This is my blog

Fallen angels, gigantic monuments and an open-air sculpture museum

2012-02-05T03:28:00.000-08:00

Madrid is home to the only statue in the world dedicated to Lucifer, the fallen angel who is believed to become the devil. It's well worth a detour to see, especially since it's in beautiful Retiro Park. Sculpted by Ricardo Bellver, a Madrid sculptor living in Rome in 1877, it caused a great deal of controversy when the Duke of Fernán Núñez purchased the statue to be placed in this popular crossroads in the Retiro. Especially to religious folks, it was unthinkable to have a monument dedicated to Lucifer in a public park, but the Duke explained that it was a work of incredible artistic workmanship and a metaphor of the fate that may arise for those who show excessive pride.

Possibly the most curious fact about this statue is that it's location is exactly 666 meters above sea level, interpreted by some as the number of the Anti-Christ.

It depicts Lucifer as a winged youth being dragged to the netherworld by a large seven-headed serpent entwined around his legs. It was inspired by John Milton's poem Paradise Lost: "...his pride had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host of rebel angels... round he throws his baleful eyes that witnessed huge affliction and dismay mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate". The symbolism of the statue is complicated because the Romans believed that Lucifer carried the light that could save humanity even though he was bound to his destiny, and also the serpent that entwines him may represent wisdom.

The pedestal was designed by José Urioste with eight gargoyle-like heads spouting water, and the statue was unveiled in its current location in 1885, undoubtedly becoming the talk of the town.

Walking along Calle Mayor you will come into view of another fallen angel statue, but this one is called Accidente Aereo, a sculpture by Miguel Ángel Ruiz in 2006.In the artist's words: "Ni Ícaro, ni el diablo. Es un aviador distraído". He describes it as a Being who has flown around the Peninsula for thousands of years and when he unexpectedly comes into contact with the high-rises of Madrid he crashes into one of them.

Moving on to non-angel related sights, strolling up Calle Serrano just North of Puerta de Alcalá will bring you face to face with gigantic monuments dedicated to the discovery of America. This is Monumento de Descrubrimiento, erected in 1970, and is adjacent to Plaza de Colón (which has a great statue of Christopher Columbus in the center of the rotary) and the Archaeological Museum (still not open because of remodeling, but it's anticipated to be one of the best museums in Madrid once it opens it's doors again). Also, the garden next to the monument has the most gigantic Spanish flag on earth.

Walking just a little farther North on Calle Serrano will take you to a fascinating open-air sculpture museum, Museo de la Escultura Abstracta, located underneath the overpass of Paseo de Eduardo Dato. There are 17 abstract sculptures here including works by Joan Miró, Eduardo Chillida, and Alberto Sánchez. My favorite one is the giant concrete block suspended in mid-air by cables hanging from the bridge. It looks like it could have been made by the engineers of the bridge, with the same materials and pragmatism, so well integrated into the environment that it would be easy to walk right by it. But then there's that moment you realize, no wait, why would they have put that here? That's art.

Google Earth Madrid

2012-01-25T13:34:00.000-08:00

Saint's blood, nun's pastries, and Arab walls

2012-01-22T14:03:00.000-08:00

Every July 27th in Madrid there is an event where a vial of blood is taken out of it's preserved case, liquefied in front of masses of devotees, and then once the day is over, taken back to coagulate and preserve itself for many years to come.

Image from quehaydonde.es

The legend is that this is the blood of Saint Pantaleón, who was executed by a Roman emperor in 305AD. Pantaleón was a doctor who had heard of a God who was supposedly quite powerful. One day he was faced with a boy who had just died from a snake bite and he challenged this God - he said, if there really is a God then let this boy be saved and the snake perish. Miraculously, the child was revived and the snake suddenly died. Pantaleón was so moved that he decided to convert to Christianity. Once the Emperor found out, he had Pantaleón publicly tortured and decapitated. After the execution, Christians carefully collected the blood of the martyred saint and their descendants have preserved the sacred blood for thousands of years since.

We weren't able to see the sacred blood today because the monastery was already closed but this is the doorway to the Real Monasterio de la Incarnación, where the vial is kept. There is also a crypt filled with glass shelves from floor to ceiling displaying relics from various saints - hair, fingers, skulls, teeth, arms, you name it - collected since 1616.

UPDATE: We saw the sacred blood. Dean and I arrived at the convent around noon on a Saturday, just in time for the one-hour tour (in Spanish). The reliquary did have an impressive collection, including the blood of San Pantaleón. There was a thriving market for saint's relics back then, since people thought the bones had the same miraculous powers of the saints. At one point there were so many fake relics being manufactured that each of the saints would have had to have around 800 bodies, so the tradition became less popular once people realized they were being fooled.

Speaking of saints, there is a very prominent saint in Madrid, possibly the patron saint, San Isidro. His remains are supposedly incorrupt, and taken out on rare occasions (possibly this coming July 2012 for the anniversary of a battle where he miraculously appeared 40 years after his death, and gave the king strategic advice).

The body is reputedly kept in this ornate gold and silver casket above the altar of the Colegiata de San Isidro el Real (Calle de Toledo 37). To learn more about the saint and his many miracles, there is a museum dedicated to him (Plaza de San Andrés 2).

Around the corner from this church is the Convento de las Monjas del Corpus Christi, whose cloistered inhabitants are called "Las Carboneras" (The Coal Women) due to their discovery of a painting of the Virgin Mary in a coal bin, which is now hanging in the church. The nuns also happen to sell delicious pastries. If you're in Madrid and get the urge for some blessed "dulces", definitely follow these steps:

1. Find this door. It's on Plaza del Conde de Miranda 3. Cloistered nuns have lived here for hundreds of years, in much the same manner as they did during the Inquisition. There are 37 other nunneries in the city, and many of them specialize in their own types of pastries.

You'll see this number on the wall when you're in the Plaza. It's literally around the corner from Mercado San Miguel (which is a perfect place for lunch before visiting the convent for dessert).

2. Ring the second bell. You have to ask the nun that answers the bell to be let in. I said, "Buenas días, queríamos dulces." and she proceeded to tell me to push open the door and come in.

3. You'll wind through the narrow hallways to get to this ancient lazy-Susan looking contraption. If you get lost, follow the sign for "torno". There is a menu on the wall with things like pastas de almendra and naranjines, but you can also buy the box of pastries, like we did. The nun made it really easy for us and put two boxes on the turntable.

4. Put the money on the turning shelf and take your goods!

5. Eat them. 8 euros for the box but worth every penny. They are delicious. Nothing too fancy, just sugar and deliciousness.

Moving on to non-religious related items... I'm obsessed with discovering the relics of ancient Arab fortifications around Madrid. Thousands of years ago Madrid was inhabited by the Moors who built a defensive wall around the city. During construction of the modern city, many remnants dating back to the 9th century of the boundary wall have been found, some in the randomest places. Here is how you can find them:

Probably the best-preserved segment is in the park of Emir Mohamed I behind the Almudena Cathedral. Also the location of the annual summer music festival in Madrid.

Every 60 feet along the wall there was a watchtower, one of which can be discovered in a relatively new parking garage under the Plaza de Oriente. You can either take the stairs into the garage or the glass-walled elevator. It's the oddest discovery in an unpleasant space filled with cars and smelling of paint, to witness one of the ancient archaeological treasures of Madrid. Apparently it is the only remnant that was saved from destruction when the garage was built, thanks to objections from people of Madrid.

The next two portions of the wall take a little more work to find. They are on Calle de la Cava Baja 10 and 30, both in the ground floor area of residential buildings.

Here's the thing: you have to be buzzed in by one of the tenants in order to see the sites. Kind of a challenge, but it just adds to the adventure. Luckily someone was coming out of both locations just as we were approaching, so with a swift explanation the tenants agreed to let us pass.

Passing through a nondescript hallway leads you to the open stairwell area with a towering portion of the wall. This is also the moment that Dean accidentally broke off a piece of the wall, which proceeded to crumble into a million pieces.

This is the view from Cava Baja 10. I wonder what it feels like to live in a building with remnants of a wall that's over 1,000 years old. Then walking outside onto one of the most bustling streets in Madrid. Cava Baja is very famous for the tapas crawl, "ir de tapas", when Madrileños wander from bar to bar ordering small plates of food and cañas (small beers), because each tapas bar has its own delicious specialty. I'm waiting for a local to lead us on this tradition because the idea of squeezing into the crowded bars and having no idea how to order is terrifying.

A few thoughts on storytelling

2012-01-17T14:09:00.000-08:00

In my field I hear the word storytelling a lot. What is it exactly? Storytelling is a verbal journey that a companion or complete stranger is able to lead us on. It's a tool to connect us all - regardless of creed, color or background - on a human level. The deepest level. It makes us realize that we're not all so different.

In November I was working on a brand redesign and thought that the identity would be so much stronger if the founders of the business would tell their story. How did the business develop, what is their inspiration and what were the challenges they faced? Every business in the world should be this transparent if they want to reach their potential customers on the deepest level. Stories stick with us, effect us, and change our behavior.

I'm fascinated by the way my experience of places changes once I know the story behind the walls. I want to create a platform for people of Madrid to be able to share their stories, and I'm sure they have lots of them. The site will be place-based and, ideally, it will point out that our surroundings are more connected to our life stories than we may realize.

There are a few precedents that I enjoy very much for different reasons. I've written about Jonathan Harris' creation, Cowbird, here, and here is the story that I contributed to the site a few days ago. The 'saga' is the defining principle of Cowbird, which for now the only one being Occupy Wall Street. Further down in the site hierarchy there are many other defining principles; people, relationships, subject tags, loved, etc. This is a layered and complex site, but SO beautiful and easy to navigate.

The stories are gorgeous and touching. Harris has given artists, poets and journalists a safe space to express their otherwise private moments. The website is turning into a smorgasborg of love, pain, longing and curiosity. There is this great capability of adding sound to the story as well. Something that this author has done really well. I feel so comfortable contributing to the site because I know that the most important thing is that my contribution comes from my heart.

Before I moved to Madrid, over the past year or so I noticed this 'pod' outside of City Hall ('pod' being a term from one of my architecture-ish classes).

Designed by Local Projects, a design studio in NYC, Storycorps booths give people the opportunity to sit down and record their life story in forty minutes. Especially significant because of the ten year anniversary of 9/11, many of the stories were from family of the victims who used the opportunity to connect others with the memory of their loved one.

Local Projects works on a plethora of storytelling projects, including this video for Stone Barns and this platform for people to tell tales of their center of town. As long as it's called "Main Street" people can submit photos, audio and written accounts of what happens on their Main Street. Local Projects is a studio of master storytellers with the ability to create meaning from a conversation, and to turn a conversation into an event. They call these projects collaborative storytelling, and it's very interesting to me that the most important aspect of their success lies with other people's ability to listen.

New York Writes Itself is a 'production' about New York by the people of New York. As they say, you can't make this shit up. The 'script' is an running Twitter-ish feed of random contributions from people all around New York City. I like the brief format with a steady stream of updates, and love the tone of the site (I mean, just check out the chairman), but I wish there was more imagery - there would be some really good photos to complement the anecdotes of the city. This site definitely has the cool-factor, and the theme capitalizes on NYC being the film-making capital of the world. I also enjoyed seeing the recent collaboration with letterpress artists recently shown at the Art Director's Club.

So what is all this? It's not about advertising, branding or selling products. It's about finding what is most important in each of our individual lives, maybe understanding each other and our environments a little better, and possibly restoring some of our faith in humanity.

More things you didn't know about Plaza Mayor

2012-01-08T12:35:00.000-08:00

Plaza Mayor has a much darker past than you would imagine from the fun and festivities that fill the square these days. In the 17th and 18th Centuries it was the regular location for autos-de-fé, public condemnations for crimes against religion during the Inquisition. Prisoners sentenced to blasphemy, adultery, witchcraft and other crimes were burned, flogged, or banished to the underground labyrinth of prisons under the square.

Looking at the front of this Irish Pub off the Northeast corner of the plaza, you would have no idea that a former Inquisition-era torture chamber is just down the stairs inside.

We ventured down, as the Irish bartender explained that, yes, in fact this is where many prisoners were kept and tortured. He added that many were forced to eat the bodies of their dead companions if they didn't want to starve. Dean and I both noticed that the room felt really heavy, even with the jolly looking kegs of beer and new paint job. The bartender noted that they chose the color red for the new paint based on the secret history the room. Creepy.

Winding around to the Southwest corner of the square, there is a long and narrow set of stairs known as the Arco de Cuchilleros, leading down to Calle de los Cuchilleros or Knife-Grinders Street. The small pulpit that you can see in the photo above on the right is famous as the location where a friar gave a speech in 1808 to incite a citizen revolt against the occupying French.

As you wind down the stairs to the right is the well-known restaurant and tourist destination dedicated to a 19th century swindler.

In 19th century Madrid, there was an infamous bandit named Luis Candelas. He was known throughout Spain as a crafty gentleman and highway robber, who could steal anything and escape from anywhere. He was sensationalized in the press and romanticized in songs and films. Maybe it's this romantic view of robbery that encourages the ever-present Madrid pickpockets. Personally, I see nothing romantic about getting your stuff stolen. Anyways. The restaurant that's now near where he and his gang used to hang out is called Las Cuevas de Luis Candelas, and the waiters actually dress like bandits as well. Slightly unnerving, but the space is very interesting - a labyrinth of caves and cellars inside. The illustrations on the walls tell the tall tales of Candelas' adventures, and huge barrel vaulted ceilings and walls are covered with trinkets and memorabilia of the gentleman bandit's life of crime.

Walking down Calle Toledo just South of Plaza Mayor brings us to the Plaza de la Cebada, which became the regular location for public hangings and garrotings after 1790. Public executions were a popular source of entertainment for hundreds of years in Europe, with flocks of people surrounding the square and watching from the wooden tenements above. Maybe the modern equivalent is watching violence and murder on TV, so no need for public violence anymore? The fountain in the center of the rotary (above) is quite unusual - it used to provide drinking water to city residents.

To our left a tiny side street leads to the Plaza de Coscorro, with an interesting statue of a man carrying a box and torch with a rope tied around his chest. This is Eloy Gonzales, an orphan and jailbird who joined the Spanish fight in Cuba and offered himself in a suicide mission. The box contains gasoline, which he used to burn down the Cuban stronghold under the cover of night. He only agreed to do it if they would then drag his lifeless body back to the Spanish side out of enemy hands, in order to have a proper burial. He was seriously wounded but the Spaniards were able to drag him back to their side alive. He survived for only nine months after, dying as a result of his wounds just after receiving the medal of honor.

Just beyond the statue stretches a long, overwhelming sea of people and vendors selling what seems like mostly scarves and T-shirts. It's worth a visit if only to ogle at how many masses of people are there. This is El Rastro, Madrid's largest flea market. The name translates to "stain" or "trail of blood" because originally it was the site of a slaughterhouse in the 17th and 18th century. People would drag the animal carcasses down the street and the blood would stain the ground.

A nice discovery slightly off the beaten track is the small square, Plaza General Vara del Rey with very different types of vendors than the main drag. There are tables dedicated to rocks and minerals, and lots of antique decorative arts, lamps, chests and trinkets. Also in the area you can find vintage office equipment like typewriters and rolltop desks, and a telephone museum with gramophones and antique radios. There are also high quality antique galleries in indoor locations along the trail.

And these guys were a pretty random surprise, tucked into the square of a long-abandoned building in the La Latina neighborhood, very close to the flea market.

Most amazing visual diary I've ever seen

2012-01-07T03:22:00.000-08:00

From Pep Carrió, a graphic designer in Madrid.

Reminiscent of the collages of Sasakisan. Such incredible imagination, precision and restraint.

Video from Experimenta

Things you probably don't know about Plaza Mayor

2012-01-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

Plaza Mayor is the busiest place in Madrid, maybe with the exception of Plaza del Sol. There are a million tourists, street performers, Spaniards with their children, and of course the ever present pick-pockets. I was overwhelmed by this area when we first visited because places like this remind me of Times Square in New York - there is so much visual stimulation, so many sounds, and so many crowds of people, that you can't understand anything else about the place. I prefer the quiet, off-the-beaten-track streets. Nonetheless, I was reading in my new favorite book about Plaza Mayor the other day, and decided to go on a historical tour.

