Human's Scribbles

Urbanized

2012-02-12T23:05:00.000+01:00

After Helvetica (2007) and Objectified (2009), Gary Hustwit came back with the last installment of his design film trilogy – Urbanized. It’s equally charming, informative, and concise. It flows smoothly from Asian cities like Mumbai and Beijing to Santiago, Bogotá, Brasília and Rio in South America, to Cap Town in South Africa; from Copenhagen, Brighton, Stuttgart in Europe to New York, New Orleans, Detroit and Phoenix in the US, touching on key urban issues along the way, such as fast growth, shrinking cities, suburbia, slums, social housing, public infrastructure, public art, community gardens, energy consumption, technology, public involvement and protests. It’s packed with ideas and opinions from leading scholars and designers, including Ricky Burdett, Jan Gehl, Alejandro Aravena, Yung Ho Chang, James Corner, Norman Foster, Oscar Niemeyer, and of course, Rem Koolhaas, although his thinking has already shifted to the countryside.

The mood of the film is generally upbeat, even though it starts in Mumbai with its slums, where 600 people share one toilet seat. (Officially in Mumbai, one toilet seat for 50 people is considered adequate sanitation.) India and China are in the middle of a rapid development. At the end of last year, China reported for the first time that its urban population had passed 50%. (And the film predicts that by 2050, 75% of the world population would call a city home.) Many urban problems were created under the economic boom. As Rem says, market economy has so much power that there is very little room left for design and thinking. Mourning the lost quality of life in Beijing, Yung Ho Chang advocates a collective effort to correct the mistakes. “In the past thirty years, cities were conceived and designed to be part of the economic development, which is OK. But livability was really ignored until recently. It’s not convenient, not comfortable.” Bruce Katz points out, “It can’t just take the recipe from 20th century America and apply it to 21st century China or India. That would be horrendous for them, and it would be horrendous, frankly, for all of us.”

Slums in Mumbai

The inconvenience of Beijing

20th century America? It was not a history of urbanization, but actually a vivid process of counter-urbanization. Endless sprawl hollowed out the center of cities, and the highways resulted in soaring car use and energy consumption. Is suburbia an “American dream” or a nightmare?

Interestingly, what’s happening in South America seems to offer fair examples of contemporary city building. In Bogotá, Colombia, former mayor Enrique Peñalosa believes “what creates traffic is not the number of cars, but the number of trips and the length of the trips.” Therefore, he restricted car use by restricting parking, and introduced TransMilenio, a bus-based public transit system, to ease traffic jams. (It reminds me of the Metro Cable system in Caracas, Venezuela.) Peñalosa also promoted bike lanes. In the film, he proudly points out that in one section of a new road, “the pedestrians and bicycles have pavement, and the cars are in the mud.” Another equally proud mayor Eduardo Paes of Rio talks about the high-tech Operation Center they built to take care of the everyday life of their people. All the departments of the city are here. “There is a big screen, bigger than NASA, that I really like.”

TransMilenio in Bogotá

Mayor Peñalosa points out the mud road for cars while cycling on a paved bike lane

Operation Center in Rio de Janeiro

Alejandro Aravena talks about the Elemental projects in Chile. The innovative partnership rethinks the ways to deliver social housing. In the project in Lo Barnechea, Santiago (2010), for example, instead of a fully built tiny house, they provided half of a good house, and let the family build the other half with their own timing, according to their own needs. One intriguing story about this “participatory design” approach is the choice between a water heater and a bathtub. They didn’t have money for both. Politicians wanted water heater, but all the families preferred a bathtub. The fact is that “when they move in, they don’t have the money to pay the bill to heat the water,” so a private bathtub would be an easier step up in terms of quality of life.

“Half of a good house” in Lo Barnechea, Santiago

Talking about South American cities, Brasília is an inevitable topic. The film features the 103-year-old Oscar Niemeyer, who considers Brasília a wonderful masterpiece. He says, “I think architecture is invention. In architecture it isn’t enough to just have the right building that works well. It can also be beautiful, it can be different, it can create surprise. And surprise is the main thing in a work of art.” Jan Gehl disagrees. In his opinion, Brasília looks fantastic from the plane, but when it gets to eye level, it’s a disaster. “Every distance is too wide; things are not connected; you have to tremble endless miles and miles along completely straight paths.” He continues, “A good city is like a good party. People are able to forget place and time, and just enjoy.” “Don’t look at how many people are walking in the city. But look at how many people have stopped walking to stay and enjoy what is there.” Of course he means Copenhagen. He points out an interesting fact about the bike lanes there: there are usually parked cars between the bike lanes and the moving cars. It gives a sense of security and further encourages people to use their bicycles as much as possible.

Walking in Brasília

Bike lanes in Copenhagen

It seems everything is a design decision. Director of NYC Department of City Planning Amanda Burden claims, “When you walk down the street, everything you see has been designed.” But what I appreciate more are the “undesigned” aspects of cities, the “chance encounters,” as Norman Foster puts it. “Something unexpected will happen along the way and you will make a discovery. That in a way is the magic of cities.” When designing the High Line, James Corner asked himself, “What will design actually mess up here? What through design will you destroy it?” In the end, it’s really just about “showcasing Manhattan in a way that is so authentic, it’s not overly manicured, overly scripted.”

It’s interesting to see the design film trilogy moves up in scale over the years, in search of the impact of design on our built environment. Helvetica was about a typeface, and graphic design in general. Objectified covered the objects/products and industrial design. And it had to end up in cities and talk about urban design to complete the explorations. Hustwit chose to close Urbanized with Edgar Pieterse’s remark: “Fundamentally as a species, we need things that can power our imaginations, that can get our passions going, that can give us a sense of meaning. And that is not a brick; it is not a pipe. It is an idea. That’s what drives cities forward.” Yes, it is the idea. And I think that’s really what drives all design disciplines, and ultimately humanity, forward.

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PS. One quote from Rem that doesn’t really relate to cities (I told you he’s not thinking about that any more), but I found it quite interesting: “There is an incredible amount of wasted effort in the profession. A fair amount of it is generated through the procedure of competitions, which is really a complete drain of intelligence. At the same time you are important, we invite your thinking, but we also announce that there is 80% chance that we will throw away your thinking and make sure that it is completely wasted.”

The shrine of design

2012-01-31T11:38:00.000+01:00

The Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz is the first major solo show of the French brothers’ almost 15 years of design collaboration. Titled “Bivouac,” the show is staged to be a temporary encampment. The 1,000-square-meter gallery is filled with beautiful objects, but the space is far more than just display of things. The ensemble creates a powerful atmosphere, something so stunning and moving that it almost feels holy. It is religious. It is the shine of design.

Honda vase and Conque wall lights in the back

The monumental scale of the gallery space enables large installations of the modular pieces. There are Clouds (2008) right at the entrance, with Twigs (2004) and Tiles (2006) on either side. These three “walls” are arranged parallel to the long gallery, while transparent screens assembled perpendicularly to divide the space naturally into zones yet at the same time maintain the visual connection of the gallery. Through Cloud Modules (2002) on one end and Algues (2004) on the other, one can see a rich superimposition of different scales, textures, and colors.

Clouds

Tiles on the left

Clouds and Osso chairs

Twigs on the left

Twigs (Branches)

Cloud modules at the end

Through the “cloud”

The Algues screen divides the space softly

Through Algues

Monumentality doesn’t exclude intimacy. Unlike a typical museum setting full of “please don’t touch” signs, the Bouroullec exhibition actually encourage interaction with the objects. The immersive experience allows visitors to feel the comfort and tactile dimension of the work with their own body. “Comfort is one of their foremost concerns, in their eyes a responsibility even.” wrote Constance Rubini, head of cultural programming at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The Textile Field (2011), originally staged at the V&A for the London Design Festival, is reenacted here in the exhibition. Sit down, or lie down. Stare at the Bell lamp (2005) or the Aim Lamp (2011), make a sketch, and contemplate.

Sit down on the Ploum sofa

Textile Field and the Bell lamp above

Sit/lie down on the Textile Field

Aim Lamp is one of the most recent designs in the room

One may spot keywords like nomadic, ephemeral, modular, organic, playful, or flexible to describe the Bouroullec brothers’ work. But to me, there is really no theme. Their work is not about rhetoric or even meaning. As the brothers say, their design is not very “talkative.” It’s expressive and intuitive. This is evident in the iPad app “Cercles” that accompanies the exhibition, which doesn’t offer any text explanation of the objects. After all, Algues doesn’t come with an IKEA-like assembly instruction.

Joyn office system showing the “Cercles” app on iPads

Sketch, felt pen on digital print, 2005 (featured in the the “Cercles” app)

In the exhibition there are also “behind the scene” videos showing how the Bouroullec brothers work. The atelier looks like a lab, where drawings are made with felt pens and prototyping emphasizes on the importance of the craftsman’s hand. This analog methodology provides a fresh breeze in the current highly digital design culture. There is no need to worry about how to materialize the flashy renderings, because materiality and production concerns come into play in the early design stage. To the Bouroullec brothers, the creative process is “an alchemy between technology, and the form and function of the object,” the “junction of experimentation and everyday life.” The result is a series of amazing products that have simply made the brothers the best working French designers in the world. (Sorry Philippe, but yes, I mean it.)

Jacques vs. Winy (+ Ricky)

2012-01-28T14:38:00.000+01:00

Jacques Herzog, Winy Maas, and Richard Burdett’s dialogue at the Swissbau fair in Basel last Saturday was both thought-provoking and entertaining. The event, titled “Small Cities, Big Buildings,” started with each of them giving a presentation, and then it got funnier and funnier in the roundtable discussion. Jacques and Winy really did what they were supposed to do – fight. Ricky tried to mediate but he eventually realized that there was not much he could do, and he was right.

Big thinking

If there were one common message from the three individual talks, it would be: good cities, big or small, and good buildings, big or small, all require big thinking. Ricky Burdett kicked off his presentation by saying “I don’t know much about small cities, so I am going to talk about London.” He used London Olympic Park as an example of how building a piece of the city through design could help rebalancing the city and stitching back neglected and fragmented neighborhoods.

The siting of London Olympic Park is to rebalance the east-west sides of the city.

KCAP’s London Olympic Legacy Master Plan Framework

Winy Maas showed several ways of tackling the problem of big vs. small: cutting (Berlin Cumberland Palace), splitting (Oslo DnB NOR), porosity, making small building bigger with big effects (Spijkenisse Library), making big city smaller through intensification (Grand Paris), etc. Didden Village, for example, is a small roof expansion. But its success made the city of Rotterdam rethink and change their urban regulations.

MVRDV, Cumberland Palace, Berlin

MVRDV, Didden Village, Rotterdam

Jacques Herzog was really playing the local card in his presentation. He began by the claim that “Basel is a small Swiss city, but it’s on its way towards a tri-national metropolitan.” HdM is currently involved in several big buildings in Basel – a scale that many Swiss are still not comfortable with. In these projects, there are always concerns about the city and ways of engagement in the smaller scale. The Novartis building, for instance, doubles the height limit to provide an iconic corner presence of the campus on the Rhine riverside. At the same time, it reactivates the waterfront promenade with a public restaurant and cafe. The addition to the Messe is another big one. I have to say, I was quite surprised to see the end of Clarastrasse completely blocked by the massive new construction. But the hole, which takes the shape of the round inner courtyard of Hall 2, really creates a new public locale within the vast plaza. I can totally see people talking on their phone, “I am right under the hole. Let’s meet here.”

HdM, Novartis building, Basel

HdM, Messe Basel, Basel

“European Paradigm”

Winy Maas claimed that “small city” is fundamentally a European paradigm. It’s all about small scale and “cuteness.” And the one country that has the most acute “small cities syndrome” is Switzerland, where there are many cute little villages. In his study of the “spatial future” of Switzerland, he proposed to densify around Lake Zurich to create a so-called “Super-Zurich” with a huge gridded array of towers. It looks like a big lipstick mark on the map. Winy said, “This is my biggest kiss to Switzerland.”

MVRDV, “Spatial Future of Switzerland” study

MVRDV, “Super-Zurich”

I thought this was really just a grandstand flubdub for a good laugh, even it could still be a compelling hypothetical statement. As Jacques said during the discussion, “This is the most stupid thing I saw today.” To my surprise, Winy tried to defend it as a real serious project. Jacques flipped, “It destroys everything that makes Switzerland Swiss!” “The conservative parties in Switzerland are still extremely anti-urban. We need to educate them by illustrating how things could work in cities. But it’s still not right to touch some ‘holy sites,’ like the lakes and the mountains.” He continued, “I believe in specificity. Places are different and it’s good like that and we should maintain it. Talking about difference is talking about the future.” Now Ricky jumped in, “Yes, I think how to calibrate the difference is key.”

Winy also presented “New Basel” in his talk – a master plan he won in Basel to turn a post-industrial site in the Klybeck area into an island with funny-looking towers. Local newspaper said it would be the Manhattan in Basel. Winy admitted that it’s nothing like Manhattan. “The cuteness of it just makes things look like a scale mistake.” In Jacques’s presentation, he showed an urban study of Basel that HdM did with Rémy Zaugg in the early 1990s. One image indicated towers on the exact same industrial site. He didn’t say it out loud, but it was clear that it meant “Hey dude, I had this idea 20 years ago!”

