Numerus Klausus #03: Animal Farm / On Recycling

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“Our Design for the Parrish Art Museum is a reinterpretation of a very Herzog & De Meuron typology, the traditional house form. What we like about this typology is that it is open for many different functions, places, and cultures. Each time this simple, almost banal form has become something ver specific, precise, and also fresh.”  — Jacques Herzog via Dezeen

Aha.

[As usual, the cartoons can be found in all their original glory at uncube's website].

Numerus Klausus #02: You’re so Kool

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Ok, let’s see if I can bring this back on trail. I really need to catch up with the blog.

This comes from Uncube Magazine # 07 : Off-places. The published version is slightly different. In the same issue, there’s an interview with Gottfried Böhm by Florian Heilmeyer which is really worth checking, if you’re a Brutalist fanatic such as myself. So go check it.

Come on.

Uncubed! (On “Numerus Klausus”)

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So, yes. It’s actually been a week or so since it was officially announced in their website, but I hadn’t really had the time to sit down and announce it here (see? that’s what twitter’s for), so there it goes: Several weeks ago, Jessica Bridger, one of the editors of Berlin-based online magazine Uncube wrote me asking if I’d like to start an ongoing collaboration with them, and -being the internet whore I am-, I immediately said yes.

So starting with their issue #07, “Off-Places”, I will start publishing a monthly cartoon in my own section, “Klaus’s Kube”. Some of the cartoons will belong in a series, “Numerus Klausus”, commenting on the things that are happening now in the architectural scene, but they will probably be combined with other more otherworldly stuff. Let’s see.

Special thanks to Jessica Bridger and Florian Heilmeyer for their interest and support (full team here).

Banham Style

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1, 2, 3…

Tell me more! (Article for Conditions magazine #10: Gossip)

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(…) Digging into the dirty laundry of the architectural star-system is, in any case, neither a recent phenomenon nor a curiosity exclusively circumscribed to today’s divas. The mouth-to-ear airing of our architectural heroes’ private sins has been an inevitable aside of their rise as idols. Small talk on the lower passions of the masters of the past has accompanied the writing of the big lines of the History of Modern Architecture, and along with our worshiping of their oeuvre comes the delight to learn about their quaintest interiorities: Mies van der Rohe´s infamous (non) affairs with Ms. Farnsworth, Alvar Aalto´s alcoholism -a recurring topic for Finnish cartoonists³, or Le Corbusier´s pathological Messianic obsessions are personal details that have transcended the boundaries of scientific biographies to become precious pieces of information we love adding to our common knowledge of them. We need both heroes and villains: The formers to inspire us, the latter to offer us some moral relief at the sight of a worse human being than ourselves. But even more, we’d rather having our heroes be our villains too. Some will argue that these minor flaws humanize our icons, making them flesh and blood human beings we can better relate to, and certainly this “fleshing out” helps build our interest on them. But this humanization is also an excuse that sugarcoats a very straight forward preservation mechanism, devised to protect our self-esteem at that point where admiration meets sheer envy. There’s nothing we love more than a rags to riches story -except for a riches to rags story, that is.

A most interesting reversion of this turns up, however, when these minutiae actually become an integral part of the mythos, to the point of being vital contributors to its very construction. Again, the careful devise of its own legend was an inherent feature of architecture’s entrance into modernity, often created as a fiction before it really happened. (…) The fascinating point here is how this emergence of gossiping contributes to the creation of the starchitect; how in the case of contemporary icons such as Rem Koolhaas it´s the unofficial flux of information surrounding the figure which ultimately elevates him into a legendary status.

Of course, in the case of Koolhaas the shaping of this aura is also engineered through conventional means; Koolhaas is a sharp thinker and an eloquent writer and spokesman who has shaken the architectural scene of the last decades with acute reflections of deliberate and controlled ambiguity. But even more than through his words, the Koolhaas mediatic persona has been constructed through a parallel dissemination of details about his behind-the-scenes: stories that tell us of a man who lives in airplanes, sending by mail corrections for a document he was given in a meeting a few hours before, of a Renaissance man who swims every time he lands, or wins a competition with a single, cunning speech⁵. All this mouth-to-ear stories, propagated through the netsphere, contribute to endow his figure with an halo of epic mystery that propells him into an almost superhuman category. Koolhaas is the über-example of the starchitect, where the personality comes first and the work second. And that’s the bottom line: Koolhaas can produce starchitecture because he is, first and foremost, a star. Le Corbusier´s delightully maudit portrait, painting nude in Saint Tropez has been replaced by a cover of L’Uomo Vogue.

