Sleeping under the American Flag. San Diego, November 2012.
1. There are an estimated 10.000 homeless people in San Diego county.
2. This estimate does not comprise of people sleeping and living in their car.
3. The winter shelter that is about to open after much waiting has 400 beds.
4. There has been a 20% increase in homelessness in the past two years, and many are homeless as a result of continued recession, job loss and home repossession by banks.
5. 32% of the homeless in San Diego have a four-year college degree.
6. There are approximately 30,000 vacant houses, condos and apartments in San Diego County. See below for more info.
In North San Diego County alone, as of August 2011, there were 15,168 vacant homes (3.5% vacancy ). In Southwest San Diego County (Metro) houses, condos and apartments went from 88,090 to 191,513 due to the early 2000’s building frenzy. By 2010 Southwest County had 7.9 % (vacancy). This means that in the metro area, where most homeless people are found, there are 15,129 vacant houses, condo and apartments. Data is extrapolated from info found here.
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.
I can feel poetry
rise out of silence
like an undeniable tide,
a Polaroid floats to the surface.
The words appear Oh honey, just take out your lighter,
they are written in lemon juice
Loving you was like
carrying a cardboard suitcase
in the rain
In the absence of
I collect mugs by my bedside
Ride in empty buses
-straw bale leggings-
and always get to the theather
after the movie ended
I walk among the Saturday night revelers huddled around a screen
-the miniskirts march in lockstep
It’s date night in San Diego
a cold one too
knights in shirt sleeves have donated their coats
and presents are opened inside cars.
I steal glances and compose poems
that don’t help anyone tonight.
The lines start to sound
like a Gillian Welch song.
If you have a mind like a diamond,
expect it to cut.
I was in love with the dream of you
And now I am shackled to a ghost.
Some kinds of pain never die;
they can only ease a little,
and not every day.
I am posting the first of a series of samples of student work from the exhibit History of Architecture: Analysis and Synthesis Through Visual Notes. Moving chronologically, today we start with the Beginnings of Architecture. This body work was completed for the Graduate History of Architecture sequence, comprising of three courses, which i taught during the 2011-2012 school year.
I will also post some photos from the Exhibit.
These visual notes are by Jackie McDowell.
Drawing by Jackie McDowell.
Drawing by Jackie McDowell.
And here is thepaper abstractsummarizing the project objectives and research purpose. The full paper will be presented and published next Spring.
History of Architecture: Analysis and Synthesis Through Visual Notes
It is that time again. November First-ish, and like every November I will try to join the marathon of Nablopomo, and maybe even Nanowrimo. I have failed so far in my previous attempts to post everyday, and while i know that the definition of madness is doing the same thing expecting different results, every November finds me with renewed hope. I have good news today. Do you remember the post on the Flaneur? My drawing of our stroller and wanderer with turtle has caught the eye of a small, independent art press and will be used as a logo for a series of walks that will be published in pamphlet form .. ‘Basically, these are poetic/conceptual walks written by writers in different cities. Readers can buy the walks/pamphlets and take them as the writer instructs’. The project just started but please take a peek.
Another month rushed by, seemingly accelerating towards the end, as though sprinting to the finish line. The year’s end. Another year.
This past month brought also new beginnings and renewals. Just like accountants, professors measure years differently from the general public.
So this, other, new year that starts with the fall -the harvest- brought Spring in October : experimental mixed media and history courses, new energy, enthusiastic and curious students, expanded involvement, new projects and many welcome social occasions…and always, the company and camaraderie of my gentle and wise kin.
I love my job and feel so blessed. (I have just been given a Service Award for Five Years of outstanding contribution to the school, celebrate good times..)
I hosted my very first reception for my Graduate students’ work in the History of Architecture course this last week. The title of the exhibition was
‘ History of Architecture: Analysis and Synthesis through Visual Notes’.
My past students’ critical, and sometimes lyrical and poetic work –their beautifully rendered drawings, sketches and diagrams–have been gracing the halls of my school and received much acclaim. This body of work and research into this alternative method for teaching history is the topic of a forthcoming paper, which I will present in the Spring.
I am also launching a project called Builtculture, which I will be editing. This is something I have been working on for few months along with a stellar Graduate student of mine, Samar Sepehri. Builtculture is a repository for lectures and cultural events happening in San Diego and the So-Cal region, for the architecture and urban design discriminating aficionados. It exists in form of a facebook page for now, but will soon morph into a simple yet useful calendar site–as soon as I can catch my breath.
Planning to post photos of the Visual Notes Exhibit next week -need to scan few more examples and ‘teasers’- and to share Builtculture when it is ready too. I am thinking about adding an Academic section to my work site, Archistdesign, for such endeavors.
All of this to say, really, is that my full-time job and volunteering [ for community build and garden build projects , I have learned to build a deck and plaster, aka architecture for social purpose … yes!] have taken ahold of my heart and days lately, and my art has had to wait.
I also (also!) will have my poetry published. New poems have been brewing and blooming, maybe I will share one later tonight.
I know that there are few of you who follow these ramblings of mine , who gently coax me when I have not posted for a while, and wanted to reach out and declare that I do not want this to be a ‘ travel blog’ , a dalliance…but that I also have to make peace with the fact that I am nor cannot be a a full-time writer, poet or artist, (although I would embrace these lives and crafts in a heartbeat, teaching is my calling) and that I cannot post or work on my art everyday. Life itself needs to be explored, precious work completed, books need to be read, and body, soul, and spirit nurtured daily. Perhaps, I have been given too many passions for just one life. These are heavy gifts and Chet Baker sings ‘I fall in love too easily’…
Before biding my hopefully brief adieu, here is a poem that I recently found among old correspondence.
It is nice to be old enough to have that.. Speaking of correspondence, see ‘ Young Goethe in Love’. I died.
The Undertaking
The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime .
The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime .
There you are — cased in clean bark you drift through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free.
The river films with lilies, shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm.
And now all fear gives way: the light looks after you, you feel the waves’ goodwill as arms widen over the water;
Love, the key is turned.
Extend yourself —it is the Nile, the sun is shining, everywhere you turn is luck.
Louise Glück
The Eternal Life of Objects, the Persistence of You
You skate
On the membrane of my dreams
We are divided by a thin layer of ice
The surface breaks
And there it is
All of our love
All of my sorrow
Flooding and resurfacing
Precarious degrees
Separating water
From water.
We spill over fields and rice paddies
-This is how we will come back-
All of our impossible futures,
The ache of forking paths
We will be streams, and rivers
Timeless and steady arteries.
I visit you in images
Stitched together between awakenings.
I take your things, put them away
The inevitability of your arms
As i come to.
You lie just beneath
the gossamer veil of thoughts
– forgive as the sea forgives,
as it heals, as it forgets,
Forgive as children are forgiven-
Their eyes are not windows yet
But mirrors.
On my way to Roma but wanted to share my latest project.These are the prep sketches and the charcoal outline on the final canvas, which measures 5.5’X2.5′.
This painting was commissioned and I am lucky to have a very lovely client : )
The last photo is from the Princeton Architectural Press catalog, which just came in my office.
I would love my studio to be like that one day…
Ciao!
Ink drawing of the sculpture “The Age of Enlightenment – Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breuteuil, Marquise de Châtelet” by Yinka Shonibare, MBE. Drawn at the San Diego Museum of Art, 2008.
There are particular nights, small time frames, where everything you want, and, yes -everything you need- is given to you.
You watch your life unfolding perfectly, like a well-written screenplay of a comedy of errors, where the characters, after a series of ‘harrowing events’ and near misses, find each other at last. These nights you believe in signs, and that there are no coincidences.
I am not saying that life or love have a happy ending, but some days do.
Last Friday, the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park hosted an extraordinary event, part of their Summer Salon Series (inspired by the tradition of French literary and cultural salons). This event was a 36 Hour ‘continued’ Salon taking place in the museum’s galleries (open consecutively for 36 hours…I will never forget contemplating Egon Schiele at 2 in the morning), auditorium, and outdoors in the sculpture garden.
Needless to say, the collection of happenings taking place ranged from the superb to the surreal. Wandering in the museum galleries in the wee hours of night with other artists, revellers and cool types felt very subversive and….Big City.
A Yes Men lecture, an avant-garde play on self-loop for four hours, museum tours, German Expressionist Cinema, ambient music with obligatory trippy visualizations, live bands, a napping station plen air, stargazing on the lawn of the sculpture garden, drawing dreams and nightmares and, my favorite, a marching band in which us, the audience, were given a makeshift instrument and played (and marched) directed by the one-man band’s crazy frontman.
The general feeling of anarchy, and being caught between confusion/freedom/disbelief/engagement made this event very Dada, or something the Situationists would have conjured up…
Click to enlarge
During a lecture, I drew one of the pieces on display {above}. you can find a photo of the piece here.
From the museum’s literature: The Age of Enlightenment – Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breuteuil, Marquise de Châtelet, is from a series of five figures depicting notable philosophers from the eighteenth century. The marquise, fluent in several languages and an accomplished mathematician and physicist, personified the “enlightened” person. Her lasting legacy is the translation and critique of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica that is still used to this day. Despite the fact that the Marquise de Châtelet was a leading mind of eighteenth-century France, much of her work was overlooked because of her gender. Her most famous lover, Voltaire, described her as a ‘great man’ whose only fault was being a woman.
I like to think that the Marquise is headless because she has never been recognized for her work and her name is virtually unknown.
She has been deliberately omitted in the annals of His-tory.
Stanzas Written On the Road Between Florence and Pisa
Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story;
The days of our youth are the days of our glory;
And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty
Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty.
What are garlands and crowns to the brow that is wrinkled?
‘Tis but as a dead flower with May-dew besprinkled.
Then away with all such from the head that is hoary!
What care I for the wreaths that can only give glory?
O Fame!—if I e’er took delight in thy praises,
‘Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases,
Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover,
She thought that I was not unworthy to love her.
There chiefly I sought thee, there only I found thee;
Her glance was the best of the rays that surround thee;
When it sparkled o’er aught that was bright in my story,
I knew it was love, and I felt it was glory.
George Gordon, Lord Byron
November, 1821
…
Romantics, for more on the lives of the Poets, you might hide here for a few days, and spend the evenings at your local cafe reading poems accompanied by a well-tempered clavier. For my part, I have ordered Ugo Foscolo’s Le Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis)–and look forward to sinking in its lyrical, poignant song that so well describes the passion and contradiction of the Italian spirit (and carries me back to the Halcyon days of Literature and Poetry studies in high school). A presto, more watercolor portraits await…
Do not write love-poems. Avoid those forms which are too trite and commonplace: they are the hardest, for a great and mature power is needed to give of one’s own where good and often brilliant traditions throng upon one. Therefore betake yourself from the usual themes to those which your everyday life offers you. Paint your sadnesses and your desires, your passing thoughts and your belief in some kind of beauty
—paint all that with quiet and modest inward sincerity; and to express yourself use the things that surround you, the pictures of your dreams and the objects of your recollections. When your daily life seems barren, do not blame it; blame yourself rather and tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the creative worker knows no barrenness and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in a prison, whose walls prevented all the bustle of the world from reaching your senses, even then would you not still have your childhood, that precious, kingly wealth, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention towards it. Try to recall the forgotten sensations of that distant past; your personality will strengthen itself, your loneliness will extend itself and become a dusky dwelling and the noise of others will pass by it far away. And when from this turning inwards, from this retreat into your own world verses come into being, then you will not think of asking anyone, whether they are good verses. Nor will you try to get journals interested in these works, for you will see in them your own loved and natural possession, a part and an expression of your life. A work of art is good, when it is born of necessity.
El Templete, Habana Vieja (with water from the Malecon). Ink on hand.book paper. Habana, Cuba. April 2012.
Example of Moorish (Mudéjar) Architecture in Habana Vieja. Ink on hand.book paper. Habana, Cuba. April 2012.
….
“Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment.”
‘Habana is very much like a rose,’ said Fico Fellove in the movie The Lost City,
‘it has petals and it has thorns…so it depends on how you grab it.
But in the end it always grabs you.’
“One of the most beautiful cities in the world. You see it with your heart.”
Enrique Nunez Del Valle, Paladar Owner
Habana’s real essence is so difficult to pin down. Plenty of writers have had a try, though; Cuban intellectual Alejo Carpentier nicknamed Habana the ‘city of columns,’ Federico Llorca declared that he had spent the best days of his life there and Graham Greene concluded that Habana was a city where ‘anything was possible.’
…
ARCHITECTURE
Habana is, without doubt, one of the most attractive and architecturally diverse cities in the world. Shaped by a colorful colonial history and embellished by myriad foreign influences from as far afield as Italy and Morocco, the Cuban capital gracefully combines Mudéjar, baroque, neoclassical, art nouveau, art deco and modernist architectural styles into a visually striking whole.
But it’s not all sweeping vistas and tree-lined boulevards. Habana doesn’t have the architectural uniformity of Paris or the instant knock-out appeal of Rome. Indeed, two decades of economic austerity has meant many of the city’s finest buildings have been left to festering an advanced state of dilapidation. Furthermore, attempting to classify Habana’s houses,palaces, churches and forts as a single architectural entity is extremely difficult.
Cuban building – rather like its music – is unusually diverse. Blending Spanish colonial with French belle epoque, and Italian Renaissance with Gaudi-esque art nouveau, the over-riding picture is often one of eclecticism run wild.
Nadie’ en tus arquiadas
En tus piedras llore’
Tus plazas me acogieron
Respire’ en la sombra de tus arboles
Sufrie’ por su cara
–los abrazos olvidados en la rena
estan alla’ hasta otro viento–
En tu son
Tu sol
Comprendi’ tus ojos infinitos
El calor the tus brazos dorados
Me calento’
En la noche el agua va corriendo en las fuentes–
Todavia estare’ alla’,
En los pasajes y las calles,
En las escaleras y las puertas serradas,
y en tu corazon de sal.
La Habana, Cuba, Avril 2012
…
Havana
I swam in your porticoes On your stones I cried Your piazzas welcomed me
I breathed in the shade of your trees I suffered for his face –the embraces forgotten on the sand there remain, until another wind.
In your sound Your sun I understood your infinite eyes The heat of your golden arms Warmed me
In the night The water will continue to run in the fountains I will be there still, In your passageways and streets, In your staircases and closed doors, And in your heart of salt.
If you’re not approaching,
I hope at least
You’re off to comfort someone who needs you more,
Not lost wandering aimlessly
Or drawn to the shelter of well-lit rooms
Where people assume you’ve arrived already.
If you’re coming this way, send me the details
—The name of the ship, the port it leaves from—
So I can be down on the dock to help you
Unload your valises, your trunks and boxes
And stow them in the big van I’ll have rented.
I’d like this to be no weekend stay
Where a single change of clothes is sufficient.
Bring clothes for all seasons, enough to fill a closet;
And instead of a single book for the bedside table
Bring boxes of all your favorites.
I’ll be eager to clear half my shelves to make room,
Eager to read any titles you recommend.
If we’ve many in common, feel free to suggest
They prove my disposition isn’t to blame
For your long absence, just some problems of attitude,
A few bad habits you’ll help me set to one side.
We can start at dinner, which you’re welcome
To cook for us while I sweep and straighten
And set the table.
Then light the candles
You’ve brought from afar for the occasion.
Light them and fill the room
I supposed I knew
With a glow that shows me
I was mistaken.
Then help me decide if I’m still the person I was
Or someone else, someone who always believed in you
And imagined no good reasons for your delay.
“To Happiness” by Carl Dennis, from Unknown Friends.
The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory.
That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.
A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry.
The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. Your are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams.
Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.
There is no need to seek her
For she is the Moon
Her stunning face hangs over me
Never lets a night go without
The ache of her beauty
Do you see the small star by her?
Her shadow is cast over the city
Like Brunelleschi’s cupola over all of Tuscany.
The heaviness of her copper lies
[in my mouth]
She hides under train tracks and asphalt
She peeks from our longtrodden alleys
She’s under and above me.
I have to see about a City
-I said to him-
The way others go see about a Girl.
‘The city is a girl’ he replied.
They wrote about us
We became Art for a moment
Part of the city like streetlamps
A collage of colors
Red for San Francisco cars
Mustard like her scarf
White, my fedora
Red was our debaucherous light
Her crisp apple shirt matched paintings
[gray as planes]
In Buena Vista park we laid on the grass
Fed mosquitoes and waited fairies
I crafted stories on Bechtle’s California suburbs
Stories of quiet misery and afternoon beers, for her…
Blue for too many train tickets
We sat in a room full of patterns
And listened.
Under brilliant suns we walked
To the edge of Sunset.
Faded too early in the streets of Janis Joplin
Among Tibetan jewelry stores,
Earrings and beads,
We found minstrels and poets.
Lemonade and Mate,
I told her about the weight of flowers
Narrated the geography
Of my broken heart.
It is night again
And I still choose my dandelion poetry
Over sleep
And being on time.
Click to see my architectural shoots over at ArchistDesign | Studio. All projects by Architectural Concepts in San Diego, CA.
Apparently this is my year. The year of the Water Dragon.
I am happy to say, I am finally completing my architecture website.
This other digital studio has been on the back burner for about a year , but it looks like 2012 is the antithesis of procrastination.
A year that quickens…like a strong sun that vanquishes the fog.
I have added some photography work for my friend and mentor Margit Whitlock at Architectural Concepts. Photographing these well-executed design projects was a joy.
Still few portfolio items to add to the site (and three new projects on the boards!)
Will keep posting updates as they happen, and hope to finish in few weeks.
Spring, and everything outside is growing,
even the tall cypress tree.
We must not leave this place.
Around the lip of the cup we share, these words,
My Life Is Not Mine
If someone were to play music, it would have to be very sweet.
We’re drinking wine, but not through lips.
We’re sleeping it off, but not in bed.
Rub the cup across your forehead.
This day is outside living and dying.
Give up wanting what other people have.
That way you’re safe.
“Where, where can I be safe?” you ask.
This is not a day for asking questions,
not a day on any calendar.
This day is conscious of itself.
This day is a lover, bread, and gentleness,
more manifest than saying can say.
Thoughts take form with words,
but this daylight is beyond and before
thinking and imagining. Those two,
they are so thirsty, but this gives smoothness
to water. Their mouths are dry, and they are tired.
The rest of this poem is too blurry for them to read.