First stop, however, was for a bocadillo de calamares. This is the spot to get them, except I heard that the best bocadillo de calamares can be found near the train station on Atocha. I'll have to check that out. Bar La Ideal is just outside the Plaza Mayor on the Southeast corner. It's the entrance that is closest to our house, thankfully, so I don't have to walk too far for my bocadillo. I should mention that in English it's a Fried Calamari sandwich. Yes, this is very normal in Madrid, to eat fried things on bread. One of my favorite things is fried calamari, and one of my other favorite things is bread, so I'm happy here.

This is what it looks like inside the joint.

This is some other stuff they offer, clearly not on my list of things to try.

There's an interesting story about the equestrian statue in the center of Plaza Mayor. It's a large cast-iron horse with Felipe III mounted on top, looking especially imposing with his sword and 17th century armor. But little do people know that the horse was actually a cemetery for dozens of sparrows who were "eaten" by the noble steed.

Now its mouth is soldered closed, but originally the horse's mouth was open just enough for a tiny bird to fly in. Once the bird perched on the mouth and then flew inside, they fluttered around in the dark bowels of the horse trying to find a way out but their wingspan was too wide to make it back out. And so sealed their fate. For hundreds of years, no one knew about the sparrow death trap, until the militant uprising in 1931 when a small bomb was thrown inside the horse's mouth and suddenly hundreds of bird bones filled the sky of Plaza Mayor.

Next on the tour is the narrowest house in Madrid, measuring 15 meters. It's not that narrow, actually, compared to some of the tenement housing in New York City, but still an interesting landmark. And the decorative lights on the street are beautiful.

The address is Calle Mayor 61, and it is the former home of the Spanish author Pedro Calderón de la Barca. I mentioned the town historian Ramón de Mesonero Romanos in a previous post, who tried to save Cervantes house from being torn down. Well, after that defeat, he wasn't going to take no for an answer this time. He was an old man by this time, and he literally went to the site of the house and physically blocked the demolition crew's sledge-hammers by swinging his cane at them. He kept guard until nighttime and then drafted a petition in the morning, which successfully halted the demolition and thus preserved the historical building.

Great videos from Death cab for Cutie and La Roux

2012-01-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

I guess they filmed this entire video in one shot. Impressive. I especially like the projections behind the band near the end of the song.

I also wanted to include the La Roux video, Bulletproof, but they disabled embedding. Sigh. Well you can see the video on youtube here. My favorite part is after about 2:30, when the geometric rainshower comes crashing down around her and then the screen is broken up into fragmented mirror pieces. Does a broken mirror make her seem more bulletproof? I'm not sure. Well, even if the video doesn't relate to what she's singing it still looks cool.

Creepy dollhouse and even creepier story

2011-12-29T12:04:00.000-08:00

In the North-east corner of the Plaza de Cibeles, which I wrote about earlier, there is an imposing building, the Palacio de Linares, which was restored in the 1990's to its current incarnation as the Casa de América. During construction in 1990, there were many odd occurrences in the house. Doors were opening by themselves, light footsteps of children and sometimes loud shrieks could be heard all centered around the human-scale dollhouse attached to the front of the mansion.

A drove of paranormal experts descended on Madrid to investigate, and one parapsychologist apparently recorded the young, frail voice of a mother that said this:
My daughter is at rest.
My daughter Raimunda,
I never heard her say mommy.
Murderers, murderers!
We are here to stay for eternity.

The newspapers in Madrid were all over this story, and soon the talk of the town became "Is the Palacio de Linares haunted?" "Who was Raimunda and was she murdered?"

Many legends emerged, including those of incest, murder and deformed babies. None of them were true however. The true story is that the Marqués de Linares built the lavish mansion with his wife in 1871, and once the building was complete they decided to adopt a child. He had made a great fortune building the first railroad in Cuba, and returned to Spain lavishing money on those in need. They even created a creepy life-sized doll house for their adopted daughter to play in. Honestly I don't blame the builders for being creeped out by this place. I wouldn't want to be there in the middle of the night either.

Oh, and the parapsychologist who supposedly recorded the words above was arrested for falsely claiming to be a doctor, and writing phony checks.

Now the Casa de América has exhibitions, performances and film screenings focusing on Latin American history and culture. I saw a great photography show here, with work from many great artists including Frida Kahlo. The address is Paseo de Recoletos 2. Thanks again to Madrid Ocultos for the story!

Things I learned in school

2011-12-18T05:21:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow at work I have a thirty minute presentation (mostly in Spanish) about myself, what I've learned in my life so far, and the work I do outside of Base. Especially since it's the end of the year, it feels like quite a fitting time to look back at my years at school and summarize what I've learned. Right, isn't this the time when everyone looks back and evaluates their past year?

In May I graduated from Pratt Institute with an MFA in Communications Design. My education challenged many of my belief systems and also the way I see and think about the world around me. I'm sure a year from now or five years from now I will be able to analyze what I learned even better but here are my three bullet points to organize some of what I learned in school.

IDEA
The idea is the most important. The concept needs to drive the work, otherwise it is just not as truthful. The medium is the message, so the final form needs to express the meaning of your concept. In fact, maybe the most important thing I learned in school is the way you phrase your idea actually makes all the difference in the way people will respond to it. One word can change your entire meaning.

PROCESS
Appreciate the journey, document the process. Looking back on my sketches and scrawled notes, blog posts, saved images and video - the building blocks - helps me to understand the big picture of where I'm going with an idea. Sometimes you have to get messy in order to get somewhere, but it helps to be organized with your messiness.

DON'T BE PRECIOUS
Ok, I actually learned this during work on freelance projects, but it was during school so it counts as something I learned in school. I will always remember my experience working for the art director at Bard Graduate Center. He told me to create an 11 x 17 document and just try a million different options for each of the infographics I was working on. Then I would show him what I did and he'd tell me to make more. You can't be precious with your work as a graphic designer because it's always going to change and it will always be a collaboration.

City Projects and Platforms for Social Interaction

2011-12-17T07:49:00.000-08:00

Wierd. I'm finally using the new format for blogger and it's really different. I feel like I'm typing into an open void. Well...

Anyways, I'm having a few ideas flying around in my head and I'd like to pin them down on the page. So I mentioned a few days ago that I have this idea. It's an idea for a platform for people in Madrid to share their stories about the city. I'm fascinated by public spaces in the city and projects or artworks that can change our viewpoint, ideas or experience and an online public space can offer a similar transformation. It's a catalog of the human experience in the city, documenting places, streets, people, and events real and mythological. With a tapestry of contributions it will feel like the city is speaking through the cracks in the sidewalks.

Some existing projects that inspire:
Jeremy Dalmas: I've posted this before but it's a wonderful audio journey through the mythological undercurrents of lower Manhattan.

Side note on mythology: I'm reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies, which is an in-depth analysis of every popular belief structure on everything from everyday items to overarching concepts. For example, the chapter I just read was on the strip-tease - its origins and meanings. The book was written in 1957 so some of his references are dated, but it makes you look very closely at our world and the beliefs we take for granted. Many of the assumptions we make about our surroundings, rituals and objects are in fact a product of our society and upbringing. He has an enjoyable way of dissecting what people experience on a daily basis, and offering fascinating new meanings for many things that surrounds us.

Carolina Melis: A motion designer who has been commissioned to create an animated video to tell the story of the Ham House garden near the Thames in Richmond, UK. She will work with a historian and offer workshops on the property for people who are interested in the innovative garden design, created by Elisabeth Dysart in the 17th Century. The film will premiere on animateprojects.org in April 2012, accompanied by site-specific installations and a program of events to educate and shift perception on this historic place.

Here is one of Melis' recent videos on weavers in Sardinia, her home country.

The Art and Public Space research group at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam: This is a group that conducts research, organizes events and creates work and publications on the subject of the interaction of art and public space. They have done a lot of work in the Zuidas area of Amsterdam, which is the generic office park on the outskirts of the city that, like so many commercial developments, created massive empty and unused public spaces.

Media Lab Prado: in Madrid. This group studies the space where the digital, technological and social worlds intersect. There are some really confusing but interesting-looking projects on their program, and I plan on connecting with them once I have a firm grasp on the Spanish language (which is improving every day I'm happy to report).

THEN! Yesterday I discovered Jonathan Harris' latest project. He wants to create a catalog of human experience through the contribution of various authors on his site, Cowbird. Omg if this site isn't similar to the format I had in my head for my Madrid diary. I feel psychic. He's been developing the site for two years, working at various residencies and locations around the world. He used Indie Maps, which is a great discovery except that they're closed until next year. #*$@^!

COWBIRD.COM

Things I love about this website. The EXTRA focus on imagery, for one. Another cool detail is that the images drift slightly as you scroll down to read the story. There are capabilities to add audio with the story, here is a really interesting example of that. The stories are predominantly a kind of poetry, whether in prose form or in shortened stanzas. I can't wait to see how this site develops. The first "saga" being recorded are the Occupy movements around the world. Ok, but how can you beat that? This may color the site a little too strongly/specifically for many contributors, but as more and more people contribute different content, I'm sure there will be greater variety of saga.

Harris worked at two locations in Iceland while he built the website, which is where the concept of the saga originated. When I visited Iceland earlier this year, I learned about the epic saga about Egil Skallagrímsson, Egil's Saga. The tale develops over the course of Egil's long life, covering various tales of battle, revenge, adventure and friendship. It's considered one of the best Icelandic sagas.

So it's quite fitting that Harris chooses to develop "sagas" with a patchwork strategy of various contributors from all corners of the globe. The sagas are accessed on the site through an easy-to-use tagging system. There are various ways to organize the info on the site actually. By diary (each writer gets a diary where all of their stories are housed), by character, by location, and then there are many individual meta tags for each story. The stories are also organized by most loved, most viewed, and other categories.

It's a very ambitious project and has great potential. This is Harris' first project that I know of which engages people on this universal level. Many of his other projects were artworks based on humans, more of an exploration of human experience from the objective view of the artist. This is a huge collaboration with people from all over the globe, and an opportunity for many story-tellers. Most of the social platforms that we have (Facebook, Twitter, etc) provide a space to contribute a short status update but beyond the individual blog there isn't anything like this. Fast Company describes Cowbird as the "anti-Facebook". The focus on slower storytelling, the unfolding of personal narratives, rather than quick updates on what's happening in the moment certainly makes you stop and think about the current hurried state of the social space.

Some inspiration for this week and weekend

2011-12-14T10:58:00.000-08:00

I have an idea. I'm designing it now but I really need some inspiration. Here's what's getting me going.

Nomed font by Med Ness

Anton Pearson

Looks a bit like Verlag, no?

Rodrigo Maltchique Braga

Images from designspiration.net (via my rss feed). I LOVE my iGoogle home page. In addition to my rss feed, Gmail, FB, twitter and HuffPo, I have weather.com - the temperature in New York City and also in Madrid. For most of the day Madrid is 10 degrees warmer. Not that it's a competition or anything.

Lights Camera Hojas!

2011-12-12T14:11:00.000-08:00

Our street

These are the leaves (hojas) that I posted during the daytime before, slightly more cheerful at night. But there's something so abrupt about them at the same time, interjecting themselves into the nighttime sky and the peaceful architecture.

Process, Prism, Poster

2011-12-09T03:34:00.000-08:00

As I develop the prism project, I'm looking back at the various flavors of prism in my sketchbook and computer files. I started going 3D in Google Sketchup, and now I'm extending the idea of the prism with representational drawings of the city with a particular emphasis on windows. Each prism has a unique code related to the current environment, time of day and sensation.

A poster (above), and some process sketches (below).

Sock puppets on Calle Lavapies

2011-12-04T10:46:00.000-08:00

This is one way to get people to stop tripping over these things.

Two videos I made

2011-12-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

Around this time last year, I created these two videos for student projects.

Urban Street Patterns from Elizabeth Kuehnen on Vimeo.

I became fascinated with the correlation between the growth of streets patterns and the veins in a leaf, and created this short animation to illustrate the academic paper that proves the theory. This was for Visual Language with Professor Alex Liebergesell, completed in November 2010. I used Flash, a painstakingly tedious program, to create the animation.

This project uses my photography and video clips of New York City to tell the story (to extraterrestrial life forms) of our struggle here on earth to maintain fragile beauty in an increasingly man-made world. For Design Technology with Professor Mark Sanders in October 2010. Side note: I taught myself After Effects in one weekend in order to complete the video. Thank you Lynda.com!

Mm-Hmm David Wilson

2011-12-03T12:32:00.000-08:00

Advent 1 - Oscar Cash from David Wilson on Vimeo.

Yes! I love this, something to make the countdown to Christmas so much more fun. Director David Wilson is making short videos every day of advent with previously unreleased tracks from 25 different artists. This is the third one so far. Such a simple idea but deeply unusual at the same time. I love the oddly real spinning swan.

Metronomy - The Bay from David Wilson on Vimeo.

Also amazing is this recent video from Metronomy. It's like he took everything that was good from cheesy feel-good 80's music videos and made it better. So hot.

Barrio de las Letras

2011-11-30T14:05:00.000-08:00

Ok, here's a little anecdote about my neighborhood, Barrio de las Letras. A bit north of me, in the Plaza de las Cortes, is the Palace Hotel and every day at noon and 8pm on the corner of the hotel, you'll see an odd little show with figures and loud chiming bells. The figures were made by the Spanish cartoonist Antonio Mingote to represent Goya, the Dutchess of Alba, King Carlos III, the bullfighter Pedro Romero, a peasant and a toy dog. I had no idea that this was here, but when I was walking by the other day I saw a tour group waiting across the street, just staring at this building and I thought I'd wait around to see what happened. The carillon started chiming and these figures appeared from their hiding place behind the doors. I tried to get a closeup shot of the figuras goyescas in all their glory.

Also in the Plaza, across from the Congreso de Deputados (Congress building), is this fabulous statue of the writer Cervantes. Cervantes is quite an important figure in my neighborhood, since this is where he lived and wrote his masterpiece Don Quixote. Side note: in the apartment where we are renting, our landlords have a secret stash of the book - probably four copies - under the bed. I feel like I need to read it now, even though I know the gist of the story. We also saw the amazing statue of the characters Don Quixote and his sidekick in the Plaza de España this past weekend. Definitely worth a visit.

Hans Christian Andersen, while not such a fan of Madrid, has this to say about the statue of Cervantes: "The whole monument is wanting in grandeur; one is inclined to pass it carelessly, supposing that it has been erected in memory of some military commander who has no particular claim to our admiration. But when we heard the name, we arrested our steps and gazed at it with the deepest interest; for in that figure which we saw before us we beheld a king in the glorious intellectual world, one whose works are immortal, whose name is honored in every part of the earth where literature flourishes. While in the full vigor of manhood, he bore the chains of a slave; in battle, he offered to his fatherland, Spain, his left arm: his contemporaries left him to suffer from want; they treated him with scandalous indifference; they could neither comprehend him, nor appreciate him. Now, however, a monument stands in memory of him."

Don Quixote has been published in more editions and translated into more languages than every book on earth except the Bible. And the writer lived his life in poverty. No one even knows the exact location of his grave. All they know is that his bones rest somewhere within the Convent of San Ildefonso de las Trinitarias, which is still inhabited by cloistered nuns. However, there are many plaques and markers throughout the neighborhood that provide bits and clues into the story of Cervantes and the meaning of Don Quixote.

This ornate plaque commemorates the spot where Cervantes lived and died.

In the early 19th Century, the businessman Luis Franco was going to tear down the building in order to build a higher income building in its place. The city historian, Don Ramón (who I mentioned in my earlier post on the Houses of Malice), with the support of King Fernando VII objected to the demolition of such a historically important building and attempted to but it. He tried to explain to the owner that the building should be preserved and turned into some sort of literary establishment in honor of its famous history, but Luis Franco wouldn't sell. He said, "Of course I know exactly who used to live here, Don Quixote. I read his book every day and I have the pleasure of owning his house. Only I will make the decision of what happens to it." Needless to say, the building was torn down for this new one now in its place. When they asked Luis Franco if he would at least put a plaque up to state that Cervantes once lived there, he replied, "A plaque for Cervantes? I don't even know who that man is!"

