loud paper

end of aughts and aught-nots

Liam Gillick, MCA Chicago

It's fitting that there is snow on the ground this New Years Eve. It muffles the sound and slows down a year, a decade that seemed to fragment and shatter. Not only at its end, but in cycles of crystalline bubbles and bursts—like the champagne music of Lawrence Welk. So, after spinning that bottle again and again, each time forgetting the killer hangover, we are at the end.

Architecture, publishing, and design all suffered massive hits this year and as 2010 dawns they will have to reshape or die. It will happen from the bottom up.

Yet, I am optimistic for 2010. Friends, colleagues, and collaborators are scheming. New ideas are brewing. Nothing is monetizable, yet. But there is a notable shift to a "do it anyway" sensibility that comes from being rudely sobered after binge-drinking mid-decade riches. 

Last year I predicted that the future is not what it used to be. It's still not. We're still kinda screwed. But, at midnight I'll raise a glass to the somewhat-hardened, bad-ass folks who are questioning, building, writing, thinking, curating, and editing right now.

Happy New Year.

warped

 

The November issue of Metropolis magazine is on newsstands and I can't think of a better way to ring in the holiday season than with a quote from the piece I wrote on the Deform Courtyard by Thom Faulders. Here's what Thom's client had to say:

“I wanted someone to barf when they look at it,” says [Jeff] Dauber, a senior executive at Apple.

Yes, warped. But the courtyard is only an illusion—a computer-generated trick rendered in CNC milled tiles.

Read the whole story here.

 

feeling sentient

It took awhile for my brain to formulate the words “science fair” as I walked through Toward the Sentient City, now on view at the Architectural League of New York, but once there I couldn’t shake them. The two words weren’t meant as derogatory or judgmental, quite the opposite. Curator Mark Shepard brought together five projects that embed the urban environment with the technologies of ubiquitous computing—sensors, RFID tags, and networks—and the result is a welcome familiarity.

Here, technology wants you to engage, not just with it, but also with the people and critters in the world around you. Amphibious Architecture, a collaboration between The Living and Natalie Jeremijenko, dunks an array of interactive tubes in the East River and the Bronx River. Equipped with sensors, the tubes collect water quality readings and monitor for fish. In the gallery, viewers are asked to text the fish a watery “What up?” and the fish report back on the state of their ecosystem. The architecture here is not just amphibious but anthropomorphic; I sent the fish a message and the fish wrote back “Underwater, it now loud,” signaling the presence of marine life, and urged me to text friends AhoyAnchovie and HeyHerring.

The National Science Fair, first founded in 1941, rose to popularity in the 1950s under the shadow of the cold war. Meanwhile suburban kitchens filled with appliances and ever more complex chemical solutions, science fairs served a double purpose. They trained American youth and offered the public a perceived transparency to the scientific and technological developments. If a high-schooler could build a crystal radio set, then the country’s future is in good hands. In many ways ubiquitous computing a similar model. The complex networks that provide the underpinnings of daily life are made visible; as seen in Trash Track that uses RFID tags to map garbage or Breakout! an experiment in co-working in the city’s café, parks, and public space. 

There’s comfort in that.

Or discomfort, if we use the street furniture developed by JooYoun Paek and David Jimison as an example. Capable of making vagrancy judgments, their Smart Bench uses movement sensors and a hearty robotic system to boot sitters if they lounge too long. Wall text describes all three of the Too Smart City projects (bench, trashcan, and street sign) as “overly enthusiastic”—a phrase that captures and critiques the blind deployment of computational technology in the urban realm. Are Paek and Jimison suggesting that we shouldn’t get too comfortable with these technologies? As our actions in public space are tracked and monitored is the correct response acceptance, awareness, or action?