MVRDV, “New Basel,” Basel

Image from “Eine Stadt im Werden?” urban study by HdM + Rémy Zaugg

Rigorous, careful, and modest

Jacques said, “We should be careful and modest to cities, although by nature I am not a modest person.” “The more I work on the urban scale, the more I feel it’s important to be rigorous. It’s not rigid in the Lampugnani way. But the city is not a battlefield for everybody to do their own freaky things.” Tate Modern is about enhancing the existing conditions and continuing the potentials. The Basel urban study and the Dreispitz area study are also about discovering possibilities of the city based on extensive research and design considerations.

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Novartis Campus Master Plan

HdM + Rémy Zaugg, “Eine Stadt im Werden?” urban study, Basel

HdM, Dreispitz area urban study: three distinct fields based on existing potentials.

City planning and democracy

Another interesting point brought up by Jacques was that most good cities, like Paris, London, Berlin, and even Amsterdam, were not made in a democratic regime. He called Paris the most beautiful city in the world. And its beauty lies both in the royal monuments and the “monotonous” Haussmannian urban fabric. Winy didn’t agree on the monotony part, but Ricky picked up the point, “London Olympics could only happen when planning power is taken from democracy.” It was not to say they ignore the general public. But city planning is by nature a “top-down” process. In the Swiss hyper-democratic system, nothing is easy in the cities. Jacques said, “In Switzerland, urbanism needs to seek an alternative form of ‘bottom-up’ monumentality.”

I guess ultimately, the judge of a good city form is still the general public. As Jacques said, “A city has to work. People have to love it.” No matter how ugly it is, Westfield Stratford City is still quite a successful project in the sense that it’s the first catalyst to attract people and revitalize the area.

Divergent Modernism

2012-01-18T23:13:00.000+01:00

If you think modernity is all about white plaster boxes or big sheets of glass, Carlo Mollino would probably tell you no. Born in Turin in 1905, Mollino worked mostly locally in northwestern Italy and remained isolated from the design establishment. His eccentric personality left his work somehow enigmatic, deviating from the dominant Italian Rationalism of the time. The retrospective at Haus der Kunst in Munich successfully captured the idiosyncrasy of Mollino’s oeuvre, presenting his multi-faceted work as an alternative “Maniera Moderna.”

Hybrid style

Although trained as an architect in the 1920s, when “Gruppo 7” published their Rationalist manifesto, Mollino was more interested in the irrational. “There are no reasons,” he once wrote, “If there were, we would have a way to build a convenient machine for making art through logic and grammar.” Instead of high modern purity, he turned to Surrealist montage methods and got inspirations from Alvar Aalto’s regionalist thinking. The result was unexpected grafting of Alpine traditional wood cabins onto bold modern concrete structure. Projects like the ski-lift complex at Lago Nero and the apartment building in Cervinia successfully married the two different aesthetics: the abstract and the figural, the so-called “high” and “low.” Casa sull’altopiano (house on the plateau) transformed the traditional rascard typology by putting it on top of a concrete platform with two legs on the side. The most mundane house has become special because it looks like eerily half floating.

Slittovia del Lago Nero, Sauze d’Oulx, 1947

Casa del Sole, Cervinia, 1955

Casa del Sole, Cervinia, interior

Casa sull’altopiano, Agra, 1953

Choreography

Besides being an architect, Mollino was also an avid skier and instructor (he wrote a book on techniques of downhill skiing with many illustrations), a racing car driver (he also designed a racing car), and a stunt pilot. Of course, hobbies are about fun and gratification. In the case of Mollino, it’s also about the formal and stylistic aspects of those sports. He drew lines of ski tracks and photographed them. He also studied acrobatic movements with detailed drawings. All his passions were choreographed ballet after all.

“Rapid and closed” parallel moves, photographed by Carlo Mollino

The asymmetric racing car “Bisiluro DaMolNar”

Carlo Mollino on his Bisiluro car, 1955

Lutrario Dance Hall gave Mollino the perfect opportunity to translate his extreme choreography into architecture. The colorful and dynamic design makes the space seem to be dancing with its users.

Lutrario Dance Hall, Turin, 1961

Mollino’s choreography was brought to the highest level in his last built work Teatro Regio in Turin. In the lobby, spaces on different levels communicate with each other, activating the performance of the public. They move in a fluid way, and the building becomes a big choreographic machine. In the auditorium, 37 boxes wrap around the perimeter. The mixed sensibilities of Futurism and Surrealism, similar to his earlier RAI Auditorium, may well made the project into a set for a Kubrick movie.

Teatro Regio, Turin, 1965-73

Teatro Regio, lobby

Chair for RAI Auditorium, Turin, 1952

The organic curves

One important part of Mollino’s oeuvre is his photography. For over three decades, Mollino produced thousands of erotic female portraits, starting with a Leica before switching to a Polaroid. The highly staged Polaroids, usually untitled, look like porn. But similar to his other hobbies, one can argue that the ultimate aim of these Polaroids is not about sex, but rather to capture the beautiful curves of the female body.

Carlo Mollino, Untitled Polaroids

Mollino’s interest in the organic curve can be seen in many of his designs. Among all the furniture he designed for Casa Minola, a green velvet armchair stood out as resembling many animal forms. Are those ears? Wings? Legs? Tails? The railing of the main stair in Lutrario, on the other hand, is a series of carefully composed plant-like shapes, paying homage to Horta and Gaudí.

Armchair for Casa Minola, 1945

Working sketch, iron balustrade for the main stair in Lutrario Dance Hall

Mollino loved curves, and he did so with parallel technical knowledge. In order to make the ideal curvatures in his furniture design, Mollino developed a process for bending plywood in 1950 and patented it. Unlike Aalto’s or the Eames’s process of steam-bent plywood, Mollino’s version was more low-tech, forming bent plywood with cool-molding. The elegant sculptural shapes were results of intense manual craftsmanship at the local Apelli & Varesio workshops, following precise unfolded plans and detail drawings.

Drawing for two small tables, 1950s

At an auction by Christie’s New York in June 2005, a unique oak and glass table designed by Mollino in 1949 for Casa Orengo was sold for $3,824,000. It set a world record price for a piece of 20th century furniture. Was it Mollino’s complex design sensibility and talent, or the rarity of the handcrafted piece? Probably both.

Hello, I’m a smartphone addict

2012-01-14T17:44:00.000+01:00

Keep refreshing your email accounts on your phone more than you need to? Constantly checking what your friends are up to through the Facebook and Twitter apps? Feel like reloading news pages all the time even you know truly significant events don’t happen every 5 minutes? Welcome to the club of smartphone addicts!

A recent research in England found out that obsessive use of smartphones may link to higher stress. Richard Balding, a psychologist in the department of psychology at the University of Worcester, and his team recruited more than 100 participants for the study, including university students, retail workers, and public-sector employees. They were asked to complete a questionnaire and conduct psychometric stress tests. The results showed that the people who check their phone more frequently tend to be more stressed. The study also revealed that 37% of adults and 60% of teenagers described themselves as addicted to their devices. People can get very anxious and suffer from withdrawal symptoms when not receiving notifications or alerts on their phones. Some are so hooked that they even begin to experience “phantom” vibrations or bings where they mistakenly believe their phone gives an alert.

It sounds like an easy accusation. But on second thought, I’m not so convinced. There are so many possible reasons for stress. Work, relationships, organizing life, or even just conducting the test itself. The cause-effect link seems a bit hastily established. Also, could it be the other way around? Maybe an easily-stressed person checks his/her phone often because he/she tend to feel more obliged to keep on top of things? Maybe those who are already stressed out would like to have some light readings for a change or turn to their friends for some fun?

The study suggested that “people should have a break from their smartphones where possible.” But human beings are social animals. It’s only natural to have the desire to be connected. Sorry Balding, I am and I will still be a smartphone addict.

Measuring time

2011-12-31T15:51:00.001+01:00

December 30, 2011 doesn't exist in the history of Samoa. The country chose to skip this day and went from Dec 29 straight to Dec 31. The reason is that they wanted to improve ties with major trade partners such as Australia and New Zealand by jumping over the International Date Line. Instead of 23 hours behind Auckland, Samoa is now one hour ahead.

The International Date Line is an imaginary line that designates the place where each calendar day begins. Crossing it eastbound or westbound would mean you lose or gain one day, respectively. It sounds familiar because people in many countries are used to losing one hour in spring and gaining it back in autumn.

All this skipping, leaping, and traveling back in time reminds me that the whole system of measuring time, or more precisely, marking time, is actually man-made. Time lapses. It does not bear absolute markers of the beginning or end of anything. But we found the natural cycles, and tried to organize time according to the cycles with a system called calendar. Most countries now use the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. It is based on the natural cycles but there are still discrepancies:
- A Lunar month is about 29.53 days;
- A sidereal year (Earth's orbit cycle) is 365.256363004 mean solar days;
- A tropical year (a complete cycle of the seasons) is 365.24219 days.

There have been different proposals for reform of the calendar, such as the World Calendar, International Fixed Calendar and Holocene calendar. The UN considered briefly to adopt such a reform in the 1950s, but eventually all the proposals lost their popularity. Anyways... until any change happens, Happy New Year!

The power of image

2011-12-13T23:52:00.000+01:00

Last week, MVRDV released their design for two luxury residential towers in the Yongsan Business District of Seoul. A "pixilated cloud" connects the two towers in the middle with public amenities and outdoor spaces. There's nothing new about pixilation - Herzog & de Meuron, OMA, and BIG all did that before. And it's certainly not the first project to bridge between towers - Steven Holl and Cesar Pelli had that built in other Asian cities already. Yet the design caused huge controversy, mainly because of the eerie renderings. They really look like WTC on 9/11!

People do judge design purely from images nowadays. A bad image alone would be powerful enough to kill the entire project. I can't decide if the renderings were accurate representations of the design. But it is surprising that people at MVRDV, Luxigon, and from the client side all underestimated the power of image and missed the uncanny resemblance.

In response to the angry comments and harsh criticism, MVRDV apologized on its website and released a new image with an actual cloud covering the middle of the towers. They are trying to re-illustrate their concept without really changing the design. I am not sure if this new image (not necessarily new design) is powerful enough to manage the crisis and convince people.

Architecture trilogy

2011-12-11T18:12:00.000+01:00

I've been saying this for more than a year now. For me, an architect is basically doing three things: study the program closely, come up with an interesting shape, and then put on a nice skin. Along the way, cultural/historic/site context, structure, and material would come into play to either inform or strengthen the decisions on those three main elements. Innovation in any one of the three is enough to make the project shine. If you got all three? It's a classic!

Recently, Jim mentioned the three reminders to architects by Le Corbusier: mass, surface, and plan. I started to feel that the two trilogies were surprisingly analogous. Perhaps I was influenced by Corb unconsciously. But at least the three reminders gave me a chance to reconsider and set my thoughts in context.

Program

Corb said, "The plan is the generator." My understanding is that by plan he actually meant use. "Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and for the city." Even if we say modernity is history, the contemporary condition still demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of architecture and urbanism. "Collective necessities" create new program, and thus generate new types and new forms.

Shape

Corb advocated for simple forms - carefully calculated and engineered. Our time is full of weird forms. No matter how weird they are, the more successful ones are still the ones that make sense. Shape shouldn't be arbitrary. It is a tool of communication, a concrete expression of an abstract idea. Ultimately, "our eyes are constructed to enable us to see forms in light," and our brain wants to understand what we see.

Skin

"A mass is enveloped in its surface." Corb made simple forms, and at the same time he cared a lot about geometrical constituents on the facade, such as the directing and generating lines. He linked the surface to pragmatic aspects such as engineering and construction. Certainly, skin is not just about aesthetics. Our skin performs: it protects, senses, regulates heat and evaporation, and it breathes. The same should happen with the building envelope.

When people get old

2011-11-28T22:10:00.000+01:00

(Based on true events...)

Rem: I'm done with cities. Let's talk about countryside. It takes up more surfaces of the earth, houses the other half of our population, consumes less energy, and generates less pollution.

Jacques: I used to like Hitchcock because it looks normal but there's always something special. Now I prefer Dali. It's right in your face!

Peter: I don't think architects have social responsibilities. We don't solve problems.

Frank: I like a lot of young people, such as Zaha. Starchitect? LEED? What the fuck are you talking about?

Zaha: Architecture is such a tough profession. Let's go shopping.

Norman: I only do interviews.

Philip: I am a whore.

Corb: Fuck it. Let's do Ronchamp!

(The other) Frank: The Guggenheim should be different from Fallingwater, right? Maybe pink?

Mies: Hmm... Let's do another box.

OMA @ Barbican

2011-11-26T21:28:00.000+01:00

For someone who follows OMA's work and ideas, the new exhibition "OMA/Progress" at the Barbican in London doesn't really provide much new information. But I find myself enjoying it because of the way it's organized and the way OMA's architecture is presented. Curated by the Belgian collective Rotor (not OMA), the show peels off layers of PR-engineered information and gets to the heart of the practice. The young and observant members of Rotor stayed in OMA's Rotterdam office for months and gathered objects and intelligence from the archive, and even from the trash. The result is a distant yet engaged interpretation of the firm's 35 years of history, providing a fresh look different from the singular narrative told by OMA on their own work (like in "Content" 8 years ago). As Rem said, this time "it's their show on our work."

The show starts with projects by AMO. (A message on the importance of broad thinking?) Then you see a chronological index of all OMA projects on a track before you get into the real lobby with a research area on the left and a shop on the right. Only now I realize the west entrance is also open, a gesture that turns this part of the lower level into a public passage cutting through the Barbican Estate. The life-size cutout figures here and there are probably signs to say "This is free."