But public notoriety is as easy to gather in the age of software as difficult to retain. The internet era is also the age of the twitterization of knowledge, a time where information both reigns and deflates, where news are as ubiquitous as thoroughly made-to-forget, immediately replaced by new installments. The same could be said about some of the architecture produced by this idiosyncrasy, made to glow for a moment and quickly disappear; architecture of futile monumentality and inevitable ephemerality designed within a discipline obsessed with creating the building of the century… of the week. In this new paradigm, the (st)architect has to become a public figure, an entertainer, a performer, or even, if needed, a celebrity of the Kardashian kind. The World Wide Web and the rapid production allowed by digital tools have multiplied the presence of architecture in everyday life, and have worked together to create a new type of architect sustained above all by his communication skills. The internet, blog culture, Twitter, have leveled the capability of everyone to achieve their share of Warholian fame, but in turn, their allotted fifteen minutes have been drastically reduced to -maybe- fifteen seconds. The attention of the audience, brought up in a solid diet of continuous novelty, is volatile, and the architecture of today has to keep nourishing its audience at a steady pace, or risk disappearing from the picture right away.

And it is in this context where gossip, criticism and satire, emerge as tools for the maintenance of public presence. The internet has also revived the long-loved tradition of the fast gag, the sketchy commentary, and the cartoon, which offer the necessary escape route for the asfixiating ubiquity and self-indulgence of architectural discourse. As any endogamic discipline, architecture has a record of taking itself too seriously, and of alternating victimism and self-deprecation with tremendous arrogance and a myopic lack of perspective (ironic as it is) on the relevance of its own obsessions. The reemergence of satire appears as a natural counterbalance for this, offering us a way to mock our loved-hated idols that’s apparently naive, inoffensive (but with the potential to become really offensive), and sublimate our frustration through ironic laughter, instead of bitter full-frontal (yes) criticism, while at the same time, reinforcing the (com)position of the starchitectural who’s who. As Oscar Wilde, via some of our infamous celebrities, would point out, the ultimate goal is to be talked about so as to be (there), even if just to be thrashed, and architects, with their fragile yet unrestrained egos, become the ideal victim/beneficiary of this revival. Today, gossip refashions itself as a form of viral advertising. The motto is “keep them talking”. (…)

Tell me more! – Gossiping, cartooning, and the nourishing of the  Starchitectural status quo

Conditions magazine #10: Gossip, July 2012

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The above are some excerpts from a (not really much longer) article published in the last issue of Conditions magazine, which I received last month, in the middle of the busiest July I can remember. Conditions is an independent Scandinavian magazine on Architecture and Urbanism edited by Joana da Rocha Sá Lima, Tor Inge Hjemdal, and  Anders Melsom whose next issue, “Possible Greenland”, will be part of the official catalogue of this year’s Danish/Greenlandic contribution to the Venice Biennale. Conditions #10 is dedicated to gossip, and features contributions by Robert Somol, Eduard Sancho, Christian Hjelle, Irene Hwang, Ed Ogosta, Espen Vatn, Freddy Massad&Alicia Guerrero Yeste, Roberto Naboni, Iben Falconer and yours truly. The essay above was written around the same time as Modern Talking, the article published in Mas Context #14: Communication that tackled on some overlapping issues, which explains the recurrent use of some examples and ramblings; either that or I’m entering a wino-in-a-bar dynamics where I just keep repeating the same the same stuff over and over. Please, be forgiving.

If you want to read the full article, click in the images below, or -much better- order a copy here. You can also read the text of Eduard Sancho’s And if most of the job offers are fake? here. Special thanks to Gislunn Halfdanardottir.

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Once upon a time, people compared with their neighbors. Your neighbor was your point of reference and thus the most desirable object of gossip and eavesdropping. Not so anymore. In the world of global networking, you are driven by ambition to compare yourself with the most clever or world-renowned exponents of your trade. Even a critique, satire or parody of the star-system of architecture is an affirmation of its hegemony. Who doesn’t want to be the object of architecture gossip? After all, it’s giving the “stars” more attention, no matter how critical the original intention was. For addicts of gossip, all news is good news, the worst thing is silence, and even a well mediated “scandal” can actually promote your career.

The current issue of CONDITIONS investigates the function of gossip in architecture. Gossip has always been around in architecture as one of the oldest ways of sharing, maneuvering and convincing. But how does it manifest itself today within the instant culture of internet and social media? What is the role of gossip in contemporary networking? Has the logic of gossip and instant gratification also penetrated what we used to call architectural critique?