Nonetheless, a plaque was finally put up in 1834, and later on the name of the street was changed to Calle de Cervantes.

The plaque reads:
Here lived and died
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Whose genius is admired worldwide.
Died in MDCXVI

Quotes from Don Quixote in shiny gold letters are ingrained in the sidewalks throughout the neighborhood. This is on Calle Huertas, around the corner from our apartment.

And this is one of the doors of the convent behind which lie Cervantes remains, however their exact location is a mystery.

Research credit to Ocultos Madrid by Mark and Peter Besas

I'm really interested in things that make us see our surroundings in a new way

2011-11-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

I'm at an interesting point in my move to Madrid. Somewhat of a turning point. I feel like I'm at home here now, almost two weeks into my internship at Base, know where all the good supermarkets are, and feeling more positive about life in general. Since I arrived two months ago I have been working steadily on a project that I've started to call "Esto es aquello". I read Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, which turned me even more onto the idea of the poetry of the street, and got me thinking about how we define ourselves in relation to the space that surrounds us. I wish I had read that book before my last semester of school! (Edvin my thesis advisor was right.)

The way we see our surroundings depends so much on our point of comparison. In the Garden of the Gods the viewpoint over, through and around these monumental rock formations changes the way we experience the landscape there at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Like the artworks I've posted on this blog, these forms are a tool to analyze the colors and shapes, lines and planes of our surroundings. By offering this frame/lens/viewpoint, we offer a way to experience the landscape with a point of comparison. The comparison itself can be anything: color, material, shape, angle, scale, etc.

I began making prisms - collages of the city - to express how we see the world, turned inside out and twisted, reflected. In the meantime, at the Thyssen I came across Paul Klee's Rotating House and I could have looked at it for days. I do look at it just about every day. In this flat painting he is able to express so many words.

Paul Klee, Rotating House, 1921

This project is so much more related to my Times Square project from earlier this year than I thought. I wanted to create a distinct feeling of being inside a close, intimate space and looking out or framing what it beyond. We want to create a protected space for ourselves, from which to look out of and to perceive things separate from ourselves, in order to understand ourselves better. For example, looking down the triangular space of the street it seems to lead endlessly into expansive possibilities. Certain viewpoints are symbolic and meaningful for us for different reasons.

Defining space with buildings is related to the search for who we really are - to understand more about ourselves we need to understand more about what surrounds us. Then I realized that instead of seeing everything as separate, it's more about seeing ourselves in others and everything around us. Like Mr. Maharaj talks about in this book. Instead of "this and that", it's "this is that". OR "esto es aquello". An early visual representation of this idea.

It's about my experience in Madrid at this moment. It's not about NYC except that the idea of "this" and "that" can be thought of as a comparison of the two cities I've lived in. It could develop into a mythological story, maybe about the angel... and the windows. About knowing Madrid - knowing where I am. Maybe it's all about being a foreigner and the loss of self that occurs when you live in a foreign culture. Kind of like a video component to Ella. It's a little tied in with the "Hidden Madrid" idea - inside/outside, understanding the dormant layers of history and the structure that ties it all together.

Also, I found two notable studios in the UK (in my search to get a j.o.b). Grrr is a collaboration between a painter and a typographer. They say this wordy yet fascinating morsel about their work: "Our practice is centered around an anthropological study of layered narratives found in naturally occurring intersections between the metaphysical and the terrestrial. By examining and documenting the fabric of the journey through a continuous dérive, a body of interconnected knowledge is gathered." I also really like the language of Introspective describing his exhibition: "Space between is a graphic exposition of the built environment. This is a participatory visual activity around spatial perception, it considers how space mght shape and be shaped by our experiences of it."

Imagenes

2011-11-27T10:54:00.000-08:00

Gareth Moore, Childrens Films

introspective.org.uk

Yes, I am a guiri

2011-11-11T16:22:00.000-08:00

Check out my post on the Guiri Guide to Madrid:

La Casa Encendida: Look at art and learn Photoshop too!

Las hojas en el Barrio de las Letras

2011-11-10T10:37:00.000-08:00

And on our street, Calle Amor de Dios

The main point of these is that they light up and look beautiful at night, but I really like them in the daytime too.

De Chirico, the Situationists, and architectural morphology

2011-11-07T08:51:00.000-08:00

It was exactly one year ago today that I posted this brief synopsis of the history of Situationist International. And coincidentally I found myself reading the situationists and the city (ed.Tom McDonough) on the metro today. In the first essay by Ivan Chtcheglov, one of the first to put the theoretical ideas of the Situationist movement down on paper, he refers to a painting by Giorgio De Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of the Street.

Side note: I found the book at a shop in New York that I only discovered two days before I moved to Madrid. Van Alen Books at 30 W. 22nd Street is a required stop for anyone interested in architecture, and the design of the tiny store itself is uncommon. It made me kind of sad to be leaving nyc, so I made sure to buy two books as inspiration for my new adventures. One is the situationists book I mentioned and another titled An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris by Georges Perec, in which he sits at different locations in Paris and records his observations of otherwise overlooked details.

Giorgio De Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914

De Chirico painted urban spaces that seem to contain the dual sentiments of emptiness and possibility. He is a visual narrator of the hidden layers of the city, using strong symbolism and oddly placed shadows for emphasis of the ominous - or promising - aspects of the story. I wrote about his American contemporary, Edward Hopper, here. Both painters capture the essence of the street to convey a distinct emotion, and through the artists eyes we uncover hidden aspects of a place and understand it on a new, previously unseen level.

After reading so much about the Situationists, I'm longing for Paris. BUT, being that I am in Madrid, these concepts can easily apply to the urban milieu "aqui".

SI fought valiantly against the sterile modernization of urban spaces in and around Paris, through artwork, performance, film and architecture. They were preoccupied with the history of the city, as successive layers of each generation add to or cover the remnants of the past. Clean, unfriendly and overly geometric architecture doesn't add any life, character or play to the city, and in their opinion, suppresses the potential for creative living.

In the introduction of the book, McDonough describes their views: "...cities were for them profoundly historical landscapes, whose current appearances were shaped - as geological strata underlay physical landscapes - by the successive events that time has buried, though never completely effaced." Their desire to reconnect with the history of the city, in particular the radical and revolutionary legacy, reminds me of my thesis exhibition that told the story of the 1920 Wall Street bombing. Seeing that event as a precedent for the current events is timely, considering that the attack targeted J.P.Morgan bank as a symbol of unfettered capitalism.

America's First Age of Terrorism, an installation that
tells the story of the 1920 Wall Street bombing.
Images from my thesis installation at Pratt.

Also, I learned a new term to describe this idea: architectural morphology. A micro level of urban morphology, it is the study of the layers of history and forces that have created the built environment. Love it.

Poster-girl for organization

2011-11-07T03:01:00.000-08:00

I worked at RxArt this past summer, and among many other things I created this poster for the fundraising gala. I was the only designer on staff and didn't have a ton of feedback from colleagues, which I found difficult after a two year program of endless feedback and critique. But sometimes it's nice to work solo, not all the time but completing this project on my own from initial concept to press check was quite fulfulling.

RxArt is an organization that curates contemporary art installations in hospitals around the US, and their annual fundraiser is a major event in New York City. This fall it was sponsored by Chanel Beauté, and featured an art auction with work from Dan Colen, Miranda July, Terence Koh, and Yoko Ono to name a few. A very cool organization doing very cool things, and I am so happy that I'm able to be a part of the family now. I have another project in the works, that is a redesign of the press package - an abbreviated version that has taken the form of a deck of cards. We'll see how it goes!

All of the current information about RxArt is found on the front of the poster, which folds out twice for the full read (or the two-page option shown above), then Rob Pruitt, who generously donated the zebra artwork for the cover of the Between the Lines coloring book, agreed to have it printed full-bleed on the back for an added bonus for attendees of the gala.

The poster was found in the Chanel gift bags as guests were leaving the gala. I thought it would be so fabulous for people to have a great time at the party, then get home and say, "let me read all about this amazing organization" ... And so my vision of this unconventional poster came to life. It is inspired by the immediacy of a newspaper (or newsletter) because it contains all of the most current news, and the poster on the back gives it that extra dimension. This is an organization devoted to great art, after all.

Doors of Toledo

2011-11-06T17:38:00.000-08:00

I visited Toledo yesterday, which is the old capital of Spain, and where there are just too many different shapes and sizes of doorways.

Also yesterday, when I got off the train (a short 30 minute ride) I realized that I have officially fallen in love with Spain. Somewhere between the toasts with everything imaginable on top and the potato pancake sandwiches, Spain caught hold of my heart. I'm looking forward to working here, really picking up the language, and getting a real Madrileña experience. My experience here feels like it has the possibility of a closed door, with me wondering what may be on the other side. I just have to open it!

One prism a day

2011-11-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

So I started doing these drawings every day - minerals from a place deep in the earth, or instruments of great sensitivity and precision. This first series (these are 4 of 9 so far) I created with colored pencils. I only have a few colored pencils here with me in Spain - I will get more next week when I go back to NY for a bit. I like the limitations of using the same set of colors and abstract shape, and I'm excited to do one of these each day for a while.

It's almost cliché to do "something a day" at this point, but it will be really positive for me to have the discipline and inspiration to make something beautiful every day. It will give me the opportunity to explore a few different mediums as well - watercolor and collage, in addition to colored pencils. I'm going to record the time of day that they are created in the title (a code). The series will be classified by different codes creating an ontology of these mythical objects.

I'm still debating whether I should start another blog, posting one each day. That seems excessive however. Maybe.

Madrid: In Photos (I)

2011-10-31T13:15:00.000-07:00

Cibeles and the Cathedral of Communications

2011-10-31T06:10:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I decided to explore the area of Madrid surrounding the Cibeles fountain.


Here she is, in all her glory.

The statue is not fully accessible because it's at the center of one of the busiest roundabouts in Madrid, so the best spot to get a photo is from the bus stop on the southern side. The four corners surrounding the fountain is known as the Plaza de la Cibeles, which was mistakenly marked as "Plaza de Cibeles" for a while until the Spanish uproar about the purity of their language. Now the signs properly read "Plaza de la Cibeles".

Cybele is the Goddess of Nature in Greek mythology, and her chariot is drawn by two male lions who have a mythology of their own... An infant girl, Atalanta, was abandoned by her father and left in a basket that floated down the river. The girl was taken in by wild bears who raised her as their own. As she grew older, she reluctantly went to the town to reunite with her father, who subsequently demanded that she marry. However, an oracle had once told Atalanta that she shouldn't marry, because if she did she would be turned into an animal. Needless to say, she really didn't want to get married. Since no one could run faster than her, she decided to require her potential suitor to beat her in a footrace in order to win her hand in marriage. One young man, Hippomenes, fell madly in love with her and decided to enlist the help of the Goddess Aphrodite to win the race. Aphrodite gave him three golden apples to drop on the track during the race. Atalanta couldn't resist the gorgeous apples and, although she was winning the race, she would stop to eat each of the apples as he placed them down. Hippomenes won the race, and they married. It became a passionate and loving marriage, and Atalanta started to think that the oracle's prophesy wouldn't come true. However, one day the couple were out hunting and decided to stop and rest - and make love - in the temple of Zeus. Zeus saw their sacreligous deed and punished them by turning the lovers into lions on the spot. After some time, the Goddess Cybele came upon the lions, and feeling pity for them, hitched them to her chariot so they would always be together.

...The strangest thing about the statue, however, is that the two lions are male. Was it purely an aesthetic decison, or does this maybe give us some insight about the sculptor... ?

At Cybele's feet is a man's face - actually part man, part vegetable - spouting water. Oh, this guy was just Cybele's grandson, Attis, who she fell in love with (not knowing that he was her grandson of course). He was in love with someone else so Cybele vowed to drive him mad. In frustration he fled to the mountains and castrated himself, and died from loss of blood. Cybele felt terrible and resurrected Attis as a pine tree, and he became the God of vegetation, in control of the death and rebirth of plant life. The sculptor Ventura Rodríguez created many pine cone details on the statue, as a reminder of this struggle and resurrection.

When Real Madrid wins a championship, this area is completely blocked off to traffic and the players and fans celebrate here. People used to be able to climb to the top of the statue but because of vandalism, no more. The fans of Atlético de Madrid actually celebrate at another fountain four blocks south of this one.

View of the fountain and La Gran Via from the observation deck

One building looms over the plaza more majestically than the rest. In the JUST recently completed centrocentro, which was converted from the early 20th century Cathedral of Communications into a cultural hub for the city, there are a wide variety of exhibitions from urban planning studies to 9/11 photography. The architecture studio Arquimática did an amazing job of renovating the building with an open, spacious update and maintaining it's historical soul.

So, in 1905 they called it the Palace of Communications but it was actually just the city post office. Apparently the magnificent Renaissance architecture demanded more monumental naming.

One strategic note: if you want to go up to the observation deck, it's necessary to get a ticket on the 2nd floor, and you can only go up at specific times. We had to wait 45 minutes to go up so the best strategy would be to buy the ticket, then walk through the exhibitions, and afterwards head to the 8th floor for your time on the deck. It's worth it, btw.

Palacio de Comunicaciones de Madrid, 1920. Photo from this blog

And today.

A view of the funky glass elevators inside.

And lastly, from the architecture studio responsible for the renovation, this is their creative interpretation of the building tower and it's surroundings.

La Torre. Exposición El Palacio de Cibeles. Arquimática

Play, Space and Place

2011-10-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

I so thoroughly enjoy artwork that changes the way we view our cities. Similar to the artists I talked about in this previous post, Chris Martin and Arnaud LaPierre are two artists asking us to rethink our city experience. It's not about focusing on or changing small details in our environment, but more of a feeling of who we are as city-dwellers and how we define ourselves in relation to our surroundings.

Chris Martin, "East River Williamsburg," Brooklyn, 2005. Image via Eflux,
Courtesy Chris Martin, KOW BERLIN, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, Foto: Donna Alberico

With this installation Chris Martin used pop colors and unusual shapes to bring our attention to the comparison - artwork vs. skyline. We compare the colors and shapes of his work to the backdrop of the New York city skyline, and it offers the possibility of breaking from reality into a color-coded fantasy city. Yes please!

Arnaud LaPierre, "The Ring Installation"
on the Place Vendome in Paris

Images from MocoLoco

Arnaud LaPierre uses mirror cubes to emphasize the connection of people with their surroundings, and the results are this gorgeous funhouse in the middle of Paris. It transforms many Parisian's everyday walk, and gives them a chance to ponder who they are in relation to their city. I really need to see this btw.

The installation plays with the concept of place. As James H Kunstler tells us in this entertaining TED talk, "Your ability to create places that are meaningful ... depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms, and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are." LaPierre isn't defining space, instead he's distorting and fragmenting it, and placing us right in the center of the urban landscape, encouraging people to take a break from their usual routine and play with the sense of place.

The Houses of Malice

2011-10-25T07:22:00.000-07:00

Walking around my neighborhood you see a lot of these signs that start with "Visita G. Manzana" and then a number:

Naturally I needed to figure this out. It turns out that the signs are the vestiges of a system created when Madrid first became the capital of Spain in the 16th century. King Felipe II, after finding that the city lacked adequate housing for all of the members of his entourage, passed a law that required residents with more than one level in their house to designate part of that space to members of the royal court. This law was called the Quartering Ordinance and it required inspections of each city block and subsequent numbering to make sure that residents were adhering to the law. If they didn't have space for the members of the court, they were required to pay a tax.

Needless to say, Madrileños were not happy about this law. Many people began to build one-story houses. If they did have a second story, they designed the windows so that it was impossible to be able to tell how many stories the house had from the outside. These houses that were created to fool the king are nicknamed "casas a la malicia" (houses of malice) and some of them still exist in the city today.

