Headband Press

Interview with Beinecke Curator Christa Sammons

2010-03-29T12:32:00.012-04:00

It was my great pleasure to sit down recently with Christa Sammons, curator of German literature at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Ms. Sammons, who studied German at Mount Holyoke College and Yale University, began working at the Beinecke Library in 1968 and shared with me some of her most memorable stories about the building and the collection.

Construction of the Beinecke Library, which was designed by Gordon Bunshaft / SOM, began 50 years ago this year. In honor of the anniversary photographs of the original architectural model for the building are featured throughout.

Great thanks are owed to Bryn Savage, a doctoral candidate at Yale and Beinecke enthusiast, for making this possible. Her comments also appear throughout the interview.

(SM) How did your career first begin at the Beinecke Library?

(CS) I was a graduate student and my husband was a professor. I married the professor essentially which would not be allowed these days. I thought when I got married I would sit home and make scones and meat loaf and he said go out and get a job. I had studied in the library for the past four years, so I went to the library and asked for a job. They said there was an opening at the Beinecke, at what was then the circulation desk. While I was still writing my dissertation I was working there at access services as someone who interfaces with the people who come down. I worked at that for two years. At that time I became assigned to work with the librarian of the German collection, because I had a degree in German. Then her husband died and she decided to go back to Germany so I basically fell into the job.

(SM) What part of the building do you work in now?

(CS) I have office on the east side of the building courtyard.

(SM) So you look onto the Noguchi sculpture garden?

(CS) Yes, as we call it the donut, the cube and the pyramid.

(CS) You know the great story about that? One day the first director was coming out of the library and he had E.J. Beinecke with him and they were going out to lunch. An undergrad was sitting on the wall looking down onto the Noguchi and said, “What damn fool paid for those?” E.J. walked up to him and said, “I am the damn fool who paid for those.”

(SM) What do you do in your job? What is a normal day like for you?

(CS) That’s hard to say because I have done so many things. When we were making publications I often liaised with the designers. I am going to retire soon, so now I am cleaning up the German collection which will not have a special curator anymore. I making sure everything has a record. What is the job of a curator at the Beincke? You do a lot of collection development, which means identifying things to add to the collection. That could be through finding donors or collectors and convincing them to give up something from their collection, or purchases from rare book dealers or at auction, and that takes a great deal of time. Then there is specialized reference work. When some aspect of research becomes too complex for a visitor they come to us. We help readers with their projects, identifying sources, etc. It’s a little bit of all kinds of work.

(SM) But you also get the chance to curate exhibitions?

(CS) Oh yes and my colleagues do all kinds of podcasts and blogs, so there is this kind of outreach as you would call it. We publicize the collections. One colleague has poetry readings, another has a lecture series on the history of the book and we have conferences with academic departments at Yale. A lot of my colleagues also teach.

(SM) What are some of your favorite items in the collection?

(CS) I am a book person. I love old books. I suppose personally I love the botanical books, the old natural sciences.

(SM) So not always something in the German collection?

(CS) Oh no because I have worn so many hats there. One of the things I enjoyed most was the last exhibition I did Trees in Fact and Fable. So I basically exhibited illustrated books that showed trees. There is a really diverse collection of tree images in the collection. You never would have thought.

(SM)What do you think makes for a good exhibition?

(CS) To me, and this is just my opinion, is to have something that is visually interesting, something that grabs people. Some of our shows are highly intellectual, they are very specialized. A show, almost like a children’s book, can have two levels: it can have a very visually appealing level so the guy who walks off the street can understand it, but it can also have a deeper structure if someone wants to study and understand it. A good example is the show that is on right now Elements of Style: Fashion and Form at the Beinecke. Louise [Louise Bernard, Curator, Collection of American Literature] is a great scholar. She has just come to us from a faculty position and so she has really thought out stuff about textuality and how these objects relate to literary tradition. There is a really deep intellectual framework to what she had done, but you can walk in off the street and say, “wow, Muriel Draper’s hat and Gertrude Stein’s vest.” You can enjoy it without understanding all of the literary critical apparatus that gives it its shape. So I would always want to make a show that had popular appeal with a deeper structure.

