Book Review: Two Magazines

Boundaries 9: Do It Yourself Architecture
July-September 2013

MONU #20: Geographical Urbanism
April 2014

As more and more magazines of various ilks cease publication each year (87 in 2013 according to one source, though over 100 started in the same period) or fold into all-digital versions, it's always good to see titles going strong, particularly in the realms of architecture and urbanism. Even with the difficulties in running print media, two titles that continue their own unique and uncompromising paths of exploration are Boundaries out of Italy, which is "entirely devoted to sustainable architecture and cooperative projects, focusing particularly on places where new developments and ideas in architecture are arising," and MONU out of the Netherlands, the self-described Magazine ON Urbanism "that focuses on the city in a broader sense, including its politics, economy, geography, ecology, its social aspects, as well as its physical structure and architecture." Here I feature recent issues of each magazine.



The photograph accompanying Luco Sampo's editorial to issue 9 of Boundaries shows two men in Burundi sawing a large tree trunk long-wise down the middle, a seemingly insurmountable task aided by leaning it at an angle upon an armature of smaller timber and by one pretty impressive saw. The photo is very telling relative to the issue's theme, not just because the two men are "doing it themselves," but because the enormous expenditure of labor is front and center. And while the idea of D.I.Y. (even in the sense of weekend projects in American suburbs) is importantly based on the end user doing what the end user wants, as opposed to it being done by somebody else, I'd argue that labor is key in the endeavor.

The investment of labor in constructing a building – be it sawing tree trunks, ramming earth, stacking stones, filling sandbags, or one of the many other acts depicted in the issue – is a source of pride, but it is also the best means for understanding how a building works, how it can be lived in to its best potential. That thinking applies to single houses but also community buildings like libraries and schools, and the latter thankfully predominates here in the issue great selection of projects, extending the idea of "building = experience" to the community level, further binding people together through their shared labor.



Given the cover photograph by Edward Burtynsky, imagery is just as important for MONU, even as much of each issue is given to writing, particularly of the scholarly and lengthy sort. Editor in Chief Bernd Upmeyer uses photographs and other illustrations to accompany the essays, projects, interviews and other features, sometimes as full-bleed backgrounds to the words. One example of this is Upmeyer's interview with critic Bart Lootsma, where the latter's full-page photos of the mountains around his apartment in Innsbruck, Austria, prompts a discussion about geography and identity, marketing, and "natural vs. artificial geography."

This last consideration about the natural and the artificial can be seen as the idea driving the issue, evidenced by Burtynsky's photos of prominent natural features balanced by large-scale human marks on the landscape, and the other contributions to varying degrees. In another interview, with Italian urban planning professor Bernardo, the flexibility of natural geography and its "improvement" through artificial means is explored. Many other highlights of the issue focus on histories of particular places, be it Mexico City (by Felipe Orensanz), Quito (by Lucas Correa-Sevilla and Pablo Pérez-Ramos), Butte City, Montana (by Sean Burkholder and Bradford Watson), and even Niagara Falls (by Kees Lokman). The diversity of positions parallels this diversity of geographical locales, making this a rewarding, if at times challenging, issue to read.

A Visit to the 9/11 Museum, Part 1

On opening day, May 21, I visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum in Lower Manhattan. I snapped lots of photos and spent a few hours there, much longer than I anticipated. Therefore, photos and impressions from that visit are split into two posts: Part 1 is the pavilion, designed by Snøhetta, and Part 2 is the below-grade museum, designed by Davis Brody Bond.


[All photos by John Hill]

Even before stepping foot inside the pavilion on opening day, the changes at the World Trade Center site are obvious. Instead of getting a timed ticket and going through airport-like security to access the memorial, with its twin pools and grove of trees designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker respectively, the perimeter of the site is partly open at its perimeter to allow unencumbered access to the memorial. While this situation allows the memorial to be more integrated into its Lower Manhattan surroundings, the ticketing and security screening are shifted to the museum proper.



Unlike the below-grade museum, New Yorkers and other visitors to the city have had time to get acclimated to Snøhetta's jagged, glass-and-metal entry pavilion, what is really the only element on the 16-acre site reminiscent of Daniel Libeskind's winning master plan entry.



Yet even with a good deal of glass facing the memorial pools, the pavilion reflects the surroundings during the day, forcing people to press their noses against the glass to attempt to see what's inside (something that Snøhetta's Craig Dykers has repeatedly said in articles as liking).



