loud paper

little green shoots

Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature, my follow up book to Tiny Houses, quietly slipped into the marketplace on March 21. No fanfare, just another title for the shelves, but slowly, over the last few weeks, momentum has built up and there's been some really cool publicity.

Over at the Brooklyn Rail, Helen Mitsios reviewed the book. Framing it as a study in personal utopias she writes, "The Micro Green homes resonate with another era—one in which people rejected the boredom of consumer society, opposed war, and organized protests to nuclear weapons." I think my growing up in Berkeley in the seventies is showing.

Details magazine put Micro Green on their Required Reading for the Design Obsessed list, calling it "an anti-McMansion manifesto." Which seems okay, considering that CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed also makes the cut.

I love that Wallpaper snappily calls escaping to a cabin in the woods the "full Thoreau." They also include a multi-page slideshow.

Finally, in John Hill's review over at A Weekly Dose of Architecture, he took a shine to the more DIY houses in the book: Michael Janzen's Tiny Free House and Derek and Dustin Diedrickson's Backwoods Skyscraper. These two scrappy projects are very much a little 'a' take on architecture and perhaps best represent the trend within small house living for a kind of hand-crafted agency.

I'll be joining the irrepressible Derek "Deek" Diedrickson in July for the Tiny House/Shelter Workshop in Stoughton, MA, which will be a howling good time. There is nothing quite like giving a writer power tools.

 

extra, extra

 

I'm excited to team up with the pinkcomma crew for Newsstand.

Celebrate pinkcomma gallery’s relocation to 46 Waltham Street at our inaugural opening in the new studio. The event, Newsstand, will present a collection of architecture and design-related broadsheets, newsprints, and ephemera. We'll also be hosting a classifieds drive for the New City Reader.

Please join us on November 19, 2010, 6:30 – 9:30 pm
NEW LOCATION: 46 WALTHAM STREET, COURTYARD 1

Newsstand is the third in a series of exhibitions on contemporary architectural publishing. Following on A Few Zines (related to design zines and magazines) and Publishing Practices (on the influence of architecture books), Newsstand examines another print medium: the newspaper. Inexpensive printing, rapid dissemination, and expanded dimensions make the newspaper a topical platform for architecture and design discourse—even in an increasingly digital world. In order to investigate the motivations behind this tendency, the exhibit presents imaginative examples of the genre from the past several years

#lgnlgn

maximum maxim

"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Now books are written by the public and read by nobody." –Oscar Wilde

 

The popularity of the aphorism, a short, memorable, often pithy statement, goes hand in hand with the invention of printing. Throughout the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries, aphorisms and maxims were published globally in thick, bound collections. Although print remains precarious in a digital age, the aphoristic statement lives on.

For last night's Book Launch Cabaret at Storefront for Art and Architecture to celebrate Studio-X's newest release, The Studio-X NY Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation (GSAPP Books, 2010), edited by Gavin Browning, I presented Maximum Maxim MMX a zine, in slideshow form, maximized with maxims germane to architecture and publishing.

Here's a slideshow.

I hadn't intended on selling copies, but there was such an interest, that I've decided to run an edition.

Order your copy here:

blue lobsters

I tackled mutant publishing practices for the latest dizzyingly fab issue of Junk Jet, Flux us, Flux you. (With goggly-eyes, too.)  I share the issue with Enrique Ramirez (maggots), Greg J. Smith (suckage), and John Southern (slop), who each turned in terrifically wonky submissions.

I had imagined the Blue Lobsters piece running with full-page images from the publications mentioned, but sadly just the text was run. I think the editors ran out of space. Ah, the confines of print. Below is the text and you'll find my mini zine within a zine here.

Blue Lobsters

Late 90s. Print was probably already dead then. It had taken too many phone calls to find a cheap offsetter. Indie bookstores feared the big boxes cutting in on their Thirdspace. Distributors, bowing to shelving and stocking requirements laid down by the chain store, put limits on the sizes of independent magazines. (This was around the time Metropolis magazine dropped from full tabloid to its current shelf-friendly size.)

