The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design Special Issue

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015 39/01 US $7 CAAN $9 UK £66 EUU €8 Architecture andDesignspecialissue The StubbornnessofSpace ART PAPERS

3 Multiple 48 Strange Shapes Letter from the GuestGuest EditorEditor david reinfurt (o-r-g) mtwtf This issue is aboutout spacespacece andan place, and various What does it mean to make One person one vote — sort of. attempts to engagegage or overcovercomeoverc them. In my old an artist’s multiple now? A design commission considers neighborhood inn SanSan Francisco,Franciranciss controversy roils over A software commission. the geometry of gerrymandering. rising rents, no-faultfault evictions,evictioctionn and clashing cultures, as Silicon Valleyy companiesanies move northward into a 14 Logistics Make the World 50 The Knoll Transcripts historically diverserse city. BeyoBeyBeyondo issues of gentrifica- jesse lecavalier margot weller tion, or the neighborlinesshborlinessess ofof corporations, the conflict has improbable roots inn the region.r Fred Turner’s book Synchronizing the world of Previously unpublished From Counterculture1ulture too CybercultureCyCybb (2006) charts commerce means attempting interviews with Knoll designers the evolution from the Bay Area communes of the to overcome time and space. revise the story of midcentury 1960s to the Silicon Valley of the 1990s. This evolution A study of logistics with a photo modernism. was premised on a belief in the power of networked essay on UPS. information technologies to emancipate users from 58 Concept Models body and physical space — if sometimes to the ne- 22 Losing Interest allied works architecture glect of the social, political, and environmental infra- shumon basar structures that support them. Turner’s social critique Beyond site or program, these has new salience in a moment of social media. A letter in response to a request models focus the minds of Our networks today, far from evenly distributed, to write about architecture. designers and communicate are by turns empowering, exploitative, galvanizing viscerally with clients. for activism, surveillant, and emotionally exhausting, 24 TV University, ca. 1964 as we project joy, empathy or moral outrage to ever john harwood more places from afar. It is now a truism that there is REVIEWS nothing immaterial about “the cloud,” with its massive Sol Cornberg, a forgotten physical support systems, and little that’s intrinsically architect of media, harnessed Books neutral about the net. What are the infrastructures on telepresence — first in the 61 Extrastatecraft which we rely, and who are their architects, figura- name of commerce, then in the carson chan tive and literal? In what ways do the facts on — and name of the Enlightenment. of — the ground still matter? As a magazine based in 62 Bauhaus Weaving Theory the South with a global reach, ART PAPERS has long 32 Typographic Fictions rachel silveri asked these kinds of questions. And the logics of erik brandt design and architecture can venture answers, making 63 Photographic Architecture these structures visible or building them anew. Brandt’s Minneapolis garage esher choi In this issue, Jesse LeCavalier surveys the space- has become a global platform defying architecture of logistics, alongside a photo for experimental graphic design. Exhibitions essay on UPS, the logistics giant and ART PAPERS’ 65 Amie Siegel: Provenance Atlanta neighbor. John Harwood introduces a midcen- 34 Open Architecture in rattanamol singh johal tury architect of telepresence, intent on obviating the Berlin-Kreuzberg physical college campus. Esra Akcan considers the esra akcan 66 Fin de Siècle spaces made for and by Turkish “guest workers” in gregor quack Berlin, and Shumon Basar surveys the state of archi- A public housing exhibition in tecture from a perch inside one of these spaces. For 1980s Berlin stands out not just 67 Beyond the Supersquare our glossary, Barry Bergdoll redefines the media of for its famous architectural cast, elis mendoza architectural exhibitions. Along the way we consider but for inviting future residents the art market’s own efficient logistics (Johal), the into the design process. 68 The Space Between ubiquity of “infrastructure space” (Chan), the stub- stephanie bailey bornness of political space (MTWTF), and the dark 42 On Vernacular Computing side of design as both power and resistance (King). jacob gaboury 69 Design and Violence Julian Bittiner guest designed this issue in a new Disobedient Objects format, and created two custom typefaces for it. The A manifesto confronts the ways emily king body text and titles are based on Karl Gerstner’s 1967 we actually use technology. Program, which recalls the Swiss modernist’s systemic, proto-software practice, despite never having been 44 Total Reset 72 Glossary: Curate released digitally. In contrast, as a kind of address karen kubey barry bergdoll number for each page, folios and section headers are based on an alphabet by Edward Wright, designed Ideas for affordable housing A re-definition releases some hot for a commemorative stone at the Imperial College from the Institute for Public air from the cult of the curator. London in 1958. Wright collaborated with architects Architecture. of the Independent Group and New Brutalism on both typographic murals and publications. As the architectural historian Craig Buckley notes, Wright saw both of these as “graphic constructions,” or spaces at the boundary between material and information. We hope you enjoy this graphic construction. Share your headspace with us at: [email protected]

– Robert Wiesenberger

The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue $500–$999 GuestGuest EdiEEditor ART PAPERS + donate Tristan Al-Haddad RobertRobert WiesenbergerWWieies T. William Alvey, III GuestGuestest DeDesigners Anonymous Julian BittinerBittinBittinee Suzanne M. Arpin + ART PAPERS is the independent ART PAPERS wishes to thank Bill & SueSue Bounds critical voice covering contem- the grantors, sponsors, and ExecutiveExecutxecutiveive Director Paul D. Harvill porary art and culture in the world donors for their generous SaskiaSaskia BenjaminBenjBen a Brian Holcombe today. ART PAPERS, an Atlanta- support of this publication and EditorEditor + ArtisticA Director Susan Ker-Seymer based nonprofit organization, our public programs. VictoriaVictor CamblinCam Dick & Marianne Lambert provides an accessible forum CreativeCreative DirectorD Judy Morris Lampert 2 for examining, discussing, and To make a donation: Jennifer SmSmith Tim O’Rourke documenting the full spectrum www.artpapers.org/donate Blanche Nettles Powers Circulation Manager of contemporary art and culture, Paul Boshears Alexandra Sachs as well as the ways they affect $20,000+ Suzanne Shaw Finance Manager and reflect our lives. We do so in Robert Brawner Paige Heurtin print, online, and through public Louis Corrigan $25–$499 Copy Editor programming. McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP Agnes Scott College Ed Hall Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund Anonymous Proofreader Board of Directors National Endowment for the Arts Anita Arliss Jill Becker Linda Armstrong President Fact Checker $10,000–$19,999 Michael L. Aurbach Kyra Baker Johnathan Short City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Anne Beidler Advertising Representative Affairs Binders Art Supplies & Frames Phil Dietz Vice President The Imlay Foundation Bonnie Calhoun Jenny Williams Interns Shearman & Sterling LLP Lucas Carpenter Alessandra Hoshor Johnathan Short William Carpenter Joey Molina Secretary Sullivan & Cromwell LLP Mac Cushing Robert Brown Contributing Editors Susannah Darrow Stephanie Bailey, Athens + London $5,000–$9,999 Decatur Book Festival + Hong Kong Treasurer Anonymous Carl Deitz Nuit Banai, Vienna Robert Brawner Fulton County Arts & Culture Nick Demos D. Eric Bookhardt, New Orleans Saim Demircan, Munich Brian Dettmer Craig Drennen Michael Fallon, Minneapolis/St. Paul $2,500–$4,999 Stephanie Dowda Sarah Emerson Cécile Bourne-Farell, Paris Richard J. Helton Cathy Downey Becky Huff Hunter, Philadelphia Ryan Gravel One Consulting Group, Inc. Craig Drennen Jennie Klein, Athens, Ohio Brian Holcombe James A. Trigg Sarah Emerson Wendy Koenig, Los Angeles Jenene Nagy Pil and Galia Kollectiv, London Jenny Williams Julia A. Fenton Joe Peragine Gean Moreno, Miami Lionel Flax Alexandra Sachs Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, New York $1,000–$2,499 John Folsom + Berlin Louise E. Shaw Anonymous Suzanne Fredericq Dinah Ryan + Paul Ryan, Staunton, Suzanne Shaw John & Beverly Baker Ryan Gravel Virginia Beth Thames Monika Szewczyk, Chicago Robert & Betty Balentine Ruth Grover James A. Trigg Bill Bibb Niels Van Tomme, Washington, DC Carolyn Griffin Hall + New York Robert Brown Diana Hills Hagedorn Foundation Gallery Julia Kjelgaard ART PAPERS The Lookout Foundation Birgit & David McQueen PO Box 5748 Atlanta, MailChimp Amy Miller GA 31107-5748 George Mattingly Voice 404.588.1837 Opal Moore Fax 678.999.7002 Diana & Bijon Memar The Morrissey Family www.artpapers.org Vernon & Valerie O’Neal Jenene Nagy PennHouse Productions Deborah & Alonzo Neese Alison Rand & Allan Zachariah ART PAPERS is supported in part by the Joe Peragine National Endowment for the Arts and the Preston Snyder Alan Robbins Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs for the Beth Thames Gary Rommelfanger City of Atlanta. Funding for this program Dawn & Eric Tresh is provided by the Fulton County Board of Ron. B Russell Commissioners. Funding and support has also W Atlanta-Downtown Megan Saltzman been generously provided by the Metropolitan David Schuster Atlanta Arts Fund, The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, and The Imlay Foundation. Cover: Álvaro Siza, Wohnhaus Louise E. Shaw Schlesisches Tor (a.k.a. Bonjour Sallie Beckwith Smith Tristesse), Berlin, completed 1984 Elizabeth Morgan Spiegel

[photo: Esra Akcan] The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue ART PAPERS + donate Esther & Jim Stokes Inside front cover, clockwise from top left: Typographic Fictions posters by: Clark & Sharon Tate Bráulio Amado, installed June 26, 2014; Sarah Workneh Matej Dlabal, installed June 5, 2014; Pascal Schilp, installed November 12, 2014; Jack Walsh, installed October 28, 2014; Michael Forrest, installed ART PAPERS LIVE July 1, 2014; Heng Chun Liow, installed Host Committee + Sponsors March 22, 2014; Erik Brandt, installed November 25, 2014; Álvaro Franca, installed November 2, 2014; (left to Community Leaders who right) Elisabeth Workman, Ping Ji, Sang generously support our public Mun installed July 15, 2013; Jérémy Vey, installed September 11, 2014; Ilya lecture series: Perevedentsev, installed November 23, 2014; Rejane Dal Bello, installed October Johnathan Short 23, 2013 One Consulting Group, Inc. Inside back cover: Site of Typographic Fictions project by Erik Brandt [photo: PennHouse Productions Eric Brandt] W Atlanta-Downtown These are some of the many faces of Multi, a small software from O-R-G commissioned for ART PAPERS.

Italian designer Enzo Mari spent the year 1957 drawing an apple. The result, La Mela, is a large silkscreen print released as an artist multiple by Danese Milano continuously since. Mari lavished time on the drawing, preparing it for industrial manufacture by abolishing detail and reducing it to an essential form. He was not looking to draw AN apple, but rather THE apple — a perfect symbol designed for the serial logic of industrial reproduction. In place of the unique work of art and its privileged market, multiples used contemporary manufacturing to produce many exact copies circulated as consumer products.

Multi reconsiders this process 50 years later, as software coding has replaced the industrial assembly line. At any one moment, this software presents one of 1,728 possible arrangements, each a face built from minimal typographic furniture. Instead of many identical copies from one design, Multi is one original set of instructions constantly producing alternative versions.

Available now as a free download for OS X, iPhone, and iPad at http://www.o-r-g.com http://www.artpapers.org/multi ART www.artpapers.org PAPERS SUB- SCRIBE ADV- ERTISE New York Randall’s Island Park May 14–17, 2015 Preview Day Wednesday, May 13 friezenewyork.com

Participating Ibid., London The Third Line, Dubai Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo In Situ - Fabienne Leclerc, Paris Vermelho, São Paulo Martha Araújo Galleries Taka Ishii, Tokyo Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Mathew, Berlin 303 Gallery, New York Alison Jacques, London Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen Than Hussein Clark Miguel Abreu, New York Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels Wallspace, New York Barbara Seiler, Zurich Acquavella, New York Casey Kaplan, New York White Columns, New York Cécile B. Evans Altman Siegel, San Francisco Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm White Cube, London Tif Sigfrids, Los Angeles The Approach, London Karma International, Zurich Wilkinson, London Zachary Leener Art : Concept, Paris Paul Kasmin, New York Jocelyn Wolff, Paris Jessica Silverman, San Francisco Alfonso Artiaco, Naples Sean Kelly, New York Zeno X, Antwerp Dashiell Manley Elba Benítez, Madrid Kerlin, Dublin David Zwirner, New York Gregor Staiger, Zurich Peter Blum, New York Anton Kern, New York Lucy Stein Blum & Poe, Los Angeles Tina Kim, New York Sultana, Paris Boers-Li, Beijing Johann König, Berlin Focus Walter Pfeiffer Marianne Boesky, New York David Kordansky, Los Angeles Algus Greenspon, New York Supplement, London Tanya Bonakdar, New York Tomio Koyama, Tokyo Bureau, New York Philomene Pirecki Bortolami, New York Andrew Kreps, New York Carlos/Ishikawa, London Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn The Box, Los Angeles Kukje, Seoul Chi-Wen, Taipei Kris Lemsalu The Breeder, Athens kurimanzutto, Mexico Clearing, New York Tempo Rubato, Tel Aviv Broadway 1602, New York Lehmann Maupin, New York Clifton Benevento, New York Lital Lev Cohen Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York Lelong, New York Lisa Cooley, New York Kate Werble, New York Buchholz, Cologne Lisson, London Croy Nielsen, Berlin Ken Tisa Shane Campbell, Chicago Long March Space, Beijing Foxy Production, New York Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai Canada, New York Kate MacGarry, London Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich Aaajiao Gisela Capitain, Cologne Matthew Marks, New York Frutta, Rome Casa Triângulo, São Paulo Fergus McCaffrey, New York James Fuentes, New York Casas Riegner, Bogotá McKee, New York François Ghebaly, Los Angeles Spotlight Cheim & Read, New York Greta Meert, Brussels Laurel Gitlen, New York Aicon, New York James Cohan, New York Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo Hunt Kastner, Prague Rasheed Araeen Sadie Coles HQ, London Kamel Mennour, Paris Instituto De Visión, Bogotá Paule Anglim, San Francisco Continua, San Gimignano Victoria Miro, London Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin Lynn Hershman Leeson Pilar Corrias, London Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London Le Guern, Warsaw Hervé Bize, Nancy CRG, New York The Modern Institute, Glasgow Limoncello, London André Cadere Chantal Crousel, Paris MOT International, London mor charpentier, Paris David Castillo, Miami Beach Massimo De Carlo, Milan Taro Nasu, Tokyo Night, Los Angeles Rafael Ferrer Elizabeth Dee, New York Franco Noero, Turin PSM, Berlin espaivisor, Valencia dépendance, Brussels David Nolan, New York Ratio 3, San Francisco Hamish Fulton Eigen + Art, Berlin Lorcan O’Neill, Rome Real Fine Arts, New York Henrique Faria, New York frank elbaz, Paris Overduin & Co., Los Angeles Silberkuppe, Berlin Anna Bella Geiger Derek Eller, New York P. P.O.W, New York Société, Berlin Garth Greenan, New York FGF, Warsaw Pace, New York Simone Subal, New York Howardena Pindell Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo Maureen Paley, London Take Ninagawa, Tokyo Hales, London Marc Foxx, Los Angeles Peres Projects, Berlin Travesia Cuatro, Madrid Carolee Schneemann Fredericks & Freiser, New York Perrotin, New York Ivan, Bucharest Carl Freedman, London Gregor Podnar, Berlin Geta Bratescu Stephen Friedman, London Simon Preston, New York Frame lokal_30, Warsaw Frith Street, London Project 88, Mumbai 80m2 Livia Benavides, Lima Natalia LL Gagosian, New York Rampa, Istanbul Sergio Zevallos Franklin Parrasch, New York gb agency, Paris Almine Rech, Paris Antenna Space, Shanghai Joan Snyder A Gentil Carioca, Rio De Janeiro Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg Liu Ding Nara Roesler, São Paulo Gladstone, New York Andrea Rosen, New York Johan Berggren, Malmö Antonio Dias Goodman, Johannesburg Salon 94, New York Eric Sidner Richard Saltoun, London Marian Goodman, New York Esther Schipper, Berlin Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Shelagh Wakely Alexander Gray Associates, New York Sfeir-Semler, Beirut Miami Beach Georgie Nettell Vigo, London Greene Naftali, New York Jack Shainman, New York Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles Ibrahim El-Salahi greengrassi, London Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York Mathis Altmann Waldburger Wouters, Brussels Grimm, Amsterdam Skarstedt, New York Dan Gunn, Berlin Lynn Hershman Leeson Karin Guenther, Hamburg Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Alexandra Navratil Zürcher, New York Hauser & Wirth, New York Sprüth Magers, Berlin JTT, New York Regina Bogat Herald St, London Standard (Oslo), Oslo Anna-Sophie Berger Xavier Hufkens, Brussels Stevenson, Cape Town Kendall Koppe, Glasgow Hyundai, Seoul T293, Rome Charlotte Prodger

Media Partner Main sponsor Deutsche Bank presents

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FEBRUARY 6 - APRIL 11, 2015 @ the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center www.thecontemporary.org

February 12 – April 11, 2015 Yannick Desranleau and Chloe Lum Desranleau and Chloe Lum Yannick Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi Curated by Julia V. Hendrickson Curated by Julia V.

Simultaneous: Supported in part by the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, Seripop & the Illinois Arts Council, and the Québec Government Ofﬁce in Chicago. For exhibition- Sonnenzimmer related public events, visit: www.colum.edu/cbpa Reception: February 12, 5 – 8 p.m. Center for Book and Paper Arts, 1104 S. Wabash, 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60605 (detail), 2008. Pigment 2008. (detail), Today’s Life and War and Life Today’s from the series Untitled #5 Gohar Dashti, Gohar Dashti, © Gohar Dashti Boston. and Robert Klein Gallery, Azita Bina, Courtesy of the artist, print. SHE WHO TELLS A STORY WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS FROM IRAN AND THE ARAB WORLD January 28 – May 4

CANTOR ARTS CENTER AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY 650-723-4177 MUSEUM.STANFORD.EDU

The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We gratefully acknowledge support for the exhibition’s presentation at Stanford from the Clumeck Fund and the Mark and Betsy Gates Fund for Photography.

LUCIAN FREUD Etchings | January 16 – April 19

Lucian Freud; British, 1922–2011; Woman with an Arm Tattoo, 1996; Etching on Somerset White paper, edition 12/40, 14 ½ x 16 ⅛ in, 36.9 x 41 cm (plate); Courtesy of Private Collection; © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images Visit The Fralin Museum of Art at www.virginia.edu/artmuseum The Fralin Museum of Art’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Acquavella Galleries, The Fralin Museum of Art Volunteer Board, WTJU 91.1 FM, albemarle Magazine, and Ivy Publications LLC’s Charlottesville Welcome Book. FAULCONER GALLERY November 21, 2014 – February 28, 2015 University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University

Photo-based works by 23 contemporary artists

Schmidt Center Gallery Ritter Art Gallery through February 28, 2015 January 16 through JANUARY 23 – MARCH 15, 2015 February 28, 2015 Ilit Azoulay Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument Erica Baum Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument is organized by the New Orleans Ellen Carey Joshua Dildine Museum of Art in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation. Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1948. Gelatin silver print, (DataSpaceTime) Noriko Furunishi printed later, Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation. Barbara Kasten Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Maria Martinez-Cañas Cassandra C. Jones

Matthew Porter John Mann

Eileen Quinlan Yamini Nayar

Hugh Scott-Douglas Asbjørn Skou

Penelope Umbrico Travess Smalley

James Welling Lucie Stahl

Ishmael Randall Weeks Catalogue Available Spring 2015 Hannah Whitaker Jennifer Williams Exhibition Curators W. Rod Faulds and Galleries Closed Jeanie Ambrosio Thanksgiving weekend >` iViLiÀÓÓq>Õ>ÀÞÈ Catalogue Essay JANUARY 23 – MARCH 15, 2015 Dr. Heather A. Diack Playing it Forward: German Expressionism to Expressionism Today William Kentridge, Man with Megaphone Cluster, 1998. Etching and aquatint, © William Kentridge, Collection of John L. and Roslyn Bakst Goldman.

The University Galleries exhibition and education programs are supported in part by the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County; the R.A. Ritter Foundation; For a full listing of events and programs, Beatrice Cummings Mayer and individual contributors. Museum Education visit grinnell.edu/faulconergallery or call 641.269.4660 programs are made possible by the Kaye Endowment for Arts Integration.

University Galleries, School of the Arts Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton GRINNELL COLLEGE ÜÜÜ°v>Õ°i`ÕÉ}>iÀiÃUxÈ£°ÓÇ°ÓÈÈ£ Artists-in-Residence Program fall 2015 program APPLY ONLINE commit to dive deeply into your work OCTOBER – DECEMBER (10 WEEKS) andersonranch.slideroom.com within a supportive community of peers spring 2016 program APPLICATIONS DUE focus on your creative, FEBRUARY – APRIL (10 WEEKS) FEBRUARY 15, 2015 intellectual and professional growth

live & work for 10 weeks at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in the heart of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains where emerging & established artists have SUMMER WORKSHOPS life-changing experiences CERAMICS | PHOTOGRAPHY & NEW MEDIA | PAINTING & DRAWING | PRINTMAKING SCULPTURE | DIGITAL FABRICATION| FURNITURE DESIGN & WOODWORKING | WOODTURNING INFORMATION & REGISTRATION: [email protected] | 970/923-3181 | andersonranch.org Spanning traditional and contemporary art, architecture and public art, this expansive collaboration of over 20 participating venues showcases Albuquerque as a true destination for both art and design. Experience exhibitions, lectures, performances, educational programming, all investigating the diversity of Albuquerque art. You’ll be amazed at all you can discover in one of the country’s art meccas. UNDER PRESSURE

Contemporary Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation

January 24 — March 29, 2015 Opening Reception: Friday, January 23, 6–8 p.m. !# #&

EO/AA/ADA Support for the exhibition and related educational and outreach institution programs has been made possible by a grant from the Jordan committed to Schnitzer Family Foundation. Additional support for the exhibition cultural diversity is provided by the Coeta and Donald Barker Changing Exhibitions Endowment, The Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, a grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endow- ment for the Arts, a federal agency, and JSMA members. Robert Indiana (American, b. ). American Dream # Series: American Dream, edition /, . Screenprint,  / x  / in. Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. ©  Morgan Art Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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1386 Mayson Street, Atlanta, GA 30324 www.masonfineartandevents.com 404.879.1500 In workingn to overcome the obstacle of time and Logistics Make the Worldorld spacep to sustain global ccomommerce, logistics rrememakes the world in its jesse lecavalier imaimagge. Architecture and tthehe human-computer interinterfaceface reveal points of ffrictionriction iinn this process, mediatinmediatingg between terri- 14tory, body, and network. Global logistics giant UPS is everyone’s neighbor, but especially ART PAPERS ’: UPS corporate headquarters is in the northern part of the greater Atlanta area; across the city, Harts- field-Jackson Interna- tional Airport is home to the Atlanta Air Gateway, where packages are loaded onto UPS aircraft to ship to regional and global hubs.