Translated by Cleman Barks in “The Essential Rumi”
My world, my California, still needs to be made.
To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly.
To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one.
Maybe you have to be lost.
The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.
The Liebster Blog Award is an award given to bloggers by bloggers, and is reserved to ‘upstart’ blogs with less than 200 followers.
It originated in Germany and its meaning is ‘beloved’, or favorite.<3
It was bestowed to me by the Kuwaiti artist (und blogschwester!) Ghadah Alkandari at PrettyGreenBullet, whom I consider a role model as a 360 degree artist and blogger.
Needless to say it is a great honor to receive this, and more to receive it from Ghadah.
Check out her other awardees, it is blog goodness at its BESTE!
I in turn will have to bestow the award onto five upstart bloggers, so stay tuned, deliberations have just started.
In the winter, Venice is like an abandoned theatre. The play is finished, but the echoes remain.
Arbit Blatas
To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.
Alexander Herzen
There is something so different in Venice from any other place in the world, that you leave at once all accustomed habits and everyday sights to enter an enchanted garden.
Mary Shelley
It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.
Erica Jong
I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand.
Lord Byron
…
A train-ride takes you from Milano to Venice..whose real name is Venezia, the Most Serene city and splendid, golden Republic. On the train you think about Byron, his letters written on trains, his Venetian Countess.
Through frozen fields and dormant earth, through fog and long-gone rice paddies , you deboard to the Sublime.
At dusk the lights from bars and cafes shimmer on the dark waters, and you start thinking in cliches, such as temporarily inhabiting an Impressionist painting.
Yet the feeling is fresh and true: each visit to this surrealists’ dream had its poignant moment of suspension of disbelief.
Each time the city grabs you and takes you away with her.
…
Here’s a taste of today’s acts of flanerie in La Serenissima.
Crocheting Cathedrals. Il Duomo with parasitic architecture (stage for New Year's festivities). Ink and watercolor on hand.book paper. December 31, 2011.
Aperol and Spritz. Most of the older ladies in my neighborhood are incredibly fashionable, decked in the latest trend winter coat. Here's two enjoying a mildly alcoholic aperitivo at 11 AM. Ink on hand.book paper. December 31, 2011.
Santa Maria Presso San Satiro. The obligatory pilgrimage to the second Bramante's church. Last year I drew Santa Maria Delle Grazie, which is near to my place. I am always amazed by the playfulness and modernity of the oculi (round windows) on the Northern Romanesque facade. I found out that the space in front of the church is called 'Largo Jorge Luis Borges'. Can it get better than this?
Ink on hand.book paper. December 31, 2011.
Window of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio. In an act of Flanerie, I got lost trying to reach the Roseto, and found these whimsical, almost Gaudi-like windows on a palazzo I had not seen since my childhood, painted in the typical warm 'Milanese Yellow' (think saffron rice and add a patina of melancholy, smog and time). Ink on hand.book paper. January 1, 2012.
New painting's "Underpainting". December 6th, 2011. Acrylic on Canvas.
I started to paint again. And now, I cannot believe i have been away from my brushes and tubes for so long. I set-up a makeshift easel in the kitchen, by the window, a little corner of happiness.
Where this new painting will go might surprise you.
Sunday, I found joy in heading to my neighborhood’s art store to buy white paint. All my old little guys are there, sketchbooks, papers, paints…and now a new jewelry section! I bought some new clasps for my wire crochet pieces.
Will post progress updates.
Art is neither a profession or hobby. Art is a Way of being.
Frederick Franck
Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic.
Pablo Picasso
Being an artist means : not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree,
which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storm of spring,
not afraid that afterward summer may not come.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems,
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
San Diego, November 25, 2011. Third Avenue Pedestrian Bridge.
San Diego, November 25, 2011. Third Avenue bridge and context (canyon).
Bridge, De-constructed.
” In recent years , the modern understanding of social responsibility as functional program has been superseded by a concern for context. But contextualism has been used as an excuse for mediocrity, for a dumb servility within the familiar. Since deconstructivist architecture seeks the unfamiliar within the familiar, it displaces the context rather than acquiesce to it. What makes it disturbing is the way deconstructivist architecture finds the unfamiliar already hidden within the familiar context. By its intervention, elements of the context become defamiliarized. In one project, towers are turned over on their sides, while in others, bridges are tilted up to become towers.”
I place your brown leather small
On top of mine
It is as if you are protecting me
A tender shelter for my hands
Made of florentine winters
cobblestones, morning trains, domes.
It runs a bit short
A black cashmere wrap, or
the vulnerable clinging of the young.
The gloves are empty
Your hands are not there
Your gloves are shells
Echoing your touch
Your gloves are naked
They are the skin you use to protect your skin
I carry them now
I carry you
Then I place mine on top
Brown like yours, but bigger
Your gloves poke from under , happy.
Mother and child of the same tan.
Wire Crochet ring. This is a cocktail ring that can have a rounded or flattened look. November 20, 2011.
Wire Crochet and Ring. November 20, 2011.
I have been busy conjuring up objects from wire.
As architects, jewelry is the smallest realized design we can create. Next of course there are the futuristic 3D printers, but I like the analog character of crochet, using my hands, painting with metal and ending up with wearable art. I have been crocheting since the age of eleven (thank you, Salesian Sisters!) but this is the first time i produced jewelry. I remember at 14 using pliers, crazy glue and metal wire to create very small butterfly earrings. My parents must not have been impressed, because i was not immediately pulled out of my Linguistic Lycaeum and redirected to the Fine Arts and Jewelry institute.
The bracelet, a simple tubular structure, and the ring (my design), can be made using pure silver , copper, gold or various wire colors. I used No. 2 Crochet Hook and 34 gauge wire.
Cannot wait to experiment further, the Amazon fairy shall visit again soon (she brought me really good books on wire and hook jewelry this time).
Merry Christmas to me and here is to more jewelry and sculpture with a hook!
Wire crochet ring- Rounded position. November 20, 2011.
Wire Crochet Ring - Flattened look. November 20, 2011
Wire Crochet Bracelet and Ring. November 20, 2011.
The story behind this photo: this was taken at Yoga One studio in San Diego while I was supposed to be in Downward Dog position.
The orange curtains created the most intoxicating reflection on the wooden floor, and the real effect is ten times better that what I captured here. The thing is, this effect is only visible when the lights are turned down, and the room is getting into a meditative mood.
I have to be sneaky, because one can’t disrupt a yoga class in the name of Art. Or can she? I have a dilemma.
I will try again next time and post updates, if I get a better frame. I learned about the term ‘Talkitecture’ tonight. Perhaps this was ‘Talking art”. Tart?
Ink drawing, Watercolor + Digital Manipulation. 16 November 2011.
I was recently reunited with luggage lost 45 days ago.
Three items were missing: a bottle of Cinema Eau De Parfum by Yves Saint Laurent, a beloved collaged orange umbrella bought in Barcelona and a pair of Sketchers shoes. Go figure.
Immediately i set out to substitute my lost umbrella. As said in one Law and Order episode (I paraphrase): “Hardheaded Calabrese: the people there are very stubborn… once something is taken away from them, they don’t rest until …they get it back.”
My mind went back to the orange umbrella I bought for my mom in Milano last Christmas (probably with her money;)), from one of my favorite stores: Muji.
In my quest, I ran into this glorious essay on a particular shade of orange.
I have a box of orange objects in my house that I have been meaning to combine into a series.
Tomorrow seems like a good day for it, and orange thoughts are perfect for winter-short days and too much yin.
If we lived during the time of the Dutch West Indies Company, I would tell you that the color that so captured me was the child of paprika and chocolate. The world no longer swoons over spice willing to risk a sail beyond the end of the known. And yes, sadly rape and pillage in its desperate greed. I had only to pass the window of the Muji store in Manhattan’s Chelsea to discover this color in an umbrella.
What is it that grabbed me? Is it a vibration for which the color is only a foil? Or is it something about the color itself lodged between memory and desire? This redder orange infused with luxurious chocolate yielded a strangely jazzier yet muter tone than orange. But if we are mapping out its terrain inevitably the orange relation comes up.
My “Muji Orange” is a distant relative of the neon orange of warning, as well as a “tangerine streamlined baby” of sixties psychedelic abandon. Its crazy older paternal cousin might be the Tang of astronauts or maybe the impossible orange of orange Crush soda, or possibly even Blake’s Tyger burning bright, but its doting grandmother, is definitely — yes, most definitely — a bittersweet French marmalade.
There is some mystery to orange. Orange is the only color in the seven-color spectrum besides violet that originates as a noun, naming a particular thing. It refers to the berry fruit of the orange tree, something very concrete and specific and not as abstract as the other colors. Was the experience of the orange fruit so strong that it came to stand for the orange experience?
The Old English Dictionary (OED) states that in Medieval Latin “the forms ‘arangia’, ‘arantia’ (Du Cange) whence ‘aurantia’ have “popular association with ‘aurum’ gold from the colour.” Perhaps, the OED postulates, there is an etymological relationship between the Old French “orenge” for “arauge” after “or” gold. The OED traces the “loss of the initial ‘n‘ in French, English and Italian” as “ascribed to its absorption into the indefinite article” resulting in “narange” absorbing “une” and “narancia” absorbing ”una.”
Also from the OED we understand that the “native country of orange appears to have been the northern frontier of India, where wild oranges are still found and the name may have originated there.” In Late Sankrit the word for orange is “naranga;” in Hindi it is “narangi” (OED, p. 2001)
Is “orange” related to the color of the fruit and/or to gold and the word “ore” (OED, p. 2001)? Are both these not only things, but also perhaps experiences of light? More questions arise as we consider other correspondences that I call “rhymes and ricochets.”
In Persian the world for pomegranate is “nar” (OED, p.2001) which echoes the nar of narange. Is this coincidence or relationship? The OED states it is not certain. Was the “nar” / pomegranate the fateful fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden myth? It is possible because the pomegranate rather than the apple was the indigenous fruit. If the pomegranate was the tree of knowledge, what was the knowledge that this golden ball embodied? Might it have reflected a relationship of light to dark?
Is there anything other than coincidence to the resonance of the pomegranate which also figures in the myth of Persephone who spends half her days in a descent into Hades when the earth experiences the dark of winter and the other half above ground when the earth experiences the light of spring – alternations or gradients of light and dark?
In one narrative color is dependent upon history and culture. The OED by definition is a history of the English language, tracing the history and values of the western world with its migrations and roots to the East. Today we think oranges are synonymous with the warm climates of Florida and California. We often believe they are indigenous to North America. However, they were planted by conquistador sailors who needed to create supplies of vitamin C to take with them to guard against scurvy on their long sea journeys.
What is orange in cultures outside of the European? In other cultures closed off to our own for so long by the migration and exchange of trade, say the Japanese or Chinese, what is the etymology of the word orange? In Cantonese Chinese (but not in Mandarin), the word for orange is related by sound to the word for gold. At New Year’s the Mandarin orange embodies good wishes for prosperity. Are “gold” and “orange” a conflation of all these color experiences of light?
What about other earlier societies? I wonder whether orange might “rhyme” with “fire.” Fire had the life-giving power that made a large difference to a culture. If gold wasn’t the commodity of value, it might make sense for the word for this experience to be “fire.” Might gold be in part only an imitation of the light of fire?
These richoceting ruminations about gold and fire are vital, because it is precisely the light of gold or fire that starts to go missing in “my” Muji Orange. It is that chocolate brown in addition to the red of the orange that makes the color “step back” toward the shade. Muji Orange recedes from the saturation and almost clear brilliance of an ordinary orange that lags just behind the brilliance of yellow—whether the origin is the light of sun, gold or fire.
Muji is a Japanese company and that perhaps contributes and infuses a measure of its aesthetic into that of the west. The store’s name is related to “mujo” which evokes “transience” in Japanese. I once heard about Japanese “killed colors.” These colors had a little bit of death in them, fading from their original brilliance and glory. I couldn’t find reference to them again but only to the rikuyu colors made from graying. In Muji Orange the quality of orange steps away from the brilliance of the sunny orange into the shade, holding a note of something that is darker. It is not a sinister dark to be avoided but one to be savored like a fine chocolate.
Is my “Muji Orange” so beautiful to me because it captures the life of light and its brilliance — and the life of dark and its recession? To me “Muji Orange” is a kumquat color par excellence. First like the sweet rind of the kumquat there is a “taste” of brilliance and then immediately, almost simultaneously, just as the fruit yields a sour taste, my Muji orange bursts with another very different moody, darker earthy “taste.” Does Muji Orange with its paprika jazzy zest want to dance the tarantula? Is it death or lack of light that gives my Muji color its kick?
I have questioned whether it was the vibration of the color that pulled me into the Chelsea store — the umbrella an extraneous element. But I wonder if the precise color of orange might also be a “rhyme” with the function of “umbrella”? Are the form and the vibration related in the poetry of memory?
Recently I recalled an earlier encounter with umbrellas. When I studied in Madrid in my 20s, I would often take the subway to go downtown to the Turner bookshop. I’d climb the stairs of the appropriately named Sol subway stop that spilled out onto Jose Antonio, emerging more often than not into a scorching sun.
On my way to the bookshop I would pass outside the window of a store that made confectionaries of violets sold in white and purple miniature hatboxes. But my favorite was the neighboring shop entirely devoted to umbrellas with a placard handwritten in a swirly old-fashioned cursive script in the window that read “Manana llovera.” Both its whimsy and its sales-minded craft were not lost in the English translation — “tomorrow it will rain.”
Last December, many years after my sunny Spanish sojourn, when to me it is now irrefutable that night and day, death and life are folded into one another and that Persephone must braid both dark and light — the Muji Orange color caught my eye. Manana llovera. Tomorrow it will rain. Dear Reader, I bought the umbrella.
Bibliographic Note The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume I, AO, (Oxford University Press, United States, 1982).
Hurricane after silence,
The Sun gives liberally —
You cannot trap its warmth:
Love cannot exist in a prison
It is true
But the Sun will always have her one Moon.
Fences in the water are useless
the water will continue to flow-
You can take a horse to it.
You cannot start fires and complain
If you get burned
You cannot sow seeds on puddles, asphalt,
Dirt
And marvel when a plant doth sprout.
A plane cuts the sky
Writes a requiem
Draws parallel light-hopes.
I live for that tender moment at the end of my days
As the sun is in full crescendo glory,
giving the last, sweet ripeness
Her moon rushes to a corner
Small, full of mischief
and twinkling laughter.
La Seine, Paris. Photograph+ Digital Alteration. November 2011.
I am sorry
For my jumbled mess of thoughts
my contradictions
my ash offerings
I am sorry
for my sterile hips
for burning like a fallow candle
for not fathoming your fullness
(I salute it now).
Penelope undoes at night
her morning’s narrative.
It changes with each day:
two steps forward and one back
is not a step forward.
In fact, it is very much like
marching in place
while wearing a hair shirt.
I am sorry for my darkness
For wanting to hurt you with dandelions
for standing by a ripped promise
like a stubborn stone.
I write because
I have to.
If necessary, I can beg for a pen and paper
to hold again my favorite barbed wire.
(Sylvia Plath tell me again
how much fun it is
to write a poem).
…
I move my arms to caress
the petals of a giant sunflower
Inhale, lenghten
Exhale, melt.
In my raw silence,
my shard-sharp mind, my heart-awareness
forgetfulness is that one wine
I cannot purchase:
The door was ajar
yet I chose not to enter.
“Forgive my thoughts,
for they bloom at night
Nightflower’d orphans
banished by light”.
Thoughts set free. Ink on paper and trace. November 9,2011.
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time,
then I’m neurotic as hell.
I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another
for the rest of my days.”
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 8
I have to thank my colleague Alan Rosenblum for sharing the concept of thinking with one’s hands and the visual poetry of The Mystery of a Murmuration. His advice is to watch this in silence.
No blind facade allowed. Paris, 2011. Intersection between Clovis and rue Descartes. Mural by Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky, poem by French poet and writer Yves Bonnefoy (2000)
Passant,
regarde ce grand arbre
et à travers lui,
il peut suffire.Car même déchiré, souillé,
l’arbre des rues,
c’est toute la nature,
tout le ciel,
l’oiseau s’y pose,
le vent y bouge, le soleil
y dit le même espoir
malgréla mort.
Philosophe,
as-tu chance d’avoir arbre
dans ta rue,
tes pensées seront moins ardues,
tes yeux plus libres,
tes mains plus désireuses
de moins de nuit.
Yves Bonnefoy
…
Passerby,
look at this great tree
and through it,
that could be enough.For even torn up, sullied,
the tree of the street is
all of nature,
all the heavens,
the bird alights there,
the wind moves there,the sun there expresses
the same hope
in spite of death.
Philosopher,
if you are lucky enough to
have trees in your street,
your thoughts will be less arduous,
your eyes more free,
your hands more desirous,
at least at night.
A luminous, blue tree explodes above the Paris rooftops of the 5ième arrondissement. L’arbre bleu (or the blue tree) is the flâneur’s reward for roaming the streets of Paris in reverie and without a map.
This 2000 mural by Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky, completed in situ, is at the intersection of rue Clovis and rue Descartes. At Alechinsky’s request, the painting has been accompanied by a poem by his friend and renowned French poet and writer Yves Bonnefoy.
The tree’s radiance is in stark contrast to its metropolitan environment: it is a bright blue column with only a few errant splashes to mar its clean lines; the branches emanate from the trunk like an open palm, fingers outstretched. The image reminds the observer that nature still has a place here – although it is somewhat camouflaged by the crowds and the congestion of buildings.
But the border of this central motif tells another story: Alechinsky, 84, delights in imperfection and the margins provide a narrative of their own. Each block in the border of l’arbre bleu reveals the troubled fragments of this urban world: charred trees have succumbed to civilization and now wilt against the concrete backdrop; bursts of royal blue spatter blemish the other blocks of the frame.
Bonnefoy, 87, has written extensively about the meaning of spoken and written words. His style is unembellished with a simple use of vocabulary that can be misleading: he manages to imbue a sensuality into this sparseness of language. As such, it is the ideal complement to Alechinsky’s l’arbre bleu.
The poem gently intrudes on the individual’s consciousness and suggests that this image is sufficient to begin a dialogue about how humans interact with their environment and specifically, how art can bring us closer to nature. The poet further explains that although it is only the image of a living tree, this “torn, soiled tree of the streets” is vivid enough that a bird perches on it, the wind moves it – even the sun shares its hopeful rays with it.
