Well here’s one Dutch immigrant detention center that’s not invisible! Just the opposite.
That’s the Sportsdomes DJI up there, by architect Willem van der Sluis, featured in Wallpaper* Magazine in 2008, the same year the project won a Dutch Design Award for his Amsterdam firm Customr.
Just like the Kabul Dome the US Government ordered from Buckminster Fuller in 1955, Customr’s Sportsdomes were designed on a tight budget; in a hurry; using the latest modular manufacturing technology; so that they can be erected, dismantled, and moved with minimal skilled labor; primarily in arguable beneficence toward brown people.
Their gradated, perforated metal skin creates an indoor/outdoor space that is meant to offer a pleasant ambiance to detainees for a couple of hours of free play during each of their last weeks in the Netherlands, while protecting their privacy/ hiding their identities from the outside world.
While they were points of contention among the neighbors, the Zaandam domes proved so successful that their patron, the Ministry of Security and Justice, ordered another “domecage” in 2008. Did I say “domecage”? I meant sportsdome.
CustomrWillemvanderSluis [customr.com via design den haag]
Previously:
Dutch camo domescapes
Welcome to the Kabul Dome
Category: architecture
De Rijkshuisstijl & The 1 Logo Project
As part of their project Caché-Exposé, investigating the Netherlands’ largely invisible detention and deportation system, the Amsterdam art & design collaborative Foundland documented obscure, anonymous detention sites around the country. Then they used a highly official, public system to distribute their images: design-it-yourself postage stamps.
What with the domes, the minimalist/industrial architecture, these stamps, and–hello, this awesome flag they shot in 2008–I can’t help noticing how beautifully designed the Dutch immigrant prison system is. So thoughtful.
That is the Ministry of Security & Justice flag there, flying over the Zaandam waterfront dome prison. The biomorphic shape is a perspectival view of the scales of Justice, a fragment of the Ministry logo, which is an abstracted, blindfolded Justice.
Is, or was. Because on Google Streetview, the flag is different. Much simpler.
That is the new Rijkshuisstijl, which is officially called the Central Government Visual Identity, but which I gladly transliterate as the State House Style, a four-year effort begun in 2007 to centralize and redesign the Dutch government’s corporate identity. Part of that initiative was the 1 Logo Project, a replacement of 125+ separate ministry and agency logos with a single logo, the national coat of arms on a vertical blue bar.
Ah, I’m told it’s a ribbon. Here’s the English version of the style guide.
Oh, man, the color palette, 16 colors “inspired by the colorful Dutch landscape painting,” plus five gradients. Get me Colby Poster on the horn.
I am kind of geeking out over this. On the one hand, it’s a normal redesign gig, tastefully done, but typical to the point of banality. On the other, because it’s the state, I can’t help but read every platitude in the mission statement and objectives, every justification of every design decision and element, through a politicized filter. Without knowing really anything about the details or shifts in Dutch poltiics beyond recent surges of right-wing populism, I can’t help but interpret the identification of problems the Rijkshuisstijl was intended to fix as criticism of the parties and governments then in power.
Partly, it’s the Rijkshuisstijl’s incredibly bold assertions of design’s importance and function. And the grand assertions of meaning:
“The symbol exists of a blue ribbon with the coat of arms. Subtle and unpretentious, an authority without being authoritarian.”
The color of the logo is Rijksoverheid Blue. Inspired by the Dutch skies and Dutch light. Blue for calm and reliability. Blue for tradition and enduring values. Blue for harmony and balance.”
“The wide variety of logos previously used by various government organisations made them less recognisable, causing confusion among the public and business community. People were no longer able to see the wood for the trees. Central government organisations seemed to be competing rather than cooperating with each other. This approach compounded the widely held view that central government was fragmented.”
“The mission statement and the motto both underline what central government stands for. They give the central government logo (Rijkslogo) real meaning.”
And then there’s the irony of context, the subjective happenstance of discovering the Rijkshuisstijl while looking at an exposé criticizing the Netherlands’ unjust treatment of immigrants, a project which I’d discovered in turn while reading about the current populist government’s massive cuts to the country’s arts infrastructure. Is this what modernism and Good Design signed on for? Because it’s what they got.
Oh, and there was a symposium, and a book, De stijl van het Rijk/ Style and the State, produced last fall by the Stichting Design den Haag.