In 1751, tax-collecting was so difficult because of the labyrinth of streets and confusion of houses, someone came up with the idea to number each city block. Thus, tiles were placed on the corner of each building. "Visita G" stands for Visita General de la Regalía de Aposento (Quartering Ordinance) and "Manzana" means city block.

It wasn't until the 19th century that Madrid streets were properly named and signposted with the help of city historian Ramón de Mesonero Romanos. Before then, letters to residents would be something like "Sr. Rodrigo Corral, Street behind San José church, next to Leon brothers bakery". Romanos and the mayor, Marqués Viudo de Pontejos, named over 240 streets with the names of important historical events and figures, identified with a plaque on every corner building. Also, each doorway was marked with numbers beginning closest to the Puerta del Sol with even numbers on the right and odd numbers on the left.

There are still 31 different designations for types of streets in Madrid, with nomenclature such as callejón, travesía, plazuela, ronda, paseo, pasadizo, corredera, cava, costanilla, glorieta, etc. So it might take me a little longer than I expected to get to know my way around.

Research credits to the awesome book Ocultos Madrid and this blog.

A couple process photos for Band of Love album

2011-10-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

The artwork is an homage to the Japanese artist Sasakisan.

I love the idea of a mineral deep in the earth as a metaphor for the heart. I listened to the band's music for a while and started looking at images of Sasakisan's artwork - he's a Japanese collage artist who works with 2-4 maximum images at a time so his work is very minimal, but so powerful and it conveys peace and transcendence.

These are sketches that I created using cut paper and a script typeface. The mineral that she's holding in her hand is a metaphor for a peaceful offering from the heart. She's offering her heart, however imperfect or awkward it may be.

Final album artwork for The Band of Love coming soon...

How cool is this building?

2011-10-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

Caixaforum is an art gallery and cultural center in Madrid, that I passed by today while taking photos of our neighborhood. In 2008 the architects Herzog and de Meuron coverted an 1899 power station, literally lifted it off the ground to create a covered plaza underneath. The higher levels of the structure are sculpted to reflect the roofscape of the surrounding buildings.

Gorg.

I love how the narrow adjacent streets are framed by the low
ceiling and fountain area below.

A vertical garden compliments the plaza in the entrance area,
reminiscent of the botanical gardens just on the other side
of the Paseo del Prado

An image of the original 1899 power station from Arcspace

When you're standing in the covered plaza, the sensation of the amount of weight hanging over your head is unbelievable. The sides of the building literally appear to have no support. We didn't go inside the building this time but there are usually exhibitions and programming curated to promote cultural understanding. Read more about the Caixa Foundation here.

Elena Asins: An architect's dream artist

2011-10-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to the Museo Reina Sofia here in Madrid, and in ten enormous rooms on the third floor was the exhibition of Elena Asin's work: Fragmentos de la memoria. She was born in 1940 in Madrid, and is one of the first artists in Spain to use the computer to assist her work, and somewhere along the way she studied semiotics with Noam Chomsky at Columbia. The seemingly endless walls of lines and planes reminded me a little of Sol Lewitt - The search for perfect geometric abstraction, and an investigation of mathematical principles in art.

In the artist's statement before you enter the exhibition, she explains that she doesn't create with the purpose of making art - she just systematically works on the problems of space that preoccupy her mind. I could see an architect walking into any of these rooms and finding endless possibilities of angles, shapes and viewpoints.

She admired the work of Piet Mondrian and in an essay in 1969 she writes "For Mondrian this space-plane is a positive void, as it is an essential condition for objective existence. Creating the void is the main action and therein lies true creation, because this void is positive; it contains the germ of the absolutely new."

The space in-between is the most important - reminds me of meditation. Her work is a life-long methodical meditation on the structure of the plane.

Images from the Museo Reina Sofia

The eternal search for beauty

2011-10-15T18:21:00.000-07:00

We visited Iceland after my graduation in May, and the highlight of the trip for me was visiting this tiny museum on the outskirts of Reykjavik. The museum is dedicated to the artist Ásmundur Sveinsson (b.1893) with a complete retrospective of his lifetime of work, and displays his artistic development with volumes and volumes of sketches. When the process sketches were placed alongside the sculpture it was a comprehensive experience of his work.

His house, which he designed himself, was transformed into the museum. The house is a nod to his interest in the Bauhaus and is a sculpture in itself. Fun fact alert: a view from above shows the footprint of the house makes a smiley face.

Sveinsson's most famous work is the Water Carrier, which is placed in downtown Reykjavik. He is considered a pioneer of sculpture in Iceland and much of his work was created for use in public space. Throughout his life he remained true to the belief that art should be created for the people, and therefore be among them.

In the sculpture garden outside the museum, I found this. Sveinsson created a form that uses its negative space so beautifully and fluidly that I had to move around to each angle to see how it framed the garden around his house.

From the curator's text: "To Sveinsson the eternal search for the essence of the subject is one of the most important attributes of each artist... and to emphasize this point he often quoted the words of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin: 'There is no such thing as beauty, only the search for beauty.' But Sveinsson added - from his own heart - that the search itself knew no boundaries."

Flux/S, Richard Galpin and Joseph Beuys

2011-09-05T20:25:00.000-07:00

Flux/S took over an open urban space at Strijp-S in Eindoven that looks otherwise unappealing to do some pretty fantastic activities. Let's see, there's an open symphony (everyone brings their instrument and starts playing), hula hooping, twister, and other play date favorites.

This is the third edition of the arts festival and they chose this spot in response to recent developments. This reminds me of similar festivals in New York that I've talked about in recent posts on psychogeography, except this festival has a unifying principle. It is a commentary on the meaning of public space in our cities, and one of their main intentions is to start a dialogue. I, for one, have had many philosophical arguments about urban design while twisting myself into a knot on a large dotted mat. But seriously, I get it. I think the intentions behind this festival are strong, and reminiscent of the original political and social rebellion that was the intention of the Situationist International and Fluxus movements. Artbomb, above, is a good example of their quietly aggressive protest, and the festival itself feels like a collective demonstration by visitors and residents of Eindoven who choose to participate.

How can we rethink our city environment, and how can art create an entirely new experience? One of the answers that I'm exploring in my work is - how can we create an entirely new experience with what is already there? Whether people themselves form the artwork, or their stories, or offering a new lens through which to see the city.

Artist Richard Galpin installed Viewing Station on the High Line in May, and I was in the middle of a project in Times Square to frame certain elements in the environment to "quiet" the experience and to meditate on your surroundings, so I was blown away by this. He takes the geometry from separating layers of photographic prints to create the abstract cut-outs. The actual view that Viewing Station frames is an interesting choice - let's just say it's only interesting through a kaleidoscopic lens like this. The power of this installation to disconnect the viewer from everyday reality and see architecture in a number of ways - by focusing on the abstract geometry, or blocks of color - is a novel re-combination of our familiar surroundings. And really friggin cool.

New York City is an open air museum, and I especially love when artists can push that further to make it even more of one. Not necessarily in a giant oversized sculpture way, or even the Sol Lewitt retrospective in City Hall park, which I thought was conventional - disappointing because I adore his work, but something subtle, that makes us take a second look. This happened to me when I was walking on West 22nd street with a few friends. I saw large naturally carved basalt stones, each placed directly adjacent to an oak tree. I realized later that it was Lynne Cooke and Dia Art Foundation's continuation of Joseph Beuys 7000 Oaks. In his words: "My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument's two parts will never be the same."

The juxtaposition of regenerative tree with inert stone is a strong environmental message intended to shake people's consciousness, and he also wanted the work to grow and expand beyond its original inauguration at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany in 1987. The goal of this social sculpture was also give everyone the ability to create art by planting trees, and also to "extend the traditional role of the art gallery so the gallery extends out into the city”.

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks. West 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in New York City.
Photo: Ken Goebel. From Dia

Re-Imagining the city

2011-05-22T13:35:00.001-07:00

Here it is - all one hundred + pages of my thesis book. I still have yet to get three more signatures in order to offically submit the two printed copies to the department, but I'm almost there! The printed book has front and back cover flaps, and on the inside covers/flaps are the dot screen images that you see in the beginning and end of the document.

My thesis topic is about the transformation of place when you learn about the environment around you. It's about making the invisible visible, and telling the untold stories of the city. I'm posting this on the same day that I read this article about legendary designer Dieter Rams, which I found interesting considering his desire to use ordinary form and materials to make functional and beautiful products. Rams writes, "Not the spectacular things are the important things — the unspectacular things are the important things, especially in the future.”

Open publication - Free publishing - More design

His words relate to a movement towards the ordinary and "unfinished", the handmade DIY ethos of recent years. My thesis falls into this category of understanding that our everyday environment - on the way to work, walking the dog, getting a cup of coffee - is enough. It can even be an fascinating adventure when we let our curiosity take over. My thesis is also a methodology for exploring the city, and an investigation into how a designer can approach the complexities and multiple narratives of the built environment.

A window into my process

2011-04-15T00:28:00.000-07:00

I didn't intentionally take this photo, but when I was cleaning up my desktop just now I saw it and think it looks pretty interesting. It's the poster I'm working on for the Times Square project.

True Challenge

2011-03-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

During this time when I have one week to complete my thesis and two weeks to set up my exhibition, both of my Grandmas passed away. This quote from Mother Theresa reminds me that life will constantly challenge us, and test our strength. This is her advice:

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

Dear Blog

2011-03-04T07:25:00.000-08:00

Thank you so much for helping me with my first draft of my thesis. Just when I thought I couldn't write another word, you were right there, giving me notes and thoughts from along the way. I just don't know if I could have done it without you. That being said, I need to apologize for neglecting you for the past few weeks. Here's a little snippet from the paper, hopefully this will make up for lost time.

In the Design Issues article, "A Passion for the Real", Jan van Toorn urges communications designers to use their specialized skills to disseminate the messages of corporate culture. He implores us to understand more about the deeper implications of our work because we cannot afford to remain on the surface of matters, blissfully unaware of the symbolic and hidden meaning of the work we create for corporate or political means. Designers should also not underestimate our power to create mythological narratives that could potentially become cultural reality.

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggests that the hyperrealism of places such as Disneyland, colonial Williamsburg and New Urbanist communities are reality in America. He believes that “simulation is the creation of the real through mythological models” and that because these places are created from an ideal model expressed through the media, these examples are actually more real than the reality of America. Especially as we become more dependent on digitally mediated experiences, place making is in the power of the designer, artist, filmmaker and photographer. Because these media have such a strong effect on our experience of place, the boundary between simulation and reality is breaking down.

These mythological models can build place by themselves. The wildly popular show "Sex and the City" built upon truths of New York City, but created an entirely fictional one at the same time. And one that was so believable that people from all over the world would travel to become a part of. Once they arrive in the city, buy the Jimmy Choos and the Manolos and max out their credit cards with trendy meals and cosmopolitans, they realize that the Sex and the City myth is not reality. The stories people tell about a place become more important than the facts, B.D. Wortham-Galvin observes in her essay "Mythologies and Placemaking", because the place gets separated from its context and a new context is put in. She states, "Mythology can become a powerful design tool if deployed judiciously."

Julius Shulman gave L.A. its history, its best self, and then exported its mythology to the world.
Mary Melton, Los Angeles Magazine

Yours always,
Liz

p.s. Be back soon!

What do Andy Warhol, The Band and Times Square have in common?

2011-01-30T15:53:00.000-08:00

Not much.

But I was listening to the Band today as I wrote this story about Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick:

Andy Warhol moved the Factory to the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West in 1965, the same year he met Edie. An unusual building for it's era, it still stands out on the block because of the intricate terra cotta details on the facade and a large minaret on the roof. Max's Kansas City was around the corner on Park Avenue South. Andy's friend Lou Reed played there regularly with the Velvet Underground, and Andy's crowd of artists, scenesters and followers became a fixture in the back room of the club.

Edie Sedgwick's entry into the New York scene was explosive. When she entered the room, people revolved around her like planets orbiting the sun. Andy claimed her as his muse and christened her his "Superstar". She wanted the Hollywood dream Andy promised and he cast her in many of his films. After returning from a Paris gallery opening in May 1965, Warhol asked his scriptwriter to write a script for Sedgwick, “something in a kitchen – something white, and clean, and plastic.” The resulting film was "Kitchen", one of the many in which Edie would wander about the set with some fuzzy purpose having unintelligible conversations with other actors. Although Edie's magnetism made the films an underground success, most of them were never screened outside of the Factory.

Whirling onto the Factory scene was Edie's escape from her troubled childhood, and drugs pushed her further away from her problems. Many people, including Bob Dylan, were at odds with Andy about the way he objectively watched - and filmed - her demise. Edie tried to get closer to Andy emotionally but he remained cold and detached. Their relationship deteriorated by the end of 1965, when she was already heavily dependent on drugs. She died of a massive overdose at the age of twenty-eight. In a short time she became a vital component of the Factory and a cultural icon, but her star burned too bright as it seared the night sky.

Then I realized that the Band toured with Bob Dylan most of the time, so there is a connection with Andy. Roni Horn did this type portrait of Andy Warhol:

Andy&Edie

Somehow this artwork by Roni Horn inspired me for my type experiments.

Yesterday I created "Times Square in White" and I'm thinking about doing an entirely white composition with type.

James Dean in Times Square 1955

This is a gathering in Times Square awaiting the results of a boxing match on the ticker.

My beef with the current state of Times Square is that when there is such a saturation of billboards, communication ceases to exist. When every advertisement screams at you, they cancel each other out and nothing remains memorable. over-stimulation = NO communication

I started reading "Learning from Las Vegas", Robert Venturi's analysis of the signage on the Las Vegas strip. He's talking about how on the strip "communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and in the landscape." The same dominance of signs occurs in Times Square at a pedestrian scale.

Random facts about Times Square:

Times Square used to be called Longacre square and was renamed in 1904 when The New York Times set up their headquarters in the building at One Times Square (where the ball drops).

The original news ticker at One Times Square was installed in 1928 and first used to announce the results of the Presidential election of 1928. (Times Square was the place that New Yorkers gathered to get news and celebrate big events like the World Series or presidential elections.)

Starting after the Depression and through the 80's, Times Square became known for it's seediness. It was a den for pornography, prostitution, drugs and criminal behavior. New development in the 80's started to clean up the area. That was when zoning regulations were made which require buildings to be covered in billboards to maintain the "authenticity" of the area.

Disney bought a space in Times Square in the 90's and changed the profile of the area to be more of a family-friendly destination. Times Square was "Disneyfied". Jane Jacobs would be horrified.

My first memory of Times Square was going to get fake ID's with a couple friends in high school! Unfortunately I can't find that photo, but need to see if someone has it.

The old billboards were spectacular - the Camel guy blowing the smoke ring, the Pepsi waterfall (both designed by Douglas Leigh) and the more recent Coke bottle with retractable straw and the steaming Cup of Noodles. Now all of the still and moving images blend together to create a monotonous scream of color and activity.

Times Square isn't actually a square - it's the crossing of two large avenues. The northern point is called Duffy Square, named after Father Duffy - LaGuardia dedicated it when he was mayor.

In the last few years Bloomberg started a program to make New York's streets more pedestrian friendly and it's really visible in Times Square. Huge areas are blocked off for pedestrians, which give people more space (and seemingly time) to stop and look around. Also, it makes travel times faster for cars because Broadway no longer chokes off the traffic coming down 7th avenue. Huh, I never would have guessed that closing roads would actually make traffic move faster, but it worked.

The Times Square alliance is also doing great work to get cutting edge artists to do installations and performances here. This is the beginning of getting real New Yorkers to visit this neighborhood but we still need good food, reasonable prices and possibly fewer flashing lights.

This neighborhood is also known as the theater district, and the theater is another place where you will rarely find New Yorkers. How to get more New Yorkers to see theater? Cheaper tickets? Waiting in line for three hours to get half-price tickets for the current shows is not fun.

In "The Experience of Place", Tony Hiss talks at length about the unique atmosphere of Times Square, different from any other place in New York. The Reuters building and Ernst and Young building, high-rises built in the 80's on 42nd street succeed in blocking out most of the afternoon sunlight in the Square. The northern part (Duffy square) is the only place that gets significant sunlight.

