JG Ballard’s writing room

As an undergraduate architecture student, I often found a strange, ineffable kinship between architecture and english majors.

Maybe it was due to the symmetry between our pursuits of ideal worlds. Or to their difference in kind … The writers, using words, lack materiality of expression yet are equipped with an infinite malleability of meaning. Architects have ‘bricks and mortars,’ but ultimately silent form; it was up to the critics and the theorists (and sometimes, the clients) to derive – often strainingly – the semiotics of their creations. The two occupations revolve around this seemingly exclusive reciprocity, but perhaps it’s this longing, across an unseen, subterranean divide, that fuels and intensifies the mutual appreciation.

Who really knows what it is, but your belief in this mythology of the writer/architect will probably inform your fascination for, and interpretations of, the following photographs, taken of various accomplished writers’ writing spaces.

Alain de Boton

Seamus Heaney

Hanif Kureishi

Mark Haddon

[via The Guardian]

With shades of theme park artificiality and cheeky, faux-nostalgic imagineering (I’d guess that the majority of young LES urbanites who make it here have never spent an evening at a drive-in theater), Grand Opening has installed a 1965 Ford Falcon convertible and a movie screen in its small Lower East Side space, and is charging $75 per private screening.

This is so awesome.

What you have to appreciate is how an atavistic expression of post-war, car-crazy rural Americana is incorporated into the knowing (and winking), urban belly of downtown Manhattan, and the way in which the private-in-public principle of the erstwhile drive-in itself (one in which the audience enjoyed the communal and outdoor spectacle of a movie while sitting inside their separate and insular aluminum cocoons) has been détourned once again; “public viewing” is really a private experience after all.

I can only hope that there’s a breeze machine and some glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling.

[via Racked]

In the sheer number of typologies (architecture, narrative, film/video, music, and interactivity) rolled up within it, HBO’s recent Voyeur project is truly, and spectacularly, ‘multimedic.’

Derived as a promotional campaign for HBO by its ad agency, BBDO, Voyeur integrates eight unfolding stories within the conceit of a single New York apartment complex, which, with its walls laid transparent, privies us to an omniscient, dollhouse view of the proceedings. The eight stories interweave and points of intersection occur throughout, both spatially and chronologically. Part of the delight in experiencing Voyeur is the intricacy of this orchestration (director Jake Scott does an impressive job knitting the pieces together); the other pleasure is purely sensual. The textures, colors, and the archetypical purity of the stories themselves (a murder in one apartment, comic hijinks in another, and two apartments linked by opposite sides of an imploding romantic affair) are intoxicating.

The multithreaded film has been done before, with Mike Figgis’ Timecode, in which the viewing screen is divided into quadrants, each one engaged in separate but realtime exposition. Set in L.A., scenes from one quadrant occasionally lazily drift into one another, but all storylines immediately synchronize and respond in unison to ‘global’ events, i.e. random earthquakes ripple through the city of L.A.; when these quakes take place, all the characters in all four quadrants hit the deck together. It’s clever, but the summary effect of the movie is baroque and distancing. Longform cinema is a commitment, and in lacking a narrative hold on the viewer, Timecode’s conceit quickly wears out its welcome. It comes off as a precious exercise in form.

The scenarios in Voyeur, on the other hand, are iconic; they are narrative shorthands that don’t require elaborate exposition, nor even dialogue. They are told, elegantly and efficiently, in broad but communicative gestures by the actors. They are hard not to watch … These vignettes are then deposited within the framework of the apartment building (the flash/video site was handsomely put together by the indefatigable Brooklyn-based boutique agency Big Spaceship), and given a new axis over which to unfold — the spatial. The filmmaker Chris Marker made a similar move with his CD-ROM project Immemory, evolving his traditionally medium of film into the interactive. He wrote in its preface:

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very lease we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw on the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends.

The little stories and tiny figures in Voyeur, bound together in the geography of the apt building, yet freed from typology and linearity, gain even more power.

The works of these two painters (first linked to via the prolific Neatorama), remind me of M.C. Escher (and a handful of other artists and visual tricksters), in a sort of user-friendly, low-calorie way.

 

Goofy, playful, graphics-laden 3D isometrics and sections permeate the work of Josh Keyes.

And the pop surrealism of Robert Gonsalvez reminds me of a cross between René Magritte, Norman Rockwell, with a dash of Maxfield Parrish.

[via Neatorama here and here]

Two pieces in today’s Times …

This discusses the green building movement in New York, and features SOM’s recently completed 7 World Trade Center, and Sir Norman Foster’s Hearst Building. When they say ‘green,’ they mean it in more senses than one:

Of course, it isn’t just environmental consciousness that is motivating developers. Because green buildings use from 30 to 70 percent less energy, they can be run for less money — but leased for more, because companies want healthy offices, which several studies have shown lead to increased productivity.