A charging Photo essay by station for the ring, wrist, and hand- Dustin Chambers held scanners used to scan and to track packages at every possible juncture.

“Logistics,” according to a recent advertising campaign for the global package delivery company UPS, “makes the world work better.” With that slogan, the company suggests that the services it provides make it easier for people to improve their business by enabling the exchange of goods in a timely, reliable, and transparent manner. UPS touts logistics as “a continuous link that is always in sync” and claims that with logistics, “technology knows right where everything goes.”1 Histori- cally, logistics has been understood as the branch of military science that concerns the planning and coordination of an operation, including provisions for movement, material, and maintenance.2 Logistics is also increasingly used to describe contexts outside the military, especially ones linked to global commerce, transportation, and coordination. The rise of logistics in this sense is coupled with neoliberal trade policies and with the politics of globalization.3 Because improving efficiency, lowering costs, and increasing profit are some of the primary aims of individuals and organizations involved in logistical practices, national borders, labor laws, or certain trade policies can be seen as obstacles to these ambitions.4 And, because logistics has a distinctly spatial dimension to it, its “sites” are increasingly legible as the spaces in which such obstacles are

negotiated, reinforced, dismantled, or mutated.5 Such sites are evident in The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Jesse LeCavalier Logistics Make the World the constituent parts of UPS’ claim that “logistics makes the world work better” and examining each more closely helps reveal the transitions that logistics is forging between the conditions it has inherited and the ones that it is currently producing. It also suggests possible futures that it might yet generate.

BETTER The appeal to improvement in the UPS slogan is ambiguous. Indeed, what are the specific ways in which logistics improves how the world works? Is it suggesting that logistics helps the world function more smoothly? Or that it improves upon the effectiveness of global labor? In another advertisement from the same campaign, an A UPS air gateway exasperated fat cat, taking a page from Ned Beatty’s Arthur Jensen employee sorts in Network, laughs nervously as he confides to a small group of con- “smalls” — packages too small to ride on cerned executives that, “Logistics was once the dominion of a very few; conveyor belts. Smalls are grouped by zip the largest and most powerful organizations. Logistics was our secret code in bags before being shipped to their weapon. Logistics was our black art. The thought that any business, any final destination. upstart could access the power of logistics … that’s unthinkable.”6 The “power” of logistics, as offered by UPS, is bureaucratic, temporal, and spatial. Apart from expediting customs processes to allow “crossing borders with ease,” UPS and its logistics work to overcome the obstacle of space and time; in other words, the problem of the shape of the planet. These dynamics illustrate, in David Harvey’s words, “A basic law of capital accumulation” that enables, “Reduction in the cost and time of movement of commodities, people (labor power), money and information through what Marx called ‘the annihilation of space through time.’” He goes on to point out that, “Since distance is measured in terms of time and cost of movement, there is also intense pressure to reduce the frictions of distance by innovations in transportation and communications.”7 It is these sites of friction where logistical thinking is most frequently deployed with its particular emphasis on location, prediction, acceleration, and lubrication.

1 UPS, “UPS We Love Logistics Com- 4 Cowen writes, in her study of Graham (London: Routledge, 2004), 6 UPS, “UPS — We Love Logistics mercial,” YouTube, http://youtu.be/ logistics and borders: “If it is the 179–184. For further reading, see Commercial — Mr. Big,” UPS Press- VCh6HnXHKRc security of efficient trade flows that Clare Lyster, “Landscapes of room, www.pressroom.ups.com/ 2 James Houston, The Sinews of War: animates maritime security today, Exchange: Re-Articulating Site,” in Video/UPS%3A+We+Love+Logistic Army Logistics 1775–1953 (Wash- then the interference that comes The Landscape Urbanism Reader, s+Commercial+-+Mr.+Big ington, DC: Office of the Chief of from ‘inefficiencies’ like democracy, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: 7 David Harvey, Spaces of Neolib- Military History, United States Army, and the actors that demand it, might Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) eralization: Towards a Theory of 1960), viii. themselves be construed as security 219–238; Charles Waldheim and Uneven Geographical Development 3 Deborah Cowen, “A Geography of threats” (Cowen, 616). Alan Berger, “Logistics Landscape,” (Kornwestheim: Franz Steiner Verlag, Logistics: Market Authority and the 5 For more on spaces of logistics, see Landscape Journal 27 (2008): 226; 2005), 38. Security of Supply Chains,” Annals Keller Easterling, “The New Orgman: Jesse LeCavalier, “The Restlessness of the Association of American Logistics as an Organizing Principle of Objects,” Cabinet 47: Logistics Geographers 100, no. 3 (2010): of Contemporary Cities,” in The (2012): 90–97. 600–620. Cybercities Reader, ed. Stephen The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Jesse LeCavalier Logistics Make the World

Computer stations at the Atlanta Air A conveyor belt takes packages for load- Gateway are used for entering and ing into air containers specially designed correcting “exceptions,” or wayward or for UPS aircraft. UPS is the world’s mislabeled packages. largest freight forwarder, and one of its largest health care supply chain manage- ment companies, with specialized facilities to accommodate the environmental needs of delicate cargo. A package handler uses a ring scanner “Tug” vehicles meet air containers from to sort packages based on the zip codes around the metro area at the Atlanta Air contained in each tracking number Gateway — one of more than 50 facilities (known internally as a “1Z”). located around the US. Larger regional and global hubs can occupy more than 100 acres and contain millions of square feet under one roof. Within such sites, it is possible to make further distinctions be- ApartApart fromfrom ex-e tween organizations based on the logistical services they provide. In the case of UPS, the company offers basic assistance to individual peditingpediting cuscucustomss customers and additional assembly and repair capabilities to business processesprocesses tto customers.8 The product mix in UPS’ “worldport” in Louisville, KY, is largely a result of individual customers’ shipping needs. However, in aallowllow “cross“cros“crossings retail distribution systems, like that of the Arkansas-based discounter Walmart, the company determines its own inventory assortment and 18bordersborders witwwithit supply sequences. Rather than delivering packages directly to home ad- ease,”” UPS and dresses, Walmart uses its expansive collection of consumer data to first determine the bulk quantities of merchandise to be delivered to a local its logistics work distribution center. The materials handling systems and the inventory to overcome the demand algorithms that control these goods then automatically direct the correct amount (with the help of human operators) to trucks waiting obstacle of to transport them, in turn, to the proper store location to await the next space and time, leg of their journey. the problem of WORK Logistics, officially, from the Council of Logistics Man- the shape of the agement is, “The process of planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient, effective flow and storage of goods, services, and related planet. information from point of origin to point of consumption for the purpose of conforming to customer requirements.”9 Making it happen takes force applied over distance: work. A typical logistical configuration concerned with physical distribution of goods involves an entanglement of biologi- cal, mechanical, and informational systems. Data about the contents of orders and their destinations (in terms of both location and time) are transmitted through communication networks. They, in turn, guide the process of directing any given order through the various stages along its path, steps that are aided by a combined system of automated or semi- automated handling and sorting machines and various humans who help the process by using their dexterous (and affordable) limbs and digits to make up for the bluntness of the current state of distribution technology. In the Taylorist version of assembly, workers were matched to a job based on their aptitude. With the development of ergonomics, jobs could be adjusted to workers such that physical differences became less of an obstacle. In the space of labor that logistics has defined — the work of assembling or building orders — obstacles to productivity are linked less to the dullness and exhaustion of repetitive actions than through the dullness and exhaustion of traversing the logistical floors, themselves made vast by the attempts to further deny space.10 In other words, in order to 8 John McPhee, Uncommon overcome time and distance for their customers, logistics organizations Carriers (New York: Farrar, amass goods in central distribution centers and fulfillment centers that Straus and Giroux. 2006), 153–184. get larger the more material they contain.11 While the dream of logistics 9 W. Bruce Allen, “The is to eliminate inventory altogether and to suspend items in a constant Logistics Revolution and flow from producer to consumer, the current state demands points of Transportation,” Annals of The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Jesse LeCavalier Logistics Make the World the American Academy storage and redirection in the form of large flat buildings. Often located of Political and Social in sites where property value encourages horizontality, the physical size Science 553 (September 1997): 107. of its merchandise nonetheless remains one of the limiting factors in 10 a system’s productivity, primarily because workers are already at their Sarah O’Connor, “Amazon Unpacked,” Financial Times limits in managing the expanse of the logistical surface. To deal with this Weekend Magazine, issue, a company called Kiva Systems, recently acquired by Amazon for February 8, 2013. 11 $775 million, has developed a system that does not require people to go Walmart uses distribution to things. Instead, machines bring smaller containers of merchandise to centers to route bulk merchandise to stores, workers for finer-grain assembly. whereas Amazon uses The decisions that determine the destination and constitution of “fulfillment” centers to ship individual orders directly orders are often made automatically through a series of replenishment to customers. An employee uses a Tug to pull an air “Ballmat” roller platforms allow workers container into position before loading it to glide air containers weighing into an awaiting “Browntail” airplane. several thousand pounds into and out of UPS aircraft. protocols and algorithms. However, the combination of digital and hu- An employee inspects the interior of a UPS man systems of labor creates a communication problem. Logistical “Browntail” MD-88. UPS is one of the ten networks use a system created for computers to be read by computers largest airlines in the that we recognize as the bar code. By scanning codes at significant world. moments in a journey, tracking software establishes a parcel’s location in approximate terms (an interface familiar to anyone who has ever at- tempted to track a package). People working inside a distribution center are unable to interpret bar codes and must rely on tools for translation — including wearable scanners, hand-held computers, scan-rings, and voice-directed picking systems. These tools allow workers in logistics facilities to keep up with the increasing speed of inventory turnover. Work applied over time, of course, is power.

WORLD Between these physical networks and data networks sit mediating elements that translate back and forth for the two and work to overcome certain territorial or spatial obstacles. For wireless communication, one such problem is the shape of the planet. Radio signals, without some form of relay, eventually leave the atmosphere entirely. However, in 1945, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a piece for Wireless World called “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Jesse LeCavalier Logistics Make the World Radio Coverage?” In it he succinctly summarizes the possibilities of a network of geosynchronous satellites: “A body in such an orbit, if its plane coincided with that of the earth’s equator, would revolve with the earth and would thus be stationary above the same spot on the planet. It would remain fixed in the sky of a whole hemisphere and unlike all other heavenly bodies would neither rise nor set.”12 Clarke suggests that these bodies could be “space-stations,” large, light buildings supporting a 12 range of habitations and functions, and capable of sending and receiving Arthur C. Clarke, “Extra- Terrestrial Relays: Can transmissions from the surface of the earth. As illustrated in Clarke’s dia- Rocket Stations Give gram, “a single station could provide coverage to only half the globe, and World-wide Radio Cover- age?,” Wireless World, for world service, three would be required, though more could be read- (October 1945), 305. ily utilized.”13 Clarke’s proposal for a network of buildings at fixed points 13 Clarke,CClarlar “Extra-Terrestrial above the earth is not so distant from, for example, Walmart’s network RelRelaRelays,”a 306. of buildings on the ground, including its retail locations, data centers, andd 14 DeDebDeborahb Cowen, The distribution centers. In architectural terms, such space stations would DeadlyDeDeaa Life of Logistics: MappingMaMapp Violence in be similar to the lightly constructed, transmission-oriented buildings thatt GlobalGGloblob Trade (Minneapolis: Walmart deploys. In the same way that satellites and stars can be difficultult UniversityUniUnivv of Minnesota Press,PrePress 2014), 30 (original to distinguish, so too are the retailer’s distribution buildings hard to parsee emphasis).eempmp from those that surround them: hidden in plain sight while undergirding21 a 15 “This Apple Was Once global logistics network and operating as relays at a global scale. Headed to Russia. Not Anymore,” Bloomberg Businessweek, September MAKES Logistical behavior tends to collapse object and field, 15–21, 2014, 13–15. figure and ground, as all of the elements in its scope become data to be attended to. For example, an illustration from the journal Army Logisti- cian, in an article called “Modeling the Wholesale Logistics Base,” de- picts the interior of the base as a monochromatic volume whose planes are inscribed with a square grid of white lines. In high-contrast black and white, a forklift operator is using his vehicle to transport a two-by-two cube rendered in the same manner as the surroundings. Thus, the objects that are being shuttled through the distribution center merge with the building itself, or vice versa. Rendering surroundings and objects in the same way conflates the two, united in the imagination of the logisti- cian as elements that fit together perfectly and in which each element and each unit of volume and area can be accounted for and modeled. The wireframe is, of course, a familiar means of modeling any kind of three-dimensional space, and the equal grid is an especially nimble means of simulating space. The equal treatment of both environment and objects further erodes the boundary between figure and ground on their mutual journey toward abstraction and the flattening tendencies of calculation. Moreover, the graphic separation of the driver and his forklift are reminders of the increasing incompatibility of humans with such environments. An employee waits for her shift to begin in the “Safety Zone,” a space for employee-led LOGISTICS Deborah Cowen links this trajectory to the industri- educational activities. Every UPS facility is alization of warfare, in which “logistics has come to lead strategy and required to have one. tactics: it has gone from being the practical afterthought to the calcu- lative process that defines thought. Changes in the material form and social organization of fuel saw logistics gradually become the how that shapes the what.”14 As it is driven by market dynamics, logistics might be seen, if somewhat indirectly, as a reflection of more base and impulsive desires. At what point will the factors that logistics externalizes become obstacles in its own development? As certain balance sheets are reor- ganized, logistics will play a role in that too. For example, increasing oil prices might make shipping goods from China to the US more expensive than manufacturing them domestically. Or, alternatively, in light of recent EU-Russia trade embargoes, increasing efficiencies and transport technologies could provide ways for farmers to direct their crops to welcoming markets, rather than letting them rot on the ground.15 However, given the ways that logistics defines and deploys global networks of people, Jesse LeCavalier is an goods, and resources, rather than accepting UPS’ claim that “logistics Assistant Professor of Architecture at the makes the world work better,” it might be more important to recognize New Jersey Institute that logistics, more simply, makes the world. of Technology and part of the design practice Co + LeCavalier. He is currently working on a book about the architecture of logistics, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. fromom New Jersey wanted to know what CBGB’sBGB’s was like in the 1970s. TheTh avant- Losing Interest garde. Crazyy hair. Made-up wordswords. 9. shumon basar For the nextxt three years, I read whateverwh I want to readead — philosophy,, literaryliterar and film theory,y, Charles Olsen, Mary Douglas,Dou Mircea 1. Eliade,liade, kinship theories — and insistinsi it’s all I want you to know that by the end of this relevantelevant to whatever I’m doing. AndAn no one A letter in response to sentence, you may have lost interest. Why? rollsll an eye. I’m I’ happy. h Nothing N thi seems off- a request to write about Because I am about to write about losing limits and I end up writing my dissertation on architecture. interest. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 feature film, Pierrot 2. le Fou. Further studies would involve excur- If you are still here: wow. If you’re not here: sions into phrenology, Zizek, Henri Bergson, not-wow. Laura Mulvey, Lost Highway, all those Semio- 3. texte paperbacks. You get the point. People like to ask me what I studied. It’s one 10. of those inescapable questions, like “Where Everything is everything is everything. are you from?” My eyeballs roll at both. The 11. past is only interesting once you’ve sussed Many years later, an astute friend will de- someone out in the here-and-present. Ques- scribe the study of architecture as a “psychic tions like this performed kinship purposes dustbin.” He says it’s a place certain kids before. Now, they seem so retrograde. end up because they come from families 4. that — like my own — would never support I answer, “Architecture,” and — before I ver- the study of art and literature even though bally place a full stop after the last “e” — I’ve that’s really where the kid should be going. launched into a little narrative that was never The study of architecture (I should add: at really asked for. But you’re going to get it. certain “elite” schools) turns out, however, to Regardless. It serves you right for asking be a fertile holding pattern until the kid is old such a one-dimensional question. enough, or lucid enough, to go and do what it 5. is s/he always wanted to do. “I wanted to study Fine Art or English Litera- 12. ture,” I exposit, “but when, at the age of 16, Before the Renaissance, it’s arguable I told my loving, caring, Bangladeshi, first whether the term “architect” was really in generation immigrant parents about these use the way we use it today (even that is plans — fueled, pretentiously, by reading probably contentious). Medieval cathedrals surrealist poetry and the paintings of Max were built through the concentrated circuitry Ernst — my mother rolled her eyes at me as if of different crafts and economies. Someone I’d asked them where they’re from. They dis- oversaw it all and had enough knowledge missed my artsy ambitions straight away, for about the constituent inputs to orchestrate in the pantheon of professionalism, neither their synthesis. We still don’t know the ‘artist’ nor ‘writer’ were proper careers. Next.” names of most of these medieval polymaths, 6. but we start to hear names once the Renais- “After some research, I suggest to them, ‘Ar- sance “arrives.” Because, there’s a mirroring chitecture?’ unsure what its study would ac- between the paradigmatic “Renaissance tually entail. It’s met, surprisingly, with instant Man” — schooled in poetry, sciences, ethics, parental approval. Only years later do I find etc. — and the “Architect.” out that in much of the non-Western world, 13. ‘architecture’ continued to signify ‘engineer- This is what I am most grateful for in my long ing.’ Something technical, based on science deviation at the tail end of the 20th century. and maths more than flimsy art. I effectively 14. The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Shumon Basar Losing Interest stow away undetected in this slippage.” Architecture’s role in the unfolding of the 7. world (as setting, witness, crime scene, John Hejduk, Kreuz- berg Tower, Berlin, If you are still here: double wow. aberrant luxury) is analogically echoed in completed 1988. Part of the International 8. what happens to your brain when you study Building Exhibition In my first week as an architecture under- architecture. You’re more neurologically (IBA 1984/87) [photo: Shumon Basar] graduate, I raid various departmental li- wired to see the interconnectedness of braries and create a totem of books: The things. You’re more predisposed to ignore Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau- the sovereignty of disciplines. If you listened Ponty; Of Grammatology and Writing carefully during class, and you care, you will and Difference by Derrida; Writing Degree know a little about many things and that’s Zero by Barthes; etc. It’s 1993 and post- useful in the 21st century because that’s the structuralism is still healthy (just) and I want abiding logic of time and space right now. to know what it’s about, maybe the way kids To invoke Foucault — one of my stalwarts from that first week — we have to be Poets Hadid and Zaha Hadid’s officece has grown to while the world acts as the ultimate Mad- a corporate size. Art is the man. 24. orgy-on-gy- 15. The only people who still use the word And then I lost interest in architecture. “avant-garde” are from real estate marketing.rketin a-yachta-ya 16. They, unlike poets, become very richh indeeindeed. I realized that this epistemological generos- 25. everyonevery ity served by architecture’s academia is not I’m in danger of providing ann all too clear rerea- from selfless reasons. It is partly born from a son for my architecture apostasy.stasy. It’s more wantswant in kind of ontological insecurity that goes back mercurial than late-blah-capitalismit li ((one of f on. In this to the man overseeing the building of the today’s easiest alibis for shallow thinking). medieval cathedral: “What exactly do I know 26. sense, art and what exactly do I do that makes me un- Other probable reasons are the comput- like anything or anyone else?” erization of space (also responsible for the is catch- 17. banalization of Hollywood), the endgame The answer is at best fuzzy. At worst, it’s of 20th-century aesthetic experimentation ing up to existentially a downer. (why all painting and sculpture looks déjà vu), architecture. 18. the true International Style as Amazoned by David Byrne recently posted a piece where Flat Earth globalization, evil Google, Snap- he outlines why he’s lost interest — love, chat, the Islamic State, Ebola, the shitty iOS8 even — in contemporary art. I won’t rehearse update, a history of slavery, bad feminists, the entire argument, but it’s the same gist as Bashar al-Assad, Mark Regev, and kale. Dave Hickey’s from 2012, when the irascible Mostly Mark Regev. dealer-turned-critic declared he was quit- 27. ting the art world because contemporary Having said all that, it’s probably just me. art has become one of the prime venues for 28. the gratification of global capital. It makes Sidenote: I’ve been living in a very special contemporary art richer — but maybe uglier piece of building made of squares, cylinders, to some people like Dave and David. rectangles, triangles. Shapes that are child- 19. like or Platonic. Abstract or figurative. For the As a comparison, think about the venue of architect John Hejduk, probably both. Hejduk contemporary literature. Do you see Rus- will be known to the academic architectural sian or Chinese oligarchs queuing to rub up cognoscenti but not to anyone else. He against the latest feted novelist? It doesn’t built very little in his lifetime, not because he happen. There are no Sotheby’s and Chris- couldn’t, but rather, he chose not to. Instead, tie’s of writing. Books haven't been 1% com- he drew scratchy drawings of carnivalesque modities since Gutenberg gutted the sacral objects wandering Europe. He wrote many, quality of text. Today, literature may hold a many poems. He constructed strange gaze upon the bloated excrescences of 21st- animistic installations. He taught. Lots. And century wealth but it doesn’t work the other yet, I’ve been residing on the 10th and 11th way around. floors of a social housing block in Berlin 20. which he architected, where each room ex- Art on the other hand is the orgy-on-a-yacht ists in its own independent tower, linked to everyone wants in on. each other by short walkways. There are only 21. seven apartments in total. It’s utterly irratio- In this sense, art is catching up to architec- nal — no developer would condone it — and ture. Wealth, power, privilege always found therefore utterly compelling. Finished in their most boastful expression in build- 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall, close by, ings, which are portraits at a bigger scale. came down, this piece of pure auteurship Architects — from Le Corbusier to Albert stands alone, apart, even from itself. Every Speer — were just puny paper dreamers day I wake up inside it, a spectral pulse runs when they were not being backed by a bank through me, mediated by this odd, oblique or Benito Mussolini. entity I temporarily call home. It is enchanting 22. and unnerving. It is the palpable strength of a Architecture without money is poetry and no strong idea. one got rich from being a poet. 29. 23. Without an abiding curiosity in the Shumon Basar is a Remember when there was a glaring dif- world — which should find form as vigilance writer. He is co- ference between clothes you could afford against complacent comfort in what you authoring The Age of on the high street and those you couldn’t in know — you die inside. Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present Yohji Yamamoto or Balenciaga? It seems so 30. with Douglas Coupland quaint now. High/low divisions, ha! The same Boredom is irradiation of the soul. and Hans Ulrich Obrist, thing’s happened in architecture. Corporate to be published by Penguin and Blue Rider offices churn out their own versions of Zaha in March 2015. Long before MOOCs or the University of Phoenix, there was Sol TV University Cornberg—a forgotten architect of media who went from designing johnohn harwood arwoodrwood stage sets for theater ca. 1964 to ones for broad-cast TV, first to sell things in immersive new ways then to revolutionize 24 education as we know it. Cornberg's Cold War innovations in telepresence promised to overcome the physical architecture of the university, making knowledge available to the widest audience. Contemporary attempts to do the same may succumb to the allure of a false promise. The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue John Harwood TV University ca. 1964