Get a Job(s) / Close encounters in Cupertino 2. Illustration for Clog: Apple

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Previous collaborations for CLOG: BIG here and here

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 “Et in Arcadia Ego”

 Poussin

“And it’s a question of how far we’re willing to go in order to let the ego shine, in order to let that beacon penetrate not only the local scene but the world.”

Taylor Hackford

For all its promise of unlimited connetivity, Apple´s design seems to leave almost everything out. Apple has built a style on impenetrability, providing us with sleek, polished technological gizmos that are not only, a product of design, but a symbol of designed obsolescence.

Apple is itself a brand and a symbol, a signifier of future and Buzz-Lightyear-ian progress towards infinity. However, its approach to design takes us back to a past, long gone vision of future utopia bred in hardcore modernism. When Apple´s New Wave was launched in 1984, cyberpunk had started to reshape the image of the future and future technology according to a postmodern sensibility. Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner introduced an image of the future as a layered, additive and textured place, a dark but rich metropolitan –megalopolitan- reality whose productive (thanks, Chen&Young) dystopianism provided us with an inclusive approach to postmodernism, as opposed to the exclussiveness of academic PoMo, and a new way to conceptualise (a new eye to look through) our urban postmodern reality.It´s extraordinarily fitting that the man chosen to inaugurate the era of Apple Design in a commercial reminiscent of Owrell´s 1984 was precisely Ridley Scott, who touched in the lapse of two years on the two poles that, as Peter Lunenfeld notes, still rule contemporary culture thirty years after.

Apple´s present-future is not the system of constant retrofitting dictated by the permanence of every-thing that Syd Mead designed for Blade Runner, but the clean, plastic and semi-translucent reality of Alex Proyas´s I Robot, a reality of immutable and ephemeral objects designed to shine and die, as user-friendly as they remain impermeable to change (…the light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long). And in doing so, Apple leaps over postmodernity to recover the dream of a clean, antiseptic, white utopia dreamt in the age of pulp. Jobs´s dream of the future is that of William Cameron Menzies´s Things to come, of streamline design, of Norman Bel-Geddes´s Futurama, where Roman togas have been substituted for Mao collars and turtlenecks.

Looking like an alien mothership hanging gently in the middle of Arcadia, the new Cupertino campus resounds with echoes of Steve Jobs sitting in peaceful yoga position in his empty apartment in the 80s, and it really speaks of a dream of ascetic-aesthetic plenitude that goes back to modern utopianism. Foster´s design, bred in a sensibility nourished by Dan Dare, Werner Von Braun and the visionary 60s conjures an ultimate state of the Corbusian cult of the liner as a model for architectural assertion. The platonic exactitude of Cupertino´s rounded shell conjures the old ideal of ectopic utopianism: a technological eutopia of isolated perfection in an anthitetic relationship with natural beauty. Apple leaves behind the organic, anarchic ambiguity of postmodernity, substituting the visceral for the virtual; and somehow, this renewed dream of an (old) brave new world scares me a little bit.

But then, I´m a PC guy.

Image Captions: 1. Cupertino: Apple Campus 2. Foster and Parners, 2011. 2. Things to Come. William Cameron Menzies, 1936. 3. Heliopolis. Project for an Olympic Village in the Mountains of Tatras. Alex Mlynarcik, 1968. 4. Werner Von Braun et al.: Space Station. Across the Space Frontier, 1952. 5. Thalassa: Project for a Floating City. Paul Maymont, 1959.

Image credits: Heliopolis photographed by the artist. In RAGON, Michel:Histoire mondiale de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme modernes. T.3. Prospective et futurologie; 350. Thalassa: Photo by P. Joly/ Vera Cardot. In RAGON, Michel: Les Cités de l’Avenir. Paris: Editions Planète, 1968.  Space station: Illustration by Chesley Bonstell. In KAPLAN, Joseph et al.: Across the Space Frontier. New York, Viking Press, 1952. Everytown: Frame from William Cameron Menzies´s Things to Come. London Film Productions/United Artists, 1936.

 

Luis Miguel Lus-Arana: “Return to Ectopia: Apple Design and Futurist Classicism”. Published in MAY, Kyle et al. (edited by): Clog: Apple nº 2. NY: February 2012, pp. 96-7

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CLOG: APPLE. On 7 June 2011, Steve Jobs presented Apple Campus 2 to the Cupertino City Council. Due to Apple’s high profile – not to mention the scale and iconic nature of Foster + Partners’s design – the online reaction to the “spaceship” was immediate and strong. While Apple has been building retail stores throughout the world for over a decade, discussion, even among architects, has typically focused on the company’s famed product design. With one of the largest American office projects in history underway in Cupertino, it’s time to talk about Apple and architecture.

