viz. - architecture

Developing Austin for the Future

Jay Voss — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 04:24:00 +0000

(Image Credit: austinchronicle.com)

This is most likely my last post of the semester, and I thought I spend it writing about development trends in Austin. Anyone who has lived here for more than a few years should be keenly aware of just how quickly this city is changing. Even my landlord is complaining. Well, he’s not technically complaining, but as soon as he has a vacancy to fill, it’s taken, and I think part of the game has been lost for him. But I digress. One of the things about expansive growth in Austin is that it tends to not coincide with urban planning, as I noted in a previous post about the Texas Capital Building. This lack of planning can be frustrating to locals because, well…it’s not Paris. But there’s charm in the city’s architectural idiosyncrasies, and these things do give the city a sense of character. Austin’s a lot like the grimy sci-fi of the original Terminator film, especially when compared to the forensic cleanliness of Star Trek’s sci-fi. So, anyway, there’s a weird thing happening throughout Austin’s current growth spurt, in which planned communities are popping up in the middle of old non-planned neighborhoods. Two questions come to mind: Does it really matter that these communities are planned given the irregular historical zoning beauty that surrounds them? And, secondly, what’s the appeal of these antiseptic neighborhoods, when Austinites could have…well, Austin?

(Image Credit: www.buryinc.com)

Two of these neighborhoods immediately come to mind. “The Domain” shopping area, east of Mopac and north of 183, and “The Triangle,” which is located where Lamar and Guadalupe merge. Anyone reading this who frequents Austin’s hipper areas is probably rolling their eyes at this point – The Domain and The Triangle are not really places where people hang out (no offense). They’re places you go to if you want to visit Office Max or Louis Vuitton. (I didn’t even know how to spell “Vuitton” when I started writing this post.) In a nutshell, each of these planned neighborhoods offers retail space at street level, and apartments or condos above. Rhetorically, it’s quite obvious that these neighborhoods are trying to approximate the European high street. However, in my mind there are two very deep differences between what you find in Europe and what’s popping up in Austin. In most these European urban spaces it’s easy to walk out from where you live and purchase the necessities. In these new Austin neighborhoods, the idea is that you walk out from where you live and purchase luxuries. The second rather obvious difference is that in Austin, these planned urban spaces are suburban. They’re for away from the center of town. So once your mind breaks through the nictitating haze of superfluous consumption, it’s really quite hard to figure out what the appeal of living in these areas is.

(Image Credit: austintowers.net)

To be fair, housing is at such a premium in Austin at the moment, that you can’t really blame anyone for living anywhere. And I guess, really, Office Max and Louis Vitton – I mean “Vuitton” – wouldn’t be putting shops in these places if there weren’t consumers ready and waiting to pounce.

Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike: A Lasting Anchor for Austin

Jay Voss — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

If we’re to think about landscapes in Austin, it only makes sense to start with something in the very heart of the city. What immediately comes to mind, of course, is the Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail. This jogging path encompasses over 10 miles of mostly flat jogging track that weaves its way around and over Lady Bird Lake. It has proved to be an enormously popular place for Austinites to escape their concrete jungle. Go down to the area for an evening workout in the warmer months, and the trail will be so packed with joggers and walkers you’d wish you’d braved the midday heat. I’ve long thought all this activity around the lake to be one of the more inspiring aspects of living in Austin. There aren’t really any other cities that I can think of that offer up swaths of seemingly undeveloped land for outdoor recreation. Sure, there’s that stretch along Lake Michigan in Chicago, or along the quays in Paris, but nothing quite compares. The architectural thinking behind the Austin trail is completely focused on getting Austinites out and about, and given that the city is otherwise obsessed with finding all sorts of comfort via technological progress, I think the hike and bike trail is really admirable.

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

What we now call Lady Bird Lake first started taking shape in 1939, when the Tom Miller Dam was constructed on the Colorado River. This dam was primarily built to provide hydroelectric power for the surrounding area. In 1960, the Longhorn Dam was built east of Austin, and this created what would eventually be called Lady Bird Lake. According to the Texas State Historical Association, the lake was created for two reasons: that the Holly Street Power Plant might have a cooling pond, and that the city might have a new recreational space. By 1970, the lake had become polluted, and its shores covered with weeds. It was then that Mayor Roy Butler teamed up with Lady Bird Johnson to establish the Town Lake Beautification Committee, which worked to transform the lake into a non-polluted recreation area and install the hike and bike trails that are the subject of this post. This makes the Lady Bird Lake Hike and Bike Trail one of the oldest tracks of its kind in the United States.

