Before his graphic commentary on the urban environment and its quirky denizens began to occupy the last page of Metropolis in 1998, we asked Ben Katchor to contribute to the magazine. His provocative visual-verbal narratives on urban manufacturing and sustainability grounded our preoccupation with these topics, still in the headlines. (Note President Obama’s second-term inauguration speech, in which the economy and climate change play important roles.)

On our May 1995 cover, Ben brought to life our story, Made in New York: The Art of Urban Manufacturing. He envisioned the look and feel of a many-layered city occupied by ordinary people, who are never quite so ordinary, making everything from Chinese food products to plywood shiva benches. When, in September 1996, we took a deep deep-dive into the subject of sustainability and the built environment, Ben showed what the city might look and feel like in 2030, if sustainable practices prevailed or if they didn’t. He saw a lively green city with bustling street life versus an abandoned pile of skyscrapers seen in the distance,  “From her concrete porch in her [subterranean] suburban home, Mrs. Levitt [wearing a gas mask] watches the sun set over a forsaken city.”

Each month for 15 years now, I look forward to reading Ben’s column as the magazine is being produced. And each month I chuckle at the foibles of teeming humanity negotiating the complex, friendly, awful, graceful urban environment where the new dukes it out with remnants of an ever-present past.  This is where we meet the architect who over-designs a light switch only to have a contractor install a cheap, noisy mechanism behind it, scaring the kids; or a man inside a Miesian skyscraper desperately trying to meet up with a woman on the windswept plaza below but she will have none of it. Modern architecture, it seems, can stifle romance.

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Beginning on Veteran’s Day this past Sunday, Broooklyn-based architecture firm Matter Practice and the Times Square Alliance in collaboration with the StoryCorp Military Voices Initiative is hosting a series of live conversations between veterans and civilians right in the heart of Times Square. The pavilion where these discussions take place—located at Duffy Square, between 46th and 47th Streets and Broadway—was designed by Sandra Wheeler and Alfred Zollinger and is composed of a simple kit-of-parts plywood and glass structure, with the program titled “Peace & Quiet” because it is intended to provide not only a place of healing and shelter for housing exchanges, but a dedicated site for bridging the divide between veterans who have loyally served our country and the civilians whose freedoms they protect. Visitors and passersby are welcome to drop in, leave a note, listen to the stories, and even shake hands with and personally thank the guest veterans on-site.

“Ever wonder what it was like to sleep in a hole in the Iraq desert? What the food was like in the mountains of Afghanistan?”—these are two of the questions posed on the site’s Facebook page, where you can also view candid process shots of the structure’s design and construction process, and see live daily feedback of the program.

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Today as I was serving breakfast tacos I talked to a customer about Community Rebuilds. She is a regular at the saloon where I work. Her name is Lisa and she has big arm muscles, which she usually displays by cutting the sleeves off of her tee shirts. While making small talk about the weather, jobs, errands, we also chatted about where we’ve been and then Moab came up.

“What were you doing in Moab?” Lisa asked.

“Well, I worked at a goat creamery for six months and then a non-profit that builds straw bale houses for low-income families,” I answered. This kind of information is often followed by raised eyebrows and a drawn out “woooowww,” or a short, punctuated, “really.” Lisa gave me both. “So you know how to build straw bale houses now.” Not a question, a statement. Her eyes were wide with impressed approval.

“…Yyyeeeaaaaahh….sort of.” I said, nervously wiping a glass.

I’ve only recently crossed over into the itchy world of straw bale enthusiasm and have since found it nearly impossible to talk about it without using tons of comparisons. People wanna know: “Does it cost more, does it take longer, isn’t it more flammable, won’t it mold, can’t it only be one story, why do they all look like adobe huts, etc.” And my answers to these questions are kind of boring: “No, depends, no, depends, no, depends, etc.” Sometimes I try to jazz it up like: “Here’s the thing, it depends, or nuh uh.” When I’m waitressing, I’m constantly perfecting the art of tactful-conversation-pausing, as in: “Yeah, natural building, it’s totally awesome. Would you like a refill?”

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One video on the Inside Out website explains how to make a homemade glue from flour, sugar and water.  Another shows the best way to plaster paper portraits onto outside walls. The website suggests finding approved locations for the exhibits, but doesn’t seem to insist on it; the mission of Inside Out, which prints and ships oversized, black and white photographic portraits, is rooted in activist public art, and its m.o. is akin to writing graffiti, only tamer.

Mama Suela

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The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which might be razed and replaced by a new development in Queens.

For almost two decades, The Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) has advocated for the transformation of the Farley Post Office into a new Penn Station to be called Moynihan Station. Governor Cuomo’s recent State of the State address suggests that 2012 could be the station’s moment.

The immediate story is, of course, the possible razing of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and its replacement, at the site of the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, by what the Governor describes as the nation’s largest convention center. Before moving ahead, however, we must make sure that what’s good for Manhattan is equally beneficial for Queens.

