Reference Page: October 2008

Pet Project
The pet-design A-list gathered this summer for two days of four-legged haute couture at New York’s annual Pet Fashion Week (www.petfashionweek.com). Intrigued? Consider Margoff’s Soirée collection (www.margoff.com). A burgundy anorak lined with orange fuzz probably won’t be a good match for Fido, but the photo gallery of dogs forced to wear the humiliating clothing is enthralling. Striking a very different pose is OoMaLoo (www.oomaloo.com), a family business based in Turkey that, oddly, specializes in both dog and children’s wear. Its sweaters and scarves are hand-knit by women living in poor Istanbul neighborhoods.

Odd Fellows
Castor (www.castordesign.ca) is about as Canadian as can be. Among the Toronto design firm’s offerings: antler headphones, a mounted stag trophy, and the “This is not a f**king Droog light, light.” (Their *s, not ours.) Walrus magazine pegs it lumberjack chic, a burgeoning aesthetic that “doesn’t so much reflect modern Canadian culture as it does other people’s expectations of what it means to be Canadian.” (Search for “lumberjack chic” at www.walrusmagazine.com.) How Canadian! Castor named its new restaurant after the Odd Fellows fraternal order, whose mission—serving the needy—dates back at least as far as George III, when helping others was about as common as French military victories (www.uk.guoofs.com; click on “About” and “GUOOFS History”). Prominent members in the States have included Chief Justice Earl Warren and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, according to one amateur historian, based the New Deal on Odd Fellows principles (www.davislodge.org). Today the organization is a less eccentric lot, though it hasn’t yet reached the banality of the Elks or the Shriners, with their pancake breakfasts and essay contests for sixth graders on “Why I love the American flag.” No, these fellows are still a little, well, odd. Skulls and coffins are their chief symbols, and it’s not strange to find one Houston branch leader swanning about town in a black Jeep, steel serpents coiled over the wheel wells (www.chron.com; search the site’s archives for “Odd Fellows”).

Reforma Movement
Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma (Spanish for “Reform Avenue”) has always been a site for contested politics. In 1864, Maximilian I, the freshly appointed emperor of Mexico, commissioned the broad boulevard (then Paseo del Emperador, or “Emperor Ave­nue”), only to be captured by republicans and executed three years later. The street was renamed and adorned with effigies of the winning camp’s military and lawyerly Pooh-Bahs. (See Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850–1950, published by Routledge in 2002; and Mexico City: A Cultural and Literary Companion, a 2000 title from Interlick Books.) Today glassy hotels and condos rise above La Reforma, yet its radical legacy lives on. In 2006, supporters of the presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador cried foul over election results and closed off the street for more than a month. And then there are the farmer-protesters, annual fixtures on the boulevard, unimpeded by weather, construction, age, or, most notably, clothes. See a video of their, er, cheeky demonstrations on YouTube; search for “Mexico City” and “naked protests.” Viva La Reforma!

Ideas into Action
“Klein Dytham architecture has almost reached a pop-star status in the architecture scene of Tokyo.” That’s one quote greeting visitors to www.klein-dytham.com. (Another is a haiku: “late for work—cherry petals in my hair.”) The firm’s stroke of genius—apart from designing a wedding chapel that opens when the betrothed kiss (www.coolboom.net; search for “Leaf Chapel)—was launching SuperDeluxe (www.super-deluxe.com), a multimedia salon for designers, architects, and artists. It was here that Pecha Kucha Night was born, revitalizing the world of business presentations with a ridiculously simple idea: 20 slides for 20 seconds. Maybe because the name is cute, or maybe because so many designers secretly long for “a pop-star status,” entrepreneurs from Beirut to Detroit have put their own gloss on the six-minute, 40-second format. For a selection, search YouTube for “Pecha Kucha.”

Freedom Check
After 9/11, bizarre upgrades to D.C.’s Capitol Visitor Center brought costs to $621 million—more than double initial projections. (Among the Senate’s requests: a makeup room for primping before public-service announcements; Google “Capitol Visitor Center Debut Again Delayed.”) Tellingly, the project came to be known as “Hastert’s hole,” after the Republican congressman who, while showing no interest in rebuilding New Orleans (“a lot of that place could be bulldozed,” he said in 2005), unleashed pit-bull aides on congressional auditors investigating reports of kickbacks, backdoor deals, and extravagant contracts. (Google “Hastert May Face Post-Election Unrest.”) One of the center’s boasting points is Exhibition Hall, where interactive stations educate visitors about the doings of the U.S. government (www.aoc.gov; click “Capitol Visitor Center” and “Exhibition Hall”). Might we suggest an exhibit on corruption?

Back to the Land
Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia University, has been a proponent of vertical farming since 1999, but apart from his devoted grad students, few Americans knew about his dream to grow Brussels sprouts and spinach in skyscrapers. That changed last June, when Despommier was a guest on the Colbert Report (www.colbertnation.com; search for “Despommier”). Traffic to his Web site, www.verticalfarm.com, jumped from an average 400 daily hits to 400,000 the day after the show, according to the New York Times. (It probably helped that Stephen Colbert called vertical farming “pleasantly phallic.”) Despommier is also sowing the message among the next generation. In 2006 he visited grade schoolers in New Rochelle, New York, and lectured them on vertical farming. Student reaction, posted on his Web site, includes this comment from young Nick: “I would want to be a vertical farmer. The only problem would be that I would be surrounded by food and plants.” The torch is passed.

Innovation from the Innovators
While pondering Masdar City, the eco-topian metropolis now rising in the United Arab Emirates, you might want to dust off your old copy of Dark Side of the Moon to fully enjoy the long, strange trip. Go to www.masdaruae.com (click on “media centre” and “Video Files”) for a video summary of the ambitious plan for the world’s first zero-carbon city; a portentous British narrator and brooding music lend the enterprise the air of a Tim Burton film. Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (www.smithgill.com) claims that its Masdar Headquarters will be “the first mixed-use positive energy building in the world.” That ambition means the prism-like structure—complete with palm trees, indoor fountains, and wind towers—will need a lot of attention to meet its scheduled 2010 completion date. Of course, the UAE has never been known for lax work schedules. Read Human Rights Watch’s take at www.hrw.org; search for “United Arab Emirates overview.”

New Malls, Old Ideas
Some very high-profile architects are reviving the dream of Victor “Father of the Mall” Gruen, the Austro-American architect who thought he could bring downtown to the suburbs. (See a few of the projects at www.daniel-libeskind.com, www.f-o-a.net, www.gabelliniassociates.com, and www.fuksas.it.) The world’s biggest mall, however, which opened three years ago in southern China, seems like Gruen’s worst nightmare. At more than seven million square feet, the South China Mall features a Venetian canal, an indoor rain forest, and a roller-coaster—but almost no customers. Read about this real estate disaster in the National, the new paper from Abu Dhabi, itself no stranger to wild and woolly commercial architecture: www.thenational.ae; search for “Mall of Misfortune.” For a survey of deteriorating malls in the United States, go to www.deadmalls.com, a site compiled by two historians obsessed with so-called grayfields.