Just as mid-century science fairs’ optimism was colored by atomic fear, Toward a Sentient City has its own specter: the fate of the environment. Natural Fuse by Usman Haque, Dot Samsen, Ai Hasegawa, Cesar Harada, and Barbara Jasinowicz, comes across at first as a cheerful, hands-on learning station. Designed to call attention to carbon offsets, houseplants are hooked up to devices that tracks their CO2 output. That local system is then tied into a city-wide network of other houseplants which regulates energy usage and carbon absorption. Sounds friendly enough, the plants thrive when everyone in the network gets along. But, if not “then the network starts to kill plants, thus diminishing the network’s electricity capacity.” Users have the option of being “selfless” or “greedy.” Plants live or plants die on collective decision. It’s a grim opposition. But such darkness embedded in the brightly lit gallery is just as welcoming as any sanguine accessibility.

subgenre

All August I've been geeking out. Just about everyone I've seen in California has gotten an earful of one of three topics: Dr. Who, Torchwood, and coffee. Probably in that order. More doses of the last equals more of the first two. I am an enthusiastic fan—dare I say fangirl? (Did I not come up with the idea for a slash pairing of Don Draper and Captain Jack?)

So, when asked by Architect magazine to review the new BLDG BLOG Book, I felt kinship with Manaugh's many "enthusiasms" and wanted to see how they'd (underground cities, musical icebergs, fantasy weather, etc.) hold up in quality paperback. You can read the whole review at Architect, but here's a few grafs.

Geoff Manaugh, founder in 2004 of the popular website BLDG BLOG, and myself, a fellow architecture blogger, share a number of enthusiasms. Among them are: novelist Don Delillo, eighteenth-century architect Sir John Soane, and '60s pranksters Archigram. Cultish figures within the discipline, they populate the pages of The BLDG BLOG Book, released this past summer by Chronicle Books. For architects whose taste skews wider than the modernist canon, finding them referenced in each chapter is like running across a favorite eccentric uncle....

I’ve long been drawn to characters and themes that provoke architectural imaginings, so I was eager to see how Manaugh would translate his verbose and eclectic website into print. “I wanted to use the book as a book,” he writes. As such, he’s created material “exclusively” for the volume. The new essays and interviews, including conversation with Archigram’s own Peter Cook, not only make up the bulk of each chapter, they are bonus tracks for hard core BLDG BLOG fans. Still it is the dozens of reprinted blog posts that make for livelier reading, especially the interviews. Such as Manaugh’s talk with novelist Patrick McGrath, where the author, in his own words, explores the writing process and the dark imagination it takes to develop “gothic landscapes.”

It is hard to say if the new texts make the book anymore book-like. It still feels very bloggy, minus the hyperlinks and comments. (Actually, links would help, in just a few pages I chalked up references to works by Umberto Eco, Neil Gaiman, Francis Ford Coppola and Orson Welles. The extensive name checking is borderline High Fidelity, i.e. record store clerk insiderness.) In each short essay, Manaugh lets his consciousness expand. For instance, in a piece entitled The Weather Bowl, he proposes manipulating the climate to create public events and fun spectacles. Letting his narrative get frothy, he writes, “Weather control is the future of urban design. Engineering the climate is how we’ll make our cities interesting again.” Interesting. Like how Katrina made New Orleans interesting again? Is Manaugh critiquing the political gap between climate change and urban infrastructure with a sly parody? We’ll never know; he finishes by imagining a new Pritzker Prize for Best Weather Effects.

Keep reading.

get lost

This past spring, around the time when architecture students nationwide were donning caps and gowns, I was researching possible futures for this fresh faced group. The outlook was grim. Here's a motivated, highly-skilled group who just went through the ringer and who'll very likely not find a job in their profession.

The feature, Have You Seen Me? runs, which in the July issue of Architect magazine, is as much about previous recessions as with this one. After undergrad back in the 90s I also faced an impossible job market. What seemed like simply personal stories of leaving architecture, turned out to have repercussions throughout the profession. During this past boom it was named "the lost generation" to explain the lack of qualified mid-career project managers. I was itching to answer the question of a repeat lost generation. Where are these graduates and young professionals headed? Are they dropping out? Tuning in? Or just getting lost?