Entrance with cardboard cutouts

AMO projects

"Project Machine" - index of all OMA projects

Research center with blue foam stools from the Milan Prada catwalk show

Public Zone

The ticketed part of the show starts with an almost empty room. Two small strange-looking lumps are displayed at the corner, lit like artworks. The description says, "It is unclear to the archivist whether these are models or just clay leftovers." On the wall next to it is a letter from Rem. I think it's a fantastic and funny juxtaposition, and the tone of the letter sounds so familiar...

The next room is about current projects under construction. The idea is an evolving gallery where the contents get updated every time the architects pay a visit to the construction site. The buildings and the exhibits are both work in progress in this case.

In the "Current Preoccupations" room, ideas, sketches and images are pinned up on the walls as simple A4 printouts, like a normal meeting in the office. On the other side, there are A5 tear-off sheets that allow the visitors to pick and make their own books. Here, you can see ideas spanning from the market economy, politics, religion, megacities, countryside, desert, Europe, education, preservation, iconic vs. generic, etc.

"Current Preoccupations" room

In the atrium is a 48-hour video that flicks through every single image Rotor found on OMA's server. There are 3,454,204 images and each one only shows up for about 1/20 of a second (close to the rate at which each frame of a movie is shown). This relentless flashy display of raw materials gives you a sense of "more or less what's going on," but more importantly, an impression of the sheer quantity of stuff OMA have produced.

The exhibition setup has been linear so far, although one can argue that the opening of the west entrance makes the public zone sequence reversible. The upper level, however, is organized as a non-sequential loop that doesn't specify a start or an end. The arrangement takes advantage of the gallery space, turning each of the eight semi-independent rooms into its own small universe with loosely related themes. These themes are not meant to set up a scholarly framework of architectural practice nor trying to cover OMA's entire body of work. They are intersections Rotor extracted from the crisscrossing of the multi-layered OMA thinking, a sampler of the zillion things that OMA is interested in.

Lower Level

Upper Level

You see a seat from Cornell's Milstein Hall next to a rotating skirt from Prada's "Waist Down" show in the room call "yet it moves," together with projects like the Dubai Renaissance, Guggenheim Hermitage, Prada New York, the Bordeaux house, and the Wyly Theater. The next room "sight lines" shows how buildings such as Casa da Musica, the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, and Seattle Library become lenses to look at views, but not in a naïve BIG way. There is a room with only white or shiny models, and another showing the museum typology as ways of display. In the room about structure, a 1:1 CCTV truss mock-up is placed opposite to the correspondence with ARUP on the wall. In the "ornament" room, you see fabrics designed by Petra, Prada LA foam, Cornell ceiling, several Casa da Musica finishes (gold leaf wood grain, blue tiles, black and white tiles), and 2x4's Mies face at IIT.

My favorite room is "Adaptation, instead of quitting." It's a collection of projects that experienced "crisis" during the design process. Examples include the compromise and subsequent demise of 23 E 22nd St, the long wait and realization of De Rotterdam, the half remaining Cordoba Congress Center, and the cantilever decision of Cornell. It's admirable to see an active attitude towards reality in the tough business of architecture.

Yet it moves

Living inside the truss

Places, and what to do with them: site visit slideshows

Two white models showing two generations of object-making

Museum as ways of display

The "secret room"

Rem said at his Cornell lecture, "We don't believe in progress any more." The Barbican show is not about progress per se, but more like work in progress. No real architecture is shown in the exhibition - everything is fragmented to the extent that it even surprised Rem. Through the bits and pieces of behind-the-scene materials and anecdotes, you get a glimpse into the design process and everyday happenings in the office of OMA. In a secret room that is not even marked in the official guide, the walls and ceiling are all covered with waste paper Rotor collected from OMA's Rotterdam office. It is brave to show architecture as a messy and complex practice, a reality far from the fancy image in Justin Bieber's mind.

Postmodernism now

2011-11-20T22:11:00.000+01:00

The timing of the "Postmodernism: Style and Subversion" exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum is both natural and strange. It seems to be a reasonable successor of the "Modernism" exhibition, following several other V&A exhibitions on major styles and movements like "Baroque" and "Art Deco." But it also sounds almost laughable just because of the tackiness of the style. Who would even think about organizing a retrospective on that?

The V&A had the guts to do it, and they've done it well. Presenting over 250 objects across the spectrum from architecture, furniture, to fashion and album covers, the exhibition is flashy, noisy, dynamic, and colorful, reflecting perfectly the aspirations of its subject.

David Byrne said, "I never understand why postmodernism had to define itself in the negative." With no clear definition in hand, the V&A curators chose to start with the negative as well. In the first room, you see the explosion of Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis on March 15, 1972, alongside the burning of Mendini's Monumentino da casa chair in 1974. Modernism was dead. Where were we gonna go? Charles Jencks said, "Let us then romp through the desolation of modern architecture, visiting the archaeological sites with a superior disinterest. After all, since it is fairly dead, we might as well enjoy picking over the corpse."

Left: Demolition of Minoru Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe housing project, 1972;
Right: Alessandro Mendini, Destruction of the Monumentino da casa chair, 1974

Bruno Zevi wrote, "Whoever decides to abandon the modern movement can choose between Versailles and Las Vegas." But to postmodernists, the choice between a look back to the past and the ubiquitous popular/commercial culture was not to pick either one, but both. This "both/and" contradiction is typically postmodern - it's at the same time contemporary and nostalgic, elegant and tacky, cheerful and ruinous, complex and superficial. It's everything and nothing.

On one hand, Venturi and Scott Brown brought our attention to the signs and decorations on the Las Vegas Strip. Later, the Memphis Group and its charismatic poster boy Ettore Sottsass showed the freedom of design with bright colors, vivid patterns, and expressive forms. These almost silly looking chairs and shelves defined the "high taste" of postmodern consumerism.

Denise Scott Brown & Robert Venturi in the Las Vegas desert, 1966

Memphis Group design collection

On the other hand, architects including James Stirling, Ricardo Bofill, Michael Graves, and the Krier brothers started to "experiment" with architectural styles from the past. The V&A curators borrowed the theme of the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980 to summarize this tendency: "The Presence of the Past." All of a sudden, the cut-and-paste bricolage was great, and decoration became fashionable business. Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans illustrates perfectly what a design full of kitsch would look like.

Charles Moore, Piazza d'Italia, 1976-79. New Orleans, LA

Hans Hollein, façade from Strada Novissima, The Presence of the Past, 1980
(reconstructed for the V&A exhibition, 2011)

History had a profound impact on postmodern aesthetic. Designers embraced not only historic motifs, but also the Apocalypse atmosphere of ruins. Examples from the show include ruin-like drawings and buildings. Rei Kawabuko's choice of putting her black knitted garment with open holes on a contorted "post-human" gesture also represents the dark sensation of the time.

Arata Isozaki, Tsukuba Center, 1979-83

Gaetano Pesce, longitudinal section of the Church of Solitude Manhattan, 1974-7

James Wines/SITE, Best showroom, 1975. Houston, TX

Rei Kawakubo (for Comme des Garçons), Ensemble, 1983.
Modeled by Susan Hess, photograph by Arthur Elgort.

Many have argued that postmodernism was less about style or aesthetic, but more an attitude. It was the defiance against the dogmas of modernism, against authority, and against singularity. I think the best illustration of this is teen star Felix Howard's portrait by Jamie Morgan on The Face magazine. You see a sort of "street" attitude in his eyes, with almost a gangster aura in the costume. It reminds me of Alex in the first half of A Clockwork Orange, representative of enfants terribles from a dystopian society, explicitly antagonistic to any rules.

Jamie Morgan (for The Face), The Harder They Come, The Better, 1985

The highlight of the show for me was the central plaza called "The Club," a space dedicated to postmodern musical performances. Here you have an androgynous Grace Jones, a David Byrne in his big suit, and the self-reinvented flamboyant Klaus Nomi singing in turns on the big screens. In the lower part, Annie Lennox's style breaks free from all gender norms, and a portrait of Andrew Logan at his 1973 Alternative Miss World show makes a loud statement of the gay rights movement.

"The Club." In the center is Jean-Paul Goude & Antonio Lopez's
Constructivist maternity dress originally worn by Grace Jones in 1979.

"The Club" with Klaus Nomi in the middle.

Mick Rock, Andrew Logan as Alternative Miss World host/hostess, 1973

I suddenly thought of Lady Gaga. She can fit right in this crowd. Her self-formation with shimmering synthetic appearances resonates so much with the postmodern idea of "what you wear on the surface defines who you are." As co-curator Glenn Adamson pointed out in an interview, "You wouldn't have Lady Gaga without Grace Jones. Lady Gaga in many ways is a completely postmodern person." Interestingly, she has also become the new gay icon, following the footsteps of Annie Lennox and Madonna, serving as a shining beacon for a community that is still fighting for its rights, struggling even for a proper kiss on TV.

Kurt and Blaine on Glee

We are now facing a social/cultural context not unlike that of the 1970s and 80s. Economy is down, authority is down, and the avant-garde is down. Lyotard's description of the postmodern condition "incredulity towards metanarratives" has never been more present. There is no "grand narratives" of any sort. Everybody just does whatever he/she wants - plurality at its best.

In terms of design, many styles today resemble postmodernism in many ways. Superficiality, nostalgia, indulgence, kitsch, pastiche, frivolousness, you name it. Some of them have got to such an extreme that they become amusing and cool. Stefan Sagmeister inherits both the witty and messy sides of postmodernism in his graphic design. Mendini's Proust chair (but without the Signac painting) resurfaced at the Milan Salone this year, where flamboyance fought against the minimalists, and Karim Rashid continued to lead the cuteness camp set out by the Memphis Group.

Sagmeister Inc., Zurich poster, 2003

The Proust chair at the Milan Salone 2011

Our built environment? I think it's fair to say that Beijing and Dubai now are probably more postmodern than Milan, London, or New York ever were. In a postmodern condition where the image is everything, many once-interesting architects have turned into merely icon makers. Former FOA principals were only interested in the superficial layer of buildings and the patterns on the envelope. OMA's recent interior work is trying to re-legitimize historic motifs as intellectually interesting references. "Emerging" young architects? J. Mayer H., FAT... I don't really want to say more about them.

FOA, John Lewis Department Store, Leicester, UK

OMA, Viktor & Rolf Store at Harvey Nichols, London, UK

Jürgen Mayer H., Danfoss Universe, Nordborg, Denmark

FAT, The Villa in the Heerlijkheid park, Hoogvliet, The Netherlands

The exhibition ends with New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle" music video directed by Robert Longo in 1986. I guess we still have this bizarre love/hate triangle between the past, the present, and us. Look at what's all around us now. It's really the perfect time to review this strange period of history and think about today. As the closing remark of the exhibition states, "Like it or not, we are all postmodern now."

Oasis in an oasis

2011-11-13T17:41:00.001+01:00

Peter Zumthor's Serpentine pavilion this year proves once again the architectural axiom of "You have to be there and feel it." Upon arrival, you only see an ordinary black box. It looks much more permanent and severe than most of the previous pavilions at the Serpentine. Following a curved gentle slope, you enter a narrow and dark corridor that circulates the perimeter of the box. Through another door, voilà! You are in a hidden inner space, a calm and wonderful wild garden designed by Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Away from the noise and traffic and the smells of the busy city outside, here is a sanctuary with the full powers of nature.

Peter Zumthor sketch

Piet Oudolf sketch

Material is always key to Zumthor's architecture. This time, he uses a lightweight timber framed structure covered in gauze and painted over with a black Idenden coating. It gives a heavy and intense impression when seen from afar, almost like stone or concrete. But up close, you will see the softness of the scrim and its irregular texture. A slightly blue wooden bench surrounds the covered inner wall to provide seating.

Obviously, the garden is the heart and focus, and the architecture is just a frame, or a stage for the flowers and light. The sloping roof also draws attention to the sky and the trees beyond the walls. After staying for a while, I found myself starting watching other people, observing their behavior and interactions. People participate, but not in a party way. This is a place to relax, to contemplate, or to enjoy a slow lunch; a place for kids, young moms, senior friends and alike to hang out and chat.

There is no loud gesture, no big statement. In the era of icons and spectacles, Zumthor has delivered serene and almost spiritual atmosphere. If Hyde Park is an oasis in London, the Serpentine pavilion by Zumthor is another oasis within it.

11.11.11.11.11.11

2011-11-11T23:11:00.000+01:00

Today we had 11:11:11 on 11/11/11. What people make from this rare number combination varies in different cultures and disciplines. To name a few:

Geeks: We all know it's rare because 11/11/11 only comes once a century. But as a "binary day" (a date that consists of only 1s and 0s in xx/xx/xx format), this is also the last before almost a century. There are only 36 such days in a century, and for the next one we will have to wait until January 1, 2100 (01/01/00).

China: In the recent years, 11/11 has been celebrated by young singles as the "Bachelor's Day" due to all the 1s. This year in particular, it has become the "Super Bachelor's Day."

US: People see it as 11s (not just 1s). 1 and 1 make 2. So people are rushing to Vegas. "We're surrounded by hundreds of couples who want to get married on 11/11/11," said the Rev. Charlotte Richards, owner of Little White Wedding Chapel on the Las Vegas Strip.

