A quick heads up. For the next few days (until January 27) you can watch Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future, the latest installment from the PBS American Masters series. Here’s the PBS blurb for the episode.
Best known for designing National Historic Landmarks such as St. Louis’ iconic Gateway Arch and the General Motors Technical Center, Saarinen also designed New York’s TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Yale University’s Ingalls Rink and Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges, Virginia’s Dulles Airport, and modernist pedestal furniture like the Tulip chair.
In the film, Saarinen’s son, Eric Saarinen, “visits the sites of his father’s work on a cathartic journey, shot in 6K with the latest in drone technology that showcases the architect’s body of timeless work for the first time. The documentary also features rare archival interviews with Eero and his second wife, The New York Times art critic Aline Saarinen, as well as letters and quotations from Aline’s memoirs voiced respectively by Peter Franzén and Blythe Danner.”
Traditional Japanese carpentry, whether used to build a dinner table or the entire house containing it, doesn’t use screws, nails, adhesives, or any other kind of non-wooden fastener. So how do its constructions hold together? How have all those thousands of wooden houses, tables, and countless other objects and structures stood up for dozens and even hundreds of years, and so solidly at that? The secret lies in the art of joinery and its elaborate cutting techniques refined, since its origin in the seventh century, through generations and generations of steadily increasing mastery — albeit by a steadily dwindling number of masters.
“Even until recent times when carpentry books began to be published, mastery of these woodworking techniques remained the fiercely guarded secret of family carpentry guilds,” writes Spoon & Tamago’s Johnny Strategy. If you find it difficult to grasp how simply cutting two pieces of wood in a certain way could unite them as if they’d grown together in the first place, have a look at a Twitter feed called The Joinery, run by a young enthusiast who has collected a great many of these carpentry books. He’s used them, in combination with mechanical design software skills presumably honed in his career in the auto industry, to create elegantly animated visual explanations of Japanese carpentry’s tried-and-true joinery methods.
Archdaily points to the work of architect Shigeru Ban as one example of how this “uniquely Japanese wood aesthetic” has survived into the modern day, but the man behind The Joinery imagines even more ambitious possibilities: “3D printing and woodworking machinery has enabled us to create complicated forms fairly easily,” he tells Spoon & Tamago. “I want to organize all the joinery techniques and create a catalog of them all,” so that anyone with the tools might potentially make use of their beauty and sturdiness in hitherto unimagined new contexts. And so another traditional Japanese craft that has looked doomed to outmoded oblivion, what with all the more advanced and efficient fabrication and construction techniques developed over the past 1400 years, may well thrive in the future. To learn more about the art of joinery, you’ll want to explore this 1995 book, The Complete Japanese Joinery.
Taught by Yale professor Diana E. E. Kleiner, this course offers “an introduction to the great buildings and engineering marvels of Rome and its empire, with an emphasis on urban planning and individual monuments and their decoration, including mural painting.”
The course description continues: “While architectural developments in Rome, Pompeii, and Central Italy are highlighted, the course also provides a survey of sites and structures in what are now North Italy, Sicily, France, Spain, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and North Africa. The lectures are illustrated with over 1,500 images, many from Professor Kleiner’s personal collection.”
You can watch the 24 lectures above, or find the complete lecture set on YouTube and iTunes. To get more information on the course, including the syllabus, please visit Yale’s website.
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Sketchup renderings of the Library of Babel. Images courtesy of Jamie Zawinski.
Fulfilling the maxim “write what you know,” Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges penned one of his most extraordinary and bewildering stories, “The Library of Babel,” while employed as an assistant librarian. Borges, it has been noted—by Borges himself in his 1970 New Yorker essay “Autobiographical Notes”—found the work dreary and unfulfilling: “nine years of solid unhappiness,” as he put it plainly. “Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears.”
And yet, for all of its tedium, his library position suited his needs as a writer like none other could. “I would do all my library work in the first hour,” he remembers, “and then steal away to the basement and pass the other five hours in reading or writing.” During those stolen hours, Borges dreamed up a library the size of the universe, “composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.” Like so many of the objects and places in Borges’ stories, this fantastic structure, Escher-like, is both vividly described and impossible to imagine.
