exemplary buildings

Ten years ago, I blogged here about the Coignet Building at the corner of Third Avenue and 3rd Street in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The building was in rather shabby condition in 2000 when I took this picture, looking down Third Avenue. (Perhaps it's better that the building is rather off in the distance.) It was built in the early 1870s as the office building for the Coignet Stone Company and to show off their fine decorative concrete work. The Gothamist site has a good article by Miranda Katz which includes the building's history and some lovely pictures by Scott Heins taken after its recent restoration. This is one of the "after" pictures:

We have the Terra Cotta Building in Alfred that was built in 1892 by the Celadon Terra Cotta Company for its office building and to display their wares.

Photo by Cynthia Wenslow

It's always good to be able to see how construction materials will look on a real building. As I meandered the streets of Ridgewood in Queens a couple days ago, I noticed a stretch of houses on Woodbine Street near Forest Avenue. The fronts of the buildings were of a rich variety and could help you decide how to re-side your row house. Do you want horizontal clapboards, diagonal boards, fancy plaster with an Italianate feel, faux stone, or maybe just an Italian renaissance palazzo?

Oh, how I wish I had any one of these row houses, whatever siding. It was a great week in New York City: lots of museums and galleries, a couple pop-up concerts at Miller Theater at Columbia, meals with friends, sitting with John's cats, going to the Lissa Rivera and BJ Lillis gallery talk at ClampArt and running into Walter on the subway later. Walter knows Lissa and would have liked to attend the gallery talk but he had to go to meetings to plan the 2018 ARLIS/NA conference.

inequality and fairness

When I was in Havana a couple years ago, there seemed to be a good sense of social interaction on the street. It may have been partly the pleasant tropical climate. People were going about their business or leisure. I know I was ready to see that Cuba was a good place. We did hear from one of the tour guides that the elite did have access to better housing but that they generally did not have more disposable income. The ostentatious signs of inequality in the U.S., such as McMansions and huge black SUVs, are not so visible in Cuba.

In last Sunday's Opinion section in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote about "What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fairness." Recent research had looked at how monkeys reacted when one of them got a prized grape rather than a cucumber slice in exchange for a pebble. Other research looked at how travelers in coach were more satisfied with their flight if they did not walk through a first-class cabin on their way to the coach cabin. With all the complaints about airplane seating, I've never been able to understand why anyone would want priority boarding. Still other research showed that sports teams with similar player salaries generally did better than teams where some players got much larger salaries than others. The perception of inequality exacerbated the situation.

I suspect that my good feelings about the general sociocultural climate in Havana came from a sense of shared space as well as the afterglow of improving relations between the U.S. and Cuba. Sure, there were some people that were more shabbily dressed than others but it wasn't the grotesque visual clash of socioeconomic inequality.

design disruption

There was a screening of Design Disruptors this afternoon up on campus. It is a documentary by invision about "the transformative power of design." The emphasis is on the user experience and mostly about how to make it seamless, effortless, intuitive. Some of the things I scribbled in the dark as the film rolled: design sprint; saving time is sexy now; obvious is not easy, great is still hard; iterate iterate; design thrives on constraints. Facebook HQ has 2G Tuesdays where designers and other staff use FB with a 2G connection to get a taste of how some of the bells and whistles work with a slow connection. Lots of good stuff to think about including packaging your ideas.

I was thinking about library cataloging software as I listened and watched. In the past decade or so, I have used several brands of cataloging software: Geac Advance; ALEPH from Ex Libris; III Millennium; Voyager from Ex Libris; OCLC Connexion. Each of them has quirks. I wonder how this software can be so clunky as I'm adding a new field or subfield, or editing the fixed fields, or putting in delimiters. Why do we put up with it? Most of the groovy library catalog developments have been on the user experience end of things, with discovery interfaces and one-box searching, usually with follow-up faceting. Maybe the back-end of some of the applications in the film are as clunky as the library programs. We only saw what Etsy looked like from the user side, not how the data on available objects is created. Still, I cannot imagine that inputting your objects on your Etsy site could be as clunky as the current library systems.