L’arbre bleu was a natural sequel to Alechinsky and Bonnefoy’s initial collaboration: in 2009 Bonnefoy had written a book about the artist’s pictorial method of expression in Alechinsky, Les traversées (The Crossings). He was well prepared for this text having written numerous essays on the subject. The book also explores his involvement with the CoBrA Group, a radical art movement from 1948 to 1951, of which Alechinsky was one of the founders.
Alechinsky is the sole surviving member of the CoBrA Group. (The name was coined by one of the founders, Christian Dotremont, from the initials of the members’ hometowns: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.) The Group was inspired by primitive art and children’s drawings. Their painting is characterised by vibrant colours, and vigorous brushstrokes; this liberty of movement is evident in l’arbre bleu. Critics have dismissed Alechinsky as “the man who grew up to be a child” and his art as infantile scribbling, but this spontaneity is representative of the CoBrA movement.
In the early 1950s Alechinsky became enamoured with oriental calligraphy: this highly stylized way of writing with an ink-wet brush allowed for greater variations in the curve and thickness of the lines he used in his work. His experience as the Paris correspondent for the Japanese journal Bokubi (The Joy of Ink) further informed his artistic methods. But the overriding trait of his art remains the combination of writing and pictorial signs.
The Blue Tree mural in Paris
L’arbre bleu differs from “standard” graffiti in that it was not created under cloak of darkness, but was commissioned; however, it still fits into the category of street art as a political vehicle that is countercultural. The painted tree explores our relationship to nature and underscores the fact that the concrete jungle can be fertile ground for the imagination.
But the real strength of l’arbre bleu lies in its economy: the painted image and the poem are layered with meaning. They articulate that nature can be accessible anywhere. Alechinsky and Bonnefoy have redefined the concrete poem: its lyricism unfolds amid the circuitry of the city – the painted tree no more out of place than a real one would be.
Ink on Miquelrius paper + Digital collage. October 2011
I want to share these two poems by Ilyas Abu Shabaku, which were given to me as a gift. Poetry is a candle in a dark room: our job in this life may just be to burn as bright as torches, as bright and as alive and loud as we can, for each glorious day we have left.
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened,
I used to dislike rainy days but now, they are just…”Paris days.”
The city acquires a new depth, a warm, poetic melancholy.
That feeling of being inside a Caillebotte painting, where the real city, what I see, what i inhabit, what i fall into, is the image in the water; that wet,beautiful canvas. The rain on the asphalth, rivulets, currents, puddles become a mirror that scrambles, abstractizes, seduces….
The rain on the windows when you are sitting in a literary cafe’, and the place becomes a haven not only for the soul (as it usually is), but a toasty, welcoming,peopled orange-glow that will shelter the body in the intemperate, stormy weather. So seeing the sign of the cafe’ in the rain, in the mist, is what the ship, no longer wreck-bound, feels at the first glimpses of the watchtower in the fog, keeper of her dreams and saviour.
It is as though the rain is inside the cafe’. The window panes are frosted and dewy. We could be anywhere. We could be in Paris.
Or all of it sunk in an ocean, a majestic ruin overgrown with algaes and debris. All of it, wooden tables and chairs from Lebanon, credenzas and tapestries from Jordan. The wine, the coffee, the tea jars. They are all tubling down. And us with them.
It is as though we are sinking in a sweet, decadent oblivion. We drink in the atmosphere while we happily drown in a vague past with no memories. Where everything is possible, allowed, forgiven. And everywhere else, outside of this retro submarine, is desert.
Namaste. Ink on paper, digital manipulation. October 2011.
MENDING WALL
Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
A talisman (from Arabic طلسم Tilasm, ultimately from Greek telesma or from the Greek word “telein” which means “to initiate into the mysteries”) is an amulet or other object considered to possess supernatural or magical powers. (thankyou wiki.)
Each spacer/bolt has the word intre·pidi·ty embedded on it.
tal·is·man \ˈtælɪzmən\: objects worn to bring specific qualities into your life, such as strength, happiness and protection.
She considers herself a “contemporary builder of talismans utilizing objects of her own culture”. As soon as I saw her rugged and evocative spacers I was immediately inspired to create an industrial/architectural piece.
It is time to lose your life,
Even if it isn’t over.
It is time to say goodbye and try to die.
It is October.
The mellow cello
Allee of trees is almost lost in sweetness and mist
When you take off your watch at sunrise
To lose your life.
You catch the plane.
You land again.
You arrive in the place.
You speak the language.
You will live in a new house,
Even if it is old.
You will live with a new wife,
Even if she is too young.
Your slender new husband will love you.
He will walk the dog in the cold.
He will cook a meal on the stove.
He will bring you your medication in bed.
Dawn at the city flower market downtown.
The vendors have just opened.
The flowers are so fresh.
The restaurants are there to decorate their tables.
Your husband rollerblades past, whizzing,
Making a whirring sound, winged like an angel–
But stops and spins around and skates back
To buy some cut flowers in the early morning frost.
I am buying them for you.
I am buying them for your blond hair at dawn.
I am buying them for your beautiful breasts.
I am buying them for your beautiful heart.
For many travelers, Paris is Parisland. Here’s the Eiffel Tower. Let’s take aboat ride along the Seine. Ah, the Champs Elysees. Five museums on the list —
let’s whip through them. And, late at night, we’ve got to find that nightclub where the girls kick up their …heels.
Others — that’s my brood and me — go to Paris for the quiet. We sit in cafes for hours. We settle on parkbenches. We take long walks on nearly empty streets. It’s still Parisland, just another kind: an open-air library, a set for dreaming, an urban pillow for outdoor naps.
From a review of Quiet Corners of Paris
Here is a curated list for the flaneur/flaneuse to pack on your messenger bag.
In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges, we find the description of a hrönir.
In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent.
Two persons look for a pencil;the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to its expectations.
These secondary objects are called hrönir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer.
…
The methodical fabrication of hrönir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists.
It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.
Curiously, the hrönir of second and third degree –the hrönir derived from another hrön — exaggerated the aberrations of the initial one;
those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second;
in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hrön of twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality.
Stranger and more pure than any hrön is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope.
Things become duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten.
A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death.
At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.
You write poetry
By longhand
in waiting
For a tram
(Waiting is disappearing as an art form)
Or when the body is moving
Transported
The in-between times of a pedestrian
In quiet
Solitude
When it’s too late
train out of service
Wrong train
Sometimes one needs to leave
to write again or be almost leaving
Not to take things for granted
Sometimes one needs to get lost
To be able to listen to silence
The vast canyon of yourself
To run away from the familiar
Leave the road that takes you home
Slightly uneasy
While away the wander-hours
The last in a museum
The first to hear the bells ring
In the deserted streets
Before turning in
Or, once, the padded snow in
A winter night landscape.
The heart needs peace
To hear its own beat
It needs time not to count the wrongs
You write poetry when you stop
At the sight of the black girl playing the cello
In the middle of the ravelers’ din
Recognize her public act of poetry
Her offering
A sight so shattering and quenching as the buddhist monk practicing.
In a busy intersection.
(You remember the red violin
And that singular ache for Lakme’s flower duet,
or Bach’ prelude to Suite No.1)
Poetry happens
when you are supposed to do something else
When you take a day-pass instead of one-ride ticket.
Poetry seldom happens
In the fat of comfort
In the butter of safety
It has been ten long days since my last post, ten days of travels, of letters written and not sent, of (re) search.
In the middle of it all, I experienced the ‘biggest blackout in the history of San Diego county’. Thursday, September 8th, 2011, power went off for millions of people in Southern California, Baja California and Arizona. No ATM’s , shuttered stores, nowhere to buy food or water in a world where, when the machines stop, the city stops. The blackout lasted for almost nine hours, from 3.30 Pm till just before Midnight, and it was all it took to plunge my two neighborhoods in an atmosphere that was at times apocalyptic, at others, surreal, magical, “european”. Beyond the novelty, even excitement, felt by some there were people trapped in high-rise elevators, in trolley cars over canyons, in mid-rise buildings without water. It was a time where everything stopped and a battery radio and candles (my only emergency preparedness) help whiled away the hours. It was a movie. And a dream.
Before I share what I have been working on in the past few days, here is my dispatch from the Blackout and some urban moments caught on camera.
Entre chien et loup is a multi-layered expression. It is used to describe a specific time of day, just before night, when the light is so dim you can’t distinguish a dog from a wolf. However, it’s not all about levels of light. It also expresses that limit between the familiar, the comfortable versus the unknown and the dangerous (or between the domestic and the wild). It is an uncertain threshold between hope and fear.
The funambulist. Ink drawing + digital collage. August 2011.
Nets
To Rietta Wallenda
Tightrope acrobats dance above safety nets
(or not)
Nerves taut like violin chords
Pulsing on neck, tendons stiff.
/
The fisherman spreads his father’s nets
Repaired a thousand times, damaged again
He sews his wounds on the beach
Fastens the corks
The old man with the young eyes
who listens to Mina and
–faraway look toward his sea,
a cigarillo in his mouth–
dreams of America.
/
Or, once a young girl
with a butterfly net
out to catch impossible sprites on hilly fields
Between highways
On the outskirts of the city.
You don’t know where I have been
and what I have seen.
/
The spider crochets his architecture
His gothic cathedrals
With divine geometry
With infinite patience
Behind the mirror.
August 2011
From British Pathe':'This 1931 video shows a woman dancing on a high wire suspended 300 feet in the air. We think this was shot in an American city possibly New York. Click to vertigo.'
Addendum September 5, 2011:
A search on the term ‘funambulist’ and inquiries about Moussavi’s “Function of Ornament” led me to find an incredible blog and post:
Various Graphite Media, depicting 'Dwelling for Imaginary Civilization of Little People,1998' by Charles Simonds. Made in clay, adobe, paint and housed in the New Mexico Museum of Art. August 2011.
Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
Photo via minecaching.tumblr.com. Click for source.
Charles Simonds began building clay villages, ruins and what he termed ” dwellings for imaginary civilizations of little people” in the 70’s, in New York.
His microscopic urban interventions at one point could be found, among others, in Paris, Venice, Shangai, Dublin.
They are now housed as prestigious artifacts in art collectors’ homes and museums (like the Whitney in NYC).
The title of the book began as a very sophisticated literary joke, an allusion to John Donne’s “Meditations on Emergent Occasions.” But as sometimes happened in O’Hara’s poetry, the joke turned out to have a surplus of meaning. His poems are meditations — but not the kind that comes after hours of quiet thought; they proceed from the heart of noise; they are written on the run, in a hurry, on a lunch break, in a perennial emergency. O’Hara’s poems perfectly capture the pace of a New York day in 1962. He is a master of the art of gentle self-laceration: “Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.”
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were
French?
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the
same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days
there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a
change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m
just like a pile of leaves.
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor
with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need
never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t
even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record
store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is
more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as
it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh
huh.
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are
indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one
trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me
up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them
still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at
home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored
but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above
the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare
myself little sleep.
Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven.
Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?)
St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like
midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love,
but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from
it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be
distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes,
there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes
and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious
vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.
Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you,
beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because
the plot is over.
“Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that
little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit
a little too.—Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.—I wish She
had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.”—Mrs. Thrale.
I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest
suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want
me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon,
there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the
lock and the knob turns.
Well, this is no good! August is almost here and once again balmy summer days flew by with traveling, urban escapades and some R&R…while the postings have been mighty sparse.
I have been a curious tourist in my own city and state, and, in between summer courses, the roamings included a visit to Joshua Tree National Park, Much Ado Abouth Nothing, a tour of the Getty Villa in Malibu, an evening dreaming of Cuba and its Architecture and finally, a retro movie under the stars. There have also been some further experiments with jewelry design. And many caffe’ shakerato’s. And many of foreign movies. And declutterings, of tangibles and intangibles. I have been busy.
I am back from my adventures for good now, just in time to be blindsided and crushed by Amy Winehouse’s death (more on this later).
I have some shots to share from my travels, the challenge now is not to turn this into a photography blog (after all it is called *sketch* bloom) so i will be back tomorrow with more sketches and plan to alternate photos with drawings and collages for the next few posts.
It’s good to be back, renewed and energized. I hope this month was good to you too.
Today I want to stray from the visual and go back to words (even though visual work is piling up by the scanner, waiting to be shared.)
The visual permeates every aspect of a designer/artist life…it is the expected outcome: something that all can see. Here in sketchbloom I share works and progress/process in form of JPEG images, pixels on the screen. Even my words are translated as pixels and a visual experience as I type. To truly appreciate words one needs to go back to audio, in a dark room, eyes closed, and listen to the sound…absorb its meaning. Listen to the words, embrace their message, intensity. In the visual world we hear people’s voices translated into impersonal pixels (emails, texts and, for those who partake, chats). The visual has become an acid which burns the eyes, making it challenging to sit still with a (pictureless) theory book, so dependent on visual candy have we become. The world of ideas, that I am so incredibly fortunate to inhabit as a profession, is threatened by the constant stimula and incessant buzzing of the digital revolution, which rides on the visual. The digital revolution that was supposed to connect us all (and it does, superficially) but in reality has made us feel alone in a different, emptier way. The comfort that one gets from the words of an author, from a book with paper and weight, is to me the comfort of flamenco guitar music on an analog cassette tape. Billie Holliday on a scratchy record, as opposed to the robotic voice of online text.
So today I just want to turn off and just listen- going back to dear words, words that imagine Bruce Mau reading to me, and to you.
Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.
Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
Study.
A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
Everyone is a leader.
Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
Harvest ideas.
Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
Keep moving.
The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
Slow down.
Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
Ask stupid questions.
Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
Collaborate.
The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
____________________.
Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
Stay up late.
Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.
Work the metaphor.
Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
Be careful to take risks.
Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
Repeat yourself.
If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
Make your own tools.
Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
Stand on someone’s shoulders.
You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
Avoid software.
The problem with software is that everyone has it.
Don’t clean your desk.
You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
Don’t enter awards competitions.
Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
Read only left-hand pages.
Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”
Make new words.
Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
Organization = Liberty.
Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’
Don’t borrow money.
Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
Listen carefully.
Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
Take field trips.
The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
Make mistakes faster.
This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
Imitate.
Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
Scat.
When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.
Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
Explore the other edge.
Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
Avoid fields.
Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
Laugh.
People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
Remember.
Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
Power to the people.
Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.
C'est fini! Here is the Fabric City on a backpack. The writing was done with 3D Fabric paint. June 25, 2011.
Back of The City. Fabric and thread. June 2011.
The reverse side of “The City” reminds me of a Situationist psychogeographic map. I toyed with the idea of letting go of all the work on the map and apply this abstract work on the backback. This would have been the gutsy thing to do but, in the end , i couldn’t let go of the work.
Guy Debord, c. 1955. Psychogeographic guide of Paris.
The energy of the City. Ideas like kites move slower than the city moves. Slower than pedestrians at a busy intersection, slower than subway trains with their human cargoes.
A musical: Death Takes a Vacation.
Absorbing and consuming the city, which becomes a commodity. Getting lost in the city, a bus to New Jersey, a ride to the Bronx.
Will post few dispatches, I have been absent with no written excuses.
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My fabric city map is almost done, it took almost a month. I have the utmost respect for seamstresses.
Until next time, with a summer-light heart, looking forward to sharing more experiments.
Tinted orange by the morning sun, a soaring dune is the backdrop for the hulks of camel thorn trees in Namib-Naukluft Park. Frans Lanting/National Geographic
It was made at dawn when the warm light of the morning sun was illuminating a huge red sand dune dotted with white grasses while the white floor of the clay pan was still in shade. It looks blue because it reflects the color of the sky above. … The perfect moment came when the sun reached all the way down to the bottom of the sand dune just before it reached the desert floor. I used a long telephoto lens and stopped it all the way down to compress the perspective.
City of Salt by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. Image via amazon.
“Here is a splendid volume from the Terry Gillam school of fictional photography… The book comes in a sturdy slipcase and features complex landscapes, painstakingly created, and digitally peopled by actors playing out scenes which conjure up a mystical Middle Eastern civilisation. Enigmatic, but beautiful.” AG Magazine
“This is a beautifully structured text with an imaginative use of words and photography. This wondrous book of tales is a complex work of art that will be read throughout our generation.” Focus: Fine Art Photography Magazine
“City of Salt… creates and documents alternate realities in miniature, accompanied by narratives inspired by Sufi tales, Italo Calvino and more.” Michelle Wildgen –Publishers Weekly
The City. Image via kahnselesnick.com. Click to enlarge.
Suspended! Image via kahnselesnick.com. Click to enlarge.
Two Streets. Image via kahnselesnick.com. Click to enlarge.
The Flyer. Image via kahnselesnick.com. Click to enlarge.
Panoramic photographs of fantastical landscapes make a bizarre Baedeker to alternative realities in City of Salt, by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. The second volume, after Scotlandfuturebog, in an intended trilogy of such otherworldly guides juxtaposes those scenes with similarly inspired texts: Sufi tales, the writings of fabulist Italo Calvino, and parables by the artists themselves. The strange deserts, marshes, sandy shores, villages, and fields are often traversed by wandering figures, frequently in peril or precariously alone. Kahn and Selesnick’s process combines sculptural and photographic media. The artists first construct the intricately detailed worlds in three-dimensional miniatures and dioramas, then digitally photograph the scene and populate it with characters in allegorical, though intriguingly puzzling, tableaux.
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I ran into this gorgeous, oversized, substantial book few years ago while visiting UCSD’s excellent Architecture library. Words and images weave imaginary tales and create an escapist landscape. May days verge on the surreal, time is suspended, perhaps in a cruel, paradoxical loop. To travel through time, for once forward instead of backwards…to harness the days as though wild horses, bridle their energy. May seems to slip through my fingers, each time. I am lulled by the calm (before the storm? No, before more tense calm.)
Dreams and collages await. I find the only cure for restlessness is mindful awareness, in brilliant execution of each undertaking- as small as it is, as humble as it is. Ambition can paralyze you in May, when mid-year approaches and mental harvests take place. Each day we need to reconcile heaven and hell within us. Refusing to attemp the feat, or lack of acceptance of our opposite instincts, is the only way the battle is lost. In numbness lies defeat.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.
'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
Where can I run? You fill the world. The only place to run is within you.