(CS) Exhibitions at the Beinecke are a real challenge from an architectural point of view because we have two long cases and eighteen jewel cases. So if you want to have some kind of narrative in your exhibition it can be hard to divide it up between the cases, and some material just won’t fit.

(CS) The curved book cases were designed to exhibit the book collections of the two Beinecke brothers who were still living when the building opened. The north one had E.J. Beinecke’s Robert Louis Stevenson collection and on the other side F.W. Beinecke’s Western Americana collection. Those cases were made just for that. The lighting has been hard to adapt to any other use, because the light was meant come down and show off those rich bindings.

(SM) Is that the only way to show things, in cases? You could never build a temporary wall or make any other major intervention?

(CS) No, this has been a great difficulty especially to display things like framed art, which generally we now hang in the stack tower. It is not ideal because you have your painting hanging in front of the busy background of all those books.

(SM) How has your perception and the public’s perception of the building changed overtime?

(CS) Well in the great days of the revolution in the 60’s, that was the day of Vietnam and the invasion of Cambodia. It was a time when students were taking over universities and burning them down. That did not happen at Yale. We had a very good president [Kingman Brewster] who kept it stable. First of all, a lot of the agitation that took place happened at the Beinecke plaza and the Beinecke itself was seen as an emblem of authority, money and the ruling class . Conspicuous consumption. It was the emblem of what was wrong. The students had a hunger strike I remember and they camped under the eaves of the Beinecke. It must have been the summer of 68 or 69. The president came out of Woodbridge Hall across the way and gave each student a vitamin pill and shook their hand, and this was how he kept the lid on things at Yale.

(CS) We also suffered from this fortress like reputation. My principal boss, Ralph Franklin, he really made the place more democratic by recruiting students to work there which I think helped the students understand that you can go in there. Back when the Beinecke was conceived, it was like the Grolier Club, a club of upscale wealthy bibliophiles. The Beinecke was like that. A bunch of rich old guys. That perception changed in the 80’s because of students and more readers who came to the library. Now I think it is a focal point of the campus. We throw a good party, we even get requests for weddings.

(SM) The building was an architectural wonder of the time. Has that faded for you at all?

(CS) No but we have had many internal renovations.

(SM) Do you like the building?

(CS) On the outside, no. The inside is lovely. The times have changed and the way we do business has changed so we have had two very major renovations. To accommodate the things we do now, that they did not know we were going to do when the place was designed.

(SM) Like what, what sort of changes in use?

(CS) The people who planned the rare book library, what they did was collected rare books, one by one. Real bibliophile kinds of things, but over the years we have moved to buying complete archives, hundreds of boxes with pages and pages. Not only does it take up a lot of storage room, but it also takes up room to process. It’s difficult to find space to process hundreds of feet of paper. Also the collection and staff have grown. We have run out of space and have offsite storage now.

(SM) Do you ever feel like the building itself is a rare book?

(CS) People call it a treasure box or a jewelry box and I think that is rather true. I have always thought Sterling Library is like a church, the little telephone booths looking like confessionals, and you walk in and there is this altar with “our lady of the bowling ball” standing there [allegorical painting over the circulation desk]. It always seemed to me that the Beinecke book tower was like an altar. A secular altar for books. I think that is meant to be. You come in and you are awed by this tremendous façade of books.

(CS) What I really like about it, especially on a summer day when you are out there on the plaza and it is white and it is hot, and you come up to this building which looks horizontal, and walk in and suddenly it is dark and it’s cold and it’s vertical.

(BS) The building is limited but the online collections are opening up access to people who would have never come into the building.

