie Zimm often sends philosophical questions my way. Queries like "So, what's your definition of deconstruction?" A week or three later I cobble together an answer and volley it back. Slow-tech with mental static. This afternoon he sent over some of his recent artwork: small paintings of quotidian objects executed on pieces of wood salvaged from the lot next to our grandmother's house in LA. You can even see the Fairfax-area sunlight hitting the concrete back patio. In my mind’s eye I see the untended orange and banana trees shading the yard. The cassette tape appeals to my retro tastes of late.

puckered veneer

I don’t really have a good bead on Veneer Magazine. From what I can tell, it is somewhere between Vice and Granta, perhaps with some Cabinet thrown it for good, artsy measure.

That said, Flint Jamison’s post on the Denver Art Museum is an inspired entry into the chic world of architectural slogging. I was at the Denver Art Museum in December after the big snow storm and all the skylights were leaking. The building is really desperate. To get at the meaning of Libeskind's creation, Flint transcribed an SMS conversation between himself and Steve Kado, an “architecture-school-drop-out-turned-semiotician colleague.” Picking out a favorite line isn’t easy.

Choice one, Kado on Libeskind:

12:45:10 PM SK: His writing reads like Bono on African poverty. But less charismatic.

Or, choice two, regarding structural details:

12:52:51 PM SK: The design he submitted to be built had to be modified because there were all these glass panels hung by psychokinesis.

Or, read the whole meghilla and try to hold back the tears.

re: retro

It’s been happening for a while now and, I suppose, I’ve been recalibrating and preternaturally bracing for the full-fledged revival of my 1990s. I say my because the dates and influences aren’t clean—I picked up on some late-80s stuff late and I’d be hard pressed to clearly call anything by a proper label such as riot grrl or grunge. My fandom has never been categorical.

Courtney Love was on Studio 360 on Sunday, babbling on about her fucked-up life and Kurt and Francis. I listened inattentively, my ears perking up only when the producers played a clip of Doll Parts off Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This. The sound is vinegary. Instantly, I am transported back in time, not to some show (although I seem to have a vague recollection of catching Hole on tour through Ithaca), but into architecture studio: headphones on, hunched over a drafting board, drawing lots and lots of lines. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense that my thesis was bathhouse in San Francisco based on corseting and peepshows, seeped in feminist architectural critique, given my steady musical diet of Hole, Liz Phair, Belly, and the Breeders.

More time travel today. I walked into my local coffee shop, Outpost, a bright spot on a particularly run down stretch of Fulton Avenue in Brooklyn. The foppy server has the Pixies’ Surfa Rosa playing on LP. Kim Deal hollers “This is a song about a superhero named Tony It's called: Tony's Theme,” and wham, back at the drafting board marking time in graphite. I have to admit that it is not quite authentic to play that 1988 album on vinyl; he’s a twenty-something Pratt student, so I’ll cut him some slack on the record-playing pretension. For me it is all about cassette.

I was thinking about cassettes a couple weeks ago when Sonic Youth headlined McCarren Pool. They played their 1988 Daydream Nation start to finish: balls-out rock ‘n roll kicked off with the opening chords of Teen Age Riot. It is an unnatural way to present the music live. Bands always mix up the hits, otherwise it’d be like singing along in the car, but without tape hiss. Playing Daydream Nation in its entirety preserves something that never happened: it fictionalizes, makes an art piece. Is it Fluxus or an easy way to recontextualize and commodify Sonic Youth for a younger generation?

While my musings on retro have yet to really codify, they began while standing in the aquamarine pool, the remaining paint flaking off while luxury condos, in various states of construction, rise tall around the perimeter. The space is a vestige of 1936 Robert-Moses brand optimism, layered with 80s nihilism, and today’s narcissism, or is it apathy? Hard to say. The band sounded great, the people looked cool, and Kim Gordon danced around the stage with abandon.

pattern language

Self-portrait with frost and terrazzo.

Over at varnelis.net, Kazys posts about his William Gibson mini-obsession—in light of the recently released Spook County. The enthusiasm is infectious, and I’ve allowed it to lead me to Gibson’s 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition.

Forty pages in, the novel makes me jittery, filled as it is with jet lag and brand name anxieties. The details overwhelm: catalogs of cool desires and detachments. It stirs up memories of a year where, coolhunter adjacent, I worried if my jeans were a dark enough hue. Soon after I switched to corduroy.

Page 19 offers up an addition to my catalog of eyeglass-related quotes:

Brutally cropped, he regards her from the depths of massive, mask-like Italian spectacles. The black-framed glasses remind her of emoticons, those snippets of playschool emotional code cobbled up from keyboard symbols to produce sideways cartoon faces. You could do his glasses with an eight, hyphen for his nose, the mouth a left slash.

8-\. The international symbol for dork. Cool be damned.