woof!

Campus scape

2011-09-28T23:22:00.000-04:00

The wild side. photo © Iwan Baan

i've long been an admirer of the work from Morphosis, even from the Rotundi days, when things were often a bit over wrought, as if trying too hard to make a statement and establish their "otherness" or bad boy (in architecture?). But those days are long gone, and in the place of those pressed efforts is the much more disciplined, coherent, and consistent work that makes up their portfolio of the last 15 years.

Their Giant Interactive Group Corporate Headquarters project in Shanghai takes familiar Morphosis themes and uses them to interesting effect, not dissimilar to the landscape theme undertaken on a much smaller scale by Aires Mateus in their Elderly Housing project posted earlier.

Here again there is a reference to a normative condition, a courtyard house, that has been opened in such a way as to release another kind of program or being, in this case a series of physical activity / recreational spaces that act as an attempt of sorts to reclaim the body from the inward, mind state of the office wing, thereby taking on the character of a monster of the Frankenstein sort, being simultaneously natural, wild, yet hyperactively human, born as they were from the more urbane, intellectual, and recognizable office and classroom wing.

The courtyard "house", where the offices, library, and meeting rooms are located, sits to one side of a road that pierces the complex, splitting it violently and initiating the release of this hyperactive man-child, as it spills out in forms both soft and shard toward the lake and canal beyond, while creating beautiful and unexpected openings and tears in the membrane that give views to the sky and other pieces of landscape and water, man-made and not.

Diagram showing opened courtyard house beyond and tumbling release of disturbed landscape

Entry level plan; road split, sinuous, broken, civic wing to the right

Upper level plan showing sinuous wing and disturbed spilling, not unlike Baker Hall by Aalto

Section through the "civic"

Road split

photo © Iwan Baan

Rupture in spilled membrane

photo © Iwan Baan

Exposed innards and soft organs of the "landscape" side.

photo © Iwan Baan

Courtyard house, unwound.

photo © Iwan Baan

One might think of the relationship between the student lounge space and dorm rooms in Aalto's Baker Hall for an apt analogy or precedent.

Milstein Hall OMA

2011-09-25T11:56:00.002-04:00

Ten years after Paul Milstein donated $10 million for a new addition to the Cornell Arts and Architecture building, and following a limited competition won by Steven Holl, Cornell has finally completed the addition to their Arts and Architecture building after having settled on OMA as their architect after stints with both Steven Holl and Barkow Leibinger.

i haven't yet visited the new facility, but intend to do so in the near future and add my own photos. My initial impression is that this is wonderful architecture and as good as anything OMA / Rem Koolhaas has produced to date, and a lively yet sensitive addition to the Cornell campus and, most importantly, the Cornell Arts Quad, one of the most interesting college quadrangles in the country.

North end of the Arts Quad, with Sibley to the right.

The Arts Quad sits high on shelf near the top of a hill overlooking Ithaca and Cayuga Lake. Like most traditional American college quads, it began as a series of buildings in a row, outside of town, that evolved into a grouping of buildings enclosing a large green. The Cornell quad has large trees scattered about, and the buildings are far enough apart and the relationships between them such that space flows through the quad, much like a traditional New England town center green. Sibley Hall, the Architecture building, sits at one end of the quad and is especially active in promoting the Arts Quad as a flowing, active space rather than a captured, static space, which you can get a sense of in the plan below:

Sibley in red, Rand in orange

Sibley Hall

The dominant feature of Sibley Hall is the central cubic volume topped with a dome. It's now such a hallmark of Sibley that it's hard to imagine the quad without the Sibley dome at the north end, just off center, terminating the long green axis in a nudge to the east. Yet there was a time when the dome wasn't part of the composition. Originally, the north end of the Quad saw only what we now perceive as the wings of the dome, with a space between what was then East Sibley and West Sibley. It wasn't until 1902 that the cubic auditorium and museum (now administrative offices) were built, tying the 2 wings together and creating a central, commanding presence on the Quad. Somewhat paradoxically, and perhaps harkening to its engineering school origins, it's the very formal geometrically disciplined composition of the Sibley dome, a circle set within a square, a dome within a cube, that is set off axis of the Quad, creating the wonderful spacial effect of leaking the space out of the Quad and initiating movement across the gorge to the north campus.

The new Milstein Hall ingeniously comments on the Sibley history and it's role in the making of the modern Arts Quad. It also behaves itself when it has to, not interrupting the flow of space along the face of Sibley out of the Quad, but aligning itself with Sibley on the south face while creating a new facade and gateway of sorts for those entering the Quad from the north.

Milstein as new entrance to Quad

Just as the Sibley dome filled in the interstitial space between two existing buildings to create a new center, so too does the new Milstein Hall, and does so using some of the same tools as the original Sibley dome, though in very different, modern, ways. The two buildings now in question are Sibley Hall and the Architecture annex of studios in Rand Hall, an early 20th century industrial building with large steel windows where all the undergraduate architecture studios were housed, and lots of interesting undergraduate friskiness occured. Most of the proposals from the other firms that have worked on this addition have razed Rand Hall, and one has to credit OMA for seeing the opportunity presented by keeping the structure just as it is.

Insertion 1, Context, Insertion 2

The backside of Sibley has always been a backside, for many years the parking lot for the Arts and Architecture buildings, though it faces one of Cornell's great assets, the Fall Creek Gorge. Milstein Hall now occupies that rear space, and does so in a way that extends the reach of the Arts Quad out behind Sibley, terminating it with the old sculpture foundry building (c 1860's). In this sense, the Milstein addition is working within the interstitial space of 3 buildings, knitting them together as they have never been, and extending the space of the Quad to the edge of the Fall Creek Gorge, as you can see in the model below.

Rear view showing roof of Milstein terminating at the sculpture foundry.

Milstein and the old Foundry; Foundry becomes a Milstein elevation when seen from beneath the slab.

i think many have questioned the space beneath the new Milstein, thinking of other modern attempts to glide cantilevers over the ground plane, often resulting in a dark and unpleasant space for the observer. i don't think this will be the result here, and even if it is, i don't think it will be without having been considered. Beneath the central dome and cubic volume of Sibley is a basement space that one enters from the Quad by going down a few steps. This space is home to the Green Dragon, a cafe and meeting place for generations of art and architecture students (free coffee!). It is a dark space with a low ceiling, very basement like, and cherished for its underground quality and murals of dragons past. It has often been understood as an extension of the space of the Quad, as the windows sit at ground level, so that as one sits in the Dragon, gazing out the windows, one is viewing the ground plane of the Quad.

As i've said above, Milstein Hall is in one way a reenactment of Sibley Hall. The main difference in Act II is that Milstein has taken the central cubic volume of Sibley Hall and inverted it. The dome is now an object sitting beneath a square volume of space that houses the studios and ties together the 3 buildings. That the space beneath the square and around the "dome" has similarities to the Dragon can't be avoided; its a modern interpretation of course, as the space isn't a confined one, and its not literally a basement; its the ground plane, activated by the perversely subterranean dome.

N-S Section

View from the Dome, with Foundry beyond, not so unlike a Green Dragon.

Lower Level

Ground Level

Upper Level (Studio's)

Spacial link between Quad and north side of Sibley/gorge.

Rand Hall and new date.

Milstein and Foundry

Dome peek a boo

Bicycles parked alongside dome as if preparing for X-games. Youth references abound.

Hard to see, but some y'onions are perched up top. One of them lost grip on her cellphone and the sound of it sliding all the way down the dome could be heard throughout. This space is a natural hangout. It both declares itself apart and of the old man to the left. You can bet which choice the kids will make.

View from opposite end. i enjoyed the "tin" ceilings, a ubiquitous feature of these parts.

Mr. Sibley, meet Mr. Milstein..

As discussed, Milstein is a building with many interesting qualities, as are many others on the planet. But this project goes a step further as the new home to the Architecture school at Cornell. This building is a pedagogical player, behind the professors and fellow students, and as such has so many things to say about the profession and where it finds itself early in this century. How does one make use of existing facilities while proposing new ones? How does one add on to an existing building, respecting both history and this modern age? What role does detail play in the language of building? How does structure integrate itself into built form, or not? How does one heat and cool a building dominated by glass walls? The building doesn't always provide answers to its questions, but thats the point.

i found many lessons being given during my visit.

Entry level

Looking back at main entrance. Interesting spandrel solution, if you can afford it.

Slab system intersection with dome

Studio level

The view from Rand, through Milstein.

Light ed

2011-07-30T13:36:00.002-04:00

How much thought goes into a light switch? For most of us its a toggle switch, and its duty is to send electrons or not. But what if it's designed in such a way that it articulates its function of providing light or ending it? The switch above i found in a cheap hotel in Paris, and it does just that. The design is deceptively simple, with a chamfered face that brilliantly catches light on its upper face while the lower face remains in shadow. The switch itself teeters between the two faces, belonging to light or belonging to shadow depending on how its switched, as if awake or sleeping. The plane of the switch that doesn't become coplanar with one face of the plate becomes an interruption of the opposite face, disturbing the harmony of its light by catching it and throwing it back into the room as you can see above. The real beauty of the switch is less that it can be switched on and off than that it switches between light and dark.