Contributors: Michael Abrahamson, Paul Adamson, Gary Allen, Collin Anderson, Haik Avanian, Rachel Berger, Freek Bos, Gabrielle Brainard, Tom Brooksbank, Keith Burns, Marcus Carter, Haiko Cornelissen, Philippine d’Avout D’Auerstaedt, Erandi de Silva, Kevin Erickson, Matthew J. Giordano, Hanny Hindi, Julia van den Hout, Allyn Hughes, Axel Kilian, Klaus, Austin Kotting, Michael Kubo, Jimenez Lai, Nicholas Leahy, Christopher Lee, Frank Lesser, Michael Ludvik, Luis Miguel Lus-Arana, Kyle May, Adam Nathaniel Mayer, Nicholas McDermott, Mark McKenna, Samuel Medina, Louise A. Mozingo, Rob Nijsse, The Office of PlayLab, Inc., Glenn Phillips, Graffitilab, Nina Rappaport, Jacob Reidel, Erin M. Routson, Mika Savela, Chris Shelley, Noam Shoked, Mike Treff, Kazys Varnelis, Ronald Wayne, and Human Wu.

Clog: Apple edited by Kyle May, Julia Van den Hout, Jacob Reidel and Human Wu. Design by PlayLab, Inc. Find it here.

Harvard Exhibition: Dispatches from the GSD – 75 years of design (Reprise)

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Last week, during the Alumni Weekend at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the exhibition “Dispatches from the GSD: 075 Years of Design” was officially inaugurated. In the GSD Website you can find all the information regarding the events that took place. For some more info and a few pics (including the stand where some of the cartoons from this blog are exhibited) you can scroll down or just click here. 

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Some of the events were streamed live, and in youtube you can find videos of the reception toast by Harvard President Drew Faust, and of the looong Faculty & Student Pecha Kucha that took place as part of the 75th anniversary celebration. There’s also a short but nicely illustrated commentary on Harvard Magazine, and a brief at Peter Christensen’s site.

Happy World Architecture Day 2011 ["happy", he said...]

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“‘So far so good,’ said she, when I had ended my story, ‘and now pay attention to what I am about to tell you- heaven itself, indeed, will recall it to your recollection. First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.”

[Homer, The Odyssey Book XII]

Harvard Exhibition: Dispatches from the GSD – 75 years of design (Some Klaus inside)

Dispatches from the GSD Exhibition – Main Wall.

The 2011-12 academic year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and in order to celebrate it, the GSD will host a number of events regarding the anniversary throughout the whole academic year. Along with those, the GSD is hosting the exhibit “Dispatches from the GSD: 075 Years of Design”, which will be on display for the duration of the Fall semester throughout Gund Hall, including installations in the lobby gallery, Loeb Library and fourth floor.

Instead of showing a chronological approach that would be inevitably incomplete, the exhibition, which was assembled by a team of students, professors, alumni and staff, has been divided into a succession of episodes; moments that Peter Christensen, curatorial director, describes as “journalistic dispatches from the past, each with its own narrative and artifacts”. All these fictional journalistic dispatches, whose texts have been written accordingly, have been arranged within six thematic categories: Design as Research, Design as Critique, City as Process, City as Form, The Continuous Institution, and The Shifting Institution. 

General view of the exhibition in Gund Hall’s lobby

Shown in this last area, The Shifting Institution, item [C02.21: A Comic Take on the Harvard Graduate School of Design] consists of several comic drawings, including some cartoons from “Klaus on the GSD” done in 2009 [I am sincerely flattered]. Here are a couple of pics and the accompanying text:

A Comic Take On the Harvard Graduate School of Design. July 25, 2009.

CAMBRIDGE, MA – If you want to know what happens between the walls of Harvard Graduate School of Design, the comic strip Klaustoons will give you the answer. Written by an Alumnus of the school hiding behind the pseudonym of “Klaus,” the blog offers humorous cartoons that capture moments of academic life, general student culture and critical discussions in architecture. Cartoons aren’t new at the Graduate School of Design, where the students’ drawing abilities have been known to serve satirical purposes since the 1980s.