From Agata e la Tempesta| Agata and the Storm
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They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”—
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”
13 Days of a mild artist block and a spring flurry of activities all around. It has been one busy month of May. In the blog-material department, I have been gathering up material for new posts (but failed to..ahem..post them), reading omnivorously,watching foreign movies,writing poetry on walls and collecting books mentioned or shown in said foreign movies — more on this later. It’s a lot to keep up with.
In days that go at double-speed, sometimes poetry finds you…and nothing is the same again.
You Reading This, Be Ready
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
Almost finished with my city of felt. ArtWalk in Little Italy provided the inspiration and urgency to come back today. Good people and my new San Diego coffee love, Caffe’ Vergnano, provided the energy. Happy May.
Here are some quotes from that day, from my notes, which i hope to be as faithful as possible:
The book was initially titled ‘Architecture and Contingencies’. The publisher made me change it to ‘Architecture Depends’. There are problems changing the title of a book once it is finished- and structured around a different title.
This book is a polemic. Architects detach themselves. This detachment starts here in academia. Architecture students go in as humans and come back as architects.
Architects are separate from life. Autonomy in architecture is detachment.We witness the treatment of buildings as though they are detached objects, displayed in the media as something apart. This detachment is a dissolution.
All we got is Vitruvius: commodity, firmness, delight. Recycled through the ages!
Of all the impossible task that modernity sets for itself, order stands out. How does modernity achieve order? By exterminating ambivalence. Modernity is behind the Holocaust.
Corbu didn’t invent modernity. He was a symptom of it.
Modernity cannot get rid of contingency.
Contingency is getting rid of the idea that things may turn out differently. In architecture contingency is inevitable.
Architects would be banished by Plato.
Contingency makes us have to make choices.
Abstract vs. situated knowledge.
“All architecture is waste in transit.” Peter Guthrie
Le Courbusier tried to banish domestic inhabitation.
Parametric people are as conservative as the New Urbanists, the latter caught in an aggressive past, the former in a progressive future .
Modernity: concerned with purity, the color white…modernity is this gleaning table with this aesthetic of getting rid of dirt.
‘You don’t know how wonderful dirt is.’ James Joyce’s last words, from Gideon’s biography.
Architects ‘make space’…negative space…what does that even mean?
‘Social space is a social product’. Henri Lefebvre
The production of space is not the agency of architecture alone!
Sustainability=sustain the status quo. This word has become meaningless.
Elvis Costello and Lo-Fi architecture: I heard Elvis Costello once in an interview saying that when you record in the studio you get caught up in a certain kind of environment. He would ask to have the record played back on a cheap transistor radio, because that’s how the music is going to be experienced by most people. The same with architecture. We have to have in mind low-fi, transistor radio architecture as we stay in front of the computer, believing what we see. The more it looks real the less real it is.
Architecture cannot be about aesthetic alone: it deals with the social and ethical. It has to be alert to the context.
I don’t like to use pictures in my presentations because, as soon as I provide pictures, the argument becomes about aesthetic.
Professions set themselves apart by setting up problems they are the only ones able to solve. Professors do the same.
‘Architecture and Agency’ will be my next book.
Sensemaking vs. problemsolving.
In architecture we have created phony ethics, we have associated ethics with aesthetics, morality with beauty…God is in the detail, etc.
Doing good by doing beautiful buildings?
Professional codes of conducts are an example of phony ethics: these are not ethical guidelines, they are principles for relating to the client.
You can’t be ethical by doing beautiful buildings! You have to assume an ethical stance, a responsibility for the other. If we start thinking that every line on a piece of paper is an act of social responsibility, then every line assumes significance.
I am against ‘Anyone is Anyone’ conferences.
From the paper ‘Lost Judgement’ from the 2003 EEAA Prize by Jeremy Till – and referred to during the talk:
The Other for architects is the one or ones who will be part of the social space our buildings help construct. In this way we can be the architects Unger would wish us to be, “enabling people as individuals and as groups to express themselves by changing their situations. …(the architect) lives out his transformative vocation by assisting someone else’s.”
An ethical person is a person who gathers discordant opinions and makes the best decision. Hope is with given given circumstances. Stop investing in objects.
The next project I will do will be on scarcity. Scarcity is much more interesting to me.
Architects sold out the profession to the agency of Capitalism. In building Dubai they forgot it was going to be built by slave labor. If all you offer is commodity you have got nothing to offer. Spatial intelligence will get us away from the cul-de-sac we got ourselves into. We should be gathering contingencies and make the best possible solutions.
I like to think of architects as angels with dirty faces.
Joe DiStefano, Principal, Calthorpe Associates, an urban design, planning and architecture firm based in Berkeley
Bill Anderson, Director of the City of San Diego’s Planning & Community Investment Department
Megan Gibb, Manager of Portland Metro’s Transit-Oriented Development Program
Moderator: Robert Cervero, Director, IURD, and Professor of City and Regional Planning UC Berkeley
During the last, San Diego came up several times!
On Friday, April 08 I also had the pleasure of sitting in on Jeremy Till’s presentation of his book “Architecture Depends”. This was a provocative lecture to say the least, presented in a very unusual format. I will share some thoughts from it next.
Rock garden at the Japanese Friendship Gardes, San Diego. Felt Tip on paper. March 22, 2011.
Ink on paper. March 22, 2011.
Felt tip on paper. March 22, 2011.
Yesterday I stopped at one of my favorite places in this gorgeous if somewhat superficial town of ours: The Japanese Friendship Garden within Balboa Park.
I always find serenity among the bonsai trees, looking at the way the light hits the vegetation around the koi pond.
This is a place for thinking, for letting go. A graceful ensemble of rocks, the shocking simplicity and beauty of it all, envelops the visitor/pilgrim.
I went with a thankful heart, I left with a sense of tender quiet. A prayer to the Japanese people, creators of so much beauty, minimal living, essential design.
First you are bent on acquiring, then the work becomes about reducing to the essential and letting go.
I saw this beautiful book and decided I wanted to take it home with me.
Japanese Garden Design by Marc P. Keane.
From the foreword by Preston L. Houser:
‘Tourists are insatiable creatures. There are basically two kinds, pilgrims and shoppers, and, in their mobile element, they assiduosly seek and devour.
Literally thousands of tourists visit Kyoto every day from different parts of Japan as well as from the far corners of the globe, and they mostly visit temples
and gardens- sacred places. The pilgrims come to gain a sense of artistic heritage which will expand and enrich their cultural identities. They temporarily
occupy spaces that artisans, aristocrats, and Zen masters of prior ages have occupied as if, by sharing the same “view”, a more enlightened perspective of the soul
and the world will be achieved. For the shoppers, on the other hand, petraveling is a kind of consumption, called “doing”, such as doing New York, or doing the Louvre, as if cultures can be done as one would do an amusement park or shopping mall–profane places. The shoppers seem to revel in the hollowness of such misadventure, and their proclamation of experience invariably betrays an exaggerated sense of mal de siecle: “Been there, done that.”
Most tourists who come to Kyoto, however, are pilgrims. For them, the rewards of travel are more profound than simply being there and doing that-or so they would prefer to think.
In the spirit of a geography of the soul (peoples as places), how do we treat the people we encounter? Are we shoppers of people, or pilgrims of people?
Votive. Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park, San Diego. March 22, 2011.
Bonsai. Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park, San Diego. March 22, 2011.
Pathway. Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park, San Diego. March 22, 2011.
Mare Mosso Act I. Graphite drawing by Gianni Aiello. Collage. March 18,2011
Mare Mosso Act II. Graphite drawing by Gianni Aiello. Collage. March 18,2011
This is another collaborative work with my father. Some of the collage images are taken from the Muji catalog. Muji is an innovative design brand from Japan.
For about a year, I have been lackadaisically documenting street conditions in San Diego.
The paranoia towards publicly shared space, the ordinances (no sitting allowed, no loitering), the lack of benches. Downtown San Diego is the antithesis of porosity, a built environment that refuses to be interacted with. We purchase community: getting out your billfold is the only way to experience publicness. Ok. So there is Seaport Village…but that is not the streets….urban San Diego.
On the street of the America’s Finest City on any given night you find first and third world country sharing the sidewalk (sorry am I being un-PC? I meant developing country.)
I refrained from taking photos of homeless people until now, out of respect. But yesterday I learned that politeness can be the opposite of sincerity.
The work of an artist/flaneur is (also) to look at things most people gloss over, or willingly ignore. We are walking bookmarks. So tonight I asked this man what he was reading. ‘Science fiction’ he said. ‘It was originally published in 1952.’
:: :: :: Later on that evening…
Yoga class having come and gone (again), I will take a page from Neruda the Brazilian writer Martha Medeiros and stop going home the same route. I will sit for an apple mint sheesha (hookah, as it’s known here) and purchase me some people time.
:: :: :: Later on that week….
This is ‘Dies Slowly’ or ‘Muere Lentamente’, a poem misattributed to Pablo Neruda, from the original ‘A Morte Devagar’ by Martha Medeiros:
The poem and the English version which follows – and which I slightly modified – come from this blog
Muere lentamente quien se transforma en esclavo del hábito, repitiendo todos los días los mismos trayectos, quien no cambia de marca, no arriesga vestir un color nuevo y nole habla a quien no conoce.
Muere lentamente quien evita una pasión, quien prefiere el negro sobre blanco y los puntos sobres las “ies” a un remolino de emociones, justamente las que rescatan el brillo de los ojos, sonrisas delos bostezos, corazones a los tropiezos y sentimientos.
Muere lentamente quien no voltea la mesa cuando está infeliz en el trabajo, quien no arriesga lo cierto por lo incierto para ir detrás de un sueño, quien no se permite porlo menos una vez en la vida, huir de los consejos sensatos.
Muere lentamente quien no viaja, quien no lee, quien no oye música, quien no encuentra gracia en sí mismo.
Muere lentamente quien destruye su amor propio, quien nose deja ayudar.
Muere lentamente quien pasa los días quejándose de sumala suerte o de la lluvia incesante.
Muere lentamente quien abandona un proyecto antes deiniciarlo, no preguntando de un asunto que desconoce o norespondiendo cuando le indagan sobre algo que sabe.
Evitemos la muerte en suaves cuotas, recordando siempre que estar vivo exige un esfuerzo mucho mayor que elsimple hecho de respirar.
Solamente la ardiente paciencia hará que conquistemos una espléndida felicidad.
…
He dies a slow death who becomes a slave to habit, repeating everyday the same paths, who doesn’t change the mark he leaves, won’t risk wearing a new color, nor talk to people he doesn’t know.
He dies a slow death who avoids passion, who prefers black to white and dotted i’s over a whirlwind of emotions,especially those that make the eyes sparkle , rescue smiles from yawns, hearts clumsy with feelings.
He dies a slow death who doesn’t upend the table when he is unhappy at work, who won’t risk a sure thing for the uncertainty behind a dream, who won’t allow himself, at least once in his life, to flee from sensible advice.
He dies a slow death who doesn’t travel, nor read, nor hear music, who doesn’t laugh at himself.
He dies a slow death who destroys self-love, who won’t let himself be helped.
He dies a slow death who spends his days complaining of his bad luck or of the neverending rain.
He dies a slow death who quits a project before starting it, not asking about what he doesn’t know, or not answering when asked about something he does know.
Let us avoid death in gentle doses, remembering always that being alive demands an effort much greater than the simple act of breathing.
Only burning patience will allow us to conquer
a splendid happiness.
As designers, architects, artists, we use the ability to first visualize then communicate a desired outcome. Implementation means having the courage, discipline and perseverance to bring that vision into the physical realm. I love to write, and to write lists, but this year I am doing something different with my 2011 resolutions. I am drawing them. It sems to be working. On good days, and they are abundant here in San Diego, you can find me in the park, chasing the sun and reading. An old-school physical book. The previous specifications is now necessary due to the variety of reading options we have (what is your pleasure, or rather, your poison: smartphone, kindle, ipad, TMZ on your laptop?). These are my immediate, must-finish charges:
Sketching and meditating. Two resolutions, perhaps one and the same.
Ink on Paper. January 2011.
Pondering on drawing, as opposed to writing, resolutions led me to think about visual vs. written and oral communication.
While drawing-or diagramming-a goal may help provide us with clues, visual or other, that help us actualize it, I don’t buy the argument that ‘visual’ people can only best communicate their intent through images. This is also known as ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ syndrome. By the same token, I refuse to accept that ‘visual’ people only understand material if it’s accompanied by images and therefore should be excused if they are poor readers or listeners. That is plain laziness. There are notions and topics in this world that cannot be boiled down to neat Powerpoints (even though, heaven knows, we have tried to even run wars through the ubiquitous slide application), but require flight of the imagination, suspension of disbelief, and the ability to follow (picture-less) complex arguments. In trying to explain critical thinking, images run the risk of appearing like obtrusive clip-arts, obfuscating rather than enlightening.
The tyranny of the visual often lets us get away with having inferior written and oral communication skills. I don’t buy the ‘visual’ doctrine (or fallacy) with my students or my architecture colleagues. Maybe it’s because I come from a linguistic lycaeum, was an English Minor, and come from Italy, but the way a person speaks or writes is more important to me, or revealing of their character, than any imagery or composition she or he can conjure up on a board. And here I need to say that, lest I behave like a whitened sepulcher, I know I have failings when trying to communicate: typos due to late night writing, listitis (I make too many lists), lectures that tend to go on a tangent and probably what is called mild A.D.D in this country (or severe A.D.D…depending on what day you ask my students;)). Lastly the fact that, no matter how many years I live here, my soul is Italian and so is the way to express myself, and we do use lot of what here are called ‘run-ons’ in writing, and perhaps even talking. We are peripatetic, scenic-route communicators.
Ok, so I am not perfect: let the flawed still admire and aim at beauty.
I ask the person I listen to to paint a convincing, even seductive picture with their words, to evoke the sense and meaning of their process. Of course exact,clear words go well with exact, clear drawings and diagrams, but seductive images without substantive explanations or clear, logical statements leave me dry. The literary arts are for the most part lost to modern architecture students, beyond the required ‘humanities’ and enticing (but seldom frequented) advanced elective courses. The result is professionals who are literate in CAD, codes, building, or even ‘architecture’, but illiterate in the sense of the global collective written word, and therefore culture. Shouldn’t the designers of shelters for the human race understand its most lyrical expressions? Shouldn’t they design for man and woman’s highest aspiration, rather than the lowest common denominator? We ask architects to create places of Beauty, places that inspire, to design poetic aedifices. Without knowing what poetry is, without at least having been exposed to it, that is an impossible feat. If architecture is the Mother of all the Arts, should it not contain them? Literature, philosophy, liberal arts, music…Where are you Muses in our curricula? We have modified –and are moving towards transforming–the academic requirements for the make-up of the future architect based on the needs (vocational at best ) of field practice, a large number made up by corporate building farms, where architecture is just a sign on the door. Of course we aim for graduates ready to enter the profession, but hopefully we are also aiming for critical thinkers, whole individuals who can inspire, not just perform. What should lead, follows. The trend can only go downward. I am talking about cad monkeys, or people who are paid ‘to draw, not think’ –I was actually told that many years ago. Call me irrational, but I call for mandatory poetry courses (mandatory poetry! an oximoron). Call me utopian, but world literature should be as much part of an architecture curriculum as world architecture. When you know, you cannot unknow. I always say that. When you are exposed to possibilities and ‘big questions’ you cannot accept passively that things are just the way they are because they have always been. Poetry and literature are democratic expressions, highly dangerous to the status quo. And therefore highly desirable.
In my quest, I ran into this book. I am collecting a body of critical readings (for myself!) and this book will definitely be included.
Bjarke Ingels came to speak to our school Friday night.
The venue was the Museum of Natural History in scenic Balboa Park.
I am still blown away by the lecture and, more importantly, the message.
It was truly (r)evolutionary. The fact that BIG’s insanely brilliant concepts not only get built but a) give back to the community in terms of urban interaction b) are socially and ecologically responsible and c) are giving him fame and making him a household name is galvanizing.
Expanding the collective idea of what is possible through architecture: this is the optimism we need after years of gloom, in face of all the naysayers and ‘pie-in-the-sky’ disablers. Something is blooming in the state of Denmark.
What an event. My friend Alan Rosenblum told me it would be as if ‘Lady Gaga came to San Diego’.
And. It. Was. The students loved it. Three days later, and we are all still giddy.
I could not agree more. Thank you Mr. Ingels.
You intensified the dialogue between students and educators, and showed us how the ‘crazy’ ideas that are developed in studio and propose new typologies for the city are not only possible but timely and welcome. This creates a better learning environment, where pragmatism actually means being part of the solution, not propagating the problem.
I had the same dilemma when working in traditional, corporate offices and found refuge in academia. BIG showed us that there is a third way, the ‘Bigamy’ way. You can have it all. You can be good and successful. You can be extremely famous
and not be arrogant. He spoke of pragmatic idealism, and hedonistic sustainability. He demonstrated how to create building that are fun to experience as inhabitants and city neighbors and yet are sustainable. He showed us the intellectual approach and use of hybridization of traditional typologies to achieve new functions and forms. To wit: the Garbage to Energy plant in the middle of Copenhagen, which will be the city’s tallest structure and will house a ski slope (!) and blow smoke rings each time one ton of CO2 is burned. These are usually ‘crazy’ projects that we see coming from the upper studio division, when we ask the students to ‘dream big’ (pun intended) and question the drab, anti-interactive reality of center cities such as San Diego. The students, deep inside, try to dream but are conditioned to think that projects such as the one we saw in the lecture could never be built due to various factors such as financial interests or politics of control, or even lack of relevance of our role as architects.
We have been liberated from all of this because we can now point to BIG’s projects. Here it was demonstrated that the only limits we have as architects and human beings are those self-imposed, or those we feel ‘reality’ has burdened us with. I know that as faculty we felt validated by BIG’s successes ( does it make sense?). The music and videos, the whole presentation and BIG’s infectious enthusiasm, warmth and positive energy were, in the words of a student ‘AWESOME’. Another student told me he learned a lot about diagrams from the lecture.
The lecture also was a model for engaging presentations. I have been toying with the idea, but now I am committed to use music and pop references in my History of Architecture classes; I ran the idea with few students and they were all for it. 🙂 I will quote Ingels when he says that we need to ‘cease to consider the building as objects but focus on what they do for the city’ : this informs and generates a new approach to ‘sacred architectural monsters’ and teaching history of architecture (or as I like to think, architectural stories).