Pop goes the music

2011-05-21T17:53:00.006-04:00

i was in the gym trying to beef my tinies a bit when i looked up at the never-off tv screen and saw this video glowing. i tried to look away and check out some of the bulgy animal shanks that come out of peoples sleeves at my gym, but instead was transfixed by this video. i don't care for the music; i'm not into pop music, really, but the video, directed by Michel Gondry for Kylie Minogue, sucked on me eyeballs like they were mama teats. Its an amazing work on multiple levels.

i suppose the most obvious way the video transfixes is the technical aspect of showing a person appear with themselves over and over, but these days, you expect everything from a toothpaste commercial to the evening news to be swamped by effects, to the point that we're all numb from over-amazement (architecture, anyone?). i was more interested in the repetitive aspect of the spectacle and how it synched with the nature of pop music in general, such that it seemed as much a commentary on the genre as a product of the artist's PR desires.

The video begins with the camera following Ms Minogue as she leaves the dry cleaners in a very day to day outfit not fit for modern pop music flesh, unknowingly dropping a package just as she leaves, walking through a very working class suburb of Paris through crowds of "normal" people engaged in their own personal dramas and work, from a rider tumbling his motorcycle to a some poor guy getting kicked out of his girl's apartment, to workers posting adverts, a skateboarder, on and on, when the music comes to its refrain and you realize that she has walked a circle and has arrived back at the dry cleaners where she started, though now realizing she dropped her package picks it up, just as another Ms Minogue leaves the dry cleaners, dropping a package, and the song moves on through the refrain, over and over, with minor progressions to the goings on around her, but mostly repetitions and multiplications.

The idea that pop music is the soundtrack to our lives isn't new; this has probably been the case since the invention of radio, but its articulated here in a way that brings the glamor of imagined love and longing into the world of minor collisions and dropped packages. That the star herself appears without the decor required of fame and glamour (is her outfit at the dry cleaners?) returns the music to its foundation, which is the invisible public that purchases it and attends the shows when they can afford to do so. That she "completes a circle" is not just a metaphor for the repetitive structure of pop music, but appears as an attempt by the artist to synchronize the making of music to the act of listening to it, in effect to deny its ability to pass time, which ties it to one of pop music's residual characteristics, that being its ability to mark a moment for the generation to which it belonged in the form of nostalgia, a moment both frozen in time and lost.

i've long thought that the secret of pop music was its repetition, and that it was the repetition of elements that allowed songs to plant themselves in our skulls like memories we never had. You don't have to like a song for it to plant itself; its the constant exposure, the repetition not just of the song itself through the course of the day, but the repetition of catchy hooks and melodies that fish for our attention in an attempt to synch themselves to the other repetitions occurring throughout our minds and bodies. In Michel Gondry's video repetition is the medium, and the medium is the message. It's pop music about pop music about us, even as Ms Minogue sings that it's her world she wants (you) to visit, when its really ours.

Earth, sky, elderly housing

2011-04-30T20:02:00.005-04:00

Last year saw the completion of an elderly housing project by Aires Mateus Architects in the town of Alcacer Do Sal, Portugal. This project is interesting on many levels beside its bold modern form, but i was most taken with its ability to document the essence of building and shelter, and do so for those at the end of their lives, in effect, distill these elements to their most abstracted forms, much as the end of the occupant's lives may be seen as summations of the lives they've lead.

i've seen this project described many times as a wall that emerges from the earth, but given the material palette, form, and coloring it seems to be doing something quite different; it seems instead to be a wall from the surface, belonging to the structures that make up the fairly clearly defined collection of buildings that are Alcacer Do Sal, acting as a form of definition that recalls earlier struggles to protect, defend, and define what it was to live in a town as opposed to not. That this project is elderly housing adds to the construct, as the collective nature of the project simultaneously gathers its occupants in an allusion to town square and moves them into the earth, though never away the village.

View Mateus_woof in a larger map

The nature of this collective is interesting. It's a wall, but an occupied one, one that alludes to the fortified city walls of the past but also to a variant of the modern inhabited wall, not so far removed from the "wall house" explorations of John Hejduk, though without the dynamism.

The model above shows how the proximity of detached structures to the project helps to proclaim the "wallness" of the Mateus project, as if there were occupied areas in need of protection or some need to define an inside or outside, belonging or not belonging, but the end effect is one of space/place making, and here lies the brilliance of the solution, which involves the coincident making of wall and clustered, semi-attached housing. The model, without articulation, appears to favor only the wall reading, and sure enough the view is from the "outside", the wall side of the project. As one can see from the plan below, there is definition of an exterior and interior in the organization, with the interior composed of occupied cells separated by notches, and the exterior, which is indeed wall, with tiny portals through which views to the exterior may be had. The differing articulation of interior and exterior is vital to understanding the conceptual origin of the composition as it's the difference between that which is alive and not. The exterior wall is literally wall, thick with material and providing the datum along which all circulation takes place, but with its chamfered edges behaves as if mimicking its occupied brethren on the other side of the corridor, as if speaking the same language though saying something quite different.

©Aires Mateus Architects

The chamfers of the occupied cells are but notches in the depth of this occupied belt, but they are space and bring light into the units, an ingenious device that allows the narrow deep units to receive much natural light. On a formal level, these notches provide a vital reading into the origin of the wall, making reference to a previous circular or courtyard arrangement that has since been straightened or reconditioned to a new situation, one that can be seen as having given birth to the detached dwellings so near by.

From the interior of the scheme, these notches have the visual effect of producing as much void as the compartments do solid, such that the "wall" is now equally mass and void, as much earth as it is sky, a phenomenal purgatory for those near the end of life.

as much void as solid

beautiful dissolved corner

View from the interior, "living" side of the wall.

View from the outside, "wall" side of the wall. Solid here outweighs void.

In this project are brought together earth and sky, shelter, and what it means to belong to one another. It speaks to the fundamentals of architecture in taking a wall and letting it differentiate not just interior from exterior but also define our relationship to both the earth and the sky, as well as youth to the elderly, and strangers to those we've known our whole life.

All color photography © Fernando Guerra FG+SG

In the end, the collective wall terminates in the earth, and here appears more sarcophagus than building roof. The vitality of life, so celebrated in town centers around the world and here in the gentle bend of a housing complex seen just beyond in the image above, terminates in a dark end of life.

Block 39 Belgrade

2011-01-23T22:46:00.001-05:00

A competition for the Center for the Promotion of Science and the development of what is known as "Block 39" in Belgrade has been won by Architect Wolfgang Tschapeller. The competition involved the development of a whole block, but at the periphery is the Science Center rendered above, which serves the purpose of bringing science to the public through exhibitions in its large hall, here located well above ground, as is the building itself.

The intent is that of classic modernism, that the ground plane may be freed for circulation and plantings, and indeed the approach to this building anticipates just that, dominated as it is by ramps, stairs, and a cafe to provide for a "slow" procession to the building entrance above.

The idea of lifting a building up in the air isn't new; one could consider the Villa Savoie to be lifted above the ground plane, but it is more phenomenally lifted, as one does arrive at a ground floor, and the circulation path takes one through the house to the sky, so that the house ends up mediating between earth and sky. i also thought about Will Alsop's Sharp Center at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, which is the only example i know of a building so completely separated from the earth that its underside may be considered to be it's facade. The difference is that whereas Alsop's building is treated as a graphic object of sorts, with all sides treated equally, Tschapeller's design makes clear a facade that is the face of the building one approaches and the one given prominence above all others.

Sharp Center, Will Alsop

This all seems very new to me, and unprecedented. i'm sure there have been proposals that have elevated buildings above the ground plane, but i don't know of any that have been so clear about the space opened up by doing so. This is really a new space, one that has only recently become possible, and one that rethinks our relationship to the earth and space making in the city. The brilliance of the Tschapeller proposal is the deliberateness of the approach, one fully considered and choreographed as a procession rather than a shaft that launches one into the underside of the building as the Sharp Center does. The Science Center proposal is just as considerate of the plane below as it is to the surface of its underside, just as any well considered facade should be to its context and approach. The facade proposes a mirror finish, which here acts to reflect the earth in the sky, as if to remind of our true foundation even as we leave its territory, substituting one element for another but showing that we are, in the end, grounded.

That the space between is celebrated by a sheltered slow climb allows for a new consideration of the city itself; a 3-dimensionallity that we have yet to experience in our day to day movement through the city. We are used to moving about past the walls and down the corridors of our cities until we find our destination, but never have we been able to truly experience moving vertically through the same city. We take elevators, of course, but for the most part the vertical movement we experience takes place in a shaft under controlled circumstances. When the Eiffel Tower was completed in Paris at the end of the 19th century it was the first time people could experience this type of movement in the open air, but there it was in the service of entertainment, whereas the Tschapeller proposal envisions a whole city block created this way, with each entrance one that adopts a slow vertical rise into our occupied space, one accompanied by a gaze out to the city proper.

tree

2011-01-10T23:06:00.010-05:00

Artist Greg Kowalski shows in this video that there is more than one way to photograph a tree. Its hard to say if this is a collage of many photographs or a video, which is of course a collection of many still images, but this capture seems to inhabit both worlds, moving and not, while showing us a tree while showing us something not a tree, so that our image of a tree is almost completely lacking in "treeness". What we get instead is information about something else, a displacement of sorts, so that the tree becomes little more than the medium for the message, a foreshadowing of its possible future as another medium of messages, as a sheet of paper.

Soundtrack: Sudden Infant

MIT Media Lab

2010-11-27T22:00:00.002-05:00

A good friend came to town a couple of weeks ago with his artist friend; i thought we would inspect the new MIT Media Lab and see what all the fuss was about. So many rave reviews, and at work i was working on a project where we chased the manufacturer of the metal panel used at the Media Lab to use on our project. Turns out we couldn't afford it, but we found another manufacturer that made a cheap copy...i thought i should see what the original looked like.

