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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It first hit me in Fuxing Park last spring.

I was being interviewed by a journalist from Beijing. She was keen for us to get out of the office to walk and talk, to have ‘culturally immersive’ experiences together, to both react to these experiences and discuss the implications.

Fuxing Park (复兴公园) lies at the corner of Shanghai’s former French Concession and is where many older Chinese people gather early every morning to do their exercises, gossip, and start their day. On this particular day, the cool spring mist gave everything a slightly surreal, otherworldly air. There were all kinds of activities going on: a strange form of choreographed badminton done to music that had a very stylized, almost balletic feel to it; various singing groups singing traditional folk songs; a laughing class that had to be seen to be believed; a particularly bizarre hair-pulling exercise group; top spinning; kiting; and interwoven through out the park, various dance troupes—samba, marimba, jive.

But it was the waltzing that really got to me.

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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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Architect Jeanne Gang on the terrace of Aqua, an 82-story skyscraper in downtown Chicago. Photo: Anna Knott.

The first time we met, Tim McCormick was standing in front of the colorful community center that Jeanne Gang had designed for his thriving non-profit. The centerpiece of the ground floor was set of large steps, with dark green shag carpet cascading down the entire thing. After the usual pleasantries, I asked McCormick what he thought of the space, and he magically lit up. He couldn’t wait to show off the building.

The Lavezzorio Community Center, designed by Studio Gang. Photo: Steve Hall

McCormick quickly came across as exactly the kind of caring leader you’d want running a community center and nonprofit focused on reuniting foster kids with their biological parents. And though he may have quietly groused about the extra money spent cleaning the abundance of windows in his prized building, he proved to be the type of client that Gang and her team needed to realize this design marvel on Chicago’s South Side.

Just like other Studio Gang clients that I’ve spoken with, McCormick exuded deep pride and gratitude for the extraordinary pro bono contributions made by Gang and her team. The moment that she was announced earlier this week as a 2011 honoree of the MacArthur Fellows Program (more commonly known as the “Genius Award,” to the chagrin of its recipients), I thought not of her acclaimed Aqua Tower or other well-published work, but instead of her roster of pro bono clients, like McCormick, and the people they help each day—and what the award might possibly mean to them.

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For all 9/11’s iconoclasm and upheaval and upset, it has produced surprising little innovation in memorials.  A remarkable number and variety of memorials have been made in the ten years that have since passed.  They demonstrate the deep importance of memorials as part of our everyday landscape, and a renewed interest in the process of memorializing.  We have all been engaged by the thousands of popular memorials, and also by the emergence of the official memorials at the WTC site, in Shanksville, at the Pentagon.  This proliferation, instead of fueling innovative approaches, though, has reinforced the already divergent, pre-2001 memorial culture.

Sometime late in the 20th century, memorial strategies diverged.  The ephemeral, popular memorial, a radically contingent foil to old bronze-and-stone memorials, took on new prominence.  “Ephemeral memorial” seems like an oxymoron at first—memorials should be designed to endure, not fade away, right?  The are not only legitimate but stand as radical challenges to traditional memorial culture of bronze and stone.  Examples included the many self-made memorials created in the aftermath of 9/11, in parks, on walls, along sidewalks, pretty much anywhere in public space.

Add to these roadside memorials, ghost bikes, and other “leavings” at disaster sites or conventional memorials.  One of the labels applied to them—makeshift—captures their provisional, temporary nature as well as the urgency and hand-made qualities that leave them both admired and reviled.  The point of ephemeral memorials is immediacy and imageability, not materiality, formal excellence, and permanence.  They expand the notion of what counts as a legitimate memorial and suggest a broadening in the kinds of memorials accepted today as part of a larger landscape—a memorial infrastructure. They make the process of memorialization more immediate for more people.  People want to see their own hand; however fleeting, they want evidence of their own remembering and forgetting.

On the other hand is the official memorial—figurative statues, pedestals, columns or obelisks. Read more…

Sao Paolo, Brazil

A few years ago (truthfully, more than a “few”) I had formed an idea of Sao Paulo, based on a visit to a project by Lina Bo Bardi, the late Brazilian modernist architect. I was a student of architecture at the time and had made a point of visiting work that caught my attention in the magazines. Bo Bardi’s SESC-POMPEIA complex was one of these. That early architectural pilgrimage (among the first that became a life-long habit) left me with two distinct impressions: how incredibly talented and original Lina was, and how disorienting Sao Paulo was. Coming from Rio, where between Sugar Loaf and the Christ statue above the harbor, and the ocean helped you orient yourself, there were no such landmarks in Sao Paulo. As the bus meandered through the vertically-charged blocks, I was completely lost in that bland labyrinth. Ever since then this  vast placelessness has been my main memory of this megalopolis.

Last week, the SESC-POMPEIA again fulfilled its role as the city’s “ambassador”, but this time it left quite a different impression.  Immediately after landing at Guarulhos International Airport I was driven to the Bo Bardi designed culture/entertainement/sports complex SESC-POMPEIA to attend the launch of an art project that will take place in another iconic project of hers, the CASA DE VIDRO (Glass House) in September 2012. This art project will bring an international group of artists and designers together to create art work for an exhibit in the house. Introduced by the curator of the project, Hans Ulrich Obrist, two of the future exhibit participants, Rem Koolhaas and Petra Balise, were there to talk about what they are planning.

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