Category: Design

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Note hideous gridded paper

I was going to put this Michael Bierut post among the week’s Unrequired Reading, but I thought it deserved its own entry. It’s all about the notebooks that Bierut has used for the past 26 years. He’s up to #85.

As anyone who knows me can imagine, I find this sorta thing fascinating. I love looking behind the curtain and seeing the processes and tools behind work. It’s the same reason that I enjoyed the Wrap-Up Show on Howard Stern (before Rufus chewed through the antenna cable of my Sirius unit in a fit of pique and left me radioless).

While he does explore his work process, Bierut also manages to discuss the significance of the notebooks as notebooks, without treating them as dreaded Art Objects. His stories of Never Leave a Notebook Behind reminded me of the brunches I spent with Chip Delany, who would invariably bust out one of his cheap spiral-bound notebooks to jot something down in mid-conversation. They were as much a part of him as his trademark Santa-beard.

I’ve never been good at note-taking. I do keep a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook in my Bag of Tricks, but rarely take it out anymore. I bring a second one with me to trade shows so that I can appear to be interested when companies give me long technical descriptions of their new products. At the office, I use notepads of employees who were fired. I find it kinda funny to take notes on phone conversations and write to-do lists on pages that bear the names of magazines that were shut down five years ago.

Still, it’s an effort for me to keep a piece of paper and a pen nearby when I’m reading those Montaigne essays. I do write down a line here or there in the Notepad of my iPhone, but they only seem smart at the time. I’m more likely to write down the beginnings of a post here in WordPress and save it as a draft. That way, there’s even less evidence of what my thought processes are.

But I digress (which is what you came here for; admit it); go read Bierut’s post nowish!

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Me and e

Virginia Heffernan has a nice piece in the NYT Magazine about Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. The biggest complaints I hear about the Kindle from tech geeks is that it needs to have an color touchscreen with a high-powered browser, cellphone service and maybe a camera. Which is to say, they miss the point. It’s an e-reader, not an e-everything. I agree with them, of course, when they say it’s a butt-ugly piece of design.

Ms. Heffernan does a good job of explaining how the Kindle’s “limitations” are what define it as a great device for . . . reading books. Which I do a lot of.

In short, you get absorbed when reading on the Kindle. You lose hours to reading novels in one sitting. You sit up straighter, energized by new ideas and new universes. You nod off, periodically, infatuated or entranced or spent. And yet the slight connection to the Web still permits the (false, probably, but nonetheless reassuring) sense that if the apocalypse came while you were shut away somewhere reading, the machine would get the news from Amazon.com and find a way to let you know. Anything short of that, though, the Kindle leaves you alone.

And alone is where I want to be, for now. It’s bliss. Emerge from the subway or alight from a flight, and the Kindle has no news for you. No missed calls. It’s ready only to be read. It’s like a good exercise machine that mysteriously incentivizes the pursuit of muscle pain while still making you feel cared for. The Kindle makes you want to read, and read hard, and read prolifically. It eventually makes me aware that, compared with reading a lush, inky book, checking e-mail is boring, workaday and lame.

The only thing she doesn’t touch upon is what I consider the Kindle’s game-changing aspect: the ability to download free samples of e-books rather than having to buy the whole thing. There are a number of books that I’ve decided not to buy after checking out their first 30 or so pages on the Kindle. In some cases, I decided I simply didn’t like the book enough to buy it; in others, I’ve passed because the formatting of that particular book hasn’t looked good on the device, or because a translation isn’t the one I wanted (Amazon’s Kindle store is a little hinky when it comes to books in translation).

Give it a read.

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Towering! Folly?

A few weeks ago, the NYTimes published a magazine supplement about architecture or something. It included this meandering ramble about building cities that have no history. Written by the paper’s starchitecture critic, Nicholas Ouroussoff, it glowingly describes the miraculous super-projects to be designed by Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl and others. The elephant in the room that Ouroussoff fails to mention is that all of these places that are offering these opportunities “happen” to be dictatorships (to be fair, he does mention that most of these “new cities” appear to be built as playgrounds for the rich, with no opportunity for interaction among classes).

While the architects celebrate the openness that these nations have, and the willingness they have to undertake massive top-down projects designed to show off their wealth, we’re able to read between the lines:

Take [Steven] Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing, for example, which has a surprisingly open, communal spirit. A series of massive portals lead from the street to an elaborate internal courtyard garden, a restaurant, a theater and a kindergarten, integrating the complex into the surrounding neighborhood. Bridges connect the towers 12 to 19 stories above ground and are conceived as a continuous string of public zones, with bars and nightclubs overlooking a glittering view of the city and a suspended swimming pool. “The developer’s openness to ideas was amazing,” Holl says. “When they first asked me to do the project, it was just housing. I suggested adding the cinematheque, the kindergarten. I added an 80-room hotel and the swimming pool as well. Anywhere else, they’d build it in phases over several years. It’s too big. After our meeting, they said we’re building the whole thing all at once. I couldn’t believe it. We haven’t had to compromise anything. . . .”

“We haven’t had to compromise anything”? Great! Because the building’s the thing!

Today’s NYTimes offers a balance to that morally idiotic sentiment, as architects discuss whether to take jobs from dictatorships. The article by Robin Pogrebin takes as a starting point Daniel Libeskind’s statement that he won’t work for totalitarian regimes (Singapore excepted) and, while it humorously tries to contrast Robert A.M. Stern with Rem Koolhaas —

Architects face ethical dilemmas in the West too. Some refuse to design prisons; others eschew churches. Robert A. M. Stern, who is also Yale’s architecture dean, drew some criticism last year when he accepted an assignment to design a planned George W. Bush Library in Dallas.

— it gets to the point about exactly the compromises that Holl avoids seeing:

Architects readily point out that dictators — or powerful central governments like China’s — can be among the most efficient in getting architecture built, as the boom in China attests. “The more centralized the power, the less compromises need to be made in architecture,” said the architect Peter Eisenman. “The directions are clearer.”

Sorta makes me want to read The Fountainhead again, now that I’m twice as old as the last time I read it.