The MIT Media Lab is an interesting institution. It gathers in one place scientists, designers, artists, and engineers and seeks to apply cutting edge theory and engineering exploration to the problems of everyday life, and anticipate those of the future, from transportation to the clothing we wear. The Media Lab was looking to expand their facilities in the late 90's, but the .com bust slowed the project until its construction restarted a couple of years ago. The project brief was for a facility that promoted interaction/connectivity not only between disciplines but with the outside world.

Fumihiko Maki, the Pritzker Prize winning architect, addressed the brief by creating a series of stacked atria one discovers after arriving in one of the two large atria that take up the south side of the building. It sounds interesting, a series of stacked double height spaces one moves through as one moves through the building, but the result is less interesting than the promise.

The building has no center. Each entrance has its own atrium, though i suppose the triple height one on the west side can be considered the dominant one, but in the end i was bored after passing through double height space after double height space, with no hierarchy or choreography to the movement through the spaces. There's no drama to moving through this building, because upon entrance one has landed in one of the dominant spaces, and one will pass by or through many more to come. Its not that they aren't pleasant; the main entrance atrium is a nice enough space, but nothing special. Much has been made of the detailing, which is fine, but i tried to find the idea it was in the service of, and had a hard time finding evidence of one. i found things to be a bit precious and tiring; back of house doors had fancy steel plate details that my current project couldn't afford even one of, and was this a research facility or a some fancy-butt gallery? What has happened to research that needed no more than those non de-script buildings of MIT's war and post war years to develop radar and explore the edges of physics, but now seems to need glazed guardrails and architectural detailing normally reserved for art institutions and Scandinavian embassies? Why the bullshit? It looks to me like misplaced priorities. i wish the building did more to express the nature of the study going on in these labs. i wish there was space that shared the character of the magic that these people seem to be engaged in, spaces that interlocked but did so without holding hands, did so with surprise and chiaroscuro, where one passed through tight spaces or corridors to find expansive lab space that soared above, where the connectivity wasn't always the path one walked, but could at times be a beam of light with origins in another space that was unreachable. Why couldn't the space be more like the Stata Center space? So many critics have fawned over this project; clearly i don't get it.

One has to keep in mind that Maki is a Japanese architect. What i've written above has a Western bias that seeks a reference to center in any spacial arrangement. But this is not the way space is made in Japan, or the way its been thought about thought their history. If our notions of center are to be found in our monotheistic religions, the Japanese can be excused for not engaging in this kind of silliness. Their religion, and their way of thinking, doesn't center the way we center. Theirs is a decentralized center of sorts, a center that one carries with one as one moves through life, as one moves through the city, as one moves through the garden, or as one moves through the temple. The center is where you are. You are the center; it doesn't exist outside your experience of it, or it can be said to exist wherever your gaze takes you. God is everywhere. Maki's building is a perfect example of this; there is no defined center, all are defined centers. There is a simultaneity about the spaces that declares no ruler, for the visitor is the ruler, and center exists with them. It is inexplicable to the Western critic, just as is the space of Japanese architecture. We cannot apply our measures to it and hope to find understanding, unless we are first willing to understand them.

Metal panel and tube screening

Close up of tube screen

Upper atrium; main entrance atrium is just off to right

Upper level hang out zone

Upper level function room. The white carpet is already filthy

Not beautiful. But the detailing...

Crank Sturgeon

2010-11-06T12:53:00.007-04:00

Back in the corner of your music appreciation room sits a lonely child playing with her chest hair & trumpets. Not many pay attention to this child, to the child's delight, but there are some who find pleasure in the sounds of the back corner. eye am juan.

If you aren't familiar, i throw a quick definition: noise is music minus the "rules" of music, though many in the corner find it fun to insert a sniff of melody, a pounding that reminds of rhythm, or voice whaling New Bedford.

The noise scene, however, has long been dominated by those enthralled with imagery most originally conjured in the late '70s by the band Throbbing Gristle, who were most interested in shining their light on the underside of society, and did their best to articulate the hypocrisy they saw through the display of crime scene footage, disections, and other visions of darkness during their performances. 30 years down the road, this display by lesser acts than Throbbing Gristle is, to put it mildly, tired. Actually, its been tired for at least 20 years. i can't tell how many performances i've seen where someone dressed in black (what else?) sits in front of a audience tinkering with obscure dials on a box while video footage is projected of napalm attack victims or some kitten having its tummy removed by a pit bull. yawn.

There are, of course, exceptions. Crank Sturgeon is an artist who's been performing since the mid 90's, but on a path that expands the definition of what "noise" is to include not just the sounds of noise but the phenomenal noise that exists between things that were never intended to be put together. In this sense noise deals with the space between rather than the objects themselves, and so favors the medium of space and sound as its primary voice. But the Crank version of noise includes not just the sonic, not just the sound of his homemade instruments and contact mic's, but the visual as well. Crank Sturgeon performances are as much vaudeville as rock show, infused as they are with humor, irreverence, comment, and intelligence. A summary, i think, of all that noise should lay claim to, but so rarely does.

His most recent performance was at the annual Sacred and Profane festival held at Peaks Island, Maine, in a concrete military bunker originally constructed to protect the east coast during WWII. From the roof of the bunker, Crank suspended an airplane of sorts, sheathed in cardboard homeless signs, many donated by the homeless of Portland, of which there are many during this distressed time. His sad plane swung back and forth, teetering and twirling, going nowhere, and sounding many a sputter as he sang a song of our world, and showed to all the unmistakable state of things. That this performance was set in a military hall was all the more poignant, given the obscene excess of our military spending while so many do with so little.

art ramble

2010-10-27T18:08:00.151-04:00

We, as a species, have declared ourselves to be the most clever of all the species wandering this planet. No doubt we are on top of everything. Not only are we are the only species to yodel with knickers glowing, but we're also the only species to make art. And so i wonder; if we are the only species to make art, making it unique to ourselves, why is it such a struggle for us? If it truly is in our nature, why do we wrestle with it so? The collision here is with evidence that it's unique to ourselves and that it must therefore inform us about ourselves and our development, and with our difficulty in creating it, never mind defining it. That art is the result of many collisions/intersections deep within the recesses of our evolution means only that the surface may be a facile one for our gaze in a moment of awareness, a flash of color and form or a sound that elicits a quick response that puts us in joy or dropkicks us into disappointment. On its surface, we may see color, read words, hear melody, and follow dramatic action, but if we don't encounter meaning during our gaze, something that expands the experience beyond its immediate presence, we are likely to be disappointed, and that piece of art is unlikely to be held in high regard.

I've always thought art should be meaningful but felt that its primary objective was to subject us to beauty, not from afar, but from within, for in beauty is proof that we belong to the rest of the planet and that we are not some being apart from nature, but rather another piece of it, no more or less special than any other. If we could create beauty, giving forth to us the same wonder and awe we experience in the landscapes and creatures around us, we would have verification that we do indeed belong, though we may have referred to this beauty in other terms, such as putting us closer to the divine.

After reading "The Art Instinct" by Dennis Dutton, i've come to believe that meaning is likely more important than beauty, no matter the definition of beauty. This book made me realize that the artist is what interests us (historically) in art more so that the work itself, a concept that turned all i thought i knew about art on its head. i always held that the Work has an objective distance from its creator, since in the end it must exist on its own, without the presence of the artist to prop it up with obscure intents and motivations. A careful study of art history reveals that it is the ability of art to inform of its age and its creator that holds our attention over time, and that art with only beauty to sustain itself fails to engage our attention through history. Mr. Dutton articulates this through his study of forgeries, noting that there have been many through time, many of them so brilliantly produced that they left little doubt among experts to be true "Vermeer's" or "Rembrandt's". Yet when they are found to be forgeries they are discarded, no matter their beauty, for they cannot tell the story that we need to be told, or fit into the puzzle that is the era of their production. We need art to tell us about ourselves more than we need it for the pleasure of its experience. It is, over time, the only mirror we have, and if we find beauty alongside the insight and information it gives us, so much the better.

Excuse the lack of picture. Imagine a dandylion stuck between a little boy's toes, with bees swirling and the windmill on fire.

Big Bambu

2010-10-12T19:26:00.004-04:00

The Starn Brothers have an installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that consists of a hive of bamboo lashed together in an ongoing construction that one is able to wander through.

The project takes a natural weed, bamboo, and cuts it, moves it, lashes it, and fashions it into something belonging to "us", and in doing so appears to summarize our time on earth. A project doesn't have to do much more than that, does it? It is abstract, fundamental to its core, and brings us face to face with our origins, and perhaps the origins of art itself. That it speaks to shelter, a making of place, creative use of naturally occurring materials, and displays our ability to imagine makes it a significant articulation of all that should embody art, without bending to current fashion. That it crowns a museum devoted to the history of art seems all the more fitting, as does the concept of the work; that of a work in progress that the visitor, at the moment of ones visit, experiences to be a whole work, but is only a slice in time of a much longer period that can only be understood with the passage of time, just as those in the museum below, subjected to thousands of years of changing attitudes over just what is "good art".