A big thank you to Allen Ghaida, the AIAS and all my colleagues at the NewSchool Arts Foundation for making this dream of an event a reality.
I sketched feverishly- and took down all the provocative quotes. Here are my hybrid/computer-augmented notes.
I will add all of the proper building names and location as soon as possible.
The Flâneur. Ink on trace paper. February 26, 2011
The Flâneur and his turtle in the streets of Paris. Digital collage. February 26, 2011. Background photo from San Francisco’s artist David Blumin. Click for his website.
Then I heard the phrase ‘Walk with a turtle’ on NPR, during an interview with Council of Dads’ author Bruce Feiler–and had an epiphany: I, too, had been a flâneuse in my early years. When I was 9 years old I used to tie a red ribbon to the shell of my turtle Stefania/Stefano (we are still not sure) and take her for ‘walks’ around my building and in the field of olive trees nearby. This cannot just be explained by mere coincidence or a sense of equanimity (i would take my giant schnautzer Zorro for walks- or rather, he would take me- and treated Stefania/Stefano to the same). By walking the city (ok , in my case the field of olive trees) at the pace of a tortoise, we are bound to pay attention to life around us, to read the city–not just skim it from the wheel of our car or glancing up from smartphones while we traverse sidewalks. Having a turtle as a guide nudges us to stop rushing. I am reminded of the buddhist monk in the documentary ‘Baraka’, slowly pacing the street with small steps , at the sound of a bell–in the midst of a hyperactive Japanese metropolis. The realization of possible multi-layered readings on the figure of the flaneur prompted a small research. Here is a documentary on Walter Benjamin’s Flâneur and Paris.
Historical evidence of The Flâneur? Or just man waiting for his wife? Undated image from: storify.com/virtualdavis/flaneur
The Flâneur
The term comes from ‘flâner’, which means to stroll in French. From this verb Baudelaire coined the word flâneur, a person who walks the city in order to experience it. The flâneur is driven by an insatiable hunger for passion; he seeks the streets and the city life for they provide inspiration and cure him of the malaise and loneliness of being human. He practices mindfulness, or conscious dilly-dallying. In US they would call him a ‘loiterer’, surely shoo him away…or perhaps fine or even jail him (I always tell my students there is no such thing as the word ‘loitering’ in Italian….what else would we do in Piazzas!?). My friend Bruce and I were discussing the flâneur few days ago and he reminded me of the symbology of the turtle and this quote from Rumi:
The soul needs as much time to wander as the feet.
Rumi
Baudelaire writes of the flâneur:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes.
His passion and passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.
To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world
impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not -‐ to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas.
A Process of Navigating Erudition
From Wikipedia: Flâneur is not limited to someone committing the physical act of peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a “complete philosophical way of living and thinking”, and a process of navigating erudition as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s essay on “Why I Walk” in the second edition of The Black Swan (2010). A Sunday Time review called The Black Swan one of the twelve most influential books since WWII.
Benjamin in his Arcades further describes the flâneur utilizes the city, which becomes an extension of his residence:
The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enameled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-‐stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.
Some of the questions I have been thinking about are : Can the flâneur be a flâneuse? Must he or she always haunt the city aloof and alone, or is ‘Flâneurie’ an activity that can be enjoyed in small groups, maybe of separate actors, each with his or her own turtle?
The flâneur is enjoying immense popularity on the Internet and blogosphere, among the hipster and (pseudo)intellectual crowd. He is radical chic, a gentleman stroller whose eccentricity is afforded to him by indipendent wealth. He is a man of leisure who can make a statement about the bondage of work and busyiness: he is above it and does not need it.
On the other side of the coin, we might re-evaluate the ‘homeless’ people, the figure of the clochard (sounds better in French doesn’t it) as flâneurs without means, but with the same intellect and intent. They also make the city their living room and library.
In “American Flaneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe“, James V. Werner describes how ‘ highly self-aware, and to a certain degree flamboyant and theatrical, dandies of the mid-nineteenth century created scenes through outrageous acts like walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris. Such acts exemplify a flâneur’s active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.’
A new interpretation of the activities of the flâneur appear in the writings of Guy Debord, the dérive also being a protest against the processes of consumption and capitalism:
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
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.
–Guy Debord
While the flaneurs practiced ‘aimless wandering’, the Situationists devised processes to purposefully get lost.
There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell’s dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothinincluding his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city.
Cornelia Otis Skinner.
Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962
Watching is the chosen pleasure of flâneur. He is an ‘urban stalker’, as Susan Sontag defines him in her 1977 essay On Photography. Modern flâneurs, let’s arm ourselves with cameras or a moleskine . Let’s pretend we are all ‘The Sartorialist’ and many, many other envoys on particular missions. Would you enjoy the streets of your city if you thought you were spying on someone, an urban detective, privy to secrets no-one else can know? What would the intelligence gathered from today? What stories could you tell(or draw)? What stories would the city reveal to you. There is so much life out there. And buildings are lessons.
This book is full of helpful suggestions, assignments and encouragements for artists, wannabe-artists and artists-to-be.
There are helpful tools, techniques and a great section on negative space. The style reminds me of Michael Nobbs and his ‘Start to Draw Your Life’ [find link to download his e-book here]
I love this quote:
I believe in the energy of art, and through the use of that energy, the artist’s ability to transform his or her life and, by example, the lives of others.
Audrey Flack
Inspired by the ‘sketch your life’ vibe,I finally got around drawing something that has been giving me JOY lately:
Ink and watercolor on paper and tracing paper. A bit of digital manipulation. Feb. 09,2011.
Yes! These magnific Illy concoctions have come to a freezer near you…I love these babies.
I also picked up the Oprah magazine…i do enjoy this publication…as a reader said ‘it brings a little magic into my life’. I devour news and ‘serious’ books ( I love novels, but have started a stack of non-fiction and architecture-related books in the past four years …and I am determined to finish it by the end of the year)…so sometimes Oprah reminds me to feed my spirit. Go ahead and judge:P
This month’s issue caught my eye, for the focus was creativity.
This is the un-quiz I am taking…designed by filmmaker Miranda July and Artist Harrell Fletcher, creators of the website Learning to Love You More. Click for creative assignments!
If you are so lucky to have an Ipad, you can check out Oprah’s own sketchbook app, SketchBook O.
Here are:
7 WAYS TO SPARK YOUR CREATIVITY:
(from designer Anna Rabinowicz)
1. Read Not a Box by Antoinette Portis
2. Go Outside
3. Start a collection
4. Touch Stuff
5. Travel Solo
6. Go Analog
7. Grab every opportunity
(read about this on this month’s issue of O, the Oprah Magazine)
One of the things I am always reminded of when I read Oprah is to give gratitude. It has been difficult lately, between my hypercritical mind, a full-out technological meltdown and a string of missed yoga classes. Nonetheless, I would like to give a shout out to these three creative individuals who are an inspiration!
1. Ghadah Alkandari @ prettygreenbullet: my blogsister, who elevates blogging to a religion, source of daily inspiration. I love you, woman.
Ghadah Alkandari, Goddess of Daily Goodness. This is her post from February 5,2011. Click to Ghadah.
One more post before the month is over. I still have a lot of sketches to share and am working on finding time to do some more collages (wow, the previous sentence needs to have more conviction to it!). Lots of changes going on around the world…. I am just sitting and seeing it all turn.
Wanted to share some words I received today:
Events of these past weeks remind us that as designers, faculty, engineers, authors, landscape architects, students, and architects we build landscapes and cities that fuel revolutions. Of knowledge and of hope…..Act of civil disobedience in Tunis and in Cairo are fueled by the spark of indignity. And in their Main Squares, we are reminded that Cities are embodied energy too. Below are words on cities. There are many. Come, let yourself fall with me into the lunar scar of our city, scratched by sewers, crystal city of vapor and mineral frost, city witness to all we forget, city of carnivorous cliffs, city of immobile pain, city of immense brevity, city of the motionless sun, city of the long burning, city of the slow fires, city up to its neck in water, city of playful lethargy, city of black nerves, city of three umbilical scars, city of yellow laughter, city of twisted stink, city between air and worms, city of ancient lights ,old city nested among birds of omen, new city next to sculpture dust, city reflection of gigantic heaven, city of dark varnish and stonework, city beneath glistening mud, city of guts and tendons, city of violated defeat, city of submissive markets, city reflecting fury city of anxious failure, city woven with amnesia….
Santa Maria Delle Grazie with Bramante's apse. Milano. Pilot pen on paper. January 2011
In the monastery adjacent this church, just a few minutes’ stroll from my house, one can find Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’. The apse (widely attributed to Donato Bramante, and dated around 1490) is significant as it signals a crucial transition from the Late Gothic style of the nave to a splendid Northern Italian Renaissance in the apse, the choir and cupola.
.25 technical pen on cardstock. January 2011.
Photoshop manipulation of pen drawing. January 2011.
MITI’S RECIPE FOR SKETCHING:
Day One: Look. (First Encounter)
Day Two: See. (Visual Analysis;walkaround…resist the urge to take photos. Training your eyes will not only lead to better sketches, better lessons learned from the Architecture itself, it will lead to–if you are so inclined–even better photography in the end. Notice, examine and mentally record -on the exterior- connections, details, rhythms, proportions, materials; on the interior: spaces, rituals, light, sequences, apertures, passages…)
Day Three: Sketch. (even quickly…by now you learned the lessons, you acquainted yourself with the building. You begin to understand.) Use the verb ‘to draw’ as in drawing water from a well, draw information (this last advice comes from Travelling the World with an Architect’s Eye)
Tips for cold-weather sketching: stop when your legs fall asleep. Wear half (I call them ‘homeless-style’) gloves to keep the hands free. Listen to warm music on your ipod. Bring a thermos or mug with hot, organic, unsweetened english breakfast tea.
And…
for impromptu urban sketching, carry your pens with the very handy penholder by Muji (did I mention before that I love Muji?)
While the first day of 2011 is coming to a close here in Milano, I think of what my mom always says: ‘What you do the first day of the year, you do all year’. I am happy to report I sketched today and fed my mind with architecture, art, and words. I also wanted to post my Milanese wishes to set the tone for this fabulous (I just know) 2011.
It was a week full of adventures here: walking in the city, enjoying aperitivi in cool lounge bars, ringing in the new year with family first and then in a club inside a deconsacrated church (can someone say adaptive reuse?). I saw two exhibits at the Palazzo Reale: Dali’ (thankyou Sara!) and, today Al-Fann l Islamic Art, the Al Sabah collection from Kuwait.
I sketched my favorite pieces, took notes (and even some clandestine photos), and have couple of ideas for near-future experiments.
The Fortress of Lost Time. Graphite on paper and magazine cutouts. December 28, 2010. Miti and Gianni Aiello.
Genova. Graphite on paper and magazine cutouts. December 27, 2010. Miti and Gianni Aiello.
These collages start with a drawing my father sketches out on thin notebook paper; I then proceed to create possible scenarios.
And this is the conversation at the end of the day with my mother, a retired judge — which i have entitled:
Talking about art with my (practical, realist) mother
[Me , retiring for the night, putting my art paraphernalia away] I’m happy about the collage. It was a good day.
Oh, did you have fun?
Mom, I don’t do art to have fun (recalling an earlier conversation about not turning your passion into an hobby).
But, didn’t you entertain yourself while you did it? Didn’t you stop worrying about other things while you were making it?
No mom, that’s not the point. I am creative. I have to create/work on something everyday.
But what’s the use? Something is useful only if someone appreciates it.
Mom, I appreciate it, then it’s enough. I do it to satisfy myself. The people who read my blog appreciate it. Art doesn’t have to be useful in the pragmatic sense.
Then it’s psychotherapy.
No, mom don’t diminish me, if you think it’s psychotherapy then that means there’s something wrong with me.
But if it benefits you it’s like psychotherapy. Ok, like fitness. Mental fitness…..It’s like writing books.
Mom, art is not about fitness.
But I don’t understand art.
Ok, how about this: I do it for something you don’t understand : for pleasure.
No, I don’t understand it.
It’s okay mom. The world is beautiful because of its variety. (Italian saying: ‘il mondo e’ bello perche’ e’ vario). [Exiting the room].
I love my practical mom! She keeps me and my father out of trouble 😉
Milano, where window shopping is elevated to an art form. Here is a Louis Vuitton window inside the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, with paper lanterns shaped as luggage. The inspiration comes from the Indian Festival of Lights.
El Prestin Del Cantun: a paradise of focaccine and pizzette...dreams do come true.
Christmas Day finds me in Amsterdam this year, on my way to Milano. Internet access may be intermittent the next few weeks, and while I plan to do art and sketch (well, as much sketching as subzero temperatures will allow), I won’t have my scanner so the quality of the drawings, collages and whatever else I may do will not be pristine, so bear with me. After all, this is the beauty of traveling: not having your usual environs, trappings and equipment leads to creative problem solving and a bit of experimenting (even though, judging from my luggage, it sure does look like I am carrying all my trappings :P). I plan to use a very nifty feature I discovered in WordPress: post by SMS (text). I am not sure my Italian sim card will allow me to use my Android phone as modem or that I will have internet on it, but I sure will be able to text so I am looking forward to post some impressions of Milano in winter, maybe even some life ephipanies (ha!).
For now I want to leave with some quotes I took down from the movie Eat, Pray , Love (don’t judge, it was playing on the plane and I happen to dig the author, as I mentioned before):
Italy:
Americans know entertainment, but they don’t know pleasure.
In Italy we have the expression ‘dolce far niente’ ; the sweetness of doing nothing.
Maybe you are a woman in search of a word.
Ruin is a gift. Ruin leads to transformation and evolution.
Bali:
Learn to see with your heart, not with your eyes, or with your head.
Meditate while smiling. Smile not just with your face, smile with your head. Smile even with your liver.
India:
You don’t have to be married or have children to have a family.
You have to learn to select your thoughts everyday, just as you select the clothes you are going to wear everyday.
God dwells within me. As me.
To live is to trust.
What if you had the capacity one day to love the whole world?
…..
A Merry, Merry Christmas
And a Happy New Year
Let’s hope is a good one
Without any fear.
(And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?)
Here is to new beginnings without old nonsenses.
Here is to lots of art and growth (and lots of good things to share)
This is my piazza, do you want to join me? We can walk inside the Battistero and talk about Islamic influences in the architecture of the Rinascimento in Firenze…or maybe just stroll about like tourists. Let’s take that via,the one on the left, do you want to come with me?
Every time I consider imaginary spaces, my mind wanders to The Forgetting Room, that magnificent book.
Should we build a forgetting room for this year (to let bitter memories flow onto Oblivion)? Or a remembering one (to extract poetry and melancholy …even, ah, wisdom…out of hardship? – the feeling of seeing a familiar river in winter). God knows I built enough altars, and burned enough. I haven’t yet learned if sadness is better than anger.
2010, what a stubborn, bittersweet, impenetrable year you were….I release you, since I could never reach you, no matter how hard I tried, or how much I mentally applied myself to understand you.
Perhaps you were never meant to be comprehended. Perhaps you were not worthy.
This has started to be a weekly blog, and I am not too happy about it. This Quarter has been so intense in a stupendous way: I am involved in a myriad of exciting projects at the school and became involved in new committees – and that has meant less free time, but an overall brand new meaning in what I do. And did I mention the books ? In my studio class we are talking about designing negative space and casting shadows and in history we are in the Golden period of Classical Times : Greece (what have the Greeks done for you lately) and Rome. Who could ask for more?
Throughout it all, we have ‘got to keep the heart’ as Wanda, my sweet ex-neighbor said. Brain food needs to be augmented by daily spirit-food, soul-food…heart-food. As fully-realized human beings we have to ask an incredible amount from each day, but I believe it’s the only way to go…or you could just go on auto-pilot and become numb. Art and what happens here is just that for me, an outlet and inlet of pure ‘heart-stuff’, to balance the facts and seductive theories I’m immersed in everyday. Could we say this is my Dyonisian to the Apollonian? The days that I don’t get to post or practice are somewhat overcast, a bit stuffy, as though not enough light or air was let in.
I finally completed my Viva La Revolucion post and a related ‘revolutionary’ piece {see previous}. It took FOREVER. I don’t know why I keep giving myself homework. But I hope you enjoy that line of thinking, always trying to put it all together in a somewhat cohesive way that has to do with the nature of this forum.
The Holidays are coming and I am looking forward to post more frequently and produce more work. And I have a long list of things/topics so definitely stay tuned!
I finally had some time to do a new collage today.
I knew I wanted to make a collage using the two for some time, and the inspiration came from a dream last night.
I did not know the word part would materialize. Using the titles of the movie in the Festival, I created a game for myself, a sort of stream-of-consciousness poem generator. Here is one of the early results.
Here is how it all came together, unwritten an unspeakable words, fragments of poems, figments of my imagination…
These are called ‘soft explosions’, such as the covering of a street in Vienna with foam,or the appearance in the streets of Paris of habitable ‘bubbles’.
Soft Space. Coop Himmelblau. Vienna, 1970.
Bubbles.Coop Himmelblau. Paris, 1968.
Coop Himmelblau’s approach,according to the pleasantly subversive Spatial Agency, is similar to that of Haus-Rucker-Co, based on the Austrian heritage of Freud’s psychoanalytic approach– this led them to explore the relationships between the architectural environment and our individual perceptions of it. Their early work leading up to the late 1970s consisted of performative installations and actions involving the spectators as participants. [read more at Post-traumatic Urbanism ]
Italian students today put the art in revolt.
During the Book Block protest in Rome (so called by the collective writers Wu Ming— see Black Block for reference ), which took place November 24, 2010 in Rome, University students fashioned ‘literary shields’ to defend themselves against the riot police (members of the Italian police have been charged with murder in several cases involving student demonstrators, sports fans rioting outside of stadiums and G-8 protesters in recent years). The shields become what the students are fighing for: the right for education against drastic government cuts. What better symbol of the predicament Italian Universities are in, than to take to the streets books relevant to today’s Italian young adults. A plank of wood sandwiched between two sheets of cardboard become the book covers. Here are some of the texts, and the titles are sometimes surprising:
Tropic of Cancer
by Artur Miller
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Italian Constitution
Decameron by Boccaccio
Naked Sun by Aasimov
A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze
Gomorrah by Saviano
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Moby Dick
by Melville
The Prince by Macchiavelliand…my favorite book of all time: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez
As the students recount, it was a spontaneous process started one November afternoon at the University. Each student proposed titles of books;they wanted to represent that ‘ culture is the only defence against a government who wants to demolish it’.
