I’ve been working on a couple of houses for Diller Scofidio +Renfro these past several months, and I know what you’re thinking: DS+R does houses? Well, yes, they do. Or at least, yes, they are doing some right now, even though they haven’t in a long time. Or ever, really.
But it’s funny, because when you think about it, a large part of this firm’s reputation was built off of the success of one particular house project: the Slow House. The original models of the Slow House still sit in various corners of the office, and every student who has gone through architecture school knows that project. And it’s still spoken of fondly in this office, a kind of happy ghost from an early era.
Now, of course, Lincoln Center and the High Line and the other recent (and future) Manhattan-based projects have become the germ from which most of our current projects stem, but these two new houses are a place for some architectural thinking that can only really be done on that scale, with that kind of client and program. And the office’s ideas and aesthetics have changed as well, and the pace and freedom of a small residential project is an exciting place to try out our ideas.
The whole point of this, though, is to point towards a website that I find continually great, and that I keep bumping into whenever I have to squat on an idea for a while: Stories of Houses, by Halldora Arnardottir and Javier Sanchez Marina. I don’t think it is updated anymore, but it’s trove of images of important and provoking houses built in the past is a great resource, and the writing is wonderful.
I’d almost been avoiding the PS1 Young Architects Award over the past several years because, without exception, its invited proposals were pretty uniformly disappointing, disheartening, and increasingly irrelevant. It’s hard to remember a time when I felt a proposal was architecturally challenging, didn’t pander to low-level social or spacial thinking, and was beautiful as well. Well, this year there was a proposal that actually made me pause, look hard, and think. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. The proposal was called “Bag Pile” byformless finder, based in NYC, essentially two young recent architectural grads from Princeton, Garrett Ricciardi and Julian Rose. I’m reposting some images here via Bustler. I’d reprint the mission statement from the formless finder website, as provoking as I think it is, but it’s probably better if you visit their site and just take a look at it.
It’s a bit weird, and almost jarring at first. It has a slightly apocalyptic feel to it, or at least suggestive of disorder and disarray. But that is exactly the point, really–it’s unlike anything that’s ever been proposed for what had become a tired, poor excuse for an event that was supposed to be a showcase of young architectural ideas.
Their approach was fairly radical, yet upon reflection, completely logical. The principal ideas were to use something heavy instead of light. To explore analog, instead of digital. To use found versus fabricated. Formless versus form.
I’m happy to see such divergent and intelligent thinking about this space and its program. The images, which are eerie yet captivating, embody their proposed ideas perfectly. Unfortunately, this proposal won’t be built, but the fact that its ideas have been published and presented well, bode well enough.
As much as I think it is a bit of a cop-out to post a link to a post I’d already written (which itself was a re-publication of a piece I’d written even longer ago), today is Groundhog’s Day and there is something about today that would seemingly make that ok. A long time ago, I wrote something about the movie Groundhog Day, by Harold Ramis and starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. As a short recap, it is a movie about one day in the life of Bill Murray’s character, were he forced to repeat it infinitely. Its main premise derives from everything that could occur from a simple disturbance in how we experience time. I never turn down an opportunity to watch it. And in turn, I have never been disappointed after watching it. It is time-defyingly good.
In a small digression, I’ve been doing a lot of research on watches lately. Wrist watches, specifically. For some reason, I got in my head a while back that the next thing that I wanted was a handcrafted Swiss timepiece. So in between my time spent at work, cramming for ARE exams, managing my stock portfolio (heavy on gold-short on China), wagering on professional football, and managing to be not completely asocial, I’ve been reading about works by A. Lange & Sohne, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, and Rolex. It’s hard not to want to own/experience one of those things once you know about them, and the horological world is a place where the knowledge is not easily exhausted. So I’ve been looking into buying one. Not anything digital, or electric, but the kind that are called “automatic” or “mechanical.” Maybe at some point one with “complications.” Run by gears, tourbillons, gyromaxes, oyster cases, and any matter of who-ha and what-not. You know, the kind that are a bit obscenely priced, and not altogether all that practical, but contain within each of them generations of knowledge derived from experiments, engineering, and a healthy dose of artisanship and inspiration. A while ago, in another post, I wrote about how a distinguishing idea about time is the primary contribution many famous architects have made to the concept of urbanity. Embodied in each watch is an idea about time, a theory of the meaning of that idea, and a mechanical execution of that idea. They’re wonderful things, and they remind me of how personal, relative, and individual our sense of time is.
