the kitchen work triangle

Today's indexing included an article by Heidi Overhill in Design issues entitled "Apple pie proxemics: Edward T. Hall in the kitchen work triangle" (spring 2014 issue). Not only did I get to meet Mr Hall as the developer of the concept of proxemics (or "spatial behavior" as the AAT has it), I got to meet home economist Christine Frederick who lived from 1883 to 1970. The Wikipedia article on Frederick describes her as an American home economist and proponent of Taylorism as applied to the domestic sphere. Her NACO heading included only her birth date so I set upon revising the record to include her death date and other updating to RDA. As I was doing that, I was thinking about my grandmother who was also a home economist. They were near contemporaries and I wonder if they ever met.

I am now living in the house with the kitchen where she spent many an hour, throughout her life. The kitchen is not (now) particularly efficient, doesn't follow the work triangle theory, but then it's also not very large. I wonder if Gram was frustrated by the layout, and I am quite sure she would have been even more horrified by an enormous expenditure on renovation.

I have no idea how many times I was in the kitchen as a child, watching Gram wash the dishes with Great Aunt Dora sitting on the stool drying them. Oh, I probably helped with the dishes as a kid when we visited Gram but it was the two sisters in their regular positions that I vividly remember.

what would Albert Speer do?

Click here for an article from io9.com on post-Soviet architecture in Kazakhstan. This is the Astana Music Hall, worthy of gold status in the Roadside Hall of Fame.

Zoe Leonard at the Whitney Biennial

I had been quite disappointed to miss the camera obscura installation by Zoe Leonard at Murray Guy Gallery in late 2012 but then, there it was, a similar installation as part of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Now, the latter has been awarded the Bucksbaum Award. Stendhal Syndrome moment, and it was far more subtle than this photo indicates on the overcast day I visited in mid April.

Photo from an email announcement by Murray Guy. © Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

houses in art

It's Sunday afternoon at the Scholes Library of Ceramics. The issues of Kunstforum International are proving to be an interesting trove of information as well as NACO records, new and updated. Issues 182 and 184 focus on houses in art: as object, as subject, as inspiration, as shelter, as part of social practice.

This work entitled Soap City (II) by Werner Alt in 2001 caught my fancy. A medieval town made out of soap. The red in the illustration in Kunstforum is much more saturated and orange and the houses are more yellow, looking more cheese-like. Perhaps the red houses belong to the 1%. Watch that you don't slip into the drain during an evening walk, one of the delights of visiting a medieval town center. This image is from the kulturatlas-oberfranken website.

And there was also an article in issue 184 on provisional architecture by Jürgen Rapp that is subtitled "Kioske, Baracken und Container."

cultural heritage

There was an an article in the paper I was looking at while eating breakfast this morning that talked about damage to Palmyra, Syria, from the Syrian Civil War. War wreaks its havoc on our cultural heritage and, once gone, the objects cannot be replaced. I feel especially sensitive about Palmyra since the illustration of egg-and-dart molding that I shared with the tattoo artist before he inked my arm was from Palmyra.

One of the 50th-anniversary articles on the World's Fair of 1964-1965 reminded me that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey archives had been destroyed in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

And on it goes: Nineveh used by U.S. as military camp during Iraq War; the destruction of the National Library in Sarajevo. Just a couple from recent history. Someone said not too long ago that while a lost generation of people is horrifying, there is the possibility of recovery. Lost archives, artifacts, and buildings are gone forever. Some documentation or reconstruction may give us a sense of the original. Some reconstructions are an interesting riff on the original.

Of course, it's not only war, terrorism, and vandalism that destroy our heritage. We sometimes willfully take down Pennsylvania Station in New York City or the Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago. I don't consider myself a knee-jerk keep-it-all preservationist anymore. In most building demolitions, we at least think about whether the building, parts of it, or the stuff in and around it should be retained or reused.

1968: Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, at New Paltz

So there I was, minding my own business in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The Gregory Battcock Archive installation by Joseph Grigely was capturing my attention for a variety of reasons and then .... there .... on the wall was a poster for the Intermedia '68 tour by Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman to some SUNY campuses, including New Paltz. It's the lower framed item on the right wall in the picture above, image from the Grigely page on the Whitney Biennial website. Attending that concert is one of the most memorable, still in the mind's eye, occasions of my undergraduate years at New Paltz State.