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Jonny Robles

It was just another bright day in uptown Miami Beach, when the first art movers loaded in paintings to the 1950’s Morris Lapidus golden “Temple of Curves,” The Deauville Resort, for the Nada art show in preparation for Art Basel/Design Miami Beach. The neighborhood shop attendants at Rite Aid, Pizza Hut and bodegas, adorned with murals of neon flamingos that morphed into sexy girls, took their cigarette and mobile breaks and quietly watched the event unfold. Would they even enter the show?

Imagine your town. Imagine a gold dusting and buzzing of high stakes international art dealers, collectors and celebrities drawn to the honey of private dinners, streets teaming with pilgrims jumping from alcohol to car and fashion brand-sponsored events, mobile phone touring teens and hipsters running through former industrial areas where hooded and masked international graffiti writers sprayed their messages on 2- story cranes. Later, higher still, sunset cocktails were downed above the city lights at a private launch of BMW’s new electric car in an open-air conceptual parking lot, now an architectural icon. This, my fellow citizens of Anytown Earth, is what they call a community of global art.

Art Basel Miami Beach 2011 was 10 years old this year. And this year, I was in search of more than the highest quality debauchery or the million-dollar manse or sale of art. I was curious about the usual urban blight to might trajectory of the influx, beginning with artists, residents, galleries, small business, big business, big entertainment, tourist buses, sky-high real estate boom, and sometimes ending with monoculture. How has and how does this once-a-year party infuse its host community with art, culture and future? Does Better Art make for Better Living?

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About halfway into the documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter, the filmmakers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey turn to Charles Eames’s way with words—or lack thereof. The legendary designer, it appears, was capable of being aimlessly verbose, repeating himself, taking off on tangents, and generally obscuring the matter at hand. “He had this ability,” the architect Kevin Roche says in the film, “of surrounding everything in a cloud of words.”

Using archival photographs and candid insights like Roche’s, the film takes on the prolific, multidisciplinary career of Charles and Ray Eames. With only occasional lapses into cheesiness—computer-animated cherry blossom petals flutter across the screen as the couple’s romance is described—it remakes the old argument that Charles (masculine, forceful, craftsman-thinker) and Ray (reticent, artistic, magpie-like hoarder) were some sort of yin and yang that produced the magic of the Eames office. There is a lot of discussion in the film about their incessant image-making: “Perhaps their greatest creation,” the celebrity narrator, James Franco, intones, “was the image of Charles and Ray Eames.”

But, I said to myself, what of their writing?

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We live in a time of unsettling opposing forces. A time when conflicting interests suggest a hopeless point of no return. But here, in the heart of New York City, Dror Benshetrit has been putting out designs that tell us something different: If applied properly, opposing forces can be a source of power and beauty.

His office is embedded in the chaotic nexus of the Garment District, Bryant Park, and Times Square with all its glare and megastores, mass retailing and marketing, old fashioned clothing production, and a piece of perfect green urbanity. Nestled quietly above all this, the studio absorbs the best of this complex setting, putting out designs that blend all these elements, seemingly perfectly. How?

The Tron chair is a good example of Dror’s design vision and openness.

What started with an informal conversation about a chair concept with Giullio Cappellini, ended up as a proposal for Walt Disney Signature in partnership Cappellini, to create popular and innovative furniture design. The ‘TRON Armchair” , inspired by Disney’s “TRON: Legacy” (the feature film that speaks of the human aspect of virtual living), fits perfectly with Dror’s ability to combine dualities like a juxtaposition of voluptuous curves and hard angles to express the thriving digital-analog world we inhabit today. The result? An exclusive product that acquires mass appeal through popular culture, bringing the design far beyond the reach of high-end, to-the-trade showrooms. Product development, both through digital and traditional hands-on-craft, took place in Dror’s workshop located a stone’s throw from the architect’s desk. Read more…

Newport Beach, California, Sunday, October 16, 2011—Around 200 Southern Californians enjoyed an extremely rare opportunity today, to enter the avant-garde Rudolf Schindler Lovell Beach House (1926). The MAK Center for Art and Architecture sold $80 and $100 tickets to raise money for its operations—based in Schindler’s own “King’s Road” house in L.A.

Some walked past unaware

With other things to do.

Others had waited many years

Just to sneak a view.

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Image courtesy Hypercities.com

An open source approach is what distinguishes UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center (ETC) from other media labs, most of which focus on discrete or proprietary products. ETC’s dedication to open source knowledge makes it findings accessible to the general public and scholars. What’s more, many of the projects are collaborations between academics and public organizations. The goal, as the lab states, is to make its research on “a wide range of phenomenological issues, including movement, sequencing, sonification, and visualization” accessible. The projects, they add, address the “broader cultural, social, economic, and political aspects of civilizations – both ancient and contemporary” in disciplines ranging from archaeology and architecture to foreign languages, education, and to substance abuse treatment.

One such project is HyperCities.

The contemporary spatial configurations of cities and their history throughout the world are collected in an interactive database, including a wide range of information in the geographic, social, and historical fields. In addition, the collaboration with local organizations gives a depth to the project that might otherwise be missing. The result: rather than merely examining one dimension, the HyperCities project allows anyone to research space diachronically with a myriad of historical data.

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