loud paper

traveling for tiny (or it's a small world, afterall)

In the early days of this blog I was obsessed with miniatures. One of my first posts linked to the tiny ceramic apartment buildings offered by the Bauhaus Center in Tel Aviv. Well, now after two twelve hour flights; a week-long press junket in Israel (a boondoggle, says a friend); and a visit to the opening of Calatrava's lovely, but not without a slew of issues, bridge in Jerusalem (pics); I have my very own wee White City replica. A model of the Bauhaus apartment building on Yehuda Halevi St. 58, scaled 1:270.

In 2003 UNESCO declared that the city of Tel Aviv a World Cultural Heritage site, owing to over 4,000 Bauhaus buildings which are spread over the city. Tel Aviv is a super-cosmopolitan and is quickly gentrifying. The same apartment buildings that spent the better part of the last century crumbling into themselves are now hot commodities. Changed development regulations encourages preservation by allowing additions and expansions. It is a weird trade-off and results are certainly mixed: some apartment buildings are beautifully restored, some still moldering, and others, with two or three new floor of construction resemble Bauhaus wedding cakes. Can I get a huppa?

For more of a taste of the variety Tel Aviv architecture, check out Open House Tel Aviv, architect Alon Bin Nun modeled the weekend event on the New York City shindig.

Doing the funky chicken:
On another note, can someone explain the chickens at PF1 (Public Farm 1)? Does poultry and dancing really mix anywhere except at weddings?

accessories for modern living

This is not quite a typical loud paper post, since I don't think I've ever written about jewelry design and only snark about fashion, but I wanted to call two designers to the fore.

First up: Kiosk sends word that Salvor Projects is having a studio sale, beginning today. All I can say is that their mathy, semi-architectural patterns and textures are amazing. I hope I can crave out some time to make it to 28th Street.

Second: Mollie Dash. I met Mollie at the Brooklyn Flea, the new flea market near my house. (Disclosure: I asked her to create a piece for me as a birthday present to myself, it will be ready on Sunday, I can't wait.) Each of her pieces is handmade and original. She repurposes old costume jewelry, vintage beads, and chains into sophisticated designs that are modern, with a little tarnished glory.

Here's Mollie on what makes her work eco friendly:

I run my studio out of my home, where I practice daily conscientious decision making on the amount of waste I produce and how many resources I require to live. I discovered recently that environmentalism is not about doing everything perfectly; it's about doing what you can. How this translates into the products I make is that they're made by a person who strives to leave a small footprint on the earth.

In my work I use many discarded, thrifted, donated, and yard sale-derived materials. I prefer metal over plastic. I like to pick things up off the street. I use a minimum of new stones. I use cotton and linen cord, rather than leather. I make things last.

it's a gas

Eric Paulos, Ergo

CO2, CH4, N2O, NOx, SO2, or  O3?

I am not sure that this is the party for smokers, SUV drivers, or people who struggle with body odor, but Berkeley-based architect and all around character Jordan Geiger sends word of Vapor, the new show at San Francisco's Southern Exposure gallery which opens tonight. Geiger and co-curator Alison Sant have assembled a group of artists, architects, and designers preoccupied with air quality, an illusive medium at best. The works are varied, some object-driven, some conceptual, some techy, all with a whiff of the political. The exhibition features: Amy Balkin, Futurefarmers, Natalie Jeremijenko, The Living, Eric Paulos, and Preemptive Media.

The curators write:

Vapor is a survey of new art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as subject matter, medium and metaphor.

Often inspired by forms of activism, the works react to the sources of climate change through the use of technologies—sensors, databases, and communications equipment— that are only recently accessible outside a lab. In this sense, the show's title also refers to the growing means by which this art is being produced, in addition to the ubiquity of greenhouse gases and other air conditions that serve as this art's medium. Vapor proposes new ways of modeling, testing and finding solutions to the problems of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions.

The curators have also put together an impressive line up of public events and lectures, as well the Vapor Symposium, co-sponsored by and hosted at the California College of the Arts, will take place April 19, 2008. Who doesn’t want to tour Jeremijenko’s One Trees Project? (Which involves biking around to some of the piece’s 1,000 cloned trees.) There is a catch: “Participants will also help to render air pollution evident by wearing Clear Skies Facemasks that visualize urban air quality.” Breathe deep.

wig in a box

Meret Oppenheim. (Swiss, 1913-1985). Object. Paris 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4 3/8" (10.9 cm) in diameter; saucer 9 3/8" (23.7 cm) in diameter; spoon 8" (20.2 cm) long, overall height 2 7/8" (7.3 cm). Purchase. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Pro Litteris, Zurich

Object (1936), Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, is a beacon. Before I moved to New York City, I used to visit the Dada artwork like an old friend. The piece puzzled me when I was a kid, taken to MoMA because of my precocious interest in art, but I liked it. Deep into an undergraduate Dada phase, I felt empowered by its perverse feminine wiles. Later, with the opening of the new building, it was heartening to find the seventy-year old object still winking in the design section. So it was really no surprise that when furry and hairy pieces showed up in Design and the Elastic Mind, MoMA’s very strong, science fair roundup of geek designs, the artwork quickly sprung to mind.

Curators Paula Antonelli and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini are clearly interested in the body, or at the very least, the human scale. The show, which opens on the 24th, is broken into sections by scale: nano, human, and global. While the nano section features Rules of Six, a nice installation by it-boys Aranda Lasch, and various data mapping projects are represented in the global section, it is the human scale that dominates with a cheeky, fleshy attitude.

