A bit late

In a F.O.G.

Image of DZ Bank, Berlin, by Manuela Martin

The fall semester is not yet over, and I have been plunged into spring semester planning. I am teaching architecture criticism again, this time to undergraduates in NYU’s Urban Design and Architecture Studies program. I am thinking of adding films for the first time, partly as a fill-in for days when written critiques are due and few students actually do the reading assignment (2.5 hours is a long time when no one has anything to say but me), partly as a way to show a different form of architectural criticism, partly to give them something else to critique. The problem may be in keeping my mouth shut.

I started my pre-viewing with Sketches of Frank Gehry, Sydney Pollack’s 2005 documentary. I have been avoiding this film for years, not a Gehry fan, and I thought I might not make it through the first five minutes, so saccharine was the tone. I calmed down, and so did the hagiography (for a while), but I can’t say I learned a thing. It is deeply strange when a film about a contemporary architect never mentions any other living practitioner of architecture; uses only friends of Frank, all artists, buddies, clients (or all three), to comment on his work; and treats the only living architect most people have heard of as an embattled revolutionary figure. Maybe that was true of Gehry in 1975, or even 1985, but it is not any more, and after years of group therapy, he should know it. (As a side note, when Gehry’s therapist mentions that other architects have come to him hoping to be head-shrunk into geniuses, I couldn’t help but think of my husband’s former boss, also a group therapy habitue, and also someone who thinks of himself as an embattled revolutionary figure.)

Sketches plays like what it is, a noodling side project for a couple of old friends (Pollock is on camera half the time, and we often hear him agreeing with whatever Barry Diller, Thomas Krens et al. are saying in praise), tanned, leather-jacketed, successful. Gehry’s aw-shucks act is only eclipsed by Pollock’s, in a scene where he acts as if he has no idea why Frank asked him to make the documentary, and hasn’t the least idea how to do it.

But maybe he doesn’t. If the adulation hadn’t gotten to me, the lack of any brilliant scenography would have. The good thing about a film about architecture occasionally making it into theaters is the opportunity to expose more people to the thrills of buildings far away. The experiential and emotional qualities that the late Herbert Muschamp (also on screen praising Gehry above all others) was so good at dramatizing can be shown. But Pollock only tells, largely shooting the outsides of Gehry’s buildings in no particular order. The inside shots are static overviews with busy people. We never follow a ramp, discover titanium around a corner, get blinded by a reflection. We never get down on the ground, so one of the most interesting and controversial aspects of Gehry’s work, its urbanism, is totally lost.

I could go on: about the punch-pulling inherent in using an academic critic like Hal Foster, with whom no viewer will ever identify, as the lone negative voice; about the vague and invidious rejection of unnamed other architects’ work as “white cubes”; and so forth. But I won’t, because the way Gehry and Pollock set it up, I can only sound like a stick-in-the-mud unable to accept change.

Seasons Greetings

Is there anything less contemporary than a Christmas card? (As the daughter of a Jewish father I only send cards that read “Happy New Year!” but I call them Christmas cards anyway.) In my memories of childhood December brought a flood of two types of card: the folded kind, with a red or green background and Santa-snowmen-snowflakes-pine trees embossed in silver or gold; and the photo card, long and thin, with a white right-hand strip reading “Joy!” or “Happy Holidays!” from my parents’ graduate school friends, my aunts and uncles and cousins. The first kind sometimes had a school photo or a high amusing Xeroxed Christmas letter inside. The second kind simply was. As I became a teenager I began to make fun of the photos, which often featured matching outfits, one sulky family member, or wildly inappropriate out-of-season snaps.

Then the cards began to taper off. My mother can now count on two hands the number she receives but she, as a graphic designer, continues to send a card of her own design each year. They used to sometimes feature me and my brother. The year she welcomed two (!) grandchildren, they got pride of place. But I always thought, once I had a child, I would send a photo card.

Two years ago I did, and I did. The “Joy” cards seemed to have disappeared by then, to be replaced with a mash-up of types 1 and 2, photos floating over red and green (and sometimes blue, for the Jews) backgrounds patterned with Santas-snowmen-snowflakes-pine trees. But sprinkled amongst the traditional designs, with their scripty fonts, and their cutesy family appellations, were a few tagged “Modern”. These never seemed to me to actually be modern, as they replaced snowflakes with wallpaper, and red and green with baby blue and brown. What they were were Domino, made into a card. The faux scallop-edge label, the voluptuous serif lettering, the new traditional color combination. Domino freed women from the traditional, moved them to transitional, and Shutterfly and Co. noticed.

This year, some smaller sites have gone further, but only in a small way. Minted, which seems to be winning the UrbanBaby race for hip alternative, has only two designs I would consider. The rest still suffer from script, or stars, or foliage. One is above, the other my friends and family will soon receive. (I feel a pang about not designing my own, using VistaPrint, but decided my husband could use a break from our design process. I get to be art director.) Mango Ink is the other alterna-provider, but when I looked at their cards I realized that I do have a traditional side. Graffiti-style lettering, sullen-on-purpose kids, faux-antique lettering? Or big type and white backgrounds? The first seems like the Freeman’s of holiday cards, and I think its moment has almost passed. The second seems like inserting your family into a Gap ad. I would rather just spread some joy.

Where Have All the Type Geeks Gone?

Something has been bothering me about the Up In the Air ads. Not the cute teaser ads with little airplane, jaunty and retro, like the branding campaign JetBlue wishes it had, Alexander Girard’s Braniff extravaganza. The ones with George Clooney—nothing wrong with that, haircut looks good, better cast as a soulless man—and yet, they seemed to be lacking something.

It finally hit me when I saw one on top of a cab. In Queens, no less. The title, it’s in Helvetica. And it just looks wrong.

First I had to check with some of my lovely second-year SVA students just to make sure it was actually Helvetica, not one of the imitators. A false call would have been embarrassing, and I am never sure of my descenders. One of them suggested it was type for another sort of transport, the dream signage of Massimo Vignelli for the New York City subways. But then again, Vignelli used it for American Airlines, still in use, still using (some) Helvetica. It is printed on a signboard in the ad, and it might have been cleverer to split the type down the middle as homage to those now-obsolesced flip-boards—or to digitize it like their replacements. It might also have been cleverer to make typographic reference to whichever airline it is that George has a million miles on. Or to real airport signage, which suggests but rarely uses real Helvetica.

To me, the type in the ad looks undercooked. I couldn’t believe one of the design blogs I read had not called this misuse to my attention before my cab epiphany. Has the film made piling on Helvetica passe? Has it been out so long it is in again (and it is always in the hearts of architects)?

I rely on you to tell me.