The Poetry Foundation in Chicago is a place that works. “Let me count the ways,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning has famously said.

The building, designed by John Ronan Architects, opened in June 2011. It’s an optimal environment to celebrate poetry—even on cold, cloudy almost-spring days like the one on which I visited it. Starting with the sidewalk, passersby are intrigued by views into the courtyard and the rest of the building. The very tall zinc wall between the sidewalk and that courtyard, is punctured by thousands of round holes that invite the curious to move in for a closer look, just as if you were to put your eye against a keyhole and see into a room. This “peeking” experience generates pleasant anticipation. Once you enter the courtyard, the wall helps to keep the city hustle-bustle at bay.

Upon entering the building, you pass through a well-ordered and luxuriously planted courtyard. Gazing out at this space from inside helps you restock your mental energy and focus your thoughts. The generous windows facing the courtyard make it hard not to look outside.

Read more…

The world around us is rich in imagination, beauty, connections, emotions, and anything else you may think of when you think of the designed environment. Yet the language we use to describe this fascinating gift to us, a gift shaped by designers, lacks the complexity and richness of our environment, that small part of the world we come in contact with every day, at every scale, from the smallest object to the teeming streets of a metropolis. This was the message of AFTERTASTE 2013, “The Atmosphere of Objects,” held at New York’s Parsons the New School for Design earlier in the spring.

The provocation for the symposium was delivered by author Akiko Busch, the first managing editor of Metropolis magazine and our contributing writer for two decades. When she read some odes to the physical world by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, those of us gathered at the school’s auditorium were given a gift of language. Busch challenged us to write our own odes to the everyday objects we come in contact with. The hand-written odes poured in, proving the basic human need to connect, through language, with the things around us. Here are some of the odes we captured that day. What would your ode be about?

Two odes to the button

1.

Closes and envelopes, secure until not, and then again lost and re-found, re-adapted.
So simple and complex—I love the form, function, form.

2.

Like you washed up on the beach after years of tumbling with salt and sand. You hold me together. Keep me from falling apart.

Ode to a MetroCard

Swish, here to there and back again, the magic key that unlocks a space-time treasure. Without you I’m stuck in one place, for all time. You unlock me, my potential, my silent partner.

Ode to my pencil

My pencil (my sword?) has a core of LEAD that will last me years (or hours?) of words pouring out like magic.  But on its far end, the eraser top scolds.

Ode to my new bread knife

Hay bread knife, you are too good at your job. You ventilated my finger with a lot less effort than it takes to bisect a bagel.

Ode to a test tube

A world-class wine tester who never gets tired of trying drinks and never gets drunk.

Walking down South St. in Philadelphia on a warm, winter night (yes, a warm, winter night), I saw an attractive young lady seated at a small table with a small, manual typewriter. A blank sheet of white paper was flopping in the old-fashioned carriage and ready to go. Her hand-lettered sign said, “Name a price. Pick a subject. Get a poem!!!”

There was something startling and disarming about that sight. Was it the young person (early 20’s ?) wielding obsolete technology to grant you an instantaneous, tangible sheaf of poetry or was it her high-wire act, putting herself out there as a writer, providing art on demand?

Perhaps there are human dimensions old technology holds that we’re losing in our headlong, digital rush. It occurred to me that she is writing intimate, one-of-a-kind poems. There’s no saving a file on a laptop or iPad. There’s no posting on Facebook for all and sundry to see. You paid for it, it’s yours; it’s a unique (and private) message.

“Type Writer”

Joseph G. Brin © 2012

Read more…

Tomorrow morning, architects, poets, and critics will assemble at the Center for Architecture, in Manhattan, for a symposium called “Form and Function: The Intersection of Poetry & Architecture.” In honor of the event, which is cosponsored by Poets House, we’ve assembled quotes from some of the participants, but we’ll leave it for you to determine their subject matter: poetry or architecture? Read more…