Still, I was blissed out on the print shop’s Thomas Paine authenticity. I figured it’d gloss my tracks with a meaning and texture not found with rapid digital printing. The details: the smell of ink, rich and bitter like coffee, the Berkeley Co-op apron worn by the grizzled anarchist, the cranky press he quietly turned, and his punk rock partner’s punctilious manner. I can’t remember if I printed 500 or 1,000 copies. Some sit in a box in the basement. On my last visit home I opened it up: A hundred ochre-covered pamphlets, surprisingly un-yellowed a decade on.

And now? Print is dead, again. As publishing empires collapse, the market bets on journalism’s odds of survival. Consensus says books are a lost cause. Are folks ready to cotton to Kindle? Has twitter killed the blog, the book, and the building? (I ask in a mere 83 characters.)

As go buildings, so go design magazines. This past year saw shelter and trade titles stumble and fold under the double deadweight of slow building starts and curtailed ad revenue. A year after Lehman’s collapse, missing consumer design rag Domino is like missing cotton candy—a vague remembrance of a cavity-inducing indulgence, so sweet at the time.

Indeed, I have to stop myself from falling into the vat of saccharine nostalgia that surrounds the publishing in the grand scheme, architecture publishing, and my own little niche of zinedom. Staple fold reminiscences, no matter how open hearted, tend to lead to a single polar standoff: print versus digital. But dividing publishing into two camps leaves us empty handed. Even the Gray Lady, the New York Times, splits her time between the two realms, pacifying those who stand and read the paper on the subway and those who glean their info online.

Meanwhile a number small architecture and art publications are sneaking into the space between the two modes. They are dependent on both mediums. They rely on social networks and digital technologies for form and content, but ultimately these wee volumes find their way into readers’ hands. For Gary Fogelson, Phil Lubliner and Soner Ön, the Brooklyn-based trio who makes up The Holster, publishing is performative. It calls attention to the act of making, even if that act is really just stapling some laser printed sheets. The collective commissioned sixteen artist to create PDFs, then set up their print-on-demand imprint, Demand & Supply, at zine expos and book fairs. Armed with laptop and printer, they publish in real time, straddling the gap between intimacy and automation.

Ephemera obsessions are de rigueur within certain circles of the contemporary art world. In 2001, the darling Hamburger Eyes established DIY publishing as the go-to format for photogs wanting to capture the grit of everyday life. And galleries/retailers like New York City’s Printer Matter and LA newcomer Ooga Booga curate short run editions into a kind of artistic lifestyle. That architecture should eventually re-embrace self-publishing after years of the book-versus-blog discourse is welcome, if not entirely unsurprising. The discipline is known to be a bit tardy.

Within the field of architecture and ubiquitous computing the Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series was relatively early adopter print-on-demand services, even as design students had been using the technology for one-off books for awhile. The publication is the outcome of a discussion on the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) mailing list, which then grew into a 2006 symposium at Urban Center and Eyebeam in New York. Unlike the Supply & Demand series, it uses the mainstream online publisher lulu.com as its printer and distributor. PDFs are available for free on the Situated Technologies website, making the decision to read online or in hard copy a personal choice.

I am tempted to call these new publications “zombies,” following Todd Gannon’s assessment (Log, Fall 2008) of Archigram and other sixties practitioners unbuilt work that persists in its influence after facing a critical death. Especially since that groups’ publications provide the emotional, if not intellectual or formal, underpinning of today’s self-publishing efforts. Or as he puts it in the essay, “Return of the Living Dead: Archigram and Architecture’s Monstrous Media:” “In nine and one-half eponymous pamphlets released from 1961 to 1974, Archigram took advantage of the highly reconfigurable space of the printed page to manipulate forms, juxtapose elements, and orchestrate architectural experiments impossible in other media.”

