Sforza In Da House!

zoo_tv_white_house.jpg
John McKinnon reports in the Wall Street Journal that the White House Press Room is getting a studio-sized makeover, including direct feed video capability and a video wall [as seen here at U2’s Zoo TV tour]:

“Both the planned video capabilities and Mr. Snow’s hiring appear to be part of a subtle but sweeping effort by administration officials to deliver their message directly to the public, particularly through video.”

Meanwhile, Newsweek is reporting [tree, forest, sound] that the renovation schedule was extended from one month to at least nine, and that the press is murmuring to itself that they may not ever get back into the White House at all.
Nothing like a sweeping administration effort to disempower and disintermediate the press to generate…hardly any reporting, criticism, or discussion at all so far.
White House Pressroom Gets A Makeover [wsj]
Extreme Makeover: The Briefing Room Edition [newsweek]

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

freitag_zurich_store.jpg

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]

I Think I’ll Wait For The Book

Here’s the schedule for this Friday’s 24-hour interviewathon at the Serpentine Gallery pavilion. Mega-interviewer Hans Ulrich Obrist and perennial interviewee Rem Koolhaas will be tag-teaming on a whole slate of “culture industry” types.
If you can’t imagine ending your night–or starting your morning–at 4AM with a Damien Hirst interview, then your best bet is probably the opening session–Friday at 6pm: Ken Adam / David Adjaye / Brian Eno / Zaha Hadid / Charles Jenks / Hanif Kureishi / Ken Loach / Tim O’Toole / Yinka Shonibare–and a nice supper.
Serpentine Gallery 24-hour Marathon Interviews [timeout.com via kultureflash]
Previously: HUO interviews, vol. 1

I Do: Ed Burns Interview About The Groomsmen

I interviewed Ed Burns the other day about his new movie, The Groomsmen, which follows a group of childhood friends through the emotionally fraught run-up to one posse member’s wedding.
And while you’re poking around on The Groomsmen, check out Apple’s own making of promo. Apple definitely recommends setting up a Final Cut Pro post studio in your guesthouse in the Hamptons.
Ed Burns Gives Some Good Phone About The Groomsmen [daddytypes.com]
Ed Burns: Risky Business [apple.com]
The Groomsmen website has release dates; the movie’s playing in NYC, NYC Metro, and LA right now and going national Aug. 5th [thegroomsmen.com]

RiffTrax Road House

So you can play Dark Side Of The Moon while watching The Wizard Of Oz, or you can play an mp3 commentary by Mystery Science Theater 3000 star/writer Mike Nelson while watching–Roadhouse, starring Patrick Swayze’s well-oiled rack.
Check out RiffTrax, Nelson’s new funny commentary site. Then check it out again when he’s got more than one movie on there. [via robotwisdom]

Filmmaker Interviews: Kevin Smith

Here’s a radio interview with critic Joel Siegel, who’s apparently trying to pad his reactionary conservative resume by loudly walking out of a press screening of Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2. The interview is with Smith, although Siegel doesn’t seem aware of that fact for quite a while.
Smith v Siegel [tmz.com]

Holy Crap, This Is All The NYT Photo Editor Has To Say About Sforza?

Looks like it’s Michele McNally, deputy photo editor for the New York Times’ turn to pooh-pooh reader questions this week:

Q. As the Times has reported on one occasion, the Bush administration has been singularly aggressive in shaping and staging angles of photographs possible to take of the president and other members of the administration. Herding the press into an enclosure from which only dynamic upward-angled shots of the president are possible, for example. or setting the president against the background of the brightly lit cathedral in New Orleans results in shots worthy of Leni Riefenstahl. Wouldn’t it be proper to either refuse to publish such manipulated shots, or run a note in the caption explaining the limits imposed on taking it? Since the manipulation is otherwise invisible to the reader, doesn’t the Times have a duty to inform readers about the behind the scenes shaping of such shots?

— Ellen Gruber Garvey, Brooklyn, N.Y.
A. Our photographers desperately try to get around that problem…
nyt_sforza_wisconsin.jpg
But seriously…about New Orleans. We spoke about the “presidential stagecraft” in this story.