(CS) It saves wear on books as well. We have some notorious things such as the Voynich manuscript. Have you heard of that? It’s debated how old it is. I think our estimate is 15th or 16th century. The latest German analysis puts it earlier. It’s a manuscript in cipher. It is all written in code and no one has ever cracked it. People think it tells the future of the world. We have always been flooded with requests about it, but now that it is digitized people can check it out for themselves. It’s probably just got recipes for cures and lotions, but it is very exotic looking.

(BS) So is there a Stieglitz collection, or is it only his correspondence with Georgia O’Keefe?

(CS) Oh it is going to be published. The year I curated the American literature, I substituted for a year; I just stood on the phone every single day explaining why people could not read the letters of Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz.

(BS) It was just opened two years ago?

(CS) Yes, Georgia restricted the letters until 25 years after her death. So anyway, I stood by the phone reading off Georgia O’Keefe’s will stating the letters have to remain sealed.

(SM) So nobody read them? Not even the curators?

Whether Donald Gallup read them before they got locked up – I remember them being in the basement in tall metal file cabinets with big padlocks on them. Whether Donald,the curator of American literature and a great friend of Georgia ever read them, I don’t know. No, they were under lock and key. You have to be very careful and about respecting wishes.

(CS) We have photographs too. There is the famous wastebasket collection. Stieglitz was making prints and throwing them away, and Georgia rescued them from the wastebasket. So it’s called the wastebasket collection. She gave it to us with the stipulation that it would never ever be publically displayed.

(BS) It is an interesting record of things. What he did not find interesting or good enough. That is great for research.

(SM) So it will never be publically displayed but can be viewed for research purposes?

(CS) Yes.

(SM) Are there any other items that were off-limits that similar moment of unveiling?

(CS) Ah yes, the diaries of Carl Van Vechten. He was a gentleman who lived in New York City. He was a novelist, a minor novelist, and amateur photographer of great skill. He also fostered the Harlem Renaissance. He was white, he was Dutch, but he took on and sponsored black writers and artists. He photographed these black artists too. It’s very famous.

(CS) Well Uncle Carlo as we call him (laughs). The Beinecke is a place of great references. There is also Uncle Al (Stieglitz) and Ex Po is Ezra Pound. That comes from a little ditty by Joyce-- no T.S. Elliot.

(CS) There was a sealed batch of stuff from Van Vechten that was not to be opened for 25 years after his death or whatever, and the curator was very excited. What was this going to be? Was this going to be the rest of the diaries, some of which were at the New York Public Library? He was so excited about it and there came the great day when we opened it. It was all these scrap books, and it seems that Uncle Carlo was mightily attracted to sailors. Ta-da! There were all these scrap books with cut out pictures of sailors. Alas, it wasn’t the diaries.

(CS) I’ve had stuff in the German collection though. Author Hermann Broch, whom you are not expected to know. He was an Austrian novelist. He was a gentleman with many mistresses, and one of his lady friends was Hannah Arendt. She gave a bunch of stuff, and it was sealed until the death of Broch’s second wife, and of course everyone wanted to see it. So the wife died and we opened the thing. Well it was all of Hannah’s correspondence with the wife. Sometimes you get disappointed. There is too much hype around those things. We try not to accept things with restrictions now.

Raimund Abraham

2010-03-05T20:57:00.004-05:00

One of our favorite architects, Raimund Abraham, passed away earlier this week. Thank you to Justin Fowler for sharing the below reflections on his life and work.

“All you need is a piece of paper, a pencil and the desire to make architecture.”

Austrian-turned New York architect Raimund Abraham recently passed away after his car collided with a Los Angeles city bus. He had just delivered a lecture at SCI-Arc entitled, “The Profanation of Solitude.” A disciple of John Hejduk at Cooper Union, Abraham was perhaps the most uncompromising figure in contemporary architecture, willing to argue for the critical sanctity of the discipline against all forms of corruption. His penchant for fedoras, cigars and sublimely apocalyptic drawings brought him insider acclaim, yet often put him at the margins of a field that has by now largely sought to abandon its critical mandate in favor of getting things built by whatever means necessary.