Grand Valley State College 1964/65 course catalogue, August 1964, p. 49 [courtesy of Grand Valley State University Archives] Television as a tool, a force, in the art of seemingly about to touch-typeyypepe notes on communication — information, educa- the portable typewriter at thehehe desk in fronfront tion and entertainment — has never of him. And should he be orthographicallythographicallycally been equaled in history. It is incumbent stumped, he can still reach uupp to his CollinCollins on intelligent people to become a party dictionary on the bookshelff an arm’s lengtlength to television lest it fall into the hands of away. the selfish and short-sighted. Just below the frame of this imaimage,ge, anda — Sol Cornberg, 1954 its caption that informs the student that susuch “study carrels, electronically25y equequipped,ipped, propro-- If it is indeed true that the medium is the vide optimum study conditions,””th the ddescrip- i message, then we are living in, and refusing tion of History 430, “Reason and Revolution,” to read the contents of, an enormous dead identifies the aforementioned stakes yet letter office. The advent of the massive open again, “stressing the Enlightenment as it was online course (MOOC) in the neoliberal uni- manifest in an attitude of materialistic ratio- versity has prompted some reflection on the nalism, and the political revolutions which history of correspondence and broadcasting followed.” in the ongoing technical reconfiguration of If this image seems strange to us to- higher education over the past 120 years, day, even comic, then we are making a big and the archive of this history is now several mistake. Universities have always been layers deep. A thoroughgoing discourse syntheses of technical media, even when analysis has yet to emerge, but even a casual those media were quills, ink, parchment, and skim through this literature reveals that the podia. What is laid out across page 49 of ideological structure of the various colleges the GVSC catalog is the redefinition of the and universities “by mail” or “of the air” university as a synthetic technical medium has not changed since the start of what has for the “Information Age.” As with any me- come to be called “distance learning.” dium, following Marshall McLuhan’s (and not What is staked in all arguments (for, just his) laws, the content of this medium against, or ambivalent) about distance is other and previous media: handwriting learning is the first “O” in “MOOC”: “open,” (note the presence of the pencil, house left/ which is usually shorthand for public or inex- stage right), print (typewriter, books), audio pensive access to information and/or edu- recording/playback (phonograph, open-reel cation.1 Whether one examines the Internet- analog tape, cassette), and visual recording/ dependent model of the contemporary playback (television, film). All of these are MOOC or the casual post baccalaureate framed within a microarchitecture — the seeking “diversion” by listening to a range carrel — which coordinates the play of media of radio broadcasts by Harvard University across a set of complex surfaces arranged in back in 1937,2 the stakes are high: nothing three dimensions. less than the success of the Enlightenment. It does not take much historical imagina- So, to read the medium as the message tion to relate the experience of our young in the most ingenuous way, one might do Michigander to that of the contemporary worse than to start with page 49 of the university, liberal arts college, community course catalog for the second year of Grand college, or vocational school student (or, for 1 The difference between “in- Valley State College (GVSC), a commuter that matter, the professor on the other side formation” and “education” school on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, of two screens, who seems to stare back at is often elided in the most MI, recently opened for the academic year us like the partial self-portrait of Velázquez enthusiastic polemics in 3 favor of telematic education. 1964–1965. Here, on a single page, is a dia- on the surface of Las Meninas). To be sure, For a historical perspec- gram of the future of enlightenment. Three the desktop and laptop computers, tablets, tive on this problem well in undergraduate-level history lecture courses smartphones, landlines, card-swipe termi- advance of current debates, see Simon Nora and Alain — History 410, 420, and 430 — are listed, nals, digital projectors, stereo and surround Minc, The Computerization framing a staged photograph of a clean-cut, audio systems, automated milling machines, of Society: A Report to the young male Michigander attending one of contract furniture, and other technical ap- President of France [1978] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, these courses. One notices straightaway the paratus of the contemporary school are 1980). unusual size of the classroom. It is in fact a differently configured and usually just as 2 classroom for one (well, really for two, but awkwardly juxtaposed. But what we see See Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez, “Before more on that below), an “educational alcove” in the carrel at the about-to-launch GVSC MOOCs, ‘Colleges of the or “carrel,” complete with a typewriter, a is almost wholly analogous to our contem- Air’,” Chronicle of Higher television, a radio receiver, and an ampli- porary university-as-mass-medium, with Education, April 23, 2013, http://chronicle.com/blogs/ fied stereo speaker set and headphone set one very important exception. In contrast to conversation/2013/04/23/ connected to a complex central multimedia today’s repeated injunctions to reimagine (or before-moocs-colleges-of- recording and playback system located in better/worse, “design”) the “new” university the-air 3 the basement below. The professor, in a tight as a wholly technical problem, in 1963 there Grand Valley State College three-quarter frame, is holding forth on the seems to have been at least a remnant or 1964/65 course catalog, eight-inch cathode ray tube as our young possibility of a historical and political di- August 1964, p. 49, Grand Valley State University man readies himself to don his eyeglasses, mension to the project of extending higher Archives. education to communicate information to as the literal sense as well as thehehe figurativefigurative — of many people as possible. the neoliberal university andd its satellite So, one might ask, where did GVSC institutions. come from and where has it gone? A provi- His early career is a fascinatingcinating subject,bject sional answer, that might show the strange but one for another time. Cornberg’sornberg’s first intimacy between the ivory tower and cor- task at NBC was the designn of the set for porate mass media, can be given through an one of the three flagship programsogrammss — To-To- investigation of the person who designed day, Home, and Tonight — ooff NBC’s new the first comprehensive system for mass- schedule of live television. 26HeHe eventually mediatized higher education. Enter, house marked the visual and spatialltfllltf aspects of all right/stage left, looming just behind our three programs, but it was Home, “a show young distance learner: the singular and that was edited like a women’s magazine to wholly forgotten Sol Cornberg (1910–1999), present tips on cooking, gardening, fashions, a man whose career spanned nearly the children, and everything else that’s wifely, entirety of the “American century” and cor- with plenty of advertising sandwiched be- responded so neatly with the emergence of tween the pages,”4 that he designed in late mass media such as telephony and radio at 1953 and built leading up to the program’s the beginning of that century and the Inter- premiere in 1954, that is most revealing. net and digital cinema at the end that, as a Through his experiences on the set of Home historian, I have struggled to even believe his Cornberg was able to glean crucial lessons extraordinary biography. from his experiments in the synthetic medium of television, earn a very particular world- Beginning his adult life as an undereducated view with regard to the stakes of using that circus stagehand, then moving on to be- mass medium in particular ways, and most come the technical director of the Cleveland importantly ascertain why he might apply his Playhouse and taking a position as lecturer expertise to education reform. at Western Reserve University in the 1930s Cornberg’s set design for Home was a and 40s, subsequently becoming a nationally technical marvel. Circular in plan, the set was 4 recognized expert on theater design, eventu- a panopticon of consumerism, designed to d.a. [author’s full name ally rising to the position of Director of Stu- place the highest possible emphasis “on unknown], “TV in a Prefab dio and Plant Planning for the NBC network things and the people who show the things.”5 Home,” Industrial Design 1, n. 3 (June 1954), 36. of television stations in the 1950s (where he The design was motivated by the core 5 revolutionized the technical production of desires of NBC’s producers and, by exten- Ibid. live television, about which more below), and sion, its advertisers. Everything about Home 6 6 Cornberg articulates then starting out on his own as a design con- was intended to be wholly telepresent. The something approaching a sultant and self-proclaimed “futurologist” in show was built around three main effects: full theory of televisual tele- the mode of better remembered figures such spontaneity, by which was meant not only a presence in his rewriting and updating of Hoyland as Daniel Bell and Alvin Toffler, Cornberg is certain lightness and improvisational quality Bettinger’s standard- perhaps more than any other human being to the presenters’ general affect, but also setting manual Television responsible for the contemporary view of the nearly instant transitions between segments; Techniques (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947; university as a data processing machine. He variety, understood as an audiovisual ef- revised edition, New York: is one of the most important architects — in fect of eclectic imagery and subject matter Harper, 1955). The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue John Harwood TV University ca. 1964

Sol Cornberg (drawing by William Riggs), Home studio, New York, 1953–54 (including set changes and live and recorded of view of the television cameras at the Donwill Company (Portland, OR), design music); and most importantly, a seductive center of the studio. Between this outer ring for a monkey-mounted camera capable presentation of a wide array of commercial of latex walls and catwalks and the cameras of rotating 370 products and services ranging from perish- was a ring of specialized machinery, some degrees, specially commissioned by Sol ables to fashion to furniture to automobiles of Cornberg’s own invention, for presenting Cornberg for NBC’s to real estate to medical care. (Any reader consumer products. A “tilt elevator” let the Home studio, 1953–54 who has ever watched daytime television in product rotate toward the camera, whereas the 21st century — perhaps while home sick a “spiral lift [picked up a chair and turned] it from work — will recognize that these quali- over to reveal the fine workmanship”; turn- ties or effects have remained unchanged in tables rotated products, but also could be everything but the technical standards used used to produce special effects such as “a to achieve them.) carousel for a children’s party.” Cornberg Cornberg addressed the problem of also developed a movable planting box to designing such a set by reformulating the allow for real flora in the studio for segments technical program of the studio from scratch, on gardening, and even a miniature weather 7 through an imaginative reconfiguration of an simulator, known as an “elementary,” which On Duschinsky, see bio- ideal circular studio plan advocated by the “[deposited] rain, hail, fog, snow, or sleet on graphical note in Walter J. Duschinsky, “The Require- 8 former Bauhaus student and aeronautical young ladies in model raincoats.” ments of Television Station and industrial engineer Walter J. Duschin- These shockingly new and exciting Design, Part I: The General sky,7 and an aggressive deployment of every machines, and the possibilities that they Problem of TV Station De- sign,” Broadcast News available mechanical and electronic tool at held open for NBC’s directors and produc- 61 (September–October his disposal. The Home set itself was circular ers, were presented to Sylvester Weaver, 1950), 34. in plan, surrounded at the outer edge by a the president of NBC, as early as December 8 Ibid., 40. Weather simula- continuous segmented wall of 13 aluminum 1953 in the form of a model with working tors had been in use in frames on which were stretched a thin, miniature lights and a representative array commercial cinema since nearly transparent layer of latex. This setup of hydraulic presentation surfaces. As Corn- its inception; on stage they had been used for centuries. allowed projectors, placed outside these berg argued to Weaver, “We designed this See George C. Izenour, walls, to project images visible to the camera set so that producer and director can walk Theater Design, 2nd ed. at the studio’s center. The effect produced in and think out loud — and their thoughts (New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1996), especially 9 a separate set background on each of the materialize.” As reported in Industrial Design, appendices 1 and 2. studio’s 13 stages; a given set for a segment “Executives were so pleased that each Home 9 of the program could thus be wholly modular [advertising] salesman was given a set of Ibid., 43. 10 and expandable. Moreover, unused modules blue prints [sic] and a model case wired for Ibid., 41. This appears to could be converted to a new background lighting to show advertising prospects.”10 have been the first time that a model of a set was used image without the noisy and cumbersome Yet none of these clever inventions of to sell advertising time; on business of dismantling, building, and mov- Cornberg’s would have functioned without the sale of advertising in ing background scenery. the crucial interface at the center of the early post-WWII television, see Philip W. Sewell, Above this outer latex wall, the stages circular studio and its surrounding flexible Television in the Age of were surrounded by a raised balcony from and ever-changing sets. The geometry of the Radio: Modernity, Imagina- which a fixed lighting grid and as much tech- studio put enormous pressure on the small tion, and the Making of a Medium (New Brunswick, nical equipment as was feasible to mount central area where the television cameras NJ: Rutgers University would be accessible to technicians but out would be located. With the ingenuity of a Press, 2014). Frank Oscar Larson, theatrical technical director, who must often be present in a manner distinct from the photograph of the Today studio through make due with a minimum of means, Corn- usual (and still uncanny) settings of the shop, the exterior window, berg solved this problem with a supremely department store, car lot, real estate agent’s April 1954 [courtesy of creative repurposing of a piece of machinery: office, and so on: his dynamic circular studio Landov Media] the “Industrial Monkey.” By inverting and would present “the thing as it has never been customizing a conventional, semi-truck- shown before — animated, mobile, divorced mounted rotating boom monkey that he had from the conventional presentation.”12 This observed “in the apple orchards of Wash- telepresence, as Cornberg believed and ington” and attaching it to the ceiling of the hinted at in his publications about television, studio, Cornberg made it possible to pro- was the dynamic ideological construct that vide an automated camera that could move held the potential to destroy the architec- throughout nearly the entire volume of the tural and infrastructural boundaries of knowl- studio (it could rotate 370 degrees horizon- edge production and consumption. The tally and had a radius of 14 feet to 31 feet vacuum cleaners and dinettes that Cornberg from its anchor point in the ceiling) without had struggled to display for Home and other trailing wires and crowding bodies of opera- programs were but guinea pigs for a larger- 11 11 Ibid., 38. tors on the studio floor. Industrial Design scale experiment with producing a telepres- 12 The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue John Harwood TV University ca. 1964 referred to the new camera and its mount as ence for knowledge as such. d.a. [?], “TV in a Prefab an “interstellar eye,” allowing roving views of In the end, Home fell victim, like so many Home,” Industrial Design 1, n. 3 (June 1954), 40. the presenters and products from above and other programs, to the rapidly shifting ex- 13 nearly every other angle. Three conventional periments pursued by television producers On the failure of the show, cameras on the studio floor would provide in the mid-1950s.13 Yet Cornberg continued see Inger L. Stole, “There Is No Place Like Home: NBC’s the more conventional shots. to pursue further innovations to the technical Search for a Daytime Audi- Yet what is perhaps most remarkable apparatus of television. Much of it was high- ence, 1954–57,” The Com- about Cornberg’s Home set is the fact that, tech: He further contributed numerous other munication Review 2 (1997): 135–161; and Bernard M. when all of these various gizmos were com- inventions, such as a mirror that would allow Timberg, “Arlene Francis bined into a single apparatus for producing makeup artists to know exactly how a given and Home (1954–57),” in: television programming, the design became treatment would look on camera, and more Television Talk: A History of the TV Talk Show (Austin: a machine for a telematic presentation of importantly designed and patented an auto- University of Texas Press, commodities. These commodities would mated and reconfigurable auditorium based 2002), 39–45. of ninety-five air hours eachaachch week fromfrom Cornberg is perhaps the Communications [Center,eenter,nter, aa]] “Point of more than any Origin” where activity “aroundround the clock” would carry a great work,k, i.e., pay loadoad other human being [sic]. This activity would serve as a greagreat tourist attraction and, moreore importantly,ortantl responsible for the would place the stamp of responsibilitresponsibilitysponsibi y and authority on the informationsrmations [[sic]sic] contemporary view passing through it, and29 oonn the corporatcorporate of the university as entity functioning it.16 Cornberg drew directly upon his experi- a data processing ence and technical acumen derived from decades in the theater and a whirlwind five machine. He is one years operating at the highest levels in the heyday of industrialized post-WWII live tele- of the most important vision to design the carrel illustrated at the architects — in the outset of this essay as the bearer of the message of reasoned revolution in the GVSC literal sense as well catalogue. But why Cornberg pursued this particular application of his synthetic multi- 14 as the figurative — media approach to education is perhaps less Sol Cornberg, “Television clear. The carrel’s design is protected by US make-up apparatus,” US of the neoliberal Patent 3,233,346, which inscribes into the Patent 3,047,654, filed June 15, 1960, issued July university and its permanent record of intellectual property the 31, 1962; “Movable live following crypto-revolutionary statement: “A audience auditorium,” US carrel is an enclosure for studying. This in- Patent 3,092,876, filed satellite institutions. June 15, 1960, issued June vention relates to a new and improved carrel 11, 1963. Cornberg’s most which [sic] utilizes audiovisual aids to edu- thorough statement and illustration of his adaptation cate a student. More particularly, it relates of Izenour’s ideas is given in to a carrel which may be utilized to eliminate Cornberg, “Space-Control in part on the innovative ideas of the cel- the need for educational institutions as we Production Area,” Broad- 17 cast News 86 (December ebrated Yale professor of theater technique know them today.” Why would Cornberg 1955): 30–47. George C. Izenour.14 But Cornberg also kept feel such a need to be worth fulfilling? 15 the architectonic space of the television stu- The answer is that Cornberg himself See, for example, Brian Stelter’s exposé Top of the dio in mind. Perhaps his most familiar inno- became disillusioned with commercial televi- Morning: Inside the Cut- vation was the very simple decision to build sion at about the same time that he came throat World of Morning TV the set of Today — the longest lasting con- into contact with a broad network of influen- (New York: Grand Central, 2013). tinually produced series on television in the tial figures confronting the massive crisis in 16 world — at plaza level in Rockefeller Center. education in the United States and its various Sol Cornberg, “Television The shop window through which spectators satellite states toward the end of the 1950s. Seeks Architectural Form,” Broadcast News 95 (June could take in the spectacle of live television Shortly after Cornberg established his own 1957), 41. production remains an icon of transparency design and consulting business, he was 17 and accessibility within mass media — so invited by Educational Facilities Laboratories, Sol Cornberg, “Carrel,” US Patent 3,233,346, filed much so that it is still the oddly off-center Inc. (EFL), a subsidiary of the Ford Founda- September 13, 1962, is- centerpiece of the show today, and has been tion, to participate in a landmark report on sued February 8, 1966. deployed as a motif in numerous widely read the state and future of American education. portrayals of the television industry.15 By the time his vision of live television had fully matured, around 1958, Cornberg had prophesied the advent of the 24-hour news network centered on a multimedia agglom- eration he called a “Communications Center” as the commercial and organizational model for the future of television. In the rather awk- ward prose of a theater technical director thrust into the role of visionary, he foresaw [a] space into which news is brought by every known means — television, radio, wire, wire photo or hand. A space where the news would be assimilated and Sol Cornberg (drawings by William programmed and from which it would Riggs, Gunther, Jackie), design for be possible to broadcast twenty hours a “Communications of television and seventy-five hours of Center” as published in Broadcast News, radio in a given week. Here a grand total June 1957 EFL, established in 1958 in response of the most modern andd comprehenscomcomprehensiveprehensive 1818 21 OnOn JonathaJonathJonathann King, see his to the imminent passage of the National audio-video system available.aailableilable. bbriefrief biograbiographyp at http:// Defense Education Act (referred to casu- The system would work, perer Zumberge,ge, crs.arccrs.arch.tamu.edu/students/rch.tamh.tamu ally as the “Sputnik bill”) and the ongoing because scholarshscholarships/king-biog-arshipsips rraphyaphy and AAvAvigailv Sachs, enrollment crises at American universities Professors’ lectures aree tatapedped and stored “Researchrch fforor Architecture: in the wake of the GI Bill, was, in effect, an and eventually all lectureseess will be initiallyinitiall BuBuildingilding a DDisciplinei and architectural firm. Its first employee, Jona- presented over the college’sege’s cclosedlosed ModernizinModernizingernizingg the Profes- ssion,”ion,”,” Ph.D. DDissertation than King, was a building systems designer, circuit system, thus freeingeeinging professors’ ((UniversityUniversity oof California, and throughout its 28-year existence EFL time for small group meetings30eetingstings with theirthe Berkeley, 22009).0 maintained an architect in a position of at students. As college populationlti grows, 19 18 Educational Facilities least vice-presidential authority. It remains efficient use of instructors’ time will Laboratories, Inc., Bricks unclear exactly how Cornberg was drawn become increasingly important, if indi- and Mortarboards: A into the very wide circle of participants vidual attention to each student is to be Report on College Planning 22 and Building (New York: (Wallace Harrison, Max Abramovitz, William maintained. EFL, 1964), pp. 69–98. Pereira, Charles Luckman, and several other Despite the intensity of their rhetoric, Corn- 20 establishment modernists were included berg’s and Zumberge’s view did not swing James J. Morisseau, “Foreword” to ibid., esp. pp. on the team of hundreds), but his views on the majority in their favor. As Donald G. 12–13, where the author the dematerialization of the university were Moore, a consultant employed by Southern catalogs various views on recorded most clearly in the 1958 report Illinois University (home of Buckminster the challenge of funding the growth of colleges Bricks and Mortarboards, wherein Cornberg Fuller), concluded after interviewing and universities and the was interviewed by none other than the 43 experts employed by companies like debts — federal, state, and journalist and yet-to-be-futurist Alvin Toffler IBM, Lockheed, the Martin Company, personal — that will result. 21 19 for the chapter “Libraries.” Cornberg’s Information Handling Services, System Quoted in Office of Admin- remarks there were largely framed by Toffler Development Corporation, Thompson istration, Grand Valley State as limited to the topic of libraries (Cornberg Ramo Woolridge, Teleprompter Corpo- College, press release (April 13, 1962). famously claimed that no library should ration, and RCA, as well as the Stanford 22 contain more than 23,000 volumes); how- Research Institute, and the University of Office of Administration, ever, many contemporary readers viewed his California Radiation Laboratory. … “There Grand Valley State College, press release (March 5, words as revolutionary statements regard- was nothing found that would conflict 1964). ing the evident lack of a need for bricks and with the conclusion that the Edwardsville 23 mortar educational instutions in the future.20 campus should have a book-containing Quoted in Alvin Toffler, “Libraries,” Bricks and Mor- 23 The boldness of Cornberg’s claims library.” tarboards, pp. 69–98, p. 97. found a ready audience, and EFL agreed to But what the pervasive blankness of the 24 Josephs, then retired from fund his research and development of what modular halls of GVSC and its imitators — the board of New York became the GVSC carrel. Eventually, sev- I’m looking at you, University of Phoenix, but Life Insurance Company, eral thousand such carrels were installed at also at the halfhearted efforts by various is quoted in the foreword to Bricks and Mortarboards, institutions new and old across the country institutions such as the University of Miami, p. 13: “The solution to the in hopes that they might obviate the need which built “The Octagon” in response to problem is clear and simple: for the construction — at the cost of billions ideas like Cornberg’s — represents is the Colleges should raise tuition fees to charge to of dollars then needed for warheads and triumph and tragedy of Cornberg’s vision. the student the full cost of tailfins — of tens of thousands of new These minimized, mass-mediatized cam- his education, and what the buildings for higher education in the 1960s puses were indeed prototypes of the current student or his parents cannot pay from past savings and 1970s. educational-industrial complex; yet their and current earnings, they As James H. Zumberge, GVSC president, realization in architectural and economic should borrow.” Emphasis suggested in the lead-up to the opening of terms was impossible without embracing in original. the college, without exploiting television and Devereaux C. Josephs’ prediction that the other telematic media, a standard college or entire expanded “system” of higher educa- university would simply be unable to cope: tion would need to rely, regardless of its We must begin this college with an mediatic configuration, upon a debt scheme audio-video system fully adequate to of epic proportions.24 The college or uni- demonstrate the advantages of going versity can move into the flexible, fungible The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue John Harwood TV University ca. 1964 farther than any college has yet done spaces of corporate real estate, with all in the use of audio and visual electronic of the investment in the logics of financial services to make more effective and markets that such a move implies; but it efficient instruction in all subjects we will could not and cannot by so doing avoid the be offering. The achievement of such corollary investment, which is to leverage the a system is essential to the role which debt of the students and faculty. This situ- our college, as I see it, must plan in the ation will not change for the better until this service of higher education in our own debt is restructured. Well-intentioned souls state, and in all states similarly obliged to of every political stripe complain that higher meet by bold, new methods the demands education was once, at the height of the for educating vastly increased numbers Cold War, supported at an average of 46% of students. Educational Facilities Labo- of annual budgeted expenses by federal and ratories has made possible the planning state governments. Today that figure has dwindled to between 2% and 5%, depending on the location of any given institution. Yet the problem is not one of government investment. The federal government provides “aid” in the form of loans to nearly 90% of all undergraduates. What must be made plain, again and again, with careful attention paid

