Reference Page: March 2007

Saint Brad
If ever the architecture profession harbored hopes of sloughing off its collective nerdiness, surely Brad Pitt’s New Orleans cause du jour is a most welcome development. Those dimples! That tousled hair! Angelina! Who better to put to rest the old trope that archi­­tects’ sexiest assets are their horn-rims? See Brad, the “design junkie,” in action at www.makeitrightnola.org. The Web site opens with the actor’s entreaty for help re-building the Lower Ninth Ward and features no shortage of “Donate Now” links. (Note the funding ticker in the bottom-left corner.) To be sure, Pitt isn’t the first Holly­wood celebrity to lend the field his superior genes. Ref­er­ence’s favorite snarky environmental-news Web site maintains a list of Hollywood’s reigning eco-stars, peopled with the likes of Cate Blanchett, Cameron Diaz, and Leonardo DiCaprio. (Go to www.grist.org and search for “Green Ac­tors.”) Rounding out 2007’s lineup: Brad’s fellow Fight Club alum Edward Norton, who has partnered his late grandfather James Rouse’s affordable-housing nonprofit, Enter-prise Com­munity Partners, with BP to offer low-income families solar power every time a celebrity purchases a compar­able system. Such altruism! This might just excuse him for 25th Hour. Read more at www.bpsolar.com/us. (Click “About BP Solar,” then “Community involvement.”)

Case Study
From looking at examples of beautifully simple wheelchairs at www.whirlwindwheelchair.org, it becomes clear that good design for the disabled is first and foremost good design. The DIY solutions to the many problems faced by people who have “lives with limitations” as featured on www.gearability.com, are further proof of this, inspiring in both their ingenuity and their purpose. A solar-powered wheelchair, designed by Australian rider Bob Triming, takes the inspiration one step further by being environmentally friendly as well: www.infolink.com.au (search “Triming”). On sunny days the solar panels provide his chair with an extra 30 minutes of power, and on rainy days they work as an umbrella. Although its parts are certainly not available all over the world (and you’d probably have to be a military engineer for this to qualify as a DIY project), the Tank Chair, www.tankchair.com, is at its core an expression of the same ideas as Whirlwind, providing an elegant solution to the problems of limited mobility—though in this case the problem being solved is the inability of normal wheelchairs to go off-road or up and down stairs at full speed. Even if you’re not disabled, a working knowledge of wheelchair construction can come in handy if you’re a pet owner or just enjoy putting cute little dogs in wheeled harnesses, as evidenced by these DIY-dachshund-wheelchair instructions from Instructables, “The World’s Biggest Show & Tell”: www.instructables.com/id/Dachshund-wheelchair.

Going Local
Diminished oil supply, according to James Howard Kunstler, is shrinking the United States. In concrete terms, that means no more Target and a New York City the size of Hoboken, New Jersey. That’s the end of the world in our book, so we’ve pledged to fill our final days doing those unseemly things typically reserved for Satur­day night. But first! Peruse our contributor’s Web site, www.kunstler.com. A former Rolling Stone writer, Kunstler maintains an “Eyesore of the Month” column, a thinly veiled hate letter to some of the country’s more “ambitious” architecture. And look! There he is eating sensimilla buds and doing Stoli shots. (See the decidedly un-“boilerplate bio.”) But the best stuff here is his blog. A paranoid, scattershot attack on the American economy, “The Cluster­fuck Nation Chronicle” joins the ranks of www.theoildrum.com, www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, and other dystopian blogs convinced that oil is the original sin. For a fictionalized historical antecedent, see Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil! (Penguin), now adapted for the screen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

Local Inspirations
The Campana brothers’ collaboration with Brazilian shoe designer Melissa, www.melissa.com.br, is the latest in the venerable tradition of jelly shoes that stretches from 1980s Valley Girl fashion to Marc Jacobs (search for “Jelly Ballet” at www.barneys.com) and “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski. As if it wasn’t already cool enough, the latest shoe from Melissa is available exclusively at überhip Paris boutique Colette: www.melissa.com.br/colette, www.colette.fr. The shoe industry must be aggressively courting the Campanas; in their spare time, they’ve been traveling around the world guest-designing Camper stores (see “Growing Up Camper,” in the Octo­ber 2007
issue of Metropolis), like this one in Berlin: www.dezeen.com (search “Camper”). Look for new designs from the Campanas this April at the Salone del Mobile, in Milan, www.cosmit.it, one of the leading furniture trade fairs in the world. New Yorkers should be sure to visit the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum while the Campanas seize control as guest curators through September: www.cooperhewitt.org/exhibitions/selects/campana.asp.

Greening the Edges
Being Fritz Haeg must be so much fun. He lives in a geodesic dome in the Los Angeles hills with his dogs, Oli and Ivy. He hosts outrageous happenings, where acrobats and contortionists fraternize with Russian poets and chefs who build pastry sculptures. He makes people’s homes fun too, enlivening their front yards with animals, or fruit and vegetable gardens. See it all at www.fritzhaeg.com. There you can peruse links to his Sundown Salons, those wild Sunday-evening gatherings with sassy themes like “hot-rods n’ hotpants” and “lttr: lesbians to the rescue.” Move along to Edible Estates to see photos of his latest gardening project or read an excerpt from his new book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn (Metropolis Books, 2008). One thing to avoid: the video posted on June 18, 2007, under “News” (scroll down in the “Edible Estates” section). Com­missioned by the Tate Modern, it traces the evolution of an Edible Estate in London’s Southwark neighborhood in far too much detail. “At the moment, the lawn is being used as a dog-pooping ground,” one resident announces while the camera pans the field. Yuck! Haeg’s showing at the Whitney Biennial promises to be more sanitary—we hope. Visit www.whitney.org and click “Exhibitions” for information.

Sizing China
The most fascinating thing about early anthropometry was its sunny optimism.
In the publisher’s preface to Signaletic Instructions Including the Theory and Practice of Anthropometrical Identification (Werner Company, 1896), Alphonse Bertillon’s law-enforcement classification system takes the form of a social panacea: “Crime could thus be rooted out, immigration laws effectively enforced, innumerable misunderstandings and much injustice prevented, and all business greatly facilitated.” Naturally, the Nazis ruined everything, taking this idea to its literal conclusion some 40 years later. Though anthropometry and its kooky cousin phrenology have since lost their place in the social-science canon, they remain some-thing of a cultural curio. The London Phrenology Company, www.london-phrenology.com, sells an array of Phrenologica— phrenology busts, phrenology journals, phrenology books—and claims a lofty purpose: “to enlighten the mind on what is and could be.” Anthropometry, meanwhile, has taken a decidedly practical turn with uses in health care, the military, and industrial design. Size China, which promises to outfit Asians with snug snowboarding helmets, is only the most recent example of the latter. “Business greatly facilitated,” indeed. Visit www.sizechina.com.