The Metamorphosis

            
BIG has finally made its North America debut with a 600-unit condo tower on West 57th Street at the Manhattan riverfront. The design takes a funny distorted shape. According to BIG, it's trying to merge the forms of a typical Manhattan tower-podium typology and a European-style perimeter block.

As usual, BIG tells the story through a series of diagrams, showing how the building morphs into shape. This reminds me of the recently completed 8 House project in Copenhagen, where Bjarke explains in a video how the design becomes a figure 8 knot. If we look further back, the same approach can be seen back in the PLOT days like in the VM Houses.

The morphing of W57

The morphing of 8 House

The morphing of VM Houses

This is certainly a pretty convincing presentation technique. But the more I see it, the more I find it problematic. Let's run though the process again.

The origin
Where do butterflies come from? There are always origins. It could be the building envelope regulated by zoning, but it's not what BIG chooses to start with. Sometimes it's a platonic shape (like a cube or an extruded trapezoid) and sometimes it's a kind of architectural type (bar building or perimeter block). This suggests a bias towards simple forms. It seems in BIG's philosophy, the default solutions have no potential for good architecture. Architecture is all about strange forms.

Driving forces
As we've seen so far, BIG uses sun, privacy, view, and urban connections as parameters that drive the morphing process. It seems objective and analytical. But are these all we need to consider when we design? Clearly there are already personal decisions made here in terms of preferences and priorities. The bigger problem is, this seemingly objective process makes design always a passive act. It seems architecture can only respond to external forces. I don't think architecture should be purely subjective. But at least it should be more active. It should do more than just react to constraints.

The result
A simplified narrative of morphing omits layers of information behind usually complicated design decisions. It appears to be a linear cause-effect development, and the end result inevitably appears to be an easy one-liner. It's just a "big gesture" and it's almost purely geometric. (You see they can only name the project after its shape.) The plain straightforwardness makes the design attractive at first glance. But over time, the lack of sophistication actually makes it boring and dated pretty soon.

Conceptual clarity is important, and optimism and playfulness are good qualities for a designer. But I think it's a very fine line between that and being superficial and naive.
        

Found humanity

  
Totally unplanned, I went to the Davy Rothbart event at the CAC when I visited Cincinnati. Davy is the creator of FOUND Magazine, a yearly publication that collects discarded notes, letters, memos, written chats, doodles, etc. At the CAC, Davy hit the audience with one after another funny notes picked up from various cities, seasoning them with his energy and extraordinary reading skills. The event turned out to be two sweet, hilarious, and amazing hours well spent between some art and a fancy dinner.

It all started after one snowy winter night in 1999 when Davy went to his car and found a note on his windshield. It was addressed to another guy named Mario:

Davy was fascinated by this mixture of hate and love. There was clearly a love triangle but Amber was still somehow hopeful at the end. With this passion, he set out to collect more found stuff and made it into a magazine. Then the readers started to send in their finds as well. After a decade, FOUND has become almost like a cult that worships little scraps of paper.

Here's one that seems to be a monthly budget typed up by a neat person. The list starts with rent 600, cell phone 50... food 500, liquor 600 (!), and... crack 600 (!!)... Another one is a comparison made by a woman trying to decide between two men. Andrew or Paul?

After a good laugh, I realized it was more than just something funny. We humans have all sorts of emotions, sometimes conflicting ones (like Amber). It's interesting to see how people would/could think and how they decide. These found notes give glimpses into other people's personal and intimate moments. As Davy's mom puts it, it's like "people watching on paper." The notes were written without any self-consciousness or pretense, since they were not meant to be public. So they reveal humanity in a rather raw and unfiltered manner. Through these notes, we can get a sense of all the kinds of lives being led around us, even if we don't necessarily connect with each other on a daily basis or in meaningful ways.

Davy saved his all-time favorite find to the end. I think it's about friendship. (Video found online, taken from another event.)

            

It's all about the twist

            
At the beginning of the month, I went to a Ben van Berkel lecture at the Cooper. Stan Allen did the introduction and the two joined force in a conversation after BvB's talk. I had the feeling that the whole evening was just about two words: "twist" from BvB and "diagram" from SA.

SA started off the introduction by talking about diagrams, saying that UNStudio's use of diagrams cuts across the usual program-form dichotomy. Then BvB took the stage. He looked back to the IFCCA competition entry that UNStudio did in 1999, where a series of diagrams mapped the performance of Manhattan and extracted parameters that defined the design of West Side. He said, diagram is in a way a "twist" of information, instrumentalizing it as a tool to organize program and infrastructure. He explained the method of
"deep planning," which means to plan in a formally rich way. By doing this, infographs are turned into abstract design models. They are like mathematical models that adapts easily. They give orientation to the design but not illustrating it. This mathematics of UNStudio's design models reminded me of their early Mobius House. Similarly, the Mercedes Museum clearly follows the geometric model of trefoil knot.