to the specific mediation of education, is not Sol Cornberg, “Carrel,” the percentages, but rather the very basic 31 US Patent 3,233,346, filed September 13, fact that no universal, syncretic, synthetic 1962, granted February medium will remake the university in order 8, 1966, sheet 1 to absolve us of the need to restructure — or better, forgive — this debt. Until we face this fact, the revolution will be televised; and if it’s on TV, you can be sure it didn’t happen.

John Harwood is an Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architectural History at Oberlin College. He is an editor of Grey Room, and is currently at work on two books, Architectures of Mass Media: Telephony, Radio, Television and Corporate Architecture, 17th to 20th Centuries. Erik Brandt’s suburban ART PAPERS: Can you walk uus through Minneapolis garage has the Ficciones process?ocess? become a platform for Typographic experimental graphic design from around the world. In a Erikik Brandt: In the beginning, submsubmissions project he calls Ficciones wereere hung by invitation only. I appapproached Typografika, Brandt wheat- Fictions bothoth designers and artists, profesprofessionals and pastes a rotating selection students alike.ke. Early submissionsubmissions tended to of posters to a 72"× 36" bee single posters, but the triptych format has board on the side of his erik brandt house and posts photos of becomeecome more popular. I opened up submis- the installations online. It’s sions relativelyltil early, l and dth the response has a hybrid of local and global, been really positive. Contributors send their offline and online, that PDFs and we start a conversation, which returns graphic design to its native, public environment is one of the more delightful aspects of the in an experimental, non- project. I only wish I could hang submis- commercial form. We speak sions faster. Some contributors have had to with Brandt, a designer and wait months before theirs could go up. They professor at the Minneapolis don’t go up in any predictable fashion — I try College of Art and Design, about his project and what instead to find appropriate “companions” in the neighbors think. this long-form narrative that is developing.

How did the project come about?

The original intent was to develop a surface I could exploit for personal work, but when I was actually constructing the poster board it occurred to me that it would be an ideal way to engage a larger community, both locally and internationally. I used to run a blog called Geotypografika, where I did much the same thing, but this became a much more vibrant and expressive opportunity.

What kind of equipment are you using?

The posters are printed on an Océ printer. I make the wheatpaste fresh for each hanging and use an old four-inch brush to apply. In warm weather I apply the wheatpaste both back and front. Once it starts dipping below 33°F I add a splash of windshield wiper fluid to keep it from freezing off the brush, and only apply on the back. It’s an amazing thing to watch hot wheatpaste steaming and freezing almost at the same time.

What are the constraints for submissions?

The only limitations are size and a single ink color, black, though there are five different grounds to choose from. I have encouraged submissions in native languages and simply The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Erik Brandt Typographic Fictions offer this idea of creating typographic fictions as a prompt.

How does this project relate to your teaching?

Posters by Erik Brandt, installed June 16, 2013 [all photos courtesy of the artist] The concept for this project has its roots in a series of Letraset experiments I created in 2001, trying to conceive new ways to expose students to a variety of simple typographic issues. The idea was to create formal projections that tried to estrange the letterforms from themselves and create “new” forms. The typographic nature of many submissions is very broadbroa in both application and concept, and I thinthink that’s especially appropriate here. It allowallows for bothoth expressive and experimental projec- tionsons but can also accommodate vital formal messages. My own practice, TypoTypografika, has always revolved around these issues.

What do the neighbors think?

The local response has been immensely satisfying. People have changed their daily routines to stop by, and it’s been wonderful to engage with them in conversation.

Ficciones could have been a Tumblr alone, with online submissions; how important is it that it’s rooted in a physical process and physical space?

It means everything. If the work is specula- tive in nature, it still becomes “real” in the sense that the idea actually becomes an object, and can be seen and touched. I really like that simple tension in the idea of fiction grounded on paper. The emails and text exchanges with the contributors are part of that fiction as well, but what really matters is when the paper reacts with the wheatpaste and goes through the transformation from a digital existence to a living, breathing apparition.

How are you approaching the project’s exhibition online?

It’s odd, actually. The Facebook page has long since overtaken the Tumblr. There are over 4,000 Tumblr followers but well over 10,000 on Facebook. I think that’s due to the ability to directly link contributors beyond just a tag. Twitter and Instagram have also become great ways to feature details of pieces and precursors to them.

Google Street View recently indexed your garage with Ficciones on it. Wel- come to the neighborhood!

Many thanks. I hope I am out there hanging posters the next time they drive by. Other- wise, wearing this scuba diving outfit every time is wasted effort.

Top to bottom, posters by: Stephen Dalley, installed August 28, 2014 Rejane Dal Bello, installed October 25, 2013 Felix Pfäffli, installed July 28, 2013 Immo Schneider, installed September 23, 2014 Berlin’sBe Kreuzberg neighborhood, a vibrant Open Architecture inn cultural center, may have stas ged its most ambitiombitious show in the 19980s80s: The International Berlin-Kreuzberg Buildinguildin Exhibition (IBA 1984/871984/87)) crcreated some 44,500,500 new dwellings esra akcan for Turkish “guest 34workers”worker by architects like Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, John Hejduk and Rem Koolhaas, in addition to renovating some 5,000 war-torn units, making future residents partners in the design process.

The Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) of 1984/87 was a building exhibi- A pun on the International Building Exhibition’s 1984/87 official logo tion in the form of urban renewal and public housing in Berlin’s immigrant exposes the divide between the exhibition’s Neubau (new building) neighborhood of Kreuzberg. The run-down neighborhood just along the and Altbau (old building) sections. Berlin Wall had been heavily bombed during the Second World War and left The front cover reproduces half of the IBA’s logo, with an idealized man to decay. “The German Harlem,” as the magazine Der Spiegel put it, had a flexing his muscles, while the back population of almost 50% “guest workers,” mostly from Turkey, and Ger- greets readers with the skeptical 1 eyes of an ethnically ambiguous man squatters who had moved into abandoned buildings. woman in work gloves. Cover of Werk und Zeit, issue no. 1, 1980

As many residents still recall, damage from the Second World War remained in the Kreuzberg of the 1980s: bullet holes covered buildings, windows were shattered, and courtyards were piled with debris. These residents lived without indoor toilets and central heating, but had big stoves where a dan- gerous type of mold was decay- ing structural wooden beams and bringing about the ceilings’ collapse [photo: Uwe Böhm] The IBA sought to align itself with the public housing heyday of Ger- many in the interwar period, but to distance itself from the postwar, large- scale urban interventions for which existing buildings were demolished.

It likewise rejected the standardized, massive housing blocks that were The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Esra Akcan Open Architecture in Berlin-Kreuzberg constructed at the peripheries of the city. Instead of demolishing Berlin’s 19th-century urban fabric, the IBA proposed to “carefully repair” and “criti- cally reconstruct” it. Building on land that belonged almost entirely to city government, the IBA renovated 5,000 existing flats, supporting 700 self-help projects in its Altbau (old building) section under the directorship of Hardt-Waltherr Hämer. In its Neubau (new building) section, under the directorship of Josef Paul Kleihues, the IBA built 4,500 new apartments. While the 39- person Altbau team appointed about 140 mostly local offices, and many historians and artists, the 11-person Neubau team commissioned some 200 established and up-and-coming international architectural firms, including Rob Krier, Aldo Rossi, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, whose theories shaped IBA's urban renewal model, as well as Bohigas/Mackaycckaykay architects, Peter Eisenman, Vittorio Gregotti, Zaha Hadid, John Hejduk,duk, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind. 35

This map, which shows the IBA’s overall district plan and some of its building projects, was exhibited in the 17th Milan Triennial under the theme “Reconstruction of the City.” From: Marco de Michelis et al., La Ricostruzione della Citta: Berlino-IBA 1987 (Milan: Electa, 1985) The IBA is an important microcosm of the architectural discipline in the 1970s and 80s, but it also needs to be discussed in relation to noncitizen rights to the city. Translating the concept of hospitality to design suggests different forms of what I call “open architecture.” This essay examines the floor plans of the apartments themselves in relation to open architecture. These plans vary in two basic ways: “designed variation” indicates diversity in plans prescribed prior to construction, whereas “ad-hoc variation” emerges during and after design and construction by opening up architecture to resident-architects. In a Baumeister article that appeared during the launch of the exhibition, Paulhans Peters criticized the exhibition’s emphasis on façadist postmodernism, challenging it for its contribution to what lies “behind the façade.” “The oft-ridiculed functionalism of the post-war era did indeed in- vent highly livable floor plans,” he wrote, asking: “What about the IBA? Did it contribute to the history of housing with the design of its floor plans?”2 The IBA had preemptively responded to such a challenge by fetishiz- ing variation. IBA-Neubau director Kleihues advocated a typological design method of preserving Berlin’s basic perimeter-block plan that he defined as the “gene structure of the city,” but also making sure to promote variation to differentiate the IBA from the perceived homogeneity of postwar housing.3 Established architects offered variations on the theme by conceiv- ing their contributions as transformations or infill that complemented the existing urban blocks. In most cases, this fascination with variation or fear of standardization was carried to the design of the apartments, either intentionally or as a byproduct of the urban design schemes. For instance, almost no single unit is the same in Oswald Mathias

1 “The Turks are Coming! Save Yourself if You 2 Paulhans Peters, “The Ground pans behind the can!” translated by David Gramling, in Germany Facades,” in Internationale Bauaustellung Berlin in Transit: Nation and Migration, ed. Deniz Gök- 1987: Wohnungsgrundrisse, special issue, türk, David Gramling, Anton Kaes (Berkeley: Baumeister 84, no. 5 (May 1987): 62. University of California Press, 2007), 110–111. Ungers’ Block 1. Prioritizing the use of pure geometric forms, the architecthhitectitect extended the square grid of his urban scheme onto the building with anan un-un - compromising formal ambition that could be possible only through complexomplex calculation of the individual units. 36

In Oswald Mathias Ungers’ exceed- ingly complex plan for Block 1, residents who occupy the duplex apartments in middle blocks access them directly from the courtyard, while the corner ground-floor duplex apartments can be reached from the common building entrances. Residents enter the flats above from corner blocks, and take the common stairs. Those in the sixth-floor apartments enjoy their private terraces, and some have duplexes accessed from the fifth floor. For the mid- block apartments on the third floor, residents can enter their units from bridges on both sides — a wasteful organization dictated by the sym- metry of the plan. [plan: Oswald Mathias Ungers]

Urban design decisions dictated many other idiosyncratic unit plans, such as the hierarchy of elliptical corridors and narrow and irregular, po- lygonal rooms designed to integrate a grand urban stair into Rob Krier’s building in Block 189. Jan and Ralf Rave’s corner building in Block 20 inverts the courtyard of the Berlin perimeter block by subtracting a public courtyard along the street — a decision that necessitates circular corridors and non-orthogonal spaces in the units. Hinrich and Inken Baller’s buildings in Block 70 stand out as unique examples of public housing, with their an- gular rooms and balconies, as much as the pair’s collaboration with Herman Hertzberger for the corner building of Block 30, where units are organized around semi-open urban stairs, and hence integrate threshold spaces be- The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Esra Akcan Open Architecture in Berlin-Kreuzberg tween nonclimatized public circulation zones and interiors. Yet the “designed variation” of Neubau hardly seems economical. How could the IBA achieve such extensive variation and high-quality construction in public housing — an architectural program usually associated in a capitalist system with low-budget, efficient construction techniques and generic, standardized unit plans? As a showpiece exhibition supported by the Berlin Senate, the IBA worked with contractors who agreed to profit-

3 “It is the floor plan in particular that testifies Building Exhibition Berlin 1987, eds., Hein- to the spiritual and cultural idea behind the rich Klotz, Josef Paul Kleihues (NY: Rizzoli, founding of a city.” Josef Paul Kleihues, 1986), 128. “Southern Friedrichstadt,” in International 37

Fatma Baris, a resident of the Ungers building, recast it against the architect’s will, by turning one of the redundant entrance bridges into her daughter’s bedroom, and the winter garden into her son’s room. The family left its signature on the unit with her elaborate furnishing and her son’s wall paintings [photo: Esra Akcan]

Anticipating user appropriation, Álvaro Siza, in his apartment building now known as Bonjour Tristesse, provided an undesignated void space in each unit as a reflection of his participatory design approach. Resident Yüksel Karaçizmeli turned this space into a kitchen, as she found the proposed open kitchen unsuitable for Turkish cuisine [photo: Esra Akcan, plan: Álvaro Siza] 8

In his slender Berlin tower, John decreasing demands for the sake of the prestige they earned by working Hejduk designed units as open lofts with service spaces attached as for the exhibition — something they balanced in other housing develop- separate towers. With one tower ments. In other words, the more high-quality working-class housing be- each for the common elevator, the fire escape, the kitchen, and the came in one area of the city, the less so it became in another. WCs and storage, these four small towers are accessible from each Apart from typological diversity, the IBA also stands out for its am- loft by crossing separate bridges. bivalent policies on social diversity. In many competitions, architects were Resident Yeliz Erçakmak appropriated Hejduk’s units by turning the required to provide 10% of the units for the handicapped and even more for loft into a divided space, which she senior citizens. The tower in Zaha Hadid’s building in Block 2, for instance, finds more appropriate for modern couples, and by inhabiting the small is specifically designed for the handicapped. However, the IBA’s social towers in unique ways [plan: John diversity policy for the noncitizen population followed the ambiguous immi- Hejduk, photo: Esra Akcan] gration laws and regulations of the Berlin Senate, passed in the mid-to-late 1970s. Among these rules the Zuzugssperre (the “ban on entry and settlement” that took effect in 1975) and the desegregation regulations of 1978 had serious consequences for the “guest worker” population. While the former prohibited additional “foreign families” from moving into Kreuzberg, Wedding, and Tiergarten (3 of the city’s 12 boroughs), the latter suggested that only 10% of residential units be rented to noncitizens all over West Berlin. Justified as “desegregation” and “integration” of foreign workers into German society by forcing them to disperse evenly into the city, the restrictions aimed to prevent Turkish families from inhabiting dwellings close to their relatives or lingual affinity groups. In other words, the IBA’s employer, the Berlin Senate, believed that there were too many Turks living in IBA areas, and that urban renewal as a form of social control would diminish foreign families’ chances of moving into the IBA-Neubau buildings and consequently changing the percentage of foreigners in the area. These housing laws were intentionally transposed into the functional program of new buildings by checking the percentage of large flats that would accommodate the stereotypically big “guest worker” family. Even though the proportion of migrants reached 50% in many areas of East

Kreuzberg, the Senate mandated that only 5%, and a maximum 10%, of new The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Esra Akcan Open Architecture in Berlin-Kreuzberg units would be big (four or more bedrooms), and that no more than 10% of foreigners could live in any building. Some projects responded directly to these conditions, such as OMA’s building in Block 4, with its rich floor plans and programmatic and spatial diversity. A building designed to combine a bus turnaround for American forces with public housing, it was introduced as follows: “OMA imagined that a section through the building would represent a section through West Berlin: Allies at the base, followed at the middle levels by larger units to be taken up by Turkish guest workers and their families, with Germans living in small units at the top.”4 This metropolitan juxtaposition of different programs and transportation systems not only exposed the US investment in West Berlin during the Cold War but also took a critical stancestance toward current anti-immigration policies by making noncitizens visible,e, albeit through the separation of their designated floors. Rob Krier’s urban design for Block 28 complemented the only rere-e- maining building on the site by adding four perimeter blocks that createdated large common gardens inside, as well as additional pedestrian streetss and a small urban plaza at the center joint of the four interlocking perimeterer blocks. As another indication of IBA’s obsession with designed variation,39tion,ion, the row buildings along the new streets were assigned to 20 different architectural firms that brought in different unit plans for a variety of family sizes. This strategy was used in many IBA blocks due to the fear of megastructures, including Block 13 by Hans Kollhoff and Arthur Ovaska, and Block 4 with an urban design by Bohigas/Mackay/Martorell architects (where OMA’s building is also situated). Such collective urban design, if it can be achieved as a collaboration of nonhierarchically positioned architects in a given urban setting, is one form of open architecture. Rafael Moneo had defined the typological design method as “an act of thinking in groups,” a “design process of bringing the elements of a typology [to] char- acterize a single work.”5 In inviting architects who were associated with the typological design method, IBA must have hoped that this model would enable collaboration, and mobilize working hospitably in groups with collective ideals. Rob Krier took the immigration issue seriously, but in ways that perpetuated an essentialist link between architectural form and national identity. He declared that he designed the big units in his own section specifically for families from Turkey: “maisonette flats with a T-shaped layout and a glazed veranda on all sides … are reminiscent of the traditional type of Turkish dwelling. Since 80 percent of the inhabitants of Kreuzberg are Turks I hope these flats will be assigned to them.”6 Krier used this perceived essentialist link between nation and form to defend his urban design decisions as well. Advocating what he termed the “European city” for the quality of its pedestrian scale, he explained: “many Turks live in Kreuzberg and I am convinced that this ethnic group still remembers, having learnt the lesson in their homeland, how to feel at home in a square and a street.”7 In other words, he used the paradoxical name term “European city” to defend the rights of noncitizens who were deemed non-European by contemporary society. In the author’s multiscreen video installation Couplings, Hatice Uzun (right), an Alawite emigrant from Turkey, does not identify the two units she inhabited in architect Rob Krier’s block as “Turkish houses,” even though this result was what the architect anticipated. Instead she explains how she would have drawn the plan if she were an architect. Whereas Krier (left) regrets not being able to erect sculptures in the outdoor plaza of his design inspired by the “European city,” Uzun laments In contrast, most architects in IBA-Altbau did not approach the non- not being able to have a grill there. citizen issue as a matter of national or ethnic identity symbolism, but rather Esra Akcan, Couplings, Series 7, Istanbul Design Biennale, 2012 as a matter of rights to the city. Instead of conventional city planning imple- [courtesy of the artist] mented from above, Altbau director Hämer promoted a participatory model and insisted that the population directly affected by the renovation should become the decision-makers. The team declared 12 principles, among

4 Mary Pepchinski, “OMA’s Berlin housing con- (Summer 1978): 22–29. 7 Rob Krier, “Berlin: South Friedrichstadt: Scheme fronted by change,” Progressive Architecture, 6 Rob Krier, “City Divided into building plots: of an Ideal project for the Friedrichstadt zone,” 71.13 (December 1990): 17. Dwelling on the Ritterstraße Berlin,” Lotus 28, Lotus 28 (1980). 5 Rafael Moneo, “On Typology,” Oppositions 13 no. 3 (1980): 81. them demands for the democratization of the process, the considerationerationn of current residents’ needs and interests, the protection of their rightshts and financial security through legal measures, the protection of the “Kreuzbergeuzberbergg mixture” (the mix of work and residential spaces), the phasing of renovationenovationovatio steps, and the improvement of common spaces in a building, open spacespace in a block, and public spaces in the neighborhood.8 As a result of thishiss urban renewal method, no single family was displaced from Kreuzberg, andnndd con-co conn- sequently, the senate’s 10% foreigner rule and ban on entry law weree40re bro-broken by a team that was employed by the senate itself. In an area of a little over one square mile and of 56,000 dwellers, a participatory model on a unit-by-unit basis required the mobilization of many working groups. In contrast to “designed variation,” this working method resulted in what I call “ad-hoc variation” — a process that I documented as an oral history by interviewing IBA residents, social workers, architects, and translators (who had been indispensable to facilitating communication between planners and residents, most of whom did not speak German).