(Image Credit: austin360.com)

It’s amazing to think that one of the more modern architectural facets of Austin is really 40 years old. I’ve talked to landscape architects from Oregon to Georgia, and several of them have at least one project like this on their docket. From a civic planning standpoint, these trails make a lot of sense. They work to keep intensely urban areas vibrant and youthful, and they encourage healthy lifestyles for citizens (which encouragement has a number of economic incentives). Visiting Town Lake and its adjacent outdoor recreation, you could of course complain how insanely artificial the entire landscape is from a BBC Planet Earth perspective. The “lake” might be said to look more like a stereotypical river, and there’s no telling if the surrounding vegetation was really that lush before the Colorado River flooded its banks.

But I say, at the end of the day, Lady Bird Lake and its surrounding area are just as invasive as the gardens at Villa Farnese and Versailles. I suppose that comparison doesn’t justify the environmental alteration that is Lady Bird Lake, but it sure does remind us that the new landscape is much more satisfying than all the glass and steel that sits behind it.

Renovating Austin: New Homes In Old Neighborhoods

Jay Voss — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

(Image credit: Jay Voss)

There’s an odd thing happening in Austin’s older neighborhoods: people are moving in, tearing down whatever 1930s homes they find on their lots, and in these spaces constructing decidedly modern dwellings. The subsequent structure stands out on its block like you wouldn’t believe. There’s such a disparity between the neighborhood’s older ranch homes and these new structures of corrugated metal and cantilevered edges. It’s a contrast between the standout and the ubiquitous, and the standout wins the eye every time. To make things more interesting: the locals I’ve asked hate these new structures, while those of us who’ve moved here recently tend to find them more inviting. I’m not sure where I stand on the issue. Although I see and understand the detriment one might perceive in continuity’s disruption, isn’t such materialistic continuity exactly what Austinites are constantly going out of their way to subvert? What gives? Aren’t we all supposed to applaud when something immaterial keeps Austin weird? Coming at the issue from a different angle, I’m a fairly serious student of architecture, and so for me it’s always refreshing to see tasteful structures going up (no matter what the situation, really). To this end I think architecture in its purist form encourages balance and harmony, and building a mansion amidst cottages (just for irony’s sake, I guess) is arrogant and misguided.

(Image credit: Jay Voss)

I bring all this up because such a mansion is going in just around the corner from where I live. The site’s been under construction for about 18 months now, which seems a bit long given the speed with which most of the structure’s gone up. Either the project ran into some financing issues or everyone’s really taking their time. I tend to suspect the latter. Crews have constantly been working on the home over the past year – everything from the windows to the floors to the fixtures seems to have been installed with patience and care. This long construction hasn’t bothered me one bit, as I’ve greatly enjoyed considering the uninhabited house. It’s an unconventional structure. For starters, the lot is oddly shaped – it’s an extremely long rectangle (maybe 50 feet by 150 feet). It’s on the edge of a block, with one 150-foot side marked by busy 31^st street. The obvious place to put this home would be as far from 31^st street as possible, affording the future residents some privacy. Surprisingly, the architect (Jay Farrell) decided to plot the home right along 31^st street, with the front of the structure facing inwards towards the side of the neighboring house. The house is at once hidden from and exposed to a busy street, and I can’t decide whether the decision is humble or masturbatory. Before I jump to conclusions, the new residents may have kids or animals that they want to shield from the street, and maybe this is the best way to safeguard the vulnerable.

(Image credit: Jay Voss)

And so it’s interesting to think about how this very modern structure relates to its chosen neighbors. Down the street are a few homes on the Texas State Historical Register, across the street is the Austin Zen Center, across and further along down 31^st street are many ranch homes that constitute (I’ve been told) Austin’s old red light district, and to the garage-side of the new home is a small apartment complex that can be a bit rough. Back when the new home’s lot was still vacant, some of the complex’s residents used to blast heavy metal through an open door and try to shoot bottles in the vacant lot with a riffle. In this way, to varying degrees, it has always seemed as though one resident of the complex is imposing themselves on another. I wonder if the proud owners of the new home across the street have any knowledge of this? I wonder if they have any knowledge of the traffic created by the Austin Zen Center on weekends? At heart, I wonder if the attempted urbanism of this lovely new home is compromised by a simple misunderstanding of place.

(Image credit: Jay Voss)

I can’t say what existed in this home’s place previously – it’s been a vacant lot for as long as I can remember – and I’m not sure what my new neighbors are trying to prove. The great architecture is, sadly, a bit like a sore thumb. I’d like to give the architect my approval, however – he designed a great building given what his client’s offered him.