Egypt: The pyramid of Khufu is closed to visitors for "necessary maintenance." Local media report that unidentified groups are rumored to hold "Jewish" or "Masonic" rites on the site to take advantage of mysterious powers coming from the pyramid on this rare date.

Surrealism revisited

2011-10-18T21:01:00.000+02:00

The Fondation Beyeler has put on a new show on Surrealism in Paris. It brings together over 200 fascinating works by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and other Surrealist artists. In addition to the well-known paintings and sculptures, there are also objects, photographs, manuscripts, jewelry, and films. It's like traveling back in time to experience the development of this important movement in art history.

Formation
The first room begins with works by Giorgio de Chirico - sets of familiar classical buildings forming unfamiliar or even mysterious stages for riddles and dreams. His haunting "metaphysical" visual style opened new horizons in art and had formative influence on the Surrealist movement. In fact, many surrealist artists including Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte acknowledged de Chirico's influence.

Giorgio de Chirico, The Delights of the Poet, 1912

In the second room are manuscripts, letters, and publications of André Breton's two manifestos of Surrealism (1924 and 1929) and several Surrealist journals. As the leader and chief theoretician of the movement, Breton defined the basic narratives of the group. First, he linked creative action to dreams and the unconscious, in a very Freudian way. Dreams and reality together form absolute reality, a sort of surreality, which reflects the internal reality of the psyche. Second, he emphasized that Surrealism was foremost a philosophical and cultural movement, less about style or school to make art but more a comprehensive radical new lifestyle.

The first issue of La révolution surréaliste, 1924

René Magritte, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1930

Automatic Writing
Surrealists believed in the unconscious mind, and automatism was thus developed as a way of expressing it. It involves "spontaneous creativity that excludes intellectual self-censorship." Praised by Breton as "the most surrealist of us all,” Miró often started out his paintings as automatic drawings. Arguably, the process cannot be entirely automatic, but at least it is free from rigorous pre-conception and judgments. Another pioneer of "automatic drawing" was André Masson, who was also a frequent contributor to La révolution surréaliste.

Joan Miró, Painting: The Fratellini Brothers, 1927

André Masson, Birth of Birds, c. 1925

This "automatic" method leaves room for unexpected incidents. The key Surrealist techniques - grattage (scraping) and frottage (rubbing) - are good examples. Developed by Max Ernst, these techniques relinquished control over the work to a certain extent, allowing surprising unplanned shapes and textures to appear on the canvas.

Max Ernst, The Entire City, 1935-36

Before the skinny figures, Alberto Giacometti was quite involved in the Surrealist movement. He became a member of the group in 1928, but in 1935 he was expelled, due to his "reawaken interest in nature studies." The group saw this tendency as "reactionary" (i.e. not automatic). Giacometti experienced intense creative crisis after that but fortunately he overcame the trauma with a novel unique style.

Alberto Giacometti, Reclining Woman, 1929

Another artist who wanted "not to lose sight of nature" was Picasso. For him, it is impossible to materialize something not inherent in the subject matter. He refused the Surrealists' basic idea of automatic writing, and still believed in the importance of conscious composition. He was never a real part of the movement. It's odd to even see him in the show. OK Beyeler, I know you have Picasso.

Pablo Picasso, Figure (Seated Woman), 1930

Desire
If we talk about Freud, desire would inevitably become a key word. The show's poster image - Dalí's Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate, one Second before Awakening - is a good example. Here, the main subject is Dalí's wife Gala. Next to the naked body, there are two suspended droplets of water and a pomegranate, a Christian symbol of fertility and resurrection. A bee, an insect that traditionally symbolizes the Virgin, is flying above the pomegranate. It is repeated symbolically in the upper part of the painting with a fish, two tigers, and a bayonet.

Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around
a Pomegranate, one Second before Awakening, 1944

Dalí defined surrealist objects as "absolutely useless from the practical and rational point of view, created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way with the maximum of tangible reality, ideas and fantasies that have a delirious character." The first of such objects that comes to my mind is Meret Oppenheim's Fur Cup (1936). It is not in this exhibition, but they do have Fur Bracelet (1935), reportedly the trigger of the cup. Another object by her, My Nurse is a pair of white lady's shoes that take the shape of a chicken dish. The high heels here represent not only gender and domesticity, but also fleshly lust, almost to the point of cannibalism.

Meret Oppenheim, Fur Bracelet, 1935

Meret Oppenheim, My Nurse, 1936

Mythology
Max Ernst's Capricorne in the foyer is like a family of hybrid creatures. The father has horns like a goat, the mother has a fish tail, and so does the little child. In fact, Capriconrnus is a part goat part fish creature in Greek mythology. This is typical Surrealistic. The artists did not really invent scary-looking things out of the blue, but they were happy to adopt grotesque beasts from ancient myths.

Max Ernst, Capricorne, 1948

Another example is Paul Delvaux's The Break of Day, where the metamorphosis of the body into a tree is likely a reference to Roman mythology.

Paul Delvaux, The Break of Day, 1937

Dalí staged the classical myth of Narcissus in a dramatically illuminated landscape. The transformation is represented by the juxtaposition of a crouching body on the left and a hand on the right holding an egg with a narcissus sprout.

Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937

Less known artists
One interesting thing about this exhibition is that it also brings in works by less known Surrealist artists, including the Romanian Victor Brauner, the Austrian Wolfgang Paalen, and the Swiss Kurt Seligmann. A native of Basel, Seligmann presents in his Carnival a dream-like atmosphere of Basler Fasnacht.

Kurt Seligmann, Carnival, 1950

In the welcoming remarks, curator Philippe Büttner says, "We hope you explore the exhibition with your eyes wide open... and keep an open mind. You don't have to find everything appealing - even we don't like everything." I found this statement rather strange and conservative. After more than half a century, are we still not ready for this? You know what? I actually like everything. As one of the most important movements in the early 20th century, Surrealism influenced many later groups and events, including Situationist International, Postmodernism, and indirectly May 1968.

Shell, space, and content

2011-10-10T23:43:00.000+02:00

10 years after the project started, the HdM-designed Museum of Cultures (Museum der Kulturen) in Basel finally opened its doors last month. The design reorganized the the entrance, the existing building facade, and added a cute little new roof with hanging plants. The formerly closed Schürhof courtyard was turned into a public space directly accessible from the Münsterplatz.

At the heart of historic Basel, it's a rule that no new construction should be seen from public streets. The geometry of the extension was thus carefully calculated according to various view angles. Only visible from above or from the inner courtyards, the ceramic-tiled folded form exists in harmony with its neighboring roofscape.

HdM provides neutral gallery spaces for the Museum's 300,000+ ethnographic artifacts, representing cultures in all continents. But the exhibition design is horrible - weird curved walls and folded table surfaces here and there, unrelated objects putting on the same table in a very loose manner. Underneath the folded roof is a large column-free gallery space, but the exhibition designers put in walls winding throughout the hall, blocking any possible perception of the grand space! Probably the only thing I found interesting was the the paper Chinese dragon in a red double-height room.

This reminds me of another recently-opened museum, the Cité de l'Océan et du Surf in Biarritz by Steven Holl. It has a rather curious shape, vaguely resembling waves and the boulders along the Atlantic coastline in Biarritz. The building is pressed half underground beneath a curved roof that forms a public plaza with theatrical sequence of topographic changes. A gentle stairway leads up to the plaza level from the street front of the building. Both sides of the plaza curve up, flanking the ocean view towards the horizon in the distance. On one side, the plaza rises to a terrace. On the other side, the plaza slopes down onto the ground, leading to a grassed park onward to the vast ocean. On the plaza, people run, climb, and jump, as if the “monkey side” of Homo sapiens were released by this dramatic form. At the southwest corner there is a skate pool for the surfers’ experiments. The cloud shape indentation also forms a strangely compressed portico to the auditorium.

Under the high corner of the curve on the roadside is the entry lobby to the exhibitions. The steep sloping ceiling intensifies the spatial indication of diving down to the semi-underground exhibition space.

As I descended the stairs, I almost cried out loud OMG! "Am I in Disneyland?" The exhibition designers had ruined the poetic space with their amusement-park-like "edutainment" installations. A splash of water that looks like a whale as "the cradle of evolution"? Rocks with colorful videos inside? Grotesque machine arms for projection? Oh boy...

It seems nobody has learned a lesson from the disastrous interior of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The chaotic exhibition arrangement completely destroys the architectural space by LIbeskind. Zigzag? Warped Star of David? Gedenkbuch? I don't see any of those from the inside!

It's quite disheartening that architecture and exhibition design seldom go hand in hand with each other in contemporary museums. The limited influence of the profession has forced many architects to either ignore the content or just go for the generic white box. We should wake up and start to break the line between architecture and exhibition, and advocate for a more holistic design for the shell, the space, and its contents.

iRemember

2011-10-06T20:22:00.000+02:00

Apple.com / Tim Cook
Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

Apple's board
Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.

Steve Wozniak
We've lost something we won't get back... he brought a lot of life to the world.

Bob Iger
His legacy will extend far beyond the products he created or the businesses he built. It will be the millions of people he inspired, the lives he changed, and the culture he defined. Steve was such an “original,” with a thoroughly creative, imaginative mind that defined an era... With his passing the world has lost a rare original, Disney has lost a member of our family, and I have lost a great friend.

John Lasseter & Ed Catmull
Steve Jobs was an extraordinary visionary, our very dear friend and the guiding light of the Pixar family. He saw the potential of what Pixar could be before the rest of us, and beyond what anyone ever imagined. Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply "make it great." He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar’s DNA.

Bill Gates
The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.

Larry Page
He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it. His focus on the user experience above all else has always been an inspiration to me.

Sergey Brin
From the earliest days of Google, whenever Larry and I sought inspiration for vision and leadership, we needed to look no farther than Cupertino. Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product (including the macbook I am writing this on right now). And I have witnessed it in person the few times we have met.

Eric Schmidt
Steve defined a generation of style and technology that's unlikely to be matched again.

Jerry Yang
Steve was my hero growing up. He not only gave me a lot of personal advice and encouragement, he showed all of us how innovation can change lives. I will miss him dearly, as will the world.

Mark Zuckerberg
Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.

Dick Costolo
Once in a rare while, somebody comes along who doesnt just raise the bar, they create an entirely new standard of measurement. #RIPSteveJobs

Meg Whitman
Steve Jobs was an iconic entrepreneur and businessman whose impact on technology was felt beyond Silicon Valley. He will be remembered for the innovation he brought to market and the inspiration he brought to the world.

Barack Obama
Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it... [H]e transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world. The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.

Bill Clinton
His passion for his work and his courage in fighting his cancer were an inspiration to us all.

Nancy Pelosi
Steve Jobs was a visionary who changed the way we live, an innovator whose products brought joy to millions, a risktaker who wasn't afraid to challenge the status quo, and an entrepreneur who led one of the most creative companies of our time. His sage advice was respected by policymakers on both sides of the aisle. His courageous fight against cancer brought strength to many.

Michael Broomberg
America lost a genius who will be remembered with Edison and Einstein, and whose ideas will shape the world for generations to come. Again and again over the last four decades, Steve Jobs saw the future and brought it to life long before most people could even see the horizon. And Steve's passionate belief in the power of technology to transform the way we live brought us more than smart phones and iPads: it brought knowledge and power that is reshaping the face of civilization.

Arnold Schwarzenegger
Steve lived the California Dream every day of his life and he changed the world and inspired all of us.

Steven Spielberg
Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.

George Lucas
The magic of Steve was that while others simply accepted the status quo, he saw the true potential in everything he touched and never compromised on that vision. He leaves behind an incredible family and a legacy that will continue to speak to people for years to come.

JJ Abrams
There are so few people who are undeniably, brilliantly inspiring. Steve Jobs, a man who changed the way we create, the way we communicate, the way we live, was one of those people. I already miss knowing he is out there.

John Hodgman
Everything good I have done, I have done on a Mac.

Walter Isaacson
He revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh: retailing, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine... Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

Lance Armstrong
His brilliant and innovative spirit will be deeply missed. Steve pioneered a new way of seeing and embracing the world and his indelible influence will be felt by generations to come... We have lost an icon and I have also lost a friend.

Norman Foster
Steve was an inspiration and a role model. He encouraged us to develop new ways of looking at design to reflect his unique ability to weave backwards and forwards between grand strategy and the minutiae of the tiniest of internal fittings. For him no detail was small in its significance and he would be simultaneously questioning the headlines of our project together whilst he delved into its fine print. He was the ultimate perfectionist and demanded of himself as he demanded of others.

Collected with my iPhone, iPad; posted from my MacBook via Safari.

Shall we talk?

2011-10-04T21:57:00.000+02:00

It was a big letdown not to see iPhone 5 announced at the Apple event today. But Siri, a talking virtual assistant is officially active now. We've used a GPS device, and we've tried speaking to the Google search app. But they were not as interactive and "intelligent." Siri will certainly change the way humans communicate with machines. At least closer to what we imagined the future would be in the past.

HAL 9000, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

"Mother," Alien (1979)

KITT, Knight Rider (1982)

V.I.K.I., I, Robot (2004)

Jarvis, Iron Man (2008)

ARIIA, Eagle Eye (2008)

GERTY 3000, Moon (2009)

These machines in the movies can talk, think, and even conspire. It's almost a shame that we get to that technology just now. Or maybe we have been careful? Maybe we should really consider what if artificial intelligence really turns into Skynet?