IBA’s Altbau team organized tenants’ meetings for every building, got the renters’ majority approval before intervention, and renovated their units by adding toilets, kitchens, double windows, central heating, and façade and interior painting. In addition to the IBA’s own team, many advisory NGOs were established during these years to represent tenants’ interests [photo: Heide Moldenhauer] The Turkish-German architect Cihan Arın, for example, was responsible for an Altbau working group in Block 81. Educated in Istanbul, Arın had just submitted his doctoral dissertation at Berlin’s Technical University on the Turkish “guest workers” living in this area, and had taken part in both the Green-Alternatives and IGI civil society groups, which demanded that noncitizens become a “discussant” in the German integration debates, rather than an “object of discussion.”9 The group had also outlined a set of urban and architectural strategies to improve the immigrant housing situ- The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Esra Akcan Open Architecture in Berlin-Kreuzberg ation, which quite compellingly overlapped with IBA-Altbau’s principles.10 During the renovation, current families were temporarily moved into different apartments, but one family found it difficult to move back and forth with

8 Wulf Eichstädt, “Die Grunsätze der behutsamen 9 Cihan Arın, “Analyse der Wohnverhältnisse Görüšleri/Stellungnahme der Ausländer zur Stadterneuerung,” Idee, Prozeß, Ergebnis: ausländischer Arbeiter in der Bundesrepub- Ausländerpolitik;” Cihan Arın, “Die nationale Die Reparatur und Rekonstruktion der Stadt, lik Deutschland — mit einer Fallstudie über Identität ist für den Alltag ohne Gebrauchswert,” 111–113. For the condensed declaration, see: türkische Arbeiterhaushalte in Berlin Kreuz- Frankfurter Rundschau 222 (September 24, Deutsche Bauzeitung 122, no. 9 (September berg,” PhD dissertation (Berlin: Technische 1983): 14. 1988): 15. An English translation appeared in Universität, 1979). Dahl & Dähne were the 11 All information is taken from Esra Akcan’s inter- Heinrich Klotz, J.P. Kleihues, eds., International architects responsible for the block. views with residents (2009–2013) and with the Building Exhibition Berlin 1987, 242–243. 10 IGI (Initiativkreis Gleichberechtigung Integra- architect Cihan Arın (July 2009). tion) “Yabancıların Yabancılar Politikasına ªliškin their newborn baby—a request accepted by the IBA team despite thee delayay caused by rephasing the construction stages. Another unit was enlargedged by combining the next-door flat so that the large family currently residingding in the building could be accommodated. Upon another resident’s request,st, a tap was installed in the living room for the sake of a more practical ablutionblutionution before Muslim prayer. 41

The Nišancı family in Block 81 (architect from IBA team: Cihan Arın) requested that the kitchen be rendered open in a second living room. After an agreement between the two tenant families, the Nišancı family was also given an additional room from the adjacent building, which is a few steps higher due to the sloping street [photo: Esra Akcan] Mindful that over-renovation would displace the immigrants due to a sudden rent increase, modernization was handled by fixing only what the current families could afford. In determining the rent increase after renovation, Arın fought to protect the tenants’ interest by, for instance, cutting the price of a double window in half and making an argument to the contractors that a single window had already existed in the previous condition.11 IBA- Neubau architect Aldo Rossi would probably identify the IBA-Altbau design process as “naïve functionalism,” but it was this process that avoided gen- trification, unlike most urban renewal projects around the world. As some of the images here show, post-design ad hoc variations also took place in IBA-Neubau buildings, after residents moved in and started appropriating their spaces. Even though architecture is inherently open by virtue of its almost always being appropriated by its residents, “open architecture” is the condition in which an architect embraces or anticipates this quality of openness during the design stage. Open architecture is predicated on the welcoming of a distinctly other mind or a group of minds into the design process. It is the translation of the ethics of hospitality into architecture, and it can take in different forms. Collective urban design, if it can become a collaboration of nonhierarchically positioned architects in a given urban setting, may be one form of open architecture. Other forms might be participatory design (even though its process remains unresolved) Esra Akcan is an and anticipation of change, of user appropriation, and of the unfinished or Associate Professor in the Department of ongoing nature of work. Open architecture involves construing the inhabit- Architecture at Cornell ant as an actor rather than as a spectator who is supposed to behave in the University. She is the author of Architecture way predefined by the author-architect. Still another difficult but worthy in Translation (Duke form of open architecture for the global present involves welcoming non- University Press, 2012), Turkey: Modern citizen participation in design, and architecture’s openness to the stateless, Architectures in History to the immigrant, to the diaspora, to the geographical “other.” Other forms (Reaktion, 2012, with Sibel BozdoŒan), and of open architecture might be…. (Land)Fill Istanbul: Twelve Scenarios for a Global City (124/3, 2004). On Vernacular Computing jacob gaboury

A manifesto confronts On September 9, 2014, in Cupertino, California, Apple unveiunveiled the the ways we actually use newest product in its hardware lineup: the Apple Watch. The event technology. marked the company’s entrance into the growing field of smart watches, and was met with anticipation, speculation, and enthusiasm by industry and consumers alike. The watch, Apple suggested, was designed to “embrace individuality and inspire desire,” an object “as simple and pure as [it is] functional.” Building on a platform and style that have been instilled in users for almost a decade through iPhone devices and applications, the Apple Watch promises the future in a familiar form, waiting to be seamlessly integrated into the lives and onto the bodies of its users. In recent years the design of computer hardware and software has increasingly followed the maxim set forth by Steve Krug in 2000, an insistence that above all, Don’t Make Me Think.1 At the time, Krug was writing about web usability as that technology was undergoing a dramatic transformation, from the early vernacular web2 of the home page, the web ring, and the chat room to our contemporary social web, in which news feeds are curated, information aggregated, and “likes” tabulated. Krug’s maxim was a push for simplicity and intuition over complexity or multiplicity, and its basic principles have become acutely visible in the clean lines, bright colors, and minimalist aesthetic of contemporary digital devices. Although Apple may exem- plify this trend, the entire field of user interface design has become devoted to this pursuit, streamlining the paths through which users navigate and use their technologies, with each click and gesture anticipated and designed for. Of course, design is not without politics. Advocates, authors, and technologists from Cory Doctorow to Richard Stallman have pushed back against this trend, insisting on the right to open and tin- ker with devices through competing mantras like “Screws Not Glue.”3 1 In lieu of encapsulation and walled gardens they propose hacking Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think (San Francisco: New and making as a kind of critical practice. We must take charge of our Riders Publishing, 2000). tools, they insist, building software, hardware, and objects that suit 2 The culture of this early our individual needs and desires. Theirs is a push toward mastery and web is explored in detail in control concerned with the unique needs of a deeply liberal subject. Olia Lialina’s “A Vernacular Web,” which served in part Together these competing philosophies form a confused dia- as inspiration for this piece. See http://art.teleportacia. lectic in which freedom either necessitates total mastery of our de- org/observation/vernacular vices or complete acquiescence to the logic of their design.4 Hacker The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Jacob Gaboury On Vernacular Computing 3 See for example Cory or user? Open or closed? Ultimately these are questions of intent Doctorow’s “Why I won’t and idealization. Each makes a claim about what technology is buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either),” for, and in doing so suggests who may use that technology and Boing Boing, April 2, how. They are the questions that shape the way we design our future. 2010, http://boingboing. net/2010/04/02/why-i- And yet these binary distinctions erase the vast majority of wont-buy-an-ipad-and- ways people use and understand their computers, phones, and digital think-yo.html 4 devices. Recall the last time you watched a parent stubbornly double This conflation is explored click a hypertext link. Or the last email you received with a massive in detail in Wendy Chun’s Control and Freedom: Pow- image attachment sent sideways at full resolution. Text messages er and Paranoia in the Age that end “Love, Grandma.” Chain emails that are 90% header text, of Fiber Optics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). their path through the Net laid bare in an almost endless string of If we continue to Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd:. Each of these exemplifies the eeveryday practice I term “vernacular computing,”puting,” a form of life that is oobstinate insist that our tools and pervasive.5 It is a use that refusesefuses to change or to undersunderstand, which lingers long after it should,uld, which remains despite all ininsistence are neutral channels to the contrary. through which And it is important. Whilehile design may train us in particuparticular forms of ideal use, or allow us to optimizeptimize our lives by integrating nenewer and we express our more efficient tools, most features of any new technology arare more individual desires, often than not misunderstood, misused, or ignored. It is here that vernacular computing persists, incapable of update. It is an embodied we misunderstand practice, emerging from the memory of platforms past — an insist- the way tools ence on an earlier logic remembered. Tolerated but dysfunctional, it is confused and difficult to capture. It cannot be made productive as inform and limit designed use or elite practice. their own use. For some this behavior is simply rude or incorrect. It is something that should be rooted out over time as operating systems update and software is no longer supported. Its solution is proper design and education. It is not something to encourage or examine. Yet in vernacular computing there lies a powerful critique of the way we imagine technology to function. Until now the debate around design and use assumed that users were either mindless vessels for input and output or transgressive hacker-makers; but this binary is false. Both are idealized and deeply political positions that are largely uncritical of technology as a social good or individual need. Vernacu- lar computing has no explicit politics. It has no ideology. It simply stumbles forward, texting, clicking, dragging, typing; and yet it forms the basis for an entire economy of use. It is the labor that makes possible targeted advertising and direct marketing. It is the path along which spam, viruses, and bugs travel and multiply. In vernacular computing we find the mundane everyday of technology’s use and design — that which we simultaneously exploit and disavow. While we may hope for a perfect system that conforms to the needs of every user, or for users who take control of their own devices and RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual), the majority of users have no need for such things and will, without intention or desire, break and abuse every device or system. If we continue to insist that our tools are neutral channels through which we express our individual desires, we misunderstand 5 the way tools inform and limit their own use. In ignoring the vernacular I see a great deal of com- computing of everyday users, or in dismissing vernacular computing monality between this work and Brian Droitcour’s “Ver- as poor or misinformed, we persist in the assumption that the solution nacular Criticism,” though to technology’s problems is simply more and better technology. We this piece was conceived prior to the publication of assume that failure is a human flaw and that it can be designed and Droitcour’s article. See http://thenewinquiry.com/ hacked away. Not so, suggests your mother as she comments on a essays/vernacular-criticism Facebook post you had written to wish a friend happy birthday: “Love, Mom.”

Jacob Gaboury is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Visual Culture at Stony Brook University and a staff writer for Rhizome.org. karen kubey Total Reset 44

David Adjaye Associates, Sugar Hill Development, New York, completed 2014 [photo: Ed Reeve, courtesy of David Adjaye Associates]

The Institute for Public One month after taking office, New York ers, researchers, advocates, finance experts, Architecture convenes a mayor Bill de Blasio declared a “total reset” and historians to discuss the most pressing roundtable and residency to take on affordable for housing. Appointing four progressive issues of the “total reset.” housing in New York. leaders to the city’s housing agencies, de The roundtable laid the groundwork for a Blasio extended his campaign pledge to residency and exhibition on the same topic. fight income inequality in New York. His The IPA selected a class of inaugural IPA “reset” promised to sharply increase the Fellows who responded to the roundtable production of below-market housing, reno- outcomes with four research and design vate aging public housing buildings, and proposals for public and below-market repair the relationship between residents of housing in New York. public housing and the city government. The In contrast with a traditional residency, mayor’s focus on these issues aligns with a retreat away from the city, the Total Reset New Yorkers’ interests: city residents have residency and installation were set in a rated the decline of affordable housing their new, below-market housing development greatest concern. in Sugar Hill, Harlem, developed by Broad- As a response to the mayor’s initiatives way Housing Communities and designed and the underlying crisis, the Institute for by architect David Adjaye. Fellows were Public Architecture (IPA) launched a pro- nominated by top New York architects and gram series, Total Reset. Supporting efforts housing experts, and were selected by a jury to improve public and below-market hous- comprising Jonathan Kirschenfeld, Susanne ing, the series brings together experts and Schindler, Juliette Spertus, and myself. The explores ambitious, achievable ideas. As project aims to catalyze discussions and to

with all IPA programs, the essential question provide a platform to emerging public inter- The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Karen Kubey Total Reset of Total Reset is: how can architecture bet- est designers. ter serve the public? Inaugural IPA Fellows are Kaja Kühl, in Total Reset began with a multidisciplinary association with Columbia University Gradu- roundtable, convened by the IPA and hosted ate School for Architecture, Preservation by Columbia University. The conversation, and Planning’s 5 Borough Studio; Nadine facilitated by former city commissioner Maleh; Quilian Riano; and the team of Sagi David Burney, foregrounded the role of Golan, Miriam Peterson, and Nathan Rich. architecture in housing, with the ultimate Together, their proposals connect design, goal of improving the lives of New Yorkers. policy, and community engagement. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) exhibition took place in a yet-to-be occupied general manager Cecil House and Reginald studio apartment. Bowman, then president of the NYCHA resi- Kaja Kühl and the 5 Borough Studio dent association, joined architects, develop- produced New York is My Home, an exhibition of “postcards from home,” sent by New below-market apartments,ts, includinguding 2255 set Yorkers, that documents what we value aside for households currentlyrently in ththe NYC about our houses, our blocks, our neighbor- homeless shelter system,, wwithithh an earlearlyy chcchild-ild- hoods, and the city we live in. Five hundred hood center and a new culturalulturalural institutioninstitutioinstitution,, postcards filled the exhibition space over the the Sugar Hill Children’s Museumuseum of Art and course of the summer. Nadine Maleh, who’s Storytelling. worked in supportive housing for more As a community of architects,chitects,chitects, developdevelodevelop-p- than a decade with Community Solutions ers, activists, and researchers,cchers,hers, the IPA iiss and Common Ground, created Journal of a committed to quality architecturehi45tecture iinn the Houser: Holistic Neighborhoods. A “houser” public interest. The shift itttitin attention tto explores the everyday stories behind the below-market housing offers the opportunity below-market housing she creates. Maleh to join together in making our city a vibrant brings together design, operations, finance, and livable place for all New Yorkers. The and neighborhood engagement to develop IPA promotes socially engaged architec- housing centered on human well-being. ture through urban research projects and a Quilian Riano’s ShareWhat?! is a col- residency program for design practitioners. laborative research and design project on By supporting architects and allied profes- the spaces and services we share, or could sionals working in the public interest, the IPA share, with others. Riano asks, what hap- strives to improve our public realm. pens when individuals leave their apartments The closing of the Total Reset exhibition and come together? His research examines marked the beginning of a long-term dis- the historical context of sharing in New York, cussion. Fellows’ work has been featured in current practices, and cooperative and ten- The New York Times and received a direct ant union structures. Named for the size of response from City Hall. Fellows presented a standard parking space, 9 × 18, by Sagi at the Municipal Art Society and the Center Golan, Miriam Peterson, and Nathan Rich, for Architecture, and I shared the work with explores how updated parking and housing AIA National and Enterprise Community Karen Kubey is the development regulations could create new Partners. The IPA is formalizing partnerships Executive Director of the Institute for potentials for affordable housing. with institutions and the city to propel the Public Architecture. The Total Reset exhibition was part of No work forward. Kubey co-founded Longer Empty’s If You Build It, a site-specific both the New York chapter of Architecture series of public installations and events in June 26–August 10, 2014 for Humanity and the Sugar Hill Project, produced in collabo- The Sugar Hill Project New Housing New ration with Broadway Housing Communities, 155th Street, Third Floor York, the city’s first design competition community partners, and artists. The Sugar totalreset.tumblr.com for sustainable and Hill Project combines 124 permanently affordable housing.

Total Reset workshop two [photo: Sben Korsh] The shift in attention to below-market housing offers the opportunity to join together in making our city a vibrant and livable place for all New Yorkers.

IPA Fellow Quilian Riano with his installation ShareWhat?!, a collaborative research and design project on the spaces and services we share, or could share, with others [photos: Christian Hansen, Sben Korsh]

Total Reset exhibition. Instal- lation by IPA Fellow Kaja Kühl with Columbia University’s 5 Borough Studio: New York is My Home [photo: Christian Hansen] The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Karen Kubey Total Reset 47

IPA Fellow Nadine Maleh with her installation Journal of a Houser: Holistic Neighborhoods, in which a “houser” explores the everyday stories behind the below-market housing she creates [photo: Sben Korsh] Named for the size of a standard parking space, 9 × 18, by Sagi Golan, Miriam Peterson, and Nathan Rich, explores how updated parking and housing development regulations could create new potentials for affordable housing. This before-and-after shows new housing spring up in existing parking lots

Parking space dimensions are easily adaptable to standard New York City affordable housing unit sizes Strange Shapes mtwtfmtw

Gerrymandering, or the redrawing of political districts expressly for the advantage of a certain party, is at least as old as Massachusetts’ Governor Elbridge Gerry, who redesigned that state’s electoral map in 1812 to pack Federalists into fewer districts and give his Republican party a majority in the rest. (One of these bizarrely formed areas resembled a salamander, giving the practice its name.) Redistricting along racial and political lines remains rampant today, awarding congressional seats to parties in vast disproportion to the popular vote. In his new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (2014), The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue MTWTF Strange Shapes former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens calls for a constitutional amendment to ban “strange shapes,” or districts “that prompt observers to question the motives of their architects.” Graphic design studio MTWTF assembles a rogues’ gallery of some of the worst offenders of recent years. 5 Research assistance by Joey Molina 2 1 Texas District 27 (2012) 2 North Carolina District 12 (1997) 3 Georgia District 4 (2003–2007) 4 Los Angeles District 4 (1994) 5 Georgia District 11 (1992) 6 Maryland District 3 (2011) 7 Illinois District 4 (2011)

6 7 The Knoll Transcriptss margot weller 50 The story of midcentury modernism in America is inconceivable without Knoll, the furnishings and textiles company founded by Hans Knoll in 1938, and joined by Florence Knoll (née Schust) in 1941. With Knoll’s generous per-mission, photographs from its archives and unpublished interviews with the designers in the company’s orbit set these figures in dialogue—capturing and complicating the making of a modern legend. The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Margot Weller The Knoll Transcripts

Florence Knoll, ca. 1948 [all images courtesy of Knoll, Inc.]

Hans Knoll Between 1977 and 1979, the architect est chairs. It had a marvelous sprspringing system GoGordon Bunschaft American,AmeAmerr 1909–1990. and later TED founder Richard Saul which has never quite been equaled.qualed. We An aararchitectr at the firm Wurman, the late graphic designer were never able to produce it iinn the begbegin-in- Skidmore,SSkidmkidm Owings & Merrill, Massimo Vignelli, and longtime Knoll ning because the steel that wasas needed wwas 1937–1979,11937937 Bunschaft was thethe pprinciple designer of executive Christine Rae conducted not available. It was wartime. thethe LLever House (1952) and interviews with some 60 figures from I was working in an architecturalectural office wouldwould become a champion Knoll’s first 40 years. They spoke both here in New York … having justst come fromfromm ofof IntInInternationalt Style archi- tecturettectuectu in the United States. to major protagonists — such as the the Illinois Institute of Technologyogy where I HeHe rerreceivede the Pritzker company’s founders and chief design- had gotten my architectural51 educationducationducation withwith PrizePrize in 1988. ers — as well as to executives, clients, Mies van der Rohe. I was workingki in i archi- hi Florence Knoll and factory operators. The transcripts, tectural offices here in the city and started American, born 1917. Flor- originally destined for an A-to-Z com- moonlighting, in a sense, doing these extra ence Knoll Bassett (née pendium, were ultimately excerpted and jobs on my own time, for Hans as an interior Schust) helped establish Knoll as a design pow- appear sparingly in the 1981 book Knoll space planner and designer. erhouse and gave it its Design, edited by Eric Larrabee and Before that, I had been at Cranbrook. comprehensive approach Massimo Vignelli. There were many people there, it was a fan- to interiors. Leading the company alongside Hans What follows are selections from an tastic group. Charlie Eames was there, Eero from 1943 until his untimely oral history, told by some of the 20th [Saarinen] and people like Ed Bacon, who death in 1955, and then century’s great designers, that maps was a fantastic city planner of Philadelphia; alone until her retirement in 1965, Florence Knoll a network of their close-knit personal Harry Weese, an excellent architect from championed young design- and professional relationships. Their Chicago; Ben Baldwin, an excellent interior ers, created the company’s accounts are illuminating, critical, and planner. It was a diverse and very interesting famous Planning Unit as an interiors consultation ser- sometimes conflicting; taken together, group. Harry Bertoia was there. He came as vice, and designed several as the editors note, they are “often a silversmith. He gradually got involved, as classics as well. Rashomonesque,” with “moments of everyone did at Cranbrook, in all forms of Harry Bertoia classic tragedy, failure, and success.” design. American, born Italy, To immerse oneself in Knoll’s origin 1915–1978. An artist, stories is, they write, “to experience HARRY BERTOIA sculptor, and metalworker, Bertoia studied at Cran- the zeitgeist of the last forty years of My first encounter with Shu was at Cran- brook before setting up design accomplishment and growth in brook. It occurred at Eliel Saarinen’s home. his own metal workshop America.” I was a student, and since the student body there in 1939. After a brief period working with was perhaps thirty-five at that time, naturally classmate Charles Eames, you met everyone. My meeting with Shu was Bertoia went on commis- GORDON BUNSCHAFT sion for Hans and Florence kind of marvelous. When I entered the home, Knoll, founding a studio in I first met Hans Knoll when he came into our she was reclining on a big beautiful Saarinen Pennsylvania in 1950, and office at 5 East 57th, I think in the winter of sofa. It was a brief encounter. She was a stu- ultimately creating his iconic 1937. He was just in from Germany and was dent in, I think, both architecture and design. collection of wire furniture. selling a special flat spring for upholstered That was my first contact with what later Peter Blake seats. I was new and our office had just became Knoll. American, born Germany, 1920–2006. Critic, archi- started and we were interested in furniture tect, and editor-in-chief of for buildings at the World’s Fair in New York PETER BLAKE Architectural Forum, 1965– in 1938–39. I told him we weren’t interested About the beginning of 1943, I came to New 1972. As a curator in the newly united Department in springs, we were interested in seats. He York and went to work as a junior writer for of Architecture and Design was a young fellow, very blonde, very enthu- Architectural Forum. One day, Howard My- at the Museum of Modern siastic, just beginning. ers, who was the editor and publisher, told Art, 1948–1950, Blake organized with Philip Johnson Later, 1939 or ’40, I was out in Chicago me that he was friendly with a man named the 1949 presentation of staying at the Stevens Hotel and I used Hans Knoll who was making some new furni- a suburban demonstration to see this lady in the dining room, who … ture out of parachute webbing and whatever home designed by Marcel Breuer, dubbed The House turned out to be Shu [Florence] Knoll. I never wood he could lay his hands on. Howard in the Museum Garden. spoke to her there, but I met her later in New suggested I go over and meet him. I went to York, about 1941, when she was working the showroom at 58th and Madison, a funny George Nelson American, 1908–1986. for Hans. He had developed a showroom little building, and met Hans. He showed me An industrial designer, on Madison and she was working there as a the chairs he was making at that time, which, architect, and prolific writer, designer. to the best of my knowledge, were designed Nelson left a legacy visible at all scales — from the by Jens Risom. Hans and I hit it off right Marshmallow Sofa to the FLORENCE KNOLL away. pedestrian mall. Nelson My relationship with the company started served as the associate editor and later co-managing during the war with some special interiors GEORGE NELSON editor of Architectural Fo- for Hans Knoll, who was just starting out in I first saw him about 1940 or so. I was rum magazine, 1935–1944. the business here in New York. He had one working at the top of the old Time and He was the first director of design at Herman Miller, good chair that he brought over from Ger- Life building and we were on a balcony. I 1947–1972. many … the design is no longer in existence. remember Hans huffing his way up with a I don’t think there are any photographs of it. chair of Risom’s on his back. I remember a It’s a shame, because it is still one of the fin- moment when he showed me a check from Florence Knoll and Eero Saarinen with TThe he Planning Unit existed becabecauseu of my the pedestal base, backgroundackackgroundground in architecture. It was tthe very ca. 1955 firstrst furniture companycompany [that][that] ever hhad a plan- ninginngg department. This came from mmy special interests.nterests. ExExpansionpansion came fromfrom HaHHansa … who waswas an empire builderbubuilder..

