loud paper

next exit

Last week I drove up through the Hudson Valley, zipped through the Catskills, skirted the Adirondacks, dipped my toes in Lake Champlain, crossed the border, and was in the Province of Quebec. Outside of Montreal, on Route 20 to Quebec City, I stopped for gas.

Gaz-o-Bar is one of just a few available pit stops along that road. When I headed back into the states I was struck by how much is available at U.S. exits—not just one station, but three or four, then there are the McDonalds, Subways, Starbucks. Old news, sure, but compared to the humble Gaz-o-Bar, there was a certain decadence to it. Although the gas station is part of a larger company founded in 1972, the Canadian truckstop served a limited menu of eight hearty (read meaty) suppers (brought tableside by hot ‘n meaty waitresses who have surely seen a few miles) to hunkered-down, hungry truckers. Not a Whopper in sight. One exit away was a nod to American-style franchise: Tim Hortons, Canada’s answer to Dunkin Donuts and home of the best Chocolate French I’ve ever tasted.

P.S. Here's a shot I took for the Blue Monday guys.

back to school

With expressionist designs by the likes of Studioworks and CoopHimmelblau popping up around the city, it is clear that the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) construction initiative is keen on crafting funky educational architecture. But what is going on behind those glittering facades?

LA-based photographer Monica Nouwens sent over a link to her series that documents a few recent public schools. There is a great interplay between the reality of each scheme and day-to-day school life.

Be sure check out her cheeky portraits of emerging architects. Guns, cigars, and steel. Seems 'bout right.

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.

ugly is the new black

Ages ago I wrote about Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist, Number I, 1950. Romanticizing a little:

His technique of layering wet paint over wet paint allows for a blending of color at the edges of each line creating lyrical filigrees. The lines are echoed with halos. The gestures are full of light… the canvas is not about flatness. There is space and infinite depth in the layers of paint.

So, when I passed by Ian Schrager's recently de-scaffolded 40 Bond Street condominium I thought Herzog & de Meuron might have been in a similarly baroque mood when they whipped up the façade.

I also thought “It looks like someone threw up on the building.” Really, I did. I love street art, knittng, digital design, Gaudi, Durell Stone and whatever else that inspired the decorative gate and embossed metal panels fronting Bond Street, but these elements combine to look clunky, contrived, and yeah, even a little ugly.

fine focus

Fiction focus

As I sit here tapping away at my laptop in my favorite Brooklyn café, Outpost, a turntable is rotating Galaxie 500, sending Tugboat strains out over the speakers. The retro continues. Perhaps it is the right soundtrack to pair with Liset Castillo’s new show, Pain Is Universal But So Is Hope, now on view at the Black and White Gallery in Chelsea. The tenderhearted title could be a lyric. On Parking Lot, Dean Wareham achingly sings out:

Sitting on a subway train and Watching all the people lose their senses

Hiding in a parking lot and
Watching all the people fall to pieces

I don't mind
I think it's fine

The spare words, capturing ephemeral moments with big meanings, are carved out of guitar fuzz. Replace “words” with “structures” and “guitar fuzz” with “sand” and you get a description of Castillo’s work. Her large-scale photographs depict miniature, crumbling utopias, not dystopias. In an artist statement on the Brooklyn Museum’s website, she says:

The notion of movement, with which the work plays, offers a reading of the historic relationship between nature and artifice. It's for this reason that it is not the object that becomes the work, but rather its representation, the photograph as a symbol of the documentation, which offers itself to the spectator as testimony of the utopia that in the end lives only as image, in the process of disappearing.

Before walking into the gallery, I expected diorama-type representation, sandbox-scaled images easily filed into my tiny collection, but the photographs are physically slick. Their size is demanding and I wouldn’t describe the sandcastle pastiche of iconic buildings as cute. The arcades at Carlo Fontana’s Piazza San Pietro collapse, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim caves under its own weight, Golden Arches tumble, and, as an observer, I am detached from the escalating chaos. But I don’t mind. I think its fine.

Pain is Universal but so is Hope (Light Blue), 2007
C-print on Aluminum
70" X 92"

Pain is Universal but so is Hope (Orange), 2007
C-print on Aluminum
70" X 92"

take city hall

Save the Hall! You hate it. We love it. By etcetera media via etsy.