Cross Section of Mid-town Manhattan

Mobius House, Het Gooi

Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart

Among the many design models, the twist is perhaps the most consistent in UNStudio's work. It appeared frequently across scale and typology. In Villa NM, the twist materialized as a physical expression of the spatial organization, visualizing the intertwining of domestic and social programs. In the Star Place in Taiwan, the atrium becomes a vertical twist - a "seamless organization of disconnected parts." (Yes, BvB showed that snake-horse-lion-man head again.)

Villa NM, Upstate New York

Star Place Atrium, Kaohsiung

Burnham Pavilion, Chicago

One of the recent works BvB showed was the Burnham Pavilion in Chicago's Millenium Park. He referred to it as a prototype, some sort of a 1:1 diagram rather than a building. He argued that there are currently too many external references (politics, economy, art, etc.) in our profession. He wants to concentrate on the internal forces of architecture. And geometric design models give him the opportunity to group the projects into series. Here I have some doubts. Is this autonomy all over again? Maybe he has cut across the usual program-form dichotomy and reached the side of pure forms.

        

Word play

      

Apologies for the lack of new posts in the last month… I was planning something important - a very complex sequence of events that needs attentive arrangements. There was stress, mistakes, and regrets, but in general I found myself enjoying the process. Perhaps it's occupational obsession. After all, architecture is mostly about planning complex sequences of events.

In addition to describing a person who designs buildings, the word "architect" also means a creator who devises and guides a plan in general, like in "the architects of the constitution," or "the architect behind the Italian job." So when we use the word specifically for architecture, it still indicates the planning of where to put things, how things are organized, and what comes first, etc. Architects are "schemers" (yes, we do make schemes), conceiving visions of the future and plotting steps towards their dreams.

But architecture is not only about plans and dreams. Etymologically, the word "architect" derives from the Latin architectus, itself derived from the Greek arkhitekton (arkhi-, chief + tekton, builder). So the profession (chief builder) has a component of execution. Unfortunately, there is too much blah blah blah in our current training and discourse, and the art of building seems to be neglected as something "uncool." But we should not forget, there is no such thing as a good plan when the planner doesn't care about how it's done.

In China, the term "architect" didn't really exist until Liang Sicheng redefined the profession in the early 20th century. Traditionally, scholars or governors came up with ideas, and builders finished construction according to standards (like Yingzao Fashi, the State Building Standards of the Song Dynasty). What we need now is a good combination of thinkers/planners and executors. And that's what the word "architect" really means.

      

Rabbit abundance

        
Happy Lunar New Year of the Rabbit! (Make sure to click on the image and zoom in to see details in the high-res card.)

In 1202, Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, calculated the growth of an idealized (biologically unrealistic) rabbit population:

Suppose a newly-born pair of rabbits, one male, one female, are put in a field. Rabbits are able to mate at the age of one month so that at the end of its second month a female can produce another pair of rabbits. Assuming that rabbits never die and a mating pair always produces one new pair (one male, one female) every month from the second month on, the puzzle that Fibonacci posed was: how many pairs will there be in one year?

The answer, as we know today, is the 13th number of the Fibonacci sequence: 233.

            

When the digital becomes physical

             

After three years of construction, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria reopened its doors on Saturday. The renovation/expansion was designed by Thomas Leeser, a Frankfurt-born architect who used to work for Peter Eisenman on signature projects like the Wexner and La Villette. I guess he's been on his own for quite a while now - this new building, probably his first significant built work, doesn't reflect much of his Eisenmanian background.

From 35th Avenue, all you see is the original 1920s white stucco building. The three-story new addition bulges out from the back as a dull and windowless big-box volume. Clad in triangular light-blue aluminum panels, the exterior tries to bring some interest with its dia-grid surface. But it seems to me that it's just a game of pattern making, and the treatment of open joints in different widths further confirms its decorative nature. Leeser talks about triangulation as a motif of the "digital," a science fiction language - like the virtual wireframe blueprint seen in Iron Man. Isn't that just a superficial and graphic interpretation of the emerging digital culture?

The main entrance is still on 35th Ave. Again, the triangles appear at the front door. The public spaces on the ground floor are blindingly white, so pristine that they make you worry how they may look like in a few years. (In fact, the polymer floor and the bottom of the painted gypsum walls have already become quite dirty after two days.) I guess when you render with white in the computer, it looks so good that you just want to stick to it. But the computer doesn't tell you how materials age through time in the physical reality.

