Little Magazines

The above retro-spoof versions of web services appeared on blogs last week to my delight. The Penguin inspired series designed by Stéphane Massa-Bidal made me laugh but also reminded me of a wonderful online resource which documents the exibition Clip/Stamp/Fold.

Clip/Stamp/Fold is the outcome of a two-year research project undertaken by students in the doctoral program at Princeton and led by Beatriz Colomina. The exhibition first appeared in 2007 at Storefront (pictured below) and has since traveled to the CCA, Documenta, the AA and is currently at the Colegio de Arquitectos de Murcia until January 17th.

The website devoted to the exhibition includes a clickable timeline of magazines from 1962 to 1979, with each pop up providing information about the contents and relevance of the featured issue. Also interesting are the small talks, a series of four video conversations between architects who created magazines during this period including members of archigram, Stefano Boeri, Tony Vidler, Ken Frampton, Hal Foster and several others.

The site also includes a press archive and images of the exhibition in its varying locations.

It also appears that there is a forthcoming publication on the exhibition from ACTAR. While I could not find specific details, Amazon has the release date set at February 2010.

There is really nothing else out there like Clip/Stamp/Fold. This is one of the few organized research efforts around architecture publications which not only documents magazines but also ackowledges their significance as sites for the production of architecture culture.

Landscape Urbanism

The Lever House Archives

Just before Thanksgiving, Stephaine Murg at UnBeige reported on the removal of Hello Kitty and friends from the Lever House. The scaled up toys created by Tom Sachs, had occupied the garden outside the landmark building since the Summer of 2008. Murg hoped that the sculptures which were forklifted off site and shuttled down Park Avenue, would be on their way to "glass-walled International Style office buildings in need of cheering up."

Since I am less convinced that Sanrio is a solution to the problems of modernity, I thought it would be fun to look back at the Lever House during the time of its original completion in 1952. Or is nostalgia worse than kitsch?

Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books

Tuesday, December 8, 6:30 – 8:00 p.m., at the Municipal Arts Society

This week Headband was at MAS for the launch of Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books. The book, based on a rotating exhibition at the Urban Center, is a voyeuristic peak into the personal libraries of twelve of the discipline’s figureheads including Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi and Diller/Scofidio. Unpacking My Library begins with an excerpt from Walther Benjamin’s Illuminations and includes brief interviews with the architects, a list of their top ten books, as well as information on the design and construction of their libraries.

Among the shelves of these libraries are rare first editions we may have never seen before and out of print gems to be coveted. Headband is especially envious of Stan Allen’s Oppostions Readers and Toshiko Mori’s copy of Mask of Medusa. But what readers are ultimately after in Unpacking My Library are insights into the influences, tastes and personalities of these twelve architects.

The group builds consensus around a few books including Complexity and Contradiction and Gravity’s Rainbow, while the heavy hitters of critical theory and philosophy are also well-represented on shelves and reading lists. Surprisingly some of the favorite finds in the libraries are decorative rather than intellectual. Model military ships are spotted in Michael Sorkin’s library and toy Porsches punctuate Tschumi’s shelves, while Michael Graves adorns his entire collection with miniature columns made from PVC pipe. More tender insights come from interviews in the book where Eisenman explains that his love for reading grew out of cultural isolation during two years of military service in Korea, and elsewhere Mori describes the lessons she learned from John Hejduk while she was a student at the Cooper Union.

The book concludes with the library of husband and wife Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Their whimsical collection and book recommendations, including children’s books like Harold and the Purple Crayon, fiction from Joan Didion to Nabokov, and tsotchkes like toy chairs, antlers and a soup can filled with daffodils, provide another episode of lightness in a book which might otherwise seem too self-conscious. Unpacking My Library is generally a very sweet book and it’s easy to imagine sequel editions with younger architects or a mixture of professionals from different art and design disciplines.

The book was celebrated with a discussion between Stan Allen, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, and moderated by MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll. Below are my notes and recollections from the discussion.

Introduction
Bergdoll opens the discussion with a history of the library, detailing the earliest art and architecture libraries and then citing an article from that day's times which stated that every 4 hours Google indexes an amount of information equivalent to the Library of Congress. He also references the Bauhaus show currently at MoMA and notes that the Bauhaus had no library but it did have a printing press.

How were shelves selected for the shoot and was any editing or clean up was done in advance?
Stan Allen: Only his Princeton library was photographed, and the shelves MAS selected were ones out of reach. He describes most of the books in his library as teaching tools.

Are there any embarrassing books in your collection?

Billie Tsien: Ayn Rand, although she confesses that she does not read architecture books.

Stan Allen: Pulp Mysteries from the 60’s.

Tod Williams: The books he loves as objects but has never read, 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

Are your libraries accumulations or collections?
All three architects suggest they are accumulations, and that no effort has been made to collect or preserve certain books.

What was book culture like when you were students (Bergdoll recalls the anecdote about Gropius burning all the books at the GSD)?
Tod Williams: Everyone read Towards a New Architecture.

Billie Tsien: Mentions the importance of Complexity and Contradiction and Vincent Scully. Believes most architecture books are poorly written, or at least not are not as engaging as fiction. Complexity and Contradiction is an exception for her.

Stan Allen: Describes how books use to be events. He can clearly recall when books like Delirious New York or Mathematics of the Ideal Villa were released and the excitement that surrounded them. He says that this sort of consensus around the event of the book is missing in architecture culture today.

Why did so many people select Complexity and Contradiction?
Stan Allen: It’s a manual on how to read architecture.

Which books you would recommend to students?
Stan Allen: Princeton has developed a reading list for incoming students, mostly made up for primary sources.

Billie Tsien: MFK Fisher. Billie talked again and again about how she enjoyed fiction more than architecture, believing that fiction was much more engaging than architecture writing. She mentioned food writer MFK Fisher stating that she appreciated the sensual quality of her writing.

What is your ideal monograph?
Billie Tsien: Billie suggests that you are constantly making books as a practicing architect ex. proposals, presentations books to clients, etc. “Graphic presentation is parallel to the design practice." Billie and Tod are currently working on a book and she calls their editorial method flashlight – to search for the one special thing and to delve deeply into it.

Selection of Audience Questions

What sort of architecture would you design for readers who use Kindle?
Billie Tsien: The first thing that comes to mind is a business class seat on British Airways.

Barry Bergdoll also describes the popularity of Starbucks among freelancers; people who could easily work at home but take their laptops to Starbucks – which he argues look like many conventional library reading rooms – out of a desire to read/work/learn in a communal space.

The release of books use to be an event (to Stan Allen) and now there is a book launch almost every night. Can you talk about what that means for architecture?
Stan Allen ultimately thinks is a good thing that it’s easy to publish and that so many different voices can now be heard. Overtime the books that are still great, that really influence architecture culture will remain.

The exhibition, pictured above, is on display at MAS through February 2010. More information is available at http://www.unpackingmylibrary.org/