loud paper

all that glitters

The buildings were packaged objects, just as much as album covers or cologne bottles, and the name was the label that signaled how to read the rest of the accouterments.

It is terribly sad to hear that John Chase, a planner for the City of West Hollywood and crackin' good writer, died yesterday. John was my thesis adviser at SCI-Arc when I started loud paper. You can see his influence all over those first three issues. Not only was I riffing on similar topics as John—Las Vegas or  dingbats (pardon, stucco boxes, per John's brilliant books Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving and Exterior Decoration)—but his smart, personal, and sly perspective on the city helped shape my voice as a writer. He encouraged me to enjoy the snap and crackle of language in service to architectural journalism.

I just saw John in LA at the Dingbat 2.0 panel hosted by the LAForum in July and was giddy when he raised his hand from center of the crowd and started peppering us panelists with questions. This is the guy who knows a thing or two about the lowly, but glittery, besmirched, but beloved, stucco box. His queries and critiques came with a generous dose of warmth and humor. We emailed after I returned to the East Coast and John shared his excitement at getting close to retiring from the city (with a pension!) and devoting himself to writing and teaching. I was looking forward to seeing what he'd produce next. With humility he wrote, "I may or may not conceive a unified mission statement and focus efforts or it might just be a diffuse cloud of gas." Gassy? Never. Insightful, researched, and stylish, always. He will be missed.

a little batty

Judy Fiskin, Untitled, Dingbat 1982-1983

Sara: Roland thinks L.A. is a place for the brain-dead. He says, if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert. But I think - I don't know, it's not what I expected. It's a place where they've taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. I've seen a lot of L.A. and I think it's also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they're doing is all right. So what do you say, Roland? 

Roland: I still say it's a place for the brain-dead.

-LA Story, 1991

This endless east coast heatwave is working my last frayed nerve, so I am jumping on a plane and heading to Los Angeles, where I can eat all the sprout and avocado sandwiches I want. Wheat germ and wheat grass, bring it. You can find me either at Intelligentsia Coffee or Vegan Glory.

While I'm in town I have the pleasure to sit on a panel hosted by the LA Forum entitled Dingbat as Cultural Icon, as part of the LA Forum’s recently completed Dingbat 2.0 Design Competition. (You can view the winners of the competition here.)

The event is moderated by Michael Osman and I'm excited to join panelists Barbara Bestor, Alan Hess, and Christopher Hawthorne. Hopefully, there will be a lively debate about the role of the dingbat as a cultural symbol for LA and the future of housing.

When: Saturday, July 17, 3-6 pm

Where: Woodbury Hollywood Exhibitions, 6518 Hollywood Boulevard

super fun

Superfront is a tiny storefront gallery on Atlantic Avenue tucked under the LIRR tracks. Wander past the ramshackle laundromat, a few car repair garages, and look for the Seven-11 across the street and you'll find its unassuming entrance. Inside, big things are happening. Superfront director Mitch McEwen's put together a whole host of summer programming for the backyard to take place under a canopy of hula hoops and the gallery is home to works by four artists with ties to architects. The show, Artists Who Play Well With Architects, opens on July 17 and includes:  Kim Holleman, Grant Guilliams , Michael Gaillard, and Eve Mosher. Holleman is also working on a project for Terrafarm at Terraform ONE and her Trailer Park will be parked outside the Metropolitan Exchange on Flatbush next week.

 
 

17 July –  13 August, 2010
Opening Saturday July 17th 6:00pm – 8:00pm

SUPERFRONT is proud to present ARTISTS WHO PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS ARCHITECTS, a summer group show on view at the Brooklyn gallery through August 13th.  The exhibition brings together 4 artists of disparate backgrounds who, nonetheless, share a common familiarity with practicing architects in New York City.

Curated by Mitch McEwen, Director of SUPERFRONT, with input from Lee Ping Kwan, architect at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, and Mimi Zeiger, editor and publisher of loud paper, the exhibit emphasizes playful and tactile investigations of landscape, site selection, authority, and scale.  The resulting exhibit mixes astute games of narrative, word play, and humor with an irreverence for architectural gravitas.  Sculptures, drawings, physical models, and instrument-like objects are on display.