Gentlemen of Bacongo

2010-09-29T22:46:00.004-04:00

Author Daniele Tamagni has just published a book about the fashionable men of Brazzaville, in the Republic of Congo. In an earlier version of this piece I mistakenly associated the Republic of Congo with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Though they are neighboring countries with similar names, they are different places with different histories. Though the Republic of Congo is run by a dictator who holds elections with quotation marks around it, its civil war passed 10 years ago. Not so in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is deep in a civil war that seems to go on with no end, and where atrocities are regularly commited against the civilian population, such as mass rape used as a weapon to spread terror in the civilian population. But this book isn't about corruption or civil wars. Its about Dandies.

What is a Dandy? Charles Baudelaire, credited with being the first to equate modernism with artifice and decadence, favored decadence and the rule of the self over virtue, which he considered to be outside our natural state and therefore artificial. He came to value the articulation of fancy for fancy's sake, for being devoid of purpose it would be but an articulation of itself; completely self referential. This was the Dandy. For Baudelaire, the Dandy had no "profession other than elegance, no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons...the Dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror (for Baudelaire, Le Grand Mirroir was a hotel he stayed at in Brussels, near the end of his life, where he kept a bat he captured from a graveyard and fed it bread and milk).

The reason for the Dandy was to express disgust for the ruling Aristocracy/Bourgeoisie through appropriating their manner and dress, but emptying it of its meaning through a lack of purpose. The Dandy had little earned income, often living off inheritance, and lived a life similar to the closely related Bohemian, though arriving at this position of opposition from a very different angle.

Congolese men are said to have returned to Congo from France in the 20's dressed to the hilt, influenced by the fashion driven cult of La Sape, a modern version of the Dandy that favored flamboyance and theatricality. These men of Brazzaville, dressed beyond their situations, have their origins in this cult of elegance, but in this poor town articulate a very different meaning; these men become lenses of sorts that magnify the poverty of their situation through the presence of their improbability.

photos © Daniele Tamagni

Channel Bloom

2010-08-26T22:52:00.001-04:00

The Fort Point Channel is blooming with plastic flowers. Sniffy creatures of discarded plastic detergent containers are appearing and disappearing with the rise and fall of the sea and lunar pull. Bright colors remind of the spring fresh promise long forgotten and collide with the history of a harbor long soiled, but now back to life despite a much darker larger picture. This display is courtesy of artist Tim Murdoch, whose previous work has explored the linkages/separations between belonging and not, inside and out, and our relationship to nature.

With tide high, this bloomy vanishes as if in night or winter, and reappears when the tide again lowers and as such it seems to be keeping time more than we ever notice with the quiet rising and dropping of the water. It signifies, but does so on more than one level, as the reminder of waters rising and dropping is also a reminder that Tide agent of our clean undies has in the past left us with frothy waters and fish floating sideways. That the harbor is now "clean" may be cause to bloom a flower, but the sign of Tide reminds that all is not well.

art e

2010-08-20T13:37:00.002-04:00

Art seems to matter, and it doesn't matter. It is, in general, scorned by many who don't do it as a trivial pursuit, one with no function other than to satisfy eyes, and a waste of money when it comes to government spending and priorities. F-22 fighter jets are held in much higher regard. It does, though, bring pleasure even to those who aren't supporters of art, and there may be no households in the world that contain no art at all. i've long believed that art was one of the first means of communication for this species, and continues to communicate ideas that fail words. But it may be that art has a more fundamental role in our species, one necessary to our survival. That is the premise behind the book "The Art Instinct" by Denis Dutton, which i highly recommend.

PAAM

2010-07-10T22:28:00.004-04:00

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum recently expanded into a new addition to their historic longtime home on Commercial St., known as the Hargood House. The new addition, by Machado & Silvetti Associates Architects, increases the amount of space for both the storage and display of art, as well as improved event facilities.

For all its progressive politics, Provincetown is artistically a conservative place, as any stroll down Commercial Street will prove with few exceptions. Therefore, to see such a modern effort in this home for art is welcome, and overall the building is successful. i like to think of it as a "nice" building; its pleasing to the eye and is, for the most part, obedient. Is this the right place for an art building to play obedience? With all the freaks trying to catch your eye here, and crotch, i wonder, but my guess is that the Town didn't want a freak.

The plan is straightforward, as you can see below. The Hargood House is on the right, housing the Moffett Gallery and fronting the large gallery and performance space behind. The new entrance, in the new addition, steps back from the street just a bit from the House (containing the Moffett Gallery), allowing the House to fill a more dominant role on the street. The circulation is straightforward; after entering at the Museum Store, one moves in either direction about the volume of the store, and experience both the old house and the new addition. The dominant space is the Hofmann Gallery, with its tall volume, abundant light, and open trusses. Its especially effective to discover this space when moving first through the low, darker spaces of the modern wing.

The elevations are the most successful aspect of the project, making references to local traditions of materials and methods of construction, but doing so in a modern idiom. The project in this respect reminds me of the firm's Allston Library project, poor in layout and movement through space (this project is a bit better in that respect), but with an attractive facade displaying a clever use of materials.

The first floor is finished in board formed concrete, with large cedar "shingles" above making reference to a Cape standard, and above more wood but this time behaving as if clapboards, but in a way that allows for transparency.

Another reference made is to the proverbial bay window, here positioned on the facade in what would have been the center of the composition had it been "completed", but instead is left voided in deference to the Hargood House, and as a way to relate the new to the old volumetrically. The bay windows turn out to be a mixed blessing, as their butt glazed elegance and near complete transparency allow glimpses to the upper level interiors, and seduce one into a visit to "see me, dahling.." Well, that was the effect they had on me, but i suppose i'm easily seduced.

In fact, you cannot visit the upper levels. Frustration! They house a school and offices for the Association. What looks from below like very provocative spaces peeked at through the bays is not part of the museum, and upon entrance there is no stair at all. The gallery is housed only on the first level, and is completely apart from anything above. No double height space, no open stair to those rooms calling you from above. The building is a pancake, and in this regard spatially banal, like one of those traditional houses it takes so many cues from.

There is also some very poor detailing at the entrance, which made me wonder if the clumsy gutter was tacked on during construction as an afterthought. That the downspout is stuck onto the Hargood House i thought was humorous, being an odd and i think intentionally overt crotch grab of Hargood to declare itself the new entrance.

faux toes

2010-06-20T19:50:00.000-04:00

new page glanceit wire wire wire s

Balance

2010-06-20T14:08:00.004-04:00

Balance is the latest installation piece by artists Dwayne Bohuslav and Joanne Brigham, who together perform as Moving Bodies. Their art typically addresses the most primal aspects of our existence and that of our planet, here using the theme of vernal equinox for a show that opened on the date thereof.

Though their themes are often primal in nature, addressing topics such as ice, human instinct, myth, and habitation, their palette of materials is a modern one that attempts to reconcile these ancient themes with our modern lives, and discourage our ever increasing distance from a life engaged with the planet.

Many of their pieces are designed by Bohuslav, who is also an architect, and occupied by Brigham for a performance of her sound works. This synthesis of space making with occupation encourages comparisons to the primitive hut, which is furthered by the ad hoc quality of the workmanship and which again attempts to reconcile modern life with our roots, just as it first did in the writings of Laugier in the 18th century. That the installations are opened as a performance, a movement from within, rather than object installed in space for our consumption as is typical, demonstrates to the viewer our connection to these themes by showing how they may be occupied. Past themes have allowed for the art viewer to be art participant, as they were encouraged to walk through elevated constructions where they set off sonic constructions and lights through motion detectors.

This piece, Balance, while scoring the vernal equinox in its tilted frame, also took inspiration from the Japanese Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, which tells of a baby girl found inside a bamboo shoot and ends with her return to the Moon, from which she originally came. The story of something/someone from the earth returning to the heavens is a common theme through the ages, and exemplifies our desire to make sense of our place in the realm of things, and reconcile our life on this surface with the sky above. The scale change in the Japanese story, from bamboo shoot to Moon in the heavens, is typical of Japanese philosophy that finds equality between the tiniest detail and largest gesture. In the Bohuslav work, one finds a massive structure overhead giving birth to small suspended bottles, scaled to ones hand, and making sense of "balance".

Many of the works by Bohuslav and Brigham are suspended from above with the viewer passing beneath, so that present in these pieces are representatives of the earth and heavens, thereby posing a meeting of body and mind, instinct and learned, and in the end, an articulation of our presence on earth.

House Holman

2010-06-12T14:00:00.003-04:00

It's not often that you're able to compare a painting with a work of architecture, but i thought i'd take the opportunity to do so with House Holman, constructed in 2004 near Sydney, Australia.

This house has received a lot of attention due to its dramatic siting, and its unusual for a house, even one with a substantial budget, to live up to such a site, much less to exceed it. The house is perched on a 70 meter cliff overlooking the ocean in what is otherwise a completely unremarkable suburb. You will never see pictures of this house from the street, because the house is sited so as to rid itself of its mundane neighbors.

The designers, Durbach Block Architects, have said the inspiration for the house came from "The Bathers", a painting by Picasso i was unfamiliar with.

"The Bathers" 1918

Picasso did another work called "The Bathers" in the '50s, but i see more of this painting in the house than the later piece, so i'm assuming it to be the painting from 1918. Its easier to understand the link between the house and the painting if you see the plans:

Level 2

Level 1

The most notable feature of the painting is the composition of the figures. Two of them are resting on the beach, and belong to it compositionally as their figures are mostly enveloped by the beach. The third figure, by contrast, is standing and expressively enchanted with her visit to the beach, with arms undone and playing with her hair as she gazes upward . She breaks the edge of the beach and that of the horizon, as if to express her joy as a limitless one, belonging more to the clouds than the earth, pointedly expressed here by her white striped bathing suit foretelling the clouds above. Her suit is blue, and here again Picasso identifies her as belonging more to the sea and sky than the earth below.