Ticketing, coat check, and entrance to the theater

On the wall is a 50-ft-long seamless projection City Glow by Chiho Aoshima

Museum Store

Cafe

I am not trying to be 100% negative here. In fact, there are several interesting moments in the museum, especially in the circulation. As you move through ramps and stairs, the experience of the dynamic space unfolds as if in a moving picture. The impressive large pieces of Corian guardrails and benches enhance the seamless transition of space.

The exhibition itself is a good combination of the digital and the physical. There are physical set models, Star Wars action figures, antique arcade video games, as well as immersive digital projections, augmented sculptures, and interactive work stations.
 

The circle of Star Wars vs. Star Trek!

Antique arcade video games

Augmented Sculpture (2007) by Pablo Valbuena

Interactive station to create your own stop motion animation

Cut from the pristine white lobby, the access to the theater is a futuristic luminous blue tunnel. Inside the theater, the Cindy Sirko designed curtain bears striking graphics of something like a zooming cyberspace. On the walls and the ceiling, the triangular motif appears again, but in this case made of vibrant Yves Klein blue felt panels. When asked about the choice of color, Leeser explained, "blue is the color of the digital world." Oh boy, I thought the triangles are already very literal...

                

Holey, wholly, holy

         
Hole

In the middle of the vast atrium of MoMA stands a lone baby grand piano. This is not just a normal piano; the Bechstein has a large hole carved out in the center of its case! Is this a sculpture then, like those by Gordon Matta-Clark or some sort? But you know it's more than that - the reversed pedals give it away. The object seems like the wire that Philippe Petit put between the twin towers, quietly awaiting some magnificent performance to occur.

 Whole

A performer approaches the piano, puts his hands on the rim and pauses. He ducks under the piano, and reemerges from the hole. Then he bends over and starts to play, from inside the piano, upside down and backwards. The relationship between the musician and the instrument is far more intimate than ordinary music performances. Here, the musician is part of the instrument. He inhabits it, like a hermit crab finds its shell. The two become a hybrid whole.

Once in a while, the performer pushes the piano and moves with it to a new location, causing the audience to move along. Seen from the upper levels, it almost looks like a shepher herding a group of sheep. Through collective choreography, the viewers/listeners participate as part of a spontaneous group dance.

Holiness

This is the performance piece by artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Maybe it's because of the Christmas/New Year season, they picked Beethoven's Ode to Joy. By altering the instrument, they alter the music, in a way that reminds me of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol's manipulations of Mona Lisa. The hole removes two octaves of strings, so the music is recognizable but incomplete. When it gets to the middle section of the keyboard, the notes are reduced to mere percussive sounds produced by the fingers hitting the keys. Due to physical constraints, the performance itself is by no means perfect. But it's exactly through this imperfection you see the performer's effect and vigor. Someone from the audience says, "Poor guy! He has to unlearn everything he learned to do this." This is precisely why the performance is so charming. On top of the physical challenges, there are psychological endeavors involved. This is a true ode to joy - the joy of passion; the joy of love.
               

On On Line

     
Walking through the galleries of the current MoMA show "On Line," I saw an amazing collection of brilliant works, featuring icons such as Picasso, Duchamp, and Kandinsky, as well as many less known but talented artists. At the same time, I felt rather confused - even lost. Is this just a survey of whatever art pieces that have beautiful lines in them? If so, why did they skip some usual suspects like Brice Marden but put in Jean Arp's square compositions? Maybe the curators made such selective decisions in order to make a point here? But what is it?

Study for the Muses (1991-1997) by Brice Marden,
whose work, for some reason, was not included in the show On Line

I went back to the entrance and read the curatorial notes. It says: "On Line ... argues for an expanded history of drawing that moves off the page into space and time." The exhibition "is organized chronologically in three sections: Surface Tension, featuring the artistic drive to construct and represent movement through line within the flat picture plane; Line Extension, composed of works in which lines extend beyond flatness into real space; and Confluence, presenting works in which line and background are fused, giving greater significance to the space between lines."

OK, they did try to voice a message and organize accordingly; just I didn't quite get it - maybe because I walked through the show backwards. It's a great concept to revisit and rediscover something as fundamental as line in art. But chronologically? Are we talking about a linear history here? (Maybe they are too obsessed with "line"...) I don't think developments in history works like that. When Picasso drew a line, did he only think about "tension on the surface" and not space or time? Is it fair to put Loie Fuller's dance in the first section with works that draw lines "within the flat picture plane," just because the performance took place more than a century ago?