At night, architecture disappears and only signage is visible. So it removes the disjointedness between sign and building. Times Square actually works really well at night.

As I contemplate this project in Times Square I'm asking myself a few questions:
What if there was massive coordination of signage in Times Square? Or integration of signage with architecture? What if the advertisements in Times Square were entirely typographic and consisted only of beautiful letterforms? Maybe there needs to be a new height/size for billboards. We need to bring in white space - it's a shame that so much money and energy is wasted on signs that can't even be read.

In our lives over-stimulation results in a lack of communication. When everything is screaming at you, it's difficult to bring meaningful personal content into the experience. If we simplify our surroundings do we actually get more out of it? Can we bring more of our own meaning when the visual noise is reduced? Beyond looking, what can people do with this visual stimuli? I could give people a blank slate and they can draw in their own images. If Times Square were more interactive it could add another layer of meaning. I could ask "What is your Times Square?"

From Jack Kerouac's "On the Road", Sal finds himself back where his journey began.
Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. The high towers of the land--the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born.

Heart

2011-01-27T20:38:00.000-08:00

Mineral By Karina Eibatova

Landscape Painting 2 by Russel Leng

Love

2011-01-19T19:38:00.000-08:00

Oh, my teacher did this.

2010-12-30T12:10:00.000-08:00

Sooo, I was googling my teacher for Cross-Disciplinary studio next semester. She's the only professor I haven't met yet and I know she's an architect so I looked to see what work she's been doing. I found this great project that is really related to some of the work I'm doing.

This is a project from 2003, called the Urban Museum of Modern Architecture. Yale student Marisa Angell wanted to turn people's eyes to architecture the same way that they look at museum exhibitions. She wrote copy for brochures on many buildings around New Haven, but the brochures didn't include any pictures of the buildings, just information on the history of the building, about the architect and other buildings they've built. Then she worked with an architecture firm, where I think my teacher Nicole Robertson was working, to build INFObjects to be installed in the lobbies of the buildings. Each object responded to the unique characteristics of the building and space.

Inspiration I've ffffound

2010-12-28T09:14:00.000-08:00

I wish they had more descriptions for all of the images on ffffound. I always want to know the designer and what they are for or about (and have the information be easily accessible).

A psychological interlude

2010-12-26T11:49:00.000-08:00

As my mind was racing last night after a whirlwind Christmas holiday, I decided to glance through my notes from the beginning of my thesis journey. Besides getting even more confused about what I want to do, I may have stumbled upon the overall meaning of my work.

I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut on a standard parcel of land somewhere in the backcountry. We barely interacted with our neighbors, and my parents seemed quite content about that (they grew up in the bustling neighborhoods of the Bronx, so maybe the peace and quiet was ideal for them). On my road there wasn't a community in the sense that people waved to each other and chatted about their kids, borrowed cups of sugar, or planned holiday get-togethers. I didn't have a group of neighborhood kids that I could run outside and play with anytime. My brother and sister are ten and twelve years older than me, and they were off to college by the time I was eight. I grew up feeling like an only child, and even though I had a lot of friends from school, time for play dates had to be well-planned.

Greenwich is a beautiful town, but once I moved to the city when I was twenty-one, I realized how much character the streets, buildings and neighborhoods could have. Since New York is a very pedestrian city, I was constantly impressed by the street art found on the walls of old buildings, and hidden doorways and various nooks and crannies found in the older settlements. Greenwich, like most suburbs, consists of long main roads and shorter side roads, and you need to take the car to get anything done. While the town has a character of its own and I lived there for twenty-one years, it's not something I grew a strong attachment to.

Both of my parents passed away by the time I was twenty-one years old, and settling in the city was a way to grow roots somewhere. The city became a constant character in my life, and I've grown an attachment to it that I can't fully explain. Thus my intention with thesis work is to tell a better story about what I love about New York City, and to offer alternate ways to experience it. My attachment to the city's landscape and character has also activated a fear - the fear of losing anything that makes New York what it is, whether it's the authenticity, energy, or diversity.

The conclusion I finally come to after all of this thesis stuff is finished will have nothing to do with preserving the way things are, or nostalgia for the way things were. New York City is constantly being transformed - rebuilt and recreated by its people. That may be the thing I love the most, and the thing that makes New York City what it is today.

SOME THINGS THAT MY THESIS IS NOT ABOUT:
While corporations with out-of-place branding is deplorable in historic neighborhoods, that is not something I want or need to tackle. I feel that corporations like McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts should have flexible branding strategies for their retail outlets, in order to connect with the community and enhance the beauty of the built environment, but this is something that needs to happen at the top levels of management. Many neighborhoods welcome chain stores because of the economic contribution, or convenience of easily grabbing a latte, gadget, or cheap shoes. Only a few community boards will completely block chain stores from opening in their neighborhoods, and some will place strong restrictions on signage to maintain visual integration.

The greater issue is the lack of historical and contextual awareness of retail stores, but costs would skyrocket if research and attention to context were required for every outpost. The responsibility is with the corporation to make a meaningful contribution to the community they enter, and many already have policies for employee volunteerism and grant programs. In this new age of social responsibility, maybe every globalized behemoth will make an effort to integrate visually and also with their community. In fact, it may even bring in a new customer base.

Also, I'm not trying to place meaning where there is none. Branding is a giant industry that tries to create beauty from the banal; to create meaningful experiences from trivial ones. I'm not interested in making the everyday beautiful, just to understand that the quotidian is enough. I'd like to uncover the truth in what is already there, and find my own meaning in the city I'm surrounded by every day. Maybe once I find truths hidden in the cracks and shadows of New York City, they can be applied to other cities around the globe.

So there you have it - a quick psychological interlude. Also it's my personal context that helps explain where I'm coming from and the color of glass that I'm peering through.

Recap of Fall 2010 final projects

2010-12-22T13:54:00.000-08:00

I started reading again today (after recovering from final critique and having limited mental functioning for about a week), but then I realized that I haven't had a recap of all the feedback and information I've gathered for the last few weeks. I pulled together my final projects and was really happy with all three... here's a quick recap of how they turned out and next steps.

1. I created a sound installation for tech studio - an experience of the city in audio form. I had four tracks playing simultaneously in four corners of a small room, each one with ambient sounds and interviews from a neighborhood in nyc. At first I wanted to find out if you could recognize a neighborhood based on it's sound alone, but then I became more interested in giving spectators the opportunity to "stop and listen" and to shut off the visual sense completely. The visual sense dominates with an overwhelming amount of sensory information in the city, so I wanted to explore how much more we experience/learn about the city by isolating the sense of hearing. Like my other work, this project is also about how our surroundings communicate to us (with conversations and other ambient sounds).

A couple ideas to explore with this project:
+It could benefit from completely shutting off the visual sense (i.e. no lights, blocking out windows).
+Also, I would like to try spacing out the audio collages even more so that when all four play simultaneously, there is the ebb and flow that I achieved with each individual one. Right now when all four play it sounds like one unchanging level.
+Technical aspect of audio installation - how to make each neighborhood audible individually at each corner while the others fade out? Have the volume increase as person walks towards it, or have a piece overhead (or headphones) that you can enter and be fully immersed in sound.
+A couple professors would have appreciated the audio at ear level, but others appreciated the upward movement of sound (similar to the experience in the city).

Everyone I talked to made me think a lot about looking at installation work and trying to go in that direction for my thesis exhibition. Michelle emphasized thinking a lot about how the viewer walks through the space - watch what they do and make adjustments based on that.

2. For the final Visual Language project I took my images from 23 Wall Street (the site of the 1920 bombing), collaged them and created a three-dimensional hanging sculpture.

These images give an idea of the process. The 3-D object explores the site of this terrorist attack from different angles, demonstrating that one story can be understood from many different perspectives. This project is also part of my ongoing investigation into how the built environment communicates to us, and the meaning we derive from it.

A few notes on this project:
+There needs to be more of an explosion, the type and composition is still relatively quiet (even when I try to make a political statement, it's polite and diplomatic. ugh)
+Until I explained what it was about, it wasn't easily understood. The main point is that the damage from the 1920 bombing is still visible on the marble walls of the building, and people were missing that. How to communicate the bombing more? How can I let the viewer figure it out? Tell the story so that the important parts are accessible but still in a subtle way. For example, if some layers had news articles and other information on it. Maybe think of it as a Museum of the City of New York installation.
+It could have more portability and not be so dependent on the wall space.
+Or it could be a large-scale installation piece and the viewer could literally walk through it. In that case the other side of the fragments would have to come into consideration - they could be the interior of the building or another component of the space (i.e. people).

What I'm thinking of NEXT looks a little bit like this:

This is a designer named Rachel Stomel, who was featured on Dwell's Youngest Guns site. The installation I would like to create for thesis exhibition has my drawings and then flashing layers of text about the place. How? I do not know! At this point it's all in my mind (and on this blog).

Words that I needed to define

2010-12-22T12:41:00.000-08:00

The following definitions of the symbol/index/icon triad are interpreted from Charles Sanders Pierce's analysis and Merriam-Webster's dictionary.

Symbol: Something that stands for something else. A symbol has a convention-based relationship with object it signifies [alphanumeric symbols]

Index: Something that leads to one particular fact or conclusion. An index is directly influenced by an object [weathervane, thermometer]
           -Can be further broken down into tracks [pawprints], symptoms [fever], or designations [pointed finger]

Icon: A pictorial representation. An icon has specific properties in common with objects [portraits, diagrams]
          -Can be further broken down into image, metaphor [representing a parallelism in something else] and diagram [subway map is a diagram of the actual subway]

More words I'm compelled to define before I have one more conversation about my thesis.

Convention: A usage or custom especially in social matters; a rule of conduct or behavior; an established technique, practice or device.

Semiotics: A general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages.
           -Comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics

       -Syntactics: Formal relations between signs or expressions in abstraction from their signification and their interpreters. Syntax is concerned with structure in a sentence.

               -Semantics: The study of meanings. Semantics is concerned with meaning to a sentence.
            -connotative: to imply [usually more emotional associations]
            -denotative: to indicate [usually to describe in a more literal way]

           -Pragmatics: The relation between signs or linguistic expressions and their users and the environment in which they occur.

Legibility: Refers to how easily one letter can be distinguished from another.

Readability: Refers to the relative ease with which a typeface can be read when characters are laid out in works, sentences, and paragraphs. [thank you Edvin Yegir - my thesis advisor - for clarifying that for me]

And more words I had to define after reading Jan van Toorn's essay "A Passion for the Real".

Dialectic: The discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation.

Dialogic: Of, relating to or characterized by dialogue.

Didactic: Designed or intended to teach.

Polemic: An agressive attack on the opinions of another; an aggressive controversialist.

Polyphonic: Relating to a style of musical composition employing two or more simultaneous but relatively independent melodic lines.

Side note: While I was working on this I was reminded of a project my friend Betsy did. She took the actual pages of the dictionary and removed all unnecessary content with a black marker from the definitions she needed. When I was looking these words up I realized how much superfluous language there is in dictionary definitions, and you have to really dig and reinterpret in order to make sense of it all.

Marian Bantjes on plastic over-packaging

2010-12-22T10:54:00.000-08:00

"We don't need to be protected from every surface, and every surface does not need to be protected from us. It's as though we have completely lost our minds."

In her entertaining Design Observer post.

So true. I've posted about the environmental impact of plastics before, and packaging is a huge culprit. Designers do have a responsibility to simplify packaging and create the argument to only use what is necessary.

Oh, right. Blogging.

2010-11-29T21:06:00.000-08:00

Three projects in the works right now:
1. Designer's statement and process book (which would be more fun if I didn't have less than a week to complete)

2. Visual interpretation of the wall street bombing of 1920 - I've found a way to tie my plexiglass idea in with a project that actually communicates something, which is good. It's always good to communicate something, especially when you're a communications designer.

This project is an exploration of how the city's built environment communicates to us. What we project onto our surroundings to make it more legible for ourselves, and then creating symbols to represent that knowledge and make it accessible for others. A symbol system will uncover the hidden meaning of a historical location on Wall Street, and tell a story of the place through abstraction.

I want to make a physical object made out of many layers of removable Plexi to create a new space within the existing space of the everyday world for people to enter freely and see a location in a new light. This is a long story, but I will try to sum up:

America's First Age of Terrorism

At noon on September 16th, 1920, a wagon passed by lunchtime crowds on Wall Street in New York City. It stopped across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial District's busiest corner. Inside, 100 pounds of dynamite with 500 pounds of heavy, cast-iron sash weights exploded in a timer-set detonation, sending the slugs tearing through the air. The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments. The 38 victims, most of whom died within moments of the blast, were mostly young and worked as messengers, stenographers, clerks and brokers. Many of the 143 injured suffered serious wounds. The bomb caused over $2 million in property damage and wrecked most of the interior spaces of the Morgan building. It was the worst terrorist attack in New York until the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

The J.P. Morgan bank had emerged as the single most powerful financial institution in the world, and both the firm and its principals had been under increasing attack since it arranged a huge loan to help the allies keep the Great War going. The Morgan building was believed to be the target of the attack but only one employee of the firm was killed, and nearly all the bank's employees were back at their desks the next morning, some bandaged and bruised. Crews cleaned up the area overnight to allow for business to operate normally the next day, but in doing so they destroyed physical evidence that might have helped police investigations. The bomb was an immeasurably cruel device that blew people apart where they walked outside, but it merely pocked the firm's impenetrable marble walls. As with most terrorist attacks, most of the victims were innocent bystanders who made a modest living and did not symbolize American capitalism at all.

I took these photos EARLY this morning. The damage is still visible on the building, which is crazy since the bombing was in 1920. It makes me realize that that wasn't actually that long ago relative to all of history. The characters in Boardwalk Empire are more like us than we'd like to think. Maybe these original terrorists are more like current religious radicals than we'd like to think.

There are many similarities in the motives and outcomes of this first terrorist attack and 9/11 and each similarity teaches us something about the current age of terrorism. Symbols are an accessible way to bring this information into the built environment.

3. Audio collages - game for people to match the audio recording to a neighborhood based on spliced together fragments of conversations and ambient sounds. I'm putting this up on a website at some point in the next week - it won't be anything fancy, just a place for people to go and play the game. That may mean I will have to program a form on the site and a submit button. Hm. Never done that before so I will have to discuss with Mark tomorrow.

Part of the inspiration for this project came from the book Image of the City by Kevin Lynch (1960). In it they compare three cities - Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles - and go through a very scientific process of interviewing residents to gather their visual impressions of the city. They were only concerned with the physical characteristics of the city and how the legibility increased for certain areas. Also, they studied how the legibility of the city created more of an attachment to certain neighborhoods.

Reading this definitely made me think of the city in a different way - in terms of the layout of the streets, contours and symbols that make a neighborhood distinctive. I've interviewed nine or so people so far and these are the questions I've been asking: (they change based on the direction the conversation goes, because I sometimes ask follow up questions when they bring up interesting points. Also different neighborhoods bring up different questions)

1. What first comes to mind, what symbolizes the word(s) [their neighborhood] for you?
2. Please draw a quick sketch of map as if you were making a rapid description of the neighborhood to a stranger, covering all the main features.
3. When you are commuting to work or doing errands in the neighborhood, describe the sequence of things you see as you picture yourself making the trip.
4. Do certain streets have a particular feeling? Do you enjoy walking down some streets more than others and why?
5. What parts of [their neighborhood] are most disctinctive?

Since all of my work so far has been visual, I wanted to see what happens with the isolation of only one sense - the sense of hearing. By recording the many layers of sound in the environment maybe there is a lot that can be learned about the city. Can you define and recognize a neighborhood based on it's sound? Do different neighborhoods have distinctive or iconic noises? Can you capture the character of a community through sound alone? And can otherwise hidden aspects of communities be revealed through sound?

I chose four neighborhoods to explore: Chelsea, West Village, Lower East Side and Downtown (FiDi). Besides the fact that they have very distinctive populations and are/have been going through major transitions, I was interested in the difference in street pattern. Downtown was the earliest Dutch settlement, and looks like more organic like the medieval cities of Europe. The Lower East Side has shorter rectangular blocks, and the grid in Chelsea creates extremely long rectangular blocks. Greenwich Village pattern is a mess, almost on the grid but streets intersecting at random intervals and angles.