The concert was so memorable for all the right reasons and for one more. At some point during the concert, a student, thinking this was participatory theater, threw a cymbal back on stage. All stage action stopped, Paik ordered that the student leave the auditorium. It may have seemed like chaos in the spring of 1968 but it was scripted theater and music, aka intermedia.

querelle posters

Separated at birth? No, appropriation. The upper picture is the theatrical release poster for the Fassbinder film Querelle (1982) from the Wikipedia page. The lower picture is a mock poster for the film by Francesco Vezzoli, part of Cinema Vezzoli which was to show at the vintage United Artists Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, early 2014, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art. That's what it says in the September 2013 issue of Art news, the text of which also appears on The Gravity Arts. The current information on the MOCA website looks like Cinema Vezzoli opens in a couple weeks at MOCA Grand Avenue and runs through the summer.

Brad Davis, OK. Josef Albers? I might have to come out to L.A. to see the Vezzoli exhibition.

imperfections and outliers

"Emilio had a scorch mark from the iron on his otherwise spotless shirt. It made him look quite fetching. A minor imperfection is always so seductive, especially if it hints at a story -- the faint trace of a scar, the most discreet of limps. The flawless tea-bowl is less beautiful, after all, according to the Japanese, than the tea-bowl with a slight distortion to its roundness, just as a full moon is less beautiful than a half-moon glimpsed through cloud, a cherry-tree in full bloom less beautiful than cherry-trees about to blossom, pristinely raked pebbles less beautiful than pebbles strewn with faded flowers. Emilio may well have less appealing imperfections (less accidental ones -- that is, more willed) but in the bar in the late afternoon light as he came towards us with his tray of sparkling glasses the mishap with the iron was working to his advantage."

I was reading this passage on page 131 in Night Letters by Robert Dessaix as I waited for the Bergren Forum to begin. This week's topic was outliers and the speaker was adjunct instructor of sociology Kelly Kirtland, studying for her doctorate at Cornell. Perhaps (non-criminal) outliers are more interesting because of their flaws even if they may play havoc with your sociological study.

This bowl is by Kohei Nakamura; image from http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_contri7/lNzJdw39a8pA76rF0Dcu

a little Prairie, a little Palladio

I "met" a new architect when I was identifying the pictures I took in Oak Park, Illinois, when I was out there in February for the College Art Association conference: Eben Ezra Roberts (1866-1943). I enjoyed this house, which is two doors down from the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, for the mix of Prairie style elements and Palladian (Serlian) window. This was the second house that Roberts designed for Andrew Jackson Redmond, in 1900. Roberts did a couple hundred houses in Oak Park, working at the same time as Wright. While I was perusing Frank Lloyd Wright and Prairie School architecture in Oak Park by Paul Sprague (2nd edition, 1978) for information on the photographed houses, I happened on another house that Roberts designed: H. Benton Howard House, 1903-1904, on Chicago Avenue. It looks to me more like Voysey than Wright though Sprague says it shows that Roberts was familiar with the work of Wright. Whatever, I wish I'd had the guide in hand as I meandered the streets of Oak Park with a tour group consisting mostly of CAA folks.

This the Howard house, with an image from prairiestyles.com:

book is just a dirty four-letter word

Way back in 1972, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote an essay in the New York Times about the library at Phillips Exeter Academy, designed by Louis Kahn. I'm reading her collected essays entitled On architecture, published by Walker in 2008. The Exeter library essay first appeared in October 1972. Her closing words about the library sound as though they could have been written quite recently.

"Mr. [Rodney] Armstrong [Exeter librarian] will be leaving Exeter to become the librarian of the Boston Atheneum on Walter Muir Whitehill's retirement next year, and a suitable parting gift would be completion of the still-unfinished terraces and planting. His parting gift to Exeter is one of permanent grace, in the pre-McLuhan tradition, although electronic resources are duly included.

'Book,' says Mr. Armstrong, obviously not believing it, 'has become a dirty four-letter word.'

'No one ever really paid the price of a book,' Kahn says, 'only the price of printing it.'

Together, they have made a beautiful box that celebrates books."

I haven't made it to Exeter, New Hampshire, to see this Kahn building but I've seen quite a few other Kahn buildings, including eating lunch many times on the porch of the Kimbell Art Museum. By the way, the Huxtable essays in On architecture are proving very enjoyable, especially since she is talking about buildings and architects that informed my appreciation of architecture way back then. And the historical distance is also intriguing.

(Photograph 2009 by Pablo Sanchez, Prague, from Wikimedia Commons)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phillips_Exeter_Library,_New_Hampshire_-_Louis_I._Kahn_%281972%29c.jpg

Speaking of historical distance, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has moved from a beaux-arts building on Massachusetts Avenue to the mid-century modernism of Watergate.

P.S. I'm still stunned that we were saying "electronic resources" 42 years ago, or at least Huxtable was.