But given that experiments in other media could now be taken to define much of architectural practice, I prefer to call these half-breeds “mutants.” Living between paper and screen, mutants are part of publishing’s evolution, even if a specific characteristic proves too unwieldy to pass on to the next generation.  Some mutations are sneaky. As is the loud paper broadsheet, published as half issue, half catalogue for the “A Few Zines” show that opened at Studio-X in January 2009. Designer Chris Grimley used the column width of a blog post to organize the page. Without being explicit, the broadsheet triggers digital references.

An iPhone is the mutant appendage needed to read Standpunkte One. Aptly entitled This Will _ This, the first issue features a single essay by John Harwood and Jesse LeCavalier who conceived the pamphlet with graphic designer Guillaume Mojon. (Standpunkte Magazine itself is out of Basel, Switzerland and edited by Reto Geiser and Tilo Richter.) A shiny black cipher, the publication is full of totemic black and white graphics. Yet, a 2D bar code reader app brings the pamphlet to life. Encryption is at the root of this first issue. A scan of the cover graphics takes you to www.thiswill-this.net. Where the editorial statement reads: "You will not to be able to read this, at least not all of it. This is fine with us." By placing the phone a filter between the web and the printed page, This Will _ This, frustrates the act of reading, but still maintains the need for a book object. It explores, as the editors write, "the thresholds and overlaps between material and immaterial media.”

It is impossible to state that mutant publishing will bring traditional print media back from death’s door. That economic model needs to independently reassemble its DNA. (Then again, it may reanimate quicker than we think. Tina Brown’s online Daily Beast just announced that it is teaming up with Perseus Books Group to create rapid-print paperbacks.) But these mutants—esoteric pamphlets operating at the riff of “material and immaterial media”—show dynamic signs of life and happily elude any nostalgic impulse.

pure folly

Lucy: folly, duck, and elephant in the room.

It's perhaps a sad irony that the short article I wrote for the last (very last) issue of I.D. magazine was on follies—those temporary structures that spring up with architectural exuberance, only to be torn down as their spectacle wears thin.

Featured in the Dec/Jan issue was the installation Folly—The View from Nowhere by Los Angeles–based architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena on view at the MOCA Pacific Design Center, a space that itself is a folly-like, westside spin off of the downtown museum. Frank and Ravi's installation is both a historical survey of transition of the folly from aristocratic expression to middle-class entertainment and a folly—a belvedere—itself. Yet the view at the PDC is fake. With four vinyl photo murals, it offers views to anywhere from nowhere.

The untimely closure of ID has been dissected at length by the design community and the unwise economic choices made leading to its folding are held in some quarters as examples of why traditional print publishing is itself a kind of folly. What's become more clear to me over the last year as more and more titles close, is that a publication can't rely only on the stakes and rigging of print, nor is the move to a digital format as surefire fix. But maybe embracing publishing as pure folly—that is, as spectacle, as event—can offer a worthwhile model. Magazines like GOOD take an integrated approach, content is online as well as in print, and it hosts events based its featured subjects. It also has the good sense to team with other titles, like Readymade, to build cross branding and robust content.

I come to this thought on the heels of spending two days in a conference based around Learning From Las Vegas, a book that in its lifetime has sold 80,000 copies. A big number for architecture publishing, but relatively small for any mass media. Despite the relatively limited number of copies, its influence is persists. In his keynote, Robert Venturi insisted that LLV is about communication and Denise Scott Brown noted that "in our information age" it is more important than ever.

subgenre

All August I've been geeking out. Just about everyone I've seen in California has gotten an earful of one of three topics: Dr. Who, Torchwood, and coffee. Probably in that order. More doses of the last equals more of the first two. I am an enthusiastic fan—dare I say fangirl? (Did I not come up with the idea for a slash pairing of Don Draper and Captain Jack?)

So, when asked by Architect magazine to review the new BLDG BLOG Book, I felt kinship with Manaugh's many "enthusiasms" and wanted to see how they'd (underground cities, musical icebergs, fantasy weather, etc.) hold up in quality paperback. You can read the whole review at Architect, but here's a few grafs.

