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highschoolisfun
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Name: alex
State: New York
Birthday: 7/13/1985
Gender: Male
Interests: Architecture, Mid-Century Modern Design, Car Design, Falsetto, Akward Social Situations, Liars, Patterns, Writing, Certain Kinds of music i wish not to discuss, Colors, Ideas and (last but not least)... other places.
Expertise: Being lame, but fun.
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  highschoolisfun
Member Since:
8/27/2002
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| Earlier today, the California Supreme Court announced the decision (opinion?) upholding Proposition 8 as a legal amendment to the State Constitution. This wasn't terribly surprising to people on either side of the issue, but the decision has resulted in rallies and protests. I understand this, as many people feel this is a civil rights issue, and are disappointed that California is lagging behind New England and Iowa to recognize and implement marriage equality. But not everyone thinks it is appropriate or convenient to rally in response; one of these people is a friend of mine named Barrett. Barrett is gay and lives in West Hollywood, along with thousands of other gay people... it's one of the gayest places on earth. When the voters initially passed proposition 8, many of the protests were centered in West Hollywood. Barrett sometimes forgets that he's gay, and today commented "Great. Now they're gonna start marching again. Soooo over it." I asked him if by "they're" he meant "we're" and he said:
"I'd only mean 'we're' if I planned on joining in, but the idea of hanging out[1] with a whole bunch of fair-weather protesters[2] who on any other night could be found getting wasted at Fiesta[3] isn't exactly the best use of my time[4]. Plus, protesting isn't going to accomplish anything[5] at this point.[6]"
I love his response for a few reasons, and I've numbered them so we can go through and make fun of it!
1. Protesting is hanging out. Yes! it's a roving, angry country club. Remember that time that all those gay guys were hanging out at that one bar in new york... Stonewall, was it? And then the police wanted to them to hang out in the back of a paddy wagon, But they decided to hang out outside the bar instead? Well I'm sure those guys had fun, but probably not as much fun as I had hanging out with friends watching The Goonies last night.
2. Protesting on an event on the same day as that event is too casual. I mean, the really cool people who are really committed to marriage equality were protesting before the court even announced its decision. Personally, I was protesting by myself last month in the rain. Because I'm a shitty-weather protester, not one of these patient assholes who clearly are thinking only of themselves.
3. Every person protesting tonight would normally be found at a notoriously skeezy gay bar. I mean, no matter how many people show up, no matter what their sexual orientation, age, or appearance they're probably a pedophile because the last time I was at Fiesta Cantina, I saw Brian Singer.
4. I'm too important and/or busy to really be bothered with any of this. You see, I have to sit in my apartment updating my facebook status and singing the version of "Don't Stop Believin'" from Glee. Or maybe some asshole I haven't seen since college is in town and I agreed months ago to grab dinner and drinks with them. Maybe we'll be ironic and go to Fiesta.
5. Protesting is pointless. When was the last time protesters accomplished anything? The California Supreme Court isn't going to respond to the protests by redacting their ruling and making same-sexed marriage legal... so it's kind of pointless for equality-minded people to join together and express their disproval.
6. Nothing will ever change. So be cool and give up now.
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| Everyone loves to travel, but few seem to love looking like a tourist. I can think of a few absurd examples in my past: refusing to wear a fanny pack, refusing to take pictures of beautiful places and, in one instance, pretending to carry on a phone conversation in French, when no one was on the line and I don't speak French. Usually, the compulsion to blend in leads to a hypersensitivity toward strangers. From what they're wearing, what they're saying, how they're saying it, to what their likely perception would be of someone stalking them, I've never been as invested in strangers as I am when I first land somewhere new.
New York is a beautiful city built in an ugly place (don't tell the weckquaesgeks). It didn't take long for me to realize that people who live in New York City rarely say they live in New York City; instead, they simply say that they live in "the city," especially when talking to other insiders. It really is a special joy to partake in the congestion of The City and communicate that you live in what is commonly confused with an archetype. Maybe the joy is caused by a decade-long lovefest that glamorizes the city as the epitome of Metropolitan Culture, Urbanism, and Style.... but such joy ignores that most of america is built on the model from the other coast, Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is an ugly city built in a beautiful place. Stucco boxes and strip malls line harsh expanses of concrete carrying smaller metal boxes and buses. Nobody seems to care about appearing new here, and the easiest way to start a conversation is to ask someone about their relocation to LA. But LA isn't an archetype like New York, it's a typology, and instead people work for an archetype: "the industry" or "the business." This is where the je ne sais quoi of my social skills fails me. The fastest way to end a conversation in LA is to mention that you don't work in The Industry or care too much about it. Sure, talking pictures, great. But not everyone can participate in the archetype of LA the way they can participate in the archetype of New York City.