Many have tried their hand at visually rendering the Library of Babel, but according to programmer Jamie Zawinski, “past attempts,” writes Carey Dunne at Hyperallergic, “aren’t faithful to the text,” omitting crucial structures like the “sleep chamber, lavatory, and hallway” and screwing up “the placement of the spiral stairway.” You can see Zawinski’s various critiques of these supposed failures on his blog, JWZ. And you may wonder how it’s even possible to construct an accurate model of a structure that may have no finite boundaries and whose internal architecture the story itself calls into question. Nonetheless, Zawinski has boldly given it a try.
Using the 3D modeling program Sketchup, he has designed what he believes to be a model superior to the rest, though he admits “I don’t think this is quite right either.” If you’re wondering “Why is he doing this?” Zawinski writes, “you and I have that in common.” The Borgesian task, like that of the librarian, is an endless one, pursued with scholastic rigor for its own sake rather than for some great reward. And once one enters the labyrinth of his twisting designs, there may be no way out but eternally through. “The possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication,” writes Borges wearily of certain librarians’ attempts to solve the library’s riddles, “or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.”
So Zawinski trudges on. His “wrestling with the details of his rendering,” writes Dunne, “his obsessive analysis of the wording of Borges’ description, recalls the library inhabitants’ futile quests to decipher the mysteries of the library.” The programmer’s admirable attention to the physics of the space may at times sound like a rather leaden way to approach what is essentially an elaborate metaphor: “I can’t help but think about the weight and pressure of a column of air that high,” he muses in his initial explorations, “and what is it sitting on, and how to route the plumbing from all of those toilets, and that toilets imply digestion, so where does the food come from?”
Such questions take him far afield of Borges’ theo-philosophical parable: “Is there a section of the library devoted to farming, and metallurgy?” Nonetheless, Zawinski’s detailed analysis has produced a visualization of the space like none other, and he admits to “overthinking a sub-infinite but nearly boundless hill of beans.” Borges’ imaginary librarian has abandoned trying to solve the library’s mysteries. Humbled by the failures of those who came before him, he persists in the “elegant hope” that the library “is unlimited and cyclical… repeated in the same disorder… which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order.” He wisely leaves the ultimate metaphysical discovery, however, to “an eternal traveler” with infinite time on their hands.
As much as we admire buildings designed by genius architects, we have to admit that — sometimes, just sometimes — those genius architects themselves can be control freaks. These tendencies manifest with a special clarity when a maker of individual structures turns his mind toward building, or knocking down and re-building, the city as a whole. The Cartesian grid of lookalike towers on the green of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City stand (or rather, the project having gone unbuilt, don’t stand) as perhaps the best-known image of urbanism re-envisioned to suit a single architect’s desires. In response, Frank Lloyd Wright came up with an urban Utopia of his own: Broadacre City.
“Imagine spacious landscaped highways,” Wright wrote in 1932, “giant roads, themselves great architecture, pass public service stations, no longer eyesores, expanded to include all kinds of service and comfort. They unite and separate — separate and unite the series of diversified units, the farm units, the factory units, the roadside markets, the garden schools, the dwelling places (each on its acre of individually adorned and cultivated ground), the places for pleasure and leisure.
All of these units so arranged and so integrated that each citizen of the future will have all forms of production, distribution, self improvement, enjoyment, within a radius of a hundred and fifty miles of his home now easily and speedily available by means of his car or plane.”
Those words appeared inThe Disappearing City, a sort of manifesto about Wright’s hope for the industrial metropolis of the early 20th century: that it would go away. He “hated cities,” writes The New Yorker’s Morgan Meis. “He thought that they were cramped and crowded, stupidly designed, or, more often, built without any sense of design at all.” Visitors to 2014’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright and the Citycould behold not just Wright’s sketches of Broadacre City but a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot model of the (to the architect) ideal place, a re-thinking of the urban with the sensibilities of the rural. Almost eighty years before, 40,000 visitors to Rockefeller Center who first saw the model saw it emblazoned with such straightforward declarations as “No slum,” “No Scum,” and “No traffic problems.”
