Norman McGrath at the exhibition of his work. Photo: Magda Biernat.

On June 2, “An Eye on Architecture,” a show of Norman McGrath’s photographs opens at the New York’s Center for Architecture where it will run until June 25th. Responsible for taking some of the most memorable images of the built environment, the veteran photographer is often mentioned in the same breath as Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman. Fellow photographers like to talk about how he “gets the essence of a building,” his proficiency in “capturing the texture of a structure,” as well as his knack for “making very small interiors spatially interesting.” Norman is known for mentoring young photographers, for his selfless sharing of information and techniques. As Stan Ries says of his oldest friend and mentor, “I am honored to be able to help curate his work so that it becomes well known to a younger generation of photographers and architects.” On the occasion of the opening and to mark Norman’s 80th birthday, I put some questions to him about his work in observing and recording architecture, changes in technology and approach, and memorable imagery.

Susan S. Szenasy: Some of your most memorable images of architecture, for me, come from you film phase, especially the black and white prints. What is it about black and white photography that is so eternally appealing?

Norman McGrath: When I was originally drawn to the field of architectural photography it was for the most part a black and white medium. Color was something of a novelty. Large format photography in color was largely confined to the advertising arena and much of it accomplished in studios. The best quality of color film was Kodachrome but that was confined to 35 mm cameras, less well suited to the documentation of architecture. 4 in. by 5 in. view cameras were considered the ideal tool. This type of camera offered the most control over the image of this essentially static subject. Read more…

Many developing countries have highly developed cultures of making-do: ingenious strategies that help people work with the realities of economic disparity, growing populations, and rapidly developing cities that put constant pressure on scarce resources. Out of things like old oil tins and discarded car parts, people put together remarkably creative products. In Kenya they call it Jua Kali, in Brazil they call it Gambiarra. The word Indians use is Jugaad.

At the Centre for Architecture, New York, a pioneering exhibition called Jugaad Urbanism is taking a closer look at this rich culture of innovation in India. 22 projects, ranging from a smokeless stove to overhead pedestrian walkways, show how Indian citizens and designers are finding solutions for pressing urban issues.  I spoke to the curator of the exhibition, architect Kanu Agrawal, to find out why this kind of grassroots ingenuity might be important for us to look at, and what designers and architects can learn from it. Read more…

Photos: Edward Lifson

Great world’s fairs traditionally leave one main, indelible image in the public’s consciousness.  In 1893, Chicago gave us civic monuments around a reflecting pool, out of which sprang the golden statue of the Republic. The Eiffel Tower soared above the 1899 Paris fair; it was the tallest man-made structure at the time. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome at Montreal’s Expo ‘67 enveloped a brave new world. This year, Shanghai presents the biggest World Expo ever, with more than 200 pavilions. But the most unforgettable building is not the largest. (That would be the red inverted pyramid representing China. It’s grand and imperial, but retreaded modernism without great detail.) The most indelible experience of architecture at this fair is at one of the smallest pavilions—the one from the United Kingdom, designed by London’s Heatherwick Studio.

After walking great distances in the dreadful heat and humidity of the Shanghai summer; after being bombarded with flashing lights and LED monitors and music and hundreds of thousands of people from all over China waiting three, four, up to nine hours to visit the most popular pavilions; just when you’re so beat you think you cannot absorb another thing—there it is. The sculptural structure is like a giant sea urchin, or a porcupine, or a squashed exploding star. Its protruding rods seem to carry energy from inside this alien thing. Other pavilions claim to take visitors into the future, but this one actually delivers. Or is this crazy moon-crawler taking us back to a primordial past?

Recently, I spoke to Thomas Heatherwick about his design, his message to the Chinese people, and the purpose of world’s fairs in the 21st century.

Tell me about the project brief—what did the British government want from its pavilion?