PETERETER BLAKEBLAKKEE 52MyMy ffirstirst impression ooff Hans was ththat he was very generous, very sweet,ti a very intense man. He never stopped working. He worked night and day. In fact, he had just started living with Shu and they were working togeth- Herbert Matter some [government department] for, I think, er. Very soon the three of us became close American, born Switzerland, 1907–1984. Employed $26,000, which in those days looked like friends. I would leave the office and the three by Condé Nast, Harper’s the national debt. He didn’t want to cash it of us would go out to dinner, then go to [the Bazaar, New Haven Rail- and Xerox was not around then. jazz nightclub] Café Society Uptown. We road, and the Guggenheim, among others, Herbert Mat- When I signed up with Herman Miller were together two or three times a week. ter was at the center of a about 1945 or 1946, I remember Hans Hans and Shu had this enormous sheep group of European émigrés coming by; and he was angry at me be- dog. He appears in the early Herbert Mat- who defined the look of graphic design in America, cause I had signed up with Herman Miller. ter ads. He was unbelievable. He slept on both through his design This struck me as odd because he had the fire escape outside their apartment, on work and his teaching at never invited me to do anything. Sutton Place. One of the last things that hap- Yale University. Matter shaped Knoll’s graphic pened to me at the end of the war in Europe identity over a span of 20 FLORENCE KNOLL was meeting this Romanian officer wearing years beginning in 1946. Many of the designs that he had at that time an enormous sheepskin coat. I bought it from were ones that I did not approve of. I felt him, brought it back to America and gave it they were too romantic and didn’t quite fit to Hans as a gift. He wore that coat while in with my ideas. They were Scandinavian. walking that huge dog and they looked like I suggested to him that he try to find other two dogs walking down the street. designers to work with him. That’s how the thing started. HERBERT MATTER I was in California in 1945. One day Hans wrote a letter and said he would like to see me and he came to California. Actually, the first few ads were done by Alvin Lustig. I really don’t know how he heard about me. He knew about Eames, perhaps he heard about that. So Hans came to Santa Monica to see me [and] Shu came also. Somehow I decided I would come back to New York and I would come to see him and start to work. As a company, I had never heard of it before. When we came back to New York in 1946, I started to work right away. First was the trademark, then some booklets and ads, especially the catalogues.

FLORENCE KNOLL We had various designers in New York working on our ads — Alvin Lustig, who has The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Margot Weller The Knoll Transcripts since died, and Paul Horan, and I never liked what they did. I was completely dissatis- fied. Their work just seemed frivolous or not strong enough. I had seen some of Herbert Matter’s work and decided it was what I wanted. I flew out to California. He was working with Charlie Eames on furniture and graphics. I went out to see him about doing our ads. He said yes, he was very interested. I think it was just the thing he needed, he Alvin Lustig ad for Jens Risom wanted to come back east. That’s how it all lounge chair in Arts started, and we worked together beauti- & Architecture Magazine, 1945 fully. We were doing many, many years ago 53

Herbert Matter ad for Eero Saarinen’s Grasshopper Chair, featuring the Knoll dog Cartree 54 The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Margot Weller The Knoll Transcripts

Herbert Matter advertisement, ca. 1948, featuring his logotype for the company, created the year prior Herbert Matter’s “chimney sweep” wholewhole period in my lifelife was excitinexciting bbecause ad for Eero I had gonegone in the wrongwrong direction. I hhad gone Saarinen’s Womb Chair, ca. 1955. twotwo years to Engineering SSchoolchool anandd was The ad ran on veryvery unhappy with that. When I ggotot tto the the inside front cover of The New InstituteInstitute ooff Design, I really liked it. WWee were Yorker’s anniver- sary edition from veryvery conscious in that school of beinbeing an 1958 to 1971 extensionextension of the BauhausBauhaus..

HERBERTHERBERT MATTERMATTER IIiBliildttidIiBliildtti was in Basel in a railroad station and sud- denly a chimney sweep on his bicycle passed by and made a very strong impression. When I was back here and thinking about an ad, it came to my mind. At that time, Martha Kai worked in the Promotion Department so I worked with her. Through her connections, she knew a Shakespearean actor … so we chose him to be the chimney sweep and he was wonderful. We used him afterwards as a juggler too, the one who juggles three chairs. Hans was really excited when I showed him, and Shu was absolutely against it. She did not think it was dignified. This was not exactly her idea of an ad. The ad was received very well. I think it was probably the most striking ad we did.

FLORENCE KNOLL Richard Schultz the thing that is now such great fashion, We saw Eero constantly, of course. He was American, born 1926. Rich- like my brother and we talked a lot in those ard Schultz participated in namely graphics in interiors. The showrooms and earned mention in one were done in combination. We designed days. One thing led to another [in] the devel- of the Museum of Modern it together in the sense that we had a wall opment of the furniture. His first one was in Art’s many Good Design laminated wood because we weren’t able competitions in the 1950s. made of string. He designed the string thing A crucial member of the and I designed the structure for it. In the to get other materials. That was a perfectly Bertoia team at Knoll, he showroom on Madison Avenue, we created nice chair, but it wasn’t one of the great suc- was tapped to develop several outdoor designs to a space in the entrance where the big case cesses. I don’t know what it was called. It complement the wire-form became a whole wall of design. I consulted was the only laminated wood chair he did. chairs. His 1966 “Leisure him about colors for the showrooms and we Then the advent of fiberglass came Collection” of outdoor furniture — initiated at the worked together. along. Eero was working on that approach; request of Florence Knoll but — this all sounds simple now — in those for her Florida home — is a RICHARD SCHULTZ days, it was very, very difficult. We finally modern classic. We used to go over to the Knoll showroom found a ship builder in New Jersey and he as students and turn the chairs over and look was working in fiberglass. We got excited at them. It was an exciting period — 1949 about it and Eero developed the Womb or 1950 — just after the war when every- Chair. This was at my specific request be- thing was starting to move. Eero’s Womb cause I was sick and tired of these chairs that Chair — the whole thing was exciting. That held you in one position. We were just bowled

The Mies van der Rohe Collection 56

Marcel Breuer’s daughter Cesca seated in the eponymous chair [photo: John Naar]

Marcel Breuer over by it. We were so excited. Eero did this GORDON BUNSCHAFT American, born Hungary, 1902–1981. Bauhaus chair and he did this prototype. He used his I don’t know exactly what Mies thought student and teacher, own office as the research lab in Bloomfield about the importance of furniture, but he had architect, and furniture Hills. We’d go out every weekend or as often designed these marvelous pieces and, as a designer Marcel Breuer immigrated to the United as we could to watch him. We’d try the seat- result of the war and other things, nothing States in 1937. Several of ing positions and experiment. I said I wanted had been done with them. The first I heard his furniture designs were a chair that was like a basket full of pillows. of it, Hans and Shu invited my wife and I to a acquired by the company in 1968 with its acquisition of Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way, but I Sunday lunch at the Plaza with Mies. It was a Italian manufacturer Gavina wanted something I could curl up in. marvelous time. He was a very quiet man and SpA. Breuer probably first Eero Saarinen and I went out to New Jer- we didn’t really talk about furniture. He likes encountered Florence Knoll when she worked under sey to beg this ship builder to make us some to talk about marble and was a great lover Walter Gropius. models. He was very skeptical. Mr. Winter of marble and onyx. Knoll had the original was his name. We just begged him. I guess drawings, and Hans gave me a set because Robert Venturi American, born 1925. we were so young and so enthusiastic that I wanted to make a chair myself. The chair Venturi has collaborated he finally gave in and worked with us. We was too big for chroming so I have the only with his partner Denise had lots of problems and failures until they chair that got as far as nickel plating, but Scott Brown for more than 50 years. Known for their finally got a chair that would work. never chromed. The steel chairs Mies origi- creative interpretations nally made are mortised at the corners with of history and classicism, GEORGE NELSON flush screws, so I had three made that way. Venturi and Brown are champions of pop and post- We had been working on chairs and chair The leather straps I had made by a harness modernism, authoring the bases and at some point we got to the man. This was prior to being put on the manifestos Complexity and pedestal base. We had a base, full size, in market. Knoll in turn developed it and made Contradiction in Architec- ture, published by MoMA clay or plaster and were fooling with it. To it in stainless, which I don’t think was done in 1966, and Learning from our dismay, Eero’s first pedestal chair ap- originally. They still make it properly and with Las Vegas (1972). peared either in a showroom or a magazine. I great care.

took a picture of the shop with the pedestal The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Margot Weller The Knoll Transcripts base and sent it to Eero saying, “You won.” MARCEL BREUER A telegram came back saying, “Well, I’ll be The naming of furniture is a general principle darned.” We withdrew it right away because in industry. The automobiles all have names. it would have looked like a knock-off. Eero’s Once, when I talked with [Dino] Gavina, he pedestal was a hell of a lot more elegant than said, “We should have a name for this.” This our pedestal. was in the sixties. I said, “[All right], what kind The real difference between Knoll and of name do you suggest?” He said you told Miller, I felt, was the Knoll stuff was really a me once that Wassily Kandinsky was the super elegant level of taste. This was Shu very first person who saw the first experi- mostly, maybe Hans. The wire chairs of mental chair.” I said, “that’s true and he is a Charlie’s look good and pretty, but that arm good friend of mine.” He said, “why don’t we chair of Harry’s with those pointed ends was call it the Wassily?” Then he said, “you have really exquisitely beautiful. a daughter don’t you. What is her name?” I said, “she has an Italian name, Francesca. ROBERTOBERT VENTURI We called her Cesca.” He said, “let’s call the It seems to me I’I’veve aalwayslways kknownnown aaboutb other chairs Cesca.” “Then these benches,” Knollnnolloll and Knoll has alwaalwaysys been theththere, which he said. “Do you have a nickname?” I said, is a little surprisinsurprisingg for someone forf my “Marcel I use officially, my middle name is generation.eneration. TheyThey were beginning wwhenh I was Lajkó.” We called the benches Lajkó. He beginningegginninginning to getget interested in aarchitarchitecture. I misunderstood the name and in the cata- probablyrobably ffirstirst heard about them whwhene I was logues he used something like Lefco. That’s workingworking at Saarinen’s in the latela forforties.t how the chairs got their names. 57 Our reaction is one ooff muchmu less obvious unityit … thithis connects t with ith complexity l it and FLORENCE KNOLL contradiction. It also connects with a variety If you look at Herman Miller’s and Knoll’s of symbolisms we now allow. We now say work, not now but earlier, they took one taste is relative. We read Herb Gann and approach and we took another. Ours was agree with him that there are a number of based on planning, [which] was due to me. taste cultures. There is not just one taste cul- I saw the development of furniture in sense ture, which is the idea, which is usually upper of need. Charlie Eames and George Nelson middle class taste. There is upper middle, saw it more in the sense of an individual lower middle, upper lower, etc. We also say piece. When I say need, I mean for a total that we react against the forced simplicity of job. I would say to Eero, for example, “There modern architecture. All I’m leading up to is … isn’t a decent office chair, swivel chair, we when we do a building we do not expect the need one. That’s what we must do.” I felt the obvious conformity between the architecture need for a nice, big, curling-up chair because and the interior design based on these two there wasn’t one on the market. Charlie things: [one, that] architecture should be designed a chair from the same interest, of complex and contradictory, and two, [that] it course, but they designed more as individual also can involve several taste cultures. You pieces rather than as a cohesive thing for a can even mix taste cultures. It can happen in whole job. the landscape and it should and can happen in your own living room with furniture. In gen- GEORGE NELSON eral, our approach has been that we assume Recently, I heard some gossip that Herman our interiors were not so controlled. We have Miller had been asked to interest itself in ac- done interiors where we mix an antique with quiring Knoll. I think that would be the worst very good 18th-century reproductions with thing that could possibly happen, because Knoll International and classic modern. the co-existence of Miller and Knoll is what We are doing a line of upholstered and really puts both of them on their toes. We non-upholstered furniture — chairs, desks, were always designing to each other. We and things. Essentially, it will be what I was wanted the audience to like what we were saying before, [that] we are modern archi- saying, but we were really playing to our peer tects but we are also eclectics and that is our group. It was so strong it was almost as if it approach to it. didn’t matter if one got a market or not.

Robert Venturi with the Venturi Collection, 1984

Margot Weller is an Associate Strategist at the design firm 2×4. She has worked as a researcher at Knoll and as a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA. Allied Works Architecture is based in Portland, OR, and New York City, and led by Concept Brad Cloepfil. The practice has designed the offices of Wieden + Kennedy Agency in Portland, the Contempo- Models rary Art Museum St. Louis, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Mu- allied seum of Arts and Design in New York, and the Clyfford works Still Museum in Denver. Its architecture current projects include the National Music Center of Canada in Calgary, the Ohio Veterans Memorial Museum in Columbus, and the United States Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique. These concept models mark moments in the studio’s formal investigations; they are both summary and catalytic. Rather than being architectural representations in a traditional sense, they convey ideas and intentions to clients viscerally while also offering a persistent image as a guide through the design process. Intimately exploring both material and perceptual qualities, these models propel the studio toward its built works. Pierced Earth (Clyfford Still Museum concept model #1), 2007, charcoal, resin, porcelain, Plexiglas

Stacked, Striated (Sokol Blosser Winery Tasting Room concept model), 2013, wood shingles The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Allied Works Architecture Concept Models

A Gathering of Resonant Vessels (National Music Centre of Canada concept model #1), 2009, modeling concrete, salvaged brass instruments, oak base Cleft Solid (Musée Cantonal des beaux- arts de Lausanne concept model), 2011, mahogany, copper leaf Between Stone and Sky (Arvo Pärt Centre concept model), 2014, pine, laminated matte board

Embedded Space (Clyfford Still Museum concept model #2), 2010, reclaimed Douglas- fir beam

Braided Space (Musée National des beaux- arts du Québec concept model), 2010, bronze, basswood, Woven Field (Dutchess County Residence– Guest House concept model), 2010, laminated wood, laminated maple blackened steel, brass 60

RE- VIEWS Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space and information, itself produces “undeclared forms of polity,” faster, more amorphous, and Keller Easterling, Verso, 2014 less definable than can be legislated. Similar models, or what Daniel Heller-Roazen calls carson chan the “paradigm of piracy,” have existed in the past, but extrastatecraft is presented also as a suite of activist responses to a present-day condition that often leaves us feeling help- In John Cheever’s famous 1960 story, The frictionless ethics of special economic zones less in the face of insurmountable, globally Death of Justina, the narrator finds himself around the world, the unanticipated results61 networked systems. Traditional binary resis- in a predicament. His wife’s cousin died on of high-speed Internet development in tance (David vs. Goliath) is powerless and their sofa, and when he tries to arrange for Africa, and the insidious ways of the Interna- irrelevant in infrastructure space. Easterling’s a funeral, he learns that his part of town is tional Organization for Standardization (ISO). conceit is that by knowing the enemy, and not zoned for dying, let alone funerals. “In Many of the key ideas and characteriza- by learning its ways, we could relieve our a world that changes more swiftly than we tions of the present moment in Extrastate- oppression, if not defeat it. As with the dif- can perceive there is always the danger that craft began in Easterling’s earlier book: our ference between a single company and the our powers of selection will be mistaken world is increasingly populated by spatial matrix of global forces that constitute “Wall and that the vision we serve will come to products, or the built manifestation of com- Street,” the book notes that the enemy is not nothing.” In this world, “the importance of mercial formulas; like sweat on a guilty brow, a thing, but rather a set of actions between zoning can’t be overestimated.” It is hard to these spatial products are knowable only by things. For the majority of Easterling’s read- overestimate the hold our self-built world their dispositions, undetectable through tra- ers — architects — this premise will come of protocols has over us, and harder still to ditional methods of architecture analysis; and as a disappointment. Alas, buildings cannot pinpoint whom to address concerns to when somewhere in and between the narratives change the world, but the systems in which something goes wrong. Local trade begat surrounding the development of the military, we build them can be reprogrammed to networked corporations, discrete conver- free trade, and universalizing tools like radio, generate a new world of buildings. In fact, sations became mass broadcasting, and lies the untold story of infrastructure space. the book can be read as a retort to the way community habits are quantized and redis- Reviewers of Enduring Innocence from architecture is currently being taught and tributed into international standards. Resis- fields other than architecture lauded the practiced. Does architecture see itself pre- tance is redirected from one automated call book for “setting aside the idea of a stable, pared to provide a spatial response to the center to another, and unlike the municipal design-driven global architecture,” and abuses of the contemporary world, or does it bureaucracy in Cheever’s story, the system making architecture “more familiar, more see itself as the maker of built confections? that governs today is perhaps not the nation political, and ultimately more relevant” to In the book, a recurring metaphor for state but a multitude of headless, dispersed everyone else.1 Stylistically, perhaps owing the workings of the contemporary world infrastructures that don’t play requests. to writer Leo Hollis’ skilled editing, Ex- is software. Resistance to injustice in the Extrastatecraft (Verso, 2014), by archi- trastatecraft eschews the elliptic phrasing form of street protest, then, is tantamount to tecture theorist Keller Easterling, is a manual and insider-speak of its predecessor; its shouting at your computer when it malfunc- for navigating this condition. Following her narrative is graspable and mobilized from tions. Easterling has identified a number of award-winning Enduring Innocence (2005), the start. Whereas Enduring Innocence “active forms” operating in infrastructure Extrastatecraft is Easterling’s second book is structured to allow the reader to skip space, and, in her words, “knowing what,” to dilate on infrastructure through space, and around the sections like salad ingredients, over time, will lead us to “knowing how.” it follows a new tradition of writing an archi- Extrastatecraft is rhetorically presented to We have to become programmers of space. tecture integrated into larger economic, mili- persuade — and it does. Design is reframed as the manipulation of an tary, technological, and political narratives, Extrastatecraft is a “portmanteau entire region’s building codes. For instance, whose other practitioners include Reinhold describing the often undisclosed activities while working on the Esentai Tower com- Martin, Felicity Scott, Eyal Weizman, and outside of, in addition to, and sometimes plex (2008) in Almaty, Kazakhstan, the the Aggregate Collaborative, to name a few. even in partnership with statecraft,” or architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and The reader is witness to a majestic sweep of government affairs. Manmade physical and Merrill had to update the city’s antiquated, places, organizations, and time frames: the invisible infrastructure, interspersing material Soviet-era building codes and bring them to international, or American, standards. Translated for the first time in English, these Dubai Internet codes were then used by all subsequent City, 2012 large-scale projects. [licensed under Creative Com- Whole cloth design is an enticing mons] prospect. The claim of our inability to fix the world — coeval with our drowning faith in representative democracy and free-trade capitalism — is due partly to the fact that we’re beginners in driving the machine of our own making. The juggernaut can be trained. Easterling lists a number of “unorthodox auxiliaries,” or techniques in which we can redesign infrastructure space: “gossip, rumor, gift-giving, compliance, mimicry, comedy, remote control, meaninglessness, misdirection, distraction, hacking or entre- preneurialism.” She expands on the mechan- ics of each item, but most importantly they are all tools with which to affect the stories, the dispositions, of infrastructure space. If you can’t change the outcome, change the students, many will ask: is this about ar- Bauhaus Weaving Theory: conversation. It’s the long con. Preventive, chitecture? Architects have long been not curative (Chinese rather than Western megalomaniacal in ambition — dreaming up From Feminine Craft to medicine), it’s a method that doesn’t pro- cities that walk and towers that spear the Mode of Design duce quick, verifiable results, but perhaps sky — but their visions have always eclipsed T’ai Smith, University of it’s one that could divert us from the endless their influence. Many of the book’s tech- cycle of piecemeal fixes we’ve become ad- niques are already intuited by the world’s Minnesota Press, 2014 dicted to. most responsive firms, including Lacaton There is danger in this proposition that Vassal and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), but rachel silveri Easterling doesn’t fully engage with in the much of the architecture profession remains62 book. Reprogramming the system will no a boutique industry, and designers of build- doubt produce more holistic changes than ings have long recognized their insignifi- item-by-item solutions. Instead of con- cance at the grandest scale of actions. In the stantly developing newfangled pesticides face of the built world’s systemic problems In Bauhaus Weaving Theory (University that insects eventually build resistance to, such as housing shortage, worker abuse, of Minnesota Press, 2014), T’ai Smith’s for example, why not adapt ancient farming and irreversible environmental destruction, astute analysis of the textiles and writing of techniques that strategically pair crops that prominent architects have shrouded them- women weavers at the legendary school, the mutually repel their respective predators? selves in theoretical obscurantism (Eisen- author shows how these artists theorized Thus, organic farming. Alternatively, we man), claimed impunity (Hadid), or literally weaving as both an individual medium and could genetically change the plants them- flipped off those who question why they do an expanded one, intricately related to a selves so that they’re inherently repellant. what they do (Gehry). Architects want to “network of other media” and a field of social Thus, genetically modified organisms, or construct, organize, and improve upon the and political forces. Weavers including Anni GMOs. Yes, “knowing how” infrastructure built world, but to improve upon a situa- Albers, Gunta Stölzl, and Otti Berger worked space operates allows us at least the chance tion, its problems have to be identified and through the logic of other media (expres- of affecting how it manifests, but at what studied. Extrastatecraft — in recognizing sionist painting, modernist architecture, “new point does our duplicitous, self-aware com- that the space we occupy today itself oper- vision” photography, and the legal patent) as pliance make us in fact complicit? Easterling ates under radically different rules than it did they worked towards the specificity of their retells the story of Jana, a crowd-sourcing a few decades earlier, when Cheever wrote own craft. This series of other discourses platform first tested in Kenya. Partnering his story — can serve as a manual for a new structures Smith’s chapters, which advance with cellphone service providers that derive generation of architects, whose designs can chronologically from the beginning of the revenue from data collection, Jana provides begin to align with their goals. Bauhaus in 1919 to the postwar era of Black users with free airtime in exchange for their Mountain College in North Carolina, where 1 Gregory Clancey, “Enduring Innocence: Review,” Technol- data collected through surveys and ques- ogy and Culture 48, no. 1 (2007): 178. Albers began teaching in 1933. Throughout, tionnaires. Cellphone users are recast as a Smith’s account yields important insights for workforce — feeding personal information the history of modernism as well as the art to a machine for continued access to the world’s current fascination with textiles and machine. What could possibly go wrong? fiber art. Humans are feckless, and it’s a hopeful, Smith defines weaving as both a spe- purposeful imagination that sees us fixing cific practice of interlacing warp (vertical our problems by outsmarting the irrational threads) and weft (horizontal threads), as products of our collective insouciance. It is well as a broader apparatus (dispositif) in the also an absolutely necessary imagination to Foucauldian sense. The first chapter focuses study, preserve, and cultivate. on weaving’s influence from expressionist What makes this book, like Enduring painting as taught in the Bauhaus classes of Innocence, so relevant to nonarchitects is Wassily Kandinsky, who introduced students that by addressing the system (infrastructure to ideas of color and form. According to the space) rather than the symptoms (architec- hierarchy of production proposed by Bau- ture), a wide range of cultural artifacts could haus founder and director Walter Gropius, be framed within its description. A special after the fine arts and craftsmanship, the economic zone in its own right, the unregu- applied arts were third-tier, regarded as a lated art market’s power is extrastatecraft. type of feminine labor. This is why the weav- What if we think about the climate system ers needed theory; a textual discourse was as extrastatecraft? What could we learn a means to counteract the devaluing of their if we reframe race, blackness, whiteness, craft.