  

Join SUPERFRONT, KIT, and the NY City Explorers to celebrate the opening of this project with a reception (for grown ups) on Saturday July 17th 6pm – 9pm. Also opening the same evening in the gallery is the group exhibit Artists Who Play Well With Architects. The reception will feature live music and beverages for sale.  No cover.

The first annual Public Summer program, developed from the theme of Temporary Publics, features a jury-selected installation designed by KIT, a young New York collective of designers.  This outdoor installation for the local community group NYC Explorers has been constructed by KIT with support from SUPERFRONT and volunteers.  The installation incorporates over 400 hula hoops, as well as found and discarded materials.

KIT’s scheme, which features hundreds of hula hoops forming a connected canopy, was selected by the Sketch 120: Temporary Publics jury comprised of DJ /rupture, nArchitects, and Slade Architecture.  The Sketch 120: Temporary Publics charrette was produced in partnership with Design in 5, a program of the Architectural League NY, with additional support from Brooklyn Arts Council and SuckerPunchDaily.com

Childrens’ activities throughout Public Summer are free and coordinated by NY City Explorers Carnival, a project by NY City Explorers, a local small business that offers a wide variety of family programs and services throughout NYC.

KIT is comprised of designers Lauren Page, Phil Kuehne, Justin Foster, and Read Langworthy. The quartet, a combination of academic and professional associations, has a passion for public design and social infrastructure. All are recent graduates from Bachelors of Architecture programs and they currently live, work, and play in New York City.

NY City Explorers (NYCE) is a Brooklyn-based family enrichment center created by Kisha Edwards-Gandsy & Keyanna Murrill that provides classes, camps, childcare, two indoor play spaces, and party planning for families throughout NYC. The NYCE Carnival at SUPERFRONT aims to provide safe, carnival style atmosphere complete with scheduled films, games, contests, healthy food vendor sampling, and creative family programming.

The PUBLIC SUMMER project has been achieved with the funding and/or materials support of the following organizations and individuals:

Design in 5/The Architectural League of New York (competition sponsors), Mark Gardner, Betty Webb, Shinique Smith, Sarah Millsaps, and suckerPUNCHdaily.

SUPERFRONT’s mission is to support, promote, and produce radically contemporary art and architecture, while fostering creative interdisciplinary exchange. This mission is achieved through exhibits, publications, panels, and projects that, while focused on architecture, also concern art, performance, media and social science. Since January 2008, SUPERFRONT has invited students, emerging architects, designers, visual artists, and performance artists to engage in a public forum that raises awareness of contemporary architectural practice and theory.

what we talk about when we talk about talking about architecture

Allais: Architecture is such a good excuse to talk about so many things.
Hyde: And why does it always end up being a discussion about architecture?

Taking a page out of Interview magazine, the new issue PRAXIS features architects in conversation with other architects. Editors Amanda Reeser Lawrence and Ashley Schafer have paired up some of the most emergent firms of the last five years—a group defined by Michael Meredith of MOS in his conversation with Marcelo Spina of PATTERNS as "the "practice" generation."

It's also a group that were able to delve into experimental practice, buoyed by ever-expanding digital tools, Ordos houses, and an economic bubble. Conversations: Continued, a symposium in celebration of the new issue at PS1 this Friday, comes at a time when all these small firms are coping, retrenching, and strategizing in a recession—basically, asking themselves what to do next?

I've been asked to join the dialogue at PS1 as a "provocateur", along with Keith Krumweide, Reinhold Martin, Kazys Varnelis, Michael Kubo, Enrique Walker, and Thomas de Monchaux. So, let's do the math: 11 architects, 2 editors, 2 critics, and 7 people with sharp tongues. It's gonna get loud.