Zenghelis notes

2011-10-03T23:09:00.000+02:00

Last Friday night, Elia Zenghelis gave a lecture at EPFL's Laboratoire Bâle (laba), a studio focuses on urban and complex architectural design led by Harry Gugger. Titled "Athens: Labor, City, Architecture. Towards a common architectural language," the lecture was primarily about a studio Zenghelis taught at the Berlage Institute in the last academic year. It was very proper old school and intellectual - no sexy renderings or bold manifestos. But it was actually quite refreshing to see a knowledgeable scholar's approach to urbanism.

Zenghelis started off by reviewing several keywords/themes of the studio:
Formal. A form has borders and an autonomous interior, and there’s also an exterior. John Hejduk's nine square grid implies a dialogue between two entities: the interior and the exterior.

John Hejduk, The Nine Square Problem

Generic. A plan made by typewriter, with undefined functions that can be reprogrammed whenever necessary. All of a sudden, architecture is liberated from constraints.

Archizoom, No-Stop City

Labor. According to Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition, an active life (vita activa) is formed by three types of activities: labor (necessity to survive biologically, like seeking water, food, and shelter), work (objectified products of labor, something to leave behind for prosperity, like architecture), and action (political involvement, the public realm and the social, like the ancient Greek Agora). In modern society, labor takes over the other two spheres. It's important to revoke political actions and understand the politics of labor.

The round city of Gur, Iran

Urbanization. The breaking of boundaries to unlimited expansion.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square

Zenghelis said, when you look at the urban form of Athens, you may think about words like informal, spontaneous, unplanned. In fact, the city of Athens is the result of very specific but unspoken political projects. He then started to describe Greek history and politics in extensive details, through the various dynasties and regimes - from the ancient "happy village" of mixed population, the Ottoman rule, to the population explosion in 1921 triggered by the Greco-Turkish War; from the massive suburbanization in the 1980s and gentrification of the center in the 90s, to the 2004 Olympics, the 2008 riots after a police shooting incident, and finally the current economic collapse (he actually used the word "demise").

Platon Issaias, Athens grid samples

Now I realized all the emphasis on history and politics was trying to understand the issues. The urban form and its transformations have always been so related to politics. We see how the Kleanthis-Schaubert plan for the new state capital defined the grid orientations in modern Athens, how prime minister Karamanlis' policies on infrastructure reshaped the city, and how property laws led to the ubiquitous archetype Polykatoikia (apartment block).

First master plan for Athens by German-trained Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert, 1832

J. A. Kaupert's map of Athens, 1875

Athens cityscape with Polykatoikia everywhere

Finally it came to the studio projects. I was quite amazed by the setup and methodology of the studio. Derived from the lengthy research on history and politics, the students' ideas were tested in the Kerameikos and Metaxourgeio districts in the center of Athens. Their work operated beyond master plan, creating a sort of pilot projects, or paradigms, for the city. The eight projects eventually came together in a way similar to Rossi's città analoga or Piranesi's map of Rome.

Aldo Rossi, La città analoga

Piranesi, Il Campo Marzio dell'Antica Roma

The studio took a very anti-iconic approach - common, "unbranded," and re-appliable in different locations. (Zenghelis actually said after the lecture that most of the architects he used to admire have corrupted to icon makers. And you know who he was talking about.) Thanks to the thorough understanding of the existing issues, the sensible interventions offer inspiring alternatives to the brutal tabula rasa operations. They are so clear conceptually that they only need single fundamental words or short phases for explanation: cloister, wall, roof, stoa, etc. "Vertical+Horizontal" means piers in between existing buildings and a ring of communal facilities on top. One project clears out the ground floor to create a continuous "platform" for the public realm. Another injects "theatre"-like elements into the urban fabric in regular intervals, creating a system of catalytic points like the Constructivist clubs. Their choice of references were also amazing - quite an insightful collection of relevant historic projects.

"Cloister" reference: Bramante, Santa Maria della Pace

"Cloister" reference: Karl Marx-Hof Vienna

"Wall" reference: Le Corbusier, Plan Obus for Algiers

"Wall" reference: John Hejduk, Wall House

"Wall" reference: Louis Kahn, Dominican Motherhouse

"Vertical+Horizontal" reference: El Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel (Cloud Iron)

"Platform" reference: Mies van der Rohe, Lake Shore Drive Apartments

"Theatre" reference: Cedric Price, Fun Palace

Some people said, there was a lack of humor in the lecture. I agree it was intense and packed with dense information, which sometimes could mean boring. But hey, the guy is in his 70s and he did all those provocative illustrations in Delirious New York. He lost his notes the day before and had to rewrite everything up till 5 minutes before the lecture. What else do you ask for?

Speed of languages

2011-09-29T21:23:00.000+02:00

When I translate an English text into Chinese, it usually becomes only about 2/3 of the original length. When I hear people speaking Spanish or Japanese, I always feel like hit by a storm of syllables and I would never be able to catch up.

An interesting study was recently published in the journal Language on the speed of human speech. Linguists Pellegrino, Coupé, and Marsico from Université de Lyon recruited 59 volunteers who were native speakers of one of seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. The subjects were instructed to read 20 different passages in their native languages into a recorder. The researcher then counted all of the syllables in each of the recordings and further analyzed how much meaning was packed into each syllable. They arrived at two critical indexes for each language: the average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech.

The intriguing discovery was a negative correlation between information density and speed. The more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second, and thus the slower the speech. Out of the seven languages, Japanese was the fastest, spoken at 7.84 syllables per second. And in the density chart, it was at the bottom. Spanish came in second in terms of speed (7.82), and its density was also quite low. Mandarin, the slowest of the seven (5.18), was also the densest language. It seems that the speed of a language depends on the average amount of information its syllable can convey.

The researchers explained, "A dense language will make use of fewer speech chunks than a sparser language for a given amount of semantic information." I guess our brain can only process so much. If the flow of information remains steady according to the capacity of the brain, speed and density have to compensate each other for the speech to be understandable and not boring.

Another explanation could be the languages' sound systems. In languages with fewer consonants and vowels, or no tones, words tend to require more syllables to remain distinct. Hawaiian for example, has only eight consonants and five vowels. That's why you will see long words like humuhumunukunukuāpua'a (state fish of Hawaii) and lauwiliwilinukunuku'oi'oi (another type of fish).

The cultures of cars

2011-09-26T22:58:00.000+02:00

Since Karl Benz produced his first patented Motorwagen in 1886, the automobile has become an essential tool in our modern life. Moreover, it has been an important cultural touchstone that reflects the socio-economic changes. Irrational add-on values take the automobile beyond a practical machine to an object of cult and fetish. The current exhibition at Museum Tinguely "Car Fetish: I drive therefore I am" examines the many facets of cars as carriers of cultural meanings. It is one of the best curated exhibitions I've seen for a while.

The show is organized as a wheel in plan (yes, a bit kitchy), with each spoke / circular sector a theme related to the cultural significance of the car. At the center is Damián Ortega's exploded car. The Mexican artist takes apart a 1983 Volkswagen Beetle and hangs every single element afloat with airplane wires. The installation invites obsessive observation and admiration.

Damián Ortega, Cosmic Thing, 2002

The car obsession starts with speed. The new feeling of time and space through high-speed movement is fantasized by the Futurist paintings where whirls and lines represent motion, energy, and dynamic space and time. Horst Baumann's photo of Jim Clark captures the Formula 1 race car moving like a zooming streamline. Erwin Wurm's cute little slanted Renault seems like deformed from the centrifugal force during a fast right turn.

Giacomo Balla, Velocità d'automobile, 1913

Horst H. Baumann, Jim Clark, Grosser Preis von England, 1963

Erwin Wurm, Renault 25 / 1991, 2009

The automobile has drastically changed our landscape with all the facilities for traffic. Upon entering the "Traffic" gallery, you immediately smell the oder of burning rubber as if you just hit the brakes. It's from Michael Sailstorfer's installation where a rubber tire is constantly scraping against the wall and turning into powder. Also in this room are Andreas Feininger's documentation of the American "carscape" and a snapshot by photojournalist Christoph Ruckstuhl in which the tire tracks in a thin snow covered plaza compose a beautiful abstract expressionist painting.

Michael Sailstorfer, Zeit ist keine Autobahn - Basel, 2011

Christoph Ruckstuhl, Untitled, 2005

The irresistible fascination makes the car center of our consumer culture. In the "Commodities Fetish" gallery, you can see the enchanting close-up photos by Peter Keetman and Patrick Weidmann in juxtaposition with Edward Burtynsky's eerie images of dead tires graveyard and Ant Farm's half buried Cadillacs. Allan Kaprow's 1961 installation is restaged in the next gallery to join the critiques of our consumerist, throw-away society.

"Commodities Fetish" gallery with photos by Patrick Weidmann, Hans Hansen,
Edward Burtynsky, and Arman's Accumulation Renault No. 105 (1967) in the middle

Ant Farm, Cadillac Ranch, 1974

Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961/2011

If something is the center of consumerism, it would inevitably become the subject of Pop Art. Andy Warhol repeats a press photo in slightly displaced prints to visualize the collision of two cars. John Chamberlain forms his monumental sculpture with compressed car body parts. In the basement of the museum, the curators put together sculptures, photos, and documents by Jean Tinguely to demonstrate his passion for speed and the machine.

"Pop Europe" gallery with works by Franz Gertsch, Gerhard Richter, Jean Dubuffet, and Jean Tinguely

Andy Warhol, Optical Car Crash, 1962

John Chamberlain, Straits of Night, 1992

Jean Tinguely, Le Safari de la mort moscovite, 1989

Jean Tinguely, Pit-Stop, 1984

The fetish could become religious. The exhibition features Chris Burden's early performance Trans-fixed during which the artist nailed himself on a VW Beetle with arms outspread like Jesus. The car was pushed out of the garage onto Speedway Avenue in Venice, CA, and the engine ran for two minutes before it disappeared back into the garage. Spanish artist Jordi Colomer placed a cute mini Popemobile on a public square in Barcelona, and documented with photography people's reactions to this odd little icon.

Chris Burden, Trans-fixed, 1974

Jordi Colomer, Papamóvil, 2005

The fetish could also get erotic. The "Sex Fetish" gallery features Kenneth Anger's short film Kustom Kar Kommandos, in which a man in tight pants buffs his car in gentle and smooth movements. In the series acts of Household, Allan Kaprow instructed women to lick off the strawberry jam smeared on a car and then destroy the towers the men built; while the men destroyed the nests the women built and ultimately set the car on fire. Chinese artist Ji Wenyu's Mad Group somehow reminds me of Pulp Fiction and Grindhouse - maybe it's the Tarantino sense of coexisting lust and tension.

Allan Kaprow, Household (Women licking jam off a car), 1964

Ji Wenyu, Mad Group, 2005

The best part of the show though is outside of the museum. The organizers operate a drive-in cinema in the museum park where people can just come in and "rent a car," sit inside and watch a movie! It looks really funny because the cars are on wooden pallets and they are clearly not "driven in."

"Drive-in" Cinema in the Tinguely Museum park

So different, so appealing

2011-09-19T22:26:00.000+02:00

Richard Hamilton passed away last Tuesday. His all-time classic Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956) in a way started the whole Pop Art movement and defined the collage aesthetics of many architects and artists in the 60s, including Archigram and Superstudio.

If we are to look at our homes today, what has changed? Probably not too much! We are still pretty much at the high point of consumer culture. Just instead of a normal TV, we now have 3D TVs. We are also after designer furniture and new gadgets like exercise bike, Wii, and the iPad. Vacuum cleaner? Now we have iRobot Roomba.

The intangible changes seems to be more significant. An appealing home can also be a gay couple happily living together with a cat. We have moved from the space fantasy of the 60s to the 21st century cyber age. All the electronic devices have an odd company: a greater demand on green features: literally natural, technologically sustainable, and flora-inspired decorative.

I made this collage to pay my tribute to the master. Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? consists of images mainly taken from American magazines (Ladies Home Journal, Tomorrow's Man, Life), cut and glued together manually. Now we do it digitally. The elements in my new collage are all from the internet, assembled with Photoshop. Source websites include eBay, BestBuy, GQ.com, marthastewart.com, Dezeen, etc.

Picking cherries

2011-09-10T11:33:00.000+02:00

When harvesting cherries, the pickers would select only the ripest and healthiest ones. This is a normal and reasonable process. But for outsiders who can only see the selected fruit, it is hard to get the whole picture. They may wrongly conclude that most, or even all, of the fruit is in such good shape.

The term "cherry picking" is thus used to describe the tendency of people favoring information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses, while ignoring cases or data that may contradict that position. This "confirmation bias" may occur as selective attention while gathering information. If you believe something/someone is bad, you tend to notice negative evidences more easily or recall mainly bad memories to prove the argument. You see what you are looking for. It can also be partial and biased interpretation. People see things through lenses. Even if two individuals are presented with the same information, they can still draw different conclusions based on their preconceived opinions.

When someone is assigned or paid to advocate a particular position, like a debater or a lawyer, he or she may pick cherries intentionally. In normal circumstances, cherry picking is a common unintentional act that anybody may perform automatically without even noticing. Some scholars explain this with the limitation of our ability to handle complex information. When things get complicated, people tend to look for shortcuts, which in this case mean "availability heuristics" - the ideas that readily come to our mind or easily follow our train of thought.

