The Venice Biennale of Architecture may have been a critical bust–both the Times’ and the Guardian’s people panned it, complaining that it’s a book in exhibition format, or text and videos but no architecture–but I have to say, it works OK for me as a blog.
MoMA’s A&D Dept. and some other folks–a lot of other folks, actually–have whipped together the Venice Super Blog, with a veritable DVD-ful of audio interviews, video clips, and Giardini gossip. It’s a bit too inside football sometimes, and sometimes the posters are a bit too pleased with themselves for attending [gee, if the “entire Architecture World” really is under the stairs of the British Pavillion with you, who’s supposed to be reading this?], but there’s interesting enough content to make it worth reading/listening/watching.
Some personal picks: Olafur Eliasson talking about his collaboration with architects, including work on the Icelandic Concert and Conference Centre, and David Adjaye’s pavillion for an OE installation. Here’s a wrap-up of a panel discussion about the pavillion project, Your Black Horizon. And here’s a photo of a 1:1 mockup of the IC&CC semi-reflective crystalline facade. [above]
Rem Koolhaas and his thinktank side, AMO, did a presentation on resort developments in Dubai–Olafur calls it “Rem talking about his golf course project in Dubai”–and the modernist building boom throughout the Persian Gulf. Here’s a brief interview, and here’s an even briefer recap.
Besides more useful tags or navigation, it’s the one thing VeniceSuperBlog could’ve done better: raw, liveblogged info. Maybe it’s a problem of too many chief curators and not enough interns.
Category: architecture
Branding Man
I know a lot of you have been asking yourselves, “Hey, what’s been going on with Greg and the Belgian Waffle?” No? Too bad. Cuz I’ll tell you.
The Burning Man curator known as LadyBee and I have been going back and forth in email over whether Uchronia’s creators co-opted Burning Man as a backdrop for their own alternabrand-enhancing PR, whether the 1,000+ photos on flickr tagged with Uchronia constitutes a brand now, or whether Arne Quinze and his co-designers are just sending out 50,000 books and DVD’s to “people in important or influential positions who help shape the socio-economic landscape and can make a difference” anonymously and with no expectation of personal benefit.
Now, as you can imagine, an MBA, ex-consultant, ex-banker would have a hard time taking a credible stand against marketing, branding, or PR, but that’s not my point, and it hasn’t been. I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wrong with marketing per se, but I give Burning Man the institution full credit for not launching Black Rock Consulting, but instead sticking to their non-commercially exploitative guns.
But it’s naive of me to have thought as I have all these years, that Burning Man somehow exists apart from the society it sought to leave behind. Just as the environmental and resource impacts of the playa can’t be overlooked–they do still share a planet, an atmosphere, and a Wal-mart distribution infrastructure with the rest of society, after all–the notion that what happens in Black Rock City stays in Black Rock City is a fantasy. And all the bartering in the desert won’t change the fact that Burning Man is a brand and an institution in itself now, and it has associative value that the Uchronians identified and skilfully leveraged–and they did it in a way that has Burning Man veterans defending them.
While LadyBee has been pretty engaging, if resolute in her defense of the Uchronians, [“of course Arne puts them on his resume – and why shouldn’t he? He designed and built the thing. All our artists do that. If it strengthens his portfolio, fine. What marketing scheme do you think they’re going to unleash? Selling imported radiators to burners?” (Arne Quinze’s co-creator Jan Kriekels has a radiator company)], and she backed off a bit from her first email [“subject: greg – get a clue!”], the Belgian she roped into our exchange started with a really petty, thin-skinned personal attack.
Burning Man’s foundation is the idea that everyone could and should make art or express herself creatively. BRC is built on that creative exchange. Great. But Burning Man also has a curator, and a grant-making and evaluation process, which they use to dole out a portion of gate receipts to art proposals. It’s an institutional system that bears a remarkable ressemblance to the non-playa-based art world.
Uchronia itself was funded completely outside that institution, as LadyBee explained in an email to Burning Man’s staff [who’d apparently had some questions about the project, too.] And its team included between 45 and 60 “volunteers,” who, it turned out, were employees of the creators’ companies, and who worked at full salary, plus expenses, on the project. By that definition, Star Wars was a “volunteer” project, too.