Conversations: Continued

A Symposium & Open Discussion in conjunction with the release of PRAXIS 11 Architects + 12 Conversations

Friday - 25 June 2010

12.30-6pm at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens

The symposium marks the release of the 11 Architects + 12 Conversations issue of PRAXIS: a journal of writing and building. The moderated discussion will invite audience participation in an open dialogue that explores shared and contested territory among this emerging generation of practices.

The symposium, "Conversations: Continued", brings together 10 Young Architectural Practices: MOS, NArchitects, WORKac, PATTERNS, Aranda/Lasch, Productora, FAR, Ciro Najle, The Living, and Howeler +Yoon with two critics, Timothy Hyde and Lucia Allais. The event continues the more formal discussion begun in PRAXIS 11, 11 Architects/12 Conversations, by bringing the firms together in a shared conversation, broadening the issues at stake, and sharing the material with a wider architectural and public audience.

We will also take this occasion to celebrate the long anticipated 2010 PRAXIS 11+12 double issue release with cocktails and a preview of Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu's Pole Dance, the winner of the MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program.

For further information and schedule, please feel free to contact us or visit us online at: www.praxisjournal.net

zines reign in spain

I'm excited to announce that loud paper and a number of "A Few Zines" alumni will be included in the show 'De Zines.' Curators Óscar Martin and Roberto Vidal (who are also inspired artists and designers) have brought together nearly 400(!) independent titles—I'm happy to see loud paper, Face B, Thumb Projects,  Standpunkte, and Mas Context share shelf space with Cabinet, Fantastic Man, Temporary Services and other pubs that span the editorial range from food to art to design and back again.

If you are in Madrid this summer, make sure to stop by the gallery.

Inéditos 2010
La Casa Encendida
29 June to 29 August 2010

Just leave enough time to read your way through this amazing collection of independent publishing—the show celebrates a form that manages to thrive in a dicey economic environment by skirting any easy definitions or making polarities between content and form, print and digital. 

‘De Zines’, tries to reflect what is happening in the contemporary editorial creation on the level of independent publications, how this area relates to the artistic production and social, cultural and current political environment. Around 400 international publications have been gathered from most established magazines in the market until handmade zines and a selection of experimental magazines.
In times of constant technological revolution and immediate access to information through the network, paper, as a media for the dissemination of culture and information seems destined to disappear. However, the number of independent publications do not stop growing. In fact, different forms of communication, digital and analogue can coexist. It’s about different ways, uses and times ranging between the immediacy of digital and the traditional way of disseminating and consuming cultural creation and art. Its contents tend to be more timeless and invite paused reflection. Beautiful design and text written with loving care in a continuous search for seamless integration between content and form. In general, they are still spaces for dissemination, review and reflection on cultural production. Objects themselves, everlasting, pages of printed paper that can be touched with the fingers, means of underground cultural expression. In the case of experimental magazines involves a different way to approach to these publications, full of visual impact, subject to different interpretations, inexhaustible source of emotions and feelings. They already have a notable presence in art fairs, specialized bookstores and museum shops.

These editorial projects, heirs of the phenomenon do it yourself culture derived from punk and art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus, are living a resurgence. Some have remained fairly true to those principles, others have grown in distribution,  budget and number of prints. They all share an independent spirit in addressing issues like music, film, fashion, design, art, philosophy, economics, literature, photography ... or closer personal projects to more people. In fact, they are a response to dominant culture, with a clear activist attitude, trying to spread other ways to understand their relations with society and even with oneself. Independent publications may be the future of print media. In fact they get a significant speed in the dissemination of current culture with a democratic way to create and share images, ideas and information. Pages filled with an impeccable editorial design, a media for freedom of expression of the obsessions and passions their creators want to communicate, have a voice.

’De Zines’, articulated as a consultation room, a space that does not only creates traffic but a place to stay, increasing the desire to know, trying to help the audience to find a  those issues so that a sense of recognition. In short, create networks among people with a similar vision in a global and plural world.

now on view

Filed under "community," Michael Maltzan's recent project, the Carver Apartments, is included in the latest National Design Triennial that opened on May 14. I have yet to tour the exhibition, but I wrote about Maltazan's building in the current issue of Architect magazine. Designed for Los Angeles' Skid Row Housing Trust, the project raises provocative questions about the visibility of needy population. Both Maltzan and Molly Rysman, the Trust’s director of special projects and external affairs, argue for architecture that isn't subsumed by its context, but rather stands out and makes a statement while serving a community.  It's a fine line to tread: a misstep can lead into architectural boosterism and back slapping while the client and neighborhood remain under served. 