Other researchers suggest that confirmation bias involves emotional motivations. In a study during the 2004 US presidential election, a group of people were shown contradictory statements by all candidates. A MRI scanner was used to monitor their brain activity when they were asked to evaluate the information. When it came to their favored candidate, the subjects' emotional centers of the brain were aroused, which didn't happen with the other statements. Our desire to believe and to defend our beliefs blinds us. We don't like to be wrong. We intuitively seek to confirm rather than falsify hypotheses because confirmation makes us feel confident and proud. To overrule a preconception, we need very powerful evidences and at the same time very strong will.

Imagine several people going to the same design meeting. Their debriefings after the meeting could be very different. The attendants may have caught only those comments that are in line with their own ideas, or put more importance to the aspects that interest them more. They may recall selectively comments from many previous meetings and insist on their own understandings. They may also interpret the bosses' verbal descriptions as utterly different material forms. With all these different hand-picked "cherries," those who didn't go the meeting would get completely lost.

Preconceptions affect judgment. We should all try to come in neutral and open-minded, and give fair evaluations to different opinions. Making the right call should be more important than proving oneself. I guess it’s easier said than done.

Watching from afar

2011-08-27T11:34:00.000+02:00

This is one of those moments when I wish I were still in New York. The Met put up an Alexander McQueen retrospective, featuring 100 ensembles and 70 accessories from his two decades of work in fashion. Now I am on the other side of the pond, all I can do is to buy the catalogue and read from the press, watching from afar...

(All images are from the Metropolitan Museum website. Photograph © Sølve Sundsbø)

Titled "Savage Beauty," the exhibition showcased McQueen's wild imagination and dark romanticism. Maybe it's because he started his career from tailoring, I always find his design very architectural, paying close attention to the tectonic aspects of the garments.

Form

Many of McQueen's forms were based on the construction/deconstruction principles of tailoring. "My designing is done mainly during fittings. I change the cut," he once explained. "I spent a long time learning how to construct clothes, which is important to do before you can deconstruct them." A simple jacket became brilliant after a light touch of alteration. A dress in Plato's Atlantis, his last collection in 2010 before he died, showed the hybrid and juxtaposition of different fabrics morphing together with an organic curved cut.

Jacket, Joan, autumn/winter 1998–99

Dress, Plato’s Atlantis, spring/summer 2010

McQueen designed from the side, the angle that he believed to be the worse where you have all the lumps and bumps. "That way I get a cut and proportion and silhouette that works all the way round the body," he said. He worked with the body, and at the same time he wanted to push the silhouette. "To change the silhouette is to change the thinking of how we look." Does it really fit? could be the question many people ask when they saw the "Jellyfish" ensemble.

“Jellyfish” Ensemble, Plato’s Atlantis, spring/summer 2010

When McQueen wanted to fit the body, he went all the way. Inspired by the coiled necklaces of the Ndebele people of southern Africa, the "Coiled" corset carefully traced the female form with aluminum coils. Jeweler Shaun Leane made the coils one by one according to a concrete cast of the model's torso. Architects, do we have the same attitude towards our building sites?

“Coiled” Corset, The Overlook, autumn/winter 1999–2000

Material/Texture

McQueen always had bold ideas about what could go on a dress. He loved feathers. He was inspired by their colors, graphics, weightlessness, and "engineering." He tried to transpose the beauty of birds to women, both the elegance and the dark side.

Dress, The Horn of Plenty, autumn/winter 2009–10

Dress, Widows of Culloden, autumn/winter 2006–7

McQueen's use of natural raw materials became shocking when he made an entire dress out of razor-clam shells in the 2001 VOSS collection. There were also oyster shells in the same series. Later in the 2003 collection, he tried to achieve the soft oyster texture through hundreds and hundreds of circles of silk organza. Again, we could see the skills of a tailor through the use of draping and lightness.

Dress, VOSS, spring/summer 2001

Ensemble, VOSS, spring/summer 2001

“Oyster” Dress, Irere, spring/summer 2003

One of the reasons McQueen used shells was to emphasize the ephemeral nature of fashion. He also used fresh flowers mixed with silk ones in the Sarabande collection. "Things rot... I used flowers because they die." This reflected perfectly his unique sense of dark romanticism.

Dress, Sarabande, spring/summer 2007

Hair was another "crazy" raw material on McQueen's dresses. There was synthetic hair and horsehair in the Eshu collection. In his graduation collection, he encapsulate human hair, and some of his own hair, in the coat.

Coat, Eshu, autumn/winter 2000–2001

Dress, Eshu, autumn/winter 2000–2001

Detail of Coat,  Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, MA Graduation Collection 1992

Reference

McQueen's graduation collection Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims was based on a London serial killer in 1888. His fascination with Victorian culture and death was also shown in a corset in the Dante collection featuring jet beading and lilac color which were symbols of mourning in the Victorian era. He once told Vogue in an interview, "I believe in history." It was no surprise to see many historic references in his work, including an English-Queen-style crimson coat and a crinoline of metal wire half exposed underneath a beige leather dress.

Corset, Dante, autumn/winter 1996–97

Ensemble, The Girl Who Lived in the Tree, autumn/winter 2008–9

Ensemble, Eshu, autumn/winter 2000–2001

As a Scotsman, McQueen was quite patriotic about Scotland. He used McQueen wool tartan in the Widows of Culloden collection, which referenced a battle in the struggles between England and Scotland.

Ensemble, Widows of Culloden, autumn/winter 2006–7

Pattern

Like the use of tartan, pattern for McQueen was never random decoration. It was another layer to the special type of beauty, the story, or the process of construction. In another Scotland-related collection Highland Rape, McQueen did his signature torn lace for the first time to convey a broken look. The way he did it was to cut around each flower to give a very delicate, torn appearance that reflected the modular assembly of the pattern.

Dress, Highland Rape, autumn/winter 1995–96

For the finale of the 1999 runway show, McQueen had two robot arms spray-painting a dress on stage. The model Shalom Harlow revolved on a turntable. Her movement and that of the robots co-authored the pattern. But was it all accidental? McQueen told us, “It was really carefully choreographed. It took a week to program the robots.”

Dress, No. 13, spring/summer 1999

The making of the No. 13 dress during the runway show

The McQueen exhibition is over now and it ended up among the Met's top 10 popular shows. (A friend told me it was 6-hour wait to get in on the last day.) I wish the exhibition would travel to Europe so that I could see the pieces with my own eyes. Maybe Lee should go home to London, perhaps V&A?

YAP @ MAXXI

2011-08-06T20:42:00.217+02:00

I can't see YAP at PS1 this year (probably didn't miss much...), but I made it to Rome for the first ever YAP MAXXI.

MoMA PS1 joined force with MAXXI to launch the Italian edition of the established Young Architects Program. For over ten years in New York, YAP have brought in emerging young talents such as SHoP, WORKac, MOS, and SO-IL to transform the courtyards of PS1 into temporary summer events spaces with shade and water. This year for the MAXXI plaza, young Roman office stARTT was chosen as winner of the first YAP in Europe. The scheme WHATAMI injects a series of artificial green islands across the outdoor space. The main island, closer to the northeast corner of the site, features several zones of different qualities for people to hang out and relax. A "river" runs in front and forms a nice recreational "water edge." Large red calla lilies grow out of the grass and provide shading in the day and lighting at night. I feel that this is more about offering a nice and attractive place to the visitors than an "architectural" geometry play in the other YAP at PS1.

It's interesting to see the notion of architecture and gender here. Zaha's concrete building is curvy, but extremely severe and imposing at the same time. Right next to it, the male team of stARTT introduces more natural elements and to some extent they soften the aggressiveness of the strong lady with cheerful summer minds. The museum building and the new intervention co-exist in harmony, and they seem to be even complementary in a funny way.

I was surprised how well this was built. I know the PS1 budget was always so tight ($60,000-85,000, varying from year to year) that the architects usually chose very cheap materials and relied on volunteers for construction. I guess the recycled or natural materials that stARTT used, such as polystyrene and pressed hay, could still be considered "cheap." But in the making-of video shown in the gallery, I saw professional construction workers and serious metal cutting and welding work. Also, the red "flowers" were so well made that they easily top all the PS1 constructions I've seen. Maybe the city was convinced to increase funding because these high-tech objects were supposed to be relocated throughout Rome, in one of those abandoned places waiting for rehabilitation.

Art on the margin

2011-08-03T11:51:00.001+02:00

Parallel to the main Art Basel, there were several smaller shows happening in the city. Design Miami/ Basel, showcasing 20th and 21st century design, was one of the prestigious ones. It was not as massive as the Milan fair, but it still had quite a few interesting things.

Design Miami/ Basel at Messe Hall 5, with Nacho Carbonell's outdoor pieces Playground Closes at Dusk

The Aranda\Lasch designed "scattered" floor layout

Jean Prouvé seemed to be the superstar this year. Both Jousse Entreprise and Galerie Patrick Seguin dedicated their booths to his work, not mentioning the chairs and tables scattered around in the hall.

Jean Prouvé at Jousse Entreprise booth

Galerie Patrick Seguin constantly assembles and dissembles Jean Prouvé's 6x6m demountable house

I spotted this chandelier I saw before as a wall installation at the "Dead or Alive" exhibition in New York. Ralph Nauta & Lonneke Gordijn of DRIFT gathered dandelions, removed the puffs and then painstakingly glued them back seed by seed to a constellation of LED lights.

DRIFT, Fragile Future 3 Chandelier, 2010

As one of the winners of the "Designers of the Future Award," London-based architect-designer Asif Khan devised an archetypal space with helium gas, water and soap. Soap bubbles slowly rose into the air, floating upward and eventually caught by a fish net stretched across the ceiling.

Asif Khan, Cloud, 2011

The most impressive work at Design Miami/ Basel was the Luciferase series by Spanish artist Nacho Carbonell. Considered as "light-producing creatures," the pieces took inspiration from flora and fauna living in abysses, with their extraordinary colors, textures, and gesture. The effects were beautiful, resembling the seductive sparkling quality of amethyst, quartz, and malachite.

Nacho Carbonell, Luciferase series, 2011

Other concurrent shows, including Scope and Liste, provided venues for emerging galleries and artists who were "too young to get into the main fair." Perhaps these shows were simply smaller so that the art could get more attention. I felt I saw a higher concentration of talents here, with fresh insights and more innovative techniques.

Scope 11 at Kaserne

Liste 16 at Werkram Warteck pp

Patrick Cornillet's oil paintings of isolated building elements, Andrew Rogers' land art, Alex and John Gailla's red nylon wire sculptures, and Samsul Arifin's installation with ricesack figures were among the nice things at Scope.

Patrick Cornillet, Structure

Andrew Rogers, Rhythms of Life: Shield, Kenya, 2010

Alexandre and John Gailla, Crucifixion (left); La Lutte (front)

Samsul Arifin, Goni's Voice, 2011

American artists Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley participated in Scope with their interesting performance piece. For the five days of the show, the two artists lived in a self-contained vertical living unit. Tied to either end of a single rope, the two had to depend on each other to move up and down their habitat, even to the kitchen and bathroom. With Schweder's architectural background (Pratt-Princeton), this artwork explored several architecture-related issues better than many "experimental" houses. It reexamined notions such as everyday domestic routine, modes of circulation, building-inhabitant interactions, and ultimately, interpersonal relationships.

Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley, Counterweight Roommate, 2011

Counterweight Roommate concept model

Digital technology is one of the trending issues in art today, especially among young artists. The "Principia" exhibition during the Milan Design Week put together some 3D-printed sculptures and a robot arm drawing portraits. This time at Scope in Basel, there was a machine painting in color pixels, very similar to the way drawings were made in the TV drama series Kyle XY.

Young Japanese artist Macoto Murayama used 3D modeling and graphic softwares to create inorganic flora in uncanny details, bringing the power of science and the fantasy of art together.

Macoto Murayama, Commelina communis L. - front - ow, 2011

Macoto Murayama, Commelina communis L. - side view - b2011

On the slightly less high-tech side, artists used computer graphic techniques to create surreal collages. They appropriated either masterpieces or familiar built environments and turned them into bizarre scenarios.

Lluis Barba, Santa Cena, Leonardo, 2009

Tom Leighton, Appropriation of Space: Venice 1, 2010

Jean-Francois Rauzier, Vestibule

Appropriation could lead to another characteristic of young art - humor. In Liste, I couldn't help laughing when I saw Romanian artist Ciprian Mureşan showing the probable result of Yves Klein's Leap into the Void, and a mock Calvin Klein advertisement by the Chinese group Double Fly.

Ciprian Mureşan, Leap into the Void, after 3 seconds, 2004

Double Fly Group, Brand Franchise, 2010

Swiss artist MARCK's work showed a good synthesis of technology and humor. His video art typically featured a woman (his life partner Sandra) in a metal box, seemingly trying to avoid a swaying sickle or finding her way between the screws. This direct confrontation with the Urangst would make us think about relations between the physical and the virtual, reality and imaginations.

MARCK, Dornen, 2009

Where history meets contemporary art

2011-07-29T00:35:00.247+02:00

After the successful introduction to Art Basel last year by Jens Hoffman, the Art Parcours program returned this year for its second edition in the St. Alban Tal area along the Rhine. The idea was to create a strong interaction with Basel's past and present, weaving artistic interventions into the fabric of the historic city. "The fair halls are so clean and proper and without much character that the historical buildings that we have chosen seem like the best contrast," Hoffman explained. In my opinion, it was exactly this contrast that made Art Parcours a million times more interesting.