This Week's New Yorker Cover and Frank Lloyd Wright

Jay Voss — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

(Image credit: The New Yorker)

This week’s New Yorker cover features a rendering of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, and I thought the occasion merited some meditation on what the museum means to us today. It’s an odd shaped building, and I can’t think of one that’s been built like it sense. Snøhetta’s Oslo Opera House, pictured below and opened in April 2008, is a great example of how contemporary architects are still designing buildings for the arts in brave new ways. (That fantastic structure mimics a Norwegian glacier melting into the sea, and many of its smart features work to invite all of Oslo, not just the operatic elite, to inhabit within and without.) But no structure for the arts built since 1960 has been as original as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Opened on 21 October 1959, the Guggenheim Museum is Frank Lloyd Wright’s last masterpiece. It was (more or less) commissioned in 1943, but the project took Wright 15 years and over 700 sketches to complete. Such revision is unusual for a Wright project, of course – most of his designs were completed in a matter of hours. (I suspect he was always thinking about his projects, and thus when the time came to get his ideas down on paper for clients there wasn’t much work to do.) What’s so unique about the Guggenheim Museum is that it’s a descending spiral. This design has two benefits: visitors can effortlessly enjoy the museum’s exhibit as they casually descend a ramp and, more importantly, the changing diameter of the spiral always allows for natural lighting at the art. Form follows function.

(Image credit: Wikipedia)

The New Yorker cover is interesting in that the Guggenheim Museum is not its subject, yet the building is featured prominently behind a scene from Central Park. That scene, let’s be honest, features a bunch of dogs dressed lamely according to breed. What are we to make of this montage? Was the Guggenheim placed in the background merely because everybody knows it sits prominently on New York’s Central Park? But anyone who knows this would also know that the stretch of Central Park in front of the Guggenheim isn’t fit for a dog fashion show – the museum’s right in front of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. Of course, I suppose the ridiculousness of the dog show negates some expectation of reality. But then why the Guggenheim? Any number of buildings on Central Park West would have sufficed.

(Image credit: The New Yorker)

I suspect that perhaps the New Yorker cover is a subtle commentary on artsy pretention. Whatever you conclude about the cover will depend on what you think about certain fashions. I myself loved the dapper Dalmatian, and took to enjoying the ways in which each dog’s breed determined their wardrobe. The Pug is correctly dressed like one of the grandmothers from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. But I can also see how someone not interested in the different ways people dress might find all of the dogs on the cover ridiculous. Just the same way that someone might find some of the Guggenheim’s notorious avant-garde art ridiculous. But I think that the take away here is that the museum is iconic. It just sits there in its spirals, and will last longer than whatever trendy business happens outside (or inside). By allowing form to follow function in such an extreme way, Frank Lloyd Wright’s last masterpiece clearly inspired architects as far away as Norway.

New Forms for Old Needs in Norman Bel Geddes’s "House of Tomorrow"

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:43:11 +0000

Image Credit: Metropolis Magazine

Walking through the Harry Ransom Center’s excellent Norman Bel Geddes exhibit, one thing that struck me is that while Bel Geddes is particularly famous for his large industrial designs—radios, cars, cities, and stadiums, for example—he also directed his talents towards the intimate spaces of the American home. Before Bel Geddes designed prefabricated homes for the Housing Corporation for America in 1939, or published his 1932 book Horizons, he wrote an article called “The House of Tomorrow” for the April 1931 issue of the Ladies Home Journal. The “twentieth-century style” he describes is one that he sees uniting form and function anew for the needs of the twentieth-century individual—or rather, what he imagines the twentieth-century individual to be.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Norman Bel Geddes's Horizons

Bel Geddes’ design philosophy is evident both within the article and in his manifesto Horizons, published the following year. As Bel Geddes and others saw himself principally as a set designer, he reframes his interest in industrial design as a kind of art for the modern era, where design has greater importance than ever before:

We are entering an era which, notably, shall be characterized by design in four specific phases: Design in social structure to insure the organization of people, work, wealth, leisure. Design in machines that shall improve working conditions by eliminating drudgery. Design in all objects of daily use that shall make them economical, durable, convenient, congenial to every one. Design in the arts, painting, sculpture, music, literature, and architecture, that shall inspire the new era. (4-5)

Bel Geddes here presents himself as an artist, who, like all others, “is sensitive to his environment” (6). He carefully notes the circumstances of life in 1930s America—post-industry, mid-Depression—and argues that they require new approaches to design in all these four phrases. He also works to break down the divisions between these different areas when he argues that “in the point of view of the artist who fails to see an aesthetic appeal in such objects of contemporary life as a railway train, a suspension bridge, a grain elevator, a dynamo, there is an inconsistency” (11). Bel Geddes argues that as modern life has centered increasingly around work, there is a greater need for conveniences, objects that function to promote ease and efficiency. Thus, while late nineteenth century art defined itself through Walter Pater’s formulation of “art for art’s sake,” Bel Geddes sees art in the perfect union of form and function

Visual design is concerned with form, space, color; with the proportioning of solids and voids and the rhythmic spacings of these elements. The governing factor as to what is pleasing to the eye is the idea, which is of an emotional nature—an emotion of pleasure, satisfaction, excitement, exhilaration, stimulation. (18)