House Holman, like the figures in the painting, is both anchored to the earth and fleeing to the sea and sky, as you can deduce by the plans above and the pictures below. It seems also, i think, to express as much joy as the woman in the painting.

The beautiful, sinuous forms of the Living/Dining spaces (02, 03 in plans above), dancing on a couple of columns and extending to the sea and sky in two different directions, have a dual nature in that they also inform the inflected space below (10), carved into the earth/context below and referencing a cave in its form, so as to reconcile earth and sky. This same spacial device is also used to define the courtyard space that leads to the pool, where the apparently free form of the living space is disciplined into a conforming part of a semi-circular formal court that appears to emerge from the edge of the cliff, along which one walks on the stepped approach from the pool, and again reconciling earth and sky; the nature of a cliff.

The approach to the court

Living space setting up the formal court to the right

Entrance from Courtyard

View from Kitchen to Courtyard

Sea and sky

The Plan

2010-06-07T11:12:00.001-04:00

i thought i would add a sniff of my current favorite archy magazine, The Plan. Its published in Italy, so its not cheap, and in fact i rarely buy it due to $18.50 a copy. Thats because i'm stupid; its essentially a book and $18.50 is cheap for a book.

The project selection is always interesting, the drawings beautifully done, and there is a focus on how building are put together as well as the usual pretty pixies. Czech it!

Packages 1

2010-06-02T16:44:00.004-04:00

Every now and then, you run into packaging that strikes you as beautiful. i remember thinking that Parkay (and maybe others used the same packaging) had a beautiful package concept, which had to do not with the graphics, but the package itself. It opened in such a way as to foretell the delivery and shape of the item inside, which in this case was a stick of not butter. i haven't seen this package in years, so i guess its been poofed. The old style match boxes had a similar design, with a box within a box, one sliding with respect to the other, so as to embody a foretelling of the lighting of the match on the side of the exterior box, which i think is a beautifully simple, though most likely unnoticed, way of packaging matches.

Another favorite package is the Wiffle packaging for both ball and bat.

The problem, i imagine, wasn't an easy one to solve. How to package a small round object with a thin object, 32 inches long? The solution was brilliant. A simple cardboard construction is placed at the end of the bat that is held in place by the friction created through the fitting of its (slightly smaller) hexagonal shape over the cylindrical form of the bat.

Hexagon to circle

This shape is then ingeniously cut along the folds of the hexagon to allow it to open and accommodate the larger "circle" of the ball, after which the cardboard returns to its original form of a hexagon to create closure. The two differing diameters of bat and ball are reconciled through the manipulation of this single hexagon. But thats not the end of it. Even more excitement! The cardboard, after returning to its hexagonal form, is now perforated on half the creases, with the intent that it be opened here in order to get the ball out. After doing so, these "freed" ribs, through the nature of their geometry, can be bend down upon themselves so as to form a nest for the ball to sit in, against the back ribs which have remained upright.

Package, broken but showing closure of ball

Nest

At this point, a single person can put the ball in the nest, toss the ball into the air, and hit it with the bat. In this brilliant packaging, the ball is reconciled with the bat, both prior to purchase and after, and from a formal standpoint, manifests that line, as bat, is but a series of many points (ball). Nothing but clarity. Now go out and play.

Cambridge Public Library, MA

2010-05-29T17:24:00.003-04:00

The original Cambridge Public Library, a Richardson-romanesque influenced building built in 1888 by Van Brunt & Howe, was recently renovated and added onto with a very modern addition by William Rawn Associates. The addition has been well received, and the city should be applauded for encouraging a contemporary solution for the addition.

The contrast between the two buildings is instructive. The original building, in heavy, articulated masonry with volumes defined through the use of geometry rather than material change, establishes a clear civic presence with a central tower set about the clearly defined entrance and reading room. There is a recognition here that society is bound by its institutions, and that government, as the organization of society, is a good thing that has the potential to improve our collective being, and especially so when it is representative of the people it is organizing.

The addition, by contrast, presents the ideal of civic responsibility and identity as a much weakened proposition. Its appearance is not of library any more than it is of corporate headquarters or large house, except for its attachment to something so clear as to be a library, or its mother, a church. Solidity and groundedness have been replaced with transparency and airiness, and the assuredness of stone replaced with the tenuousness of hundreds of maintenance seeking motors making countless adjustments to movable louvers and foils, so as to enable the near complete transparency.

The new addition is slick. But its only mediocre architecture. Its attraction is the transparent bar that presents itself as the new identity of the Public Library, but this bar is not much more than a kit of parts shipped over from Germany and extruded the requisite length. It's more about technology than space making, and is emblematic of the current fetishizing of facades over space making/defining. For all it's articulation, it's completely inarticulate, with entrance noted only as a horizontal plane hovering over the doors. Entrance exists as an intrusion through expensive German technology, and with respect to the facade appears incidental in its placement, though located on axis with Trowbridge St.

Facade as composition of volumes/elements

Facade as tool of light delivery and temperature control

One doesn't arrive at this building; one passes through two bars until confronted with a fourth bar at an elevated position. As you can infer from this description, this is another "bar" scheme, consisting of laminated bars through which one (effortlessly) penetrates upon entry, a bit like chomping into a wafer bar. One can observe these layers, but they are so subtly articulated that passing through them doesn't add to the experience, as each bar is equally open and light, in contrast to the original building, in which each volume is highly articulated, sequenced, and dark. The first bar in the new addition is a reading room and shares the curtain wall; this space can be understood as a Loggia of sorts, and is no doubt a pleasant place to sit and casually read. I say casually, because with the near total openness one is constantly subject to distraction. This is an interesting contrast with the old building, and points to the difference in attitude and culture between the eras. It's as if the new wing had a set mission to articulate the multitasking distracted citizens of today with a library intent on reinforcing those traits.

The East Elevation is all about articulating the bars

One of the saddest aspects of the new wing is the way it eviscerates the original library. The main entry to the complex is now through the new wing, and the circulation bar provides connection to the original building, which still houses a reading room and a "teen room", along with some other functions. The original entry is now a dead end conference room of some sort, with the loggia infilled with glass. The steps now have blocks set on them, centered on the arches, to emphasize that entry "no longer happens here".

It's too bad the original building couldn't be retained as the entrance to the new complex. Its a much more dignified building, and its sad to see it relegated to corner reading room. There would have been accessibility issues, and perhaps the programming would have had to be revised a bit, but it would have been a more satisfying solution.

Arakawa

2010-05-24T10:23:00.001-04:00

Arakawa died last week. If you aren't familiar with his work, its because you've been swimming the mainstream and have concerned yourself with "serious" architecture over the friskiness and occasional bizarreness of the near fringes, though perhaps Arakawa wasn't so near. i'm nearly as guilty as anyone, though was exposed to his (and his partner's) work a couple of years ago when the Bioscleve House was published online. i remember a grin passing over my face when i first saw it. For the most part, as architects, we are subject to and have bought into the norms of our profession and those of the public at large: planar walls set in orthogonal composition, a bit of window trickery, a color here and there, yawn. Of course, there are the starchitect and one-off exceptions, but they, too, generally fulfill our expectations as to how "proper" and "correct" architecture should behave.

Thankfully, there have always been some freaks out there. The Dean of my school told me the only time he ever walked out of a guest architect's lecture to the school was after the architect showed a slide of some detail the Dean thought was a violation of the architect's duty to protect the safety and well being of the Public. That architect was Bruce Goff. i loved the idea that he could get our Dean so upset as to walk out of a lecture, but that was just my ignorance as a student interested in rebellion. Bruce Goff wasn't so interested in making people angry as following what he believed in, and Arakawa was just such a visionary.

People have been making fun of the fact that he thought people could avoid death through the making of a specific architecture. And like many an evangelical who promised the absurd, his death has made clear the absurdity of his view, though i suppose one could always take refuge in the thought he just got his forms wrong. Regardless, there is no doubting the joy in his work.

Though its clear that the shaping of space alone won't keep us from death, its clear that the nature of the space we inhabit has a significant impact on our well being. One of the curious aspects of these images of the Bioscleve House is how conventional the spaces are. They really don't have the spacial complexity his thoughts conjure when he talks about the ability of space to (re)shape our being, and keep us from death through a questioning of the most banal aspect of our existence.

As Photographer Hans Silvester noted in one of his books, the more severe and straight-edged the architecture, the less happy the cat. Cats thrive in spatial complexity, where they can hide if need be or watch from a perch as they care for their territory. He believed that if we only took more notice of the feelings of cats in the making of our dwellings, we would all live happier lives.

i appreciate the work of Arakawa, but i don't find it to be great architecture. Its fun, but ironically is too conventional in the ways that would make it interesting to architects. Though he created spherical toilet rooms, the movement through his spaces was generally very two dimensional. Full of knobby sloping floors, its not hard to imagine tripping down into the kitchen, and dying with a hard boiled egg lodged in your eye socket.

wabbit, west in peace

2010-05-17T16:38:00.003-04:00

Me '84 Rabbit GTI was sick. Gas mileage was way down. Gas fumes were a nice perfume, but they were lately getting kind of strong. Into Al's garage went me Wabbit, where it has always gone since coming here from Buffalo.

i called Al Sat morn to see when i could pick it up, but he told me something else. He told me it was over. i couldn't say a word. "...your gas tank was rusted out, so i got you a new one. But theres too much rust. You can't do it. It doesn't make sense. You need a new car."

