A bit late

China as Architectural Haven/Heaven?

I can’t let the New York Times’s insanely rosy picture of China as a savior for mid-size U.S. firms get buried over the weekend. Talk about an article without context: minimal Chinese reporting (no dateline), a rendering of what looks like two Pacific Northwest houses bonded together with glue, and no counter-experiences. It makes it sound as if only the Chinese are insane enough to build the inside of Steven Holl’s brain: that may be the only truth.

These firms are grateful for the commissions, and not only for the obvious reason — that the Chinese work has helped fill the void left by a listless American economy. More intriguing, the architects say, is that Chinese developers and even government agencies are proving to be better clients than their American counterparts. They say the Chinese are more ambitious, more adventurous and even more willing to spend the money necessary to realize the designs. This thrills the architects, who have artistic undercurrents that often struggle to find an outlet.

I Tweeted over the weekend:

For @nytimes article on US architects in China, they couldn’t find anyone who’s been burned? Awfully rosy account http://nyti.ms/h8bHEd

I was thinking of a couple of architects who have had big China projects, worked on for months, just disappear. No more phone calls. I’ve also heard about U.S. architects fired who then saw their designs built under a Chinese architect’s name. It is hard enough to get copyright protection for a building design in America. Greg.org also Tweeted back:

Alvaro Siza found out developer had doubled his design. MT @LangeAlexandra @nytimes couldnt find any architects who’ve been burned in China?

It is nice to see architecture not in the Arts section, but if this is the quality of reporting, I’ll go back to Robin and Nicolai.

Not Afraid of Color

For once, Alice Rawsthorn and I think alike.

From her T Magazine piece on the Le Corbusier palette.

Whatever you imagined, I’ll bet it was in black and white. It’s a safe bet, because our perceptions of early Modernism — at the Bauhaus design school in 1920s Germany, or the purist villas that Le Corbusier was building in France — are shaped by the photographs taken at the time, and they were all in black and white.

In fact, Modernist interiors were much more vivid than the photographs suggest. When you go to those places, you’ll discover that although many of them do indeed sport gleaming glass, tubular steel and so on, there are often glorious splashes of color to complement the white walls. And one of the most gifted colorists of the era was none other than Le Corbusier himself; the vibrant shades he chose then are among the best you’ll find today.

That’s Maison La Roche-Jeanneret, now home of the Le Corbusier foundation, built in 1925.

Cranky fact-check: Can you have a nickname for a (self-bestowed) nickname? It is not as if Le Corbusier was known as such at birth. Corb is really just archi-shorthand. I always write LeC in my notes.

From “Why This Book?” in Design Research.

I wrote my dissertation on American corporate architecture and design of the 1950s and 1960s, and one of my discoveries was the amount of color and texture in the work of designers like Florence Knoll and Eero Saarinen. The black-and-white photos we typically see of their work leave that out, as do many of the history books. Caring about interiors began to seem like a subversive interest for an architectural historian, yet it turns out it was a subversive interest for architects such as Ben Thompson.

We usually see icons like Eames chairs in a vacuum: in expensive catalogues against a white background, or in minimalist apartments with white walls and oak floors. As museum pieces they seem like a cliché. But the D/R way of combining modernism and folk and crazy fabrics and fruit and flowers was much richer, more interesting, and more personal than that, as I hope this book shows. Ben Thompson was trying to overcome staid, matchy-matchy formalism; today we need to overcome matchy-matchy modernism.

Masdar: So Many Questions

So Nicolai heads out of town in order to find a sustainable city, and returns questioning the nature of utopia, suburbia, and Manhattan.

And yet Masdar seems like the fulfillment of that idea. Ever since the notion that thoughtful planning could improve the lot of humankind died out, sometime in the 1970s, both the megarich and the educated middle classes have increasingly found solace by walling themselves off inside a variety of mini-utopias.

This has involved not only the proliferation of suburban gated communities, but also the transformation of city centers in places like Paris and New York into playgrounds for tourists and the rich. Masdar is the culmination of this trend: a self-sufficient society, lifted on a pedestal and outside the reach of most of the world’s citizens.

Masdar, IKYDK, is “the world’s first zero-carbon city” built on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi and designed by Foster & Partners. And Ouroussoff’s point is well-taken, though I question shoehorning in a critique of the current state of Paris and New York so casually, unless he intends to take up the populist urban cudgel later.

But (and you know there would be a but) so many other questions occurred to me as I read his critic’s notebook, questions that seem to pre-date whether or not this was just another gated community.

Like, how much carbon does it take to build a zero-carbon city, much less one in the desert? Aren’t there places on earth better suited to such efforts, if lacking in oil money? Is it carbon neutral if the gas we’ve been buying for the last 10 years paid for the wind towers and solar arrays?

From a design perspective, aren’t those gorgeous pierced screens, based on the traditional mashrabiya, a little too cute? They are made of concrete, tinted to match traditional terra cotta, and remind me excessively of the 1950s and 1960s modernist American embassies by Edward Durell Stone, Harry Weese, et. al. that wrapped your basic Bunshaft box in a concrete version of the traditional ornament. Meanwhile, the research buildings are as high tech, and placeless, as can be.