What’s interesting here is how much emphasis Bel Geddes in this quotation places on the emotions of the artist. Elsewhere in Horizons, when he predicts that twentieth-century art will detach itself from galleries and statuary, he describes what he sees as the continuity between the art of the past and tomorrow: “The work of the artist always has been, and will be, a distinctly individual product—the antithesis of ‘machine-made.’ Fundamentally, the artist is an emotional person in that he relies more upon his feelings and intuitions than upon reasoning” (11). It’s easy to think that functional design must be based upon reasoning, but Bel Geddes flips the script to emphasize emotion, feeling, and intuition—language typically associated with the feminine.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

However, does publishing “The House of Tomorrow” in Ladies Home Journal necessarily imply that the twentieth-century figure he imagines is a feminine one? There could be a reading of the article that would point out the fact that the house is pink, that would consider the intertextual relationship between the drawings and discussion of design with the inset poem, “Hunches” by Elizabeth Boyd Borie, that would connect Bel Geddes’ intuitive designs with feminine thinking and feminine spaces. Yet such a reading might be incongruous with the Ladies Home Journal’s history, a magazine which published not only the muckraking work of Jane Addams but also Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural designs. This widely-read magazine, like Bel Geddes himself, often contemplated questions of function, questions Bel Geddes emphasizes in “The House of Tomorrow.”

In fact, Bel Geddes quickly establishes the reasons he sees for a change in home planning and design: “The keynote of all the good contemporary work is that it must perfectly suit its ultimate purpose. We have returned to simplicity because we have realized in this age that the overornamentation and elaboration of the past are not in keeping with us today. We are more forthright people than were our forefathers, we bother less with forms and conventions, and so it is surely fitting that we carry our ideas into our homes.” This description of the modern American individual is one perhaps that sounds suited equally to our age as to the 1930s; he neatly transitions from thinking about the people to the houses that should shelter such folks.

Image Credit: Alcade / The Harry Ransom Center

His solutions include moving the bedrooms from the front of the house to the back, nearer to the sunshine and expansive yards that are beautiful to behold. Even as he proposes to build more with steel girders and concrete, which might sound ugly, he notes that “in pursuit of light and air, since we are not bound down by any arbitrary limits, we can make our windows stretch the whole length of our rooms,” and likewise turn our roofs into flat spaces suitable for gardens. The emphasis he places on light, convenience, and the unity between interior and exterior design all bespeak his interest in making the home a place that does not trap its inhabitants but allows them “to take full advantage of all the innumerable aids to more convenient living that have been evolved in the past few years.” This emphasis on function is much in line with the kinds of rhetoric used in 1940s and 1950s advertising that encourages women to buy appliances to help with their domestic labor, but what’s refreshing is how ungendered his language is throughout the piece. If Bel Geddes expects the modern house “to assure complete satisfaction of every material and psychic need of the owner” (138-9), it seems that ownership is shared equally between the men and women in the space. Women have since the Victorian period been seen as the domestic goddesses, but Bel Geddes contemplates a twentieth century where their needs and interests extend beyond the interiors outward. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, considering that Bel Geddes changed his name to include the “Bel” when he published his early writings alongside his first wife and collaborator Helen Belle Sneider, but Bel Geddes’s futurism offers new forms for old needs for women as well as men.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

艾未未

Jay Voss — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 22:43:08 +0000

(Image credit: hyperallergic.com)

I’ve been a fan of Ai Weiwei’s work ever since the Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate (October 2010). In that work, Ai commissioned 1,600 Chinese artisans from the town of Jingdezhen (a town that’s been producing pottery for nearly 2 millennia) to hand-paint 100,000,000 porcelain sunflower seeds, and the pieces were then scattered evenly on the floor of the museum’s great hall. Visitors were initially allowed onto the seeds, making the spot a lovely place to pass an afternoon. What drew me to the exhibit and its creator were not the political implications of the installation (which I’d come to respect later) or the smart way in which Ai decided to fill the Tate’s space, but rather the fact that 8 million extra seeds had been created to account for visitors taking a handful on their way out. It’s probably fair to say that most artists invited to fill the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall are rather finicky about their work, but here was someone honest enough to account for the fact that visitors might be tempted to take a piece home with them.

(Image credit: Loz Pycock)

As I’ve occasionally thought about this installation throughout the past two years, I’ve come to see it as a very beautiful thing. By asking the porcelain painters of Jingdezhen to help with this project, Ai has given autonomy to hundreds of workers who’d otherwise remain anonymous in China’s export economy – their names masked by the ubiquitous “Made in China” label. Each of the sunflower seeds, though similar in its general characteristics, is unique in its own pattern. The Jingdezhen artisans were trying to create similar seeds, but because each cornel is hand-painted, myriad differences in pattern distinguish them. Similarly, although China’s huge porcelain industry doesn’t allow its workers personal expression, each of the artisans is unique and special and talented, and Ai Weiwei is encouraging everyone to remember this. I can’t think of another contemporary studio artist who celebrates the machine world with such empathy, which is heartening in a socioeconomic cycle that increasingly celebrates the immediate.