Nelson Rockefeller supported the idea of Broadacre city, as did Albert Einstein and John Dewey, all of whom signed a petition Wright passed around in its favor in 1943. But “even in the 1930s, urban planners were disgusted by Broadacre,” writes Next City’s Katherine Don. “Its philosophy was deeply individualistic; its layout was conspicuously wasteful. Liberals of the time who emulated the socialist spirit of Europe classified Wright as an anti-government eccentric, which indeed he was.” Matt Novak at Paleofuture describes Wright’s utopia as “ultimately an extension of the things that made him personally comfortable: open spaces, the automobile, and not surprisingly, the architect as master controller.”
Though Wright and Le Corbusier “shared an interest in dismantling the recognizable urban fabric, they had different ideas about what should replace it,” writes City Journal’s Anthony Paletta. The architect of Fallingwater thought it best for the city “not to be rationalized but to be pastoralized. Urban ills were to be diluted by ample helpings of prairie soil.” By the time he died in 1958, a sprawling postwar America had wholeheartedly adopted his “new standard of space measurement — the man seated in his automobile.” But nothing as techno-pastoral paradisiacal as a Broadacre ever came into being, and indeed, the suburbs turned out to grow in a fashion even more haphazard and irrational than the one that so disgusted him in traditional cities. Then again, a true perfectionist — and a true artist — must grow accustomed to such disappointments.
I was surprised there’s an actual, medical name for it: pareidolia, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful, image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.”
Thomas Lamadieu, the artist whose work is showcased above, has a different, but not wholly unrelated condition.
Most of us prefer to contemplate the heavens in a bucolic setting. Lamadieu’s art compels him to look upwards from a more urban landscape. The tops of the buildings hemming him in supply with irregularly shaped frames, which he captures using a fish eye lens. Later, he fills them in with Microsoft Paint drawings, which frequently feature a bearded man whose t‑shirt is striped in sky blue. Negative space, not Crayola, supplies the color here.
Think of it as street art in the sky.
Not every day can be a brilliant azure, but it hardly matters when even Lamadieu’s grayest views exhibit a determined playfulness. It takes a very unique sort of eye to tease a pink nippled, stripe-limbed bunny from a steely UK sky.
Like many street artists, he takes a global approach, traveling the world in search of giant unclaimed canvases. His portfolio contains vistas originally captured in Hong Kong, South Korea, Germany, Spain, Austria, Canada, Belgium, and the United States, as well as his native France.
“The bearded man in my images stands for the sky itself,” he told The Independent, adding that his is a wholly secular vision.
“For average prospective house owners the choice between the hysterics who hope to solve housing problems by magic alone and those who attempt to ride into the future piggy back on the status quo, the situation is confusing and discouraging.” Those words, as much as they could describe the situation today, actually came printed in Arts & Architecture magazine’s issue of June 1945.
“Therefore it occurs to us that the only way in which any of us can find out anything will be to pose specific problems in a specific program on a put-up-or-shut-up basis.” What the magazine, at the behest of its publisher John Entenza, put up was the Case Study Houses, which defined the ideal of the midcentury modern American home.
More specifically, they defined the ideal of the midcentury modern southern Californian home. Los Angeles provided a promising environment for many of the formidable European minds who came to America around the Second World War, including writers like Aldous Huxley, composers like Arnold Schoenberg, and philosophers like Theodor Adorno. Architects, such as the earlier arrival Richard Neutra, especially thrived in the young city’s vast space and under its bright sun, giving shape to a new kind of twentieth-century house, one influenced by the rigorously clean aesthetics of the German Bauhaus movement but adapted to a much friendlier climate, both in terms of the weather and the freedom from strict tradition.
Even if you don’t know architecture, you know the Case Study houses from their countless appearances in movies, television, and print over the past seventy years. Sooner or later, everyone sees an image of Neutra’s Stuart Bailey House, Charles and Ray Eames’ Eames House, or Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House. The decades have turned these and other houses from the peak of midcentury modernism into priceless architectural treasures — or at least extremely high-priced architectural treasures. Some open themselves to tours now and again, but very few of us will ever have a chance to experience these houses as not quasi-museums but actual livable spaces.
Now we have the next best thing in the form of the University of Southern California’s Architectural Teaching Slide Collection, which collects about 1300 rarely seen photographs of midcentury modern houses shot all over the western United States from the 1940s to the 1960s by Koenig himself, along with his colleague Fritz Block, who also happened to own a color slide company. “Instead of the polished tableaus you might find in the pages of Architectural Digest,” writes Hyperallergic’s Carey Dunne, “these spontaneous snapshots capture quirky and more intimate views.” Koenig and Block captured these houses “with an architect’s geometrically minded and detail-oriented eye, never presenting them as mere real estate.” The archive also offers images of models, blueprints, and other such technical materials.