The slideshow shows Masdar to be a present and future architectural extravaganza. Are there any fabric buildings, or does it include every idea Foster wasn’t allowed to build elsewhere? Ouroussoff rightly notes the retro-futuristic nature of those electric cars. They hail from the same era as the screens, and an entirely different mindset than the ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene—“a super-strong translucent plastic”—facades.

The most casually chilling comment is probably Foster’s:

The result, Mr. Foster acknowledged, feels a bit like Disneyland. “Disneyland is attractive because all the service is below ground,” he said. “We do the same here — it is literally a walled city. Traditional cars are stopped at the edges.”

I would love to explore this a little more. Was Walt Disney the ruling urbanist for the 21st century? How different is the way Disneyland buries services underground than, say, Brooklyn? What else is buried here?

This is all a little too sci fi for me, a world split into new archi-cities in which service is soundless and carbon neutral and the messy realities we manufactured from 1851 to 2009 (pick your own dates). Does Foster really think he can plan so far ahead that Masdar will never have its own version of the Second Avenue Subway? Years in the planning, massive urban disruption, the unattractive innards rearing their head above the city’s skin. If H.G. Wells were writing today the Morlocks would be the systems that serve us. To push Ouroussoff’s critique to a spookier place, Masdar is a city apparently designed for Eloi.

NYT Opinionator: What’s Cooking in Kitchen Design?

Second of my three installments for the New York Times Living Rooms series, this one on kitchens: What’s Cooking in Kitchen Design?

So how did we go from efficiency to entertainment? In “Mad Men,” Betty Draper has wall ovens and a stove-top island, both desirable today; the differences are the brown plaid wallpaper and cabinets made from dowdy knotted pine. In other words, what felt like a battle in the 1920s was, by the mid-1960s, a victory. The emphasis on time-saving consumer technology, born in the Frankfurt Kitchen and fueled by the postwar domestic revolution in the United States, brought us the microwave, the fridge-freezer combo, the automatic coffee maker and a thousand other gadgets; with those in place, we could relax. The barrier between the workplace of the kitchen and the social space of the living room broke down; we could invite the rest of the family in.

My favorite discovery during my research for the piece was the Hoosier cabinet, pictured above, a turn-of-the-century labor-saving device that put all ingredients and utensils within the cook’s reach. Many examples even had rule-of-thumb recipe charts developed by “home engineer” Christine Frederick pasted inside the cupboard doors. (For a great visual history of the American kitchen, buy America’s Kitchens published by Historic New England.)

My original inspiration for this essay was the upcoming MoMA exhibition Counter Space: Design on the Modern Kitchen, which opens September 15 on the museum’s second floor (always exciting when design breaks out of its third-floor ghetto). I interviewed curator Juliet Kinchin for the story, and the exhibit sounds amazing, starting with the installation of a real Frankfurt Kitchen (1926-1927), one of thousands installed in German social housing in the 1920s and 1930s.

Designed by Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky, the kitchen is (appropriately? ironically?) the earliest work by a woman architect in the museum’s collection, as well as one of the most influential. What first struck me about it—shallow, I know— was its color palette, which looks so current and so Remodelista. And those bins! I need those, and so do you.

On a personal note, since this was cut from the story: I grew up with the dread avocado fridge. Not my mother’s choice, what our house in Cambridge came with. Funny thing is, by next year, I think they are not going to be a joke anymore.

Finally, so my blog doesn’t become all D/R, all the time, just a link to Pentagram’s new post on my book Design Research, which shows inside spreads and talks about how the design and writing team worked together.

And another link to Architizer’s excellent summary, From D/R to IKEA.

Texts Without Context

I keep thinking about Michiko Kakutani’s piece from last Sunday’s New York Times, Texts Without Context. In it she summarized a number of books, including Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, that begin the discussion of what is being lost to culture by the supremacy of the web. I have had such thoughts myself over the past year, but suppressed most of them out of the fear that I was just not getting it. I am a notoriously late adopter, as well as a bit of a romantic, and I thought I might just be over the hill at 37. But here is a troop of books by people with other skills—economic, technological—saying fearful things about the future of reading, writing, research, creativity with which I agree. There seems to be a relentless media push forward at the moment which shames those who mourn the past, and makes the desire for correction seem retrograde. I joined Twitter a month ago, and I am still not sure it isn’t a venue for people in the media to talk at each other. Or something that gives smartphone users a reason to use their phones. If you read the Times Business section you might think EVERYONE had an iPhone. And I know from the contents of my own purse that’s not true.

There were a number of passages in Kakutani’s essay that rang true to my own experience… and for the career prospects of those of us who think writing is worth something.

As John Updike pointed out, [Kevin] Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”

Indeed, I fear oblivion every morning.

[Lanier] points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

And it is not just old stuff. The amount of duplication of information blog to blog is staggering. I saw OK Go’s new video in five different contexts within a couple of days, meaning that it became old news almost immediately. If the lifespan of a work is five minutes, why should you spend more than five minutes making it? (I ask, having made the rounds with several publishers over the last six months.)

