Category: Urban issues

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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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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.

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More on Jacobs

Witold Rybczynski at Slate has a brief appreciation of Jane Jacobs’s work. He points out that Jacobs largely ignored the suburbs, which is putting it mildly. In her best-known book, she considers them solely as a negative, the way most urban theorists do. Which reminds me that I need to get back to reading Bruegmann’s Sprawl sometime soon, maybe before I make the leap into that Robert Moses book. Guess I oughtta get to reading Rybczynski’s City Life sometime, too.

(And I oughtta get back to some of my ruminations on Jacobs & New Orleans)

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No double-whammy, no double-whammy!

The City Journal’s Steven Malanga explains why my home state sucks:

But today New Jersey is a cautionary example of how to cripple a thriving state. Increasingly muscular public-sector unions have won billions in outlandish benefits and wages from compliant officeholders. A powerful public education cartel has driven school spending skyward, making Jersey among the nation’s biggest education spenders, even as student achievement lags. Inept, often corrupt, politicians have squandered yet more billions wrung from suburban taxpayers, supposedly to uplift the poor in the state’s troubled cities, which have nevertheless continued to crumble despite the record spending. To fund this extravagance, the state has relentlessly raised taxes on both residents and businesses, while localities have jacked up property taxes furiously. Jersey’s cost advantage over its free-spending neighbors has vanished: it is now among the nation’s most heavily taxed places. And despite the extra levies, new governor Jon Corzine faces a $4.5 billion deficit and a stagnant economy during a national boom.

While over at the New York Times, we find out that my hometown is about to be put back on the EPA’s Superfund cleanup list:

Contractors hired by Ford dumped tons of paint sludge laced with toxic chemicals and other polluted debris in a remote area of Ringwood around two Revolutionary War-era iron mines. Some local residents, most of them members of the Ramapough Mountain Indian Tribe, have serious illnesses, including certain cancers and skin diseases that have been linked to the toxins. They also have leukemia rates that are twice the statewide average, according to a lawsuit they filed against Ford in January.

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Toddling with Mr. 3000

Off to Chicago for the BIO Conference. I’ll try to get Bernie Mac’s autograph at his plenary session.

I’m also hoping to get out and meander in the city for a bit. I was in Chicago in March 2000 for a small conference, but that was my only visit. I remember that the architecture in the core area (I forget what it’s called: the Loop or something?) was interesting because, while grand, it didn’t have the sheer vertical overwhelmingness of NYC’s major buildings. It felt more welcoming, in the way that the buildings seemed to sweep away and up, rather than upupUP.

Anyway, if I take any good pix, you’ll be the first to know.

Also, I just finished re-reading the Shakespeare’s Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV 1&2, and Henry V), and have decided to make my next couple of readings “books other people really like and told me to read.” So I’m taking along Geek Love (my wife adores it) and Clockers (my buddy Mark contends it’s like good Charles Dickens, with crack).

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The Cos on the Cleanup

Bill Cosby spoke at a rally in NO,LA about reconstruction:

Cosby, whose criticism of some aspects of modern African-American culture has stirred controversy in recent years, told a rally headed by black leaders that the city needed to look at the “wound” it had before Katrina struck.

“It’s painful, but we can’t cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound,” Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people in front of the city’s convention center.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children,” he said.

“What kind of a village is that?”

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Pastor Johnny Ray Youngblood also discussed the introspective portion of the rebuilding process:

With Katrina, as with East Brooklyn and North Philadelphia and Southeast Washington, the way out is straight ahead. We have to act our way out of this — as in constructive action by hopeful actors who work with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other.

We have to raise our own money, not just wrestle over government money. We have to find our own housing sites. We have to hire and monitor builders and developers who work for us, not for some bureaucrat in Washington.

We have to deflect all the hustlers and talkers within our community who see this catastrophe as just another opportunity to shake people down and line their pockets.

We have to see this as a generational struggle — 10 years, maybe 20 — not as a quick fix.

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About that fountainhead . . .

Neat interview at BusinessWeek with Joshua Prince-Ramus, the lead partner and owner of the New York branch of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the firm founded by Rem Koolhaas. It’s all about the rational process of designing “outrageous” buildings:

We believe in a hyper-rational process where you accept the constraints, conditions, and challenges of a project, and you attempt to engage them by going back to first principles. You don’t accept any convention. If someone says, “This is how you solve that problem,” you give them the bird. You just say, “I don’t want to hear it.” [. . .]

We’re seeing constraints as opportunities. It’s not like we’re getting around the constraints. We’re saying, “The project’s just the constraints.” If we can solve the constraints, that’s where the form will come, that’s where the beauty will come, that’s where the logic will come. And more likely than not, you can get it built, you can get it financed, you can get it on budget.

I find this stuff fascinating, but I have a different view on art than some of my friends. Read more.

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Before the flood

Just finished reading Rob Walker’s Letters from New Orleans, which I enjoyed much more than Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters. I found the latter to be far too preachy, bordering on a sort of “White Man’s Burden” for why no expense must be spared in rebuilding the city. Walker’s book, on the other hand, made me care much more for the city and what it means and has meant.

Maybe the big difference is that one writer was discussing NO,LA pre-Katrina, and the other post-Katrina.

Or maybe it’s that one writer is a journalist, and the other is a novelist.

Or maybe one guy is someone you could just chill out and have a beer with, and the other guy is a douche.