Foundland [foundland.org]
Rijkshuisstijl guide in English [rijkshuisstijl.nl]
UPDATE: So the work was actually done by Studio Dumbar in Rotterdam, announced on their site in 2007 [studiodumbar.com]
Dutch Camo Domescapes
I love it when a plan comes together. Or at least when several subjects of interest converge unexpectedly.
It seems the Dutch art world is about to be decimated by sudden and substantial government funding cuts and reorganizations. [for angry details, check sven lutticken’s recent post; for plaintive, possibly resigned reaction from the affected institutions, try the open letter at the Dutch public arts organization, SKOR.]
If the proposed changes really do take effect, and the status quo of one of the most highly developed state-sponsored ecosystems for the arts is actually dismantled at a stroke, I think it’s really important to requestion every comfortable assumption of the involvement between art and politics. It has a lot of obvious problems and weaknesses, but the Dutch system, at least as perceived from abroad, has always seemed like the apotheosis of certain ideals of cultural industrial policy, which, Lutticken argues, now “don’t seem to be worth a penny.”
Anyway, not that they saw them coming, but SKOR tried to understand the political shifts that precipitated these cuts in the December 2010 issue [#20] of their excellent journal, Open, which examines populism and the persistent need for narrative and myth in the democratic process.
Dutch populism seems to center on–surprise–issues of immigration, assimilation, and Muslim vs. Christian cultural influence. As it turns out, one of the contributors in Open 20 is Foundland, a graphics, art, and research group that seems part collaborative, part design firm.
In 2009, Foundland created CACHÉ ÉXPOSÉ, an investigation into the remote, largely invisible, and unreported system of detention and deportation facilities in the Netherlands. The majority of the people imprisoned in the facilities or subjected to the system seem to be immigrants and refugees from largely Muslim countries.
When I read the description of the project, I wanted to see if, like the intelligence- and military-related sites, these politically sensitive detention sites were obscured on Google Maps. Fortunately, Foundland had created a Google Maps list as part of the CACHÉ ÉXPOSÉ project.
And the short answer is no. Their industrial anonymity is camouflage enough. But then hey-ho, looking at the waterfront detention center in Zaandam, a commercial city northwest of Amsterdam, what do I see? Awesome-looking domes.
Double geodesic domes of unknown purpose, but which look to be at least somewhat transparent or translucent from Street View. What a wonderfully open society the Netherlands must be that in can allow the Google Street View car to drive right up into the middle of its immigrant prisons. Oh wait.
What strikes me, besides the lone figure standing outside the double barbed-wire fence? Is irony the right word to see a geodesic dome, a form which was once erected to great fanfare in Afghanistan, where it served as a symbolic center of friendship, trade, democracy, and political cooperation with the west, being deployed in a back alley prison in Europe filled, presumably, with impoverished immigrants from the Middle East?
Then again, Afghans in 1956 apparently did see the US’s Kabul Dome pavilion as representing The Future. So.
iIkea: Furniture In The Cloud
An aside from Dan Hill’s extended examination of physical retail:
a conversation earlier today, spiraling out of the fact that we have some Ikea furniture (a bed) in a shipping container somewhere, traveling from Australia to Finland, and the thought occurs that Ikea could replace that physical shipping by simply sending a copy of the bed from the Espoo store, and picking up the old one in Sydney. A form of fabrication possible with their already distributed network of components.
On Retail [cityofsound]
Blue Memory By Gabriel Orozco
Looking back at some of the other projects of FREE SOL LEWITT co-curator Daniel McClean, I have basically concluded that we have been walking in a weird parallel in the art world for ten-plus years, without ever actually meeting.
In 2000, when we were still buying a fair amount of his work [i.e., when it was last affordable enough for us to buy, or to buy more than one thing], McClean curated an installation in Japan by Gabriel Orozco.
Called Blue Memory, Orozco hung a screen of fine, blue netting/fencing on the edge of the eaves of Kyoto garden designer Shigemori Mirei’s house, where the bamboo sunshades usually go. It’s classic Orozco, a transformative effect produced with modest, found or offcast materials.
See more images at Shima/Island, a series of four temporary installations and artist/curator-led seminars in 2000-2001 about the Japanese landscape. [hi-ho.ne.jp]
Artistic License: Daniel McClean on Contracts and Aesthetics [bombsite]
Fuller Fly’s Eye Dome Gets Miami Makeover
So everyone dutifully reproduced the press release about Craig Robins putting Buckminster Fuller’s 24-foot version of the Fly’s Eye Dome through a “historic restoration” by boat fabricator Goetz Composites, yet no one seems to have followed through with picture of the completed job. Well here you go, from Goetz themselves.