These photographs of the office of Wikileaks are fairly remarkable, for various reasons. It seems straight out of a movie. Was that intentional? Why does an organization that supposedly tries to promote transparency need such an opaque environment? It seems a long way from the Bauhaus, when the idea of phenomenal and literal transparency was the architectural goal. It brings up an idea: as the world becomes more data-permeable, does that mean that material impermeability becomes more important?
The San Francisco Giants just won the World Series, and as I stopped by a bar after work to catch the game (alongside some Monday Night Football), I thought about how baseball is the one sport in which a “perfect game” is one in which literally nothing happens (I also thought about how I missed PacBell Park or SBC Park or whatever they call it now). In any other sport, a game in which neither side scores would be described as “ugly,” “a bad ambassador to the sport,” or “an unmitigated disaster.” But tonight, watching the wonderful duel between Tim Lincecum and Cliff Lee, this sort of nothingness is a taut, tense exposition on control.
The contrast on the screens of the sports bar in Fort Greene that I stopped by on the way home from work was interesting–on the left: baseball (the most nostalgic of sports), on the right: American football (the most complex, interesting, and metaphorical of sports). It’s hard to imagine describing a single game of any other sport as “perfect,” as baseball does–what is a perfect soccer game? Perfect football game? The corollary for tennis, I suppose, would be what we called a “bagel” when I was a young tennis player: 6-0, 6-0. It was ugly and you didn’t want to watch it. But tennis is an individual sport. Baseball, ostensibly a team sport, is not quite an individual sport, yet not quite a true team sport. It’s more of an aggregation of individual actions. Just as how the Davis Cup or Ryder Cup ostensibly has teams, all three are essentially just a simple sum of individual results. They have nothing of the complex planning, coordination, and hierarchy, mixed with a hearty dose of controlled randomness, of American football–essentially, all the components of life in a modern, developed world. In contrast, soccer, I believe, will never catch on in America because it’s too Third World–the structure of the game is a continual flow of accreted improvisations across a field of undifferentiated actors with an absolute minimum of oversight and quantification. Planning, strategy, coaching, and analysis are second to the coherence and cooperation of all eleven players on the field per side. Very un-American.
Malcolm Gladwell & Bill Simmons
The best reason to watch American football, however, is as a supplement to reading the work of best young writers who are working in America today. There is a long history of American sports writing, from George Plimpton to Norman Mailer, and it often seems that the only sporting events of any cultural significance are the ones that are being written about by the best writers. A while ago, boxing captured the imaginations of a generation’s best writers. Today, I believe it is American football that has the attention of the brightest. My favorite writers, Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman, write extensively about American football, and are continual points of imaginative and inspiring writing.
I just wanted to quickly share one of the comments on my design imperialism post that was sent to me by a friend. Of the many I’ve received, it’s one of the more intelligent. Here’s what (s)he has to say:
“Not considering the moral aspects of the conversation it seems that architects are often at their best (most interesting, most socially useful, most poignant) when they are questioning and speculating, and that is in a sense at odds with the concept of designing solutions. I’m not sure how you interpret ‘no ideas but in things’, does it hint at a possible bias on this topic?
“The notion of architecture as an expression of power is interesting, it aligns architects immediately with politicians. This is inevitable in a sense given that architecture, like politics, resides outside of, or parallel to, the biggest force in our American lives, the economy. Because architecture isn’t bought and sold in a market of producers and consumers it cycles separately, it has it’s own peaks and valley. There is unfortunately no Keynesian theory that can explain the great PoMo bubble of the early 80’s. (Somewhat unrelatedly, Mumford’s history tracing the development of the city at the birth of the modern market economy is amazing in its illumination of the sometimes subtle sometimes overt relationship between urban centers and mercantile interests.) But I also think it’s misleading to describe architecture as a kind of politics. The differences between politics and architecture are ultimately too great to hold the two together for very long. Politics is power, explicitly. Every governmental system is an application of an idea about the holding, distribution and application of power. Architecture merely expresses power, sometimes. It’s more interesting to think about the fact that architecture has an expressive ability at all, and it has it in spades. The design colonists effect to abdicate expression for blunt problem solving (no ideas, just things), while their detractors accuse them of being destructively expressive, of in effect repressing other forms of expression (ideas over things).