I also have used LibraryThing over the past decade. It is a website where you can catalog your personal books (or "wanna-reads" or "would-love-to-owns") and tag them and put them in collections. It's quite a lot more straightforward than the library systems, at least on the cataloging side of things. The library systems also try to control circulation and acquisition information. Our libraries also have mountains of legacy data.

build from strength

Maurice Cox is the planning director of Detroit, Michigan, and the recipient of this year's Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal. He was just interviewed by critic Blair Kamin at the opening plenary session of the 105th annual conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in Detroit. Kamin's picture show ended with aerial views of Detroit and Toronto. Cox looks to Toronto for inspiration. Build from strength. Cities are composed of neighborhoods, or cities within cities. Transit-oriented development. Varying scales. Building the connections. After listening to Cox's inspirational and aspirational comments, a Detroit more like Toronto seemed reasonable. Different but rich nonetheless.

 (Detroit photo by Alex S. MacLean for the New York Times)

(Toronto Skyline 2016, by www.peakaerials.com)

listening to the natives

Some years ago, I read Greg Grandin's book on Fordlandia, the company town and rubber plantation developed by Henry Ford in the Amazon. Ford wanted a midwestern utopia where the workers didn't drink and there were cement sidewalks, where Ford Motor Company could get the rubber it needed. Fordlandia was not a great success for a variety of reasons. Utopian attempts are nonetheless interesting. I was reminded of Fordlandia by a recent article in The New York Times by Simon Romero: Deep in Brazil's Amazon, exploring the ruins of Ford's Fantasyland.

(Bryan Denton for the New York Times)

It wasn't the first time today that I read something about attempts to build in relatively inhospitable climes and not use the local and native methods. I was indexing the December 2016 issue of Metropolis and there was an essay by Lola Sheppard and Mason White based on their forthcoming book Many Norths: building in a shifting territory (Actar, 2017). "The growing cities of the Canadian Arctic are contending with decades-old planning mistakes that ignored indigenous settlement patterns and building knowledge." I was surprised to read that "Canada's North is home to the fastest-growing population in the country, with more than 115,000 people living in small, dispersed, and isolated communities." Ralph Erskine and others designed megastructures and microclimate bubbles while the Inuits preferred to build near the shore for proximity to fishing and hunting sites. The Inuits also avoided wind screens because the wind helped clear the snow and wind screens result in drifts. (Tonight and tomorrow, we may get up to 15-18 inches of snow. I wonder if it will drift.)

P.S. A few days later, the New York Times published a review of "Architecture of Independence--African Modernism" at the Center for Architecture in New York City. The exhibition started at the Vitra Design Museum, the "640-page doorstop" catalog was published then. The author of the review, Justin Farago, mentions the small size of the Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster photographs in the show. It is, after all, the 50th anniversary of Complexity and contradiction in architecture, by Robert Venturi, famously illustrated with small images.

walking and eating

The day before yesterday, I was meandering (walking) around the website for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, a museum in Lincoln, Mass., that I have visited several times. I was lucky enough to meet DeWitt Godfrey's work there before I met him on the CAA trip to Cuba in 2015.

This work was on display in the summer of 2014. I came across the listing on the deCordova website for a summer 2015 exhibition entitled "Walking Sculpture 1967-2015."

Sorry I missed it, particularly because I am fond of the art of Francis Alÿs among others. And I really like to walk so why not make art of it? The show included Bruce Nauman's Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-1968 (illustration on the exhibition webpage, linked above).

My supper reading today included "Bruce Nauman, art provocateur, returns. Are you ready?" by Randy Kennedy from the New York Times last September 11, a review of shows opening soon after that at Sperone Westwater and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The principal work was "Contrapposto Studies" which revisits a 1968 video work entitled "Walk with Contrapposto." Circling around, always.

Randy Kennedy reports that during his interview with Nauman at his home in Galisteo, N.M., Nauman served a lunch of supermarket rotisserie chicken with cheese, bread, and apples. I happened to be eating bread, cheese, and apple as I read. My bread was probably more mundane than Nauman's (Wegmans multi-grain with peanut butter).

colorful neighbors

These happen to be next to each other in my Flickr photostream:

Saint John's Living, for seniors

(Highland Park, Rochester, NY)

Società Concordia Partanna

(corner of Forest Ave. and Palmetto St., Ridgewood, Queens, NY)

(We stopped in Partanna, March 2013.)