It's been a really interesting process so far speaking with different residents of these neighborhoods. I've learned a lot about the differences in community, and especially people's thoughts on gentrification. I didn't even bring it up myself, but nearly everyone mentioned it at one time during the interview.

And I forgot to mention, we have two weeks to complete these projects for final critique and set up our presentation. Actually one week for #1, which suddenly changed from two weeks for some reason.

Making progress - final projects for the semester

2010-11-21T15:38:00.000-08:00

All of the roads are leading to the same place now. I think for a while I was exploring many different directions and I feel like now I'm on only one path, which is good!

I have an idea that's still being formed, but it involves a shape/symbol/index framing some part of the cityscape.

Here is the sketch of this idea. The shape frames an otherwise hidden aspect of the street and is an index to the underlying form in our surroundings.

I also took one photo every minute for an hour to capture a slice of community in time and space. Here are a few of those photos - I should put them into a video, but I'm still trying to figure out where I think that's going. It's probably something I can use a little bit down the road.

I set up the camera under an overhang on the eastern section of Rivington street. I have to say, it was really boring to stand there for an hour especially when I'm not even sure what I got out of it. My favorite part of the progression is the hard line between sun and shadow that moves east along the building where ABC No Rio is located. To take it further I could also splice the photos together to create a collage that describes the whole hour.

Ok, here are ideas for final projects this semester:
I'm working on the definition of a neighborhood in New York City. What is a neighborhood? My attempt: A neighborhood is a place with defined boundaries that communicates a distinct essence - unique to that area. How are they defined differently by residents and visitors - what are symbols, landmarks, boundaries, distinct paths? What neighborhoods have strong visual organization? How does each neighborhood communicate to people differently - with ads, storefronts, contours, colors, architecture? How does the visual organization and communication effect the strength of mental image of a place and how does that effect the attachment people feel to neighborhoods?

One project I'm working on for Visual Language incorporates the history of the place as well. I'd like to compare three different locations and create a system of symbols to describe the hidden meaning and story behind them. So far I'm interested in looking at Wall Street, Greenwich Village (or Lower East side) and Chelsea. I chose these neighborhoods because of their unique characteristics and distinction from other areas of the city. They all have distinct communication as well. I need to narrow down the options by taking a walk through the different areas and documenting the forms/signs/sounds I observe.

So I have two different projects going on:
1. An audio experiment to capture the essence of visual form through community perception. I'd like to create a game online where people can play the different audio clips and guess which neighborhood they are listening to or hearing a description of.
2. Describing the hidden meaning of a place/uncovering the history through a symbol system. For this one I want to insert the symbols into the physical environment (like the photo sketch above) in many layers. I like Plexiglass for this project because you can place a symbol on the glass and maintain clear view within and outside the symbol, then it would make the multiple layers possible with sheets of plexi sliding out to reveal a different story. I need to figure out where the text would be written so it's easy to read but out of view.

So for the audio project I need to figure out who I'm going to interview and what questions to ask. I'm thinking that the interviewees need comparable profiles for each neighborhood. So long-term residents and then visitors/tourists plus just the ambient sound of the street. I will ask what their impressions are of the place - what symbolizes this neighborhood, what are common landmarks, paths? Maybe ask what is one word to describe how it feels.

For the history symbol project, I need to do some research into events and interesting anecdotes about buildings in these neighborhoods. Coming soon!

These threads they are so fragile

2010-11-11T20:12:00.000-08:00

I just found this random photo I took last year for the texture phase of Type 1 with Tom Dolle. I didn't use it in my book but now I find it oddly interesting. I was going through my color phase (now I'm going through a black and white phase) - is that symbolic of my general mood? Side note: as I was going through the old photos of my husband and I, I started missing the time when we actually had a life. Now all we do is work - he's studying for the GMAT and me in grad school. Soon enough things will be back to normal!

Anyways, back to being self-absorbed in my work. I'm excited about a few connections I made today. From a previous post: "I've decided that for my final project in tech studio I'm focusing on the audio aspect of the street. I can use the wavelength of an audio clip from the ambient experience of the street, then map that with visual information or doing a light or color analysis with audio. There are sound processing freewares that can do this. I'm interested in the alternate ways of experiencing an environment." My proposal for tech studio bombed on Tuesday (don't even want to talk about it), and it leads me back to this idea (I had forgotten about this idea, which is why I didn't mention it in class). How can I combine the idea I have of mapping the meaning of community interactions with this audio project?

Tomorrow I'm setting up a camera on a tripod to record the time-lapse experience of Rivington street. It will be a mini investigation of time, space and community by showing different communities at different times of the day, and also how shadows transform the experience of the street. I'm doing once a minute for an hour, then another time I'll do once an hour for 24 hours. Possibilities include: splicing the time-lapse photos into different compositions, or cut different objects out of the photo and examine how that changes the experience.

What does the visual information in our city-scape say about our society? How can we shut off the noise in order to have an inner journey instead? I'm taking photos of the busy nyc landscape and removing all signage. Also possibly adding lines to show hidden contours, shapes and patterns.

Speaking of shape abstractions, I also have an interesting project in the works using those but that needs to be developed a little bit. Warning: it might involve Plexi.

So I'm happy to report that my thesis is STILL about telling a better story about a place but my projects are getting more specific/less abstract.

What is all this psychogeographic stuff?

2010-11-10T21:31:00.000-08:00

In the hopes of learning through making, I've explored a few possibilities for maps of my own.

This isn't really a map but I wanted to include it anyways because when I started writing this post I was reminded of it. My friend Betsy asked me to contribute to an exquisite corpse project she was working on for the Michael Rock lecture, and this is what I sent (above).

I handed this out for my presentation today - a map of my ideas in a Situationist style. I realized that psychogeography is an umbrella topic for many different things:
a. the personal experience of the street
b. the alternate experience of the street enabled by another person (artist/performer)
c. an artist who aggregates many people's experiences.

The experience can include emotions, atmospheres, encounters with people, play, and letting the contours of geography guide you.

Another topic entirely is the memory map - recording all of the associations you have with a place.

Ok, glad I got that all organized for myself. Here are a few drawings I made with colored pencils based on the symbol exploration (I posted earlier). Using the abstract grid and symbols I recreated my personal experience on Rivington street. So these are memory maps, not psychogeographies. But how can you represent the psychogeography you experience on the street? Through memory, unless there is a way to record it in real time. Oh, video does that. But video doesn't capture the moods, feelings and energy of a place as well as being there. I'm feeling the limitations of all mediums for this idea but I'm prepared to embrace those constraints. I have a relatively interesting idea for my next project, and I'm excited to see where it takes me.

There are three different types of symbols that I used for these: actual symbols, letters that are similar in form to the symbol, then a "free draw" of what I felt represented the symbol. I'm using the word symbol loosely here, and maybe I should look into other word options.

I'm not going to go much in depth about my critique with Bruce Mau last Friday, but the most important thing I learned was to NEVER say the word preservation in association with my thesis. EVER AGAIN.

Exhibitions and installations based on psychogeography

2010-11-08T07:22:00.000-08:00

Of the two festivals that offer installations and performances roughly based on psychogeography, Conflux and AIOP seem to have lost a strong thread tying all of the exhibitions together. The individual installations and performances included in these events are only scratching the surface, but when viewed as a collective festival it infuses the urban landscape with experimentation. Conflux has more of a technology focus, and AIOP is mostly different groups of performance artists set up in different locations in the city. In one performance, a group of artists from the collective Flux Factory wear t-shirts with waivers printed on the back of them. One artist stands across the street and waves to someone walking down the street (they choose specific people to wave at - people in hats, boots, etc). If the person waves back, another artist on that side of the street stops them and asks them to sign the waiver on the back of their shirt. The performance is called Sign a Waiver. I don't know about you but one of my biggest pet peeves is when someone stops me on the street, to ask me something, hand out something, etc. I'm usually in a rush, being a New Yorker and all, and it bothers me that someone assumes that my time is not that important. If I'm meandering through the city on a derive, however, I probably wouldn't mind that much. Unfortunately I don't usually have the luxury of that freedom.

This brings up an interesting point about time, psychogeography and who really cares? I think it's fascinating that there can never be two identical psychogeographies of an area, because each person will have different memories and experiences in a place. However, who has the time to drift through the city, letting the contours and encounters guide you. The only purpose you have is to keep your awareness open to chance and circumstance and a sense of play and adventure. Is this aimless navel-gazing for jobless people with too much free time? Or is it something that everyone, even people whose jobs and families prevent them from having much freedom, would benefit from experiencing?

The concept of psychogeography is deeply rooted in the theory and circumstances of the Sixties. This new approach to the city was a rebellion against the "spectacle". In these days, the spectacle is more powerful than ever, so much so that we don't even notice it anymore. Many of these street installations are surface treatments of a larger issue that is underlying but not mentioned. Or maybe people aren't interested in making political statements anymore. The closest any of the artists get to making a political statement is Rebecca Nagle who stands in the middle of Times Square with a sign saying "I can't compete with this". She attempts to bring awareness to the increasing competing advertisements that make up the texture of our urban environment.

This project is interesting - the artist Todd Jokl proposed to track participants paths on a map of nyc. Each person has a hand-held GPS device that they use to check-in at every Conflux event they visit. The map he draws in the simulation is beautiful, the line quality is organic and each path combines to create this nice visual harmony. When you see the actual results of the project the feeling completely changes. It looks so unnatural and forced. There are 12 lines, some follow identical paths, and others just meander around the small space of the parks. Also, that shaky, natural line quality is gone. Maybe there were technical restraints to actually creating a path on Google maps but I would have liked to see the artist draw the path lines himself then. I'm struggling to see the purpose of this project, beyond trying to make a beautiful composition at the end of the festival.

I just played three of these gnome games and they're very addictive. The artist's name is Mateusz Skutnik and he highlights little known or abandoned places by creating a scavenger hunt for gnomes hiding in the structures and behind walls. His images are high contrast black and white, so very expressive and mysterious, and during the game an ominous melody plays in the background. The gnomes themselves are adorable and have so much personality that it makes me so happy to find them. This game makes me smile. Thanks Mateusz!

This is a lovely audio tour by Jeremy Dalmas that infuses the city with some mystery and adventure. He started in Golden gate park and by popular demand created an audio tour for the southwest part of New York City. You are meant to download the tour on an ipod and begin at the start of the tour. He takes you through back streets and down staircases, through parks, sometimes providing true historical facts and other times embellishing a little. He makes the experience of the street so intimate amidst the hustle and bustle, and even unearths some hidden creatures and forgotten stories along the way. The various music is a rich complement to his relaxing voice. The tour encourages a playful approach to the city and gives the participant a new sense of wonder while walking through ordinary surroundings.

oooooh! I'm starting to get it

2010-11-07T10:47:00.000-08:00

Michelle also said something in our meeting on Thursday that made me think. How do I see this work entering the community itself? What do I see as the site-specific application of my abstractions, symbols and drawings? I just discovered a Brooklyn artist who places tape in geometric (mostly cubes and rectangles) shapes in the street environment. This is the description from the Art in Odd Places festival in 2008: "In a city made up of rectangular buildings, windows, and blocks the artist plays with a shape that is symbolic of New York City. In the attempt to draw attention to forgotten dimensions and overlooked layers, he creates reminders and portals with cubes that allow pedestrians to see the lines they are surrounded by in a new light."

Image from Art in Odd Places.

Aakash Nihalani currently has his first solo show at the Bose Pacia gallery and I'm actually so happy for him it's as if I knew him as a friend. I feel such a kinship and understanding of the work he's doing in the street environment, and he also has beautiful abstract paintings.

I'm putting together a presentation for Seminar class that started out trying to define psychogeography and it's really interesting to track the trajectory of my research. I started with psychogeography on Wikipedia. Apparently the term was coined by a man named Ivan Chtcheglov in the 1953 essay "Formulary for a New Urbanism". He was then banned from Situationist International (SI) and was eventually committed to a mental institution where he went through shock therapy and eventually died in 1998. It's horrible how fickle the SI and Lettrist movements were and there was constant turnover in the membership of both movements. Guy Debord seems to be the only constant name throughout, and also the only member with a full theoretical work, Society of the Spectacle. I read this book over the summer after finishing Naomi Klein's No Logo and was inspired by the lofty language and theory of the former while learning about case studies through the more practical language of the latter. Both books are essentially about the "spectacle" of contemporary society, and not having to accept the way it is just because that's how it is.

You can see the similarity in beliefs from the biography of Guy Debord on the European Graduate School site: "At the beginning of the SI movement their goal was to transgress the boundary separating art and culture from the everyday and make them part of common life. They theorized that Capitalism has the effect of diverting and stifling creativity, dividing the social body into producers and consumers, or actors and spectators. The SI saw art and poetry as a production by all people, that this was a way to make art the dominant power rather than having power rest in a small group of designated men. They argued for complete divertissement, and were against work. By 1962 they were applying their critique to all aspects of capitalist society, and no longer limiting it to arts and culture."

It also turns out that Debord was quite the heavy drinker and the SI movement did most of their theorizing in bars around Paris. Not the upscale bars that philosophers like Camus frequented, but smaller, seedier places. Debord tragically committed suicide in France in 1994, at which time the French press memorialized him after never acknowledging or recognizing any of his work before.

Psychogeography began in this way as a critique of urban geography. In the late 50's and 60's the French intellectuals and artists that made up SI were contemporaries to the Beat generation in the US. They rejected the traditional experience of the street, which they considered part of the spectacle itself with expressionless, cold modern glass towers. Le Corbusier was their nemesis because of his insistence on homogenous architectural structures and spaces that left little adventure in their chance and exploration. They proposed a more organic and spontaneous encounter with the city landscape. Debord describes the theory of the derive: "In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones"

Chance. That was the theme of the latest Art in Odd Places festival in New York City. It's surprising that this event (or series of events) is so related to the theory of Dada and Situationist movements but they make not one mention of it on their site. In the opening sentence of the curatorial statement they mention the word spectacle, which is an obvious nod to the work of Debord without literally saying it. As the statement goes on, they suggest that chance gives us the opportunity to move past our cultural conditioning to see the world in a new way. They aim to reveal undetected aspects of the city through performance and sound-based work.

Coming soon: a critique on this event series and also the Conflux festival.

Continuing on the road to abstraction

2010-11-04T22:24:00.000-07:00

I had a great and productive meeting with Michelle Hinebrook today. She's not a thesis advisor but I thought I would benefit from her perspective so I asked her to take a look at what I'm working on. She thought I should feel comfortable to go further into abstraction and be limitless at this point. Every question I'm asking myself at this point is precious because this is the work that will carry me forward into my career. Given the topic I'm on now, I couldn't even cover it in a life's work. There's just that much you can do. The visual explorations of our surroundings are limitless, and my approach has been very open-minded and experimental. She made me realize that I should feel more comfortable showing process and talking about the questions I have.

What is my question for Bruce Mau's visit tomorrow? He's coming to give us all a short crit and I've decided to show him some of my process work for thesis. Using my shape abstraction tracings (from a previous post) as a jumping off point, I started sketching a series of symbols to organize the visual language in our surroundings. I'm interested in the legibility of the city and the mental map that lets us remember a place and navigate through it.

I paired the symbols with phrases from Jane Jacobs "The Life and Death of American Cities". I thought the language from the foremost urban planning critic would give the images a new context, bringing into light the neighborhood character that is in constant flux. All of these shapes are images taken on Rivington street.

The next phase was taking these images further into abstraction to get to the absolute simplest form. I still haven't gone far enough into abstraction, so I can do a lot more. This was a really fun process of seeing where the shapes led me, listening to "the yes or no of our material" as Anne Albers said.

Here's my question: I'm working a lot with abstraction, and I'm exploring it's communication value. Do you think complete abstraction communicates in that the viewer can insert themselves into what they are looking at? Richard Tuttle is an example of an artist that works with abstraction of the simplest shapes, and I see cityscapes in them. Someone else might see something else, so in that way does it communicate a message in it's simplicity?