This op-ed by Jamie Lincoln Kitman of Automobile Magazine applies some lucidity to the hype surrounding hybrid cars:

Several bills floating around Congress, for instance, have proposed tax incentives to buyers of hybrid cars, irrespective of their gas mileage. Thus, under one failed but sure to resurface formulation, the suburbanite who buys a hypothetical hybrid Dodge Durango that gets 14 miles per gallon instead of 12 thanks to its second, electric power source would be entitled to a huge tax incentive, while the buyer of a conventional, gasoline-powered Honda Civic that delivers 40 miles per gallon on the open road gets none.

And under some imaginable patchwork of state and local ordinances, the Durango buyer might get a special parking space at the train station and the right to use a high occupancy vehicle lane, despite appalling fuel economy and a car full of empty seats, while the Honda driver will have to walk to the train from a distant parking lot after braving the worst of morning rush hour traffic on the highway just like everybody else.

*** 

Holy hyperlinking! While we are discussing the Times, I was pleasantly surprised when I saved the above article and received this smart, Amazon-style followup — a long-overdue feature, for sure:

This chummy interview with Rem Koolhaas appeared in the German rag Der Spiegel last week. The issue of his desire to enter politics is addressed, but is also frustratingly short on detail.

I mean, Koolhaas spent the nineties, in the face of sweeping globalization, in a non-ideological, agnostic, pro-active stance. His call to arms for architects, if I recall, was to drop the reflexive Modernist postures of utopianism and to engage the crushing wave of capital as a surfer, not as a wall. So his entry into politics as a socialist begs an inquiry beyond the teasy answers given here, though for the most part this interview provides a fun, low-calorie read, featuring some vintage Koolhaasian dialectical exchanges such as this one:

Koolhaas: Ugliness also has a right to exist. Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. But seriously, if something like [Berlin's Palace of the Republic] is ugly but nevertheless important, we must preserve it.

SPIEGEL: And if it had been beautiful and important? Shouldn’t architects be the prophets of beauty?

Koolhaas: Beauty isn’t what I’m primarily interested in. I think appropriateness is more important.

SPIEGEL: What do you think is the world’s most beautiful building?

Koolhaas: Very conventionally, the Pantheon in Rome, for example. Isn’t it remarkable? Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

[via Archinect]

 

I knew Blaine Brownell from architecture school — I was an undergrad and he was a grad student working on his thesis. He’s in Seattle now, and a Seattle friend of mine, recently sent a link to his blog Transstudio to me. A couple of weeks later, Archinect posted this interview with Blaine in Business Week (be sure look through the slide show section). So in a short amount of time, the Blaine Brownell alarm has been sounding, and thus a closer examination was in order.

It appears that Blaine has just published a book called Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment (a description of the book, published by PAP, can be found here) that documents innovations in materials and their potential uses, aesthetic and practical, in architectural design. It’s not always easy for architecture to get press for innovation; after all, construction methods haven’t significantly changed in thousands of years (the Romans invented concrete, and not much about it has changed about concrete except that we now have big trucks with rotating cylindrical barrels to haul it around in. Oh, and maybe rebar). Architectural ‘innovation’ is invariably of a formal or stylistic nature, and that esoteric criteria — which float above the pablum in an aesthetic cloud-world, populated and described by the crispy, airless, sometimes bloviated phonemes of archispeak – tend to leave most people cold. Compare that to technological innovation, which gives rise to new ontologies with each OS or software launch (how would you explain Google to someone in 1980? Or the internet?) and whose outcomes affect and are immediately recognizable to millions of people – to anyone who has a desktop computer, for instance, who can practically feel the difference between the dreadful OS9 and the elegant OSX kicking them in the head.

That is perhaps the nature of things. But at least the snail’s pace of physical material can now ride the blogosphere at the speed of dsl, thanks to Transstudio. Architects, contractors, fabricators, vendors, interior descecrators and you stingy sheetrock-loving clients, bookmark now.

In any case, let me know if something gets built with transparent concrete anytime soon — the architect in me needs some old school materials porn every once in a while. Oh, and whisper sweet archispeak in my ear while you’re at it.

In somewhat related news (and onto a topic that’s dear to my heart and a bone that can never quite be tickled enough), check out the always-entertaining Peter Hall’s self-evidently named essay Living Skins: Architecture as Interface, published in the Adobe Design Center.

[from Core77]

 

I spent my Friday off roaming the streets of the city and the hallways of the Met and the Museum of Natural History.