Again, this is all totally cool, but it seems to me that if what happens at Burning Man doesn’t stay at Burning Man after all, and there are curatorial decisions being made and business transactions being done, then these people could respond a little better to criticisms, alternative interpretations, or a response that’s anything less than sheer, uncritical gratitude and ecstasy.
When Christo “gave” the “Gates” to the world, he kept trotting out his figure for how much he spent–$20 million, he said–while the boost the project gave his own art sales and holdings–in a private, pre-“Gates” interview, Jean-Claude claimed they had $400 million–was almost never mentioned.
The “Gates” was what it was, and Uchronia is what it is. But one of the things it is is a page in a portfolio for a “creator of atmosphere” who sells his own brand of edgy counter-cultural buzz to corporate clients like Compaq, Diesel, and Rem Koolhaas.
Standing Too Close To The Fire Of Burning Man
In a previous post, I characterized the Belgian designers behind Uchronia, a giant pavilion at Burning Man constructed by an army of their firms’ employees and others of new wood and then burned to the ground, as “self-aggrandizing eco-idiots.” Christine Kristen, aka LadyBee, the curator of art projects at Burning Man, takes issue with my characterization. The designers are not, it turns out, eco-idiots. Greg.org regrets the error.
LadyBee:
The Belgian project at Burning Man was a stellar example of community and generosity, funded by two Belgian business owners who regularly do community based art projects worldwide. The wood they used was last-quality Canadian wood destined for the dump. Additionally they are planting trees in Belgium equal to the wood used, and all leftover wood was donated to Burners without Borders, a Burning Man group that does relief work in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Get your facts straight before you criticize. You mean-spirited comments make you seem…petty and vindictive. I managed this project for Burning Man and there was virtually nothing objectionable in it. In fact these two business owners are trying to promote community through art-making and are very generous and forward thinking.
Though her explanation doesn’t entirely contradict Treehugger’s description of the wood used as “virgin pine,” it is a welcome correction.
For the rest of my response to LadyBee, see below. And for documentation of the Uchronia brand, check flickr.
Continue reading “Standing Too Close To The Fire Of Burning Man”
Uh-oh, I Hope PS1 Doesn’t Find Out About This
A swoopy playground for hipsters built by an army of volunteers in an arid, rocky landscape? Alas, it appears they haven’t heard of reclaimed lumber in Belgium.
Uchronia, by Jan Kriekels and Arne Quinze at this year’s Burning Man Festival [sfgate via archinect]
Anyone who calls themselves “the spirituals”… plus, they built off the Black Rock City grid. [uchronians.org]
update: You’re kidding. these self-aggrandizing eco-idiots burned this thing, made of virgin pine, the night after The Man. [via treehugger]
9/17 Conflux: Taking Urbanist Icons To The Woodshed
At Adam Greenfield of v-2.org and elsewhere will be giving a talk I’d go to just for the title alone, even if it weren’t about rethinking the superheroes of 20th century urbanism: “Killing The Fathers, or: If You See Jane Jacobs On The Road…”
We need to come to terms, in other words, with the fact that fetishizing Jane Jacobs’ long-lost Hudson Street gives us, ack, Celebration; that the Situationists’ collapse of public/private and work/leisure into “unitary urbanism” mostly turns out to mean having to listen to some clueless bozo yawping into his mobile in the Starbucks; that Archigram’s headlong embrace of the disposable ethic looks ever more embarrassing in an era when resource wars loom as the most likely endstate of all our most cherished plans.
I’ve been on something of a Situationist/Constant’s New Babylonian binge for a couple of weeks, and with the ideas I had for the WTC Site Memorial still gnawing on some remote part of my brain, I will probably be the future-old-kook with a sheaf of crumpled schematics stuffed into my satchel on the front row, waiting to ask him woefully underpunctuated questions.
Conflux lectures, 9.17.06 [confluxfestival.org]
Reversals, inversions, anticipations, returns [v-2.org]
Previously: my WTC memorial proposal, part 1, part 2, nov 2003; my angsting over it, mar 2005. I posted my embarassingly designed poster/entry on flickr [I used powerpoint; it’s all I had at that moment.]
