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?

fwd: thinking

Braulio of Architect magazine just wrote in to say that his new blog, Fwd: Architecture, is finally live. I've been on the receiving end of his link-filled emails for awhile, so I know that he's got great, broad taste in architecture, music, and tech.

And I am totally biased, since Fwd: Architecture's second post links to an article I wrote on 4-D Cities. That piece covers research going on at Georgia Tech. The team's developing software that creates a 4-D virtual model of the urban environment out of historic and new photographs. If it resembles Photosynth, that's because both spring from the same research department and have similar core code. But 4-D Cities adds a snazzy timeline to the program making it possible to time travel the model.

just add a paper umbrella

Concoct a Singapore Sling and sit down at the keyboard; the urbanism magazine, MONU, is looking for submissions for its Exotic Urbanism issue. They posit “exotic” as the alternative to “authentic” or “native.” (I might add “local.”)

MONU#9 investigates what the term exotic actually means for our cities and how exotic urban elements appear, what they look like, and how they may influence our cities. In any case, exotic urban features appear more and more as an inexhaustible source for progressive urban design ideas. When the exotic influenced the appearance of the “Art Nouveau” at the end of the 19th century, it might today have the power to create an “Urban Nouveau”.

“Daring concepts, mind-stretching speculations, and ground-breaking new strategies” are due June 2008.

new old, old new

Best to admit it right now: the New Museum is old news. I was in San Francisco way back when it opened in early December. On return, I lallygagged getting over there. Yeah, I was excited, but then again, I had already read a bunch of commentary. My faves include Kazys’ review over at varnelis.net and Sam Jacobs' scathing photo essay at Strange Harvest that documents twenty fundraising plaques throughout the space. Memorial water fountain anyone?

I made my pilgrimage to the SANAA addition to the Bowery a couple weeks ago. At 4pm, the light was too low for the skylights to work, so the effect of the stacked boxes was lost on me. Collage, the second (and more promising) installment of Unmonumental just opened, so I’ll try to return earlier in the day. Overall, the big spaces didn’t seem big enough. Perhaps unmonumental sums up the building, too. The assemblage art was installed too close together, and little of it made use of the lofty ceiling heights. My favorite moments in the building were the tiny, tiny spaces along the rear stair. Oddball niches no bigger than a closet, they seemed a bit illicit, as if the architects had gotten away with something—an alcove where art lovers can sneak away for a snog.

Much of the criticism of the New Museum frets over what a cultural institution located next to the Bowery Mission is doing to the Bowery. That bringing the arts to the neighborhood is really just giving up the ghost to gentrification. That a beloved grubby street historically dotted by bums and kitchen suppliers represents authentic New York. Sure, I see their point. I too enjoy a bit of grit and a little subcultural tourism. I might even follow it with a vegan BLT at Moby’s Teany. But I also wonder if the artistic commoditization of the Bowery is something that’s been going on since it was Skid Row.

Recently, at closing party of NYNYNY (photos of this great mini-urban assemblage show here), Flux Factory screened the 1956 film On The Bowery by Lionel Rogosin. The award-winning, quasi-documentary tracks real down-and-outers as they try to shake the bottle and get back on their feet. It is true Beat verite filmed under the shadow of the El. The New Museum with its industrial loft gallery spaces and mesh clad façade (to be blackened soon) is just another entry trying to capture some of that patina.

back to...

Happy New Year. I'm back from Dublin and my jet lag/lingering hangover has cleared. For those of you who follow Gaelic football, you’ll be excited to know that the undefeated Crossmaglen Rangers filled Delta flight 160. Since I was unfamiliar with the sport, the player seated next to me said it was like soccer, but you can use your hands. Maybe like rugby? They were on their way to Orlando to celebrate at Disneyworld.

Speaking of theme parks, I was surprised how Dublin (endlessly pedestrian and cleaned up due to techboom money) was not a prepackaged luck-of-the-Irish E-ticket ride. Sure there were gift shops with woolly sweaters, tour buses, and a Molly Malone statue, but the city seemed to be used by its resident “Dubs.” I wandered as much of the city as I could possibly traverse on foot.

The area around the Grand Canal, the district that’s seen the bulk of rapid development, especially struck me: lots of not bad modern lofts and office buildings. U2 is planning a tower and Libeskind is signed up for a performing arts center. The checkerboard hotel by Portuguese architect Aires Mateus & Associados (project architect McCauley Daye O'Connell) wasn’t open, but looked pretty cool. The strangest thing about this area is how placeless the architecture felt. Modern buildings that could be anywhere: San Jose, South of Market, or Chelsea. My favorite moments were where the new construction bumped up against the old making strange juxtapositions between crumbling warehouses and cheery glass facades.