Gian Mario Anselmi, professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna says: : “These kids used culture as shield, our true and only identity. We defend ourselves with classical texts. The titles they chose are incredibly diverse, fruit of who knows what advice and suggestion, but it does not matter. It is the smbol that matters. And on these shields told of utopia, history, courage and love.”
The Book Block protest plans to make an appearance again on December 14 in Rome.
The writer Roberto Saviano, in his open letter to the newspaper ‘La Repubblica’ –written to condemn the violence emerged in some recent student revolts –praises ‘intellectual’ and creative demonstrations such as the ‘Book Bloc’. He writes:
‘C’era allegria nei ragazzi che avevano avuto l’idea dei Book Block, i libri come difesa, che vogliono dire crescita, presa di coscienza. Vogliono dire che le parole sono lì a difenderci, che tutto parte dai libri, dalla scuola, dall’istruzione… La testa serve per pensare, non per fare l’ariete. I book block mi sembrano una risposta meravigliosa a chi in tuta nera si dice anarchico senza sapere cos’è l’anarchismo neanche lontanamente.’
The kids who had the idea of th ‘Book Block’ did so in good spirit, books as defense, books that signify growth, self-awareness. Books are there to say words come to our defense, that everything starts with books, school, learning…Your head is there for you to think , not to use it as a battering ram. I think the Book Blocs are a wonderful answer to those who call themselves anarchic, wearing black overalls, without even knowing what anarchy even means.’
As I was preparing this post, I collected these quotes and thoughts on revolution and books:
From the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego site: For the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in urban communities. The urban setting and its corresponding lifestyle are major sources of inspiration in contemporary culture. This is an historic revolution in visual culture, in which the codes and icons of the everyday—found on the streets in graffiti, signage, waste, tattoos, advertising, and graphic design—have been appropriated and used as an integral part of contemporary art-making. The urban landscape inspires and serves as both a platform for innovation and a vehicle for expression for many artists. The city itself, its buildings, vehicles, people, and advertisements, are not only the surface where the art is applied. The city fuels the practice.
A multifaceted exhibition that explores the dialogue between artists and the urban landscape, Viva la Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape features works both in the Museum’s galleries as well as at public sites throughout downtown San Diego.
The exhibition includes a diverse range of 20 artists from 10 countries that are linked together by how their work addresses urban issues — Akay (Sweden), Banksy (U.K.), Blu (Italy), Mark Bradford (U.S.), William Cordova (U.S.), Date Farmers (U.S.), Stephan Doitschinoff [CALMA] (Brazil), Dr. Lakra (Mexico), Dzine (Puerto Rico), David Ellis (U.S.), FAILE (Canada), Shepard Fairey (U.S.), Invader (France), JR (France), Barry McGee (U.S.), Ryan McGinness (U.S.), Moris (Mexico), Os Gemeos (Brazil), Swoon (U.S.), and Vhils (Portugal).
Viva la Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape is curated by guest curator Pedro Alonzo and MCASD Associate Curator Lucía Sanromán.
Bologna-based Blu took 10 days to film the stop-motion graffiti film 'Combo'. If you enjoyed the opening animation of the Monthy Python movies, you will LOVE this.
If you only see TWO works from this show, lucky you, they are only a click away. You MUST check out these videos. Guaranteed to blow your mind.
I have taken an unjustified leave of absence for sketchbloom, but life and the mind have been in a state of ‘good’ intensity. Lots of good words, good books…hopefully good thinking… GREAT conversations.
So I missed Nablopomo, Nanowrimo, annhilated my phone (hence no internet)…but I am still here. New replacement phone is here, and I am plugged in.
There are lots of possible revolutions. There is one going on right now (subject of next post), maybe I was waiting for just this.
I am going for a revolution of the mind.
Two weekends ago I went to see ‘Viva La Revolucion’, the incorrectly titled but intriguing show at MCASD. That is our museum of contemporary art in downtown San Diego. GO.
This show will last till January…then it will be gone.
SO what is it all about? Well, the relationship between urban (graffiti art) and the built environment. SO here you see, there is a nexus of what I am trying to do (or say) occasionally.
What do you think of the Space Invader project?
The Space Invader Walk. Video. 10 Minutes. Invader, best known for his use of ceramic tiles to recreate the Space Invader video game. The walk in downtown San Diego, once mapped, reveals the outline of a Space Invader. A sort of Urban Etch-a-Sketch. The artist uses GPS tracking technology.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the uber-famous Banksy. Always eye opening to see his provocative work.
Just really wanted to poke my head in and say ‘ I’m back, have a nice ‘night’- because more than two weeks of silence (and silent art) pain me.
Then leave.
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Ghost Dogs. Acrylic and mixed media on wood. Date Farmers, 2010
Keith Haring. Stencil impression and mixed media collage. Shepard Fairey, 2010.
Basquiat. Stencil impression and mixed media collage on canvas. Shepard Fairey, 2010.
untitled (lumumbazapata). 60000 bundled newspapers, stones, gourds, edition of 2. William Cordova, 1969-2009
Untitled. India Ink on wall. Dr. Lakra, 2010.
Untitled. India Ink on wall. Dr. Lakra, 2010.
Scratching the Surface. Sculpted brick wall with plaster and white paint. Vhils, 2010.
Swimming Sisters of Switchback Sea. Hand painted block painted block print on wood with found objects. Swoon. 2008
The Space Invader Walk. Video. 10 Minutes. Invader, best known for his use of ceramic tiles to recreate the Space Invader video game. The walk in downtown San Diego, once mapped, reveals the outline of a Space Invader. A sort of Urban Etch-a-Sketch. The artist uses GPS tracking technology.
Real San diego once outside the museum. It does look like a canvas.
Space Invader ‘spaceinvades’ Paris book.
Banksy. West Bank barrier, Bethlehem. 2007
Bologna-based Blu took 10 days to film the stop-motion graffiti film ‘Combo’. If you enjoyed the opening animation of the Monthy Python movies, you will LOVE this.
My work has always been inspired by nature…and now nature has become an important part of the design process, as I start to incorporate into my embroidered pieces elements like grass, dried artichoke leaves, pebbles, seeds, nutshells and the bark of the paper birch tree, which is so beautifully designed by nature I can hardly improve on it! Southern California holds a bounty of natural expression waiting to be discovered. I enjoy a great deal of variety in my work, combining embroidery with a variety of mediums from painting on silk and batik to collage and quilting.
Tonight Ken Kellogg, Architect, spoke at my school.
The organic, sinuous forms of his small projects reminded me of Steve Badanes, and the Architecture of Jersey Devil. I was lucky enough to attend Mr. Badanes’ lectures twice and even have a jet-steamer autograph of his (and yes, the mandatory Fremont Troll t-shirt). This is the stuff I though I was going to help build and design once out of Architecture school. Architecture that was art and poetry, light and dream (a direct descendant of my first idol, Gaudi?). Ha.
Here are some stream-of-consciousness notes, jotting down forms from the slides….the lecture moved so fast and I could not coherently correlate each thumbnail sketch with the appropriate project. Here is his website, Kendrick Bangs Kellog, Global Architect Organic, where you can feast on the work.
Below the essence of what I heard and saw tonight: poetry from a seemingly pragmatic man, whose soul can be seen in his work, who believes ‘this stuff doesn’t have to be esoteric’ and speaks the language of the field to the clients. Yet he mentions being a dreamer, and ‘dragon tails’. Here are fins, ancient skeletons, shells, waves, mother-of-pearl surfaces. Here is light and energy.
Obviously Mr. Kellogg is a man who, in the words of Shelock Holmes ‘says rather less than he means’.
I have a peculiar habit which makes it difficult to watch movies at home in my company: I pause the movie whenever I miss a word (a single word being of so much importance to me that I fear, by losing it, I might miss the meaning of the film, or a fragment of poetry at least). I also pause to capture stills and collect them, a way of appreciating the photography of the movie, the eye of the director, the attention to framing and contexts. Out of these still sometimes paintings emerge. Sometime technological aberrations.
These stills are from the film ‘Murderous Maids’ (Les Blessures Assassines) . When I pasted the captured image, horizontal lines were formed, adding to the frailty of the character. In the stills the red hat becomes a faded rose petal, an accent of vermillion in an Old Master’s painting…I am thinking Vermeer, Northern Impressionism, malancholy light.
The theme of stairs in literature and film is one worthy of investigation. Here stairs are not only architectural elements, but, I believe, symbolic of the undercurrents of this film. I can never really stay away from Architecture, can I ?
Here are some quotes from ‘Murderous Maids’; ponder a while:
Lea: If we were rich… Christine: What would change? Rich ladies have everything but I’ve seen them weeping in secret.
Christine: [to her sister Lea on her first of work] And always speak to them in third person. Aunt Isabelle said a master is three people. the one he is, the one others think he is and the one he believes he is. Always address the last one.
Interesting Fact: There is no music whatsoever in the movie, perhaps that is why the camera shots speak so loud, and why there is a nervous energy that pervades the movie, an obsessive attention to details passed on to the viewer in the heavy silences, in the pregnant pauses.
I am reviewing couple of his books, Vladivostok and The Mask of Medusa and thought I would share some of the ear-cornered pages. Like Marco Polo, John Hedjuk’s travels start from Venice. Some of you may know my mother is from the Venice region, Treviso to be precise, and it was endearing to find the Serenissima in this book, a fascinating fusion of East and West, and even Milano, my birthplace. From the foreword:
The journey I have been on for the past ten years followed an eastern route starting at Venice, then moving north to Berlin through Prague, then northeast to Riga, from Riga Eastward to Lake Baikal and then on to Vladivostok. This has been, and is, a long journey.
Bodies of water mark the trek. Venice of the Adriatic, the lagoons, the Venetian canals, the river Vitava of Prague with its echoes of Rilke and Kafka, the waterways of Berlin, the Gulf of Riga, Lake Baikal, and the Sea of japan in Valdivostok. The elements giving off their particular atmospheres, and sounds, impregnate my soul with the spirit of place, place actual…place imagined.
The works from this journey are named and form trilogies.
In Venice;
The Cemetery of Ashes of Thought
The Silent Wtnesses and
The 13 Watchtowers of Cannaregio
In Berlin;
Berlin Masque
Victims, and Berlin Night
In Russia;
Riga,
Lake Baikal, and
Vladivostok
[ ]
I state the above to indicate the nature of a practice.
[ ]
I have established a repertoire of objects/subjects, and this troupe accompanies me from city to city, from place to place, to cities I have been to and to cities I have not visited. The cast presents itself to a city and its inhabitants. Some of the objects are buit and remain in the city; some are built for a time, then are dismantled and disappear;some are built, dismantled and move on to another city where they are reconstructed.
I believe that this method/practice is a new way of approaching the architecture of a city and of giving proper respect to a city’s inhabitants.
Reading this book, at the nexus between literature and architecture reminds me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. One of the future anterior projects: to illustrate Calvino’s cities. But it’s been done.
Cultural Minister
The Minister of Culture reads the works of Hawthorne, Flaubert and Hardy.What impresses him is the extraordinary love of women by these authors. Somehow the three writers are related through the strenght of Zanobia,Madame Bovary, and Batsheba. The Minister of Culture is aware of their seductions. He imagines, fabricates, and sews the dresses they had worn. He folds each garment and places it in an oblong box and waits for sundown. He precisely selects his victim, follows her, commits his crime, redresses herin the dress from the box, and places the body at the edge of the water. At Dawn he reads from the appropriate passages in a trembling voice.
Charlie Rose interviews Norman Foster. Click to watch.
Architecture as a spiritual experience, architecture as a [moving] container for art in Foster’s Sperone Westwater Art Gallery in the Bowery, NYC, architecture concerned with light and genius loci. It is beautiful to watch Foster’s hands accompany his slow, eloquent, deliberate answers–there is poetry there. The documentary ‘ How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?” is introduced, named after a question posed by Buckminster Fuller, whom Foster collaborated with from 1968 until Fuller’s death, in 1983.
I have to thank my friend Lamees for sharing this. What a gift.
It is November, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). The goal of the first is to write a novel of 50,000 words in the next 30 days, by sticking to a schedule of 1667 words per day. If you have been thinking about writing for a while, and completing that literary project of yours, this is the time to do it. NaBloPoMo is set up as its usual one post per day, but this time there are prizes and more publicity.
I wanted to share some inspiring badges for this month. Let the writing begin.
My second board for the faculty display wall. I now have a list of new art to add to my portfolio tabs, as this was a great opportunity to curate my artwork.
It feels great to be done (for now). Happy Halloween!
Practice+Pedagogy. October 28, 2010. Made on a Mac. Click to enlarge.
The board is done and up on the faculty display wall.
In the process, I refined my skills with Illustrator, pondered philosophy, practice, pedagogy,and crystallized what I am, do, stand for — in a tangible format.
Stonehenge. Detail of trabeation (Post and Lintel). Considered one of the foremost examples of Megalithic Architecture (Mega+ Lithos, or Colossal Stone)Salisbury Plain, England. C.2750-1500 B.C.E
From my Friday’s History Class.
The Beginnings of Architecture covers Stonehenge, the caves at Lascaux and Altamira, and what we consider the beginning of the urban revolution in our hemisphere, the proto-cities of Catal Huyuk and Jericho. I will share weekly my History powerpoints, well, okay, the ones I consider complete…next I want to sharpen up the lecture on Pre-Columbian|Precontact Architecture of the Americas and will then share it here.
Click to Stonehenge (Before Stonehenge there was Woodhenge and Strawhenge...)
These are the texts I use in my History of Architecture class:
Architecture: From Prehistory to Postmodernity. 2nd ed. Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, 2002
A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. Spiro Kostof. Second Edition. Revisions by Greg Castillo. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
A World History of Architecture. Michael Fazio, Marian Moffett, Lawence Wodehouse. McGraw|Hill.
A Global History of Architecture. Francis D.K. Ching, Mark M. Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash. Wiley, 2006.
Apologies for the absence of the recent days, I have so much to share, as always, yet the days have been filled with preparations for our Architecture school’s NAAB Accreditation.
It is an all-school process and effort and we have all been preparing for months; there is an energy and purpose as we all pull together the work which represents us, as a school, an intellectual entity, a collective of creatives. What is our pedagogical approach? What do we stand for? What idea of Architecture are we partial to and propagate?
As we pull back and see the sparkling work produced by faculty and students there is a moment of realization: we are a force that, properly channeled, could bring forth astounding change. In a way, this is my school’s and all of the faculty’s graduation. SO throw those caps and let’s invent our future, and pave roads that have not even been mapped yet.
So, blog and blogreaders, if the collective you’s were a single friend, I would say “I have not come to visit you yet I have thought of you“. I have written few lines in preparation for a board I am compiling on my practice and pedagogy. It is a daunting task, pulling together a cohesive snapshot of who I am, what I stand for, and what my aspirations are.
But as long as I keep thinking and growing I feel the work is being done, I think, here I might have something to share, even though it’s not a sketch, or a finished work.
In the recent past there was a lecture I put together for my weekly History of Architecture class, on the beginnings of Architecture, Stonehenge, the caves at Lascaux and Altamira, and the urban revolution in Jericho and Catal Huyuk (I wonder if putting online my History of Architecture powerpoints would work).
I was happy because I felt the lecture was complete, as in, I used all the resources/images of the four texts I employ for the class and outside research, and was able to have time to annotate everything . Bullet points, paragraphs, dates, location, I even designed each slide like a board…the works! Often it’s hard enough putting all the images together while preparing the lecture part and I have been historically in awe of the beautifully designed presentations Joe Nicholson, my mentor, brings to class. My History students, all Grad ones since I now teach the Master level course, also turned in a spectacular body of work for their research in Pre-Columbian/Pre-Contact Architecture of the Americas. I am so proud.
I met a fellow faculty at my favorite haunt, Cafe’ Bassam, and he told me: To teach is like singing, the first few times it might not be that great, but the more you practice the song, the more you perfect it. The trick I think, is to constantly update the song and demand of yourself a better performance each time.
When that works, well, all the stars are aligned.
I don’t have new art right now, and don’t want to touch the backlog tonight, so I offer you my mind, and give you a peek of the (stolen/borrowed) books in my satchel, the toys I am playing with today.
Architecture needs to transcend the built and enter the realm of the poetic. In this enlightened environment alone it can illuminate.
I was walking past glistening walls today, surfaces that would leap and swim with the dancing light. There, I thought, there is the beauty of Architecture, the brilliant mind of the designer, who works with matter and creates wonder. Walls, surfaces can then speak to me: they spring to life in a beautiful song, and I fall in love.
Le Corbusier said:
You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good, I am happy and I say: “This is beautiful.” That is Architecture. Art enters in.
The books I carried today (there may be a Pecha Kucha with my photography of Kuwait and poetry of the Arab woman soon).
The Poetry of Arab Women
Modern Arabic Poetry
Muslim Europe or Euro- Islam
(I actually met Prof. Nezar Alsayyad, in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies he designed in Berkeley :))
One of my favorite books, by my ‘History of Architecture mentor’, Spiro Kostof.
History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals
(my copy is actually autographed by another Berkeley gem, Prof. Greg Castillo)
Inchoate: Experiments in Architectural Education
The book I have been trying to finish since 2002:
Wherever you go There you Are
A novel I picked up (on Ancient Egypt): River God
And three books-part of a series of four) I found after couple of years of looking (they were in school all this time!)
Architecture in Detail: Colors
Architecture in Detail: Elements
Architecture in Detail: Materials
Architecture in Detail: Spaces
To everyday sit in the light few minutes, make our soul soar with words and thoughts greater than the mundane tasks, lists and even technologies we surround ourselves. To rise above exhaustion and see a smiling face who tells you ‘It is always so good to see you. Seeing you always makes me smile.’ To take a moment to be kind and acknowledge kindness….to realize the greatest technological marvel is already inside of us. To celebrate our spirit, learn everyday something new, take an instant to be thankful and, above all, silent. To live art and music everyday. To sneak in a poem, or remember words such as ‘illuminate’, ‘transcend’, ‘visionary’, ‘catalyst’. These are the things I am working on. I am busy, the work is never done, yet I try not to forget becoming is the goal, not just doing.