The entrance to the museum is located on the north side of the pavilion, where the crowd control starts. My ticket is set for 10am, and while the ropes portend a long wait, the walk through them and the security screening in the lobby is speedy and much less stressful than the similar custom of trying to catch a plane.



Once through the security lobby at the west end of the pavilion, one's direction and gaze is shifted eastward, toward the glass corner, the rusty tridents from the Twin Towers, and the memorial beyond. The glazing, view and artifact from the original World Trade Center combine to create a strong draw, first to the east and then down into the darkness of the museum.



But the wood slats covering the mezzanine's spandrel (the most overtly Scandinavian part of the design) and the wood steps rising to the east offer the visitor the option of ascending rather than descending. Upstairs are bathrooms, a cafe, and an auditorium showing a 10-minute film with (I hear, as I didn't watch it on my visit) politicians and others speaking about their roles and reactions on September 11, 2001.



I observe that most people walk down rather than up, but I head up the stairs to get a vantage of the corner from the mezzanine:



From this level, Snøhetta's angles clearly counter the gridded horizontals and verticals of the surrounding buildings:



But after a few minutes looking out the glass and reading a sign about the Twin Towers tridents – also overhearing the barista telling a customer in the corner cafe (visible at the end of the mezzanine in the below photo) that they don't take tips – it's time to descend from the pavilion's high point to the underground museum.



Each step that one takes down the stairs (or each second the escalator descends), the darkness of the underground museum becomes larger...



And larger...



But before being enveloped by the dark, it is necessary to stop and snap what will likely become (if not already) the most photographed sight within the 9/11 Memorial Museum: looking up at the tridents with 1WTC beyond:



The tridents do many things in their current context: Physically, they anchor an important corner of the pavilion; they are an immediate reminder of what stood on the site until 2001; and they reach down to the lobby level of the museum, in effect bridging the above and below realms and leading us down into the literal and figurative darkness.



Part 2 will be posted in a few days.

Book Review: 2 Books Exploring Environment

The Air from Other Planets: A Brief History of Architecture to Come by Sean Lally
Lars Müller Publishers, 2014
Hardcover, 248 pages

Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis by David Gissen
University of Minnesota Press, 2014
Paperback, 240 pages



For the 2014 Venice Biennale, director Rem Koolhaas is asking visitors to consider the Fundamentals of architecture. One aspect of the exhibition that opens on June 7 is Elements of Architecture, which "will pay close attention to the fundamentals of our buildings, used by any architect, anywhere, anytime: the floor, the wall, the ceiling, the roof, the door, the window, the façade, the balcony, the corridor, the fireplace, the toilet, the stair, the escalator, the elevator, the ramp..." I'm thinking of this much-anticipated (and equally hyped, one could say) exhibition in the context of these two books because all of these elements are material entities, but Lally and Gissen are more interested with environmental "materials" – air, energy, sounds, etc. – rather than the traditional architectural palette. Which raises the question: Where does the palette of architectural elements end? And how can architects manipulate those elements outside the traditional ones to improve the environments where we live, work and play?

While Koolhaas himself has examined the role of air conditioning on architectural spaces, when we consider the environmental (meaning the substances in and around a building, not "green" concerns) implications of architecture the book that most obviously springs to mind is Reyner Banham's classic The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment. Considering the technological advances that have taken place since the book's publication in 1969 (not to mention the concerns of climate change that architects sometimes address), the timing seems ripe for new explorations about how architecture is literally formed, and if a revolution in architecture based on mechanical and other innovations, as portended by Banham, will take place. Lally's book looks ahead enthusiastically to scenarios where architecture is more than floors, walls, and roofs of solid materials, while Gissen's book looks back to a particular place and period – 1970s and 80s New York City – to analyze how large interior environments were restructured for the city's late 20th-century evolution.

The Air from Other Planets is like two books intertwined into one: A monograph on the work of Sean Lally's firm Weathers, and a speculative theory of how architecture can some day be made from energy as well as solids. Lally's projects veer from installations that look at the effects of humidity, for example, to proposals for buildings where space is defined by air currents rather than walls; needless to say, the latter proposals are yet to be realized. Lally's position has one foot in the realm of science fiction and the other in architectural history, hinted at by the subtitle of the book, a Brief History of Architecture to Come. His forward/backward approaches synthesize in the book – and are found at the root of Weathers – as a belief in the the power of architecture and the architect as an agent of change. While Lally looks to science, technology and other fields for justifying that his ideas can happen, considerations about the clients, manufacturers, and other entities that would partake in the realization of such visions is nonexistent, as if the architect willing them through designs and arguments is enough. But those entities outside the architect are a core part of Gissen's book.