And, for some reason, everyone between the two has to live in sad approximations of each. | | |
| "If I were my keys, where would I be?" I say this to myself all the time frantically searching my 56 square foot apartment for access to the outside world. It's so strange that a fear of being locked out of my apartment can just as easily leave me locked in my own apartment without ever using the metal apparatus on the door. So I re-trace my steps (which are almost always circles in my tiny apartment) and usually find my keys somewhere they do not belong... like my refrigerator, toilet, or under a flap of skin. On the counter, right inside the door, I have a small bowl that I bought precisely to put my keys and change in... and while the change makes it... my keys never do. It's as if the nickel-plated brass of my keys hate the nickel-plated copper of my nickels. Maybe the Nickel family went through a nasty divorce and kids hate cousins because they heard the parents fighting about who did what after drinking too much alkaline. I don't have the answers.
For a period of time as a child, nothing made me happier than the ball pit at McDonald's. The glass doors covered in "Play at your own risk" signs and smally, greasy fingerprints always separated the real word from a molded plastic utopia. The smell of polypropylene gave me high along with the sensation of the static field charging me as I slid down the inexplicably loopy slide. Tupelo wasn't big enough to have an real sort of indoor playground beyond what the Golden Arches provided, but that changed when I was in the fourth grade and my parent's friends opened Party Zone. It was almost immediately a disaster, but for those brief few months fueled by optimism and a small-business loan, the metal building that housed Tupelo's largest indoor playground echoed with the delight of children. Specifically, it was my delight, and the delight of the guests to my 9th birthday party. I think we were the only ones that ever went. And before the smell of fresh paint and glossy vinyl tiles gave way to urine and disappointment, the space was converted into a chinese buffet.
After that the McDonald's Playplace lost some of it's luster. The lights were not as bright as they had been before, and some of the McDonald's where we would stop on road trips didn't even have ball pits. These were sad places. The mercury vapor lamps that lit these spans of concrete and clusters of metal were harsh when direct, and too dim when indirect. In places like West Point Mississippi, I would wait out the alloted time sitting inside the head of a happy meal character with a burger for a head. I don't remember his name because it wasn't as clever as the hamburglar, but it's the first space I remember having an idea of what it meant to be disappointed. I would climb through his trunk and sit wedged in a kind of bowl between the bars that kept me from falling out of his head and the structural tube that made up his body. I saw what he would see looking out from his eyes, and it was almost always a view of the door painted with greasy fingerprints and the back of the sign that said "play at your own risk." But this was not the same door I had seen before, because I wasn't in the plastic intestines of Ronald McDonald. Instead, I was in a shallow, steel bowl that smelled like nickels. | | |
| Tonight, I rode the Red Line downtown to see Eric Owen Moss lecture at Sci-Arc. The fact that I took the subway there is unremarkable other than to say that public transportation in LA is not the shit storm of crazy and discomfort that is often described to me by people who never take the bus or metro. Another nice thing about taking the Red Line is that it ends in Union Station, one of my favorite public spaces in LA. Walking through it today I felt like I was walking through Valhalla, in part because I just saw Das Rheingold and also because the lofty ceiling is made of heavy wood timbers. But this is mostly extraneous.
Thom Mayne introduced Eric Owen Moss (hereafter EOM) showing funny pictures of EOM having photoshopped brain surgery.
To show his work, EOM used three side-by-side projectors. On the wall, his images probably spanned sixty feet; that's a pretty big screen. He started out with a triptych of quotes taken from older non-architects and he set out to show how his work was situated in the "past 100 years of architecture discourse." And while I know where he started, I'm not really sure I know where he ended up. From FDR he gleamed "Do it, do it, do it;" from Marco Polo he learned "Hear what you cannot hear," and Kierkegaard taught him something about technology and technique.