Now, for creative brainstorm, try to google images for ‘inchoate’, ‘inchoate : experiments in architectural education’ ,’detail in architecture’, and ‘architecture detail color space elements’ . I see a collage coming…
The beginning of an urban scenario collage. Oct.19, 2010.
I have been thinking and wanting to explore collages again since this summer, when I was so inspired by Hector Perez and his students’ work with SoCal Ex–but not until today I finally acted on that impulse. I have two works done and one almost complete. Two to share, and one part of a larger, more ambitious project that will have to wait for a bit.
What I love about collages is their sustainability (this below was made for prints that were to be thrown away), and their serendipity. There is a magic about collages, finding enough materials or copies of subject to bring a piece to completion, or that sudden inspiration that constitutes the ‘aha!’ factor of the collage. I am referring to old-school paper, scissors and exacto knife collages, glue-messy ones….there is nothing like digging through your collage material container and unearth and reassemble a work you didn’t even know existed or could compose. The root of the word collage is the same as the French verb ‘coller’ or to glue (a latin verb, in italian ‘incollare’). Collages are associated the the Cubist and Surrealist art movements in the last century. Picasso and George Braques are said to have coined the term. In Surrealism, we find more three-dimensional assembly/collages that resemble nonsensical machinery. There is a very fine line between sculpture made of found objects and three-dimensional ‘collages’. The key being, in my opinion, the spontaneity and uplanned process leading to the finished product, which, really, is never meant to be finished.
The exploratory aspect is the most attractive component of the collage process to me, the element of surprise, play, even psychological discovery that all contribute to give life to a work. It is quite extraordinary how when the mind lets go the art takes over (you can call it soul), and such a welcome relief from too much art that is planned and executed like a project. Collages keep the wander, let us, like sketching, solve ourselves. There is no right or wrong because the destination is never known in collages. How utterly liberating.
Yet the best collages, like the best works of art, appear undeniable in the end, as if the piece just ‘made sense’; they acquire layers of meaning with passing of time, age well, even acquire a certain patina. More than anything, they became more lovely or intense with each time your gaze falls on them. The personal fragments embedded in the collages will echo throughout the years; they will forever signify a time, place and emotion captured, crystallized, amplified.
In architecture, collages are extremely useful right-brain experimentation, and we see the Situationist using them to chart new maps of possible cities. We see collages in the 1960’s and 70’s in the works of Archigram, Superstudio, Coop Himmelblau and others. Richard Meier is a starchitect and collager. Whether or not you favor his brand of architecture I think that we all, as architects and academics, ought to have, like him, a way and time to let our innate sense of creativity develop, A time to use our hands (not the mouse, not the tip of our finger)and remember how to let our mind play and discover itself. Build something with our hands, an alternate reality, even if paper-thin. Collages are where we can dream, using pieces of reality. I suspect that regular collaging would open us (and our art/design) to inspiration, mental flexibility, maybe even brilliance.
Richard Meier’s collages complement his architecture. Unlike his architectural drawings, they are nonrepresentational; like these drawings, they record process. Like his architecture itself, they study relationships in space and seek difficult reconciliations of the opposed conditions of “found” discord and ideal order.
“A single collage is not begun and finished by itself,” says Meier. “On the contrary, works in various stages of evolution are left in notebooks and on the shelves of my studio, left sometimes for months or even years to await their own period of development. A collage is often the result of many revisions. Each must be seen as an element in my total work; they are, for me, an adjunct and a passion related to my life as an architect.”
“Meier has an eye, and a mind to use it,” the architect John Hedjuk has written. “He doesn’t create all those collages at night at home for nothing. The collage making is his midnight boxing ring. It keeps the hand and the eye trained.”
This is what I have been working on, all material from extra pages from printing this blog for my mom in Italy (I send monthly installments via mail because she refuses to make friends with computers. Mamma, when you read this, know you killed a tree ;)).
I applied an ‘antiquing’ crackling glaze to the glazed canvas so we’ll see how it develops. I dig the diagonal/chainlink texture which resulted from the juxtaposition of the pieces. The celling adds an architectural/design reading to the piece. What do you think?
Steel frame poetry. Click for more info ore read below.
Choi+Shine, a Massachusetts-based design studio has recently received the Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture Award for their creative concept Land of Giants™, transforming the generic steel-framed electricity pylons across the Icelandic landscape into unique, individual humanised forms.
In contrast to the poetry of the unbuilt, and whenever I see vision in design and architecture, there are the missed opportunities of the city around me. In my History of Architecture class I like to tell students that Architecture is built politics. By this I mean that the architecture of the civilizations we study, even the built environment around us, is the embodiment of a people’s values, belief system, socio-economic conditions (or agendas). Architecture can literally be considered ‘the body politik’.
During a recent conversation with a colleague the meaning of absence came up, that is, the absence of benches or piazzas in downtown San Diego. America’s Finest City enjoys the perfect temperate weather, is gifted with a beautiful natural setting, and yet its downtown does not invite enjoyment, people watching, outside of commercial establishment. This is a city that is, peculiarly, not urban at all, but fragmented, servile to cars, at times alienating. In the heart of its historical quarter, the Gaslamp, the city does not yield; no place to sit and pause to take it in.
Downtown San Diego. Horton Plaza is in the 'Core'. Balboa Park is visible on the upper right corner. from onlinesandiegohomes.com
Horton Plaza/Fountain Side is a potential piazza whose use is twarthed by the deliberate use of ‘discomfort’ tactics: rough landscaping and the absence of benches, or seating at human-being level. I see tourists crouching down on curb edges everytime I walk by. There is a plan by the CCDC to ‘reenvision” the public park to make it more attractive‘.
Horton Plaza, facing the U.S Grant Hotel. San Diego, 1910. Fountain and plaza design by Irving Gill, who proposed four tiled walks (the city approved two, not tiled). Notice the cordoned-off lawn, and the absence of benches, even back then. sandiegodailyphoto.blogspot.com
Horton Plaza before 2008, with fountain still operable. It is flanked by a mall by the same name ( I love when malls appropriate the names of public space they displace, names such as 'Plaza', 'Avenues', 'Boulevard' etc.). Tall, unattractive plantings and no benches make the use of this piazza impossible. From http://sdhs1960.org/photos/yesterdaytoday.html. Adding ugliness to infamy, the fountain has remained fenced and inoperable for two years with no immediate plans for restoration. From signonsandiego.com
Horton Plaza/’Farmer Market’ Side is an open space eager to be a piazza, yet at the stage of ‘Piazza. Interrupted’. Why? The absence of seating, appropriate lighting, or a focal point in this location (a fountain? a modern sculpture?) renders this an open space to be traversed as quickly as possible, day or night, where spontaneous gathering is not encouraged (except for the commercially-viable weekly Farmers’ Market half-days or the inescapable ritual of the holiday ice-rink).
Horton Square, between the Horton Plaza Mall and the NBC building in Downtown San Diego. From shindohd@ flickr.com.
But Horton Square has potential, at least it’ s not a permanently-in-shade, unusable ‘public space’ such as those found among high-rises in financial districts nation-wide. You know what I’m talking about.
Wells Fargo 'Plaza', Financial district, San Diego. from frwl @ flickr.com.
Upon reading ‘ Why Public Spaces Fail’, it seems like San Diego has used this article as a blueprint to eschew its public responsibility and alienate the public sphere.
Of course anytime public space is brought up, the issue of the homeless is dragged out like a decaying corpse from the cellar, to once more make an appereance in trite arguments. The refrain goes ‘ We cannot have any public space in San Diego because of the homeless’. Meaning, if you build it, they (the homeless) will come. And we can’t have that. It’s as if the city, to paraphrase Ani di Franco’s words, instead of curing the disease, is bent on suppressing any evidence of the symptoms.
Of course we have the public, but touristy, Seaport Village and our cultural, manicured, Balboa Park. Both are not integrated with the urban fabric of downtown San Diego, that is they are destinations, not generators (can I say incubators?) of urban moments within the streets/flow of the city.
Balboa Parkis a wonderful (or maybe just pretty, depends on the days and my mood) public space, also designed by Irvin Gill, and yet it is a place apart, an idyllic, bucolic, museum-filled oasis . I have not tried to go there at night, but I suspect that, in addition to dangerous, the park closes at night (like most American parks, something that doesn’t happen for public spaces in Europe). There are no night activities encouraged in Balboa, except for going to eat at The Prado restaurant, which stops serving food around ten. This could also says something about San Diego early bird ethic, and limited vision when it comes to cultural events. Balboa Park could be made an integral part of Downtown by better, more frequent transportation and by its transformation into a cultural hub, with stores and museums open at night. There are already good news: the main plaza of the park, originally designed as a public space and made in recent decades into an ugly valet parking lot is to be restored to its original use (!!). San Diego will finally have a true piazza (hopefully with seating opportunities) and I for one plan to go there sketching as often as possible.
The lack of piazzas or urban public spaces is not of course a San Diego phenomenon, or a Southern Californian one, but a North-American one. Why criminalize the act of spontaneous gathering, why call it ‘loitering’? We do not have this word in the Italian language, not with the negative connotation. What else but healthy loitering and thinking is done in piazzas in Italy? We can speculate, get political, be conspiracy theorists. We could talk about the privatization of public space. We could wax poetic about missing piazzas and the public consciousness of European cities.
Or we could-maybe- all agree on the beauty of (un)built poetry.
All images are from a research project completed by my student, Mariam Thomas, on Architects as Artists and their rendering/design techniques.
The relationship between architecture and art, and the study of practitioners who are also artists (with the mindframe of artists), whose design process transcends design practices and pragmatism to include enlightment, discoveries and art- wonderings is of immense interest to me. Not only because I come from Italy , where the greatest architects of ‘our’ Rinascimento where first and foremost artists, but because I believe Architecture (with the capital A) is meant to embody Art and , in the best cases, become visual poetry (or frozen music). The relationship between the word and the built, i.e, literature and architecture, and architects/artists who are poets and writers…all these are dynamics that not only fascinate me, but give me hope and recharge me. I would love to one day explore these themes through one of more courses.
It’s fantastic to see the relationship between Steven Holl’s initial sketches and watercolors and his buildings, which preserve intact the spirit of their inception. I saw one of his works on the water in Amsterdam: it was similar to an e. e cummings poem, minimal and undeniable.
The line is so thin between his grayscale watercolors (an obsession of mine lately) and his white-grey walls. Holl’s book ‘Written on Water’ is one of my favorite books in our library, I steal it often.
Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful. I need to complete some collages soon, semi-architectural, archigram-style.
I have only been collecting ‘collage material’ for eight years. I hold on to fragments that could one day be part of a piece, it is time to justify these attachments.
I can hear the words in my future memoir:
At the end of the aughts, beginning of the twenties, there was no work. We were all doing collages….they were beautiful. We had time to think, sometimes not, but we still had books, and paper, and ink.
Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum(1992-1998). Steven Holl
Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum(1992-1998). Steven Holl.
Nanjing Museum of Art & Architecture (2002-2009). Steven Holl.
Nanjing Museum of Art & Architecture (2002-2009). Steven Holl.
Knut Hamsen Museum (1994-2009). Steven Holl.
Knut Hamsen Museum (1994-2009). Steven Holl.
Knut Hamsen Museum (1994-2009). Steven Holl.
Chapel of St. Ignatius (1994-1997). Steven Holl
Simmons Hall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999-2002). Steven Holl.
Simmons Hall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CAD drawing. (1999-2002). Steven Holl.
Simmons Hall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999-2002). Steven Holl.
10 AM Roy de Vries- Learn to paint with Windsor & Newton Oil Bar
Roy was our first mentor, We started the day experimenting with oil bars, a mix between big oil pastels and oil paint. They allow for playfulness and immediate gratification, while lending themselves to interesting blending and the joy of an oil painting without all the cleanup and threatened muddyness.
First experiment with oil bars. Can't wait to pair this up with a poem.
11 AM Valerie Henderson- Hands on Monoprint Workshop
'Stretching' the ink onto the plexiglass.
Removing the ink, working on negative space and texture with toothpicks and cutips.
The result: the spent plexiglass, the image and its ghost. I love prints and textures. Ready to be a designer for Ikea now;)
12 PM Lisa Starace- Screenprinting Demo
1 PM Marcy Gordon- Water Color.
Learning new watercolor techniques: wetting selecting areas of the drawing, alternating petals in this case, allows the water to have 'boundaries' and results in more controlled bleeding and blending.
3 PM San Diego Guild of Puppetry- Overhead Shadow Puppetry: Tips and Techniques.
Shadow puppetry ...what a magical workshop. Here are my first movable 'puppets': a chicken and a worm/dragon. This was pure fun and I started thinking about shadow puppetry for architectural application (a city skyline to start a journey into form exploration).
The back of the puppets. Lots of work goes into making the moveable parts seamless and invisible.
4 PM Chris Warren- Laptop Musicianship. 5 PM Jennifer Bennet- Collaborative Linoleum Print.
My first linoleum print since art school. Miss carving.
8 PM Colette Plush- A Visual Interpretation of a Sentence.
My starting sentence.
We followed a pretty elaborate process in choosing various hardware and found objects from various mounds, according to the number of words, adjective , verbs, the color of our sentence...
The end product.
I attended these workshops two Sundays ago at SD Space for Art. It was incredible, a whole day of art, a sort of ‘intervention’ that every creative should undergo at least once a year.
I apologize for the delay in posting this, and for going a bit M.I.A. Fall Semester has started at my school and while there is new energy and new purpose in the air — and I’m excited for the History of Architecture class– there just seemed to not be enough hours in the day lately.
The measure of a good book is its ability to haunt us. I have been delinquent; the past few days’ in-between moments, usually dedicated to art and this blog, stolen away by a classic charmer of a book, Jane Eyre.
Yet I have been thinking, almost pining, for another book –and the time and the place of its reading. This particular story begun for me on a train to Nice, on my way to Provence, during a fall where everything changed.
A book, unlike anything read online, is forever tied to its place of discovery and unfolding. This alone speaks to the mindfulness of reading books.
The images, feelings before words, that keep coming back to me like a calling are from an exquisite, excruciating novel by Marguerite Dumas (of ‘The Lover’ fame- if you have not read the book or watched the movie, you are in for a ride) called, simply, Blue Eyes, Black Hair. In Italian though, it does sound better, more poetic, and less like a description of a convicted felon: Occhi blu, Capelli Neri.
The story, and premise of the book are meant to be forgotten, but not the feeling, the soul state (stato d’anima). The book is filled by silent presences and vocal absences; the words, the dialogues take place in the mind of the two main characters, but alas, they are never uttered.
Occhi Blu, Capelli Neri is about longing, isolation, deprivation and a love/passion/dependence that is meant to be measured out and sipped slowly (the italian word I am thinking of is centellinare); each moment, each degree of ‘closeness’, each kindness,must be begged for. The object of this liason is the breaking down of any vestige of pride till all is left is naked, raw need.
At least this is my interpretation of the book: while I do not remember all the particulars, I see ‘shots’ of the book as if, in reading it, I was already seeing the movie. If this ever became a film, it would be one of those French movies where the waiting replaces the action, where the climax is anticlimatic but intense. It would be a difficult, anxious, art house movie that would no doubt not work for the majority of the moviegoing audience in this country (hard to eat popcorn to this, Eddie Izzard docet). But it would be a poignant, bittersweet movie that would leave a beautiful lingering sadness. Well, beautiful if you happen to believe that there is something arresting about sadness.
I read this review of the book, and have translated some sentences from the original Italian. I found the words used to describe the book intoxicating. Is it possible to get drunk on prose?
I enjoyed the nod to Dumas’ architectural awareness, I enjoyed finding in this essay a communion of feeling for the book, which became for me a shared human experience. It is surprisingly comforting to discover that I am not alone in the feelings elicited by this strange novel, and that there are people walking about, being haunted by the same imagery, poetry, longing.
I owe this post to St Loup, a literary inspiration. Thank you, flâneur . And to these word I accompany some grayscale objects from my life, some recent watercolors (wanting chiaroscuro).
..Libro d’arte. Espressione vera di capacità e sensibilità, oscillanti tra le tre stoffe di prima. Una pièce, più che un romanzo
Arthouse book. True expression of ability and sensitivity, fluctuating between the swaths of fabric aforementioned. A pièce , rather than a novel.
Una concentrazione di parole fluide e belle, strutturate con la parola del narratore ad interferire e le intenzioni espresse a chiarire, spiegare, provocare.
A concentration of words, beautiful and fluid, structured with the narrator’s voice to interfere, and expressed intentions to clarify, explain, provoke.
Finta sceneggiatura di qualcosa, tra teatro e recitazione astratta e pensata con personaggi predefiniti, semplici nelle iconografie, fortissimi, tremendi, assurdamente complessi nelle logiche individuali.
Fake scenography of a something, between theatre or abstract acting with predefined characters in mind, simple in their iconographies, powerful, tremendous, absurdly complex in their individual logic.
L’amore è il Nuovo Romanzo francese, di cui l’autrice è figlia legittima. Quella struttura che in Alain Robbe-Grillet vede il fautore della nuova comunicazione scritta, che passa negli oggetti, nelle fantasie degli oggetti, nelle descrizioni paranoiche e reiterate, nell’immobilità e arriva al marchio finale, provato anche dal lettore alla chiusura del libro.
Love is the New French Novel, and the author is its legitimate daughter. That structure which, in Alain Robbe-Grillet witnesses the proponent of the new written communication, which traverses objects, fantasies of objects, paranoid, reiterated descriptions, stillness, and reaches the final stage, the selfsame felt by the reader at the closing of the book.
E’ l’amore mio per esso e per quel senso di configurazione deciso che prescinde dalla trama del racconto per lasciare un’orma, un’impronta, come se il libro fosse un album di foto personali, che non si riapre più ma che impolvera nel diritto di essere stato e avere dato.
It is the love I have for [this book] and for that impression of deliberate configuration which transcends the plot of the novel and leaves a footprint, a fingerprint, as if the book was an album of personal photos, which is meant to be open no more, yet gets covered in dust with the right of having been, and having given.
Località di mare. Non è nuova l’Autrice a parlarne. Spazia dall’Indocina alla cittadina francese dal mare freddo e bianco, tra architetture nate apposta per essere fuori stagione e spiagge testimoni di passeggiate silenti.
Seaside resort. Nothing new to the author. She ranges from Indochine to the French town endowed by a white,cold sea, to architectures born to be out-of-season, and beaches witness of silent walks.
