loud paper

sundry summer items

Hornsey Housing Study, Archigram

Saturday, as I was walking around Bushwick, the wind picked up and blew in the first fall breeze. That gust tells me that summer is rapidly coming to a close. The first part of my summer was spent finishing up Micro Green. Then, the last month went by so fast that I didn't have a chance to post any of my recently published writing. So, here, in an inelegant list, is the summer writing round up:

Screen Grab: archigram.westminster.ac.uk, Architect

The Archigram Archival Project cues up the ’60s pop group’s hits and B-sides.

"I used to regularly collect this stuff out of the waste bin," Crompton says.

(A short piece, it allowed me to sit down with Dennis Crompton for an hour in Cooper Square and pepper him with mad fangirl questions.)

US Land Port of Entry, Architect

When architect Robert Siegel received the commission to design the United States Land Port of Entry in Calais, Maine, the easternmost border crossing between the U.S. and Canada, he didn’t instantly start sketching—he went on a road trip. In the middle of winter, Siegel and project manager Eduardo Ramos left their New York office, jumped in the car and visited more than 20 border-control stations in the Northeast. Driving back and forth between the two nations was revealing, even as it raised a few patrol officers’ eyebrows. The architecture at each crossing was universally banal, if not downright off-putting: acres of asphalt, bad signage, and antiquated and undistinguished buildings. Not exactly a warm welcome to the United States.

In the Clouds, Architect

Compared with, say, the financial-services industry, architecture has been slow to catch on to every technological trend. And while the IT lag was made worse by the economic downturn and a reluctance to invest in new hardware, the move into the cloud is coming along at just the right time. With cheaper hardware and software refreshes, it’s a competitive boon for smaller practices lacking the in-house computational might of larger firms.

Richard Meier's Model Museum, Long Island City, Wallpaper

MZ: What do you think of the fantastically shaped CNC-milled models that people are making today?
RM: Well, it's different. It expresses what they're doing. We're not doing that.

Fine Dine-ing, Dwell

Interior and furniture designer Nick Dine—son of pop artist Jim Dine—has a love-hate relationship with his 2,000-square-foot Hudson Square condo loft.

Dine: "I want this apartment to be an inspirational place. It’s very stimulating for the children to have all of this visual material to look at–—like an original Sex Pistols poster. It’s not a piece of art, but I treat it like art or a design object. I don’t listen to the Sex Pistols every day, but it’s a memory, a moment, a time: New York in 1977."

(This piece also got some attention on Unhappy Hipsters, which featured (skewered) not one, two, but three images from the photo shoot.)

Grow a Living Wall, Readymade

Going green is, unfortunately, new to New Orleans. Lagging behind most major municipalities, it’s still without a citywide recycling program. But architect Coleman Coker of buildingstudio is out to raise awareness and, so far, reactions have been positive. “We were surprised when lots of people came to the opening and started telling us about their own retention ponds and backyard cisternsŃthey’re watering vegetable gardens and breeding dragonflies,” says Coker excitedly. “It has a small, but important, impact on a city that is rebuilding itself.”

The Littlest Loft, or How to Hack a Murphy Bed, Readymade

William L. Murphy, of the eponymous bed, came to his design because (like Bauge) he lived in a small, one-room apartment but liked to entertain. Murphy patented his invention at the turn of the last century and it quickly gave rise to comedy skits, including Charlie Chaplin’s epic battle in the 1916 silent film One A.M.

feeling sentient

It took awhile for my brain to formulate the words “science fair” as I walked through Toward the Sentient City, now on view at the Architectural League of New York, but once there I couldn’t shake them. The two words weren’t meant as derogatory or judgmental, quite the opposite. Curator Mark Shepard brought together five projects that embed the urban environment with the technologies of ubiquitous computing—sensors, RFID tags, and networks—and the result is a welcome familiarity.

Here, technology wants you to engage, not just with it, but also with the people and critters in the world around you. Amphibious Architecture, a collaboration between The Living and Natalie Jeremijenko, dunks an array of interactive tubes in the East River and the Bronx River. Equipped with sensors, the tubes collect water quality readings and monitor for fish. In the gallery, viewers are asked to text the fish a watery “What up?” and the fish report back on the state of their ecosystem. The architecture here is not just amphibious but anthropomorphic; I sent the fish a message and the fish wrote back “Underwater, it now loud,” signaling the presence of marine life, and urged me to text friends AhoyAnchovie and HeyHerring.