I snapped a few pics at yesterday's press preview:

Epidermits Interactive Pet from the Cautionary Visions project, model, 2006, Stuart Karten Design

Necklace, 1995 and Chocolate Nipples, 1995-2003, Ana Mir, Emiliana Design Studio

Chest Hair Curler from the Accessories for Lonely Men Project, 2001, Noam Toran

Hair Alarm Clock from the Accessories for Lonely Men Project, 2001, Noam Toran

…And a couple more hirsute things which I need to go back and identify.

blue wednesday

Wow by Studio Luz

I’ve been slogging through back-to-back deadlines (a whole range of fun stuff: spray on clothing, productive buildings, sci-fi cabins), so I’ve been a little late in discovering the last round of projects online. I am happy to report that Azure magazine relaunched their website and it is just as pretty as the hard copy. Now, all sorts of content is perusable, including a couple short pieces I wrote for their Forms and Function section. I took a look at Steven Holl’s renovation of New York University's department of philosophy and I chatted with Bernard Tschumi about his design for Blue, the newish, blueish tower gracing the LSE skyline. (It seems perverse to use that word in relation to such a historically unassuming nabe.)

Elsewhere, Form magazine posted a PDF of the first two pages of my profile of Boston-based Studio Luz. While the actual piece is longer, you can see a few pics of their latest project, Doma, a 1,200-square foot package store (or liquor boutique.) Incidentally, the On the Cheap issue was the last one edited by the amazingly kick ass Jennifer Caterino. I'll certainly miss working with her.

monkey see

When ripening, bananas don’t really smell like bananas. Instead they have an elusive, heady, ozone smell. (Maybe it’s the smell of ethylene—bananas have a higher concentration of that gas than other, rounder, fruits.) I mention this, not as a gratuitous phallic food reference, but because it explains why I didn’t realize that the new Stefan Sagmeister exhibition, Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far, contained a wall of the elongated, green, yellowing, soon-to-be-brown-and-attracting-fruit-flies, produce.

After walking past the reception desk at Deitch Projects, and checking out the title work, Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far, an installation of blank note pads waiting to be filled, I headed into the larger gallery. My nose picked up the sweet, chemical odor before my gaze traveled over to the 10,000 bananas. The piece, Self-confidence Produces Fine Results, spells out those words in green and yellow fruit: The sampler slogan, already obscured, as the unripe font turned golden in the warm room.

The things the graphic designer has learned in his life so far are simple truisms done up in quirky drag, but I’ve always liked this growing collection. Sagmeister transforms near-clichés into aphorisms that tap into how a creative mind works. 43 folders has the entire list here. Picking a favorite is tough. Today it is “Having guts always works out for me.” I am not sure it always holds true, but it is something to live up to. I’ll abide by the banana billboard as well.

the revolution begins at home

Punk House, Interiors in Anarchy (yes, that is really the title) landed in my mailbox last week. A thick, photographic tome featuring images by Abby Banks and a rather awkward introduction by Thurston “I never lived in a punk house, I never even heard of them until the mid-1980s.” Moore, makes me wonder if some coffee table books should be left unpublished. Banks traveled the country to some fifty squats, warehouses, and communal houses. Her photographs reveal what you would expect: crusty couches, milk crates stacked with mix tapes, compost bins, stenciled grafitti, a few pierced and patched-together denizens (the guy in the Jawbreaker t-shirt wins my heart), and scrawled flyers tacked to the walls in the spirit on one of my favorite books, Fucked Up and Photocopied, from which this volume certainly draws inspiration, if not market share.

Like Thurston, I’ve never lived in a “punk house,” and since my participation punk culture in generally is more about the zines and the music, rather than full blown peacocking or lifestyle, I am not sure I have much right to feel any indignation about the packaging of said subculture. In fact, I am not sure I even feel any indignation, this kind of commodification goes back to punks roots, like it or not. So why are my panties in a twist? I guess it is because I feel like Aaron Cometbus definitively captured punk houses with Double Duce. Meticulously handwritten, the pages spark with punk rock ethos, caffeine-fueled mishaps, and love-live-loss introspection as Cometbus tells his fictionalized biography of a flop in Berkeley. The narrative offers a better glimpse of these “anarchist interiors” than any shot of a dirty bathroom stained with hair dye.

design is like bacon

Cherry Creek Mall playstructure via

More than half the architects and designers I know are foodies: their sense of taste, well, carries over to taste. The other percentage considers coffee a food group. Wait, maybe all of them do. I’m only half way through the french press this morning and still fuzzy headed. Anyway, that said, Form’s new Food issue is now available. I tag-teamed with Alissa Walker and Yosh Asato to check out hot spots in New York, LA, and San Francisco. The whole roundup is delicious.

The cover shot is Brooklyn’s Macri Park by ParaProject. Other NYC haunts: LeRoy Studio’s Chop’t, 4-Pli’s Urban Spring, and Top Chef winner Harold Dieterle’s Perilla designed by Studios GO. Tasty.

dear diary

Cover by Joshua Davis

In August 2000, someguy founded the 1000 Journals Project, “an ongoing collaborative experiment attempting to follow 1000 journals throughout their travels.” Seven years later, the journals are still networked throughout the world and are collecting drawings, collages, and stories: repositories for momentary creative output. It is a simple idea, get a journal, place something in it, and send it on. A website collects user-submitted images of the pages. But finding a journal is tough, says the website:

Unfortunately, you've got a better chance of winning the lottery, then of getting a hold of a journal. That's the problem when there are only 1000 of them. Now, you're best bet is to check out 1001 Journals where you can sign up for a journal, or launch your own traveling, location, or personal journals.

A launch pad for new collective projects, 1000J has spawned a couple of its own: a book and a movie. The film by Andrea Kreuzhage, screens in November at the AFI International Film Festival, Los Angeles. loud paper friends Brian Singer and Ruth Keffer show up on screen.

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.