In 2008, Max Protetch exhibited the fiberglass dome, a prototype manufactured in 1976-7–which used to be described as a 26-foot diameter dome, btw–at La Guardia Place in the Village. The photo below is from his installation at Protetch: Beacon last year.
Said the press release:
Eric [Goetz] and his team, working with Daniel J. Reiser and John Warren who fabricated the original structure with Bucky, have gone to extraordinary lengths to engage this process with the same meticulous detail as a world-class fine art restorer.
Which is apparently not the same thing as restoring a world-class work of art, or even a piece of design, where the patina is to be preserved, even treasured, but more like a Pebble Beach concours-style project, where you chrome-plate all the screws.
Maybe it could be argued that stripping off the blue paint on the inside brings it closer to its “original condition.” But looking at the raw fiberglass interior of the 33-foot dome Jack Lenor Larsen installed at Longhouse Reserve in Easthampton, I wonder if original originally meant something else.
Larsen’s dome was first loaned to him by Fuller’s daughter Allegra Fuller Snyder. It was constructed by John Kuhtik, whose company Emod had by then been working to produce the Fly’s Eye dome “for nearly a decade”, presumably with Fuller’s blessing and involvement.
Anyway, I guess I’m stoked that Protetch hustled and saved one of Fuller’s rare artifacts, even if saving it means stripping it of its history. I’m sure it’ll look shiny and fantastic in Miami.
Restoration of Buckminster Fuller’s iconic Fly’s Eye Dome at America’s Cup [archdaily]
In Afghanistan Did Buckminster Fuller A Statecrafty Geodesic Dome Erect
US Pavilion at Jeshyn Fair, 1956, photo by James Cudney
In the Spring of 1956, as the Jeshyn Fair celebrating Afghan independence approached, and the Soviets were well along in constructing a massive pavilion, US diplomats in Kabul thought the US better have one, too.
A USIA officer named Jack Masey commissioned Buckminster Fuller to create a 100-foot diameter geodesic dome in two months. His Raleigh, NC-based firm, Synergetics, Inc., apparently completed it in one.
Pashto laborers assembling Buckminster Fuller dome, 1956, photo by Jack Masey
It was airlifted to Kabul, where a crew of local Pashto erected it in two days. The aluminum & plastic-coated nylon dome tent pavilion was a hit, “perhaps the most significant cultural event” of the “golden age” of US-Afghan relations, according to the creators of “In Small Things Remembered,” an exhibit looking at the history of the two countries’ relationship.
The show, which closed yesterday at the Meridian International Center in Washington, DC, was organized by Dr. Curtis Sandberg, VP of the Arts at Meridian, and sponsored by the State Department. It comprised photos discovered in various archives and foreign service officers’ private collections, such as Masey, above, and James Cudney, top, who spent eleven years in Afghanistan taking pictures, and developing various photography- and media-based culture, education, and diplomacy programs. Cudney passed away in 2009, but some more of his Afghan photos can be seen in the previews of two 2010 calendars he or his family created on lulu.com. They look pretty amazing.
Anyway, the US Information Agency and Dept. of Commerce continued to use the Kabul dome for trade fairs across Asia. As USIA’s director of design, Masey would go on to select Fuller to build the US Pavilion at the Montreal 67 expo, too.
In Small Things Remembered, at Meridian through June 5 [meridian.org]
Esso De Cherbourg
It may not be the absolute origin of my desire to live in a converted, modernist gas station, but AO Scott’s recent reminiscence reminds me that the Esso station at the end of Jacques Demy’s incomparable Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is one of my formative cinematic and architectural experiences.
I got completely blindsided by the film in the early 1990s when I basically wandered into the Time Warner screening room at MoMA and watched a preview of the restoration of the film spearheaded by Demy’s widow, Agnes Varda, who was on hand to discuss it. Truly not worthy, but there you go.
Uh-oh, something looks screwy with these prices; is there an issue with US availability of the DVD? [amazon]
Aarhus Madness
O wow.
Olafur Eliasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama opens Thursday on the roof of ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark. It’s a 360-degree glass promenade which paints the cityscape with every color of the spectrum.
Too bad the promenade roof’s not rainbow-tinted glass, too. That’d make one helluva signature on Google Maps.