The city’s rich literary past is inescapable. Statues and historical plaques of Joyce, Wilde, Yeats, Stoker, and Beckett are everywhere. It seems that Beckett has followed me back to New York. Still delirious from my travels, I caught a collection of four of his short plays staring Mikhail Baryshnikov at New York Theater Workshop. Existential and spare, the pieces are accompanied by a Philip Glass score and a set designed by Russian architect Alexander Brodsky (of Brodsky and Utkin) Thirteen tons of sand fill a stage framed by mini-blinds and fluorescent tube lights. It sure isn’t a Celtic green, but strangely, my ears picked up an Irish lilt in the meditations on the human condition.

Dublin snapshots here.

civic bodies

Richard Perry for the New York Times.

I am going to lay it out there: Sure it is dodgy and a circus, but I really love Brooklyn’s Futon Street Mall. Sure half the spaces above the ground floor are empty, but it is so integrated into the neighborhood fabric, that its presence is alive, but low-key. Andy Newman’s pre-Christmas article in Sunday’s New York Times, which focused a bit over-sweetly on the gold-toothed Santas, dubious cell phones, and urban patois (checkitoutcheckoutcheckiout), touched on the mall’s redevelopment. Plans are in the works:

The old Albee Square Mall, an enclosed shopping center within this stretch of Fulton Street, closed this year to make way for City Point, a high-rise tower that will house people, businesses and, on the ground floor, major retail tenants along the lines of Target.

“With all the housing stock that we have now and the demographics in the communities that surround Downtown Brooklyn,” said Joseph Chan, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, an economic development group, “the fact that there’s not a Bed Bath & Beyond, a Pottery Barn, a Pier 1 in the downtown of a city of 2.5 million people is odd.”

Albert Laboz, one of the street’s biggest property owners and chairman of the Fulton Mall Improvement Association, said that deals were in the works with several leading retailers. “I think you’re going to see a nice transition in the next few years,” he said.

A Bath & Beyond, a Pottery Barn, and a Pier 1 are not really what I am looking for in Downtown Brooklyn. Why should that part of the city look like the Upper West Side, or suburban California for that matter? I like the diversity, not just the jumble of small and large stores, or the racial mix, but the range of bodies that such a range represents. The root of my affection lies not in subcultural tourism or nostalgia, but in my own vested interests: retail spaces for women blessed with curves. The Fulton Street Mall has the plus-size chains Lane Bryant and Ashley Stewart as well as multiple independent stores celebrating those girls who have back, and front.

What I’ve learned from my time in Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and now New York City, the more urban the neighborhood, the more racial diverse, the greater the likelihood that there is a store where I can by a pair of queen-size tights. Bring in the homogenizing Banana Republic or Forever 21 and I can pick up a t-shirt or a pair of earrings, but no tights.

call for submissions: not nice

via kill da archy

Abject seduction is pretty much par for the course in our post-ironic era. Chalk it up to myspace or recurrent 80s fashion trends. (God help me, neon is back.) But it’s the logical contrast to nice modernism, bright green washes and bamboo floors. So, without turning the snark volume up to eleven, how can we thoughtfully address things unpleasant, ugly, and downright mean? By the same token, is it useful to not play nice? Is ugly, however subjective, transformative? Is there a place in the discourse for brutal honesty and nasty asides?

I sure hope so. loud paper is looking for essays, interviews, and projects (art and architecture) along our “Not Nice” theme.

Wit, insight, and original material are encouraged. Please send in your concise intentions—about a paragraph or two for articles. I’ll be reviewing and posting submissions on rolling basis until the end of January, so get your chops going. If you are interested in writing a book or music review, or have any other questions, please drop a line.

sonic highway

Courtesy Brooklyn Vegan.

Harmonies, hula hoops, and honking horns. On Friday I caught Sufjan Steven’s performance of The BQE at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), joining some 2,000 fellow aging hipsters decked out in glasses and corduroy and armed with iPhones. If we all disappeared in a Moscow-type tragedy, would Apple sales dip? In the opera house lobby I nearly bumped into BAM regular Lou Reed, thrillingly and neatly bringing my Velvets/Warhol thread full circle. (Apparently Reed and Laurie Anderson attended the evening before, so he was coming back for a repeat performance.)

Sufjan’s composition, commissioned by BAM, is an ambitious addition to his geographic interpretations Illinoise and Michigan (two entries in his Fifty States Project). Sonically taking on Robert Moses’s gritty highway with a thirty-piece orchestra.