The National Science Fair, first founded in 1941, rose to popularity in the 1950s under the shadow of the cold war. Meanwhile suburban kitchens filled with appliances and ever more complex chemical solutions, science fairs served a double purpose. They trained American youth and offered the public a perceived transparency to the scientific and technological developments. If a high-schooler could build a crystal radio set, then the country’s future is in good hands. In many ways ubiquitous computing a similar model. The complex networks that provide the underpinnings of daily life are made visible; as seen in Trash Track that uses RFID tags to map garbage or Breakout! an experiment in co-working in the city’s café, parks, and public space. 

There’s comfort in that.

Or discomfort, if we use the street furniture developed by JooYoun Paek and David Jimison as an example. Capable of making vagrancy judgments, their Smart Bench uses movement sensors and a hearty robotic system to boot sitters if they lounge too long. Wall text describes all three of the Too Smart City projects (bench, trashcan, and street sign) as “overly enthusiastic”—a phrase that captures and critiques the blind deployment of computational technology in the urban realm. Are Paek and Jimison suggesting that we shouldn’t get too comfortable with these technologies? As our actions in public space are tracked and monitored is the correct response acceptance, awareness, or action?

Just as mid-century science fairs’ optimism was colored by atomic fear, Toward a Sentient City has its own specter: the fate of the environment. Natural Fuse by Usman Haque, Dot Samsen, Ai Hasegawa, Cesar Harada, and Barbara Jasinowicz, comes across at first as a cheerful, hands-on learning station. Designed to call attention to carbon offsets, houseplants are hooked up to devices that tracks their CO2 output. That local system is then tied into a city-wide network of other houseplants which regulates energy usage and carbon absorption. Sounds friendly enough, the plants thrive when everyone in the network gets along. But, if not “then the network starts to kill plants, thus diminishing the network’s electricity capacity.” Users have the option of being “selfless” or “greedy.” Plants live or plants die on collective decision. It’s a grim opposition. But such darkness embedded in the brightly lit gallery is just as welcoming as any sanguine accessibility.

virtual seduction

Thomas Wilfred at Clavilux keyboard

This afternoon I met up with Molly Steenson, Enrique Ramirez, and John Szot to hash out just what we are going to cover on our Meet the Architects panel at SXSW Interactive. Amped on good coffee and thick slices of grilled pita bread, we dashed from tangent to tangent. Somewhere in there, John, an architect who works for the media firm Digital Foundry in Brooklyn, noted that these days it is easy to get so caught up in what is flashing on the screen, and calling it architecture, that actual buildings become an afterthought.

I bring up the conversation not to (re)start any paper architecture debate, but because with this discussion in mind I came across a paper written in 1947 by inventor and light artist Thomas Wilfred.

Wilfred’s work has fallen into obscurity of late. Ranging from the surreal to the psychedelic, his career stretched from the 1920s until his death in 1968. His medium was light, manipulated into dreamlike compositions of varying colors and intensities. A practice he called lumina, it falls somewhere between music, painting, and sculpture. Trained as a musician, he would build complex contraptions, Clavilux, to play his works.

Describing this “new art form” he wrote:

The lumia artist conceives his idea as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space.

In order to share his vision with others he must materialize it. This he may do by executing it as a two-dimensional sequence, projected on a flat white screen by means of a specially constructed projection instrument controlled from a keyboard.Seated before the keyboard he may, by manipulation of sliding keys, release white light, mold the light into form, add color and imbue the result with motion and change. But the original vision—the three-dimensional drama in space—is constantly before him and he strives to add, by optical means, an illusion of the missing third dimension to his flat screen image, and to perform it so convincingly in a spatial way that the screen creates the illusion of a large window opening on infinity, and the spectator imagines he is witnessing a radiant drama in deep space.

A couple visuals here.

I came across this article because a friend recently gave me a DVD of Wilfred’s work to check out. While I was dubious at first, picturing lava lamps and Sparkletts’ Dancing Waters, but then the jadedness washed away. Here was something proto-digital, which without bits or bytes and certainly not filmic, created space on screen. While I think the projections are pretty groovy, the projectors fascinate me. Unlike sleek laptops, the Clavilux were clunky boxes full of gears: objects desperate to escape the physical, but ultimately tied to their bulk.

For more images, the Yale University Library has an archive of ephemera related to the artist and the majority of Wilfred’s work is privately conserved by the Epstein Collection.