Image and statement via olafureliasson.net [olafureliasson.net]
More images at designboom [designboom.com]
Previously: Olafur: The Magazine?
Color Experiment paintings
The Secret Bauhaus’s Other Ball
Andy helpfully pointed out this mirrored glass ball, which I’d missed in the catalogue for Phillips’ upcoming design auction.
Everyone knows the Bauhaus was a huge party school. And during the Winter 1929 semester, Oskar Schlemmer had put an extra emphasis on partying, “to preserve the character of the Bauhaus community.” And so what had started as a metal shop farewell get-together for Marianne Brandt on 9 February 1929 with the tasteful theme, “Church Bells, Doorbells, and Other Bells” [Hmm, one of the few cases where it sounds better in German: “Glocken Schellen, Klingel Fest.”] became a raging, balls-out “Metallisches Fest,” which took over the entire, iconic Dessau building. As MoMA’s 2009 catalogue tells it:
The pure qualities of metal lend themselves to costumes with decorations that magically transform the Bauhaus through shimmering, reflective surfaces. According to Schlemmer, “The Bauhaus was also attractive from the outside, radiant in the winter night: the windows with metal paper stuck inside them, the light bulbs–white and colored according to the room–the views through the great glass block–for a whole night these transformed the building of the ‘Hoschschule fur Gestaltung.”
Party on, Oskar! I’m glad the Bauhaus Arkiv is so careful with all their materials, they don’t let anything more than a postage-stamp-sized image slip through to the web.
I can’t remember where I found this copy of the Bauhaus wallpaper sales brochure which came out soon after the Fest, but it wasn’t the Bauhaus Arkiv:
And Marianne Brandt Geselleschaft only had a tiny version of this Brandt self-portrait taken a mirrored glass ball.
Though to their credit, the firm did throw another Metallische Fest in 2005, even if the guest of honor had long since departed for good.
Lot 130 Bauhaus Mirror Ball, est $5-7,000 [phillipsdepury.com]
Previously [as in previously on greg.org, but after the Bauhaus, obv]: Shiny Space Balls? Yes Please!
Oh wait, Muybridge was before the Bauhaus
Leviathan Is Architecture
Believe me, I know how this looks.
But also this. Balloons and the Grand Palais go way back:
And anyway also this, Leviathan has a groin vault:
and is the venue for a concert performance by minimalist composer and maximalist stuffed animal shaman Charlemagne Palestine:
[image of Anish Kapoor posing in front of Leviathan via mymodernmet, as baited by starwarsmodern. Images of Charlemagne Palestine performance inside Leviathan via Monumenta 2011]
There’s No Escaping Leviathan
Hm, OK.
I think we’re in the clear here, satelloon-wise. It is true that Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan is inflated, and 35 meters tall.
But when you enter the Grand Palais to see Leviathan, you enter Leviathan itself. It’s a space, a bulbous, three-chambered cathedral of a space, “like going into the belly of a whale,” says the Guardian. Though of course, it’s really going into the belly of a cinematic whale. So it’s a belly of imagination.
But it’s a space, not an object. At least, not at first. When you exit, though, it’s a thing. And well, hm. At first, things look pretty grim, which is to say, satelloonish.
But ultimately, it’s a different thing, very different. One thing that’s emphasized in Kapoor’s talk to the Guardian is the light and space of the Grand Palais, and its vast expanses of glass:
“This is a terror of a space, probably much more difficult than the Turbine Hall,” Kapoor said. “It’s three times the size, huge horizontally and vertically and above all the light is a killer. It’s almost brighter than it is outside.”
There are any number of spaces–dirigible hangars, stadiums, train stations–that could hold a 100-ft mirror-skinned aluminum sphere; but in this time, there are no art spaces except, now, the Grand Palais. And that’s part of the point.
Not only can satelloons not escape the problems Gerhard Richter diagnosed for spheres–they’re too beautiful and perfect–they blow these problems up [sic] to gargantuan scale. Which is kind of interesting.
Monumenta 2011 has a Facebook wall [facebook.com]
Open House Teardown
In 1997 or so, the Junior Associates at MoMA organized a day of studio visits in Williamsburg. Worried about where to eat, we packed our own food, sandwiches from a fellow board member’s startup, Cosi. We ate lunch on Meg Webster’s roof. Most people took the bus to Momenta, but a brave group of us decided to walk, unprotected, up Berry Street. The very idea that we might be from Manhattan being beyond their imagination, some people sitting on the stoop of a vinyl-clad house stopped us and asked if we were Dutch.