....The New Carver Apartments is farther afield, sited in South Park, a rapidly developing neighborhood near L.A. Live and the Staples Center.

The location is strategic on two levels. It houses residents in an area with access to transit and grocery stores, and it is a statement to Los Angeles: Affordable housing is not a blight that needs to be hidden away.

“It is a controversial concept. When we first showed [Maltzan’s design] to the investors, they wondered why we were making such a dramatic building,” says Molly Rysman, the Trust’s director of special projects and external affairs. “We had to convince them that it doesn’t need to be bland. Affordable housing improves the neighborhood and creates an anchor in the community. It’s not about blending in, but about having an impact.”...

However, it takes a lounge and laundry room on the third floor to see Maltzan’s design at its most polemic. A window looks out over the freeway, and L.A. drivers can see through the thick, acoustic glass into the all-yellow space where the formerly homeless fold laundry, check e-mail, and watch TV. “The excruciating irony of the homeless is that because they are so much in the public view, they are shut off from the world. The building creates opportunities for public interactions, and gives them a chance to re-emerge,” explains Maltzan. “It is important that people see that [the residents] are part of the greater community—it’s not to put them on display, but to see them as real.” It’s a charged, eye-to-eye situation, a risky attempt to humanize an outcast group.

Read the entire piece here.

dingbat redux

The LA Forum sends news of a competition ready to change the plucked, powdered, and withering face of LA housing: Dingbat 2.0. I'm happy to spread the word, not only because a piece I wrote for ReadyMade magazine years ago is cited as source material, but because there's a terrific jury ready to cull through forward thinking proposals for Los Angeles' future.

Dingbat 2.0:

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design proposes DINGBAT 2.0, an open, single-stage, international design competition, reconsidering Los Angeles’ ubiquitous dingbat apartment building for the 21st century. All designers, architects, artists, engineers, students, and other interested parties are fully eligible for participation in this competition.

Final Jury:

Barbara Bestor (Principal, Bestor Architecture)
John Chase (Author / Urban Designer, City of West hollywood) 
Dana Cuff (Director, cityLAB -UCLA/AUD, Los Angeles)
Teddy Cruz (Principal, Estudio Teddy Cruz, San Diego)
Neil Denari (Principal, NMDA, Los Angeles)
Joshua Prince-Ramus (Principal, REX, New York)

Dingbats:  

The Dingbat grew out of Los Angeles’ rapid postwar expansion period and defined a pervasive vernacular that still weaves through the space of the city’s neighborhoods and the decades of their development. For more than half a century, this idiosyncratic typology has been vilified, praised, studied, and often misunderstood – as much for being ugly and ordinary as for being innovative, iconoclastic, and distinctly “L.A.” As a housing type, the Dingbat has aided the sprawl for which L.A. is infamous while simultaneously creating a consistency of urban density achieved by few other cities. Beyond its role as an alternative to L.A.’s traditionally single-family planning focus, the Dingbat allowed millions of immigrants to arrive in Los Angeles and find their shared piece of paradise. The Dingbat offered the tropes of the singly family house minus the mortgage – a consolation prize to the American Dream.

Yet despite its dominance for over 50 years, the original Dingbat no longer fulfills the changing needs of a new Los Angeles. The majority of new immigrants to L.A. no longer arrive from Middle America and instead they carry with them different traditions of individuality and family life. The car (and the development patterns it demands) is no longer sustainable in a metropolis whose very identity is synonymous with “car culture.” Today is an opportune time to revisit the Dingbat, its relationship to the identity of the city, and the unexploited possibilities it may yet offer the discipline of architecture.