EOM advanced by saying that architecture has often looked outwardly to Art or Technology to bolster its discourse, relying on these as a means of justification and tethering ideas to them. I don't think he ever said it (although he might have, his talk was over two hours) he suggested that this mode of rationalization was disingenuous, because architecture was just as capable of developing its own discourse. To prove this he showed a series of his own projects not in their order of completion, but in order of iterative, formal similarities that have advanced in his projects. "We came up with these for this project, but it was cancelled... so we used it in this project, which was also cancelled, so we used it in this project, which...." Most notably were a grid of glass rods used structurally as part of a "room for democracy" in a competition hosted by the Smithsonian. After that project folded, they went to Nike, and then somewhere else before landing as part of a parking garage currently in CD. He never really showed that these were part of a discourse beyond his telling people in his office to make these funny models, but we could clearly see that yes, this is an idea implemented in successive, unrealized projects. The rods had changed though, from being solid-looking with a half-meter radius, to being curved glass segments point-fixed to a frame of circles below a skylight. To me, this change is a little like going from a solid gold watch to a watch spray-painted gold.
This focus on the image, or formal quality, of curved glass rods used to make a topographical ceiling, challenges EOM's assertion that his work cannot be understood through a single vantage point. Why? Because it illustrates a fixation on a particular image and solution. It seems logical to me that a notion of transparent structure would arise out of a competition dealing with "democracy," but how does this idea migrate to a shoe company or parking garage? It migrates because EOM finds the technology compelling, indebting this particular discourse to the very thing he was trying to avoid using as a rationale, and all the while reproducing the same image. "Oh look, rods!" But EOM is correct that you should move around his projects, especially ones that involve compound-curved glass. Looking through this glass makes everything on the other side look surrealist.
As a student, I was repeatedly told to avoid a particular image, yet asked to do renderings. One particularly heinous critic once told a student that he only allows students to work in illustrator, and not photoshop because he wants to avoid them becoming attached to a specific image of what they want their project to be. I think what this critic and EOM share is a distaste for the image as it has become associated with a kind of starchitecture that aims to produce visceral sensations. I've also heard that compelling images are great ways to drive a project forward, if you can capture the qualities and haptic sensations you want to evoke in a space. So I'm not sure why so many people criminalize the image as being superficial. Because it's not spatial? It's the same argument I hear about taking the metro: "it doesn't go anywhere." Clearly that's not true. The Metro will never be as expansive as the sprawl of Los Angeles County, but that doesn't make the metro bad or useless.
Another thing about the work of EOM is that it seems to rely heavily on existing building fabric, and he admitted to loving and hating history. A lot of his work exists as additions and interventions to existing buildings, and I think he struggles when it comes time to form free-standing projects. I say this because his formal style is quite aggressive and expressive. Undeniably contemporary-looking parasites on top of older buildings or cut through existing buildings. When faced with the challenge of making and object in a field, he reverts to using simple shapes and then intersecting them with his wonky ones. I'm thinking of his project for a musuem in Guangzhou. The most prominent feature of his scheme are four square towers arranged in a square, creating biaxial symmetry... which seems really conservative for someone with his aesthetic agenda. Several of his projects relied on an interaction with a parking structure, something much more systematic and primitive. Relying on some kind of a background for his work is certainly not a fault, but was entirely absent from his discussion about his work. Then again, it was two hours....
EOM did articulate a point about scripting that really helped me expand how I understand it, and he did this by tying the notion of surface and pattern scripting to The Matrix. That point was that everything around us would express coded or embedded technology and I immediately thought "hey, that's modernism!" But I left the lecture thinking about the classical formality of his project in Guangzhou. And the power of classical formality as it has appeared (however disguised) in the work of other architects, and as I have experienced in places like Union Station in downtown LA. Anyone who has seen my work would never accuse me of being a classicist, and part of me worries that my increasing interest in more classic geometry is me becoming more conservative. Regardless, the lecture ended (or might as well have ended) with a long quote on the front wall "Architecture needs an adversary." I think it already has one. Buildings are huge and expensive, so we already have scale and the economy working against us most of the time. But the discourse of architecture is too exclusive. We spend most of our life inside buildings, but very few people even distinguish buildings from architecture (and group anything old into the later category.) It's strange and frustrating that the discourse of architecture is irrelevant to most folks. I spent an hour yesterday thinking about the relationship of architecture and curtains after someone complained about a new Diller, Scofidio + Renfro project in New York.
Clearly, Architecture's biggest adversary is ignorance: sometimes I think it's the ignorance of the public... and other times I think it's the ignorance of the architects, themselves.
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