We were very conscious of the context in which it was going to sit—the world’s largest-ever Expo. But the brief from the government asked for a building that showed that the U.K. is a good place to live and work, has good governance, and is multicultural and diverse and sustainable. So you’re going slightly numb reading that brief, because you know that that’s exactly the same brief that every other designer of every other pavilion has been given. And the British government added,  ‘And get voted one of the top ten pavilions!’ We felt that if we just did a cheesy advert for Britain, with clichés, we would not achieve that goal. The only way we would be noticed is by being slightly oblique. Read more…

With all the talk about climate change, many of us still find it hard to connect with the crisis. Yes, we intuit that we’re facing something huge and life-altering, yet we continue to wallow in a state of denial. As frequent and devastating storms swoop down in our neighborhoods, we know something is very wrong.  Nevertheless, we’re too distracted or paralyzed to spring into political action. A new online competition, the CoolClimate Art Contest, is meant to help us recover from our political paralysis. Its organizers believe that artists and designers, with their well-known abilities to reach into our emotions, can help mobilize us to push for policy initiatives in energy, alternative fuels, and green jobs, among other subsets of climate change. To learn more about how artists can turn us into political activists, we asked the organizers of the CoolClimate Art Contest to share their hopes for their timely initiative. Our respondents are David Ross, the former head of the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a judge of the contest; Josh Wattles, advisor in chief at DeviantART, the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts with over 13.5 million registered members; Karl Burkhart, an expert in social media and the environment; and Sarah Ingersoll, the director of the CoolClimate Art Contest.

Why put art in the service of climate change?

Karl Burkhart: Just last week an unprecedented event occurred in Greenland. An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan broke off one of the largest and oldest ice sheets in the world in less than twenty-four hours. Scientists are still scratching their heads to figure out why global warming in certain regions is happening faster than predicted. The famous ‘Al Gore graph’ turns out to have underestimated the scope and speed of climate change.

Despite these facts, much of the public is clueless. At least half of Americans do not believe climate change is real and thus are completely inactive when it comes to advocacy and engaging their elected leaders. There has been a critical failing in communications around climate change and a big part of the problem has been a lack of ‘imagery’ that evokes and symbolizes the global changes that are, as we speak, changing the shape of the planet we live on. That is why we are turning to the artists. Read more…

Ruediger Otte and Roman Lindebaum’s Greenwich Tea Time table. Image: courtesy the designers

The notion of a single designer creating an object that is finished when it rolls off the assembly line is as antiquated as Ford’s Model T. Increasingly, the decision-making power is being put in the hands of consumers, who are being asked to vote for potential product releases, customize their new purchases, and even design their own wares through open-source Web applications. It’s a broad-reaching and often grassroots movement in which individuals, from laymen to pros, are participating in the creation or modification of mass-produced objects, blurring the line between the role of designer and consumer. In his first curatorial effort, the industrial designer Yves Béhar—the founder of fuseproject, whose products include the $100 XO laptop, a jewel-like Bluetooth headset, and, most recently, hip glasses for needy Mexican children—explores these developments for an exhibition called TechnoCRAFT, opening at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for Contemporary Art on July 10. Recently, Behar spoke with me about this 21st-century arts-and-crafts movement and what it means for the future of design and the assembly line.

How do you define “techno-craft?”

It’s all these new ways in which people are bringing the notion of craft into design, the notion of self-made, self-crafted, self-developed products and software. The big phenomenon that the show is trying to explain and walk visitors through is this notion that while a lot of people said craft was disappearing, actually there’s a new type of craft, a new type of involvement of the human and the hand in the mass-production process. Read more…

Kuma in Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall, on the IIT campus in Chicago. Photo: Edward Lifson

The 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize was recently given to the Japanese duo who lead the firm SANAA. People in the know can think of several other Japanese architects who also deserve the prize. One who is not as well known in the United States is Kengo Kuma. Born in 1954, Kuma leads a Tokyo-based firm that has completed dozens of projects, including the Hiroshige Museum of Art, in Japan; the Great (Bamboo) Wall house, in Beijing; and the Opposite House hotel, also in Beijing. His feet are in traditional Japanese architecture with his mind looking through the 21st century.