Over,under architects Mark Pasnik and long-time loud paper conspirator Chris Grimley send word of their new gallery, pink comma. Rethinking Boston City Hall opens this weekend. Firms were asked to rework the lovably brutal, decidely funky, 1962 building by Gerhald Kallman and Michael McKinnel. This inaugural exhibit showcases schemes, "suggesting innovative modifications to the aging monument," by Howeler+Yoon Architecture, kuo.chaouni with Uenal Karamuk, over,under, SINGLE speed DESIGN, and Studio Luz Architects with c2|studio Landscape Architects.

Its inspiring to see a group of emerging architects using their talents to pilot visionary urban designs. Pink comma gallery writes:

These unbuilt proposals provide compelling counterpoints to the recent calls for relocating the city’s seat of government.

I shutter imagining a banal monstrosity rising in its place.

View all the proposals in ArchitectureBoston’s September/October issue. PDF

Update: Mark sent over a couple of snapshots and reports that the opening was a success, attracting some 500 people over the weekend. The show will be on view during weekday hours or by appointment until October 19.

smockdown

Friday kicked off Fall, and the art world converged on Chelsea. Charles Renfro peddled his bike down 22nd Street as the crowds took shape—there’s a man devoted to culture.

I stuck my head into Susan Inglett Gallery where fashion-meets-art was in full swing. The show/retail venture smockshop, is a project launched by artist Andrea Zittel. Known, among other things, for her utilitarian uniforms, she asked a number of artists to re-interpret her simple smock according to their own vision. The garments are then sold to generate income for the artists, who’s work, according to the website, is “either non-commercial, or not yet self-sustaining.”

The scene was a tad Barney’s Warehouse Sale as the gal-heavy crowd pawed through the circular rack of dresses. Priced at a reasonable 300 to 500 dollars, each is piece a temptress in felt, silk, embroidery, or tarpaulin. According to the release, there is an artistic caveat that comes with the purchase:

In keeping with her personal practice, Zittel recommends that clients wear each smock exclusively for the entire season. Perhaps that’s not realistic in chic Chelsea, particularly during fashion week, but the artist hopes her project will inspire a more frugal approach to design. “Our current state of consumerism is pretty out of whack right now,” she says. “Wear what you work.” And if that sounds too Marxist, Zittel offers this slogan to the fashion legions: Liberation through Limitation.

I’m a big Zittel fan, having written about her work for both Dwell and for the 2002 Goetz Collection catalog. But the show, in thoroughly blurring the line between retail fashion and art (if that line was even there before), reduces both to the kind of crafty consumerism I can find on etsy.com: beautiful, desirable, and handmade, but also easily digestible. Zittel’s “Marxist” slogan and the rigors she applies to her own art are part of an ongoing critique, and sadly, it is undermined by the gallery’s need for a fashion week tie-in.

affordable ambition

Glenmore Gardens, slab on grade duplex by Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis.

The Brooklyn neighborhoods I haunt are full of construction: new lofts/condos in Williamsburg and Park Slope; cheap, Fedders apartment buildings in Clinton Hill; and the ominous, early rumblings of demolition for Ratner and Gehry’s Atlantic Yards. Faced with this changing landscape I am too much of a recent transplant to feel nostalgia or weave a narrative of loss. New housing is needed at every level of the economic spectrum, but does it have to be so downright ugly? Is a regard for context, inventive use of materials, and livable spaces an impossible dream?

Nope, it is possible. I found that out writing the bicoastal story, More for Less, for Azure magazine this summer. The piece features Broadway Court Housing in Santa Monica by Pugh + Scarpa and Glenmore Garden Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood developed by Della Valle Bernheimer with Briggs Knowles Architecture + Design, Architecture Research Office (ARO), and Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis. The projects struggle with different typologies: the apartment court and duplex houses, but both succeed in creating a humane approach to development on budget.

I’ve posted a low-res pdf below, but you can find a hard copy in Azure’s current issue entitled, ironically enough, Ambition.

Download Affordable.pdf