Year: 2006

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More posts about buildings and food

I came across BLDG BLOG yesterday, thanks to a link in the NY Observer. The most recent post, on the shortcomings of architectural criticism, is awfully read-worthy. It explores how an art form (and again, I’m using architecture as a stand-in for other art forms) can become too esoteric for its own good:

[S]trong and interesting architectural criticism is defined by the way you talk about architecture, not the buildings you choose to talk about.

In other words, fine: you can talk about Fumihiko Maki instead of, say, Half-Life, or Doom, or super-garages, but if you start citing Le Corbusier, or arguing about whether something is truly “parametric,” then you shouldn’t be surprised if anyone who’s not a grad student, studying with one of your friends at Columbia, puts the article down, gets in a car — and drives to the mall, riding that knotwork of self-intersecting crosstown flyovers and neo-Roman car parks that most architecture critics are too busy to consider analyzing.

All along, your non-Adorno-reading former subscriber will be interacting with, experiencing, and probably complaining about architecture — but you’ve missed a perfect chance to join in.

The mention of Adorno puts me in mind of the great essay, “Is Bad Writing Necessary?” which appeared in the late, lamented Lingua Franca a few years ago. (It took me a long time to find that article online after LF folded, but I dug it up on a Chinese site, cleaned up the typography, and saved it as a Word doc, which I present here.)

That essay explored the attraction of ‘esoteric writing’ of sorts, that use of academic jargon and deliberate obfuscation that (in my opinion) creates a closed, insulated circuit of theory that has little involvement in the real world. The writer contrasts this style of writing (as exemplified by Theodor Adorno) with the ‘windowpane’ style of George Orwell, which strove to be as unjargonistic as possible.

Even though I went to a theory-heavy undergrad institution, I ended up championing Orwell’s prose over the self-privileging of academic jargon (okay, maybe that should read, ‘Because I went to a . . .’). I understand that some concepts are awfully tricky and need plenty of work to explain, but if you can’t convey them to a reasonably intelligent person without resorting to a glossary of strange terminology, you’re probably just spinning your wheels.

(I’m not sure if the example of explaining the pick-and-roll to my wife this weekend applies, but that was an instance where, rather than resorting to basketball terminology, I used our salt and pepper shakers, a salad dressing bottle and a bottle-cap to demonstrate exactly what the p&r is. Then I explained to her how the Lakers’ terrible defensive rotation on the wing led to Tim Thomas rolling 20 feet for an unimpeded dunk.)

BLDG BLOG writer Geoff Manaugh also explores this idea of theory essentially having its head stuck up its ass:

First, early on, one of the panelists stated: “It’s not our job to say: ‘Gee, the new Home Depot sucks. . .'”

But of course it is!

That’s exactly your role; that’s exactly the built environment as it’s now experienced by the majority of the American public. “Architecture,” for most Americans, means Home Depot — not Mies Van Der Rohe. You have every right to discuss that architecture. For questions of accessibility, material use, and land policy alone, if you could change the way Home Depots all around the world are designed and constructed, you’d have an impact on built space and the construction industry several orders of magnitude larger than changing just one new high-rise in Manhattan — or San Francisco, or Boston’s Back Bay.

You’d also help people realize that their local Home Depot is an architectural concern, and that everyone has the right to critique — or celebrate — these buildings now popping up on every corner. If critics only choose to write about avant-garde pharmaceutical headquarters in the woods of central New Jersey — citing Le Corbusier — then, of course, architectural criticism will continue to lose its audience. And it is losing its audience: this was unanimously agreed upon by all of last night’s panelists.

Put simply, if everyday users of everyday architecture don’t realize that Home Depot, Best Buy, WalMart, even Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose, can be criticized — if people don’t realize that even suburbs and shopping malls and parking garages can be criticized — then you end up with the architectural situation we have today: low-quality, badly situated housing stock, illogically designed and full of uncomfortable amounts of excess closet space.

And no one says a thing.

I’m not sure why I’ve grown so interested in architecture and buildings in the last few years. Maybe it’s because of the sorta intersection of art, commerce, and real-world-ness (it’s a building). I should probably ruminate on that for a while.

Anyway, enjoy the article.

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No Soccer Moms

Well, I see who wears the pants in this theocratic tyranny:

[Iran’s] President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ruled in April that he would allow women to go to soccer games and sit in a separate section of the stands. He wanted to “improve soccer-watching manners and promote a healthy atmosphere.”

But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who under the Islamic Republic’s constitution has the final say — opposed the move.

“The president has decided to revise his decision based on the supreme leader’s opinion,” Iranian government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said Monday.

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Take it to the bank

Robert Reich, Clinton’s secretary of labor, argues for Wal-Mart’s inclusion into the banking/credit field:

I say, let Wal-Mart under the tent. Commercial banking is now one of the stodgiest and least-competitive parts of the American economy. Fees and prices are way too high. Service is lousy. The industry needs a shakeup. Have you ever had a bank give itself an interest-free “float” on your money while you waited two weeks for a check to clear? Have you ever filled out twenty-five forms to get a simple bank loan? Have you ever collected anything close to fair interest on money you keep in your checking account?

