loud paper

urban fabric

Funded by Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program, Kathryn Pannepacker’s Wall of Rugs No. 1 represents textile traditions from 42 countries and cultures. Her assistants on the project were Angela Crafton, Theodore Harris and Michael Schwartz. (Photo by Anna Wolf.)

I visited Philadelphia for the first time back in February. On assignment for American Craft magazine, I met with textile artist Kathryn Pannepacker. The day we drove around North Philly was frigid, but Kathryn is one of the warmest people I've had the pleasure of meeting. When we stopped to look at her mural pieces, she'd say hello to people who passed us on the street. Pannepacker's Wall of Rugs are woven into the community, illustrations of history, culture, and technique.

Here's a bit:

A loaded paintbrush in hand, the artist Kathryn Pannepacker crouches down and applies a black stroke to a steel panel. It’s a late afternoon in January, and it’s starting to snow. The welcoming glow of the Sunoco mini-mart and the car wash’s green neon signs cut through the gathering dusk. She finishes the touch-up on her Wall of Rugs #2 mural (Jordon now reads Jordan), rights her tall frame and surveys Philadelphia’s Broad and Lehigh Streets. Kitty-corner is the empty Botany 500 building, the apparel company’s brick edifice, a commemorative remnant of a once-booming garment district. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, Philadelphia was famous for its textiles—silk hosiery, men’s suits and wool carpets.

Pannepacker knows this intersection well. Over summer and fall she worked daily on the 115-foot-long mural—each of the 18 diamond plate steel panels, which separate the roadway from the train tracks, represents a textile from a different country. Her Wall of Rugs #1, located on two corners at the intersection of Girard and Belmont Avenues, was completed in 2005. Five hundred feet long, the seven-foot-high hand-painted mural ambitiously features over 40 countries. Both artworks were commissioned and funded by the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, an organization dedicated to making art accessible to a general public and the force behind the 2,800 murals that can be found dotting the city’s landscape.

North Philly is a gritty neighborhood, and a cold winter day amplifies a certain desolation. But beyond the debris and weathered buildings there’s life and a diverse culture. Pannepacker’s mural is not an urban ills cleanup campaign. Local stories are woven into the Wall of Rugs project. A Sunoco employee brought Pannepacker a photograph of an embroidered fabric from his native Bangladesh. Adam Alli, a West African artist who works long hours at the car wash, keeps an eye on the mural, and suggested Niger’s black-and-tan printed patterns. Designs from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Mongolia show up in Wall of Rugs #2, each linked to a person who stopped to talk to Pannepacker about her work. Used as floor or wall coverings, rugs have historically marked out space, both domestic and spiritual—nomadic tents lined with kilim carpets or cathedrals hung with tapestries. In Pannepacker’s hands, a global collection of rugs makes a windswept thoroughfare feel more like home.

Keep reading.

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?

urban renewal

Since the new year, the blog-waves have been full of punditry on stimulus spending, infrastructure, and urbanism. Now. I'm weighing in with Architect magazine's March cover story, Urban Renewal. I wasn't content to just ruminate on the issues or grouse about lame shovel-ready projects, instead I looked to four practices with both visions and realities for our cities, suburbs, and that space in-between. The feature grew out of the desire to counter what was looking to be urban policies heavily weighted with New Urbanist thinking. Clearly, there had to be some new urbanists out there who aren't New Urbanists. The result is a diverse group. cityLAB, Interboro Partners, Fletcher Studio, and Terreform ONE represent four different approaches to what's next for urbanism, from the everyday to the ecological to futuristic.The administration should take note.

Here's a bit:

Stumping in Toledo, Ohio, last August, Obama was handed a copy of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities by an audience member. The exchange sparked the candidate to give a nuanced explanation of the relationship between cities and suburbs.

"The research has shown that if you want a thriving suburban area, then you better have a thriving city. If you want a state as a whole to do well, then the metropolitan areas in that state have to do well," Obama said. "There is no separation. It is all linked together. We have to get past this notion that we can just leave the cities to rot, because your economy will rot. We want to work to revitalize cities, to diversify their economy."

The new administration's emphasis on urbanism, combined with unprecedented infrastructure spending and the appointment of a "green dream team" to tackle climate change issues, has raised hopes for architects and urban designers. "The stimulus package could be really exciting, and everyone has something riding on it, and some of us around here are feeling that we are at a tipping point to connecting our urban policies to some trends we've been seeing—to more compact development, focus on the center, quality of life, and sustainability," says Philip Myrick , vice president of the New York–based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces.

But Myrick's optimism is cautious. In the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed into law on Feb. 17, total infrastructure accounts for just a fraction, with $47 billion going to a combination of transit, rail, roads, and bridges. Highway investments dominate the allotment. Is this the way to jump-start cities? "We need to put a more efficient, less sprawling, less car-dependent infrastructure on the table, but I really don't see it in the package," Myrick warns. "My fear is that rather than changing the way we live in a profound way, which is what we need to do, that we will wind up replacing one technology with another, that we will still live in this land-gobbling way."

Myrick stresses a commitment to "soft infrastructure," the social spots where we live and work: parks, downtowns, public spaces. "These places are vital to our public heath and to the success of cities," he explains. "It's what makes them sustainable and what makes them better. There is very little awareness that creating those vital spaces in the public realm is a critical bottom line of any stimulus package."

With the Office of Urban Affairs and the stimulus package, the new administration is sending a mixed message: Yes, we are committed to re-envisioning cities, and yes, transportation and infrastructure remain status quo. This leads to questions: What model will the next urbanism take? And who will design it?

To find out, read the whole feature and cityLAB, Interboro Partners, Fletcher Studio, and Terreform ONE profiles.

in praise of modesty

Tiny Houses, my new collection of 30 or so houses all under 1,000 square feet, doesn't come out until the end of March, but it is starting to get reviewed. Designed by the good folks at over,under, the book is sweet without falling into cuteness.

And hey, Met Home, Preservation magazine (on the same page as Ada Louise, oh my), and Time Out New York all agreed.

And I love Gavin Browning's description of skinny Lucky Drops:

Then there is Lucky Drops, Atelier Tekuto’s long, narrow stretch of all-white reinforced plastic and perforated steel grating in Tokyo. This last space, a little too reminiscent of Catherine Deneuve’s claustrophobia-inducing haunted hallway in Repulsion, probably won’t convert diehard suburbanites. But most of the homes documented here are inspired and inviting enough that they could serve as blueprints for a much-needed national architectural trend: modesty.

in defense of print

Gearing up here at the loud paper headquarters to move A Few Zines northward and a host panel ready to take on publishing and practice, it seems appropriate, if not imperative to post What Type's posters protesting the end of print. Pedro Monteiro challenges What Type readers to be participants and print out the posters and place them where the message can be read loud and clear: a real-world means to support the newspaper industry. Sure the move is a bit idealistic, but I'd be a grade-A cynic not to want it to work.

Or, as Monteiro puts it:

By supporting your newspaper you will fight for your own voice. By telling what you want and expect from a newspaper, one that’s worth both your money and your time, you will be fighting for a better world.

You can download the posters here, here, here and here.