Some of the venues were old houses in the neighborhood. Gabriel Sierra inserted various wooden structures in the different rooms of Raum33, marking the spatial sequence between the street and the riverfront. Anne Chu covered the floor of Hohen Dolder House with large rugs inspired by the deer-antler motifs in the surrounding murals.

Gabriel Sierra, Untitled, Estructures for transition #9

Anne Chu, A resting place with William Tell

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller showed their playfulness in the pop-up bar inside an old water reservoir. Through a heavy old door and a dimly-lit staircase, you entered a vaulted space with a tiki hut in the middle. There were dancing waves projected on the damp walls, tropical music playing in the background, and a couple of bartenders serving you colorful fruity cocktails.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Blue Hawaii Bar

On a cargo ship, Chris Johanson built a stage for his own Art Parcours Night performance with his band Sun Foot. I don't know how it looked during the party. But in the day, it didn't find it so appealing.

Chris Johanson / Sun Foot, An Evening of Going Through Things and Looking at Each Other with Each Other

Along the river bank, Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero painted four fishing huts with colors and shapes from his hometown San José, bringing an unusual festive atmosphere to the quite Swiss town.

Federico Herrero, Vibrantes

It was ironic to see Ai Weiwei's work on the old city wall. In a way, these remains of the medieval fortification reminded me of the various walls in China and the artist in prison.

Ai Weiwei, Fairytale People

In front of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinka Shonibare "decorated" the trees along the river with hundreds of kites of different colors and patterns. They could be flying or trapped, depending on your mood when you saw it I guess.

Yinka Shonibare, 500 Kites

Three sculptures by Ugo Rondinone from the Scholar Rocks series were placed in the St. Alban churchyard. Well, you know what it is - I don't have too much to say about this.

Ugo Rondinone, Scholar Rocks

The best work of all was inside the St. Alban Church, where Belgian artist Kris Martin covered the floor with innumerable tiny bronze discs. It was extremely moving because of the multiple layers of dual qualities: subtlety and strong presence; playfulness and sublime; specificity and ambiguity; form and formless; transience and eternity. It gave us a great example of well-balanced intervention and interaction.

Kris Martin, Festum II

Art supermarket

2011-07-26T17:25:00.091+02:00

After a whole month, I finally have the time to start blogging about Art Basel. Official announcement said that the 42nd annual art fair attracted record attendance of 65,000 visitors coming to see an estimated $1.75 billion worth of art by 2,500 artists represented by more than 300 galleries from 35 countries.

I have to say, the fair was overwhelming in quantity but a bit underwhelming in quality. You could see 20th century masters like Picasso, Miro, and Francis Bacon; plus contemporary blue-chip artists such as Andy Warhol, Richard Serra, and Anish Kapoor. But the setting didn't feel right - the atmosphere in the exhibition halls had an uncanny resemblance to what's in a supermarket. Just instead of 99¢, the price tags would probably say $99,000.

The Huffington Post reported that 300 private jets landed in the city on the first day, drawing in celebrities like Eli Broad, Naomi Campbell, and Will Ferrell. The media suggested that it was a sign of recovering economy. True or not, I guess at least for rich people art was still a safer place to put their money than the investment banking system.

VIP lounge

Antony Gormley, Tony Cragg, and Not Vital at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Richard Long's "Autumn to Winter Circle" (2010) seems a bit out of context

Jaume Plensa's "Three Graces" (2010) is quite cramped in here without too much grace.

Louise Bourgeois' "Eyes" (2001) lying at the Cheim & Read booth

Bernar Venet's "216.5° Arc x 14" (2007) seems to be randomly placed in an office.

Businessman on the phone: Should we buy this Ai Weiwei?

But of course, out of $1.75 billion worth of art, there must be something interesting. The "Art Unlimited" sector, for example, featured several nice large installations. My favorite is To R.M. for EVER, where Swedish artist Christian Andersson constructed the scene of René Magritte's The Art of Conversation in reality with styrofoam and plaster. Mona Hatoum's Impenetrable used barbed wires to form a floating cube, combining the notions of delicacy and danger. Other artists in this sector included Daniel Buren (who also brought some subtle changes to the escalators), Puerto Rican duo Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla who were chosen to represent the US in the Venice Biennale this year, and not surprisingly, Anish Kapoor.

Art Unlimited. Left: Nari Ward, CarouSoul, 2011
Right: Kendell Geers, Hanging Piece, 1993

Mario Merz, 74 gradini riappaiono in una crescita di geometria concentrica, 1992

Christian Andersson, To R.M. for EVER, 2011

Mona Hatoum, Impenetrable, 2009

Daniel Buren, Autour du retour d'un détour - Inscriptions, 1986-1988

The escalator "decorated" by Daniel Buren

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Scale of Justice Carried by Shore Foam, 2010

Anish Kapoor, Push - Pull, 2008

Anish Kapoor was quite ubiquitous this time. His unique sensitivity towards material and space never failed me. Other artists like Takashi Naraha used the same play of smoothness and roughness in his sculptures, and produced very nice works as well.

Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2011

Anish Kapoor, Sans titre, 2011

Takashi Naraha, Mandala-Wall N86, 1990

Smoothness vs. roughness seemed to be a common concern between Kapoor and many other sculptors. Tony Cragg reached a certain roughness with his wrinkled smoothness, and this time the smoothness wrapped around and created mysterious inner spaces. David Altmejd's signature plaster casting with burlap explored the textures of purity and decay.

Tony Cragg, Lost in Thought, 2011

David Altmejd, Untitled, 2011

Here are some other curious objects. The little marble Manhattan made me a bit nostalgic...

David Shrigley, Thing, 2008

Yutaka Sone, Little Manhanttan (marble), 2007-09

Paul McCarthy, Tripod, 2006

Jesus Rafael Soto and Olle Baertling at Galerie Denise René Rive Gauche

Objects were one thing, but the subtlety of special material treatments always intrigued me more. Emil Lukas's Growing Sound, for example, used thread to "paint" a surface - extremely brilliant and exquisite.

Mária Bartuszová, Untitled 23, 1987

Emil Lukas, Growing Sound (thread over wood frame), 2011

Alternative icons

2011-06-20T21:48:00.025+02:00

Earlier this month, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Foster-designed Apple Headquarters in front of the city council of Cupertino. Judging from the mayor's reactions, Steve can really just build whatever he wants as long as he stays in Cupertino and pay taxes.

To be honest, the donut scheme is so BAD that I think it may as well be anything else. Perhaps they are better off just using their beautiful graphic and product design.

Size does matter

2011-06-16T22:58:00.074+02:00

The Grand Palais is grand. How do you make it even grander? Insert a biblical sea monster, Anish Kapoor says.

For this year's Monumenta, the Indian-born British artist fills the glass-domed nave of Grand Palais with a giant inflatable sculpture titled "Leviathan." I am so glad that I made the trip to Paris, because this is definitely one of the most powerful artwork I've seen in recent years.

Through the revolving doors, visitors are ushered into a womb-like space flooded in vibrant red. "We are inside the beast," a friend says. Three pods extend in three directions, but you can't really tell how far they go. The eerie lighting condition and the monochromic environment cancel out the sense of depth. When the sun throws shadows of the metal roof structure onto the thin rubbery membrane, you start to read more clearly the curvy geometry, and the space takes on a different expression. But still, everything remains mysterious.

The exterior deserves a louder "wow" - this is huge! If the interior is more about the ambiguous atmosphere of a void, the outside is an enormous presence right in front of your eyes. Larger than the trumpet at the Tate 9 years ago, this new piece is 35-meter tall - almost reaching the roof. It uses 72,000 square meters of surface material, and weighs 18 tons. People look like ants around it, and at the same time, the super smooth purple surface makes the sculpture scaleless. I guess that's why most of my photos look like model shots.

Size not only gives strong visual impacts but also allows physical interactions. Walking around the structure, you feel the dynamics of the shape. This odd three-legged creature forms tangential spaces and arches, and creates interesting in-between spaces together with the Grand Palais envelope. There is sharp contrast between the plain surface of the balloon and the ornate Art Nouveau stairs and balcony, but the two co-exist in harmony.

Leviathan is immersive both in the physical and mental dimensions. It's experiential, and emotions give richness to the singularity of the physical form. Words or photos don't do justice - it is pre-language and beyond language. Anish Kapoor often says, "I have nothing to say." I guess we shouldn't intellectualize his work too much. In front of the immense and immersive sculpture in Grand Palais, words cease to have meanings.

Jet d'eau

2011-06-07T21:23:00.126+02:00

This jet of water is in all the Geneva-related things: guidebooks, postcards, websites... But seeing it in person is a different story. It's just utterly beautiful and awe-inspiring! (Duh...)

It all started in 1886 when a hydraulic plant at La Coulouvrenière put up a simple security valve to control excess pressure. In July 1891, the city of Geneva decided to move it into the harbor and make it a tourist attraction. Over the years, Jet d'eau has become a truly striking symbol of Geneva.

Original Jet d'eau in 1886

It took me quite a while to figure out how to describe my feelings with words. What amazed me the most is the unity of opposite qualities. Jet d'eau shows an ambitious yet humble city with a bold but subtle gesture. It is simple because there's no flashy swaying or musical rhythms. But it renders a powerful image with its sheer height, volume, and speed. It's also a perfect balance between the man-made and nature. It animates the harbor with sophisticated engineering, utilizing its own essential element - water. It is definitely one of the best example of urban editing I've seen.

Basic technical facts:
Maximum height: 140 m
Water velocity on exit: 200 km/h
Pump rate: 500 litres/sec
Total power of the two pumps: 1000 kW

Urban Editing

2011-06-02T23:38:00.004+02:00

Heraclitus said, you could not step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing. All things change; our cities are no exceptions. The question is how to understand the changes and how to define the role of design in the process of urban evolution. The latest issue of MONU Magazine "Editing Urbanism" tackles this topic with full power, introducing diverse views from architects, landscape architects, artists, politicians, researchers and theorists. Once again, MONU proves itself to be an interesting and relevant platform for urban discourse.

The term "editing" implies intervention. In the realm of design intervention, we've seen alteration of use and consequently the trajectory of development, like the reactivation of the High Line mentioned in Sean Burkholder's contribution, and OMA's light but powerful revision of the platform in the Bordeaux House. Another type of editing can be to adjust the speed of change. Governments in China and Dubai speed up urban transformation to show their lively visions and ambitions. On the other hand, the fear of dying makes us want to slow down urban decay, prevent any type of changes, or even reverse the flow of time.

The High Line turns an elevated train track into an elevated park.

A large pillow transforms a work space into a relaxation area after the death of the former owner.

We could go quite intensive about this. In The Naked Lunch: A Stark Honest Discussion On Renewal, members of UNION3 talk about overbuilding in Spain and the Netherlands. We can see this in China and Germany as well. Since German reunification, more than 180,000 new residential units have been built in Berlin. But in 2008 the vacancy rate in the city was as high as 10%. This "urban bubble" materialized itself from the optimistic assumption that the new capital could lure big money and rapid population growth.

Another extreme is Venice. Ippolito Pestellini of OMA talks about his experience of working on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi renovation in Extreme Demolition and Extreme Preservation. In Venice, any kind of minor intervention could be against city legislation. This extreme preservation turns a once vibrant city into a touristy "museum" of empty shells - the lack of standard modern urban facilities simply makes it unlivable. What's more worrying is that this extreme preservation trend is spreading throughout the world. According to OMA/AMO's calculation, 12% of the world's surface is now blocked from any potential changes.

OMA's contribution in MONU #14

The purpose of preservation is to prevent disrespectful or careless alteration. But if it gets to the extreme like Venice, rigid regulations would rule out healthy progressions as well. We know cities adapt and evolve through time. Why do we freeze the moment and stop any type of transformation? Jarrik Ouburg argues in his contribution that the World Heritage status of Amsterdam's canal district may potentially kill the energy of this unique neighborhood. "The city of Amsterdam is praised by the UNESCO because of its town planning and engineering of the past, but will be punished for having the same ambitions for the future." The only future for the preserved district is to be what it was before. This paradox is wonderfully illustrated in Beatriz Ramo/STAR's In the Name of the Past. If the current logics of preservation were applied centuries ago, many of today's monuments, like the Duomo of Florence and the Eiffel Tower, would not even exit.

If UNESCO had existed in 1059, the Duomo of Florence would not be there
because it would obscure the views to Baptistery of St. John. (c) STAR

OMA/AMO brings up another paradox: what if something was designed to change? Kurokawa's Capsule Tower in Tokyo, for example, is facing the danger of demolition. Trying to get the historic landmark status seems to be the only way to save this early 1970s masterpiece. But static preservation is against the original design concepts of the Metabolism movement. Should we respect the abstract ideas or their concrete manifestations?

The biggest contradiction of preservation, in my opinion, is restoration - it reverses the passage of time! STAR compares this operation with the Photoshop retouch of Madonna's Vanity Fair cover. Former Superstudio member Adolfo Natalini further ridicules restoration practices by digging out a surreal image of flooded Florence created in 1972. "If you really want to restore the situation, why just restore to the 19th century? Why not restore the Renaissance situation?" Why not Medieval, Roman, or even Pleistocene situation? "In the Pleistocene situation, Florence was a lake!"

Madonna and her restored youth.