As mentioned, Manhattan Atmospheres looks at a particular time in New York City's recent history, a time that coincides with crises that led to the urban environment's deterioration. Graffiti-covered subway cars and burning buildings in the Bronx are the cliche images of New York's problems in the 1970s, and Gissen's four case studies – the Washington Bridge Extension Project, corporate atria like the Ford Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Temple of Dendur Room, and trading floors in buildings like the World Financial Center in Battery Park City – are constructions that are positioned relative to the larger environmental degradation in the city. The spaces Gissen thoroughly and most fascinatingly examines are seen as cleaner alternatives to the outside environment, each in a different way. The Dendur Room, for example, offers a controlled environment for a temple from a much different climate, while the trading floors must contend with the heat created by people as well as computers, the latter enabling the speedy transactions that have created 21st century New York City to a large degree.

The word and concept that pervades Gissen's book is "socionatural," which is the social construction of nature. The Ford Foundation is the most overt example of such a construction from the quartet, since it involves the transplantation of tropical plants into the year-round warm environment of the 12-story-high space, in effect creating a pleasing space for the people working adjacent to the atrium, a corporate benefit that is also open to the public. But each space in Gissen's analysis – part architectural history, part critical geography – constructs nature in some manner; or more accurately filters out the city's contaminants outside of their buildings to make the city an amenable host to certain functions. The architect is an important part of these creations, but so is the mechanical engineer, the landscape architect, the client, and the city itself.

What Gissen's analysis means for New York and other cities today and in the future is a matter of interpretation. One could venture to the extreme position that Lally might take; that formerly enclosed environments could merge with the city through barriers created by energy fields. Or perhaps the grooming of the city's spaces through pedestrianization and developer-friendly parks like the High Line have succeeded the internal environments in the city's continued evolution as a place created by and for those with money. Yet Gissen is more optimistic, envisioning that socionatural environments can be part of creating a city that is desired. If this is the case, these two books are then a call for architects to take an active role in a broader definition of design – environmental – if they want to be a major part of how cities are shaped, rather than just powerless progenitors of form.

The Air from Other Planets:

Manhattan Atmospheres:

Those fine 'Fine Paints of Europe'

As an architect you constantly find yourself specifying interesting and beautiful products but how does one get to make an educated decision over which products to use? I decided to try one out myself - Fine Paints of Europe. Fine Paints of Europe, or FPE as I'll call it in this post, is an oil based paint renowned for its glossy, almost glass-like appearance. To achieve this shine a rather detailed process is involved and on a recent project I decided to try it myself rather than leave it to the painters so that I could really get to understand the process.

Lets start at the very beginning shall we?  The project was an old and rather, lets say, 'dated' townhouse in Georgetown.  Above you can see the 100 year old door forlornly hidden behind an ugly security gate and layers of pink paint.

The first step was to get the house right. Painters were brought in to banish the pink and white scheme and new landscaping was installed. Dated storm doors in the city? No thanks, rip that out! Much better already, no?  After the long missing shutters were re-installed the only thing remaining on the street front was how to make that front door a focal point. It had to be something really special I felt - a bold color - and a shiny finish would be the finishing touch. Rather than a traditional red or green accent door, purple was decided upon. Yes - PURPLE. If you're gonna go for it - GO FOR IT!

Picking up my paint brush I was careful to follow the FPE instructions. After removing all of the brass hardware (to be thoroughly polished) and sanding the door (a very important step as the high gloss would show any imperfection), a specialty primer by FPE was used. This primer was so thick and rigid, like super glue, that it created a smooth surface to work on; not an easy feat on a rough old Victorian door! This took about 3 HOURS!! The 3 day holiday weekend was a perfect time for this as it took an entire day for the door to be sanded, primed, and then dry. The 2nd day was the 1st coat of paint.  The paint was also thick, although not as rigid as the primer. It went on smoothly and after very careful brush strokes, miraculously produced a perfect glossy surface!

The first coat dried perfectly and I was tempted to leave well enough alone but the directions said to apply a second coat. So the 3rd day I woke up early and did as directed. The 2nd coat was somewhat difficult as the paint dries as glossy as it is while wet so making sure I was achieving even coverage was a bit of a chore (viewing the door sideways helped). After drying for 12 hours I was able to re-install the now gleaming brass hardware and voila!