Last week Kuma visited the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), in Chicago, to show his current work, which includes a concert hall in Besançon, France, and a contemporary art center in Marseilles. He’s also redeveloping the Gustave Eiffel–designed train station in Budapest and working in Naples and Granada. In the United States, his only commission is a house in Connecticut, but Kuma is on the shortlist for a medical center at Columbia University, in New York. At home he is updating a Kabuki theater and Tokyo’s central post office.

Kuma is known for exploring new materials and, at IIT, he showed images of his experiments with concrete embedded with glass fiber optics, walls of plastic filled with water, and plastic teahouses that inflate—“Ready to go in ten minutes, like ramen noodles!” he said. During his recent visit to Chicago, Kuma spoke with me in Mies van der Rohe’s IIT masterpiece, Crown Hall.

Many economists say that the twenty-first century will belong to Asia. How might that influence world architecture?

Bruno Taut said that Western architecture is about shape and form and Asian architecture is about relationships. The last two thousand years were driven by European cultures. I expect we’ll find new paradigms of space. Probably it will be very enjoyable! [Laughs] Chinese history is of cultural exchanges with their neighbors. This can happen again in the twenty-first century. China may be the center of the world, and they may fight with other cultures, but they will also collaborate with other cultures. That tension can move the world in interesting new directions. This will change architecture. Read more…

The New York graphic designer Rodrigo Corral has crafted some of the most memorable book covers of the last decade: the sprinkle-dipped hand of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces; the red-graffiti (or is it blood?) silhouette on Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; the gleefully macabre illustrations for all of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels since 1999—including his newest, Tell All, to be released in May. Based on that list, you might assume that Corral specializes in depicting American male angst, which is not entirely accurate; his most recent designs include a box set of Akira Kurosawa films and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen’s Influence (two projects that, one suspects, have very little else in common.) Earlier this year, I caught up with Corral to ask him about his working methods, the changing face of the design profession, and the differences between designing for Chuck Palahniuk and the Olsen twins.

First, some history: how did you get involved with design and eventually end up with a New York design studio?

I’ve always loved to draw, but it’s been my fascination with popular culture that led me into design. I realize pop culture isn’t so exceptional these days—it’s everywhere and it’s hard to be inspired by it—but while I was growing up, I was affected by TV shows, advertising, and the ideas behind them. Mostly, I was interested in the way visual communication could reach and affect people during the seventies and eighties. TV was different then, and even sitcoms were more meaningful than they seem to be today. They did not feel as safe or politically correct.

At the School of Visual Arts, I learned more about the theories and processes of conceptual design, and I was able to learn on the job afterward in book publishing.  Read more…

Last month, the Queens contemporary-art mecca P.S.1 announced the winner of its annual Young Architects Program, which chooses an emerging firm to remake the museum’s courtyard through a temporary installation-cum-party space. This year’s selection, Pole Dance, combines a circus aesthetic with a hint of existential vertigo. The structure consists of 100 pivoting fiberglass rods bolted to the ground and connected by bungee cords to a net suspended overhead. Visitors—quickly transformed into participants—move a set of multicolored balls that fill the net, setting the whole structure in motion. It is the creation of Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL), a Brooklyn firm founded by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu in 2007. Earlier this week, Idenburg spoke to me about the P.S.1 installation, architectural cynicism, and striking the perfect balance between whimsy and anxiety.

Why did your proposal take the form it did? What does it mean?

We take interest in the effects and workings of the immaterial systems we have created to organize our world, especially in relation to the way we organize our physical surroundings. We think people’s care and attention towards our physical environment could be reinvigorated by taking some of the qualities of the virtual into the architectural project. The idea of the structure as an “interface” —elasticity, instability, and connectivity—were ideas we tried to incorporate.