You shouldn't get attached to your car. Its only a stupid machine. But i was attached to me Wabbit. i loved its wild smells and rattles, and it was a blast to drive. i loved taking people for a drive, though they didn't always share my enthusiasm. The armrest on the passenger side was scratched and indented where visitors had dug their nails. But occasionally people (men only) would come up to me and compliment me with "cool car dude", and i knew it to be one of the great car designs of all time (Giorgio Giugiaro), though my Americanized version of the original was a lesser design. i spent the weekend thinking about my history with this car, and how impossible it would be to replace. yik.

Anyway, i already miss my Rabbit. and Rat Fink. and Bert lounging in the back (above).

Matsuyama Castle

2010-05-16T19:28:00.004-04:00

These images by photographer Eisuke Muroga of Matsuyama Castle show the unique nature of the Japanese castle when compared to the European model. The high stone base is a dry wall, meaning no mortar was used in its construction, with the gaps in the stone filled with smaller stones, which aid in draining the wall of water and allowing flexibility, so important in earthquake prone Japan. Though not on display in this castle, many Edo period walls were constructed with the stones laid on the diagonal, which further aided in resisting lateral forces due to earthquake.

These castles depended not only on their walls for defense, but were often built on hills or mountaintops, to further frustrate an attacking army. The other obvious difference with the European model is the wood structure perched on top of the wall. From a formal standpoint, i love the differentiation of the occupied space, in wood, from that of the "earth", in stone, if for no other reason than its articulation of the Japanese cultural relationship to nature, which i think is summed up in the picture above, where nature is understood not as something to be dominated, but to exist alongside as an equal. The delicacy of the wood structure sitting on the stone wall is telling.

i believe this castle was only used for ceremonial purposes.

Japan musings 6

2010-05-15T11:22:00.015-04:00

Shinto, the religion of Japan, doesn’t identify any one god. There are many gods, so to speak, though they are less gods than spirits (Kami), and may take the form of mountains, wind, or trees, but at the same time exist within people. If the center-centric cultures of the west can be said to originate in monotheism, or at least find definition through monotheism, than its not unreasonable to find in Shintoism the Japanese preoccupation with the periphery or edge, but here its more nuanced than saying Shintoism = edge or periphery, and more accurate to say that Shintoism denies any one center. It is multi-centered, but where many claim center, center ceases to exist as its namesake declares, and assumes another role, that of localized node, or a character within a cast of characters. The periphery then exists less as the perimeter of an established center then as a container of multiple characters, and this is the more accurate rendition of perimeter within the context of Japanese culture. Rather than “all roads lead to Rome”, one has a rice paddy, with a clear, defined edge but many claimed “centers”.

We understand a path as a means to a destination. European cities exist as a network of paths that allow us to travel to various destinations, but they also establish a hierarchy within the city as to the relative importance of those same destinations. Our cities are organized around these paths, and through their association with destination and hierarchy, they exist as extensions of the city center, whether localized as a neighborhood center or centrally as the Town Square. Its not a surprise, then, that our doors along these paths are numbered linearly according to their position on the path. This is the primary means of way finding in the European city, organized by number along a street.

In Japan, things are arranged inversely. Though paths take people to their destinations, the nature of the city structure is such that the importance of the path is diminished. If in the European city the path has an “object” quality in terms of its assigned importance, in Japan it is the city block that is object. The Japanese city/town is defined not by a city center, but by a multiplicity of centers each with a sphere of influence around which the city is organized. Each door is numbered according to the sequence in which it was constructed with respect to the local node or center; the street is only of secondary import, and is usually not even named.

Japanese Penguin

The compartmentalization so clear in this diagram can be seen throughout Japanese culture, from rice paddys to the bento boxes. The expression of multiple centers over the means of connecting those centers is the Japanese expression of a de-centered/multi-centered society, and can be found to originate in Shinto where there is a heightened value placed on the expression of ones relationships to another person, as opposed to having the rules of that interaction codified by law.

Midway gardens

2010-05-10T14:55:00.003-04:00

As a y'onion, deep in the punk movement and sounds of late 70's through the 80's, there were many brands of ethos, but the one that fascinated me was the one that declared "destruction = creation".

The photography of Chris Jordan demonstrates this, but does so in a way that goes beyond creating beauty to question the habits of our species. In his art, one senses that the "art instinct" must be real.

He shot these pictures at the Midway Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and far from "civilization". It was the scene of one of the largest naval battles of the Second World War. These pictures show another, more recent battle, though they again register with us as scenes on a beach.

Rolex Learning Center

2010-05-09T22:58:00.003-04:00

Architects SANAA have received a lot of attention lately, especially after having won the Pritzger Prize. i find this project, the Rolex Learning Center, to be an interesting one.

Funimag photoblog

archiCentral

The program is for a learning center for the Ecole Polytechnique in Lauzanne, Switzerland, which includes a library, auditorium, conference spaces, large forum, cafe, and restaurant.

The undulating form is a perversion of bumpy Switzerland, the building sitting as it does on a flat site near the lake, yet offering hills and dales in a floor that rises and falls, seemingly without reason except to create interesting effect. Apparently the undulating floor and courtyards are used as devices to differentiate the space functions without having to resort to walls, which are practically non existent. This has the effect of creating a curious situation where site and building have been inverted; the site providing a neutral space amenable to human occupation, the building rolling up and down as if in need of earth graders to provide a suitable surface. The building is essentially undifferentiated in thickness, existing in the abstract as if a strata or membrane, but with no walls it reads as composed of 2 layers, with some form of medium (meaning?) that makes their separation impossible. The pairing of inseparable membranes, acting as a datum of sorts, with the random undulation of the membrane has an interesting parallel in plan, where the random placement and size of the courts is put in stark contrast to the rigidity of the building perimeter, and recalls an inversion of the French Hotel plan type where an interior order is created within an undifferentiated, random perimeter.

This curious allegiance between the rational and the irrational, carried through in both plan and elevation/section, provides a table of sorts that should be the basis for higher education, embodying here an institution of higher learning, and seeming every bit as abstract as "learning center".

dezeen

i first wished the underside of the slab weren't so pristine, though came to realize that this reinforces the abstractness of the thing. i first thought this building was for Rolex, and so was interested in how the treatment of the underside as a grotto might create a metaphor for the passing of time, but it turns out Rolex only provided funding; they have no other connection to the building.

Japan musings 5

2010-05-08T21:00:00.004-04:00

Where in the west, and perhaps most of the rest of the world, things are fastened and secured through a direct, center oriented, confrontational relationship between 2 objects, in Japan, those same two objects are secured through tangental, peripheral relationships. That Japanese culture and being is grounded in notions of de-centering, favoring the peripheral over the centered, is central to understanding not only the Japanese way putting two things together, but also understanding their relationship to nature. This pervasive and simple notion, observable throughout Japanese culture, and noted over and over in these musings, is the beauty of the place, and not to be found anywhere else in the world.

When you walk through a Japanese garden or temple or manor house, you will observe that no two objects are put together against their will (yes, objects have will). They will instead be placed adjacent to each other such that each maintains its integrity and self, and thus exist in harmony with each other, and by extension establish harmony throughout the construct.

In these examples of Japanese fences, you can see that the members are allowed to slide by adjacent members, with each component serving its own function, but not in such a way that it becomes subservient to another. The fences, when wood, are rarely set into the earth by digging a hole and setting in a post, but rather they are often set onto a stone wall or base, which itself is set into the earth as a stone might naturally do. This is practical, as the wood is kept from the moist earth, but also establishes the same hierarchy held by nature, thereby ensuring the small piece is in harmony with the much larger whole.

photopassjapan.com

The same phenomenon, that of component pieces passing by each other yet bound to create a new whole, can be seen in the wood framing of temple roofs, where the Japanese developed a sophisticated language of wood joinery. Wood joinery, of course, exists all over the world, but in Japan it is consistent with a prevailing attitude toward design in general, and so takes on special significance.

The example above shows clearly wood members passing by other members in order to create a hierarchy of support and structure. This passing doesn't occur without one member acknowledging the other; one member receives the other in such a way as to address one or more of the forces acting on the whole: compression, tension, bending, and shear. The example above is interesting because it shows two beams that appear to be coming out of the corner post, or attached to it. In fact, these beams are passing by the column (the beam is in fact 2 pieces), but internally their anatomy's are interlocked such that they become one being, allowing forces to be transferred from a horizontal member to a vertical one. Notice also the diagonal beam, which is in fact two beams joined together, and how the tiny gap between them articulates the line created by the intersection of the beams below, as well as the corner of the column. This articulates a larger truth, that of the comfort the diagonal has as in the Japanese orthogonal realm, which is nothing more than a restating of the presence of typhoon, earthquake, volcano, or other divine intervention to mans imagined ordering of the world, and the Japanese acceptance of this in their design vocabulary. In the west in particular, the diagonal is an alien presence, and is usually only awkwardly addressed.

knew

2010-05-08T13:43:00.000-04:00

water messes of wires,
in me pixie

glea rhymes with flea

safe

2010-05-03T15:56:00.002-04:00

For some reason i decided to buy a padlock for me gym locker while i was at the grocery store. This is known as "stupid". i bought some cheapbutt piece 'ocrap made in guesswhere that cost maybe $2.60, including tax.