as infrastructure space? Accelerationism, In developing their theories of weaving, The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Reviews a trending concept in political philosophy artists such as Albers and Stölzl also used that sees expanding capitalism as a way to the language of architectural functionalism, escape capitalism, could do well by consid- transforming that vocabulary in the process. ering Easterling’s far more holistic idea of Albers theorized weaving as a form of direct “exaggerated compliance” as a way out of experimentation with materials on a hand- the quagmires of Marxist theory. Rather than loom, capable of improving mass-produced hanging an entire discursive and aesthetic textiles, whereas Stölzl considered how the project on a single technology, observers of function of textiles defines their form. Each the post-Internet art movement would find elaborated the utility of weaving within the the concept of infrastructure space — of a modern household. contextual frame layered with many net- Gunta Stölzl, Wall Hanging, 1923, Otti Berger likewise absorbed the cotton, wool, and viscose [courtesy works — particularly enriching. of Museum für Gestaltung, Basel, discourse of new vision photography, par- No doubt that as this book makes its Switzerland, © Artists Rights Society ticularly the work of László Moholy-Nagy. (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, way to the desks of architects and their Bonn., 2013] Tackling contemporary debates on optical- ity versus tactility, Berger insisted that the as well as its complex and thorough atten- Photographic Architecture definition of weaving depends primarily on tion to gender dynamics, Smith’s book also its tactile identity (i.e. texture). In her final provides a valuable example for the ways in in the Twentieth Century chapter Smith considers Berger’s attempts which any scholarly or critical work stem- Claire Zimmerman, at patenting her textiles, arguing that the ming from Kittlerian-Foucauldian media University of Minnesota medium of weaving thereby became based theory must seriously contend with issues in “the process of its production” rather than of gender and sexual difference. Bauhaus Press, 2014 its visual pattern. Weaving Theory is a welcome resource for Smith ultimately returns to Albers’ notion any scholar of modernism, and a crucial lens esther choi of a medium based in experiential practice on contemporary textile art — toward its63 and considers the common medium/media continued theorization. distinction in art history. Here, she situates Albers as simultaneously engaging and eschewing both the high modernist notion Accounts of modern architecture’s interme- of the medium as “grounded in the mate- diality — or the way in which buildings are rial” (think Clement Greenberg’s medium represented — could constitute a veritable specificity) as well as Marshall McLuhan’s romance novel replete with a series of understanding of the medium as “a vehicle turbulent highs and lows. Kissing flirtations, of communication, a technical apparatus that fetishes, paranoid surveillance, and publicity transmits messages or ideas.” stunts are but a few of these tales. Previous Throughout the book the specificity of narratives have often been perfumed with an weaving emerges: a construction of mate- air of new historicism (an “eau de Foucault”) rial based in the gridded structure of warp/ in their descriptions of how various media weft; fundamentally tactile; tied to the use have informed, reformed, and deformed the of and experimentation with a loom; depen- making and interpretation of modern archi- dent on the various possibilities of textile tecture. Yet despite its elaborate history of functionality. Across their writings, Albers, intermedial intermingling, architecture is a Stölzl, and Berger articulated this medium- figure that remains unsettled: accounts of specificity as a means to bolster the status this relationship have consistently revolved of weaving within the Bauhaus. And yet, around the impasse between architecture as Smith reveals, they also opened up the David Wager, Hunstanton and its mediatic other, otherwise known as School, furnished [courtesy of notion of a medium beyond purely formal Smithson Family Archive] the lacuna between sense and signification. properties. On the one hand, the medium of weaving remediates other media: analyzing how weaving incorporates and transforms other media discourses, Smith argues that it is only through the mediation of writing that any medium (including painting) can come to be seen as purely formal. Smith also shows how the medium of weaving acts as “a certain mediation of the semiautonomous zones of form and history.” In this regard, Smith situates weaving within a broader social, historical, and economic network including the history of domestic and industrial textile labor, women’s culture within the Weimar Republic, practices of advertising and consumerism within the interwar economy, discourses of authorship (and anonymity) within design, and the history of the uneven feminization and gendering of the textile field. Weaving becomes an apparatus (dispositif) to link these larger institutions, practices, and discourses. The value of Smith’s book lies in strad- dling this dual notion of the medium. At the same time, readers are made to think the Bauhaus and its weaving workshop anew and grapple with a theory of the medium (and media) that has profound effects on the history of modernism. Turning to Ger- man media theory as a means to situate this expansive definition of weaving, Smith provides art historians with a rigorously historical example of how to theorize an expanded medium as well as a methodol- ogy for examining processes of remediation across the avant-garde. With its privileging of women artists, The most recent chronicle in this saga, methods of historical quotation characteris- curity, and why the book frequently feels Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth tic of postmodern design. obliged to recapitulate this story. Like most Century (University of Minnesota Press, Despite this effort to equalize the nar- accounts, Photographic Architecture pres- 2014), builds upon the legacy of architec- rative, the picture that emerges through- ents a version of photography that is an ac- ture’s intermedial liaisons by offering an epi- out is of an arranged marriage between complice to architecture’s preoccupations, sodic account of disciplinary codependency. two disciplines: photography is frequently an apparatus whose presence is so available The book’s framework aims to re-present positioned at the service of architecture as that architecture cannot help but absorb the canonical objects of modern architec- a device for its documentation, interpreta- and take advantage of its many competent ture anew, as commodities supported by tion, and dissemination, with little reciprocal qualities, despite its objections. But other an inconspicuous mediatic web, unveiling reward. A lopsidedness in Zimmerman’s64 possible narratives might emerge. photography’s presence in architectural account of the two disciplines’ parallel Glimpses of a new approach — that history. Yet this relationship is presented in histories may be to blame. Astute insights contributes insights to not only architectural Zimmerman’s book as a rigmarole of needs pertaining to architectural history and history but also the realm of media stud- and services, reinforcing the age-old presup- technology are intermittently interrupted by ies — populate the text. Take, for instance, position that, like mismatched lovers, archi- descriptions of photography’s professional Zimmerman’s discussion of architectural tecture — an elusive and complex spatial history and techniques that are less refined. surface, which suggests that pivotal epi- construct — has never been fully compatible There are, for example, frequent reminders sodes in building history — such as the stage with its two-dimensional compeer. of the photograph’s veracity — that, indeed, at which exterior cladding became liber- Organized in nine chapters across three “photographs conceal as much as they ated from structure — enabled architecture sections, common themes such as transla- reveal,” echoing debates that dominated to adopt a proto-photographic outlook, tion, documentation, and circulation are photographic discourse in the late 70s. Pithy underscoring the dilemma of how architec- connected to architecture’s material and summations of photographic theory, such as ture is to function indexically through (and technological histories. The book begins the section on photography and abstraction, despite) its own limited means of significa- with a broad smattering of case studies that are comparatively underdeveloped. tion. When the author sidesteps staid com- examine the tension between representa- Still, one feels compelled to overlook parisons of form, rigid oppositions between tion and tectonics. Zimmerman assembles these moments as the book seduces with architecture and two-dimensional media are a number of German examples, including its patent command of early-20th-century subtly recalibrated. Instead, we are rightly early-20th-century studies in architectural German material, one of Zimmerman’s challenged to probe why shared epistemo- “image surfaces” (Bildarchitektur) and the specialties. The first chapter has some of logical concerns between the two disciplines photography-reliant reconstruction efforts the book’s most compelling observations, may have arisen at particular historical of Mies van der Rohe’s 1930 Tugendhat wherein the author recuperates an array of junctures. House, to discuss the distinct formal vocab- marginalized examples and offers brief yet Zimmerman’s project is most effec- ularies between the two disciplines. Com- precise reflections on photography’s tive when it loosens its grip on positioning mon concepts such as surface, construction, connection to the technological history of architecture and photography as stratified depth, and abstraction are shown to denote architecture. Flashes of frisson ignite when- modes of production bound by differences wildly different things for both fields when ever the book’s tendency to lean toward a in form. Like any dalliance, the book’s focus examined through technological changes in narrative of methodical opposition is com- on the ambiguous gray zone of the body/ the building and imaging industries. plicated and actually undone by the author’s eye conundrum offers the most original The book then turns to explore the im- extensive research, as it, at times, points contributions to an ongoing conversation pact of photographic codes and formats on to sympathetic technical and philosophical about architecture’s expanded field. In such the dissemination and alteration of architec- interests between the two disciplines. instances, another form of investigation tural ideas, before and after WWII. A dutiful These episodes beg us to ask why this begins to take shape, one that is neither overview of the professional conventions of relationship has been presented so tidily as instrumentalized nor instrumentalizing, but architectural photography in Germany forms a clashing union, so unnecessarily bound to imbues the historical project with significant a backdrop to case studies that appraise past traumas of disciplinary-specific inse- theoretical stakes. the utility of publications and exhibitions respectively. We are asked to consider how publicity materials, like those used to advertise Walter Gropius’ 1926 Bauhaus building in Dessau, functioned to brand and circulate commercial architectural practice, and how exhibitions used photography to inform and broadcast the ideological and aesthetic campaign of modern architecture within and

beyond the German context. The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Reviews The final section of the book focuses more explicitly on photography’s alteration of architectural aesthetics. Postwar Britain is here the locus for another set of well-known projects. Alison and Peter Smithson’s 1954 Hunstanton School shows how architecture consciously assimilated the “superficial” and rhetorical function of photography to become a representational cipher for a range of political and economic debates. Likewise, in a meditation on James Stirling’s output, we witness architecture simultaneously internalize and recycle its own propagandis- tic narratives and iconicity to produce the Amie Siegel: Provenance piece are modular workstations and rotating office chairs, today enjoying the kind of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York universal proliferation that modernist design and architecture never did achieve. What rattanamol singh johal is most striking is the coexistence of these period-specific solutions, heightened by the camera’s extended deliberation. No one seems concerned with stylistic incongruities The passages that populate Amie Sie- legacy of Corb (and company — Pierre or, more significantly, the depletion and slow gel’s 2013 work Provenance [June 23, Jeanneret, Jane Drew, and Maxwell Fry)65 and pilferage of a unique legacy. Functionality, 2014–January 4, 2015] appear seamless Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. comfort, affordability, and ease of mainte- and unhindered. Her expertly executed An avowed modernist, Nehru commissioned nance are the order of the day. three-part installation at the Metropolitan the city to affirm and embody his vision of a What, then, is Siegel trying to convey? Museum of Art consists of a central 40-min- forward-looking, secular, and modern new Are we to be surprised that the all- ute video projection (Provenance), a framed nation, grappling with the trauma of Parti- subsuming art market continues to operate spread from the printer’s proof of an auction tion, the challenges of economic ruin, glaring through the nefarious activities of deal- catalogue (Christie’s, October 19, 2013), rural-urban disparities, and a severe lack of ers and suppliers who never fail to exploit and a short video set in the auction room at infrastructure and industry. weaknesses and leaks in the system? Christie’s London, which documents the bid- Every aspect of the new city echoed the Or does she rehearse the trope of inher- ding battle for the title video, consigned by ideals of the architects and their commis- ent asymmetry in concepts of heritage, the artist to the Post-War and Contemporary sioner, from its key organizing principle (the cultural patrimony, and associated value, Art Sale (it sold for $84,788). Within the indefatigable modernist grid) to the layout between modernism’s intellectual home- installation’s frame, the viewer traverses dis- and design of its major public buildings (High land and the peripheries where its produc- parate geographies, clashing chronologies, Court, Legislative Assembly, Secretariat, tions have remained empty signifiers? The and competing object economies, yet the Panjab University, and Government Museum insertion of her own work into the auction urgencies of the situation being documented and Art Gallery) and their furnishings. Desks, house — wedged between Jasper Johns are constantly neutralized by a perfected chairs, coffee tables, sofas, and cabinets and Valie Export — speaks of the kind of aesthetic of distance, detachment, and to were fabricated en masse, employing the self-reflexive strategy spawned by 80s some extent ambivalence. designs of Corbusier’s cousin Pierre Jean- institutional critique, whose potential, rest- The high-definition video camera, a neret, his principal collaborator on Chandi- ing in the gesture’s immanence, may be constant companion on the artist’s transcon- garh, who remained in the city serving as altogether exhausted in 2014. For an incre- tinental reconnaissance mission, captures its chief architect for much of his life. The dibly sleek, seductive, and highly watchable the pristine and seemingly uninhabited salons unidentified yet easily discernible spaces work, Provenance doesn’t quite come clean and living rooms of the Euro-American elite, that open Siegel’s video are impeccably about what is at stake. then courses through auction rooms, photog- appointed with carefully picked speci- Perhaps Corb’s anthropomorphic raphy studios, conservation facilities, ware- mens from this prolific production. Chairs metaphors offer us something: if Chandigarh houses, and cargo-ship holds, before explor- dominate this global survey of Jeanneret’s was designed with a head (the govern- ing the contours, crevices, and cavernous displaced furniture, running the gamut from ment and judicial headquarters), a heart (the chambers of Chandigarh’s modernist build- the “Senate” variety with leather upholstery central commercial district), and lungs (the ings, known across the world as achieve- to the more modest classroom, conference network of green spaces running through), ments of that 20th-century architecture room, and library chairs with cane seats and is the scavenging of its inner flesh and tissue giant, Le Corbusier. The north-Indian city, backs. In each of these spotless rooms, the symptomatic of a collapsed body, a lifeless planned and constructed from scratch in the camera pans and lingers on the individual organism? Looking beyond the images of 1950s and 60s to serve as a capital for the design objects, doting on their economy dilapidation and decrepitude, we know the states of Punjab and Haryana, is the shared of form and material while revealing subtle contemporary city endures, supported by its traces of their past lives and locations post-modern prostheses and an unshaken (painted inventory numbers remain visible on confidence in its ability to draw India’s one their freshly polished surfaces). percent with the promise of wide roads, And thus the journey begins, a voyage- regulated traffic, and abundant greenery in-reverse, that is. Auctioneers accept bids (Chandigarh consistently tops rankings of running into thousands of dollars, in-house per capita income, living standards, and photographers scramble to make each cleanliness levels in the country). The con- furniture object appear unique and desir- centric logic of Siegel’s installation parallels able, restorers work their magic on torn the dialectic between postcolonial modern- upholstery, broken legs, and damaged ization and a home-grown modernism, set in wicker. Shots of crowded warehouses and motion by the formidable Nehru-Corb duo. shipping containers lead us right back to the This dialectic plays itself out repeatedly, its source — the provenance — of these mobile multiple syntheses continually reaffirming commodities. Siegel captures Chandigarh’s and servicing the demands of a global elite. concrete edifices and their interiors exquisitely: the dull winter sun, the stray monkeys, the pools of water reflecting and softening the architecture’s hard edges, and indeed, the crowded offices where the same chairs and tables are subject to continuous use, wear, and tear. Over the years, hundreds have been condemned to rooftops and stor- Amie Siegel, Provenance (still), 2013, HD video, age closets, where they await a purge under color, sound, 40 min. suitable protocols. Replacing them piece by and 30 sec. [courtesy of Simon Preston Gallery, New York] and lighting to imbue individual objects with something like personality, Angelidakis puts visitors in a role somewhere between the human protagonists of Ionesco’s play and Clint Eastwood chewing out an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Angelidakis’ original and idiosyncratic installation resonates with some of the ideas now current in the theoretical discourses of 66art and architecture. Catalyzed in part by the work of sociologist Bruno Latour, thinkers from many disciplines have recently begun to grant different kinds of agency and even life to stuff previously categorized as dead matter. What if, as the political scientist Jane Bennett asks, we took seriously “the capac- ity of things — edibles, commodities, storms, metals — not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, pro- pensities, or tendencies of their own?” Could that, they ask hopefully, help us to finally take seriously challenges such as climate Fin de Siècle, installa- change, in which such nonhuman things play Fin de Siècle tion view, 2014 [photo: Daniel Perez, courtesy vital roles? of the Swiss Institute] Swiss Institute, New York With this context in mind, the exhibition at the Swiss Institute reminds us of two gregor quack related things. First, the mere fact that it has taken theorists and philosophers decades to get around to an idea, that does not mean artists, architects, and designers haven’t Fin de Siècle [September 17–November 23, the show as a “curatorial homage” to The intuited it long before. It was Louis Kahn who 2014] marks an innovation for New York’s Chairs, an absurdist play by the French famously prompted his students in 1971: “If Swiss Institute as the inaugural edition of playwright Eugène Ionesco that debuted you think of Brick, you say to Brick, ‘What the gallery’s annual design series. Yet the in 1952. The play’s single act is populated do you want, Brick? ’” And second, the same show’s title evokes a sense of latter-day only by an elderly couple who seem to have ideas that are thought of in one field as stra- gloom. The checklist comprises some isolated themselves from a world nearing tegic ways to attack large philosophical and 40 rare, curious, and/or important chairs its end. As they lament the passing of their political problems can, in another, become selected by the Greek-Norwegian architect youth and the man’s lifelong failure to take that and more: rowdy, captivating, and even, and curator Andreas Angelidakis from the meaningful political action, they begin to well, fun. collections of W Magazine’s longtime cre- place one empty chair after another in the ative director Dennis Freedman and the Vitra middle of the stage. Before long, they begin Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. to converse with the chairs, hallucinating a As they would in their museum homes, indi- cohort of mute, imaginary guests sitting in vidual objects here stand in for the design- them: the “Colonel,” the “Photo-engraver,” historical periods that birthed them. “In our and the aptly named “Invisible Lady.” current moment of plurality and infinite flux,” Picking up on the echoes between Angelidakis writes, “these objects from the Ionesco’s work and the eschatological past era of grand movements are juxtaposed undertones that often color today’s design- with one another.” High-modernist icons world discussions about climate change or such as Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perri- the loss of grand political or artistic visions, and’s chaise longue are presented alongside Angelidakis has copied and exaggerated the postmodernist ones like Robert Venturi and stage directions of The Chairs. Angelidakis Denise Scott Brown’s Queen Anne chair, invites visitors to “contemplate … inaudible