Abraham won his largest commission, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, by appealing directly to the Austrian parliament in 1996. As he later recounted in the New York Times, “The Austria that I respect and admire is the Austria of the early 20th century, the Austria of Wittgenstein, the Austria that built the most radical housing projects in the world. This is the Austria I celebrate with my building and with my symbolic, very personal protest.” In a similar act of protest, Abraham adopted a U.S. citizenship when Jörg Haider assumed power in Austria in 2000. Such a move, is of course, rare in a global culture of architectural production where many of today’s leading practitioners are more than willing to provide window-dressing for dubious regimes. In many respects, Abraham’s code of conduct was one of negation as a form of preservation, abandoning his country of birth in order to save the memory of its history and its potential; and resisting architecture’s current trajectory in order to retain the autonomy of the discipline.

Self-conscious legend, unapologetic combatant, and a supremely gifted visual craftsman, Abraham made his home within the void from which so many architects have tiptoed away.

Idlewild Airport

2010-03-01T22:07:00.002-05:00

This treasure was found between the pages of an old book this week. The postcard shows the customs facilities at Idlewild Airport (now JFK). The caption on the back describes the "streamlined" customs process at the "36 supermarket-type checkout counters". I can't decide if I am more impressed by the short lines or the luminous ceiling?

More historic photography of the airport here.

Plastics Euphoria

2010-02-28T12:10:00.005-05:00

Are balloons the new symbol of optimism in architecture? During the last few weeks several proposals have been unveiled that resemble or include balloons. It is a little different too than the history of pneumatic structures we normally think of (Kenzo Tange & Frei Otto in Antarctica, Reyner Banham's Un-house or pavilions at the Osaka Expo), since in many of the examples below the balloons have a more symbolic function.

MAD proposal for "Contemplating the Void".

DS+R for Hirshhorn (The least balloon-like from a semiotics standpoint or maybe not?)

SO-IL at PS1

BIG at PS1

My favorite: The Townshift Competition proposal by Paisajes Emergentes. More poetic zeppelin than exuberant childhood relic.

Salton Sea Opera

2010-02-15T21:47:00.013-05:00

If you have a copy of GSD Platform 2, the annual tome of student work produced at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, then you may have come across a project for the Salton Sea Opera pictured above. The project, the work of graduate student Erin Kasimow, was completed as part of a studio organized last year by Mack Scogin. In line with the studio concept students were asked to select a site, and in response the instructor selected a program.

Salton Sea is a lake in California that is more than 35 miles long and fraught with all the melodrama that one would associate with opera. The lake as it stands today was created in 1905 when a swell in the Colorado River over ran the Alamo Canal and filled in a sink over a period of two years. During the 1920’s the area became a tourist attraction as well as a fishery and home to several species of migratory birds. Over time however, the lack of outflow at the lake produced high levels of salinity, which when coupled with industrial run off, has killed local wildlife and turned much of the lake’s perimeter into a wasteland.

The project is compelling in its success at registering the contradictions, conditions and story of the place. Located on an island in the north edge of the lake, the building is sited at the mouth of the Alamo River, the same river which created the lake, but also delivers its toxic levels of salt and chemical run off.

The figure of the building resembles the remains of a squatting prehistoric bird or some other strange creature which might have once occupied the site. The form and program are organized around a centralized fly tower, from which the primary auditorium and several auxiliary performance spaces are suspended in a careful compositional balance – an idea which is interesting given the lake’s constant state of flux.

An exaggerated series of ramps traverse the volumes and allow visitors to oscillate between the experience of the site and the experience of opera, effectively conflating the two. There is an interesting tension here in that from the exterior the building functions as an image as bizarre as the lake itself, yet the interior experience of the building is focused on the performance of opera and viewing the site, and to some extent erodes our awareness of the building at all.

Like other opera houses the project is a beacon, but rather than symbolizing urban or cultural renewal, the Salton Sea Opera is a carefully calibrated reflection of place.