Dingbat 2.0 asks designers to re-envision the Dingbat, and, in so doing, offer a revised vision for L.A. itself. In order to redefine the Dingbat, it is essential to understand what has made it so successful (or at least ubiquitous) and determine what form of Dingbat-ness will best define a new identity for an emerging 21st Century Los Angeles. In short, this is not Banham’s Dingbat. Instead, Dingbat 2.0 is a complete re-invention of the typology, one that could allude to L.A.’s residential future, rather than simply glorifying one of the many pop-cultural icons of its past.

For me it’s the sad, faded dignity of the apartment buildings that makes this plasticky City of Angels seem like a livable place. A place where names are no longer placeholders for a better tomorrow, but first editions of the American dream, executed in shades of turquoise and dusty rose.

 -Mimi Zeiger, Dingbat Culture

Design Challenge:

The competition calls for the consideration of two design issues regarding the Dingbat and it’s impact on the urban fabric of Los Angeles.  Two boards (digital-only submittal) will be required for the competition. One board will address the typology of the Dingbat at the scale of the individual building (are they to be retrofitted? replaced?), and the second board will consider the larger urban scale of an entire city block within a ‘Dingbat neighborhood’.  Three separate sites in three distinct Los Angeles neighborhoods will be considered for the competition.

......................................................................
Competition Schedule:
April 1: Competition announcement
April 12: Complete Competition Brief available
May 31: Registration period ends
June 4: Submission deadline
June 12: Jury
June 19: Winners announced + Exhibition
.......................................................................

Prizes and Entry Fees:

A total of $9,000 USD in prize money will be awarded in the following categories:

PROFESSIONAL:
1st place $4000
2nd place $2000
3rd place $750
Honorary Mentions*

STUDENT:
1st place $1500
2nd place $500
3rd place $250
Honorary Mentions*

ENTRY FEES:
Professional entry fee: $75 USD
Student entry fee: $25 USD (must provide copy of Student ID)
.......................................................................

Registration:

Click here for registration and payment information.

in junk veritas

Please join VAMOS Architects, LGNLGN, and Junk Jet magazine for the U.S. launch of the Junk Jet n°3 flux-us! flux-you! issue. To celebrate, Junk Jet and Vamos Architects will each create a dynamic installation, Jetistics: The Analysis of Junk and I Know You.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Festivities begin at 6:30 and we'll be there until 10 pm.

RSVP over at the Facebook event page.

Drinks sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery and Original Sin Hard Cider.

VAMOS Architects Storefront
100 N 3rd Street (Between Berry and Wythe)
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Subway: L, Bedford stop

 
JETISTICS: THE ANALYSIS OF JUNK.
THE JUNK OF ANALYSIS?
 
After three years of publishing the experimental magazine Junk Jet, it is time for a serious analysis of junk. Therefore, Jetistics reports revealing details and secrets of world’s most important periodical publications dealing with junk data. As evidence, the presentation tracks and compares changes over time, showing overall trends and local details, analyzing patterns and breaks of junk.
 
For the storefront of VAMOS Architects, Jetistics builds, in neo-neo-classicist style, a monumental micro-architecture, or an architectural micro-monument.
 

What you see is what you jet: junk data, statistical landscapes, golden rate graphs, bumps charts, purchase waves, classical façade, trend analysis, random walks, empirical measurements, data paths, dot-dash plots.

I KNOW YOU
In the spirit of engagement, VAMOS Architects will create I Know You, a physical diagram of a social network. With help from residents, businesses, and visitors on the block, the project will emerge throughout the course of the day.
 
VAMOS Architects is a sociologically-driven design firm led by Evan Bennett and Silvia Fuster. Collaborators and clients include Macro Sea, DBI, Calvin Klein, DvF, and Chris Blackwell/Island Outpost.
 