I guarantee you Wal-Mart’s low-price business model will force complacent bankers to do better.

I’ve still never been to a Wal-Mart, but they’re building one about 10 miles away, so maybe I’ll check it out.

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Raze the roof

Yesterday, I wrote a little about brand awareness among architects (and, by extension, other artists).

Today, I offer you an article from BusinessWeek on remaking the McDonald’s brand:

The traditional McDonald’s yellow and red colors will remain, but the red will be muted to terra cotta and olive and sage green will be added to the mix. To warm up their look, the restaurants will have less plastic and more brick and wood, with modern hanging lights to produce a softer glow. Contemporary art or framed photographs will hang on the walls. Bob Dixon, a private school fund-raiser in Chicago, says of an Oak Brook (Ill.) restaurant that sports the new design: “It’s bright, it’s lively, it’s clean. It stunned me how beautiful it was.”

The dining area will be separated into three sections with distinct personalities. The “linger” zone will offer comfortable armchairs, sofas, and Wi-Fi connections. “The focus is on young adults who want to socialize, hang out, and linger,” says Dixon. Brand consultant Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a brand consulting firm, says that Starbucks has raised the bar: “A level has been set by Starbucks, which offers the experience of relaxed chairs and a clean environment where people feel comfortable hanging out even if it’s just over a cup of coffee.”

I haven’t had a burger at a McDonald’s since 1986, but my brother & I still consider the fry-dipped-in-strawberry-shake to be some sorta Proustian memory-trigger. Anyway, the article brings up issues of reducing brand-awareness in the name of hipness. I, for one, wonder how many diners at McDonald’s are that interested in wi-fi. I just don’t think you can be all things to all people.

There’s a slideshow that goes with the story, and it includes a shot of the new roof-style, which will replace the incredibly boring but effective brand-image of the mansard roof:

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Art Inaction

Witold Rybczynski has an article at Slate about how architects create a brand for themselves. Near the end, he brings up a point that I’d like to ponder (and would like you, dear reader, to ponder):

Most architectural careers are marked by a deliberate evolution–a slow simmer rather than a fast boil. The drive to establish their own unique brands pushes young architects to distinguish themselves early–too early. Moreover, public recognition of an architect’s particular approach–Meier’s minimalism, Stern’s traditionalism, Santiago Calatrava’s bravura–can serve to stymie the natural artistic evolution of a designer’s style.

This has me thinking about the conflicting impulses for just about any artist: how does one achieve commercial success without freezing one’s artistic development?

It brings me back to a post of mine from last year:

Years ago, the first time I phoned the critic and novelist David Gates, I asked him about the novel he was working on. He said, pretty facetiously, “I’m in a sort of bind. If it comes out like Jernigan [his first novel, which I adored], people will say I’m only capable of writing that type of book. If it comes out nothing like Jernigan, people who liked that book will complain that this one is no good.”

A few years later, when I read it, I thought, “This is pretty good, but it’s no Jernigan.” I was a little embarrassed about that reaction, but hey. I read the book again a few months ago, and enjoyed it a lot more than I remembered the first time.

So can you think of artists who’ve achieved renown, financial success and some degree of celebrity who’ve managed not get caught in that stasis?

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Effluent Society

George Will takes down the legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith as an excuse for condescension, while making time to bash John McCain:

Advertising, Galbraith argued, was a leading cause of America’s “private affluence and public squalor.” By that he meant Americans’ consumerism, which produced their deplorable reluctance to surrender more of their income to taxation, trusting government to spend it wisely.

If advertising were as potent as Galbraith thought, the advent of television — a large dose of advertising, delivered to every living room — should have caused a sharp increase in consumption relative to savings. No such increase coincided with the arrival of television, but Galbraith, reluctant to allow empiricism to slow the flow of theory, was never a martyr to Moynihan’s axiom that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.

Enjoy.

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Clooless

I think Nina Shea gives George Clooney a little too much, um, credibility in this essay about his cluelessness re:Darfur, but I’m with her on the idea that maybe it’s not Bush’s fault.

I’ve been pretty quiet about Darfur lately, mainly because I’m beaten down by the idea that it’s all too late. People mobilized last weekend, but tomorrow’s the second anniversary of my first post about this stuff, inspired by Samantha Power’s work to publicize the genocide.

Again: it took two years for people to gather in DC to say that we need to stop the genocide. Without, of course, any real plan beyond “pressuring the government.” But it’s not going to happen. Multilateral diplomacy was an utter failure not because of George Bush, but because of China and India’s oil interests in Sudan. Other countries have a very strong interest in not stopping what’s going on in Sudan, while the U.S. has self-imposed sanctions on the country.

The African Union isn’t capable of keeping peace in the region. The UN allowed Sudan to serve on its Human Rights Council, which should give you enough of an idea of what a joke that institution is. The Security Council faces an automatic veto from China, which needs oil more than it needs the people of Darfur alive.