This sounds very serious. At the same time, it is an installation for a few months that needs to accommodate parties. We wanted it to be a really fun place, precisely through this interactivity. We are interested in creating spaces, not objects. We wanted it to be a total dynamic environment. Read more…

In developing ideas for the What’s Next issue, we had a rather logical thought. The subject was “Landscape/Climate Change”—and the thought? We need to talk to a Dutchmen about this, for fairly obvious reasons. So we contacted Jan H. de Jager, a civil engineer and an expert on dikes and dams, who in the course of our conversation gave us a primer on the Dutch ways with water.
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Tell us how the Dutch approach the problem of rising sea levels. They’ve been at this for thousands of years.

Our coast is very soft and sandy, with a number of major rivers crossing into the North Sea. The country was actually formed by these rivers over the last one or two hundred thousand years. It’s a country built on sediments, which were brought in by the Rhine River. A couple hundred thousand years ago we didn’t even exist. Our ancestors have dealt with sea level rises in the past. And they had only modest means, so what they did was build little platforms, plateaus, where they built up their farms and houses. So when sea water would rise, they would run to their earth plateau and sit out the high water.

When the country got more inhabited, and now I’m talking about two thousand years ago, these practices were still in use. About one thousand years ago the population increased to such an extent that the people felt that we had to organize things. The water boards were an early form of democracy. Our oldest water boards’ [jurisdictions] are over one thousand years old. They choose a chairman and a secretary. All the people living in a certain area had to contribute to the water board, whether in money or manual labor, or horses or cows to transport earth. And then we started to build dikes. Not the same sort of thing we consider a dike now. These were earth berms, which were extended over many kilometers to fend off possible high waters. The water boards evolved over the years. In the early days, there may have been one thousand water boards, in a country the size of Maryland. But up to sixty percent of the country is below the current mean sea level, which means most of the country is still being protected by dikes. The number of water boards has decreased. We now have less than one hundred, which is cheaper and easier to manage. People don’t supply the labor anymore. They just pay a bill every month. The inhabitants pay according to the size of land they own and the properties built on it.

That’s how they maintain the dikes?

Yes. And to maintain the water levels, because precipitation falls into these polders behind the dikes and we have to pump it out. We also have water seeping in from underneath the dikes that has to be pumped out. All those costs are borne by the water boards but paid for by the inhabitants of the area. Read more…

Images: courtesy WORK Architecture Company

With its startling lack of parks, community gardens, or farmers’ markets, the Gravesend neighborhood of southern Brooklyn is currently one of the least green sections of New York’s most populous borough. That is set to change this fall, however, when a neighborhood public school—P.S. 216—launches the first East Coast incarnation of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed in 1995 by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation to teach schoolchildren about food, farming, and nutrition. For the new venture, Manhattan’s WORK Architecture Company designed a solar-powered farm—complete with classrooms, a pizza oven, and a chicken coop—scheduled to be built over the summer on what is now a parking lot beside the school. The firm’s founders, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, have previous experience with urban gardens: in 2008, they created Public Farm 1 (P.F.1), an undulating cardboard bridge filled with vegetables and herbs, for the annual MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program. Recently, I talked to Andraos and Wood about the Edible Schoolyard and their longstanding fascination with the intersection of architecture and farming.

Why was P.S. 216 chosen to host the Edible Schoolyard?

Dan Wood: John Lyons, president of production at Focus Features, is on the Chez Panisse Foundation board. He was in New York City’s Principal for a Day program and the last school he went to was P.S. 216. He became a huge fan of the school and its principal. The school is amazing. In a district where one hundred percent of the students are eligible for the free-lunch program, she is running an amazing school: they have art classes, healthy snacks, a new library. It’s a real neighborhood with a mix of different students from many parts of the world.

Amale Andraos: The idea, as well, is that we will, hopefully, be able to expand the Edible Schoolyard to all five boroughs. So everybody felt this was a great school to test the first prototype.

DW: And the school has a huge parking lot! Read more…