The Met is currently showcasing a collection of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines,’ the name for his mixed media, half-painted, half-sculptural works. I was already enamored with Rauschenberg’s messy, layered, collage sensibility (I throw Tapies, DeKoonig, and Basquiat into this camp as well, but Rauschenberg was probably there first), but to see physical objects — furniture, window frames, clothing, ladders, electrical fixtures, and stuffed animals, including an alpaca goat with a tire hooped around it! — extend out of the picture frame into your physical viewing space was very satisfying in a real, visceral way.

There is also something satisfying by their utter lack of pretension, too. If Marcel Duchamp’s dull, ordinary, mass-produced ‘found objects’ were meant to puncture the sanctimony of High Art, they still did so by taking on themselves the articulation of that polemic — the urinal, the bicycle wheel, the wine rack, provide a semiotic purpose, and are therefore still slaves to a concept; they are still ideas. Rauschenberg’s found objects, on the other hand, are much humbler. They are comfortable amidst the paint smudges and their own ugly, scattered imperfections. They lack any sense of self-consciousness, they don’t raise their voices …

In a distant room in the museum, much smaller in size and more compact in presentation, was a small exhibit of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s sculptural and architectural projects, its emphasis on the relationship between the two.

Ok, I begrudge Calatrava (trained as both an architect and an engineer) the precision and elegance of his sculptures; every piece is a system of tension (wires) and mass / compression (solid material, usually ebony or bronze) held static in an equipoise of competing forces. His buildings and his bridges also share that kind of structural rigor, and they too are beautiful to behold. But when extrapolated to the scale of architectural, the beauty of Calatrava’s formalism turns tyrannical. We can all tiptoe around his sculptures and admire them at a distance in the controlled space of a museum (no cameras please!), but architecture is a larger, more complex, messier, interactive affair — it contains a vitality and dynamism that fights against Calatrava’s rigidity. This conflict is especially apparent given the fact that several of his recent commissions seem to be massive transportation hubs (including the World Trade Center Transportation Hub under construction in Lower Manhattan), whose urbanity and bustle seem completely at odds with their stately, quasi-religious designs. Now if he were designing cathedrals or libraries or something of the like, then perhaps I would be onboard …

I can no longer remember which professor/architect said this at one of our undergraduate studio reviews, but the critique, over a student’s spartan, hyper-symmetrical, super-minimalist, ultimately prison-like design, went something like, ‘Now tell me. What about the Coke machine? If you have to put one in here, and you will, where would you put it? Where can you put it?’

The final, and as it turned out, the longest, leg of my day was across the park at the Museum of Natural History, which was mounting an exhibit on Charles Darwin, founder of Evolution. I went primarily as a show of support and solidarity for fellow reason-based, humanist souls, in light of the shitstorm brewing these days over the teaching of Intelligent Design in American public schools. My $20 was meant mainly to say, ‘Thank you for putting on this show at this particular point in time, and fighting the good fight against the forces of ignorance,’ but it ended up paying for much more than mere lip-service.

The show is incredibly well-executed. The displays (which contain a lot of text — those who don’t like to stand and read be warned) are arranged chronologically, with a strong sense of pacing and narrative. The story begins with Darwin’s curious, insect-collecting boyhood, and progresses through his college days; his 5 years traveling the world and collecting exotic specimens (and eating them! ha!) aboard the HMS Beagle; his return to London and his subsequent entry into its scientific intelligentsia; his move, with his new family, to his manor in the English countryside, where the germination and methodical development of his Evolutionary theory began in earnest; and up through, finally, the publication of The Origin of Species, and the subsequent storm of controversy that it generated — and eventually triumped over. As any well told story does, it envelopes you so completely. And it is also successful because it not only presents the scientific history intelligently and rigorously, but situates the ideas in the rich, emotional life of Darwin the man.

The rebuke of Creationism (and its insidious proxy, Intelligent Design) comes at the very end, but the argument is made persuasively, not angrily. Which meant the show has a good political sense, too, by making politics invisible. This is was perhaps the only museum exhibition I’ve ever left with the urge to applaud outloud.

Now my question is: could anybody over at the Discovery Institute mount something as smart and coherent as this without some kind of divine intervention?

 

The Guardian has a terrific, rather literary piece from 2002 about Mark Rothko’s presitigious late-career commission for murals in the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. It was a commission he himself scotched, giving his paintings instead to the Tate in London.

There is much psychobabble here about Rothko’s vengeful artistic temperament, and the elite social and cultural scene of late 50s New York — centered in the Four Seasons, in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building – on which he wanted to inflict it, as well as some discussion of Michelangelo’s vestibule to the Laurentian Library in Florence, whose spatial derangement served as Rothko’s muse.