(Image credit: tate.org.uk)

And so over the course of this past summer I anxiously awaited news of Ai’s tax evasion case. Back in April 2011 he was arrested at Beijing Airport just before boarding a flight to Hong Kong on vague charges. Every newspaper account of the arrest provides its own array of reasons for the detention, but at a certain point it's plainly obvious that the Chinese authorities simply felt threatened by the free-speaking artist. Their anxiety boiled over in the wake of the Arab Spring. They released Ai after several months in detention and slapped him with a 12 million yuan ($1.85 million) tax bill, although it’s impossible to know the veracity of this alleged malfeasance. Additionally, Ai was instructed to remain in Beijing for a year and refrain from posting on his Twitter account (he'd previously been an avid tweeter). A few months after all of this, Ai was tweeting again. As he has said, “Never retreat, retweet.” Ai’s appeal of his tax evasion case was rejected in court a few weeks ago, on July 20^th.

It strikes me that many Americans are unfamiliar with Ai Weiwei’s art. Well, at least those I’ve asked claim they are. Everyone who tuned into the 2008 Summer Olympics has seen some of Ai’s work: he was the artistic consultant for the great Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron when they designed the Beijing National Stadium. (Ai distanced himself from the project after helping to design the stadium, declaiming the way the Communist Party started using the Olympics as a piece or propaganda.) But the rest of Ai’s work is known to a relative few in the states, and this is unfortunate. Although the artist is often riffing on the oppression he feels in China, almost everything he creates encourages one to think about fundamental human rights and our tendency not to question the institutions we appreciate. Through Ai’s work on the Sichuan earthquake, for example, not only does one feel for the many who needlessly lost their lives in the poorly constructed public buildings, but we’re also compelled to question a political elite who’d cynically view such disaster as opportunity. In this hectic political season, no matter one’s persuasion, it might be worthwhile to meditate on Ai’s commentary about propaganda and institutional mandates. Perhaps the best any of us can do in such a complicated system is retweet, and understand that some of us won't be able to resist picking up a handful of sunflower seeds.

An Art Deco King James in the Orientalist Vein: François-Louis Schmied’s Engravings of the Creation and Ruth Stories

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 17:08:36 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Just before viz. took a break for spring, we visited the Harry Ransom Center’s newest exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. Instead of finding only illuminated manuscripts, we were surprised to find contemporary art, literary manuscripts, film posters, and even a sculpture of a golden calf. The exhibition is not just a collection of well-preserved historic Bibles—it’s a unique collection of visual artifacts tangentially related to the King James Bible. As the viz. team walked around the exhibition, one grouping of images caught my eye. Art Deco engraver François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of both Genesis and The Book of Ruth from the King James Bible is absolutely stunning. The artwork is most interesting for its fusion of the geometric lines of Art Deco with the Orientalism of its creator and the lyricism of the Biblical stories it illustrates.

Art Deco was a remarkably successful and widespread architectural and artistic movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. The movement was one focused on decoration—the geometric, symmetrical forms of the buildings and drawings of the movement were influenced by ancient Egyptian flourishes. As Edward Said reminds us, since Napoleon’s foray into Egypt in the 18^th century, “Egypt was to become a department of French learning.” Along with Napoleon’s soldiers, “chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians” were tasked with “put[ting] Egypt into modern French.” Started around the heyday of archaeological work in Egypt (King Tut’s tomb was discovered in 1922), Art Deco internalized the general Egyptomania of the times. “Art Deco,” says British historian John M. MacKenzie in his book Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, “though not oriental in any obvious overall way, owed much to oriental influences: the geometrical patterns, often brightly coloured, the strongly projecting corbels, the sunbursts, winged elements, (like clocks rendered as solar discs), and other features.” Most of us are familiar with the architectural epitomes of this style, NYC’s Chrysler Building and Empire State Building. Both of these buildings make use of Egypt-inspired tropes, such as the lotus decorations on the elevators in the lobby of the Chrysler Building.

Image Credit: Archaeology.org

François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of the books of Genesis is no different when it comes to using Egypt-inspired visual elements. His depiction of the Creation is composed of brightly colored animals bursting (like sunrays) off the page. The whales spew water in symmetrical arcs, while a tidy group of partridges march along the bottom of the engraving.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Schmied was an Orientalist in the clearest sense. Working in the 1920s and 1930s, Schmied internalized the Egyptomania of his times. He even painted himself in “Oriental dress” at the beginning of his career in 1927. His willingness to take on the dress of the Other might be a sign of Schmied’s identification with the Orient of the past.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Shmied’s clear investment in the Orientalist project is critical to reading his illustration of the Book of Ruth. In his engraving for the marriage of Ruth and Boaz, Schmied chose to depict Boaz with darker skin than the outsider from Moab, Ruth. Moabites were excluded from the Jewish community as stipulated by God in Deuteronomy 23:3–6.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Ruth, as a Moabite, was allowed to congregate with Israelites because she was a woman (and Moabite women were begrudgingly accepted by Israelites). The story of Ruth and Boaz’s marriage is one of acceptance and compassion—Boaz marries the widowed and impoverished Ruth and fathers a son with her in the direct line of David and Jesus. Their story is not one of passionate love—nowhere does the Bible describe Ruth’s and Boaz’s physical attributes. So, it’s especially interesting that Schmied made Ruth into an olive-skinned beauty and Boaz into a dark-skinned savior. Schmied’s artistic choices might reflect his internalization of another culture, that of “the Orient.” In any case, his engraving is a unique one of an oft-depicted Biblical scene that merits much critical analysis.