Pareti, finestre, pensieri, silenzi, pensieri mentre l’altro o l’altra dorme. Nuovo romanzo puro. Silenzi. Dovrebbe essere pieno di pagine bianche, un libro come questo. Ne rimango sempre tramortito. Sempre.
Walls, windows, thoughts,silences, thoughts while the other (woman or man) sleeps. A New pure Novel. Silences. A book like this should be full of blank pages. I always end up stunned. Always.
Le pagine scorrono mentre montano le storie. Il distacco iniziale si fonde in una miscela densa che prende corpo e dona il sapore della trama, senza in realtà che ci sia mai stata.
The pages run as the stories mount. The initial detachment coalesce into a thick mixture which takes form and lends the flavour of a plot, without a plot actually ever having been there.
Grande la Duras, in questo. Il romanzo corre via e sembra accompagnato da una musica di piano, leggero, struggente, assolutamente non enfatico o retorico. Neanche Chopin, forse Mahler per quel che ne so io.
Duras is great in this work. The novel spirits away and seems to be accompanied by the notes of a piano, light, poignant, absolutely not emphatic or rethorical. Not even Chopin; for all I know it could be Mahler.
Sembra accompagnato da balli senza senso, modello maliarda, tra effluvi e movimenti di veli di seta, come nella descrizione della ragazza, spesso si legge. Un tourbillon di dorsi di mano e lacrime e sonni precari, tra “ieri ero lì” e “ieri era lì…” e così via con ogni coniugazione e meditazione possibile. Senza dolcezza sprecata, assolutamente.
[The novel] seems accompanied by senseless dances, as if by sorceress, betwixt efflusion and movements of silk veils, as we often read in the descriptions made by the girl. A tourbillon of backs of hands and tears and precarious sleeps, between “yesterday I was there” and “yesterday [he/she was there] and so on with every variant of conjugation and meditation possible. No wasted sweetness, whatsoever.
Un giorno di nubi diventato libro, con la stagione presumibilmente in decadenza e la noia che abbraccia e bacia le ore, una per una, come fossero tutte figlie sue, conosciute per quel che possono dare e odiate per quel che danno.
A cloudy day which becomes book, with the high season presumably decaying and boredom embracing and kissing the hours, each by each, as if they were all her own daughters, known by what they can give and hated for what they do give.
Il romanzo è complesso, intollerante di distrazioni o scivolate inerti. È un libro per persone sveglie e zitte, leste di emozioni nel torpore di un dolore qualunque.
The novel is complex, intolerant of distractions or inert slides. It is a book for those alert and quiet, quick of emotions in the torpor of any given sorrow.
È un cortometraggio breve di vita e di proibito di essa, girato e concepito dentro i privilegi tipici delle realtà durasiane, senza ipocrisie.
It is a short-lived, forbidding short, filmed and conceived within typical privileges of Durasian realities, without hypocrisies.
Un attacco ai piani alti dell’esistenza, condensati nelle bramosità e nelle ovvietà più inconfessabili. Condito ad arte dentro le attenzioni meravigliosamente femminili che l’Autrice dispone con senso teatrale, quasi da architetto d’interni oserei dire, che dispongono negli occhi blu a pelle chiara e capelli scuri, il fenotipo perfetto per la rappresentazione così disagiata di sentimenti forti e originalità estreme.
[It is] an attack to the lofty spheres of existence, condensed in the most inconfessable longing and obviousness. Artfully seasoned with wonderfully feminine attentions arranged by the author with theatrical sensibility, almost as an architect of interiors I dare say, which display in the blue eyes with fair skin and dark hair, the perfect phenotype for a most uneasy portrayal of strong feelings and extreme originality.
La passione, unico motore in un contesto straordinario dipinto d’arte, come è il libro, frutto di enorme talento. Se ne prova distacco e attrazione insieme. Antipatia per il fulgore di quei caratteri somatici così caldi e freddi insieme, tanto da far innamorare o incazzare senza vie di compromesso. Il titolo ne enfatizza l’antitetica possibilità contenuta.
Passion, sole engine within an expertly painted, extraordinary context is, as the book, fruit of enourmous talent. One feels detachment and attraction at the same time. Antipathy for the blinding light of those somatic traits together so hot and cold, such as could make one fall in love or in a fit of rage without any way of compromising.
The title [of the book] underscores the antiethical possibility contained therein.
Niente di scomodo. Niente di decisamente scostante. Le pieghe scomode sono nell’essenza stessa semmai. Nella cerchia ristretta degli identificanti possibili: personaggi a parte, il mondo durasiano è fastidiosamente elitario a volte. Di quell’élite da sturbo, ideologica e strutturata nei salotti, di cui mi lamento ovunque. Una selva di cose belle per persone belle che ad una lettura profonda si immaginano poi neanche così belle. Alla francese più che altro.
Nothing uncomfortable here. Nothing decidedly unsettled. The uncomfortable folds are, if anything, the very essence of the story. Within the narrow circle of the possible identifiers: aside from the characters, the Durasian world is bothersome in its elitarianism at times. That self-numbing elite, ideological and designed around parlours, which I complain about everywhere. A moltitude of beautiful things for beautiful people who, upon further analysis, we imagine, are not even that beautiful. In French fashion, more than anything.
Il libro avanza, si srotola e finisce. Passando per la Duras, va letto assolutamente. Non passandoci, si può anche regalare e basta. Un libro da donna non più giovane ma lontana comunque da tutte le donne possibili.
The book advances, unravels, then comes to an end. A must read, if your literary wanderings traverse Duras. In case they don’t, this book can be given as a gift. A book suited for a woman no longer young, yet invariably far from all possible women.’
…
The intricacies of the human heart, the complex workings of our minds are the true subject of Occhi Blu, Capelli Neri.
Catharsis: intense hatred must invariably stem from intense love; they are but two sides of the selfsame coin. I am humbled.
‘Never worry About things That you are unable To change Change your own way Of looking at truth.’
How to pin a heart to a sleeve. Ink on Paper. 2002
A Time for Everything
There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven ~ 2 A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted. 3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up. 4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance. 5 A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing. 6 A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to throw away. 7 A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time to speak. 8 A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace.
“Amare, non significa convertire,
ma per prima cosa ascoltare,
scoprire questo uomo,
…questa donna,
che appartengono a una civiltà
e ad una religione diversa.
L’amore consiste non nel sentire
che si ama, ma nel voler amare;
quando si vuol amare, si ama;
quando si vuol amare sopra ogni cosa,
si ama sopra ogni cosa.”
Prete cattolico e religioso che visse tra i Tuareq nel Sahara dell’Algeria
…
“To Love, does not mean to convert,
but first of all to listen,
discover this man,
this woman,
who belong to different civilizations and religions.
Love consists not in feeling we are in love,
but in the will to love;
When one is willing to love, she loves;
When one is willing to love above all else,
she loves above all else.”
In the courtyard of Space For Art, Barri Logan, San Diego. Sept. 4, 2010.
Art installation by Curtis Bracher. Click on image to be taken to his website.
The studio of May-Ling Martinez. Click her to see her blog.
May-Ling welcomes us.
Some of her pieces. Like 3D drawings! There seemed a current of 'retro' inspired pieces at the Space for Art. May-Ling is drawn to black and white drawings, attention to lineweight and retro ads.
My friend/twin Richard (we are both born on Sept.12!) and one of May-Ling's works.
Gothic Cathedral. Crutches, Xrays, Pipettes, Test Tubes. 9'L x 7'W x 8'H Artist Statement: This piece addresses the 'illuminations'- the questions, convergences, and contradictions of spirituality and science...
Flying buttresses, crossing and apse.
Roof expression of the apse and crossing.
The nave and aisles, their paving beautifully detailed.
Another noir work by May-Ling, guarding the door to the courtyard.
Misgivings in Barrio Logans, ghosts stories, ominous hands that prey (still too close).
Misgivings II. The burnt witch.
Pardon the quality of the photos, my Panasonic camera is still out of commission, hope to get it back in working order soon!
Iam fading out, but wanted to post few mementos from the weekend of Art I just had, from the San Diego Art Fair at The Hilton Downtown (missed the gallery:() Friday, to Barrio Logan on Saturday Sept. 5 with the events at Periscope (child of the dear Petar Perisic) and Space For Art (child of the charette I participated in last September). I have few photos to add, and have to introduce you to some of the works and artists I met, but for now, my first sketches on my new urban mini-sketchbook.
The Archangel Michael leads the Army of God. According to Wikipedia, {argh}. Michael is an Archangel in the Christian, Islamic, and Hebrew traditions.
He is the patron of the warrior.
I love the power of iconic images, the symbolism of the Catholic faith I have left behind yet respect in its ability to give visual comfort to the afflicted.
Justice is represented by the sword. How do we define it? I found these thoughts of comfort, as I have been slaying dragons and cutting the last of the hydra-heads. I am a woman who knows evil, yet art in the form of protective, powerful imagery gives solace, hope for deliverance and, of course, just retribution (hell hath no fury…etc. etc.).
Someday some abstract rendition will come out of this; I will be able to process it all and turn it into art, or in one of Ghadah’s women/girls..but today I am literal like a church fresco, I tell my story as if to pheasants, through illustrated stained- glass windows. The via crucis is made not by twelve stops, but more like one hundred and nine, or seventy-seven – a year-long Lent. I am a cathedral of crutches* and all the lessons are learned on my skin.
So, on Justice:
The great American trial lawyer, Gerry Spence, wrote, “There is no power like the power of justice”.
British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, in a speech to the House of Commons in 1853, stated, “Justice is truth in action”.
The above picture represents the “power of justice”.
The shield protects, the sword destroys. The power is strong, like the young warrior. The power comes quickly, as if on wings, out of the heavens.
Happy September. Post coming late today, but it is a new month and I hope this, my birthday month (yay) will be better than the last- and all summer for that matter. Lots of challenges and growth but…they don’t call them growing pains for nothing.
In my classes today we shared links on artists, visual notes, wonderful quotes, and great books. I can’t wait to tell you all about it. Things are getting really exciting and we are all growing by leaps and bounds. Good stuff and a great feeling of accomplishment at the end of this intense summer quarter.
Few unrelated topics that I have been mulling over lately:
1. Working out shadows in axonometric settings, like solving algebraic equations, helps to solve ourselves and gives us mathematical certainties (certainties that cannot be so cleanly and clearly found in real life). I always heard math is not an opinion, and I am appreciating its impartiality, its justice even. I know now its compassion.
Still, a solution is relative to the light angle we construct a priori, a philosophical question if there ever was one.
Shadows, like math, are either ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ relative to the established angle of light; no room for fuzzyness, approximation, guessing. How refreshing. How pure the solution. These (platonic) objects exists in an utopian airtight chamber or world, and the light is absolute, the light of truth.
The ‘real’ world (and ‘real’ shadows), like all matters of architecture and design and their ‘solutions’, are much more subtle, nuanced, grayscale— as opposed to black and white.
And so even truth is relative in our confounded orb.
2. I am thinking of ways to design the freehand drawing classes to transcend drawing as transposing what we ‘see’ and help it become a design tool (depicting what may be, or possible scenarios).
It is a challenge, because the basic drawing techniques still need to be mastered, but the course could be imbued with and define a research path, becoming not only a stronger vehicle for learning, but generating material for publication. Exciting stuff, now it’s just a matter of tightening up my interest areas and plan for action.
The Freehand Drawing and Rendering and Delineation classes will meet again next summer, and I have held some meetings to design its contents(more on this on coming posts) . Some words buzzing in my head are collages/assemblages, words, poetry, architecture, grayscale abstracts, visual notes/sketchnotes, inventories, data gathering quests, urban scavenging, pattern and in-formation.
3. The more I grow as a passive designer- passive because I have been in an observing, absorbing mode for a while now…just storing information until the right moment comes- the more drawings i do, I am realizing that the challenges of design are not additive ones, but subtractive.
Learning what to remove, what to take away, leaving just the essential, is the challenge. Architecture is a matter of reduction, not addition. Let me try to explain myself better. During our architectural education and pedestrian work experiences we are taught to include so many details, turn in complete drawings, complete construction documents sets etc. All of this is techniciams’ stuff. It is the drafter’s realm, or the CAD operator’s realm. It is not the Architect’s or designer’s province, which should aspire to loftier expressions. Design is abstraction of thought and ideas. It is reducing your concept to your most pure expression, cutting away all the fat and the unnecessary. Even the best art, I am finding, is painfully created by reducing your concept, feelings, ideas, to the most clear image, the prime number, the denominator. Significant work is created through ruthlessly leaving out all unnecessary data, information. Including too much is just self-indulgence; the disciplined designer pursues truth as she or he defines it and does not or cannot have time for self-indulgence. The purity of the idea is what one needs to be faithful to, everything else is interference by bureaucrats, technicians, pencil pushers.
Am I sounding like Howard Roark? WellI am in the process of defining a design philosophy and given the person that I am, this definition comes first in words , which will guide the action. As my dear friend Lamees said, one is not to do without being first. Be first–then do– then have…it all happens spontaneously.
Part of being an architect is accepting an elitist role, necessary not to set apart one from the rest of humanity, but to preserve the purity of the design idea, its drive and execution. Part of being an architect and an artist is learning to let go of many things once thought necessary and just rendering our work in the most pure, direct, potent way.
Finally, a quote that is driving my days, these days:
Sensory overload for the coffee fiend at Whole Foods.
Can I take you all home with me?
A short, sweet poem for you today, like the piece of dark chocolate my friend Susan at Chi Chocolat used to place at the end of her black, strong espressos. A small indulgence, a titillating surprise.
Enjoy with coffee.
All you have to do is take these lies and make them true…
…manier les mots, les soupeser, en explorer le sens, es une manière de faire l’amour, surtout lorsque ce qu’on écrit est inspiré par quelqu’un, ou promis à quelqu’un.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Quoi? L’Éternité, Paris, Gallimard, 1988, p. 147
[“…manipular las palabras, sopesarlas, explorar su sentido, es una manera de hacer el amor, sobre todo cuando lo que se escribe está inspirado en alguien, o está prometido a alguien.”]
Let Me In. Graphite on paper. Image via Darrel Tank of the Five Pencil Methd
I ran into Darrel Tank’s Five Pencil Method few weeks ago. His work is breathtaking.
The site full of wonderful video tutorials, and in his blog, Darrel offers videos with step by step advice on submitted portraits. All I can say is I’m Jealous WOW.
I really just drew one portrait, my first — if we don’t count some self-portraits done as homework for drawing classes in college. And I don’t think we want to see that type of work here, or maybe yes, for giggles. Just so you know in one I was made-up like The Crow. Oh yes there is also that whole other side of me…
Just Go Grayscale And Call It ‘Art’
But all of this is just to shamelessly plug in this portrait that the photographer Dianna Ippolito took of yours truly last week. It will go on the Faculty wall of my school. And if a photo could ever make someone happy this is it, and I wanted to share it here, hoping you will overlook the fact that it is my photo: it is the art of photography and catching a soul with a lens as well.
Moreover, I am losing my innocence and naivete’ as we speak, so good thing they were preserved here;)
I’ve been organizing my school folders, and always find that decluttering frees up the space of the mind first of all, and readies it for new projects and enterprises (cool folders and Italian stationery also helps :)).
Speaking of stationery, I would be remiss if I didn’t share this delicious site, Galison New York.
As usual, I have been pondering about the amount of projects I have, which are invariably inversely proportionate to the time available at a given moment (activity begets activity).
My wise mother told me ‘Don’t you know writers take a month to write a book, but years to gestate it’?
Favorite drawings, paintings, collages and handwork on SketchBloom
Ink on Paper. September 2009
Final Twomoons Piece, Summer 2008
Ink on tracing paper. Kuwait, January 2010. The scene at the bottom is what I saw-or decided to see- at The Avenues, the most popular malla in Kuwait City. There is nothing like seeing photography and drawings from a trip abroad to make you realize all reality is subjective, and we choose to see what we want to. We just don’t realize it in our own backyard.
Felt tip on paper. March 22, 2011.
Pilot Pen on Paper. November 2009
Persimmon- very quick pastel rendering. November 12, 2009.
The Sun, the Moon, and on there being no abstracts in life. Pencil, ink, watercolor on 4″X5″ canvas.2009
Baggalini Red.
Collage, Pilot Pen on Paper
Barcelona Chairs by Mies Van De Rohe, 1929 @ the CED Library in Berkeley
Mare Mosso Act II. Graphite drawing by Gianni Aiello. Collage. March 18,2011
Watercolor and Graphite. November 12, 2009
Ink on Paper. December 2010.
our very own coffee cart @ NewSchool: Cafe’ A la Carte
Concept for jewelry piece ‘twomoons’
Ink on Paper. Calabria, Italia. September 29, 2011.
Mare Mosso Act III. Graphite and pen drawing by Gianni Aiello. Collag and pastel. March 19, 2011.
Casa Del Fascio, contrast corrected thru Photoshop, Como, 2007
The funambulist. Ink drawing + digital collage. August 2011.
Dr. Gregory House. Watercolor on Paper. June 3, 2010
Coffee Carrier (delle). Graphite on paper. Kuwait. January 2010
Watercolor on paper. June 3, 2010
The Fortress of Lost Time. Graphite on paper and magazine cutouts. December 27, 2010. Miti and Gianni Aiello.
Ink and watercolor on paper and tracing paper. A bit of digital manipulation. Feb. 09,2011.
Pilot pen on paper. January 2011
Ink on Paper. December 2010.
Pencil and Watercolor on canvas
Ink on hand.book paper. Paris, 2011.
Earth Henna, Eucalyptus Oil. May 2, 2010.
July 27, San Diego Museum Of Art. The Age of Enlightenment – Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breuteuil, Marquise du Chatelet by Yinka Shonibare- Ink on hand.book paper
Waiting for Godot | Static Head. Digital Collage. May 5th, 2010
Earth and Water. Beads and yarn. June 24, 2011
Twomoons Wax Proof-modeled after concept sketch
Graphite on paper and magazine cutouts. December 27, 2010. Miti and Gianni Aiello.
Miniature Pomegranate. Watercolor on chocolate wrap. Kuwait. January 2010
Queen Califia’s Garden, Totem/Sculpture. Ink, color pencils and markers. 2009
tre·pid
i·ty embedded on it.
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