[from BoingBoing via Things Magazine]

 

I picked up The Book of Probes from the always excellent Reed Space while wandering the LES a couple of weekends ago. The book could easily be one of those vaguely pretentious, eyecandy / Big Idea books that stimulates your impulse-buy nerve, and then gets put on the shelf or on the coffee table once you get home, never to be opened again. Those art books that disappointingly turn out more farty than arty … 

It’s the sad fact that the über-hotshot designer David Carson, who put together the visuals for the book, for me represents the worst of that pretentious, pseudo-artistic/literary tendency due to his work for the erstwhile late ’90s magazine Raygun (a magazine whose graphic anarchy pushed itself to the very edge of legibility). Yes, Carson’s art direction was certainly eye-popping and unprecedented (upside-down, backwards copy, articles that begin on the cover, articles written in some kind of since-clichéd ’broken typewriter’ typeface, etc), but it was in service to writing that was utterly disposable, even shoddy. Nothing transcendent came out of the relationship. Raygun was in the end all skin and no brains …

But in support of the evocative, epigrammatic writing of late Canadian media mystic Marshall McLuhan (of ‘Global Village’ and ‘the medium is the message’ fame), Carson’s aggressive design sensibility is given a second life, and the two elements on the page (MM’s words and DC’s visuals) find a clear and powerful synthesis.

Another recent impulse purchase that escaped coffee table purgatory was the fabulous book Hidden Track: How Visual Culture is Going Places, a survey book of primarily graphic artists (such as Ryan McGuiness and Pleix’s Genevieve Gauckler) who are moving their flat media into the volumetric.

From the book description:

‘From surface and into space is the overlying design trend these days. Graphic designers and urban artists are creating objects and interiors, moving into art galleries and museums worldwide. Designs, artworks and illustrations are emerging into the third-dimension increasingly featuring ornamental and sculptural objects. Hidden Track documents this movement introducing protagonists and their spaces that are taking current visual culture out of the underground to the the level of high culture.’

 

The Times has an ongoing series that covers the staggering construction juggernaut that is contemporary China. If the abstractions of numbers that don’t drive what is happening in China home (such as the meaning of the record $201.6 billion US-China trade deficit), perhaps bricks-and-mortar equivalencies can create a more tangible and lasting impression. Consider this factoid from one of the articles: there is currently one billion square feet (equal to about 10,000 football stadiums) of new construction going up in the city of Shanghai alone; there exists only about 350 milllion square feet of commercial real estate in all of New York City combined.

Ok, so that wasn’t entirely non-numerical. Here’s another number-cruncher, and it’s a favorite quote of mine, among many, from Rem Koolhaas:

‘The Chinese Architect is the most important, influential, and powerful architect on earth. The average lifetime construction volume of the Chinese Architect in housing alone is approximately three dozen thirty-story highrise buildings. The Chinese Architect designs the largest volume, in the shortest time, for the lowest fee. There is one-tenth the number of architects in China than in the United States, designing five times the project volume in one-fifth the time, earning one-tenth the design fee. This implies an efficiency of 2500 times that of an American architect.’

 

The can be the prototype to that thing in Cube, the shittiest good sci-fi movie ever made … (perhaps v2.0 will include acid nozzles and death lasers)

‘NEVEL is a moving labyrinth (11 X 11 m) consisting of 9 programmable walls able to rotate 360°. Architecture comes alive, walls become doors, spaces open and close, visitors are locked up and set free again.’

[from ARTEFACT via WeMakeMoneyNotArt]

Ane Lykke: “Mind the Gap.”

I am impressed by the natural grace and subtlety of this installation, especially when it is contrasted with the de facto ‘technological’ strategy for many designers who pursue ‘animate architecture,’ which is to employ sensors and servos and cameras and speakers and thermometers; in others, attack the problem with gear, which in sort order become a laborious, noisy, bug-ridden, and sometimes self-destructing proposition. A complex, reactive system in physical reality almost never retains the poetry it had when it lived in the ‘perfect conditions’ of the creator’s mind, sketchbook, or computer screen.

This intriguing installation will be up until February 20th at Danish Design Centre’s Balcony space. Lykke has set up two parallel layers of hexagonal boxes–each painted with red lines–hung 14 cm apart, along the back wall of the gallery. As visitors enter the room, they create air disturbances, which are tranposed into subtle moire patterns. Very low tech, but very sophisticated.

As Lykke explains, the wall is “passively waiting” and is only activated when the spectator moves within the space. Then variations of the patterns follow along as a film, forming a living, vibrating surface. In this way, the spectator alters the wall.

[From DDC via Core77]