Curbed: ‘Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit blogging.’
Fortunately, Tropolism is on the job.
MetLife puts 80 Manhattan acres and 110 buildings up for sale, hinting $5 billion. [nyt]
Modernism: Any Color As Long As It’s White
For a couple of months now, I’ve been really pre-occupied by this discussion of the color white and its association with modernism. It’s between Olafur Eliasson, curator Daniel Birnbaum, and Mark Wigley, the dean of Columbia’s architecture school and author of White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, and it’s in the latest exhibition catalogue of Olafur’s work [which was maddeningly unavailable in the US for a long time, except at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. It’s a stunning, eye-opening book, no pun intended.]
DB: How did modern architecture become white?
MW: Well it only became really white after the mid-century.
DB: It was not in Stuttgart? [at the Weissenhof siedlung, an architectural showcase/manifesto featuring work by Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and other pioneering modernist architects]
MW: No. The polemical exhibition of modern buildings in 1927 had a kind of off-white. It takes a long time to become white white, like that of a Richard Meier building today which is completely unlike the white of classic modern architecture. The pioneering buildings had more like an eggshell color, so there is a way in which modern architecture whitens over time. One could argue that it does so as a reaction to the black-and-white photographs. The eggshell color looks white in black-and-white photos and all of the other colors on the buildings, green, brown, and so on, tend to go very dark. So a first result of the photographs is that you don’t realize that there are many colors. One of the main points of the White Walls book was to say that modern architecture was not white but multi-colored. In that system of many colors, white was playing a crucial role as a kind of reference point. So of course I was interested in the ideological construction of the idea of white as a default frame of reference. The famous black-and-white photographs make white famous, and then the buildings try to look more like the photographs and become really white and all the other colors are removed. So that somebody can make a building that is really super white today and people would think that it is modern.
OE: You mean the photograph representing the actual spaces?
MW: Yes. If you look at the photographs of the Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition houses they look absolutely white but Mies van der Rohe’s building was a kind of pink. [emphasis added]
Rem Sleepless, Or Discussion Is The New Performance Art
Much like the 24-hour interview-a-thon itself, Claire Bishop’s report from the Serpentine Pavilion starts out hilariously–my original title for this post was to be “LOLOLOL”–and ends with unexpected substance and insight. Whether her declaration is the first, I don’t care, but Bishop nails it when she tags “the incessant production of talks and symposia” as “the new performance art. Authenticity, presence, consciousness raising—all of the attributes of ’70s performance—now attach themselves to discussion. In this environment, it would seem that Obrist and Koolhaas are the new Ulay and Abramovic.”
This had me laughing out loud:
Like trying to watch all five Cremaster films in one go, there eventually came a breakthrough when the experience was no longer painful. Mine arrived when I realized that our interviewers were suffering, too. Koolhaas’s opening gambit to laidback design legend Ron Arad couldn’t conceal his resignation: “I have always felt sympathy and respect for you, but never the inclination to talk to you. Now I have to ask you questions.”
Speech Bubble [artforum.com]
Previously: On watching Cremaster 1-5. In order.
Serpentine Eats Its Tail
Unrealized Projects, an agency, a book, a NYT article
TGI Freitag
Been a while since I’ve posted shipping container architecture news, but it’s become so hot everywhere else, I’m sure no one minds. This is worth mentioning, though.
Regine interviewed one of the Freitag brothers about the bag company’s new concept store in Zurich, which is made of a tower of shipping containers. It showed up on flickr a couple of weeks ago, too.
But this just reminds me how, every time I drive between NYC and DC, I fantasize about living in a tricked out stack of shipping containers like the ones stacked along the Turnpike. sigh.
17 containers for a concept store [wmmna, with lots of pix]
tons of photos, including official construction/fabrication images at freitag+zurich on flickr [flickr]
The Future Was Then: Sweet Taiwanese Pods
Somewhere else, I saw someone licking the feet of the real estate developers who licensed Jade Jagger’s name for their galley kitchens.
But it wasn’t on Tropolism. No, that’s where I saw the suh-weet Taiwanese pod living architecture, inexplicably abandoned. Get me a white spandex jumpsuit and some meal-in-a-pills, people, because it looks like the future.