This Long Island daytrip comes to mind when I read about Open House, a reconceptualization of Levittown which is the latest project from Droog Lab and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
I hope if my heroes ever organize a self-indulgent, vanity symposium and an utterly disconnected, irrelevant publicity stunt exhibition about the suburbs that misses like five real points and replaces them with trite photo-op interventions designed solely for the benefit of the critics they bus out from the city for the afternoon, my review of their debacle will be as tactful and constructive a devastating takedown of the shitshow as Alison Arieff’s is.
Conceptual Suburbia: A Design Project Descends on Levittown [nyt]
The US Expo 67 Pavilion Has Seven Fathers
I’m getting pretty comfortable with my love affair/obsession with the US Pavilion at the Expo 67 in Montreal. I mean, it’s got Buckminster Fuller; Alan Solomon curating gigantic paintings; photomurals; and satelloons, what’s not to love, right?
So seeing Design for a Fair, the 1968 promo short film by Peter Chermayeff is awesome just as it is. The vintage footage and photos are some of the crispest I’ve seen, and it really is pretty crazy on a whole bunch of levels that this thing existed at all.
But maybe the greatest thing–even better than the giant graphic designed flags that look like a lost Ellsworth Kelly, as if there wasn’t enough giant, escalator-optimized, actual art already–and even better than the sheer soft power/propaganda play that was so drop-dead awesome it won the future for the day–is the voiceover.
Because the whole thing really sounds like Chermayeff’s idea. Every last bit of it, dome to nuts. It’s fantastic. Chermayeff, of course, is an architect and exhibition designer, and his former firm, Cambridge Seven Associates, or C7A, was contracted by the US Information Agency to produce the US Expo entry.
And so, as Chermayeff tells it, they knew they wanted a 3/4 geodesic dome, so they ordered one. And they wanted some giant art, so they ordered that. And the moon stuff, and the Hollywood and all the happy parts of American culture.
Now I don’t doubt a thing; I’m sure that’s exactly how it all went down. It’s just that that’s not how it’s typically remembered. Architects only remember Fuller; the art world only recognizes Solomon and the artists, not the venue or the show or the implications of it; and everything else is artifact and prop. [And the poor lunar photomural, I’ve hardly found anyone remembering that at all.]
The historical focus is either on the general awesomeness of the spectacle and mood, the political context and propaganda, or on the parts in isolation. What Design for a Fair reminds me of, though, is the visitor’s experience, the carefully orchestrated messaging, and the reality that it was orchestrated by a contractor working to a brief provided by the USIA. It was a government-funded gesamtkunstwerk, a massive piece of installation art before the fact, and probably one of the most cost-effective public diplomacy efforts of the Cold War era. It literally seems unimaginable today.
The Free Speech Movement Monument Was Censored.
In 1989, a group of veteran activists organized the Berkeley Art Project to create a monument marking the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Mark Brest van Kempen’s conceptual proposal won the elaborate national competition and dialogue. It is a 6-inch diameter circle of earth surrounded by a granite circle that reads, “This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity’s jurisdiction.”
Remarkably, the Berkeley University administration only accepted the monument on the condition that any reference at all to the Free Speech Movement be stricken from the work and any surrounding publicity.
A podcast I’d never heard of but really like now, 99% Invisible, has the story of the Free Speech Monument, and an interview with the artist.
For added perspective, check out the 1992 statement by FSM leader Michael Rossman, who opposed the selection of a conceptualist monument–until Berkeley’s president added to its conceptual power by censoring it:
If this story be remembered as part of the work, it will stand for the ages, or until a censorious jackhammer erases it from the Plaza. A century hence, our descendants may read the truth written in stone: What happened here in 1964 was so significant and so deeply contested that nearly thirty years later the university administration still would not permit faculty and students to honor its name, but instead insisted on censoring their political expression. In this perversely perfect monument to the FSM, they may read a larger truth applying far beyond the campus: that the issues opened in that conflict and era, of civil liberties and rights, had still not been resolved, but continued deeply contested.
The Invisible Monument To Free Speech [99percentinvisible.org via someone awesome I can’t remember who, but probably Geoff Manaugh, since he’s the subject of the previous episode]
The Berkeley Art Project, by Michael Rossman [mrossman.org]