I have abstract maps that I created today as well (need to think of a better word than map), and I will post them tomorrow with the feedback from the crit.

New Rube Ideas

2010-11-04T19:46:00.000-07:00

I presented my Rube Goldberg device on Tuesday, although it wasn't exactly a device. The project reveals the Rube Goldberg machine in everyday life. I created a poster (below) with all of the photos I took in my trek around the city (to trace hello on the map). The process highlights the connections between people and their interactions at each of the sixteen points. In phase two (this poster is phase one) I will track the life story of the goods and services that are exchanged at each of these points. It's fascinating to think of the effect even small exchanges can make on people's lives.

I plan on staging a street intervention by placing posters at strategic points on a map, providing a website for people to go and tell the story of their recent transaction. This project requires participation in order to work, so maybe I will also send out emails to ask people to participate as well. Oh I could start a new Ning network, but some sort of platform that encourages interaction would work.

I just started envisioning this project taking off. People submit their latest interaction with another human, and how that changed their day in some way. For example, I just ate a great meal and took an extra long walk. On that walk I ran into someone I haven't seen in ten years, etc. I need to push the storytelling aspect of it, which is how I'm challenging myself lately. I could involve everyone on my facebook and twitter accounts if I wanted to, instead of restricting it to the posters on the street and word of mouth. The website should have a mapping technology that creates a beautiful design with each point entered. Not like a literal google map but something more abstract and human.

For the street intervention, I will scale the posters down and make them more noticable. Some of the circular photos will be takeaway cards with the website on the back. To be continued...

Urban form study

2010-10-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

My interest in this topic began with researching Hippodamus, the first recorded urban planner in ancient Greece and the person credited with the invention of the city grid. This is an image of Pirea, which is the first city to be laid out on a grid. How appropriate that rational Western thought would have created this structure that goes completely against natural growth of cities to make our lives more organized.

City planning in the far east was developed around more mythological theory, and geomancy or "earth divination" is a fascinating method that was used to generate street patterns in ancient China.

Then I discovered urban morphology, which explains how cities are developed based on a multitude of factors. Religious structures, topography, city planning, fortifications, harbors, subterranean networks, and suburbs are all components that contribute to the development of the street pattern in our cities.

I used the list of top 25 cities based on the quality of life study done by Monocle magazine to choose cities for this street pattern study (above). Maybe there is some correlation between the pattern and quality of life. Also, maybe there is one central factor that led to the appearance of the city layout. Medieval cities were developed around religious structures, whereas in Mesopotamia the city was built around the king's palace. The United States has far more planned cities than in Europe and that contributes to their homogenous form.

The most interesting discovery I've found in this research so far is this paper that correlates the development of street patterns to the veins in a leaf. In fact, they compare transportation networks as structures that convey energy or matter in a variety of fields: city streets, plant leaves, river networks, mammalian circulatory systems, networks for commodities delivery and technological networks. Is the development of ALL of these structures related at a basic level?

Yes! I found Rob Carter's video on vimeo

2010-10-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

I saw this video on the artists website (not the VCU Rob Carter but the Brooklyn artist Rob Carter) and wished I could link to it somehow. Today I just discovered the video on Vimeo while searching for inspiration for another class.

Metropolis by Rob Carter - Last 3 minutes from Rob Carter on Vimeo.

Amazing. Wish I could do something like this for my thesis project because it shows the change in spaces so vividly. In the full video he begins with the drawings of thecolonial town and progresses centuries into the future. Check out more of his work and the full video here.

Ella

2010-10-24T11:28:00.000-07:00

This is the first project I created for visual language this semester. Our task was to create an autobiographical folio. I looked at the various stages of my life and correlating interests, and decided that my foray into film and acting was the most transformational time in my life. I wrote a short script about a girl searching through New York City for something she lost... sometime, somewhere.

This project is a psychogeography of new york, and I'm happy that it relates to my thesis more than I originally thought. I was able to tell a personal story and tried to provide an intimate experience for the reader, which is something new for me. My work until now has been either crafty, abstract, commercial or scientific so I enjoyed creating this juxtaposition of narrative and high contrast photos of New York. My inspiration for this project were the films of Robert Bresson, and I tried to capture the peace and transcendence representative of his work.

Richard Tuttle and notes from my thesis presentation

2010-10-23T21:50:00.000-07:00

I found an artist's work that represents the ideas floating around in my head perfectly. Richard Tuttle abstracts form in such a basic way and creates dynamic, balanced compositions.

While I'm on the subject of abstraction of form, I should post the drawings I created last week. I used one image of the street in the Lower East side to analyze all of the shapes, patterns and interactions of form. There is so much more I can do with this project, and Richard Tuttle's work is an example of taking it to another level.

Some notes from the presentation feedback:
1. My previous work is a lot more related to my thesis than I realize. The folio is an exercise in psychogeography (I will post tomorrow), and possibly my Sun Day book from earlier this year.

2. I see two distinct directions: psychogeography/memory mapping as the intersection of all my ideas and exploring further with abstraction of form, or being more scientific and creating the system of symbols/typology of the components in our environment (this could be a comparison among cities or a system for nyc)

3. Engaging with the community: some ideas include asking people to define the boundaries of their "neighborhood", giving people cameras to record their own photos and tell their own story.

4. Incorporating the interior life of a building as well as the building from all angles and perspectives.

5. Defining my topic and creating a stronger argument will be key as we progress. I'm interested in recording the components that define the "essence" of a place; essentially telling a better story about a place in the way that artists like Edward Hopper have done (the block that he painted in Early Sunday Morning below was preserved mostly because of the value created by the artists depiction). I would like to create something that naturally leads to preservation through awareness of the unique value of the sensory experience of a place.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (currently on view at the Whitney)

A new recycling discovery

2010-10-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

I was reading Fast Company magazine last night and found an article that made me really happy. Mainly because I have the "electronics bag" sitting in a closet, which contains electronics from as early as 2002 that I couldn't bear to throw in the trash. Gazelle.com is buying back consumer electronics and reselling them on sites like Ebay and Amazon. So that means less electronic waste in landfills, and cheaper gadgets for people who need them.

Very old or poor quality products are sold in bulk to emerging markets, and any items that are useless are properly recycled. They chose not to make a profit on the back end, which tells me that this company has a good conscience. That step is easily overlooked, and many companies will forgo recycling when costs are prohibitively high. It says a lot that Gazelle will follow through and do the right thing.

Now we just have to figure out why there is such a glut of consumer electronics to begin with. Why do we need new gadgets every year or so? I have a blackberry that's falling apart because I've had it for about three years. I plan on using it until the Iphone gets Verizon, but that's still a long time to hang on to a phone!

My Rube Adventure

2010-10-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

I need to find a connection for my Rube Goldberg project. The assignment is to say "hello" and I want to map out strategic points on a map to spell the word out. The transactions in everyday life are a form of Rube goldberg device. You go to work, get the paycheck, have a dollar bill, spend it on flour, make cookies, bring them to your grandma, she gives you a bag of candy for trick-or-treaters, one trick-or-treater trades the candy for a video game, which he then gives as a birthday gift for his brother, etc.

"Live" is a good word to use, because I'm uncovering the device in our everyday life. On a side note, evil is live backwards. live/evil We can choose to use our purchases towards evil, like companies that have deplorable social practices or environmental standards. What are some examples of companies like that in nyc? live is so abstract, as usual I have a totally abstract idea. I also like "connect", "contact" and "transfer". Connect is the most meaningful of those three words, because it conveys a deeper connection among people than contact or transfer. It's about the interaction between people that results from the transactions (working, spending money, etc.).

Now I need to decide on an area of interest and strategic points that will elucidate my ideas. If I simply draw "connect" on a map that's not enough. I need to get outside and walk around, choosing my points thoughtfully. How can each of these points convey a greeting or transaction among people. Once I choose the points, I will map them and create posters to display on the street, as well as the website for people to go and share their stories about what their purchases have been for recently.

Hopefully I will get some good stories!

Update: I decided to trace the words "hello" on a map because that was the simplest and least obvious solution. I thought connect would be too obvious in the end, and made a quick decision before I left for the adventure. I'm really happy with the photos I took and look forward to placing them on a map to tell the story. I'm really interested in doing a google maps type thing where you click on the distinct points and images come up with a short description. That will complete phase 1 of the project. Phase 2 can be the poster/website project.

Image of the city on googlebooks

2010-10-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

I found the Kevin Lynch book Image of the City on Google (well parts of it at least). He suggests that the mental image we have of our home towns depends on if the place offers a richly-detailed and well-defined experience. My latest idea for a thesis project is based on pattern recognition in our surroundings. I'd like to create a symbol archive for recognizable forms, patterns and interactions in a city (based on Lynch's work). A water tower could be labelled "hope" and other patterns could represent other feelings and ideas. We remember patterns in the abstract and can identify different places based on this mental map, or internal photograph we take of a place. The mental map idea is fascinating to me.

Similar to Lynch, my project is inspired by the need for an antidote to the separateness and disjointedness of the city. By exploring the line relationships, patterns, textures, sounds and shape interactions of one section of the street we can begin to create order and find meaning in our surroundings. Humans instinctively seek patterns in our environment, for this is a way of establishing order in the midst of chaos. I am imposing my own order through the lens of the camera but also through line drawings and analyzing shape abstractions/interactions.

I have a basic understanding of the New Urbanism and it's roots in the writings of Jane Jacobs. Modernism was such an idealistic approach, to reduce all complex phenomena to a few general abstractions. In planning however it rejected the real needs of human beings living in a community and created isolated, unnatural urban spaces. In architecture, modernism created clean, simple (some might argue boring) structures with the intention of transparency and being true to the materials.

A few interesting urban planning blogs I came across:
http://www.bricoleurbanism.org/
http://emergenturbanism.com/
http://abramv.com/blog/

I'm interested in looking at modern architecture's effect on our sense of place. The tradition of architectural ornament is sadly missing today, and these details show the human touch and contribute to a rich and meaningful experience of the street.

Possible studies: overall shapes (b/w and color), color study, texture study, middle shapes (windows, doors, lampposts), detail shapes (bricks, street art) ***shape abstraction at a basic level may tell a story similar to the overall shapes, audio (see below), system of points of reference (symbol archive of abstractions), also abstract paintings to visualize a memory map or meaning of place.

The layers of history and the interaction of architectural structure and human interference is really interesting and related to my original interest in conservation of a neighborhood. The Lower East side is the point that immigrants have historically passed through and is currently in the process of severe gentrification. This image is the door of a 1903 synagogue on Rivington street. The curving graffiti is such an interesting addition layered on top of the odd shapes of the door.

Another example of the juxtaposition of old and new. The door seems like it has seen so much history and has such an interesting story itself, but placed next to the new (terrible) signage of Kuta it's telling an entirely new tale of what happens when the layers of history are collapsed on top of one another.

Related to my previous rants, corporations have the opportunity to integrate into this pattern to fit the buildings needs and maintain the atmosphere of the neighborhood, but it's also interesting to look at the lengths that businesses go to "create" authenticity. I've mentioned stores that fully integrate into the architecture and community that surrounds them, but retail stores like Earnest Sewn began less than 10 years ago and have adopted this antique look and feel with painted signage on the windows. They are catering to a customer who appreciates this antique feel and catering to a trend, and it's interesting to learn why some people are more comfortable shopping in that kind of environment. It's not authentic but does faux authenticity accomplish the same objective?

I need to look at the work of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Robert Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas, the MOMA architecture exhibition and also check out the Norman Foster gallery on the Bowery.

Also I'm looking at urban form now in Visual Language class, and it will probably tie in nicely with my thesis. I've started looking into urban planning history for this project and am mainly interested in the layout of different cities based on different patterns (grid, radial, chaos, geometric).

I've decided that for my final project in tech studio I'm focusing on the audio aspect of the street. I can use the wavelength of an audio clip from the ambient experience of the street, then map that with visual information or doing a light or color analysis with audio. There are sound processing freewares that can do this. I'm interested in the alternate ways of experiencing an environment.

My next project for thesis, after doing the studies listed above will be setting up a camera on a tripod to record the time-lapse experience of the street. It will be a mini investigation of time, space and community by showing different communities at different times of the day, and also how shadows transform the experience of the street. I can choose a segment of time, maybe one hour or 24 hours. Then splice the time-lapse photos into different compositions, or cut different objects out of the photo and examine how that changes the experience.

The bottom line is that my thesis is about telling a better story about a place.

Thesis statement as of now

2010-10-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

For thousands of years, artists and designers have captured the essence of a place through their work. In my thesis work I intend to explore how art and design can be used to help people have a unique experience of a place, and thus be moved to preserve it’s authenticity. The unique sensory experience of Grand Central Station moved people to halt it’s demolition in the 70’s. Edward Hopper’s paintings of Greenwich village have inspired people to preserve the area’s authentic storefronts. How can a sensory experience be enhanced through design, and how can design capture the essence of a neighborhood?

My current focus is on the Rivington street neighborhood of the Lower East side, and projects will range from documentation, community interaction, and visual experimentation through drawing, collage and painting. Also of interest is the memory map, or abstract experience of a path through an area.

Kevin Lynch, ideas and documentation map

2010-10-10T12:36:00.000-07:00

One more book to read: Kevin Lynch The Image of the City, 1961

I spent the afternoon on Friday reading Adrian Forty's Words and Buildings. In the book there is a diagram from Kevin Lynch called "Form Qualities of the City" in which he simplifies our visual world to nine different illustrations. To Lynch and other urbanists concerned with the lack of intelligibility of our cities, form was the property that would overcome the alienation of modern cities. Not sure if I understand exactly how, but Forty writes "Interest in 'form' as the means of resisting the effects of mass culture and of urbanization have been recurrent throughout the twentieth century". I think I'm onto something here because this is exactly what I'm interested in studying, but I need to read his book to understand completely.

I am halfway through reading The Experience of Place by Tony Hiss. It's helped to open my eyes to all of the senses that create a feeling of atmosphere. For example smells, sounds, climate, angles of buildings (where patterns emerge), how sunlight creates space (relates to height of buildings) are all factors that contribute to our experience of place. Also something I would like to explore is to show how a space could be altered with significant changes - this could be the project where I remove all remnants of branding or signage from storefronts and examine how that changes the experience.

Naturally tied in with this experience is the awareness of previous uses and flows, and historical changes. This education could naturally create interest in the preservation of authenticity of a place. For example, the sensory experience of Grand Central station contributed to it's preservation when the city wanted to tear it down in the 70's. Also, the loss of Penn station before that was the driving force behind the creation of the Historical landmark commission in New York City.

My biggest challenge in all of this is to sift through the massive amount of information I'm encountering. I'm reading so much in my Seminar class that I haven't been able to read as much as I would like for thesis. I think Kevin Lynch is exactly the jumping off point I needed, because my point of view is coming from two different areas and it seems like he marries those points of view. They are: 1. the rejection of speed and consumerism of our culture and preservation of authenticity of place. or at least awareness of historical and cultural context in development and signage. 2. Uncovering hidden forms, patterns and relationships in our surroundings and how these discoveries contribute to the atmosphere of a place.

We read a lot of Herbert Muschamp's architecture criticism for Seminar this week, and I was interested in his differentiation between context and adjacency when discussing The New Museum. He writes that the New Museum's roots are deep in Soho and thus the structure represents large raw loft spaces, but it's location is firmly on the border of Soho and the Lower East side. There is no awareness of it's place in a rich and layered historical neighborhood (the neighborhood I learned about from Charlie Cohen) apparent in the building's white-walled interior or exterior of galvanized zinc. It is located directly next to the Bowery Mission and Salvation army, which has been housing, feeding and clothing the homeless and destitute since the late 1800's. I wonder what the interaction is between these two institutions, the employees and visitors. I also wonder what Muschamp believed are the differences between context and adjacency?

On Wednesday night last week I walked from one end of Rivington street to the other with a tape recorder to capture the feeling of atmosphere at different junctures. I found it really interesting that there were three distinct atmospheres on this one street, and I am exploring the reasons why. This is the sketch of the documentation map I created. I wanted to capture all of the interactions, places and details that create the atmosphere of a neighborhood.