AFTER I GRADUATED from college in 1994 and moved back home to the Bay Area, my dad handed me a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? A practical electrical engineer with his own business, he was well aware that the construction industry was stymied by recession. With a new B.Arch. degree and a portfolio of conceptual drawings, I was hungry to enter the design profession and dismissive of any job-hunting manual. My summer was spent sending out dozens of résumés to firms.

When I got no reply, I knew my color: It was black.

I wasn't alone. Friends were struggling to find work. Then, as now, firms had scaled back, leaving less room for budding architects to make their way into the profession. Many left the field. In turn, they chose jobs in the tech industry that was just beginning to boom, especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

At first glance, their defections are unremarkable. Architecture school training—a design degree—has long been marketed as a way to see the world, not necessarily a passport to practice. From Gordon Matta- Clark to Herbert Muschamp, there's a comfortable legacy of graduates pursuing film, art, graphic design, or criticism. Others have ventured toward hands-on roles as contractors, construction managers, remodelers, and furniture designers. But the contraction of the architecture job market in the early 1990s left a gap in the profession that didn't reveal itself until the boom economy of a decade later.

Read more...

Thanks to the folks who let me make their stories public:  David Kuykendall, Theresa Franzese, Jef Zaborski, Archiculture's David Krantz, and Peter Oberdorfer.

still billboarding

Rebeca Mendez, There Is No There, 2009. Triptych. Each Panel: 20h x 13.3w. Archival Inkjet print, plexiglass and matte white silkscreen ink.

Billboards, the classic meditation of text in space. Pop art darling, Decon construct, and NIMBY troublemaker. The digital age vies for click-thrus and little miss billboard just asks for your ad here. Pretty please. COA's Eric Kahn sends over news of a new show at Koplin Del Rio, plaintively named, Memory of the L.A. Billboard: Telepolis in the Archetype.


Wes Jones, Billboard Series 2, graphite on paper, 12" x 24" (love the ghosting Chrysler)

The group show presents works by artists and architects showing works based on the "Los Angeles billboard imagery landscape." The media is certainly mixed: Folks like Kahn, Sandow Birk, Neil Denari, Wes Jones (soon to be an A Few Zines panelist), Rebeca Mendez, and Marcelo Spina, all take a parting shot at the advertising icon.

And while I'm telling an LA story, I totally forgot to blog about Tiny Houses in the LA Times. You can catch the slideshow here.

brute force

Central parking garage, former Terminal One, Pearson International

It's not Canadian Mounties with nightsticks, it's Concrete Toronto that's hitting pinkcomma hard on May 15. That's when fave Boston gallery mounts (groan) an exhibition of the Toronto's hunky Brutalism based on the book edited by Michael McClelland and Graeme Stewart. They write:

The city has concrete buildings of all stripes – international landmarks, metropolitan infrastructure and even the single family home. Hundreds of these structures were built, including Viljo Revell’s groundbreaking New City Hall, John Andrew’s seminal Scarborough College and the record-smashing CN Tower. Toronto is a city cast in concrete

Celebrate all things concrete, which will melt into air after a couple Newcastles. Opening reception, Friday, 15 May 2009, 6:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. The show runs through June 12.

publishing perspectives

Las Vegas Helicopter footage c.1968

If you have an affinity for drink and snacks and happen to be in the Buffalo area (which stretches from Greenland to Princeton, NJ) do drop by the Hayes Hall Lobby gallery at 11am (early, since the bars are open until 4am) at the University at Buffalo, where Michael Kubo will be heading up a panel on architecture and publishing.

Here's the info:

The exhibition features the work developed this semester under the Banham Fellowship through a seminar (Publishing as Practice) on publishing as a critical form of architectural practice, and a studio (Strategic Organizations) to design a contemporary headquarters for the RAND Corporation, the world's first think tank.