The cartoons displayed are Changes in the GSD (Hairstyles I), Platform 2008, GSD Lectures 2008: Parametric Design (I), GSD Lectures 2008: Parametric Performances, Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk: Networks and Spheres, On Starchitecture, and Koolhaas at Harvard: Ecological Urbanism. In the same display there are three more cartoons provided by the Special Collections Department of the Loeb Library: one by Fran Hosken (c1940s), and two more signed by Wang, from the 70s-80s (Inés Zalduendo dixit)

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Dispatches from the GSD: 075 years of design
August 22–December 22, 2011

Anniversaries offer the opportunity to consider the past as an active interlocutor with the present and the future. For the GSD, this means foregrounding an array of agents—people, events, objects, and ideas—in a rich institutional history to bring the collective memory of seventy-five years into sharper focus for design practice today and tomorrow. Conjuring a comprehensive account of the institution since 1936—its thousands of alumni, hundreds of faculty and staff, and two homes—would run the risk of homogenizing a history characterized so consistently by heterogeneity and multiplicity.

As such, the exhibition employs an approach that is episodic, reveling in moments of the GSD’s history that are as singular as they are important. In the spirit of framing these moments as stories unto themselves, they have been conceived of as journalistic dispatches from the past, each with its own narrative and artifacts. Writing history in the present tense, as this exhibition does, is an attempt to make the GSD’s vitality clear and to claim a future that is at once inherited and projective.

The 120 dispatches in this exhibition begin in 1936 and arrive at the present day to include a handful of contemporary thought pieces from a cross section of the School’s faculty, each expressing in a single authorial voice a reflection on the state of design today and the challenges of its future. The historical dispatches are organized into six thematic categories: Design as Research, Design as Critique, City as Process, City as Form, The Continuous Institution, and The Shifting Institution. Each section contains dispatches that speak to a greater set of themes spanning all of the School’s programs and departments, various media, and all seventy-five of the School’s years. In momentarily stopping the clock, this exhibition hopes to enliven the GSD, and Harvard University at large, with the engagement and propulsion that the past can offer us today and tomorrow.

—Peter Christensen (PhD ’14), Curatorial Director

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Below these lines you can find some general photos of the exhibition. Make sure to check the GSD website for more pics and updates on the exhibition and events. Also, Bruce Mau Design offer a couple of peeks at the  posters they designed for the event (updated here).

Special thanks to Inés Zalduendo and Mary Daniels (Curatorial Advisors of the exhibition and masters of the Dark), Marta Fenollosa and Igor Ekstajn (all additional photographs by Igor Ekstajn)

 

 

Help Japan

(Via Lily Ladaga from Yahoo News)

Japan was hit by one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded on March 11. The magnitude-9.0 quake spawned a deadly tsunami that slammed into the nation’s east coast, leaving a huge swath of devastation in its wake. Thousands of people are dead and many more are still missing or injured.

Japan has often donated when other countries have experienced disasters, such as when Hurricane Katrina impacted the United States. Below are organizations that are working on relief and recovery in the region.

AMERICAN RED CROSS: The American Red Cross is currently supporting and advising the Japanese Red Cross, which continues to assist the government in its response.  You can help people affected by disasters, like floods, fires, tornadoes and hurricanes, as well as countless other crises at home and around the world by making a donation to support American Red Cross Disaster Relief. Donate here.

GLOBALGIVING: Established a fund to disburse donations to organizations providing relief and emergency services to victims of the earthquake and tsunami. Donate here.

SAVE THE CHILDREN:  Save the Children, which has worked in Japan since 1986, has an immediate goal of $5 million to launch longer-term recovery for children affected by Japan’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Donate here.

SALVATION ARMY: The Salvation Army has been in Japan since 1895 and is currently providing emergency assistance to those in need. Donate here.

AMERICARES: Emergency response manager and local relief workers are in the city of Sendai to assess medical needs and coordinate with government officials and other international partner organizations. AmeriCares is also directly in contact with hospitals treating the injured in Miyagi, Fukashima and Iwate. Donate here.

INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CORPS: A team of doctors flew to Sendai, where they will be delivering supplies, assessing needs, and identifying communities that have not yet been reached. We continue to coordinate with local health authorities and partners on critical gaps, providing technical expertise and assisting with logistics. Donate here.

SHELTERBOX: ShelterBox responds instantly to natural and man-made disasters by delivering boxes of aid to those who are most in need. The box includes a tent for a family of 10, cooker, blankets, water purification, tool kit and other items survivors need to rebuild their lives in the days, weeks and months following a disaster. Donate here.

A collection of artwork attempting to raise money for relief efforts in Japan to be found here, ando also in Tsunami: Des Images pour le Japon, as well as in this auction of works by Spanish comics artists.