Arts & Architecture meant to commission ideas for the everyman’s house of the future, “subject to the usual (and sometimes regrettable) building restrictions,” “capable of duplication,” and “in no sense… an individual ‘performance.’ ” Yet American midcentury modern houses, from the Case Study Program or elsewhere, all came out as individual performances, but also the first works of architecture many of us get to know as works of art. And the work of architectural photographers like Julius Shulman, especially his iconic shot of the Stahl House high above the illuminated grid of Los Angeles, has done much to instill in viewers a reverence suited to art. A collection of non-standard views like these, though, reminds us that even the most visionary house is a real place. Enter the USC archive here.
What do we do with all the dead malls? Anyone with an eye on the years-long spate of unambiguous headlines — “The Death of the American Mall,”“The Economics (and Nostalgia) of Dead Malls,”“America’s Shopping Malls Are Dying A Slow, Ugly Death” — knows that the question has begun to vex American cities, and more so American suburbs. But just twenty years ago (which I remember as the time of my own if not mall-centric then often mall-oriented adolescence), nobody could have foreseen the end of the large, enclosed shopping mall as an American institution — nobody except Douglas Coupland.
“On August 11 1992 I was in Bloomington, Minnesota, close to Minneapolis,” remembers the Generation X author in a recent Financial Times column. “I was on a book tour and it was the grand opening day of Mall of America, the biggest mall in the US.” He took the stage to give a live radio interview and the host said, “I guess you must think this whole mall is kind of hokey and trashy.” No such thing, replied Coupland: “I feel like I’m in another era that we thought had vanished, but it really hasn’t, not yet. I think we might one day look back on photos of today and think to ourselves, ‘You know, those people were living in golden times and they didn’t even know it.’”
Golden times or not, they now look unquestionably like the high watermark of the era when “malls used to be cool.” Coupland describes the shopping mall as “the internet shopping of 1968,” but they go back a bit farther: 1956, to be precise, the year the Southdale Center, the very first enclosed, department store-anchored mall of the form that would spread across America and elsewhere over the next forty years, opened in Edina, Minnesota. You can see vintage color footage of the Southdale Center in all its midcentury glory — its auto showroom, its playground, its full-service Red Owl grocery, its umbrella-tabled cafés under a vast atrium, and outside, of course, its even vaster parking lot — at the top of the post.
“You have no idea what an innovation this was in the 1950s,” says writer and midcentury Minnesota enthusiast James Lileks. “There wasn’t any place where you could sit ‘outside’ in your shirt-sleeves in January.” I used that quote when I wrote a piece for the Guardian on the Southdale Center, an institution easily important enough for their History of Cities in 50 Buildings (as well as PBS’ television series Ten Buildings that Changed America), whether you love them or hate them. The Austrian architect Victor Gruen, who came to America in flight from the Nazis, hated them, but he also created them; or rather, he envisioned the oases of rich Viennese urbanity for his new country that would, corrupted by American reality, quickly become shorthand for “consumerist” suburban life at its blandest.
Malcolm Gladwell tells that story in full in his New Yorker profile of Gruen and the creation he disowned: “He revisited one of his old shopping centers, and saw all the sprawling development around it, and pronounced himself in ‘severe emotional shock.’ Malls, he said, had been disfigured by ‘the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking’ around them.” Given Gruen’s final pronouncement on the matter — “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments” — one imagines he would applaud the shopping mall’s present day devolution.
“Where is the gracious Muzak’ed trance of yore?” asks Coupland as he surveys America’s blighted mallscape today. “Where is the civility? The calm covered with plywood sheeting and graffiti, and filled with dead tropical plants and shopping carts missing wheels, they’ve basically entered the realm of backdrops for science fiction novels and movies and I’m OK with that. Change happens.” Change, in the form of thorough remodeling and modernization, has also happened to the Southdale Center, but the mall that started it all remains in business today, all rumors of its own imminent demise seemingly exaggerated.
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