Flooded Florence by Superstudio

Obvious, the notion of decay and death is center to the struggle. As Natalini says in the interview Deadly Serious, "the reason we don't like our physical changes is that they remind us that we are moving closer and closer towards death." In Eternal Ise, Ouburg points out that the interesting rebuilding cycle of the Ise Shrine in Japan may be UNESCO's antidote. Since 690 AD, the shrine has been rebuilt every 20 years. The site is divided into two halves: one is the current building in use and the other is where the shrine was 20 years ago and will be in 20 years. This life and death cycle is like the rebirth of phoenix - a dynamic eternity. But of course, the reborn building is too new to be a World Heritage according to UNESCO's standards.

The self-replicating Ise Shrine

With all the struggles and paradox, the role of architects has become less and less significant in reshaping our built environment. Starchitects who make flashy icons are prominent within the profession, but very few of them are regarded as credible public figures. OMA/AMO points out that since Philip Johnson in 1979, no architect has appeared on the cover of Time magazine. In fact, I found it extremely ironic to see Zaha Hadid in the category of "thinker" alongside Steve Jobs and Sonia Sotomayor in the 2010 Time 100.

The public credibility of architects

In order to regain leadership in guiding urban transformations, UNION3 advocates for a new role of urban curatorship. Designers should understand the life of city and architecture and manipulate it with the right tools and forward thinking. This reminds me of Constant's New Babylon. What the designer provides is a completely re-arrangeable platform instead of a fixed settlement. It's a "dynamic labyrinth" where the inhabitants drift around, endlessly reconstructing the atmospheres of the spaces according to the moment of life. The continuity of a network allows mobility and its open-endedness (or open-mindedness) fosters spontaneous urban editing. As Burkholder argues in What not to Do: A Case for Design Neglect, "in a dynamic system, doing nothing is doing something." Designers can just "present signals of human intentionality and let the system do the rest." At the end, I guess the Taoist paradigm was right: to govern by doing nothing.

New Babylon by Constant

E-books or p-books?

2011-05-21T17:46:00.075+02:00

Amazon announced on Thursday that they are selling more e-books for Kindle than print books (p-books) - hardcover and paperback books combined. Since April 1, 2011, Amazon has sold 105 e-books for every 100 print book. That includes sales of hardcover and paperback books that have no Kindle edition, and not counting free Kindle downloads. This is not even four years since Amazon started the Kindle business in November 2007, and less than one year after they announced that e-book sales surpassed hardcover book sales last July.

This is definitely a significant milestone. But to be honest, I haven't really figured out how I feel about this. I love the physical existence of p-books (hence also known as "real books"). There is the irreplaceable intimacy of feeling it as an object: look, touch, and sometimes smell the fresh ink. But I enjoy my iPad a lot as well. E-books are compact, lightweight - convenient to carry around. They are cheaper and you can get them right away, in the comfort of your own home or on the go. But it's always fun to physically be in bookstores and browse around real books. You can flip through the pages and get a quick idea about the content. It's easier to write notes on the margin of p-books, but e-books are easier to search and the highlight function is really powerful. And the built-in dictionary allows you to check out definitions of words with just one touch.

The most amazing thing about e-books for me is the interactive dimension of the format. Many magazines embed multimedia materials like slideshows, audio and videos in their digital edition, enriching the experience of reading and revolutionizing what we perceive as the publishing industry.

It may look ridiculous nowadays to carry scrolls of papyrus around. But some of them have survived the evolution of technology because they contain valuable original knowledge. Continue this thinking of the basics, both p-books and e-books allow you to do the most important thing - to read a book. The essence is the content. Maybe it doesn't really matter so much what form it takes.

We lost a good architect

2011-05-09T23:26:00.013+02:00

When I saw the recently released winning entry of Comic and Animation Museum by MVRDV, I was very tempted to list it with the other literal buildings I gathered. It's a museum about comics, so let's make it with speech balloons!

Comic and Animation Museum, Hangzhou, China

Again and again, MVRDV's recent projects made me shiver with the thought that they were trapped in the cheap side of today's design culture and becoming less and less relevance. Four major symptoms:

1. Literal reference
The reference to speech balloons is very literal. What's even worse is that the building form is a literal translation of that. I've expressed many times my thoughts on literal design - no need to say more now.

2. Superficial wallpaper
One of the first lessons we learn from school is that architecture is not just about how it looks on the facade. But some architects today are quite satisfied with only dealing with the envelope, and are even trying to make a theory out of that. MVRDV doesn't seem to be immune to this fad. The Teletech call center in Dijon, for example, uses a cheap printed wallpaper facade to communicate "the activities of the company." 2D barcode? Give me a break.

Teletech Call Center, Dijon, France

3. Repeated cliché
The "Future Towers" (Amanora Hills) in India is a chimera of outdated fashion. Apartments mixed with amenities; hexagonal grid plan; raked roofs with balconies; concrete grid facade with punched windows... Is there anything news? We should probably call this project "Past Towers" instead.

Future Towers, Pune, India

4. Careless randomness
At Berlage, Winy Maas is pushing very hard the hyper-rational design process with game theory. At MVRDV, he's producing design with complete randomness: apparent chaos with no underlying logic. The Tirana Lake master plan project from a few years ago is the best example.

I planned to put "ugliness" as the fifth symptom, because it can be seen pretty much in all the projects mentioned above. But on second thought, I left it out. It's more a matter of taste after all. Maybe some people would actually think they are beautiful...

10 years ago, many of us were fascinated by the team of young Dutch architects. It was refreshing to see the dynamic spatial energy of Villa VPRO, the innovative sandwich of the Dutch Pavilion at the Hanover Expo, and the insightful studies on density in FARMAX. But now, I think we've lost them.

Bipolar society

2011-05-08T14:48:00.046+02:00

This is the front page of the latest Weekly Telegraph. The juxtaposition of the two pieces of news makes a compelling example of the status of our culture: the two poles of hard and soft stories, conflicts and fantasies. When you turn on the TV, you see news about Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Then switch the channel, voila! American Idol! Well yeah... Let's go watch Thor.

Report Milano 7 - Rising Stars

2011-04-30T15:59:00.251+02:00

In addition to the well established superstars, the rising young talents have brought in quite some fresh air into the Salone scene. The Bouroullec brothers, for example, are everywhere with brands like Vitra, Mattiazzi, Magis, Flos, and Alessi. I find the balance between delicacy and expressiveness in their work very attractive. Like the Osso chair, the simple assembly of four CNC-milled pieces makes an elegant and modestly expressive object.

Osso chairs by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec for Mattiazzi

Ovale by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec for Alessi

Designs by both former PLOT partners can be seen in Milan. Julien de Smedt is featured in the "Belgium is Design" show at the Pinacoteca di Brera, presenting his New Nordic shelves and Crushed Bowl for Muuto, a plywood stair prototype, and the Bone chair.

New Nordic shelves and Crushed bowls by JDS for Muuto

Bjarke Ingels shows up as part of KiBiSi, a joint venture of Kilo Design, BIG, and Skibsted Ideation. Two lamps are feature at the Danish Design Center show in Zona Tortona, alongside with Danish design legends like Kaare Klint, Verner Panton, and Poul Christiansen. Compared to JDS's operations somehow within architectural languages, KiBiSi's lamps seem to be just intending to shock...

Bunch of Bulbs by KiBiSi

Knot by KiBiSi

There is no national pavilion of Japan, but the force of Japanese design is quite strong. At the Salone, Arketipo features a line designed by Nendo, including Cube magazine storage, Link and Moya coffee tables, Eda coat stand, Hide cabinet, and Target shelves.

Link tables (front) and Eda coat stand (back) by Nendo for Arketipo

Hide cabinet by Nendo for Arketipo

Target bookshelves by Nendo for Arketipo

In their own showroom at the Galleria Jannone, Nendo presents more recent works under the title "Textured Transparencies." Here, we see a cast clear acrylic table top with a strong wood texture, a pendant lamp with a ring of protective film which changes transparency when seen from different angles, a chair of elastic polyurethane film mounted on only a backrest and armrests, and artificial ulexite frames that make the images behind them floating. The general message is that transparency is not about disappearing, but rather the existence in gradations and nuance.

Transparent Table, Transparent Lamp, and Transparent Chair by Nendo

Transparent Chair

Transparent Frame by Nendo

At the Triennale Museum, Nendo designs the exhibition setting for the Taiwanese design brand Yii. A forest of inflatable transparent vinyl tubes are hung from the ceiling. They blur the objects and force you to meander between them to get through. This "non-direct" approach is in a way very Asian.

In the Boffi showroom in Brera, Living Divani puts up a show to present their Junya Ishigami line. Family Chair is a collection of 5 lovely shaped steel wire chairs. Each of them has a slightly different personality (wide, tall, short, normal, and a stool), but they "live" in harmony together like a family. Drop Table is basically a lens on legs, creating intriguing optical effects. And there are also Garden Plates. Well, these things are just adorable!

Family Chairs by Junya Ishigami

Drop Table by Junya Ishigami

Garden Plate by Junya Ishigami

In Zona Tortona, Ishigami appears again with Sou Fujimoto and Akihisa Hirata at Spazio FMG's "Architecture as a Piece of Nature" exhibition. It's almost like a statement that a new generation of Japanese architects has matured and left the shadows of Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, and Shigaru Ban.

Although neither of the two principals of SO-IL is Japanese, their design for the Arper stand at the Salone clearly reflects the influence of Japanese sensibility they got from their SANAA years. The translucent fabric skin of the cubes produces overlapping and blurred visual effects.

Report Milano 6 - Teaming Up

2011-04-28T22:13:00.116+02:00

It's a tradition that furniture brands would team up with architects to develop product or showroom design. At the Salone del Mobile this year, Olivari reviews its 100 years of collaboration with architects and designers, from Gio Ponti, BBPR to more contemporary big names like Toyo Ito and Steven Holl.

Horm once again manufactures a Steven Holl design. It's a system of hexagonal modulars that can be flanked into various configurations. It can function as a stool or a side table, available in Lecce stone and okoume wood. Jean Nouvel's "Vienna" for Wittmann is also a modular system. It can be arranged into a chaise lounge or sofas of different length.

In its showroom on via Manzoni, Alessi launches the Piana chair by David Chipperfield. Near Porta Volta, Lumina shows the FLO reading lamp by Foster+Partners. I really appreciate the simplicity and elegance of these British designs.

On the other side of the spectrum, Zaha Hadid designs the flamboyant Z-Chair for Sawaya & Moroni. It's probably the only chair in the city that doesn't allow visitors to sit on. I guess it won't look as "attractive" if it has fingerprints all over the polished stainless steel surface after use. In the basement of the S&M showroom, there's also the Daniel Libeskind designed tea set. OK, speechless.

Hermès has hired Shigaru Ban (with his Pompidou-Metz partner Jean de Gastines) to design a temporary pavilion at La Pelota for its new interior collections. It's the first time I've got to see Shigaru Ban's signature cardboard tube structure. Woven with paper and joined by cardboard planes, the tubes form the envelope of a sequence of intimate and calm spaces.

Similarly intimate but with a more substantial material - stone, "Nucleus" by Manuel Aires Mateus for Pibamarmi's bathroom line is featured in a group exhibition of stone design at the Triennale Museum. It seems to be a reduced version of "A Temple for Stone Gods" shown last year.

Bisazza is going artsy this year, with an exhibition at Triennale of Alessandro Mendini's sculptures using Bisazza mosaics.

Corian is famous for teaming up with architects and designers to demonstrate the potentials of this high-tech (and expensive) material in the occasions of the Salone. We've seen Marc Newson's Diode lamps (2003), Ron Arad's Oh-Void chair (2004), Zaha Hadid's Z-Island kitchen (2006), and Jean Nouvel's Lumières back-lit cabinets (2007). This year, Corian has a surprise: a TRON-inspired show with Disney in Zona Tortona. The first room is Flynn's Arcade with brightly lit walls and digital display on the table. The next is dark with the fancy Light Cycle in the spotlight. The highlight of the show is Kevin Flynn's safe house. I don't necessarily like the extravagant design. But no doubt it shows a fascinating life-style. And of course, the Daft Punk soundtracks in the background add a lot to the theatrical effects.

Report Milano 5 - Cheesy is the New Cool

2011-04-27T23:23:00.104+02:00

Is Lady Gaga cheesy or cool? I would say her over-the-top style makes her the coolest (or hottest?) singer of our time. A similar trend has also appeared in our design culture. Some brands at the Salone del Mobile prove that being cheesy is actually cool.

I was shocked standing in front of Kartell’s area. Flashy neon billboards with large shameless self-promoting slogans look like some nightclub in Vegas. But the show does what it’s supposed to do. The commercial/design message is loud and clear. If wearing meat as a dress is cool, this is certainly no problem.

The Edra stand is also full of cheese. In a dim room, there are many ultra-glossy and glittering objects, as well as hair and straws. People are very keen on sitting on things like that. The extreme popularity makes it very hard to take pictures of the chairs themselves.

Grinza armchair series in leather or fur, by the Campana brothers.

Cabana shelves covered with raffia, and Scrigno cabinet with mirror, also by the Campana brothers.

Mario Cananzi & Roberto Semprini's Tatlin Sofa covered with shiny Swarovski crystals

Alice armchair by Jacopo Foggini

The hairiness can also be seen in many other stands, including Baxter and Casamania.

Loop Chaise Lounge by Sophie de Vocht for Casamania

Another trend is what I would like to call "Neo-Baroque": using more contemporary materials to make bold and richly decorated forms. Good examples include the Magis Proust armchair by Alessandro Mendini and the Paper Chandelier by Studio Job for Moooi.