See the engravings yourself at the Ransom Center’s exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The exhibition is up until the 29^th of July.

Art + Architecture: Fact and Fiction in The Buell Hypothesis

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

A few days ago, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) unveiled its newest exhibition, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. A collection of five architectural plans that reimagine how five different suburbs in America could have benefitted significantly from Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, Foreclosed is an amazing exhibition that melds art and architecture, politics and place. Today, I’m going to discuss the impetus of this exhibition—The Buell Hypothesis. The Hypothesis is an amazing hybrid publication created by Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. According to the publication’s graphic designers, The Buell Hypothesis is “part socratic dialogue, part contemporary screenplay, part media scape and part power point slide presentation.” This hybrid production, with its emphasis on collaboration and reinterpretation, is an appropriate point of genesis for Foreclosed.

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

As its creators—Buell Center colleagues Reinhold Martin, Leah Meisterlin, and Anna Kenoff—proudly proclaim in their preface to The Buell Hypothesis, the document is “both documentary and imaginary. It describes a world in which fiction informs fact just as much as fact informs fiction.” The structure of the Hypothesis reflects this collaborative process between the real and the fictional, as the document (interestingly described as “a screenplay” for “a film” by Martin et al. in their preface) is interspersed with such disparate elements as: descriptions of montaged images (of empty living rooms, of suburban houses) if the screenplay were to be made into a film; imagined dialogues between Socrates and Glaucon about the status of suburbs as they’re stuck in traffic on Interstate Highway 95 en route to a symposium organized by Diotima; clippings from real-world newspaper articles about public housing development and building policy since the New Deal Era; and case studies of a number of suburbs presented by Diotima in an imaginary PowerPoint presentation at an imaginary symposium.

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

The ultimate goal of this hybrid between the real and the imaginary is to get readers of the Hypothesis—likely urban planners, architects, and even art curators—to rethink our preconceived notions and preconceptualized images of suburban development. Again Martin et al. use their preface to explain the goals of their project—“The Buell Hypothesis, at its most basic, is as follows: change the dream and you change the city. The single-family house, and the city or suburb in which it is situated, share a common destiny. Hence, change the narratives guiding suburban housing and the priorities they imply, including spatial arrangements, ownership patterns, the balance between public and private interests, and the mixtures of activities and services that any town or city entails, and you begin the process of redirecting suburban sprawl.”

Image Credit: Metropolis Mag

It’s interesting that the very form of the Hypothesis—with its genre-crossing use of various tropes from screenwriting, classic dialogue, PowerPoint presentations, and scrapbooking—informs the ultimate goal of the project. Martin et al.’s text asks us to rethink our beliefs about what scientific or architectural reports look like (we’re used to seeing drab reports, of the “Title/Abstract/ Introduction/Materials and Methods/Results/Discussion/Literature Cited” variety) with a baby-blue covered publication (one reviewer hilariously said that the Hypothesis “looks like it was retroactively leaked from the RAND Corporation in the 1960s”) full of both fact and fiction. In reimagining the report form to include dialogues and diversions, The Buell Hypothesis opens avenues for hybrid, user-centered projects to profoundly affect the future of urban planning and design.

The Hypothesis has already affected the real world with MoMA’s Foreclosed exhibition, an art/architecture exhibition which takes Diotima’s PowerPoint case studies of a few suburbs around the United States and imagines alternate futures for five of them. Read Foreclosed's inspiration, The Buell Hypothesis, in its entirety at the Buell Center’s site.

Art + Architecture: Diana Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:01:16 +0000

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

For those of us interested in architectural sculpture, the last few months in Austin (especially on the UT campus) have felt like gifts from the art gods. I’ve already written about one exhibition (the recently-closed El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa show at the Blanton Museum of Art). This month ushered in a second sculptural exhibition. New York sculptor Diana Al-Hadid’s Suspended After Image, a site-specific installation at UT’s Visual Arts Center’s Vaulted Gallery, is a feat of texture and height. As a fantastic example of architectural art, Al-Hadid’s most recent work for the VAC asks viewers to circumambulate the sculpture and ponder the relationship between memory, built objects, and humanity.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson (cropped)