“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, [Sunstein] writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities.” He adds that studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.

This is why I still subscribe to the New York Times. If I didn’t, I am not sure I would have ever seen Kakutani’s essay. I am not sure I would have heard of Jaron Lanier’s book without my weekly flip through the Book Review. As I page through the paper, reading it from back (Arts) to front each day, I at least look at every headline. I have serendipitous encounters with all sorts of news I would not have thought I was interested in. It is one of the things my parents did every morning that bored me until, miraculously, it began to interest me. I hope my son can have serendipity too, and not the StumbleUpon kind.

Times Op-Ed: Hole Earth Catalog

On the New York Times Op-Ed page today, my suggestion for an adopt-a-pothole program for New York City. If we are teaching our children about botony in the schoolyards, why not teach them about the ecology of the urban environment?

Urban ecology is very topical, what with the opening of the MoMA exhibition Rising Currents tomorrow (I wrote about it here). Among the five fascinating proposals is one by ARO and dlandstudio to replace the asphalt of Lower Manhattan, block by block, with permeable pavements that would absorb rainwater and storm surges, rather than redirecting both to the overtaxed sewers. Planted swales along the sides of the streets would replace parking spots with native, absorptive plants. A side benefit would be no more potholes: these streets would breathe, thus ending the freeze-thaw cycle that results in pocked pavement.

If you are just joining me as a result of the op-ed, you might be interested in some of my previous posts on New York City and public works: Governors Island, Brooklyn Bridge Park (opening today!) and Atlantic Yards.

The Mysteries of Retail

I loved this the last time, design bestsellers and bombs, via New York Times Home section. These are the stores that are carefully curating their selection, not selling the same things that you can get online for less, and, I bet, exist in quirky spaces of their own.

However, their customers clearly exist in a different retail universe than I do. I don’t spend more than $100 easily, and certainly not for something breakable, without function, or something for my kid that costs more than anything I own. So I am not a bit surprised that the bowl of melted army men (above) did not fly off the shelves along with the other bombs (boat seat, $42 tea towel). Hipsters without children are gullible, so I can see them buying Sally Voor’s leather piglets, not realizing that it is a rare child that prefers to stand books on end. The stackable melamine bowls and measuring spoons, however, are genius. I think the Conran Shop is right to bet on the red bench, mostly because it doesn’t look so modern. But: more bowls, candlesticks, and tabletop ornaments for hundreds of dollars? Hasn’t everyone in America been through the lemon centerpiece phase, and realized that the center of your table can just remain open?

The Women

Zaha Hadid, The Peak Project, Kowloon, Hong Kong (1991)

Last week was the week the New York Times discovered there were no successful female directors. Or maybe just one. The contrast between Manohla Dargis’s truth-telling rant on Jezebel and Daphne Merkin’s accepting profile of Nancy Meyers in the magazine could not have been more stark. One blew up the annual think-piece about the lack of women in charge in Hollywood, the one that always includes hand-wringing, nature-v-nurture debates and the suggestion that women don’t want it enough, or don’t go to the movies enough, or trumpet the exceptionalism of Meyers and her close compatriot in the realm of middle-aged female fantasy, Nora Ephron. The other affirmed a number of gauzy ideas about the limits of the female audience’s appetite for a challenge, and failed to advance the dialogue about just which kind of porn Meyers promulgates: sex after 50, or a sexy kitchen.

I love movies, and like Dargis believe rom-coms deserve better but will always have their place at the cineplex. But I also felt a sense of relief. At least people were talking truthfully about women in Hollywood. The narrative of struggle and failure, lack of opportunity and lack of progress, are the same in Architectureland, but no one ever talks about it, least of all the women.

Case in point: the profile of Zaha Hadid in the same week’s New Yorker, simultaneously cruel and caressing. It is a positive profile, accepting of Hadid as a genius, uncritical of her built work, establishing that work’s intellectual sources in Arabic calligraphy and Suprematism. (The first argument I had never heard before, the second I always considered ex post facto rationalization for the architects grouped in the MoMA’s Deconstructivist Architecture show.) But the article is also undermining, with an opening that focuses on her wired assistants, her talking with her mouth full, her chilliness (personal and interpersonal). Her portrait on the same spread is one of the most unflattering I have seen. Like celebrity profilers, looking, literally, for crumbs as revelatory of character, Seabrook focuses on the person of Hadid, rather than her work, and comes away with little. The rap on Hadid has been that she is all self-image, that her buildings are empty shows, and the profile only reinforces that shallow stereotype.

It also allows Hadid to completely sidestep discussion of her place as the only women to win a Pritzker, and the most famous living female architect, feinting at the question with old news about why her Cardiff Opera House was never built (sexism, traditionalism, Prince Charles). I wrote a review of a monograph on architect Deborah Berke last year and found the same refusal to engage on the part of both author and subject. I think both Berke and Hadid are playing by the old rules of silence about gender, ones that didn’t work in Hollywood and haven’t yet worked in architecture. How can the experience of women in architecture improve if no one ever talks about it? We need a Dargis to blow up the 30-year-old narrative.