>>6 months. i was being a peaceful type, wet things dripping from me rippling geezer meats, trying to undo my cheapbutt as i just got back to my locker from the stankygym shower, when the thing just came apart in my hand. All of a sudden, i had a handful of lock parts. i wasn't even turning it hard, though i think i might have yawned. It just went to pieces. In my hand. It was kinda funny, seeing as it was supposed to be a security device. Imagine being the burglar trying to break into a gym locker, and having the lock come apart in your hand. You'd think you just met Jesus. i decorated the fuker..

eye poke

2010-05-03T11:03:00.003-04:00

You see this stuff all the time, and if you have even the slightest tinkle of loveliness, it means that your mind is covered in monkeys trying to jump out of your skull to escape another moment witnessing these horrors..

Elevator call station at Nasty Hospital

Excessive, uncoordinated signage seems to be rampant in this culture, as well as an aversion to using graphics to communicate messages. i first noticed this when i was a kid, living in France, where we had a French car that had the nicest simple graphics to denote the gas level, oil pressure, fan, hot, cold, etc. This was in contrast to American cars, which for years would spell everything out in letters, as if the target audience was complete idiots that needed to read, over and over, what was being displayed in the gas gauge. i'm still amazed that we have to write "stop" on all our stop signs. Is our legal system to blame for our text centered culture?

This picture is interesting because it demonstrates the limits of both graphics and text. The large stop on the stop sign is redundant with the graphic of a red octagon placed at an intersection, and therefore becomes intellectually invisible. However, as soon as the sprayed note shows up, "stop" becomes integral to another message that has nothing to do with the original intent of the graphic, and so separates itself from the graphic to join its more natural home in text. "Stop", as text, is torn by the tension between its imposed home in the alien world of graphics and its more natural home as text and component of a sentence. The sprayed message takes advantage of the use of a stop sign to symbolize "Stop", but in this location it has the unintended consequence of commenting on nature of text and graphics, and the uneasy relationship between both.

i suppose there are those who would argue that text is nothing more than a collection of graphic symbols for the sounds we peep, and that anything we "write" is graphic, but that tosses out the usefulness of a distinction between the two.

rollicked

2010-04-26T20:10:00.002-04:00

This past weekend i ran to witness a slight smear of Lightning Bolt, me prettiest band. An hour drive to hear 35 minutes of thickrock noisypaste. One of me favorite flavors.

Brian Gibson once said the secret of their sound, and rock in general, was volume. Be loud, all else will fall into place. The prime ingredient of rock is to rock, and to rock you have to turn up that volume dial, loud enough to make your ribs wiggle like they had birds perched. Or your hat brim to vibrate, as mine did this past weekend. Without amplification, there would be no rock music, and one fewer lightning bolt.

Japan musings 4

2010-04-22T13:00:00.000-04:00

If you didn't know what sushi was, you probably wouldn't eat it. Many know what it is and that's reason enough never to touch it. Sushi doesn't really look like "food". It inhabits strange territory that only the Japanese could have invented, and is very much a product of the Japanese attitude and relationship toward nature, and reinforces the preceding discussions about the formal structure of Japanese culture.

The invention of sushi involved the reconciliation of land and sea, a reconciliation that might describe Japan itself. It was found that fish could be preserved if it were wrapped with rice that was allowed to ferment (along with salt). And so fish, one of the staples of the Japanese diet, was married to the other staple, rice, which was produced inland. The result was something that phenomenally reinforced the edge over center, as if to declare to rice that land will not own our cuisine, and to seafood that the ocean will not be central, either. The interstice, the coast, will be our center.

The combination of fish and rice did not proceed without changing the nature of the fish or the rice. The fish lost its fishness; it is no longer identifiable as such. It has been sliced into an abstract of both size and form, and its canvas is rice, which must now be self supporting. Often sticky, the rice may assume the form of the fish, or it may be bound together with the fish by a band, also eatable. The new creation is not cooked but is raw, with the shiny flesh of the sea creature showing itself to the world, and the granular cloud of white grain beneath, as if soft bones clinging to each other. Sushi declares itself not fish, not rice. Its a new species, only minutes from life, served with brethren equally alien, from both land and sea.

This remaking of nature in mans image in not a new idea. The history of the garden is the history of just such remaking. But in Japan this remaking is allowed its own realm, where the remade version is understood not as mans interpretation of nature but as the nature of nature. It is the essence of nature; more nature than nature.

©Hiromi Kikuno

ICA Boston

2010-04-20T10:39:00.001-04:00

Architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro were the designers of this museum, which has received rave reviews in the design press since its opening in late 2006. The museum is a great place to see art, and the terrace overlooking the harbor is a nice gesture to the long neglected Boston waterfront, and is part of the Harborwalk, a long walk which runs along the edge of the water from the North End to the new museum. But as a building, a piece of architecture, this thing sucks.

Unless you're on the other side of the harbor, which most of us aren't, your view of this building is one of empty, sad looking metal panels and dim channel glass with the requisite scatter pattern of openings, trying to look interesting but failing miserably. The building doesn't even try to connect to the city behind it, and instead is focused on the water, where it succeeds in engaging with the harbor and public walk. For most of the design community, it seems, this is enough, and many are just relieved to have a "modern" building go up in Boston, let alone one not covered in brick. But why does it have to be so ugly?

This building is completely lacking in grace. It's an intellectual exercise that in the modern tradition relegated aesthetics to a residual component of the mental game being played. Viewed from the side you can see one of the (very fashionable) games played, that of the undulating plane that alternately moves between being floor and wall, and then back to ceiling/floor.

This is most successful on the north side (above), where there is an auditorium to play into the hands of this formal game, but on the south side you have only a ball of confusion, as the plane wiggles back and forth, fighting for definition on the flat facade (below). This makes my butt look pretty, and i'm a skinny old man. For good reason, you almost never see a picture of it from this side.

I want to just declare this an ugly, heavy handed building, but another thing that bothers me, and which i see as rampant in the world of architecture these days, is the concealing of structure for the sake of a formal exercise. When you look at the pictures above, don't you marvel at the cantilever? Don't you wonder how this thing is held up? You won't get any answers in this building, they want you to believe its all magic. Like a 19th century neo-you-name-it, with concealed steel beneath stone pretend, structure here is suppressed. Suppressed in the name of what? At least in the 19th century, you got a nice, civil looking building out of the exercise. Now we get eyesores.

i suppose i could go on and on about what has happened to beauty in modernism, but that has to wait for another post.

Japan musings 3

2010-04-14T17:51:00.005-04:00

Last weekend i was in DC, but missed the Cherry Blossom festival. There were still a few pink shiners around town, but for the most part they were gone. And thats the nature of the cherry blossom, it flowers for a few days, then its poofed. As you probably know, the cherry trees were a gift from Japan to the US in 1912 to symbolize friendship between the two countries.

Cherry blossoms carry great cultural significance in Japan. Hanami is the name of the celebration of the blossoming of these trees, when the people of Japan go out for no other purpose than to enjoy the sight of these trees in bloom. If you've read the previous musings on Japan, you can see where this is going. The Hanami is another aspect of Japanese culture that exemplifies the celebration of the moment over the eternal, rebirth over extended life, and the certainty of change. One might say it's finding the eternal within a moment. That beauty is found and celebrated in the short flowering of the blossoms is characteristic of Japanese thought, where there's a cultural recognition that a moment may give rise to a new Era or the destruction of a foreign fleet of invaders. So, is it the beauty of the blossoms that is celebrated, or is it their transience? There are many beautiful flowers in Japan. I think without a doubt it is the transience that is celebrated, and its not a leap to think of the blossoms as the visual equivalent of haiku, as they are both celebrations of the moment and the ephemeral. In the image below, so central to the psyche of Japan, we see celebrated the moment in two of its three aspects; about to pass, and pregnant.

i love that the Japanese 100 Yen coin has on one side a depiction of cherry blossoms. Isn't money the perfect vehicle for transience?

It probably isn't polite to mention that many kamikaze pilots would have painted on their planes imagery of cherry blossoms, but its not irrelevant, either.

Since i'm in this discussion about the place of the moment in Japanese culture, its hard not to mention their attitude toward the camera and the snapshot. It doesn't matter where you are, if you live in an interesting enough place that is subject to bus loads of Japanese tourists, say in Paris or Rome, you've seen them pull up, unload the tourists, tourists zoom out and take group pictures, get back into the bus, and pull out to the next destination. For some reason i thought this happened only in Europe, after having traveled half the world, but when i went to Japan i saw it to the nth degree. The big difference i noticed between the way most tourists photograph a tourist spot and the way the Japanese go about it is the importance the Japanese place on placing themselves in the picture, as opposed to simply taking a picture of the attraction and cutting out the people as i would do. i like to think of this phenomenon as related in its psychology to that of the Rising Sun. Japan is the "Land of the Rising Sun", as one can see in its flag, but this description is interesting with respect to the displacement it conjures. For whom is it the land of the rising sun? If you are in Japan, an island floating in the sea, and you are on the east coast standing on a beach early morning, you will see the sun rising in the east, but you will not yourself experience a rising; you are separated from it by perception, and will experience only the sun rising. If you are in China (Korea), however, the sun rises over a land to the east, and so this land may be witnessed as a land of the rising sun. This displacement is central to the Japanese psyche, and so reinforces the notion i mentioned in an earlier musing of the Japanese aversion to "center", and shows that even where you might think they have accepted a notion of center, as in their flag, within itself one finds it is in fact a center removed. Thus the tourist, and pictures of themselves.