“I sawRadiant Child, the new Basquiat biopic, this weekend and one of the talking heads frames what’s good about his work in a way that I like. I’m paraphrasing poorly, but he says something like Basquiat’s best work essentially says to the viewer, ‘open your eyes, the world is a complex place full of beautiful, terrible and contradictory ideas; start noticing them; here are a few hints.’ This might also be Koolhaas’s gift.”
I got a lot of responses from my last post on design imperialism, and you can read some of them on the comments section of that post. Really, a lot of the responses just proved my point that it’s often hard to get unemotional responses when you bring this topic up–and I’m not quite sure why. Sometimes, in defense of imperialism, you get some really weird writing, much like Bono’s op-eds in the New York Times, or Cameron’s Sinclair’s nonsensical responses to the article that kicked off this debate most recently on the web (Bruce Nussbaum’s “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?“). Nevertheless, the exchange allowed me to put in writing more concretely some issues that I only briefly sketched around in other posts. So, for the sake of posterity, these are the issues I’m concerned about in regards to foreign interventions:
What steps/methods need to be taken to ensure that foreign intervention doesn’t end up creating dependency: political, economic, or intellectual? How do you avoid reiterating or reifying the power structures that created the need for aid in the first place?
Does material/physical concerns outweigh mental/spiritual? As in, if you save a group from suffering from water-borne disease, but breed resentment and ill-will through “drive-by aid,” is one worth the cost to the other? How much?
How much knowledge of another culture do you need before you can feel confident to enter their community and change things? Is the language enough? Two years of study? Does having attended an elite Western university prepare you to intervene on any community, anywhere? Why not the other way around?
Across what kind of scale do you think it’s appropriate to act? Does one type of intervention work unfailingly for an entire continent? A country? A city? A community? A group of friends? One person?
Across what spans of times can we frame the parameters for success or failure? If one generation benefits from an intervention, but the next one is harmed by it, is the project a success? If some group shows benefits within the year, but the next year no progress is shown, was the intervention a success? Or is the idea that no matter what harm you do immediately, generations that follow will benefit (the Mao-George W gambit)? What kind of time frame do we frame our actions by?
Do certain fields of intervention have differing criteria for the above? As in, if you’re an architect, the scales and time frame by which we judge your work is such and such; however, if you are a doctor, then these are the parameters by which we will judge the effectiveness of your aid?
How much resistance are you willing to fight in order to impose your ideas/designs/solutions/food/aid/medicine/politics? From where is resistance acceptable, since there is inevitably some from some place or another. How much resistance is the sign to cease and desist? Like in the spread of vaccines? Or in politics? i.e., “We must destroy the village in order to save the village.”
As much as it is possible to put down in words what concerns me about design imperialism or foreign interventions, the above is as best as I can frame it at this point. I think in all of the above points, there is a fundamental line that each of us has to draw, where we delineate how much harm we are willing to do to attempt to help in whatever way we can. This is in part because I believe that is in our fundamental human nature to destroy as much as we create, and life itself is an endless cycle of creation and destruction. You just have to decide how many eggs you are willing to break to create the omelet you want to make.
One of my favorite moments in the great Stanley Kubrick movie, Full Metal Jacket, is when the main character, a journalist for the Army, runs into a high ranking officer on one of his assignments. The office asks the journalist, why are you wearing a helmet that says ‘Born to Kill’ along with a peace symbol? And the protagonist tries to laugh off the question, but the officer or general won’t let it go. Why? he continues to shout over the loud din of surrounding battle site. Finally, the journalist gives in, and answers the commanding officer–he shouts: “WELL, I GUESS I WAS TRYING TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE DUALITY OF MAN.” To which the officer just stands there, dumbfounded, and then says–get on our team–inside every gook is an American trying to get out.