A panel of invited faculty will discuss publishing and the book as a form of architectural practice; the discussion will also serve as a public review of the final book projects published by students in the seminar. Drinks and snacks will be served.

cult classic

I was reading Joan Acocella’s vampire essay, In the Blood, from last week’s New Yorker (I am always a week behind), drinking coffee, and flipping through C-Lab’s bootlegged issue of Urban China. It was an unsettling combination—a crisis of attention, really. Tidy columns versus san serif sprawl.

Acocella dissected Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Methodically, she traced its history, and then she pinned down the novel’s structure:

The narrative method of “Dracula” is to assemble a collage of purportedly authentic documents, most of them in the first person. Many of the materials are identified as excerpts from the diaries of the main characters. In addition, there are letters to and from these people—but also from lawyers, carting companies, and Hungarian nuns—plus telegrams, “newspaper” clippings, and a ship’s log. This multiplicity of voices gives the book a wonderful liveliness. A long horror story could easily become suffocating.

And here I pause. A narrative built out of collage?

Could Stoker’s 1897 fiction, a work I started to read as an undergrad but never finished, really mirror the cacophony of blogs, news reports, tweets, pieces of journalism, and status updates that make up my daily life online?

Ah, too strangely heady to answer with a straight face.

But look at Crisis, it’s doing it too. Essays, interviews, photographs, roundtable discussions, and blog gleanings tumble over each other across the pages. Everyone weights in. Laura Hanna talks to a 9-1-1 operator in Anaheim, John McMorrough tackles the Apocalypse, Geoff Manaugh sees foreclosure. Infrastructure crumbles. The Biosphere and the economy have meltdowns. We are sandbagged by shock, awe, and Obama urbanism.

It’s less the DIY bootleg Jeffery Inaba describes—“an improvised, illegitimate work… largely motivated by a wish to share”—as it is a horror story told with classic technique. The crisis is amplified so it can be separated from daily life before being analyzed and digested. I turn back to Acocella:

The alternation of voices also lends texture. It’s as if we were turning an interesting object around in our hands, looking at it from this angle, then that. And since the story is reported by so many different witnesses, we are more likely to believe it.

So, what do we do with this belief? Does it motivate action or does it suck us dry?

some strip, some tease

Even in tough economic times, there's still room for some vicarious real estate. A little architectural burlesque.

So, with that preamble, I'm excited to link to Undoing the Cover-Up, a profile on the home of Natalya Kashper, partner in Brooklyn's own DUB Studios. (Shout outs to the other partners: Michael Piper and Gabriel Sandoval.)

The 7,200-square-foot space started out as a Pop-art bachelor pad (the previous owner's tasteful  rhinestone fireplaces didn't make it into the story) and was stripped down to reveal the building's 1890s bones. I feel a Duchamp reference somewhere in that last sentence.

The design is stunning. I lust after the space. It haunts my dreams. I could fit seven to fifteen Tiny Houses in it.

So, without further ado, my first outing with the Grey Lady's Thursday Home section:

NATALYA KASHPER sat in her minimalist living room, a light-filled space made rich with rough brick walls, a sculptural masonry fireplace and wooden ceiling joists. She looked out of the arched windows, framed in deep wood casements, and took in the view.

“I remember coming to SoHo with my mom and thinking, ‘This is so beautiful,’ ” said Ms. Kashper, who grew up in California. “SoHo is the epitome of an old American city.”

That might explain her instant attraction to the 7,200-square foot loft, which occupies the entire top floor of a landmark red-limestone building at the corner of Wooster and Broome Streets.

Ms. Kashper is one of the three architects who formed DUB Studios, a young practice with offices in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. So after Ms. Kashper and her husband, Eugene, an entrepreneur with beverage and real estate interests both in the United States and Russia, bought the property for $6.9 million in 2006, she naturally appointed herself the principal designer.

Continue reading.
Slide show