Metropolis Restored

2010-02-15T21:46:00.002-05:00

The recently restored scenes from Metropolis debuted to a snowy Berlin last Friday. More from Der Spiegel:

"After 83 years, Fritz Lang's Sci-Fi classic "Metropolis" has returned to Berlin in its full glory. On Friday night 2,000 fans braved the snowy weather to watch the restored classic at the Brandenburg Gate. It took restorers a year to repair the damage to the newly discovered scenes. They say the original film was much more complex and interesting than just a sci-fi cult classic."

Architecture For a Cold Day

2010-01-31T15:06:00.008-05:00

The Walking Igloo, The Architectural Forum, April 1968

"This eight-legged tortoise is a glass-fiber igloo designed by Architects Cohos, DeLesalle & Evamy of Calgary, Alberta, and manufactured there. It weights all of 480 lbs., which comes to 2/3 lb. per cu. ft. of space enclosed. This particular model is made of 12 orangepeel-shaped sections that can be bolted together in 90 minutes to form a shelter 14 ft. in diameter and 7.5 ft. tall at the center. Other models are lengthened by the use of straight, intermediate sections; and there is a super-igloo currently going up at the North Pole that will house helicopters. It measures 76 ft. long and 17.5 ft. high, and weighs 6,000 lbs. The igloos come in bright colors, and the shells are translucent".

The Sun Sets on Venturi Scott Brown at Yale

2010-01-27T22:26:00.007-05:00

If you are looking for something to do this weekend hop on Metro-North and catch the final weekend of What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven. The exhibitions, there are actually two, showcase some of the original data collected by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and 13 Yale graduate students on their legendary site visit to Las Vegas 40 years ago. Given the iconic status of the resulting publication, it is really exciting to see these previously archived treasures first hand. The exhibition also covers their firm's later work with a focus on urbanism but also including buildings (the obligatory model of Venturi's mother's house is in there) and design objects from dinner ware to chairs.

The exhibition and companion symposium at Yale were just some of the events which have put the couple back on the architectural map. Denise also recently released a collection of essays titled Having Words which traces the evolution of her thinking about architecture and urbanism. The book was celebrated back in December at the Municipal Arts Society in the form of a conversation between Denise, Sarah Whiting and Hillary Sample, with moderation from Paola Antonelli. Ironically, this was technically the first event I covered on behalf of Headband Press, but somehow the potency of the group did not pan out into a really meaningful conversation.

My favorite of these nostalgic trips is the June 2009 special issue of A+U, Venturi and Scott Brown: What Turns Them On, which is an interview between the couple and OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu. Below are a few cute excerpts from the interview as well as snap shots of the exhibition which closes February 5th.

A few fun moments out of the A+U issue in no particular order:

#1 DSB: My mother had studied architecture, she was part of the group that initiated the change to modernism at the university. And there is a letter from Le Corbusier to students in that Johannesburg group in 1936 saying can't you find a very rich client there and I'll come out and we'll all do a project together.... My mother took gymnastics exercises with a woman who had connections with the Bauhaus. One of her claims to fame was that at a Bauhaus party she had danced with Jean Arp.

#2 DSB: I picked up the Smithsons' 'active socioplastics'. I still think it's a pretty nice idea but when the Smithsons actually tried to put it into effect and by working with sociologists to understand how people really live, how they have a street life, the things the Brutalists were talking about, they found the sociologists could not bend to them, and they could not bend to the sociologists. So they said no to active socioplastics. But I did not, though I had to come to America to find people to help with this problem and to learn it was no use asking sociologists to interpret their knowledge for me.

#3 RV: Denise once came out with this wonderful statement, its a bit pretentious, but sort of fun, about being misunderstood. Freud was not Freudian, Marx was not a Marxist, and ....

DSB: And we're not post-Modernists.

RV: We're not post-Modernist. Venturi is not post-Modernist.