with its giddy collision of classical forms and conversations,” their contemplation aided by The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Reviews pink candy color. various floodlights, disco balls, and moving Encounters like this one are staged spotlights. A skeletal, black wingback chair in an unruly, restless display architecture designed by H.R. Giger for the Harkonnen conceived by Angelidakis, a far cry from emperor in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s legend- the clean lines of a design museum. Wood ary but ill-fated Dune project towers menac- crates complete with shipping labels fill the ingly over a half-circle of timid, modernist gallery alongside unfinished drywall parti- side chairs. A gang of three brutish resin tions. Opened and unopened, stacked flush chairs by Martine Boileau has cornered a or at crooked angles, they create a land- somber Marcel Breuer cantilevered model. scape of canyons and unexpected corners And a trio of wacky, ebony-stained wood for individual chairs to hide and be found. chairs by Paolo Pallucco teeter over the According to the press text, the inspira- side of the gallery’s raised second level, as tion for this strong curatorial touch came if caught in the midst of a desperate, unsuc- from literary history. Angelidakis conceived cessful suicide attempt. Using positioning Jordi Colomer, Co-Op City, 2010, video, 8:13 mins. [courtesy of the artist] Beyond the Supersquare Latin America in Construction: Architecture Architecture thus serves as a device to read 1955–1980 (March 2015). Among this the complexities of the present moment in Bronx Museum of the Arts, spate of important new assessments is Be- Latin America, rather than just its historical New York yond the Supersquare at the Bronx Museum past. Nevertheless, this device can easily of the Arts [May 1, 2014–January 11, 2015], perpetuate some of the stereotypes the ex- elis mendoza an exhibition in many ways different from the hibition seeks to address, critiquing modern- others. Organized by Director Holly Block ism while ignoring its social dimension. and curated by María Inés Rodriguez, direc- Still, there are several works in the tor of CAPC, the Musée d’Art Contemporain exhibition that explore architecture’s hid- in Bordeaux, the exhibition emerged from67 den relationships, intimacy, and opposi- a four-year research project and a three- tions in an enticing and provocative way. Modern art and architecture in Latin America day conference that aimed, in the curators’ In Manuel Piña’s video The Hope and the have often been identified with the social words, “to examine the complicated legacies Rope (2003), the artist alternates narration progress, construction of national identity, of modernist architecture and thought — as about the construction of microbrigadas large education programs, and unstoppable embodied by the political, economic, environ- apartment blocks — a self-building hous- growth that made possible the creation mental, and social challenges faced by coun- ing system supported by the government of the capital city of Brasília and UNAM’s tries throughout Latin America — through the in 1970s Cuba — with personal accounts university campus in Mexico City. But they unique perspective of artists working today.” of romance involving the civil engineer in have also been associated with modern- The exhibition attempts to distance itself charge of the project and a future resident, ism’s failed promises, as in Mario Pani’s from associating modern architecture with suggesting the less obvious ways in which earthquake-destroyed apartment complex in its most famous faces and forms, instead the apartments have influenced daily life in Mexico City, Havana’s abandoned National examining day-to-day life and its influence on Cuba. Felipe Arturo’s Casa Domino (2010) Art Schools, and the anonymous national contemporary art. imagines Le Corbusier’s iconic, reinforced housing projects that have crudely grouped The assembled artists act as translators concrete prototype for an open plan struc- thousands of dwellings at the outskirts of of their own cultural and professional back- ture, but adapted to Latin American realities megalopolises. There are still many facets ground in the context of architecture for, as by leaving rebar exposed at the top for the of Latin America’s modernization project Ana María Duran Calisto noted in her essay house to be expanded in the future. And that have not been addressed by the usual for the catalogue, several of the most Felipe Dulzaides’ Interrogating Architecture surveys of the region, though — namely the prominent contemporary artists in Latin (2012) presents the plans of Ricardo Porro’s failure to incorporate indigenous popula- America were trained as architects. In more National School of Modern Dance in Havana tions and to address the area’s multicultural than 60 works, these artists examine the as they are menacingly confronted by two context. The question of appropriation also traces and influences of modern architecture microphones perched above. The looming endures: how should peoples whose way of that linger in the social and cultural imagi- silence suggests answers that might never life has gone unconsidered by moderniza- nary. Through video, installations, photog- come to questions about these buildings’ tion process it and merge it with their own raphy, graphic design, and industrial design, noncompletion and failed utopian dreams. cultural realities? these artists respond — as described in the At its best, the exhibition revises pre- There have, however, been recent at- press release — to the aggressiveness of conceptions of Latin American modernism, tempts to reassess and reposition modern modern urban centers, their growth, their well into the present. Yet a more in-depth Latin American art and architecture, including environmental dimensions, and the backlash analysis that delves into the diverse cultural, two major shows in New York this past sum- against them. ideological, and racial context of Latin mer alone — the Guggenheim’s Under the Modernism is viewed here both as the America is still much needed. The question of Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today and origin of these aggressive developments, appropriation in this context is about much the Museum of Modern Art’s Lygia Clark: and as the lens through which the artists more than how modernism’s right angles and The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988. We analyze their own work and the contem- smooth white surfaces transformed into lush can also look forward to MoMA’s upcoming porary social conditions of their countries. curves, rich textures, and brilliant colors. The Space Between the secret of repetition as a formal quality artist’s father) roams an empty, seemingly at a time when we use it most.” This state- stagnant construction site at the outskirts One Athens, Athens ment resonated with the current incarnation of Cairo, carrying a flashlight. The work of Doxiadis’ former offices as the renovated evoked the ambiguous sense of loss (and of stephanie bailey “One Athens” — a luxury residential com- being lost) that demolition — and construc- plex that has yet to open. (The only original tion — produces. features to remain untouched by developers Magdy’s video also referenced the are the driveway and the internal courtyard, Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, As an exhibition, The Space Between [Oc- where Iris Touliatou’s sculptures The Ce- who believed in action over theoretical tober 2–November 14, 2014] embodied its ment Is Just For Weight, Dear and The68 articulation, a view that one might associate location: the former offices of architect Con- Cities That He Worked on Are No Longer with the intentions and outcomes of Doxi- staninos Doxiadis, completed in 1958 — a There, both 2012, stood in silent homage.) adis’ design projects. Take his plan for the modernist complex that included the first The idea of architectural progress as a restructuring of Baghdad, for instance: it design school in Greece, and a graduate process of historical erasure and decontex- has been critiqued for imposing scale and school of “Ekistics,” the science of human tualization was a key theme in this exhibition, hierarchy that greatly emphasized adminis- settlement and a key urban planning concept alluded to in Hiraki Sawa’s single-channel trative order at the expense of social equity. for Doxiadis. Nestled in the foothills of Mount video Did I? (2011), a projection of a man in- This sense of potential alienation is redolent Lycabettus with a direct view of the Acropo- teracting with a strange, ephemeral domes- in Pawel Althamer’s 1991 Self-Portrait, in lis (Doxiadis’ former office is level with the tic space. The notion of the ghost in such an which the artist portrays himself from behind Parthenon), the building’s position reflects architectural shell was also reflected in Hrair in wrapping paper, oil paint, gouache, and how Doxiadis conceptualized his practice Sarkissian’s Stand Still series (2009–2010), even his own hair, as he gazes out of a win- as one that mediated (human) nature with wherein the artist photographs abandoned, dow onto a series of apartment blocks at the civilization. The Space Between’s curators, uncompleted buildings in Damascus, Syria, outskirts of Warsaw. And yet, at the same Locus Athens (Maria-Thalia Carras and Olga that emerge out of barren landscapes. In time, the unifying intentions in such modern- Hatzidaki), used this venue as a frame in Eftihis Patsourakis’ duo of works taken from ist projects as Doxiadis’ were also honored, which invited artists could respond to the his Headless and Pause series, a woman and particularly in the inclusion of Jonathas de city’s metacondition in the overlapping lega- a man are painted from discarded photo- Andrade’s installation Moral Census Tak- cies of antiquity, neoclassicism, orthodoxy, graphs of the 1970s (a girl running toward ing of the City of Recife (2008), wherein de and modernism. the camera, her head cut out of the frame, Andrade created a questionnaire based on One key contribution was Cevdet Erek’s and a man photographed from behind, moral behavior. Doxiadis, after all, made the Faça. Erek produced this site-specific respectively) that invoke the modernizing first attempt at producing a complete hous- response with materials from the Doxiadis specter of Greece’s recent past. Similarly ing census of Athens in 1940, which led to archives: two editions of the Greek architec- Vangelis Vlahos brought Patsourakis’ history a multidimensional study that mapped out a tural magazine Arhitektoniki (published dur- forward with his own archival project on detailed history of settlement in Greece. ing the 1960s and 70s) and one of Arkitekt, the Koskotas Scandal, a major political and Indeed, it was in this middle ground that a Turkish architectural magazine from the financial episode in Greece during the late The Space Between took advantage of a same period. Pages cut out, reassembled, 1980s and early 1990s. building as historical monument to produce and combined with Erek’s own notes and This kind of historical mapping produced complex sociohistorical cartographies. By documentation from city walks all appeared a sense of drift between works occupying collating evidence of how modernism has on a long (time) table that invoked the artist’s spaces around the complex’s courtyard, instilled itself in the practices of artists who “rulers and rhythms” studies, which perform which became a key zone within which vari- experienced its demise and postmodern res- articulations of time through “timeline mak- ous notions of existing “between” coalesced, urrection — within a complex that articulates ers.” Faça charted a history in “southern” whether from the physical act of moving such an evolution — the exhibition expresses modernism, which has since been overwrit- room to room or from the communication a condition of being neither here nor there, ten by a kind of postmodernity. A 1971 between items in the exhibition as a whole. but somewhere in between. article by Peter Smithson that was included Such drift was encapsulated by Basim in an installation of Erek’s, “Simple Thoughts Magdy’s video projection My Father Looks on Repetition,” reads: “We seem to have lost for an Honest City (2010). In it a man (the

Jonathas de Andrade, Recenseamento Moral da Cidade do Recife (Moral Census Taking of the City of Recife), 2008, installation detail, dimensions variable [courtesy of the artist and Galeria Vermelho] The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Reviews Design and Violence Museum of Modern Art, New York Disobedient Objects Victoria and Albert Museum, London 69 emily king

The Victoria and Albert Museum was founded for the purpose of guiding a public Digital render- that was new to the means of consumption. ing, Liberator pistol [courtesy Acquiring objects from the Great Exhibition of Defense of 1851, a committee led by the museum’s Distributed] founder Henry Cole reported that “each specimen has been selected for its merits in exhibition Disobedient Objects [July 26, design is a tool by which ordinary people can exemplifying some right principle of con- 2014–February 1, 2015] is significant. More defend their interests. It’s not the first time struction or of ornament,” and a few years than just recognizing the need to explore the the V&A has touched on such issues — the later the museum went on the offensive in complex and sometimes ambivalent interplay museum has collections of graphics pro- the battle for public taste with a display titled between design and society, both museums duced by green movements and punk Examples of False Principles in Decoration. are asserting the relevance of design by fanzines, for example — but in terms of scale Launched 80-odd years later, the Museum arguing that today’s most pressing issues and position in the museum, Disobedient of Modern Art’s design department was can be explored through objects, be they Objects amounts to a significant statement established on slightly different principles. instruments of power or of protest, or simply of the museum’s current take on design. Although still intent on amassing the right evidence of the relationship between people The geographical, chronological, politi- stuff, the museum’s first director, Alfred and capital. cal, and philosophical sweep of Disobedient Barr, endeavored to map the progress of The V&A’s Disobedient Objects is a free- Objects results in many of the exhibited modernity through significant examples of to-enter exhibition in a gallery adjacent to items going somewhat unexplained. I left industrial design and architecture, just as he the museum’s main lobby. Although relatively feeling that I needed to read up on a multi- was doing with art. In the early 1950s the small, it includes material gathered from tude of recent struggles — surely not such museum also made a foray into consumer across the globe — from Chile to Burma a bad thing. More profoundly problematic, education with its series of five Good Design via Europe and the US. Most of the objects however, is the exhibition’s message that exhibitions, but in general its goals have are from the last 40 years, the period the protest is always progressive. Although remained more abstract. curators Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon Flood and Grindon claim to have avoided From a contemporary perspective, the associate with “neo-liberal economic poli- the “rigid geometric scheme” of left and V&A’s initial aim, and MoMA’s post-WWII cies enacted on a broad scale” and “parallel right, I found nothing in Disobedient Objects venture, seem overly paternalistic, yet close changes in the organization technology of that challenged my own soft-left schema. to a century later the idea of charting a work, leisure, communication and cultural Showing a teacup and saucer decorated single progressive course in design holds production.” Unlike the beautifully crafted with a suffragette insignia in 1910, the strong. It may have been watered down by or painstakingly produced pieces that make curators claim the piece is a “comfortable postmodern bids for pluralism and inflected up the bulk of the V&A’s collection, most object to contemplate” because of the broad by a curatorial bent toward connoisseurship of the work in Disobedient Objects is the agreement around its cause. That is certainly (spend a lot of time with objects and it’s hard improvised product of amateurs. There are the case, yet to this visitor the same is true not to start loving them for their own sake), protective shields made of foam, cardboard, of the other more recent objects. There are but the desire to chart the forward march and Plexiglas decorated with titles of well- many protesters whose ideas make me feel of culture, technology, and society through known tomes (among them Samuel Beck- uncomfortable — anti-abortionists or ex- a series of things continues to account for ett’s Endgame and Herbert Marcuse’s One- treme animal rights activists, perhaps — yet the collecting policies of the world’s major Dimensional Man) that were employed in the they are given no space in the V&A. design museums. UK protests against university fees in 2010; Also marked is the absence of any Changes are afoot, however. Although tear-gas masks created by customizing potentially violent objects in the exhibition. MoMA and the V&A still assess potential water bottles used in the actions in Istanbul One exception is a slingshot made from the acquisitions in terms of their place in a single in 2013; and stenciled portraits executed tongue of a shoe that was used by Palestin- ongoing design history, both have begun to illicitly through the bottom of a paper bag to ian youths to hurl projectiles at Israeli jeeps acknowledge that there might be other tales commemorate activists who died in the early in the course of the second Intifada. The dis- to tell — stories that might involve leaving days of the Syrian uprising. cussion around this object could have been the sphere of professionalism or venturing Disobedient Objects does not eschew the most charged of the exhibition, particu- beyond Europe and America, for example. beauty — among its items are seduc- larly against the background of events in The coincidence this year of MoMA’s “online tive trade union banners from the north of Gaza and Israel in recent months, yet the curatorial experiment” Design and Violence England and exquisite quilts made by South curators pulled their punches. The context of [October 2013–ongoing] with the V&A’s American woman to commemorate injus- the improvised weapon is given little space “Rapid Response” collecting initiative [July tices — yet the implication of all the objects in the gallery, and though an image of a 4, 2014–ongoing] and that museum’s on view, the elegant and the less so, is that Palestinian youth brandishing it at advanc- reactionary sentiment of the rest of the The subject of exhibition, but it might go some way toward compensating for its lack of tension and loss Disobedient of urgency. The curators of Disobedient Objects Objects might be seem to want to make nice, but elsewhere confrontation, in the V&A there is a distinct taste for the nasty. In the small second-floor gallery but the exhibition dedicated to showing objects acquired since mid-2013 through the museum’s 70new goes out of its Rapid Response collecting strategy, it seems that no holds are barred: there is a pair of way to avoid any jeans made at Rana Plaza, the Bangladesh factory that collapsed in April 2013, killing such thing. more than a thousand workers; Katy Perry- branded eyelashes woven from human hair by poorly paid Indonesian women; and the now infamous 3-D–printed gun designed by Texan law student Cody Wilson. Even items ing jeeps is used as the frontispiece for the that might look glamorous elsewhere — a of the museum collection, which somewhat catalogue, there is no other mention of it or range of Christian Laboutin “nude” court overeggs the heroics involved in keeping its political context. The subject of Disobedi- shoes graded to match different skin tones, up with the news and getting hold of things ent Objects might be confrontation, but the for example — begin to look distinctly un- related to its big stories. That said, for a exhibition goes out of its way to avoid any pleasant in this context, though in that case museum the likes of the V&A, the collect- such thing. I think it is ethical-issue-turned-marketing- ing policy is bold. The danger is that once By the exit to the gallery there is an gimmick that grates. the impact of debates around the objects empty space on the wall with the promise, Led by Kieran Long, head of V&A’s has subsided, the museum will be left as the “This space is held for future disobedient ob- Architecture, Design and Digital department, long-term custodian of a cupboard full of jects.” The biggest news in terms of “disobe- the curators in charge of Rapid Response of- unimportant ephemera. It may well be that dience” since the start of the exhibition is the fer the visitor ample information about each the acquisition strategy itself, rather than extraordinary rise of the self-styled Islamic item. In contrast with Disobedient Objects, the things collected, becomes the object of State in Iraq and Syria. Perhaps the empty they might even tip the balance too far in retrospective curiosity. space could be given over to an explanation favor of context, coupling a pair of undis- While the V&A runs the risk of acquiring of the mechanism by which that organiza- tinguished black jeans with a picture of the a herd of white elephants, MoMA plays it tion raises money for its violent activities, the ruins of the factory in which they were made relatively safe by keeping the curatorial ven- methods by which it builds its “caliphate,” or and an account of the associated horror. The ture Design and Violence in the digital realm. the preaching van it uses to recruit members. Rapid Response captions are headed with This project of curator Paola Antonelli has, in It wouldn’t be in keeping with the vaguely the date on which the objects became part scope and approach, much in common with

Eclectic Electric Collective and Enmedio Collec- tive, Inflatable Cobblestone, 2012 [photo: Oriana Elicabe, courtesy of Enmedio.info] The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Reviews 71

Trevor Paglen, Five Classi- fied Aircraft, 2007, five fabric patches, framed, 15.25 × 32.75 × 2.25 in. [courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures] her previous and ambitious themed gallery American Felling Axe designed by Peter however, it indicates a new direction in the exhibitions such as SAFE: Design Takes Buchanan-Smith, for example — encounters collecting and exhibiting of design in major on Risk (2005) and Design and the Elastic in real space could be rewarding. The project museums that could take hold over the next Mind (2008). In contrast with Flood and raises questions about the impact a digital few decades. Just as design curators would Grindon, Antonelli and her co-curators tackle venture of this kind might have in the long no longer presume to dictate consumer violence head on, their definition being “a term. Perhaps the comparison is too gran- choice, perhaps they are beginning to ques- manifestation of the power to alter circum- diose, but it seems unlikely that an online tion whether they should be continuing with stances, against the will of others and to discussion could have anything close to the the attempt to map a single progressive, their detriment.” Their rough starting date historical significance of MoMA’s 1934 ex- professional design history. Trained design- is 2001, the beginning of what the curators hibition Machine Art. In keeping proceedings ers continue to make brilliant and beautiful term “a permanent War on Terror.” virtual, is MoMA hinting that this design and things, of course, but increasing access to Introducing a new object roughly every society thing is a fad and that the institution information has created widespread aware- week since the project’s launch in October is looking forward to some future return to ness that design is much else besides. In this 2013, the Design and Violence team has canonical business as usual? new context, stories from the street, or from invited experts from various fields to write a Perhaps the coincidence of V&A’s Dis- the field, are proving compelling. If museums response to each. The objects vary consid- obedient Objects and Rapid Response col- pursue this course, the role of the design erably, from the latest Army Field Manual to lecting with Design and Violence at MoMA curator will become less that of the arbiter the stiletto heel, and so too does the nature represents a socially aware blip among and more one of the editor. of the commentary. Addressing the for- the curators in these museums. Perhaps, mer, Major Harry Jones plays it straight, not- ing the publication’s role in helping the US Army “function successfully and ethically.” Writing on the latter, Camille Paglia is pithy and wide-ranging if somewhat hyperbolic: “The stiletto heel is the modern woman’s most lethal social weapon.” Oh, please. Likewise, the volume and standard of public debate varies greatly from subject to subject. Whereas most essays generate 5 to 10 comments, a piece on the serpentine slaugh- terhouse ramp designed by Temple Grandin provokes more than a hundred responses (it should probably come as no surprise that concern over violence against animals vastly outweighs concern over violence against people). Discussions that touch on firearms also provoke passion, supporters of the right to bear arms being quick to respond to any online discussion that touches their sphere of interest. With no gallery presence, the only real- space manifestation of Design and Violence is a series of debates at the museum, of which the first addressed “open source” (that printed gun again). This overwhelmingly digital format makes a lot of sense when the Chilean arpilleras wall hanging, Dónde están nuestros objects are as unwieldy as Grandin’s ramp hijos, Roberta Bacic’s collec- or Halden Prison in Norway. But in other tion [photo: Martin Melaugh] cases — fungal building blocks conceived by the artist Philip Ross or the aestheticized As early as the mid-18th centuryury the noun “curator” had exexpanded from its original meaning of takingking care of persons or thingsthings, sancti- Curate fied by ancient Roman law, to encompasspass caring for art objeobjects. Al- ( v. transitive) most from the beginning the British Museum had curators oon staff to care for the growing collections. Theseese keepers, sometimes called barry bergdoll curators, might even worry about howow to display works of art as well as preserve them, although these activities were and are ococcasionally at odds with each other. Althoughh architecture proved recarecalcitrant in entering the space of the museum, ultimately its forms of representa- tion, from models and drawings to photographs, began in the 19th century to join the corpus of a keeper’s charge. By 1932 the Museum of Modern Art in New York appointed a curator of architecture, even though the main goal was the diffusion of information and influence rather than the formation of a collection. My old copy of the Oxford English Dictionary had yet to admit the verb “curate” to describe the activity of such persons, perhaps because one does not need to be a curator to curate. In recent years not only exhibitions at all scales from a corridor to a biennale over multiple acres are curated, but also books, web “content” (another word that needs some taming), cur- ricula, restaurant menus, wardrobes, and so on. With his or her move from the hierarchy of the church, where a curate was subordinate to a priest, the curator in the art and architecture worlds has risen rapidly in recent years to rival or even surpass the artist or architect. In the recent Venice Biennale, curated by architect Rem Koolhaas, scarcely a living architect was on display, but the work of the curator and his many curatorial delegates provided the mise-en-scène of a veritable avalanche of material, largely in the form of scans, representing 20th-century architecture. Curating doesn’t always imply that less is more, even though it seems that a new the- saurus would list it simply as a synonym for “choosing.” And to curate has been set free from its original obligations of caring for persons or things with a heavy legal burden and a view to eternity. Rather, the freer one is of institutional obligations, the freer one is to curate! At its best, today’s curator uses his or her newly curated status to promote the work of architects or artists not yet well known, seeking to be recessive after the selection is made and the installation plan decided. But increasingly the selection and the installation is itself what is on view. And the curator, or even star curator, might well be what is discussed rather than the architecture on display, much of it created to be displayed, perhaps, rather than built, or chosen to prove a thesis of the curator rather than of the creator. Curating today is decid- edly about the provisional brilliantly animating the conversation — a conversation at its best, perhaps, when “curated” by what used to be called a moderator. One wonders only what happens to the archi-

tecture that is in the real world, curated by forces outside the closed The Stubbornness of Space Architecture and Design special issue Barry Bergdoll Glossary: Curate circuit of biennials and pop-up display spaces, now that curating even architecture is often unmoored from the concerns of the daily environ-

Barry Bergdoll is the ment. When curating and criticism are conflated, all distance between Meyer Schapiro production and reception runs the risk of collapsing, leaving us to Professor of Art History and Archae- curate the bytes that we would like to care for and try to preserve, to ology at Columbia stem the terrible feedback of “URL not found.” University. He served as the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Archi- tecture and Design at MoMA from 2007 to 2013, and is currently at work on a history of exhibiting architecture.