I was so happy with the end result and think it puts the finishing touch on this lovely Georgetown townhouse. On future projects I'll now be able to instruct painters with assurance having tried the product myself.  Lesson learned: follow the directions, they're there for a reason!
I received no compensation for this post but rather I wanted to share my experience with a great product!

Make Shift Happen

The title of this post is the punny catchphrase printed on postcards for Makeshift Society, which bills itself as "a coworking space and organization for creatives, by creatives." The first space is found on Gough Street in San Francisco, and the second one, which just opened a few weeks ago, is located in an old factory building on Hope Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Last week I got a tour of the two-story space from Bryan Boyer, a partner at Makeshift Society and principal at Dash Marshall, who worked with Rena Tom, founder and partner at Makeshift Society, on the design of the space and its furnishings.


[All photos by John Hill]

The space is located on the ground floor of a building less than one block from the BQE, but more importantly, it is close to three subway lines: L, G, and J/Z. The space gets plenty of sunlight through two large storefront windows facing south and windows on the both sides, overlooking a parking lot (right in the photo above) and a slender courtyard planted with bamboo.



The first thing I notice stepping into the tall space isn't the rough concrete columns, or the exposed ceiling, or the wood box and green doors in the back of the space, or the really long table (23 feet, if memory serves me right) near the front; it's the noise, or lack thereof. This stretch of Williamsburg isn't particularly loud, but with the BQE close by, and other sounds of the city going on, the change is palpable. Of course, the space is being used as a workspace by only a handful of people at the time of my visit, and more people in the space would naturally equal more noise, be it clicking keyboards, sneezes, or music leaking from one's headphones. Yet there is still something about the space that is conducive to quiet, an environment suited to concentration while still being around other people, unlike, say, Starbucks.




The main, storefront level of the space is demarcated by two large concrete columns that separate it into six areas: left and right halves, and front, middle, and back. The large table occupies both halves of the front, accompanied by some informal seating. Work tables occupy the middle and back zones on the left, while these areas are respectively an informal lounge area and wood box on the right. Small tables, as we'll see, make the most of the space, filling in gaps that would otherwise be empty.

The combination of light wood, well chosen chairs, and custom details like the green doors with leathers straps for handles add up to a Scandinavian feeling. This is not surprising, given the time Boyer spent working in Finland. I liken the space to a makeshift UN inserted into a warehouse.



The wood box is an intriguing object that sits in the back-right part of the space. A seam down the middle and mirrored panels on top hint at what is inside, but getting inside the box requires walking around it to the door on the rear, past some two-seater tables made from scrap wood created in the process of making the box (photo below). At the very back of the space (by the black wall in the same photo) is another informal lounge area with a couch. Ultimately, the mix of tables, chairs, seating, and the size of micro-spaces within the larger storefront space gives coworkers a number of possibilities in finding comfort at Makeshift Society.




A library occupies the back wall of the wood box, next to which is a doorway to access it. From outside, the angled mirrors reflect the space inside the box, the space outside the box, or even the top of the wall, all depending on one's angle.



From inside the effect is more interesting, as the mirrors can reflect the street, for example...



Or disappear above the wood walls that are treated with a clear coat for being used as marker boards:



Not pictured (so you'll have to take my word for it) is how the two panels on the front of the wood box swing into the small conference room to open it up to the front of the space. When open, the box becomes a stage for one of the many after-hours events that take place at Makeshift, such as a recent talk by Creighton Berman, the maker of a manual coffeemaker that was funded via Kickstarter.

The box does not have a top, so during business hours it is not suitable for private meetings/conversations, like much of the storefront space. For those hush-hush conversations there are phone booths (with USB jacks, shelves, and a light in lieu of actual phones) behind the green doors visible in the second photo, and a conference room with full-height walls in the basement for meetings (below, the conference room is beyond the translucent plastic wall).



The basement is also where the kitchen area and bathrooms are located and where certain members have permanent desks and the ability to leave their belongings, such as laptops and documents. Putting the regular customers, if you will, in the basement, below the trial coworkers using day passes in the storefront space, might seem topsy-turvy. But the basement is also blessed with a good deal of natural light and even more quiet for "making shift happen."

For those in and around Brooklyn, Makeshift Society is having an open house and launch party on June 4. Click the link for more information and to get free tickets.

A Building For Measuring Borders

The so-called "Yolo Buggy" was not a 19th-century adventure tourism vehicle for those of us who only live once; it was a mobile building, field shelter, and geopolitical laboratory for measuring the borders of an American county. Yolo County, California.