She also insists that it’s illegal to photograph subways or bridges.
Does calling BS on this total dodge of the real, larger, ongoing issue by disingenuously focusing on the particulars of a single incident screw my chances of ever writing for the Times again?

The Education Of A Sforza Critic

Unbelievable. Aided only a 40-oz., and using only a reference-letter-seeking grad student as a nervous sounding board, Steven Heller turns out 5,000 words of derision for the “lackluster,” “atrocious” design of Sforzian Backdrops [“all the subtlety of a PowerPoint presentation for a financial-services company”], all without betraying the slightest clue about the how or why or what for behind them.
Seriously, the entire thing is about typefaces and dropshadows. Does he not recognize the television and cable news origins of the backdrops’ “style”? Does he not question for a second how well they might perform the multiple objectives they’re designed for? What their purposes might actually be? Who their intended audience is? What their effects or implications are when they’re published and broadcast? All of these questions have been widely researched, documented, and commented on–not just here, either, but by the creator of these graphics, Scott Sforza himself.
Someone is in need of a serious education in Google.
POTUS Typographicus: Appealing to the Baseline and George W’s Typographic Legacy [metropolis/aiga.org via designobserver]

Geodesic dome house in Reykjavik




Geodesic dome house in Reykjavik

Originally uploaded by gregorg.

So Olafur Eliasson’s work includes many references to the work of Buckminster Fuller, especially to geodesic domes. There are some hanging on the wall right next to me, in fact.

Turns out thanks to the work of a former student/collaborator of Fuller, Einarr Thorstein, the Icelandic power company used geodesic domes as their standard architectural form. They now dot the country, situated on geothermal wellpoints and along pipelines.

AND there’s a double dome house [pictured] in a Reykjavik housing development. Down the street is a double pyramid house, too; otherwise, the place looks like Fullterton, California circa 1980.

KFC in Iceland




KFC in Iceland

Originally uploaded by gregorg.

One thing that most people notice on arrival in Iceland is the uniformly modernist architecture. It looks like the whole country was imported as flatpack and built in about six weeks–sometime in the mid-80’s.

There’s a little bit of frontier town utilitarianism, a little Scandinavian modernism, and a little eastern bloc uniformity, plus a little Bermudian/Atlantic island nation colored roof fixation.

What stands out? The Kentucky Fried Chickens. They’re everywhere, and they all seem to have relatively innovative/eyecatching architecture. Finally, after seeing this sleek, anthacite-panelled example in Keflavik, I had to start snapping pictures.

Inside, there was very nice clerestory lighting over the cash registers and the indoor playground. The bathrooms were high-end euro-trendy, and all the interior concrete uses the woodgrain from the poured-in-place forms to very nice effect.

Some Iceland Photos: Richard Serra

I went to Iceland a couple of weeks ago, and I just put some photos up on flickr from the trip.

This one is of Afangar, a sculpture/installation by Richard Serra. The tops of these squared off basalt columns are level, but one column is 4m high, while the other is 3m. The distance between them, then, is determined by the slope of the land.

Serra placed nine pairs of colums around the periphery of one half of Videy, this island in the Reykjavik harbor, and some of them are quite close together; others, like these, are far apart.

The main feature as you walk, though, is bird droppings. When I first visited Videy in 1994, it was November, and except for a couple of Icelandic horses, I was alone on the island. This time, though, the place was teeming with sea birds, and the faint trail through the grass was chock full of tern turd. When you’d inadvertently get too close to an invisible nest, the birds would get really agitated. One nest was right next to the trail, and we didn’t see it until the mother flew out from underfoot and startled us. A lot of the Serra columns on the leeward side of the island are topped with a crown of guano, but the windward side is pretty clear.

It surprised us to see Olafur Eliasson’s Blind Pavilion from the 2004 Venice Biennale perched on top of the hill above the ferry dock, though. Apparently, they installed it there in early 2005 as part of his show at the National Museum. It looks like a gun turret up on there, though.