I Feel Like I’ve Gotten Stupid
especially when I read something like this–and to be honest, I haven’t even finished it yet:
Design. Architecture. Football. [cityofsound.com via bldgblog]
Urban Nomads, 21st Century-Style
From Hennessy & Papanek’s classic 1973 hippie DIY book, Nomadic Furniture comes the “Resource Tower”:
It organizes living space in a radically different way. Usually we put bookcases and storage walls all over the room’s walls. We suggest [as shown in the lower plan] that getting it all together in the center of the room makes an interesting alternative.
Interesting indeed, especially after reading about the freestanding Aristo Pods, Luxo Pods, and Boho Pods being put into Jade, a new mid-block condo conversion in the Flatiron District.
The project is named after Jade Jagger and promised “Jade Living” [sic] at its finest. As Triple Mint explains the tiny galley kitchens, “These pods are a kind of tacit admission that many people in New York end up living like global nomads.” Yeah, except that, back in the day, the nomads didn’t buy their plywood pods already made and lacquered in Jade-picked colors; they built them their own damn nomadic selves.
Jade by Jagger [triple mint via curbed, whose commenter made the plywood call]
resource tower image via the exhaustively interesting The Legacy of The Urban Nomads
And Some Have ‘Starchitect’ Thrust Upon Them
Supposedly reluctant starchitect Rem Koolhaas talked with the NYT’s Robin Pogrebin about the mutiny in his firm, OMA’s NY office, which is headed by supposedly reluctant starchitect-in-training Josh Prince-Ramus. Since the completion of the office’s Seattle Library in 2004, PR [sic] has been the subject of many articles in which he professes annoyance at being the subject of so many articles.
“But he [i.e., Koolhaas] said that he didn’t seek this status, that stardom had been pressed on him by a media culture that craves major figures. ‘In America the cult of celebrity makes the reality of a partnership harder to maintain,’ he said.”
PR concurs, “The media’s desire to make everything about an individual doesn’t reflect our reality.” Damn media and their craving for starchitects.
Now if we could just do something about those damn clients: Said Bill Lively, the go-to guy for the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, which is just getting underway, “‘We’re going to have a Koolhaas-O.M.A. theater.'”
And as the client on another big OMA project in the works, an arts center in Louisville, explained, “‘The Koolhaas name obviously led us to the firm, but as I’ve learned over the years, you’re working with individuals…I think Josh is a celebrity in his own right.'” Nice.
Joshua Prince-Ramus Leaving Koolhaas’s O.M.A. to Start New Architecture Firm [nyt]
Previously: You can call me Rem
PS: archinect’s forum called this story two months ago.
Ouroussoff, Koolhaas, and The Scalable Jane Jacobs
I still can’t tell if I was the only one kind of weirded out by the sudden and overwhelming outpouring of nostalgic loss and ruminating over the death of Jane Jacobs.
Archinect, Tropolism, Curbed, Kottke, even the Home of the Whopper of Superficiality, Gawker, had a paean to the urban theorist/activist within hours after she died.
Not to speak too ill of her or her vital, inspiring ideas and all, but I wonder if someone with a Nexis account can look up how many mentions Jacob had garnered in the weeks, months, even year or two before her death, just to get a little bit of perspective.
Of course, I’m always troubled when I end up agreeing with Witold Rybczynski, who pointed out what many New Yorkers already know as giant, extruded “luxury” condo towers fill up once-edgy, heterogeneous neighborhoods and a once-risky High Line is on track to become the High Lawn for a dozen-plus starchitected buildings: vibrant city fabric is now a luxury amenity.
But Kottke’s right and too nice to be righter when he says that Nicolai Ouroussoff‘s counter-examples to Jacob’s idealized dense cityscape–Lincoln Center and the WTC–are a joke. There needs to be some contrast and some alleviation of the pressure that a dense city creates, but as recently as like five minutes ago, Lincoln Center was a consensus failure set for a Diller+Scofidial jazzing up. You know, to pump up the energy level and get some more street-level activity going.