About 7 months after I first wrote about this stuff, a friend of mine asked me about it, because it was going to be a topic in a journalism exam she was taking that weekend. Her premise was, “If the neocons felt that invading Iraq was so important, why are they so quiet about Darfur?”

I tried telling her that, in my opinion, the U.S. has been out in front on this, but that most of the rest of the world would rather it just went away, but that didn’t satisfy her real premise, which was to make sure “it’s all Bush’s fault.”

Anyway, now George Clooney’s on the scene. I feel about this largely the way I felt about The Passion of the Christ; if a guy who wasn’t Mel Gibson made that movie, no one would’ve cared. I guess no one’s asking Noah Wyle or Julianna Margulies how they’d ‘solve’ the genocide in Darfur, but I guess Clooney was the smart guy on ER:

So when Clooney urges a “multi-national” peace keeping force going into Darfur, he must be envisioning a large and powerful army legitimized by the inclusion of troops from other Muslim and Arab nations and sanctioned by the United Nations’ Security Council. And Bush would then have to be blamed for failing to persuade the Arab League and China to vote against their own economic interests in order to defend the human rights of insignificant, impoverished African tribes against the oil-rich Khartoum regime.

Never before has either China or the Arab League based its foreign policy on altruism. It would be remarkable if these dictatorships suddenly sacrificed self-interest in order to defend human rights that they routinely disregard within their own borders. It was the presence of China and various distinguished members of the Arab League on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that discredited that body and caused it to be disbanded earlier this year. For this group, “never again” has no meaning. Clooney’s “solution” is preposterous.

Yet Clooney does not seem to have any intention of criticizing these countries–in his view, attribution of blame is to be reserved almost exclusively for the Bush administration. Rarely does he criticize any other government by name–not even the government of Sudan, the author of the genocide. His discussion of the facts of Darfur focuses on the victims and on the United States, not on the perpetrators in Sudan and their abettors in China, the Arab League, and the U.N.

Read the essay. I’m gonna go watch some hoops.

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One Shot at History

I find the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald fascinating. The more facts we know, the less of a complete picture we get of the guy. Ron Rosenbaum has a neat essay on the JFK assassination theorists in his big collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune, that (to me) forms a sort of trilogy with essays on Danny Casolaro and Kim Philby.

But this essay by James Piereson in Commentary contends that my Oswald-mosaic concept is bunk, and that LHO was set on killing JFK in response to U.S. attempts to kill Castro. More to the point, Piereson contends that most of the conspiracy-theorizing derives from the fact the LHO was a left-wing assassin:

Hence, when the word spread on November 22 that President Kennedy had been shot, the immediate and understandable reaction was that the assassin must be a right-wing extremist–an anti-Communist, perhaps, or a white supremacist. Such speculation went out immediately over the national airwaves, and it seemed to make perfect sense, echoed by the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who said that Kennedy had been martyred “as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.”

It therefore came as a shock when the police announced later the same day that a Communist had been arrested for the murder, and when the television networks began to run tapes taken a few months earlier showing the suspected assassin passing out leaflets in New Orleans in support of Fidel Castro. Nor was Lee Harvey Oswald just any leftist, playing games with radical ideas in order to shock friends and relatives. Instead, he was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist who had defected to the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman before returning to the U.S. the previous year. One of the first of an evolving breed, Oswald had lately rejected the Soviet Union in favor of third-world dictators like Mao, Ho, and Castro.

Informed later that evening of Oswald’s arrest, Mrs. Kennedy lamented bitterly that her husband had apparently been shot by this warped and misguided Communist. To have been killed by such a person, she felt, would rob his death of all meaning. Far better, she said, if, like Lincoln, he had been martyred for civil rights and racial justice.

Now that last paragraph is hearsay, as far as I’m concerned, but Piereson uses this idea of Oswald-denial as a springboard for the meltdown of liberalism. I find it pretty fascinating, but you know what I’m like.

Give it a read.

Or just write humorless comments about how big corporations are controlling our minds.

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Grand

I laughed yesterday when my new issue of City Journal arrived in the mail next to a copy of the Hampshire College Reports, but I’ve got a wacky sense of humor.

I haven’t opened the piece from my alma mater, but the City Journal includes a history/appreciation of the Plaza Hotel in New York. You oughtta read it; the article is almost devoid of the political tilt of the rest of the magazine, and it’s a refreshing reminder that it’s called City Journal for a reason. (Unfortunately, the online version doesn’t have all the great photographs of the Plaza that are in the print edition.)

Also, here’s a little (unexpected) appreciation of Times Square in Metropolis by Marshall Berman:

Don’t you think that the scale of the newer buildings is a bit insane?

Yes. But the horrible buildings of the 1990s are much less horrible than the horrible buildings of the 1960s and the ’70s. Think of 1 Astor Plaza, which knocked out the Astor Hotel, or the Marriott Marquis, which erased the Helen Hayes Theater. Those buildings are really blots on the square. Compared with those monstrosities, the newer buildings–which are just blah–aren’t so bad. Buildings don’t have to be great architecture to be good urbanism.