Memory inspired the entire installation. Al-Hadid was stirred to create her sculpture “Suspended After Image” after seeing a Gothic painting of the Visitation which featured an intricate cloak. Working with twelve UT art assistants, Al-Hadid turned her memory of a two-dimensional painting into a three-dimensional structure. “Suspended After Image” has a certain sinuousness to it—a river of faux-fabric permanently flows over more than half of the sculpture. I’m tempted to think that the sumptuous river of cardboard, wood, plaster, and metal evokes the way that memory works. Much as fabric folds and rivers flow, we remember in spurts and starts. In a recent article on Al-Hadid’s installation at the VAC, Austin blogger Michael Graupmann reviews the artist’s creation process: “images she sees often get stuck in her mind, (‘made sacred’) and stay with her until she transforms them through her work.” The curvy form of Al-Hadid’s piece seems to mimic its creation process.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

And yet there is also a sharp jaggedness to the whole thing—paint globs create skyscraper-like structures that rise out of the ground. It’s safe to say that “Suspended After Image” is a work that mimics our built environment, as Al-Hadid’s creations often involve architectural tools and methods. For this particular piece, Al-Hadid used a 3D modeling program and CNC router to plan its structure. Intricate lattices and elaborate stairs need to be modeled, whether they are used for art or architecture.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson (cropped)

And behind every architectural design is a person. Al-Hadid’s sculpture doesn’t allow its viewers to forget the human element in architecture and art. While walking around the sculpture (which urges us to do so from multiple viewpoints, even from above in the VAC’s Mezzanine), we’re surprised that the artist planned for every angle to be seen by an ambulatory audience. The most surprising part of Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image” is the supple plaster body that is either disappearing into or emerging from the stairs at the bottom of the sculpture. Is the built environment oppressing this body into oblivion? Is it growing human loins? I’m unsure myself. But at least the human (in the sculpture and outside of it) isn’t forgotten.

See Diana Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image” yourself at the Visual Arts Center until March 10^th, when another Artist-in-Residence piece will take its place.

Create, Skate, and Destroy: Architecture in Motion

Michael Widner — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Rodney Torres, 50-50 through Love Sculpture, image from Quartersnacks

Street skaters love architecture. Few people other than architects notice or appreciate the designs in concrete, marble, metal, and brick that comprise a city, but seen through a skater's eyes, lines of movement appear everywhere. Ledges, stairs, hand rails, and even (or especially) smooth concrete and marble elicit a joyful recognition of possibilities. Rather than an agglomeration of static structures, the city becomes an invitation to motion; the skater desires contact with the hard surfaces of the urban environment. Assemblage of body, board, and buildings: a intimate becoming, in love with (the) concrete.

Fred Gall, bluntslide, image from chrome ball incident

Gall slides across a wax-blackened stair rather than stepping up or down the set, reflecting a dramatic shift in perspective:

Streetskaters are the other great horde of architectural fetishists. The fetish is slightly different in aspect but not in intensity. Perspectivally, architects are generally schooled to gaze upward, and cultivate an awe of form. Skateboarders remain at eye-level, street-level, on the plane of human actions. Architects strive to behold totalities; skaters fixate, on smaller parts— they look closer, at details and textures and otherwise unremarkable typologies. Skaters are the sensualists, the kinesthetic lovers of space and form. (Skateboarding, Action, and Architecture)

Eric Koston (Skater of the Year 2006), 50-50, image from chrome ball incident

A very long, round handrail with multiple kinks requires precise balance that can distinguish and respond to every nuance of the metal:

Skateboarding lets you experience buildings not as a set of objects, designed by architects, but as a set of spatial experiences. By this I mean that moving around on a skateboard makes you consider buildings and landscapes as a set of opportunities to skate, you are constantly sizing up banks, ledges, curves, curbs and so on for their ability to be skated upon. So there is this initial process of interrogation, looking at architecture differently, working out whether it can be skated or not. And then there is the actual engagement with the architecture, using the skateboard and your body in relation to the physicality of the building, and here one appreciates architecture differently again, this time as a direct sensual engagement, less to do with the mind and more to do the living body that we all possess. (Skateboarding vs Architecture)

Image from chrome ball incident

[Skateboarding] addresses the physical architecture of the modern city, yet responds not with another object but with a dynamic presence.... It produces space, but also time and the self. Skateboarding is constantly repressed and legislated against, but counters not through negative destruction but through creativity and production of desires.... It requires a tool (the skateboard), but absorbs that tool into the body. It involves great effort, but produces no commodity ready for exchange. It is highly visual, but refutes the reduction of activity solely to the spectacle of the image. (Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space, and the City: Architecture and the Body, p. 1.)

The time-lapse image above is from a chrome ball incident post focused not on a single skater, but on a single spot. Skaters constantly seek out new spots or attempt new tricks at old spots. The ever-changing urban landscape offers opportunity one week, only to take it away the next. Some spots become legendary:

The History of Hubba Hideout

But these legends will eventually be destroyed. Skating highlights not only the possibilities of motion through space, but also the transitory nature of the most seemingly permanent of fixtures. The city is a localized phoenix; spots are constantly destroyed and created.