Spencer Finch: A Certain Slant of Light

(installation at Morgan Library & Museum, New York City)

medieval modernism

"Art out of time" has long intrigued me, and perhaps all of us. The way that art and culture play with and against art and culture from another moment, whether near or far in time. In a profile of Steve Reich at 80 in the New York Times (October 2, 2016), he is quoted as saying "I'm not a Luddite, but I understand the Luddites."

After I got back from paper and pancakes this morning, I was sitting at my desk and realized the stack to the left of my computer was annoyingly high and I pulled the issue of Visual Resources (first issue for 2016) since it was the fattest item. An old cataloging trick: do the fat books and your backlog shrinks in size (and generally increases in complexity). The issue was devoted to "Medieval modernity" and I'd bookmarked the article by Graham Smith on "Rauschenberg's modern infernos for Life magazine" for potential inclusion in the queer art bibliography I maintain on Zotero. It grew out of the newsletter of the Queer Caucus for Art that I co-edited for a dozen years. The article doesn't seem to have any particular queer aspect (what? you expect me to really read rather than just peruse it?) but is intriguing as are a number of other articles. cf table of contents

As I was looking through the issue, I remembered that I'd bought a book with a similar title a few years ago: Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time, by Alexander Nagel, published by Thames & Hudson, 2012. I've borrowed the subtitle for the opening of this post. The verso of the title page includes a quote from Walter Benjamin which starts "Historicism is content with establishing a casual connection between various moments of history. A fact can be a cause but it is not therefore historical." (Hmm, why did "fake news" fly through my brain?)

I also was given a start by seeing "Christian Huemer" in the list of advisors to Visual Resources. Now I'm thinking of Christina Huemer, who I met at Cornell in 1970 and who was the librarian at the American Academy in Rome for many years before her retirement and death. She loved Rome, one of those places where the medieval and modern rub up against each other, and the ancient and the whole (western) shebang.

3-cent stamps

"Not that [Emily Dickinson] intended her poems to go unread -- she often sent them in letters to friends, sometimes with other enclosures: dried flowers, a three-cent stamp, a dead cricket. She also tried a form of self-publishing: from around 1858 until roughly 1864, she gathered her poems into forty handmade books, known as 'fascicles,' by folding single sheets of blank paper in half to form four consecutive pages, which she then wrote on and later, bound, one folded sheet on another, with red-and-white thread strung through crudely punched holes." (from "Out of print: the scrap poetry of Emily Dickinson," by Dan Chiasson, in The New Yorker, December 5, 2016, page 77)

What would Emily Dickinson have done if Blurb had been available? How long has it been since I thought of fascicles? The incidental drawings in this issue of The New Yorker include a tangle of red lines, rather like thread. And three-cent stamps? The second time they've come up today.

"I won't forget what happened when your Aunt Ida tried to help. It took me days to undo what she'd done! And some things I could never undo. For instance, she threw away an entire sheet of postage stamps; three-cent postage stamps. I wasn't aware of it at the time because I was out of the room, fixing her a snack. That's how it is when people try to help; they need snacks and cups of tea, and before you know it you've gone to more trouble than if they'd stayed at home." (from Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler, Ballantine Books, 2002, page 56)

Should Rebecca's mother have relaxed and let Aunt Ida help with sorting things so she could get on with her life? The theme of Back When We Were Grownups is wondering how you got into the life you're in and what would have happened if you'd made different decisions at critical points. So I'm up at the library reading The New Yorker and blogging rather than sorting things at the house so I can get on with my life, or writing Christmas letters/cards or whatever.

big hair buildings

Elbphilharmonie

Hamburg

Herzog & de Meuron

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/nov/04/hamburg-elbphilhamonie-herzog-de-meuron-a-cathedral-for-our-time

Port House

Antwerp

Zaha Hadid Architects

https://www.dezeen.com/2016/09/22/zaha-hadid-architects-faceted-port-house-antwerp-belgium/

These aren't quite toupées but there's a certain awkwardness. Still, I'd rather look at them than most other toupées or awkward hairdos. When I was in Madrid a few years ago, I enjoyed visiting the CaixaForum, also by Herzog & de Meuron. The interior was delightful and you could see the Museo Reina Sofía from some of the windows. The renovation and expansion of the Museo Reina Sofía building are by Jean Nouvel and also pretty darn fine.