It was a great moment in American cinema, and the spectrum of movies that were made about the Vietnam War continue to be marvels of moviemaking, for various reasons that might have a lot to do with the way movie studios were structured at that time. However, such sentiment is more common in the Japanese movies that I’ve seen. In many Japanese movies, there doesn’t exist this idea of a binary good versus evil that probably is most archetypically found in examples by Disney. A lot of Japanese movies start out with a crisis, like any traditional narrative would, but as the movie unwinds, we find that the agent causing the strife to begin with isn’t something with malicious or malevolent intent, as we would in any standard American film. Instead, the cause of the suffering in many Japanese movie is another person who is trying to do GOOD. It’s just that that one idea of how to do good is causing hurt to another way of life. It’s a more sophisticated and mature understanding of human nature, and it’s something that gets lost when people try to discuss issues such as ‘imperialism.’ Often, people on one side or the other of that issue caricature the other sides’ argument, trying to box the opposing viewpoint into some sort of absolutist position: you are good if you believe this; you are bad if you believe that.
This is why I never really understood giving George W. Bush a hard time. I don’t mean to defend him, and in my personal opinion, I believe he caused incredible amounts of harm and suffering. But I always felt he sincerely was trying to help people. A lot of people disagreed, and for good reason. But he staked his ground, and acted upon it. The issue is what conclusions he came to in regards to the issues I listed above. For example, in issue number 5 that I brought up above, it’s very easy to say that for George W. Bush, he thought the time frame in which he would be judged is over many generations. History will vindicate him, he often said, by which he meant that anywhere from 10-200 years in the future we will not look at him so harshly. So it was fine if he sent thousands of people to die immediately, invaded countries and created animosity, provoked enemies and created huge swaths of political instability–FOR NOW. He knew the sacrifices he would be making, or so I believe. He sat in front of families of soldiers who were maimed and killed. He simply thought it would be worth it–good would come out of his actions–AT SOME POINT IN THE FUTURE. I find that conclusion dangerous. But some people believe in it. But I felt it was immature to simply call him evil. That isn’t understanding anything, any more than when he called Iran or North Korea evil. This is what I mean when I think it’s important to think about the issues I listed above, and to discuss them without rage or caricaturing the other side. What time frame is acceptable for us to judge our interventions?
But actually, I’m not sure that Bush understood the magnitude of the sacrifices he made other people go through for his idea of doing good–and that was a critique that was often leveled at him, fairly, I believe. In a similar, but very personal way, I’m not sure that most people understand the magnitude of cultural and intellectual oppression that can occur when one country, with whatever good intentions, enters another and gives aid. This is the resentment from locals that Bruce Nussbaum pointed out whenever there was some presentation about a fancy new aid intervention being bestowed upon some community. The underlying message, though delivered with a smile and good intentions, is pure and simple, from one culture to another: you need our help. You can’t do this on your own, and it’s your fault. We thought of this–you didn’t. We’re better than you.
Downtown Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
I’ve often felt this because I actually feel it is a defining national psychological trait of the Vietnamese people. As a country that has been colonized, or attempted to be, by well meaning Western powers for most of the 20th century, subtle reminders of our cultural inferiority are there at every building in the center of town built in the French colonial style, or in the numbers of children still born with birth defects due to Agent Orange, or quite frankly, in the numbers of Westerners coming in and handing out candy and food and discarded clothing as some well-meaning but ultimately humiliating gesture. I worked as a medical assistant in an orphanage in the center of Ho Chi Minh City for one summer. There was a storage room full of candy from such foreign visitors. More than they could give away.
The Vietnamese-American novelist Andrew X Pham wrote about this cultural feeling of inferiority a bit in his wonderful memoir, Catfish and Mandala. And I think you sense it a bit in sensitive novels like Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The main means of transportation in Vietnam are these mopeds: small engine motorcycles that cost about $2000 for a nice Japanese model. The Honda Dream model was the most desired of the road in Ho Chi Minh City (they considered Vespas too unreliable). Since the streets were literally bursting at the seams with these foreign mopeds, and this sort of transport was sort of unique to Vietnam (these Japenese models aren’t used in Japan), I naturally wondered if there wasn’t a local manufacturer. When I asked the local people why there was no Vietnamese producer of mopeds, the unified response was, “There’s no way–we’re not as smart as other countries that can produce cars and such.” This sentiment, I feel, is in part due to the legacy of colonialism. This is why I’m concerned when somebody with little knowledge of another culture feels entitled to travel thousands of miles to give aid–be it in the form of design, medicine, or other forms to a community they have little understanding of. The issue is time, scale, and power (see the list above)–strangely, very architectural concerns. I assume the intentions are good. I just feel the results can often be bad–in ways that can be too subtle to measure, but are ultimately devastatingly debilitating.
