loud paper

puff piece

Guggenheim

Jimmy over at Life Without Buildings culled through the work of Austrian artist Erwin Wurm (on view at MUMOK). The sculptures featured are somewhere between melting and inflating, like marshmallows in the microwave. And yes, there is a bit of critique in the curation:

The following examples aren't particularly representative of his work as a whole, but since this is supposed to be an architecture blog, they're probably the most interesting to you, dear reader. Plus, the field of architecture can always use a little deflating.

Fat House Moller/Adolf Loos

I am sold on the Moller House in a Jiffy Pop disguise. Still in a mini-Warhol mode, I feel compelled to create a graphic match with Silver Clouds, from the Silver Factory days. One sags, one floats.

Silver Clouds

And speaking of Andy, I dug up his pithty quote:

I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.

I have to admit, that pretty much captures blogging: active observations and a screen.

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.

velveteen vitrine

Last week I was Googling for an image of Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 classic, The Medium is the Message, and I came across an archival entry from Sam Jacob’s StrangeHarvest. The amazing post, partly cribbed from an essay he wrote for Volume, places Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground within the Philip Johnson’s terrarium-like Glass House. The same year as McLuhan’s treatise, the Factory tripped out to Connecticut for a benefit for the Merce Cunningham Dance Troupe.

Writes Jacob:

And somewhere between Lou Reed, Electricity, Marshal McLuhan, and Andy Warhol - I forget exactly the circumstances - I drew a comparison between the translucent walls of the Johnson Glass House, and the metallic-reflective walls of Warhol's silver Factory. They seemed like related opposites: spaces that were very similar, famous for the material surface of their walls that were both materials which both fascinated modern architecture. Both had qualities that embody modernity - transparency, reflection, flat and smooth, seamless, almost textureless, technological, industrialised, cold-to-the-touch and factory-formed into sheets from molten state. The Glass House and the Factory are like opposing twins.

It is amazing to think about these opposing scenes, lead by iconic figures (Warhol and Johnson separated at birth?), meshing for a summer afternoon. I am, of course, seduced by the photos, but am also starting to muse about the sexuality of both these men, especially as the 70s codifies the modernist (generally thought of as conservative) camp surrounding Johnson. Or should I say, their sexuality in relationship to how it is permitted or excluded by other parallel art scenes of the era. I was particularly struck by a quote in this weekend’s Times. In an article on Warhol’s films Manohla Dargis writes:

The dread that Warhol’s sexuality inspired is nothing new. On the first page of his memoir “Popism: The Warhol Sixties,” written with Pat Hackett, he explains that Pop artists “did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles — all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” About 10 pages later he adds one other item to the list of things that some Abstract Expressionists tried hard not to notice: homosexuality. “You’re too swish,” his friend, the filmmaker Emile de Antonio, bluntly dropped, when Warhol asked why Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg didn’t like him. “And that upsets them.”

There is a curious correlation between a mess of quotidian stuff and gayness that I am still worrying over. It is all the stuff that is banished from Johnson’s manse, and from Ice Storm modernism in general. Is it as simple as a Manhattan vs. New Caanan polemic? I am not sure where I am going with this line of questioning yet, my guess that there is a wealth of texts covering this territory, so I’ll report back soon. Interestingly, around the same time as when Warhol visited the Glass House, he started filming the explicit and hermetic I, a Man, in which Valerie Solanas makes an appearance.

write stuff

If you are in the Boston area on Thursday and have some free time in the middle of the day and want to sit in a lecture hall on MIT's campus, come on over to the Writing Architecture panel Eric Howeler put together. I'll be sitting down to chat about "The Contemporary" with all sorts of really smart folks from Rizzoli, Praxis, The Boston Globe, and Archinect. For my part, I promise a modicum of wit.

pop opt

A trillion years ago Mike was in the band Black Tambourine.

A billion years ago he co-founded Slumberland Records and went on to release Stereolab and Velocity Girl singles.

A million years ago Slumberland released records from my favorite San Francisco pop band The Aislers Set.

Now, after a little quiet period in the catalog, Slumberland is back with more catchy melodies: a new album, Grown-Ups, by The Lodger.

I am a shameless pop fan, so when analogies are drawn, I perk up and nod my head up and down in time to the jangle:

We don't know if it's something in the water or what, but England is fairly bursting with exciting guitar pop bands right now, and The Lodger are amongst the brightest hopes. Taking their cues from fellow northerners The Smiths and The Wedding Present, The Lodger's music is classic melodic pop, fueled by sparkling hooks and plangent lyrics. The tunes are sharp and timeless, a thoroughly modern distillation of great Britpop from the 60s right up to today.

The Lodger is on tour this month and you can download the hit "Let it Go" on the Slumberland site and stream the whole album on myspace.

pecha kucha this

Okay, the guy at the door of St. Cyril’s said “No way. It’s a fire hazard in there.” So, tonight’s Pecha Kucha must have been hot. Apparently there were 800 people inside. Sadly, I was stuck outside and missed presentations by the inimitable Israel Kandarian and the architect-shit-sick-of-er Annie Choi. But all was not lost, I ran into another old SCI-Arc buddy (and now Brooklyn neighbor), Sebastian Kaempf, who just got married. Mazel tov.