Shampoo gratings

2010-04-08T16:23:00.002-04:00

What do things feel like? This probably seems like a stupid question, but i've found that the way things feel has a lot to do with how pleasant your interaction with that thing is. i remember having to rent a Ford Mustang a couple of years ago, and thinking wow i rented a classic American sports car to go to my stupid job meeting. One of the first things you do when you get into your rental car is adjust the seat, especially if you're a tall lanky dude, and so that was really my first interaction with the car. i felt under the seat, and immediately my hand came onto some nasty, cheap, sharp piece of plastic that i was supposed to adjust the seat with. It was a piece of plastic i never saw, as it was under the seat, but it formed my initial impression of the car, and since the rest of the car failed to overcome it, the result is that i would never buy a Ford Mustang, all because of a piece of plastic hidden under the seat. Do you think Ford cares about this?

So, about shampoo, i bitch the following: i buy Head and Shoulders shampoo, if for no other reason than its cheap and it seems to work. The design of the bottle is fine, nothing special, trying to distinguish itself on the shelf with raw geometry, but the experience of using the bottle makes you wish you had chosen a fistful of beetles. The top is made of hard cheap plastic, and when you open the lid to reveal the (invisible) spout, which is nothing but a hole in the top of the bottle, it makes this thin, cheap, cracking sound that's like a tiny spine snapping, just to let you know the designers didn't think about this experience at all. The lid is also hard to open, and you have to fight with the nasty thing to pull it up, and while doing so it chews on your fingers like an old dachshund, or maybe the seat adjustment on a Mustang. i hate opening the bottle.

Its easy for me to imagine the designers sitting around, perhaps having an occasional meeting to discuss how beautiful their new bottle for Proctor and Gamble is, while ignoring the act of using the stupid thing. In the end, its a bad experience. Sort of like having dandruff. Which is gone, by the way.

Japan musings 2

2010-03-29T13:54:00.004-04:00

It's interesting to look at one of the most famous Japanese prints made by the artist Hokusai, and here find relevance to the idea of the vacant center, which i referred to earlier. The print i'm referring to is "The Great Wave":

Whats interesting for me about this image is the way the wave implies a circling of the mountain in the background (Mt. Fuji). Its not a circle completed, but one implied, and it has an interesting relative in the 5 yen coin, where a rice shoot is shown to be bent in the wind, creating, or reinforcing, the vacant center.

And what is the "vacant" center in the print? It is Mt. Fuji, the spiritual center of Japan, and perhaps its primary symbol. This print verifies the central role a "Great Wave" has in the history and making of the Japanese nation, as i alluded to in the first post, but beyond this narrative, there is another layer of information contained in this print that alludes to the fundamental quality of Japanese being. If one looks again at the print, Mt Fuji appears as any other mountain, but it differs greatly in its formality. Mt Fuji is a volcano, and as such may be said to be "empty" in the sense that it is but a conduit for the molten center of our planet. If one were to look down onto a volcano from above, Mt Fuji might appear as the coin does, with an empty center and full perimeter. In this sense, a volcano is the ideal iconic image of the history and collective experience of Japan, as it is simultaneously at peace in its harmonious, singular composition, and menacing in its reality as a volcano. It duels with itself in appearing to be central while simultaneously denying center, or rather presenting center as something empty, vacant. Many of Japan's sensibilities and customs come from this tension between center and perimeter, order and disorder; where often the perimeter is activated by en emptied center, and as i'll later demonstrate, the appearance of "empty" is anything but.

Roland Barthes explored this notion in his musings about Japanese train stations, which in his mind were the genuine "centers" of Japanese cities, rather than the Town Halls, Squares, and civic buildings of western cities. He noted that the train station, which was generally full of people and thus heavily populated, was in a constant state of flux between emptying and filling, much like a heart, filling with blood only to send it away. This state of flux makes it a very unique kind of "center" as it is one that does not hold its contents, but expels them, both inward and outward. It is a center that exists in and celebrates the moment, the moment of arrival and departure, rather than the passing of decades and centuries. This celebration of the moment over what elsewhere might take the form of a collective salute to history is also a very Japanese notion, and not unrelated its inclination to reset its calendar, or design with an acknowledgement of disorder, upon the arrival of epic "moments".

me obsession

2010-03-24T11:39:00.003-04:00

czech pixie page for more glowies

Japan musings

2010-03-18T21:26:00.007-04:00

For much of its history, Japan has been isolated from western influences, with the exception of 200 years between the 15th and 17th century, when the Portuguese "discovered" Japan. Japan closed this opening in 1639, and it wasn't to open again until the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854. The result of this relative isolation is an incredible unity of thought and purpose that crosses all aspects of its culture, and which struck me dumb when i visited in the early 90's. i plan to ramble about many of the visual aspects that struck me, and no doubt you will recognize the thoughts of others, such as Bataille and Barthes, though i've forgotten which are the pillaged thoughts.

Japan is a "frame" culture, as can be said of American culture. But the idea of frame in Japan is very different from that in the US. Whereas the American frame is one of extension and allowance, it doesn't deal well with disruption, and is averse to variation, though of course has had to allow for it. The American "frame", if one is to think in these terms, is also very "center" oriented; the Japanese frame not so. The Japanese "frame" culture is one that celebrates the interruption of the frame, and relishes these interruptions as though works of art. As it must. For Japan exists in the ocean, at the edge of a tectonic plate, and so has a history pierced, and to a degree defined, by natural disasters in the form of earthquakes and typhoons. These cataclysmic events are not welcomed per se, after all they are cataclysms, but they have been "let in", and one could say the aesthetics of Japan are partially characterized by a "disaster mentality", a mentality that from a formal standpoint favors the perimeter over the center, and celebrates interruption of the standing order, the flecks of disorder. The traditional Japanese calendar, for example, is marked by eras, most of which are defined by the arrival of a new emperor, but some of these eras are defined by the occurrence of an earthquake or tsunami, at which, in one sense, the calendar is "reset", and a new era defined. Thus a natural disaster, a disruption of the established order, is celebrated as the birth of something new, rather than the demise of the existing order.

From a formal standpoint, Japan is all perimeter. It is a number of islands with a variegated coastline and high, dense mountains. The "center" does not want to be occupied. And so most of the population has lived on or near the coastline, and the Japanese people have long favored fishing over agriculture and animal husbandry (fishing can be seen as the taking from without, farming as a taking from within, and so it involves a "reach", a distention from the self, the home). Even the production of rice, which is central to their diet, involves the creation of many small "seas", or paddy's, which i will discuss again later. This notion of favoring perimeter over center can be seen throughout Japanese culture, from the treatment of packages to the presentation of their food, and from their way of greeting to the way they build their temples. It permeates everything, but this is not the most interesting feature of the Japanese "sense"; what is most interesting to me is the consistency of this feature as an aesthetic, as if it were a gene all Japanese are born with, a folklore passed on through generations, and the amazing ability of this aesthetic to extend throughout Japanese culture, from teenage fashion to fortress walls.

More to follow...

VW Bug

2010-03-09T14:05:00.006-05:00

The VW Beetle is considered one of the great cars of all time, and the design an icon of automobile design. From a formal standpoint, it describes an almost primal arrangement that goes back to the origins of shelter: 4 corners (the wheels) describing a perimeter that shelters a center (the cabin). Of course, all cars have 4 wheels and a cabin, but the articulation of the wheels through the fenders in the Beetle, and the shape of the cabin reduce these forms to archetype. Its really beautiful in its simplicity.

When the new version of the VW Beetle came out in 1998, it jumped on the tendency of car designers of that period to ape an older design with a few tweaks for an "updated" look. The New Beetle was considered a success in terms of design, though maybe less so as an automobile. But i never liked it. There was something really clumsy about it and i could never put my finger on it until a few months ago (!). And no, i have no idea why it took me so long to discover what it was in that design that bugged me no pun there. i knew the new design was awkward/clumsy in a number of areas, but where it really fails is at the rear of the car. Here is the original:

Notice the flow of the roof line into the trunk, which acts to separate and define the cabin from the wheels. It flows, and is such a graceful line uniting the pieces into a whole.

Here is a view of the New Beetle. What a wretch. This is what happens when designers try to be too clever for their own good.

Notice how the flow of the roof line is interrupted by the fenders trying to unite themselves through a bent horizontal of sorts. This kind of interruption/distortion of the lines is typical of modern car design, where there is an obsession with "clever" lines that bend and connect in all directions, as if on a transformer toy. In this case, the fender line has disrupted the reading of the "4 corners" discussed earlier, a sad omission.

Of course, when you try to capture an aspect of the past by aping it, you are doomed to these kinds of comparisons, and are bound to fail (Mini aside). They should have gone the Golf route, creating a new design belonging to this age.

Suffering from local news

2010-02-27T17:05:00.007-05:00

Is there anything more visually obnoxious than the graphics for your local news? Don't you feel physically assaulted every time the weather report comes on, with its hyper graphics trying to poke the glass out of your tv? The people who put these things together have absolutely no visual sense at all, or rather, they have the same visual sense as your local used car dealer or mattress retailer. Check out this nastinesssssss:

And its not just one station. Its all American stations, including the major networks. In this country the only way we know how to communicate is to club someone over the head with a nasty stew of hyper graphics and over the top vidded transformations, as if there was some danger in blinking that they felt obligated to save us from.