#4 SS: When I first read your books, it was very interesting how provocative they were, and I was almost jealous that someone had something to react to so strongly.

#5 RV reading from is essay the Vision Thing: Creeps who talk about vision make me sick and suspicious. I say screw you to vision. Up your's to visionaries. Vision sucks. What a supreme irony that those who proclaim and pursue vision are least likely to attain it. Vision is not something you attain by consciously or heroically trying. It's achieved via indirection.

Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas

2010-01-24T21:26:00.000-05:00

The Aula Magna, part of the University of the City of Caracas designed by Carlos Villanueva, is easily one of my favorite architecture projects of all time, so I was completely delighted to come across this set of 21 pamphlets which document all of the Villanueva designed buildings on the campus.

Created in 2007 by the Fundacion Centro de Arquitectura Caracas, the booklets are essentially a reorganization of the materials prepared in support of the project's nomination as a UNESCO world heritage site. Each pamphlet represents a different building or public space on campus with photography, drawings and text. The boxed set format of the publication is very successful in its ability to communicate the incredible quantity of buildings Villanueva designed in one place.

The project is praised as "a masterpiece of modern city planning, architecture and art" and a "coherent realization of the urban, architectural, and artistic ideals of the early 20th century" but for me the campus is so compelling for its strange blend of the sensual and the melancholic.

Thanks to friend, lighting designer and native Venezuelan, Francesca Bastianini for brining this book to my attention and for the incredible photography of the campus below.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront

2010-01-15T22:57:00.000-05:00

So I think this is going to be really good, and I don't say that about everything that comes out of the architecture and design department at the MoMA.

Five teams including ARO/dland Studio, LTL, nArchitects, Mathew Baird Architects and SCAPE, participated in an eight week residency at PS1 to create landscape and urban design propositions in response to the rising water levels which will impact New York City as a result of climate change. The teams who each worked on a different site in New York harbor (pictured above) presented their work on January 9th to a standing room crowd at PS1.

The work was introduced by chief curator and exhibition organizer Barry Bergdoll, who explained that the idea for the project is a critique of hard infrastructure and "shovel ready" projects -- which Bergdoll believes "shut down innovation." Bergdoll further argued that climate change is an urban problem that must be addressed, but rather than a doomsday scenario he offered the Rising Currents project as an optimistic exploration of design potential that comes from an unpleasant reality.

What we get IS a lot of potential. Collectively, the five propositions envision a New York whose edges become porous allowing water to enter the city and enliven its public spaces. Teams also employed ecological solutions including new plant life, artificial islands and colonies of oysters to control water levels and minimize the impact of storm surge. The result is new urban conditions that we have never seen before, and this is exciting. More important perhaps is the shift in attitude that occurs in these propositions. Rather than evading nature, they are allow it to come in and make the city a more interesting place.

The one item that does raise eye brows is the participant selection. Most of the selected teams are architects with very thin or no urban design portfolios. For a project that has the potential to provide landscape and urban design with an unprecedented amount of public attention, why were so many of their best thinkers left out? This is not to deny the importance of SCAPE on the participant roster. Kate Orff is one the most refreshing landscape designers in recent memory and I am very excited to see her working here.

Final proposals will be on view at MoMA beginning March 24th.

Pictured below in order are presentation slides from ARO/dland Studio, LTL and SCAPE.

Letters from OMA

2010-01-15T22:23:00.000-05:00

One of the perks of being a former OMA employee (aside from no longer working 20 hours a day) is that you occasionally wake up to a new releases from the office announcing a new commission or winning competition entry. Such was the case this morning when I received an email detailing the win of Chu Hai College Campus in Hong Kong. Below are a few images and an excerpt of the concept description from the press release.

"OMA conceived a building that consists of two parallel horizontal slabs connected by a ‘mat’ of social and educational facilities. The slabs, each eight stories high, contain flexible space for classrooms, studios, and offices. Their aerated structural facades provide a visual unity for the campus, and allow views into the inner workings of the buildings and out over Castle Peak Bay and its verdant surrounding hills. The slabs are oriented to maximise natural ventilation, reducing air conditioning demands by 15–30 per cent and contributing to an efficient, sustainable design.