These events coincide with the first annual North Third Block Association’s block party, which celebrates the block’s unique mix of businesses: bookstores, design shops, boutiques, chocolatiers, restaurants and bars.

the sweet spot

 
Tasting the Void, Group8

I've been lucky enough the past few weeks to have several articles hit the page and screen, so I thought I'd round them up in a single post. The subjects vary widely: GIS and Geodesign, Learning from Las Vegas, and some critical thinking about the nature of speculative architecture, both at the Guggenheim and at the MoMA, but what ties these piece together is that they all hit that sweet spot where I really enjoyed writing them, had to work my chops the process, and I was pleased with final results.

The round-up:

Meet the Geodesigner, Architect

GIS technology, long relied on by planners, is making inroads into architecture. What happens when data-rich map layers meet 3D building designs?

So, what happens when architects, and not just planners, embrace the potential of GIS and geodesign? Things get data-rich and complicated very fast. “It used to be that we were operating in the walled garden of architecture, but now we are moving from a place where it was hard to find information to where we are flooded with place-based data,” says Nicholas de Monchaux, an architect, urbanist, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, comparing the old analog maps and tables with Google Earth. “That change will have a sweeping effect on the design profession.”

Letter from New Haven: Pop Rules, Architect
Weighing the legacy of the Yale Las Vegas studio.

"Well, ‘what happens in Vegas … ’?” began a Yale University professor, Emmanuel Petit, about halfway through the first day of the “Architecture After Las Vegas” symposium held at the New Haven institution in January. It was just a matter of time before someone invoked Sin City’s marketing slogan—such low-hanging fruit at a highbrow conference.

Contemplating the Void, Icon

Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic design – the tantalizing volume bounded by spiraling ramps – begs to be filled, but with what? Trees? Trampolines? Chocolate?...

But, as Contemplating the Void canvasses all these practitioners, what does it really ask? Is it a speculative free-for-all (speculations being in vogue at the moment) or something else? Under former director Thomas Krens, the museum spent the past two decades in expansion mode, creating fame for the Guggenheim brand across the globe. His departure two years ago coincided with economic contractions everywhere; this modest exhibition reasserts the New York Guggenheim as the main event.

[nb. My original version had ""umbilicus mundi," the navel of the world, instead of "main event"—a turn of phrase that meant to capture the big G's narcissism, which, IMHO, gets lost with the celebratory replacement.]

Two Feet High and Rising: On Optimism, Speculation and Oysters, Places Journal/Design Observer

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, the latest exhibition to open in the architecture and design gallery of the Museum of Modern Art, begins with a grim premise: that global climate change is making sea levels rise and powerful storm surges more frequent. Watch out, we’re gonna get wet. If we don't take action, we're in for catastrophe, with floods wiping out parts of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and northern New Jersey. To underscore the creek we are up, the exhibition designers have grafted water lines — two, four, six, eight, ten feet — on the dark gray gallery walls. Glub, glub....

Rising Currents comes at a time when scenario planning and disaster speculation have become part of the architecture and urbanism zeitgeist — an intellectualized way of coping with an onrush of crises. In previous decades, construction downturns were marked by a rise in paper architecture, in unrealized visions. Now, we trade in speculation. Neither science fiction, exactly, nor an architecture of the everyday, a speculative practice carefully chooses which realities to contend with, betting on which futures might come to fruition. The approach isn’t ironic; it’s truly sincere. Yet, as contemporary books, blogs, studios and gallery shows reveal, the desire to do good is complicated by methodologies charged up on risk, as if the energetic discussion of failing cities, displaced populations and wasted landscapes were a kind of extreme design sport — a chance for architecture to free climb to the very limits of the discipline.

new city, new additons

A Few Zines hits Chicago on Monday (panel and reception on Friday, April 9) and it seems that each new venue grows the exhibition. This time we have a slew of new publications: David Garcia Studio's two MAPs (Manual of Architectural Possibilities), both Antarctica and Quarantine; Fred Scharmen's Losing My Edge, a lgnlgn-related release; hard copies of the new and prolific MAS Context (I can't believe how good #5 is); and the latest edition of Standpunkte (the German title roughly translates to "How did you do that?" 6 talks about architecture).

To get your hands on copies, come by the show at University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Architecture, Room 3100, 845 West Harrison Street, Chicago.