Supra team riders at Lego Land, Austin DIY skate spot, image from Lunchbox Party

Something as simple as concrete slabs leaning against one another can become a hidden pleasure garden. Not content to skate only what the governments and corporations build, skaters also take it upon themselves to rework their spaces with DIY projects (Portland's Burnside skate park is the grandfather of them all) like Austin's Lego Land (above) or the now destroyed Alien Pod (below). Skaters become architects of the local, the temporary. The knowledge that the landscape always changes demands an urgency. Tomorrow might be too late:

Alien Pod (RIP), Austin DIY skate spot, image from Concrete Disciples

MIT suing Gehry over impractical design

John Jones — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:29:50 +0000

Last month I posted a link to Slate’s photo-essay on functional architecture. That essay emphasized the trend in architecture toward functional buildings over flashy—and often impractical—works like those Frank Gehry is known for.

Now, MIT is suing Gehry for his design of the Stata center, pictured above.

The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.

The rhetoric of wandering around your apartment in your bathrobe

John Jones — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 21:33:34 +0000

The New York Times has an article on architects Jeremy Fletcher and Alejandra Lillo of Graft, who have designed a new condo tower in Manhattan, the W Downtown, with glass walls. According to Fletcher and Lillo, the purpose of the see-through design is to “[work] out a dialogue between voyeurism and exhibitionism”:

Not only will the building’s glass walls allow W residents to see, and be seen by, passers-by on the street below, but Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Lillo have created peekaboo features within each apartment, like a window between the kitchen and the bedroom, and a bathroom that’s a glass cube, allowing residents to expose themselves to their roommates and family members, too. The idea, Mr. Fletcher said, was to frame and exhibit the intimate details of life, or at least ones that would be aesthetically pleasing, “like your silhouette in the shower.”

My first thought when reading this piece was that if someone wanted to expose his or herself to a roommate or family member, it could be done without peekaboo windows. More germane to this blog, I find the focus on performance to be very interesting. The author of the article, Penelope Green, connects this trend in architecture to Facebook and YouTube, where users regularly “expose” the intimate details of their lives for all the world to see. The difference between the two, Green points out, is that the information users post to these sites is “conscious,” that is, carefully chosen and scripted to present an image that the user wants to project, while the mundane details of day-to-day living is “unconscious.” Fletcher points out that his and Lillo’s design is open to the kind of careful choreography available online:

“We are creating stages for people to perform on in some way, but it’s a very scripted and considered display,” he said. “Cooking could be a display, for example, with your partner watching you from the bedroom.”

He talked about tuning the privacy of each room, using shades or scrims to have larger or smaller openings, as you would change the aperture of a camera. “So if you don’t want your partner to see you shaving your legs in the shower,” he said, “you can pull the shade.

However, the reality of living in a glass house seems more likely to lend itself to this experience:

In September, Curbed, the feisty New York City real estate blog, posted a photograph of a newly completed, glass-walled condo building on East 13th Street. You could see right into the apartments, which looked most like messy dorm rooms. It was a grubby retort to the marketing hoo-ha that surrounds these now ubiquitous buildings and trumpets a sleekly attractive lifestyle accessorized by midcentury modern furniture and designer clothing. There were unmade beds jammed right up against the glass, mangled paper Venetian shades, a towel over a chair.

The article then ventures into questions of what we will do if we have to perform all the time, without having a private retreat to some place where we can drape our towels with abandon. It’s an interesting read.

Functional architecture

John Jones — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:21:53 +0000

Slate has posted a slide show featuring functional architecture, emphasizing the function and versatility of buildings over Gehry-esque flashiness. This article from Good Magazine makes a similar point.

Ethnic Cleansing in Brooklyn

John Jones — Mon, 28 May 2007 20:01:50 +0000

Jerome Krase at BrooklynSoc.org passed along a photo gallery comparing an artist’s rendering of the Fulton Street Mall in Brooklyn versus the mall itself.

As Dr. Krase puts it,

A New York Post “Exclusive” article by Rich Calder, ‘Mall Wonder,’ (5/21/07: 19) featured a digital rendering of how the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Brooklyn will look after a $15 Million “facelift.” It looked odd to me, so I took some photos at the Mall the next day. Perhaps they meant “ethnic cleansing,” or what we used to refer to as “Negro Removal” when Urban Renewal was in vogue in the 1960s. FYI: Brooklyn has become a very hot real estate market in recent years and many of the areas which had essentially become part of “Black Brooklyn” from the 1970s onward are now ripe for picking. I walked down the Fulton Mall from beginning to end taking photos and the Person of Color to Person of No-color ratio was the reverse of the artist rendering from the article. One might also consider whether the rendering is advertising as opposed to Neo-Freudian slip.

Here’s a link to the entire gallery at BrooklynSoc.org.