Clashing strings and horns evoke swelling traffic jams. Flutes zip through the score, changing lanes with ease. Sufjan paired the music with an abstract film and live hula hoopers. The result is equal parts beautiful, quirky, and a love letter to Brooklyn. With Super-8 shots of neighborhood landmarks and signs—there’s the bright yellow storage building near my house; look, the ugly new loft going up—recognition draws you into the piece.

The BQE is part of a history of orchestrated city interpretations. And there is certainly an Eamesian and Koyaanisqatsi quality to Sufjan’s footage, but I was reminded immediately of the 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which uses the railroad to track the daily life of the city in much the same way as the BQE organizes Sufjan’s Brooklyn. (See Mitchell Schwarzer’s Zoomscape.)

In program notes the musician muses on the mash up of car wheels and hoops:

Perhaps a creative exegesis of the hoop might begin to unravel the bureaucratic mysteries of the interstate roadway, the automobile, and the Hula Hoop’s unlikely nemesis: Robert Moses. A renowned critic of idle recreation, Moses often orchestrated his park projects around more competitive, athletic endeavors: mammoth swimming pools, diving boards, baseball diamonds, and tennis courts. These hefty, utilitarian designs were modern responses to Frederick Law Olmstead’s romantic topography intended for less strenuous activities: afternoon strolls, Sunday picnics, and, perhaps, Hula Hooping. Of course, there was nothing natural, bucolic, or egalitarian about Moses’s park designs: blocky, boxy cement landscapes that resembled more prison yard than public park. Indeed, his roadways often took this aesthetic to the extreme. Like most highway projects of the time, the BQE was an execution of bullishness mixed with economic fastidiousness, a project that championed commerce, cars, and the commuter work force in spite of the “disorderly” charm of Brooklyn’s network of villages and neighborhoods, settled long before the automobile.

Although the triad is almost too much to watch at once, all parts came together at for one brilliant moment: five hula hoopers twisting their hips in unison, speedy road music, and film of driving at night. The conceit drops away leaving only rhythm and motion.

justice league

CampBaltimore
Listening, Collaboration, Solidarity

Next week LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) opens the truly compelling Just Space(s) exhibition and symposium. Curated by Ava Bromberg and Nicholas Brown, the show features some thirty artist and organizations, including:Trevor Paglen, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Markus Miessen & Patricia Reed, Teddy Cruz, and the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL).

Just Space(s) aims not merely to show what is unjust about our world, but to inspire visitors to consider what the active production of just space(s) might look like. It asks a crucial question: “How do we move from injustice to justice exactly where we stand – in our neighborhoods and our institutions, at the level of the body, the home, the street corner, the city, the region, the network, the supranational trade agreement and every space within, between, and beyond?”

I am blown away by breath of actively-engaged work represented and I am disappointed that I can’t be there for the symposium. I’d love someone to go and report back.

An Atlas, an exhibition of “radical cartography” and text, which blends art, maps, and activism, is on view concurrently with Just Space(s). Organized by artists Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, the show goes hand in hand with the publication, An Atlas of Radical Cartography, (upcoming Fall 2007, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, Los Angeles.)

FWB
The New Yorkers' Guide to Military Recruitment in the 5 Boroughs

Adrian Blackwell
Detroit's Underdevelopment

resurrecting boring: provisional monument

Back when I sent out a call for boring submissions, Jeremy Beaudry was one of the first people to contact me with a project.

What an incredibly stupid and banal act it was to measure the perimeter of this accidentally spectacular structure. And with a conventional 100-foot tape measure, at that. Might not I have just as well performed somersaults around the building and counted those, or counted real toe-to-heel feet, or placed a succession of those tiny pebbles around the structure, counting every single one.

Writes Beaudry in the essay and slideshow Provisional Monument, 2003. The project documents his musings and small-scale interventions on a the shell of a big box store under construction in the barren landscape of central Illinois. It captures a certain wintry pathos and the inherent romanticism of architecture trapped somewhere between ruin and punchlist.

A touch misty, but there's a call to arms lurking in the text. Beaudry urges engagement and participation, which is why it is great to see that his latest collaboration, Think Tank (or the Think Take that has yet to be named), is actively delving into the relationship between art, urbanism, and gentrification. The about page reads:

With the realization that the so-called “artist” is often a hapless, or even willing, tool of the hipster-fication, sanitization, and homogenization of urban space, we were compelled to critically acknowledge our roles as gentrifiers and subsequently interrogate and challenge this condition.

This summer the group released the pdf, 22 Readings on Artists & Gentrification: Think Tank Reader Vol. II. It is a comprehensive resource for anyone tracking recent discourse related to the Creative Class.