Actually, I should be happy to see Loie Fuller's work in the show. In art, lines exist not only as drawn with pencil on paper or brush on canvas. Artists have explored many different mediums. A line can be created by cutting (Lucio Fontana, Gordon Matta-Clark), folding (Dorothea Rockburne), dancing (Loie Fuller, Trisha Brown), and walking (Richard Long). Materials can be thread (Anna Maria Maiolino, Ranjani Shettar), metal wires (Alexander Calder, Gego), Plexiglas (Georges Vantongerloo), or even horsehair (Pierrette Bloch). On Line successfully captures this expanded definition of drawing. But I think they missed out three important artists: André Cadere, Cai Guoqiang, and Dan Flavin. Cadere represents the process of sculpting a line (as opposed to sculpting with lines, like Gego), while Cai draws through gunpowder explosion. Flavin uses light as drawing material, and consequentially paints the wall.

Lines of different processes and materials
Clockwise from top left: Fontana, Matta-Clark, Fuller, Cadere, Gego, Flavin, Long.

Cai Guoqiang, Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared (1996)

Here, I am proposing a counter-curation of On Line. Instead of a flatfooted linear chronological display, we can explore multiple developments of the concept of line in the history of modern/contemporary art through different themes, and we can use the notion of "relation" as an organizational thread. First of all, there are compositional relations, which we can take examples from De Stijl (Mondrian), Russian Constructivists (El Lissitzky), Bauhaus (Kandinsky), and more recently, Ellsworth Kelly. These artists explore line in relation to the page and other elements on it. The meandering compositions by Brice Marden can serve as example of line that folds and unfolds onto itself.

Then there are dimensional relations. A line is one-dimensional. How does art express line in relation to point (0D), plane (2D), space (3D), and space-time (4D)? Space is the primary focus of the current exhibition (with Picasso's Cubist drawings and Sol LeWitt's three-dimensional grid). But it doesn't address much of the other dimensions. Line is composed by points. André Cadere's round bars could be understood as such. At a larger scale, The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which didn't make it to the current selection, shows the point-line relation just as well. Many large wall drawings by Sol LeWitt (none of which was picked by the MoMA curators) are perfect examples of lines composing a plane. Tara Donovan's installation of loose folded plastic sheeting has a similar effect. The forth dimension is a bit tricky. MoMA features some dance and performance pieces. Perhaps also music? We can include works by Iannis Xenakis. His branching drawings remind me of the Algue screen that the Bouroullec Brothers designed for Vitra, which in fact is also a surface formed by many lines.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates (2005)

Sol LeWitt, Scribble (2007)

Iannis Xenakis, Study for Erikhthon (c.1973)

Now I have mentioned The Gates, the issue of scale and Land Art leads us to the notion of line in relation to nature. Other key figures under this theme include Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, and Walter de Maria. These artists used land as the canvas, placing abstract geometry such as straight, curve/spiral, or zigzag lines in nature as symbols of human intervention. They also borrowed and reappropriated lines directly from nature, like The Lightening Field by Walter de Maria. I have to admit, I am so tempted to include The Palm Islands in Dubai here.

Lines in Land Art
Clockwise from top left: Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970); Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field (1977); Walter de Maria, Mile Long Drawing (1968); Richard Long, A Line in the Himalayas (1975); Christo, Running Fence (1972-6); Michael Heizer, Dissipate (1968)

I was very happy to see young Lithuanian artist Zilvinas Kempinas' Double O featured in the show. I saw it last year at Yvon Lambert and I still find it ingenious - the two dancing circles are formed by the combined forces of gravity, wind, and magnetic field. The installation comes to life through basic physics, constantly changing and always reflecting the complex conditions of "now."

Zilvinas Kempinas, Double O (2008)

In my alternative version of the show, I would like to add two other young artists who have also skillfully and gracefully dealt with lines. One is Tomas Saraceno, born in Argentina and now based in Frankfurt. Formerly trained as an architect, he follows the tradition of visionary architects like Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman, using elastic ropes to form spider's web or cloud-like tensile structures that somehow imply floating habitats.

Tomas Saraceno, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008)

Tomas Saraceno, Cloud Cities Connectome (2010)

The other is Seattle-based duo Lead Pencil Studio (Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo), who are also architects-turned-artists. Their recent installation at the US-Canada border near Vancouver looks like a giant Sol LeWitt wall drawing, but with depth. Interestingly, this piece touches almost all types of relations mentioned above. Countless metal bars are welded together to create a three-dimensional volume. Fuzzy on the outside, the volume frames an inner void with crisp edges. This "missing billboard" redirects attention to the landscape, and relates itself to nature in general. With exquisite elegance, it marks the socio-political line of the border.

Lead Pencil Studio, Non-Sign II (2010)