Geoff Manaugh, founder in 2004 of the popular website BLDG BLOG, and myself, a fellow architecture blogger, share a number of enthusiasms. Among them are: novelist Don Delillo, eighteenth-century architect Sir John Soane, and '60s pranksters Archigram. Cultish figures within the discipline, they populate the pages of The BLDG BLOG Book, released this past summer by Chronicle Books. For architects whose taste skews wider than the modernist canon, finding them referenced in each chapter is like running across a favorite eccentric uncle....

I’ve long been drawn to characters and themes that provoke architectural imaginings, so I was eager to see how Manaugh would translate his verbose and eclectic website into print. “I wanted to use the book as a book,” he writes. As such, he’s created material “exclusively” for the volume. The new essays and interviews, including conversation with Archigram’s own Peter Cook, not only make up the bulk of each chapter, they are bonus tracks for hard core BLDG BLOG fans. Still it is the dozens of reprinted blog posts that make for livelier reading, especially the interviews. Such as Manaugh’s talk with novelist Patrick McGrath, where the author, in his own words, explores the writing process and the dark imagination it takes to develop “gothic landscapes.”

It is hard to say if the new texts make the book anymore book-like. It still feels very bloggy, minus the hyperlinks and comments. (Actually, links would help, in just a few pages I chalked up references to works by Umberto Eco, Neil Gaiman, Francis Ford Coppola and Orson Welles. The extensive name checking is borderline High Fidelity, i.e. record store clerk insiderness.) In each short essay, Manaugh lets his consciousness expand. For instance, in a piece entitled The Weather Bowl, he proposes manipulating the climate to create public events and fun spectacles. Letting his narrative get frothy, he writes, “Weather control is the future of urban design. Engineering the climate is how we’ll make our cities interesting again.” Interesting. Like how Katrina made New Orleans interesting again? Is Manaugh critiquing the political gap between climate change and urban infrastructure with a sly parody? We’ll never know; he finishes by imagining a new Pritzker Prize for Best Weather Effects.

Keep reading.

refining the language of sprawl

Last night I attended a lecture at the Metropolitan Exchange, hosted by CUP. Novelist and editor Matthew Stadler spoke on "Where We Live Now." It is a book, the translation of a text by German urbanist Thomas Sieverts and additional readings by  Rem Koolhaas, Aaron Betsky, Saskia Sassen, but it is also a comment on the contemporary condition, the  Zwischenstadt, or "in-between landscape." Those places that are not country or city, but specific moments in the generic sprawl. Here, Matthew argues, is a space rich in its own kind of logic and tradition. To just dismiss it is sprawl is to ignore what Sieverts says is the condition of 80 percent of the populated globe.

To illustrate his talk, Matthew brought up the work of Shawn Records, a Portland-based photographer, who's images of Beaverton, OR capture the mixed messages in our cities, suburbs, and countryside.

Both Matthew and Shawn are part of the bigger project, suddenly.org, which creates events, books, artworks, and ideas about the shape of cities.

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.

pattern language

Self-portrait with frost and terrazzo.

Over at varnelis.net, Kazys posts about his William Gibson mini-obsession—in light of the recently released Spook County. The enthusiasm is infectious, and I’ve allowed it to lead me to Gibson’s 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition.

Forty pages in, the novel makes me jittery, filled as it is with jet lag and brand name anxieties. The details overwhelm: catalogs of cool desires and detachments. It stirs up memories of a year where, coolhunter adjacent, I worried if my jeans were a dark enough hue. Soon after I switched to corduroy.

Page 19 offers up an addition to my catalog of eyeglass-related quotes:

Brutally cropped, he regards her from the depths of massive, mask-like Italian spectacles. The black-framed glasses remind her of emoticons, those snippets of playschool emotional code cobbled up from keyboard symbols to produce sideways cartoon faces. You could do his glasses with an eight, hyphen for his nose, the mouth a left slash.

8-\. The international symbol for dork. Cool be damned.