The "moveable tent or 'Yolo Buggy,'" as the libraries at UC Berkeley describe it, helped teams of state surveyors perform acts of measurement across the landscape in order to mathematically understand—and, thus, to tax, police, and regulate—the western terrain of the United States. It was a kind of Borgesian parade, a carnival of instruments on the move.

The resulting "Yolo Baseline" and the geometries that emerged from it allowed these teams to establish a constant point of cartographic reference for future mapping expeditions and charts. In effect, it was an invisible line across the landscape that they tried to make governmentally real by leaving small markers in their wake. (Read more about meridians and baselines over at the Center for Land Use Interpretation).

In the process, these teams carried architecture along with them in the form of the "moveable tent" seen here—which was simultaneously a room in which they could stay out of the sun and a pop-up work station for making sense of the earth's surface—and the related tower visible in the opening image.

That control tower allowed the teams' literal supervisors to look back at where they'd come from and to scan much further ahead, at whatever future calculations of the grid they might be able to map in the days to come. You could say that it was mobile optical infrastructure for gaining administrative control of new land.

Like a dust-covered Tron of the desert, surrounded by the invisible mathematics of a grid that had yet to be realized, these over-dressed gentlemen of another century helped give rise to an abstract model of the state. Their comparatively minor work thus contributed to a virtual database of points and coordinates, something immaterial and totally out of scale with the bruised shins and splintered fingers associated with moving this wooden behemoth across the California hills.

(All images courtesy UC Berkeley/Calisphere).

100 Views of a Drowning World

[Image: Kahn & Selesnick, courtesy Yancey Richardson].

I've mentioned the work of artists Kahn & Selesnick before; their surreal narratives are illustrated with elaborately propped photos that fall somewhere between avant-garde theater and landscape fiction, with mountain glaciers, salt mines, alien planets, utopian cityscapes, and, as seen here, the slowly flooding marshes of an unidentified hinterland.

[Image: Kahn & Selesnick, courtesy Yancey Richardson].

These images are from a new project, called Truppe Fledermaus & The Carnival at the End of the World, that opened at New York's Yancey Richardson gallery last week. "Utilizing photography, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and performance," the gallery writes, "the artists create robust mythic realities for each project, building imaginary, character-driven fictions from kernels of obscure historical truth."

Kahn & Selesnick’s latest project follows a fictitious cabaret troupe—Truppe Fledermaus (Bat Troupe)—who travel the countryside staging absurd and inscrutable performances in abandoned landscapes for an audience of no one. The playful but dire message presented by the troupe is of impending ecological disaster, caused by rising waters and a warming planet, the immediate consequences of which include the extinction of the Bat, in this mythology a shamanistic figure representing both nature and humanity. In one sense, the entire cabaret troupe can be seen as a direct reflection of the artists themselves, both entities employing farce and black humor to engage utterly serious concerns.

The particular scenes shown here, all on display until July 3, 2014, are from a sub-series within the project called "100 Views of a Drowning World."

[Image: Kahn & Selesnick, courtesy Yancey Richardson].

Eccentric residents of a drowning landscape live lives indistinguishable from absurdist stagecraft, as they wander through seemingly wild landscapes that are actually ruins and that will eventually all disappear beneath the deceptively placid tidal flats flowing around them.

[Image: Kahn & Selesnick, courtesy Yancey Richardson].

These anonymous coastal dwellers simulate a nature that is already artificial—a kind of maritime grotesque of overgrown animal forms and humans buried beneath ropes and seaweed—and they set off on doomed expeditions through terrains whose original inhabitants have long been forgotten.

[Image: Kahn & Selesnick, courtesy Yancey Richardson].

Lone figures in boats look out into what will soon be sea, attempting to navigate land as if it is already an ocean.

[Images: Kahn & Selesnick, courtesy Yancey Richardson].

And others attempt to escape into some new strain of Romanticism, witnesses of large-scale terrestrial change who know that this moment on the Earth is rare—though not unique—for the extraordinary transitions that lie over the horizon.

[Image: Kahn & Selesnick, courtesy Yancey Richardson].

In the end, then, the idea is not that these characters' actions somehow represent or propose a new humanist response to climate change, or that the artists are offering us any sort of practical or ethical insight into what futures might face us in a drowned world, but that these absurd rituals and dreamlike antics instead simply illustrate "a world that is sinking into a marsh."

It is, as the show's title suggests, just a carnival at the end of the world.

[Image: Kahn & Selesnick, courtesy Yancey Richardson].

The Yancey Richardson gallery is on W. 22nd Street, over near the High Line; be sure to stop by before July 3. Here is a map and here are more images.