However, the best part of my evening came at my local bodega. It was a moment of pure cross-cultural geeky exchange. While I was buying a Diet 7-Up, the thirty-something guy behind me animatedly addressed Yaffa Deli’s night clerk: “You like Star Wars, right? You have to see what my wife just bought me.” Then he reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a PSP. But not just any PSP, the Darth Vader PSP—white with a black Vader silhouette. But the line of the evening was to come: “Did you see?” he eagerly said. “It’s storm trooper white.”

suburban simulacrum

Muddling together the potentially-toxic combination of retro ranch, architecture, and memory, this weekend the Times Design Magazine served up an entry into the art/architecture category. Keith Edmier’s Bremen Towne, a recreation of his Illinois childhood home (a prefab, three-bedroom Strathmore) is under construction in a loft space in Chelsea.

Each artifact in the house is recreated says author Christopher Bollen:

That herculean task meant many months of staring at snapshots of, say, himself and his sister hamming it up in front of a fake-zebra-grained wall on New Year’s Eve in 1981 or his sister feeding their pet rabbit chunks of fruit on the kitchen floor, and focusing not so much on the human subjects of these photos as on all the stuff that surrounds them.

The installation opens at Bard October 20th.

play time

Delve into the psyche of any architect of a certain age and you'll find a stash of LEGOs. The nubby, plastic modulars pack a default ironic punch. BIG’s take on the LEGO—“a homage to the Danish building industry” and commentary on prefab—is now on view at Storefront. Five housing project models fill the space, leaving not much room to maneuver. The twelve by twelve-foot, 250,000-piece LEGO model is pretty impressive and I am sure I am not the only person to find two, of the 1,000 LEGO people, engaged in a naughty activity. (I had to look. I grew up in the age of Slow House cross-sections and recto verso.)

Glowing like a shot out of Jacques Tati’s 1967 Play Time, the piece is described by the BIG team as: “…an elastic field of peaks and valleys. A thousand plateaus ascending and descending, separating and merging to form a fluid space of private and public plateaus. Combining the rigorous and the adventurous. The box and the blob.” Yeah. Those dirty Danes.

in-between days

An Te Lui
Untitled (Complex IV), 2007
carpeting, Corian, air sterilizers, distilled water, male and female pheromones, vibrators

An Te Liu, an artist best known for modeling modernist utopias out of off-the-shelf appliances, sends word of his new website. As expected, it clean and smart, with a slight whiff of something alluring. Is it Old Spice?

An Te’s announcement (and work) reminds me of the Architecture in Art feature posted in the last Artkrush. Without interjecting much theory or criticism Deputy Editor Bryony Roberts tracks the decade-long rise of artists using architecture: models, drawings, spaces, and other representations, in their art. I disagree with her statement: “The division between art and architecture has long been a rigid one.” (Um, come on now.) But I am happy to see so many of artists, who’s work bobs around my favorite theme (and many who I’ve interviewed or written about over the last few years), collected in one post: e.g., Andrea Zittel, Jorge Pardo, Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Morris, Felix Schramm, and Liam Gillick. A lot is happening in this space in-between the disciplines. All month Storefront's hosting a slew (well, twenty-six to be exact) events that, taken a whole, eccentrically blur the distinctions between realms. I'll post about a couple evenings soon.

It happens that this buzz around the intersection of art and architecture gives me an opportunity to plug the vintage Art/Architecture issue of loud paper (the last of the hard copies are still available), edited by Ruth Keffer and myself. In it you’ll find, among other things interviews with Pardo and Doug Aiken, the thoughts on the drawings of Form:uLA Dimension Laboratory and the paintings of Brian Alfred.

Brian Alfred
Spray
2007

tiny bubbles

When I was up in Canada I didn’t get a chance to visit Montreal. Our little Subaru skirted around the civic center and got caught in some rush hour traffic. This gave me a chance to gaze longingly at the seemingly-abandoned biosphere, sitting as it does on a marshy area dotted with crusty 60s and 70s apartment buildings. (See drowning in culture for a hit of Safdie-esque détournement.) The Bucky dome, built originally for the 67 Expo, burned in 1976, but the bubble was restored in 1990 and now is home to, appropriately enough, an environmental museum.

Via Off the Fence, via Library and Archives, Canada.

I also missed an entry for my tiny file while zooming past the city. The a new photography show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Naoya Hatakeyama: Scales features three series of images by the Japanese artist.

New York/Tobu World Square and New York/Window of the World depict scaled architecture models of New York City’s streets and skyscrapers. The photographs ape the high-contrast, modern tropes of photographers Berenice Abbott and Alfred Stieglitz, but also reveal the preciousness and artificiality of the models, and by extension, the fragile façade of the city.

New York/Window of the World
Naoya Hatakeyama
CCA collection

New York/Tobu World Square
Naoya Hatakeyama
CCA collection