Looking Up and Other Inspiration

2010-09-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

So I found this project, Sketches from Street Level, on Flickr after I had just finished an almost identical one that I called looking up. This photographer and I definitely have the same interests! See below:

I'm thinking that I can use this project as a jumping off point to transition to looking out at the streetscape (angles and patterns associated with looking down a street or up an avenue), then looking in, which wouldn't be looking inside but instead looking at very simple and otherwise overlooked building details.

And then holy @#$% I found this. A link to part of Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's Memoires from 1952. The delicate placement of type with dripping ink patterns is beautiful and reminiscent of the journey along a path. I can't understand the French but I imagine them to be describing a daydream of the experience of the streets of Paris in the 1950's.

I also discovered Place Magazine recently, a now closed publication from the 80's and 90's on urban spaces and planning. This is an exerpt from the editor's letter Summer 1990 issue: "Places, like lives, evolve; sometimes uncertainly, sometimes abruptly, sometimes to good ends, sometimes for naught. Places though, carry our lives within them. They give structure to where we spend our time, what and whom we encounter, how much sky we see, how much green surrounds us, and how tightly or freely we conceive the community. Places form an armature for the imagination."

Along this same line of thinking, I would like to explore the geography of a place to uncover these qualities. I spoke with Leigh Okies today and she gave magnificent advice on this direction. She created a project during her grad school experience at Art Center that was based on the Situationist movement (which I have studied at length for my topic!). They were really interested in the idea of derive, and just going out and experiencing the world. Their project began as a series of observations, not idea based at all but more of a game to formulate the project around these observations. They drew the word 'gospel' on a map of LA and drove around to different points on the map, observing and doing experiments. Their project culminated in visual artifacts that represent this series of experiments and observations. It is so inspiring to hear that her project produced such concrete benefits for the designers involved, and started out so amorphous.

This project speaks to me because I am struggling with the theoretical nature of many of our classes, finding that the thinking in words is taking away from my visual experimentation. I think a lot of reading and theoretical assignments have taken up time when I could be making, creating interesting projects for my thesis. I've posted many of my drawings on this blog in previous posts but I will post a new series here. Also a couple sketches for ideas I have towards making abstract maps, or memory maps. I just put together an "exhibition" of 20 artworks around nyc around this theme and it's inspired me to create some of my own.

Mmm... Skyscaper I Love You just arrived as well, and it's giving me even more visual direction. One of the earliest projects of Tomato (Karl Hyde and John Warwicker) created a book that feels like a film, all in homage to the feeling of walking around New York City. The compositions are made up of simple elements and typography but the texture that is created with out using any actual textures or colors besides black and white is striking. This inspires me to incorporate my drawings into a very simple but impactful graphic landscape.

I visited the Whitney on Sunday, and was blown away by the Edward Hopper painting, Early Sunday Morning. He had this way of creating a feeling that was entirely his own creation but it still represents the place in a powerful way. So much so that people have made efforts to restore the building that he depicted in Early Sunday Morning. It made me wonder how can I capture the feeling and essence of a place to communicate to others? As a designer I can create strategies to keep the authenticity of a place alive, and to get people interested in historical and cultural concerns. Luigi Fusco Girard says in The Human Sustainable City, "The historical and cultural heritage, representing the collective memory of the city, it's specificity and identity, must be preserved and promoted as a key contribution to the humanization of our cities."

Part of me thinks that my thesis needs to look at decades of urban planning in NYC and all historical factors that contribute to a specific neighborhood. Along those lines, one of my ideas for a visual project is to take a streetscape (on Rivington or nearby) that explores all of the buildings, storefronts and signage, research all of the historical factors and engage the community in conversation.

Another project I'm considering is taking close-up shots of building details and place them along a specific route on a map. These details can also be interpreted by drawing or another medium. I really want to focus on drawing and painting as my initial mediums and use those explorations to create a final design project. I need to let go of the idea of having this final finished product and let all of these explorations naturally lead to it. I find that it's only through drawing the contours of an object or place that I recognize it's true beauty. Drawing allows you to move beyond just looking to see and feel the relationships in space, and this could lead to rich visual investigations and who knows what applications down the road.

A few references I need to jot down from thesis advisors:
pritzkerprize.com -- to understand how architecture is verbalized. Also Words and Buildings by Adrian Forty
Verbalizing the Visual by Michael Clarke
Delirious New York and Mutations by Rem Koolhas
Metropolis magazine (which I already love but need to look at more)
"Visual Acoustics" - a Jules Sherman documentary

Also:
The Architectural Review
Arch. publishers such as ACTAR
101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
also look at how architecture and urban planning programs describe their missions and activities
ANY - Architecture NY (Vignelli-designed)
Tadao Ando
listen to interviews with Frank Gehry
check out architecture supply stores

I have many ideas for projects and have no idea where they will take me. Leigh Okies handed out an Anni Albers statement on designing when she visited our class last week. "We come to know in art that we do not clearly know where we will arrive in our work, although we set the compass, our vision; that we are lead in going along, by material and work process. We have plans and blueprints, but the finished work is still a surprise. We learn to listen to our voices; the yes or no of our material, our tools, our time." I love when she writes "the yes or no of our material" - we have such a close relationship with our material and awareness allows us to listen when we need to change direction or continue following a path.

Oh, one more thing. My interests lie on the border of art and design, so another thing I want to explore is how these two fields interact and complement each other.

Setting the scene

2010-09-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

A mood board created from photography of the Rivington/Bowery area, containing typography, colors and the tactile experience of the place.

Charlie's Story

2010-09-16T19:04:00.000-07:00

An amazing thing happened the other day when I began doing research on Rivington Street. I was taking photos where the street begins at the Bowery, and I by chance turned onto Freeman's Alley. I had been there a few times in the past and had old photos from there, so I considered just continuing down the street.

I'm standing there taking some photos and this guy approaches me and says "If you give me 25 cents I'll let you take my picture." I said "What?". He said, "This alley used to be full of bums and they used to say, If you give me 25 cents I'll let you take my picture." I didn't really know what to say, but I asked him if he lived around here. He said, "Yeah, I own this building right over here." and he cheerfully led me over to the area where you could see the backside of his building.

Since he had owned the building since 1969, I got into a conversation with him about the history of that area. He told me about the Southern Italian immigrants that lived there at first, all of the artists squats surrounding the area, the Mission and Salvation army, then the crazy drug problems in the 80's. Now he said it's attracting more people with money and there are galleries cropping up all over the place. This has been a trend since the New Museum opened a few years ago.

This is the kind of conversation I need to have. He is a real New Yorker, and has a genuine interest in talking about the community and sharing his wealth of knowledge in the area. Thank you Charlie! This collage is a personal visualization of the conversation we had.

Cittaslow and Girard

2010-09-05T21:03:00.000-07:00

I just read a fascinating article by the Italian professor Luigi Fusco Girard. One of his main points is that sustainable conservation and renewable energy usage should go hand-in-hand.

"Conservation of urban heritage can be genuinely sustainable to the extent that it revitalizes communities by creating a dynamic, growth-oriented mix of new functions that regenerate economic and social life, while at the same time reducing energy consumption and increasing the use of renewable resources."

Somehow the new "telecommunications-based" economy needs to valorize the cultural identity of the historic urban core, by connecting with traditional "old economy" activities. Also, beauty is key to quality of life, and this is one of the most important factors to attract economic activities that produce wealth.

"Beauty is linked not only to the existing order in a territory. It reflects the harmony existing among its different elements. It transmits a sense of completeness rising from the perception that some attributes are satisfied at their maximum level. Beauty is the synthesis of different dimensions: it is the perception that every element is mutually interconnected, and fosters a sense of connection between community, capital, and assets."

There are many examples of European cities that are investing in green technologies to reduce their carbon footprint. Local Agenda 21 are urban movements to implement solar cities and sustainable initiatives throughout Europe. This decreases the dangers to human health that naturally arise from living in a city, and contribute to the attractiveness of a place. Our surroundings have a significant effect on our health and well-being, and more integrated surroundings inspire us to feel a greater sense of community and social integration. Girard does a really good job of capturing in words what is important about cultural preservation:

"Intrinsic value reflects this sense of cultural belonging, resulting from the unified integration of many diverse components that all combine together to express the 'spirit' of the place...The roots of these intrinsic values are in cultural traditions, in the history of a community that reflects itself in the whole of the physical signs, symbols, and spiritual values that inspire it...places represent living embodiments of the collective memory of vital historic events that help determines a sense of co-belonging, of deep unity between people and nature and between individuals, families, and larger communities; of mutual interdependence that connects all of us together as a fundamental characteristic of humanity."

Specifically for me, community is important because I've never had a strong one, and I'd like to be a part of a group of interacting, supportive citizens. People help one another in an ideal community, with practical things (like sharing tools and babysitting) but also for companionship (especially in old age).

Also, preservation of culture is key because if the world all of a sudden became completely homogenized then there are fewer ideas and perspectives, Coming from a different perspective (and learning from others) in one of the most valuable learning experiences in life, and can lead to better problem solving. A different cultural perspective can solve a problem such as how to live a better life, or how to lose weight, how to make your baby sleep better, how to cook chicken curry, etc.

My grandparents and great-grandparents took great pains to Americanize themselves once they arrived in New York, at the loss of language and customs. They tried so hard to fit in that they lost their original voice. Luckily my grandma passed down her many great recipes for traditional Italian meals that her mother taught her, and I will always have their stories. In the interest of retaining the original voice of a community, one must learn their different inherent wisdoms and stories. Story-telling is a vital form of cultural preservation.

Cittaslow is a movement growing from Italy throughout the globe. It takes the main principles of the Slow Food movement and applies them to the city infrastructure.

"We are looking for towns where people are still curious about times past, towns rich in theatres, squares, cafes, workshops, restaurants and spiritual places, towns with untouched landscapes and fascinating craftsmen, where people are still aware of the slow passing of the seasons, marked by genuine products, respecting tastes, health and spontaneous customs...." Original Cittaslow Manifesto

There are 50 goals and principles that each Cittaslow town works to achieve, and a rigorous application process to become designated as a Cittaslow town. The only town in the United States so far is Sonoma Valley, California (according to Wikipedia). The main aims of the movement are to improve quality of life, resist homogenization, and protect the environment. Gosh, I would love to live in one of these towns.

Books to Read

2010-09-05T20:10:00.000-07:00

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. chapter: “Walking in the City” 1984.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place. chapter: “Architectural Space and Awareness”

John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. 1998

John Brinckerhoff Jackson, who said: "The older I grow and the longer I look at landscapes and seek to understand them, the more convinced I am that their beauty is not simply an aspect but their very essence and that that beauty derives from the human presence."

2 of his books:
Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984)
A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (1994)

Luigi Fusco Girard The Human Sustainable City: Challenges and perspectives from the habitat agenda

Robert Putnam Bowling Alone

Roberta Brandes Gratz The Living City: How America's Cities are being revitalized by thinking small in a big way

Bill McKibbons Deep Economies: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

Adrian Forty The Objects of Desire and Words and Buildings

Tony Hiss The Experience of Place

Kunstler The Geography of Nowhere

David Seamon Dwelling, Place and Environment

Yi-fu Tuan Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience

also the PBS series by Robert A.M. Stern "A Sense of Place"

Cities by Lawrence Halprin

Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau. New York: Anchor Books, 1991

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs [1961]. New York: Modern Library, 1992

City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World by Witold Rybzinski. New York: HarperCollins, 1995

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte. Washington DC: The Conservation Foundation, 1980

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin. New York and Oxford (UK): Oxford University Press, 2009

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Others not exactly related to my thesis but nevertheless on the list:
Buckminster Fuller Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
Roland Barthes Image Music Text
Kenyahara Designing Design

Preserving the environment, historical integrity and involving the community

2010-09-05T19:59:00.000-07:00

What is the best way to accomplish these things in a large city? Why do I feel like sustainability is the last thing on people's minds in New York City. As one of the largest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world, we should be setting the standard not lagging behind with backwards policies and low standards for environmental regulation. Most Northern and Western European countries get it - if we don't start functioning sustainably, pretty soon we won't have a choice. If we don't implement new technologies to save energy and decrease the use of fossil fuels, New York City will soon be the least desirable place to live because of high costs, pollution and deterioration. July's issue of Monocle magazine listed the top 25 places to live in the world based on their quality of life index. The only American city that made the list was Portland - NYC was nowhere on the list. Munich, Copenhagen and Zurich took the top three spots.

Bloomberg is a corporate mayor (even though he makes regular appearances on John Stewart); under his watch we've seen the most gentrification of any other era in New York. It's safe here now, but what about the spark that keeps the city alive? The grit and edge?? Everything in the city is so expensive! How did we get so far from our roots? Although I have to admit some of the development that has been moving forward is brilliant: The High Line, Governors Island, making the city more pedestrian friendly, and artist collaborations like the one with Antony Gormley sculptures everywhere.

How can we embrace the change that's happening, while giving respect to the history of our place? The environmental movement has for so long been the environmentalists against the corporations - this hasn't worked. You cannot hold back the change, however you can work with the winds of change. My idea is not to make the city a museum, but to look to the future while considering the past, and understanding the traditions and uniqueness of the town; Planning for our future while preserving our history.

One example of a problem is that I've observed a lot of signage lately that is glaringly out of context with the historical buildings it occupies.

Besides assaulting our senses and selling unhealthy food, what are these companies doing to add value to the community? Admittedly, Union Square isn't much of a community (it never has been, since it's always been a hub for commercial activity) and Canal Street is an eyesore and place to avoid more than anything. The problem is that the needs of the brand bulldoze any shred of historical significance that the building may have, and there is no perceived connection with the place the business inhabits. I understand branding. I know that people go to chain stores because they know what to expect; there is a formulaic exactness to every recipe and wall hanging.

The fact is, the city is what it is today because of it's past. Using relics and detail that depicts the spirit of a neighborhood and it's rich history, designers can work with chain stores to build connection to the community. In the neighborhoods where community boards don't already keep them out, chain stores need grassroots efforts to understand how to gain a happy local customer base, and give back to the people they are profiting from. Actually, they can probably gain an entirely new customer that way.

I'm not saying they shouldn't do business here. Everyone has the right to do business. This is America and capitalism is the driving force in our society after all. Instead, I'm searching for a solution that mediates between the needs of the community in the interest of cultural preservation and business. I want the McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts to have more of an awareness of the place they are setting up shop, and to implement policies and practices that connect to individuals in the community and build more constructive interaction.

I've chosen Rivington Street as my focus because of the rich history of the area and it's distinct possibility of being harmed by development (much has already occurred).

The following is a rough outline of my methodology for research:
1.historical concerns: "how it used to be"

2.Formal observation: capture the personality in detail form, inspiration-board style, through photography and drawing. Typographic details, storefront signage, architecture, accidental patterns in building facades and interiors, and of course people will be captured in visual form.
3.People: Compelling interviews with long-term residents and local business owners to learn the story of the place. Involve myself in community centers like the Rivington House and ABC No Rio.
4. Community board research - to learn about possibilities of business development.
5. Research sustainability reports from companies - learn how progressive companies are connecting with communities and implementing sustainable policies.

There are many ways for a business to build connection with the community:
Partnering with a local organization or school, takeaway items can highlight the community history, hang art by a local artist in the store, employee education, employee volunteerism, sustainability actions to reduce footprint, integration of outdoor presence with surroundings, donation to local causes, grants for initiatives to make improvements to the area.

Berenice Abbott/my obsession with historical images of New York

2010-08-31T17:32:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks of summer, I created a project using historical images of New York City's Lower East Side. After a few trips to the NYPL Image Library (great resource btw), I found images organized by street name and neighborhood that would work. I wanted to capture the timeless essence of the neighborhood by using historical images, and drew the details on rice paper.

I found an incredible book that documents many of the photographer Berenice Abbott's works, and another called "Then and Now", which compares images of the same location at the turn of the century and the mid-70's.

The first image is the large sheet of rice paper with the images juxtaposed next to each other, but I see it as more of a book that you can flip through.