Meanwhile, mall developers are, oddly, the ones working the hardest to apply Jacobs’ multi-use, multi-constituency formulas to their newest urban destination retail experience centers [sic], which are essentially privately owned and managed downtowns.
Ouroussoff’s strongest refutation of Jacobism is, of course, LA, but what if that’s some kind of Jacobist diversity/vibrancy, just with a car’s extended range?
No one going to Manhattan anymore because it’s too crowded and expensive. From Williamsburg to The Slope and who-knows-where, Brooklyn is ascendant. I wonder if the Jacobs ideals still hold true, just on a larger scale than her little legs could imagine.
Koolhaas talked about the NY Grid and the city center’s march northward over 200 years, From within (the) Wall to Five Points to Allen to Bowery to Astor to Sixth to Fifth to Park to. Then once at Columbia, I watched him make the same argument, only about the Pearl River Delta, where the entirety of Hong Kong and Kowloon is the late 19th century Delancey Street of the late 21st century.
Now look what I’ve done. I started out only wanting to mention that in fact, according to the buzz, Lincoln Center is supposed to suck, [I don’t really think it happens to, but then, I don’t use it that much, except to enjoy all the unobstructed light it sends into the apartment.] but now I’ve wound around and ended up agreeing with that monkey who curated the dress show at his “Prada Epicenter” [sic sic sic]. It’s late. Let me sleep on this, and in the morning, after a nice big glass of Diet Coke, I’ll come back adn solve the Problems Facing Our Cities.
Hal Foster on Koolhaas on urban congestion, Delirious New York, and the Pearl River Delta. [lrb.co.uk]
0 Yen Houses, 0 Yen Movies
In 2004, Kyohei Sakaguchi published 0 Yen Houses, a book of photographs of street people architecture in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. A burgeoning urban street population, mostly men in their 50’s and 60’s, is one consequence of the Japanese economic and real estate situation over the last 10-15 years. These men often continue to work, but they’re unable to afford housing, so they improvise their own, squatting on public lands (river banks and parks, mostly). They often form the favelas that preoccupy the nomadic scavenger-artist Tadashi Kawamata [who, after 20+ years of roaming, might be able to come home now that Japan has some, too.]
Police give advance notice when they’re coming to inspect, so the street people are able to move their houses–and then replace them after the police have gone.
This kind of accommodation to the extreme prices and densities of Japan is like a grey market version of Atelier Bow Wow’s study of Pet Architecture, the impossibly tiny structures that inhabit even the most improbably small slivers of land in Tokyo. [On the other end of the spectrum, of course, is Klein Dytham’s Billboard Building, a 2m-wide (at most) spec bldg put up on a former 3-car parking lot in the extremely expensive Hiro-o neighborhood after the road was widened–and the parking lot was rendered unusable.
It turns out that Sakaguchi first gained attention for some video pieces he did while still in college [Waseda U.’s architecture program]. Whether they’re art, documentary, or home movies, who can say, but they seem to fit the jishu eiga/self-made movie mode pretty well. The first, Living in a Water Tank, is just what it sounds like, a video diary of the 21-year-old Sakaguchi’s life inside an unused apartment building rooftop water tank.
Then he made House Biker, in which he cruised around Tokyo on a pimped out pizza delivery scooter with a functioning microhouse on the back. He called it his “O Yen Movie,” a retroactive extension of the new “Zero Yen” brand.
Sakaguchi’s work seems to provoke some embarassment and discomfort among Japanese audiences, but like most things in Japan, it mostly just entertains. Take last year’s Zero Yen House Tour, in which Sakaguchi led a bunch of college students in a contest to build their own shelters using only scavenged materials. If only their plight wasn’t so aesthetically interesting, who knows, they might get some help; but right now, these homeless guys might be too cool for their own good.
0 Yen House, published by Little More and available at amazon-uk [littlemore.co.jp]
0 Yen House Tour, Kyoto Seika Univ. [kyoto-seika.ac.jp]
Happiness is just a riverside shack for designer homeless [timesonline, “designer homeless”?? via archinect]
Sakaguchi Kyohei’s homepage, mostly in Japanese, but there’s a link to autotranslations as well. [kyohei sakaguchi]