Connecting the two slabs, the mat contains the library, cafeteria, gym, and lecture theatres. On top of this mat OMA has designed a shaded area of steps, platforms, and ramps that acts as a circulation system between the various educational and social facilities. Crucially, this ramp coincides with the slope of the existing hill on the site, grounding the new campus firmly within the landscape.

OMA’s concentrated and efficient design for the campus allows several of the original British army buildings on the site to be preserved. These buildings will be used for accommodation, student union and canteen facilities."

Bess Krietemeyer at Hendershot Gallery

2010-01-09T21:20:00.000-05:00

This is the last week to enjoy the work of designer Bess Krietemeyer as part of Architecturally.../ a series of installations on display at the Hendershot Gallery in Chelsea. Krietemeyer's installation is a video which approximates the effects of a daylighting system she has been developing as part of her doctoral research at Rensselaer Polytechnic. In this instance however, she leaves the science behind to create a video installation which is a stand alone work in itself.

The video feels like a contemporary update of Edward Hopper paintings like Room in Brooklyn or Night Windows, as we the viewer find ourselves again staring out a triptych of windows that might appear in an a typical brownstone apartment. Unlike in a Hopper where we look out on the shock of modernity, in Krietemeyer's video our view is obstructed by a white gridded field making wave-like pulsations across the windows. This time we are wrapped in a strange technological membrane which produces the same sense of melancholy and isolation that Hopper's figure always seem to exude.

The video takes us through a twenty-four hour period of daylight and dark which effect the grid's constantly changing speed and aperture. The result is atmospheric, haunting and not to be missed.

The Beast Must Die

2010-01-09T17:46:00.000-05:00

Remnants from Afterparty, the woolly mammoth-like winner of the 2009 MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program created by Michael Meredith and Hillary Sample of MOS. We miss partying under your prehistoric carcass.

urbanSHED

2010-01-08T20:30:00.000-05:00

Thursday, January 7th, 6:00-8:00 pm, at the Center for Architecture

So you may remember that this summer that the AIA and the New York City Department of Buildings sponsored a competition to redesign (err, design in the first place) the sidewalk sheds that currently protect New York city pedestrians from from the falling debris of buildings under construction. More than simply being ugly, the current sheds do not feel safe to walk under and their presence often proves fatal to small businesses, so a change was certainly overdue.

The competition finalists presented their work on Thursday evening at the Center for Architecture. The three finalists (which are pictured in order below) included: Tripod MOD(ule) by XChange Architects, Urban Umbrella by Young Hwan Choi and Urban Cloud by KNEstudio. I was impressed by how robust and complete all three proposals were. Finalists collaborated with structural engineers, cost estimators and lighting consultants to come up with three very viable and ready to be built designs.

Entries from the three selected finalists are all very different. Tripod MOD(ule) moves to accommodate the width of the street and is clean and minimal in appearance; Urban Umbrella operates on the structural logic of the umbrella; and Urban Cloud provides shelter with a field of truncated diamonds that are illuminated. I didn't leave the presentation with a clear favorite, but having sometime to digest the schemes I would favor the Tripod MOD(ule) for its simplicity and lack of association with any particular aesthetic. In ten years this shed won't look dated the way the other two schemes might.

While each of the schemes improves the experience of being under a sidewalk shed, they don't radically altar the structural framework. We are still standing under a roof with two or more columns. I kept wishing for an option with an unobstructed cantilever to appear, which seems like the most ideal condition. The winner will be announced later this month and then installed at the Department of Buildings on 280 Broadway. An exhibition on the competition continues through January at the Center for Architecture.

Little Magazines

2009-12-20T15:38:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-20T13:27:00.000-05:00

The Lever House Archives

2009-12-15T21:20:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-12T12:48:00.000-05:00

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/