The Anti-Monograph

A few weeks ago Mark Lamster put up a spirited defense of the architectural monograph, responding to a column by Martin Filler in Architectural Record that suggested the form was doomed by economics and sycophancy. (And, BTW, if Record is going to save itself by getting critical, let’s support the effort.) Mark wrote:

It seems particularly wrong to me to suggest that a singular genius will be required to reinvent the monograph format into something meaningful for today. This only reinforces the profession’s lamentable stratification into a system of stars and anonymous drones. (In the past, Filler has lamented the “Great Man” school of history, so this seems a strange proposition coming from him.) In any case, the standard monograph format — a critical introduction followed by a series of explicated projects — happens to be an efficient means of presentation, and in most cases needs no reinvention.

When I was editing monographs, and it was not so long ago, the first conversation I would have with an architect would inevitably begin with the architect in question stating flatly that he or she was not interested in a “traditional monograph.” That was fine with me. But then we’d start talking, and as we’d get down to the nitty-gritty, the book would move closer and closer to the “traditional” format. Not every time. But most times.

So it was particularly amusing to me to receive Reveal, the first monograph of the work of 13-year-old Chicago firm Studio Gang (published, coincidentally, by Mark’s old employers at Princeton Architectural Press; they are also my publishers for the forthcoming Writing About Architecture). Reveal was part of the launch of the exciting Van Alen Books, a new architecture and design bookstore (the only one in Manhattan) run by the urban institute of the same name, on Thursday, April 21.

City Beautiful of Kazakhstan

Last week’s Journeys issue of the New Yorker was one of the magazine’s best in months. And I think the digital powers that be know it, since much of the good stuff is behind little blue locks on the website. (One piece that isn’t is Evan Osnos’s Chinese bus trip through Europe: priceless.) The most architectural journey was Keith Gessen’s to Astana, a.k.a. “Nowheresville,” the new capital of Kazakhstan, where Foster + Partners has designed the Palace of Peace (above) as well as the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center (below), which may be the world’s first mall-slash-beach-slash-midway. Gessen’s description seems equal parts Vegas, John Portman, and insanity.

All That Glitters (and Swoops)

Fodder for my perhaps-never-to-happen shortform blog, Let’s Get Critical. Let’s Get Critical would pick choice reviews from the wide world of culture, so you (if you were like me) would always have a place to go when you needed to read something (constructively, eloquently) mean. Exquisite Corpse is also a good respite. Collecting reviews of different types in one place would allow some patterns to emerge, an anatomy of critique.

Making the Modern House Home

For many American architects, their first commission is a house. Even if they go on to fame and fortune and skyscrapers, what people think of first, when they hear the name, is that house. Eero Saarinen grew up in two houses designed by his father Eliel, first Hvittrask (1901-03) in Finland, then the Saarinen House (1928-30) at Cranbrook. The Saarinen House became, like the Cranbrook and Kingswood school buildings, a family project. Mother Loja Saarinen created fabrics and rugs and collaborated on the garden. Eero designed furniture for his parents’ bedroom. Sister Pipsan designed motifs for the family’s bedroom doors. Eero himself has never been identified with a house. But that might be about to change.

Muddying the Waters

The first of it was shipped in from New Jersey, 500 tons of an off-white grain which is evidently in high mixture of dirt and silt, on top of which a series of cheap wooden tables serve as vending counters on which Tecate and Pabst are tendered for five dollars a can, and where an open grill continuously produces a wet, rich, cloud of beefy grease.

When the beach was expanded northward along the East River to accommodate more seating and an occasional volleyball court, it was supplemented with several more truckloads of sand imported from Long Beach, and the slightly paler, finer, grains now intermingle throughout, mixing freely with ashes and dirt, a briny beige-gray that finds its way on to every surface, gets caught in the occasional kick or gust and drifts over tables and folding chairs.

That’s an excerpt from “Some Versions of Pastoral,” an essay by Zachary Sachs from At Water’s Edge, the just-released first volume of a chapbook series published by the MFA Design Criticism Program at the School of Visual Arts (a.k.a. D-Crit). Edited by students Saundra Marcel and Vera Sacchetti, with faculty member Akiko Busch, the book collects essays on New York’s waterfront by this year’s graduating class. Zach visited Long Island City’s Water Taxi Beach and found “a half-acre — perfectly rectangular — bank of sand”; other essays consider the Gowanus, Red Hook, the Staten Island Ferry, navigating the alternately shabby and glossy edges of the boroughs.

Bad Faith Towers

From yesterday’s Times:

In a bid to cut costs at his star-crossed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the developer Bruce C. Ratner is pursuing plans to erect the world’s tallest prefabricated steel structure, a 34-story tower that would fulfill his obligation to start building affordable housing at the site.

The prefabricated, or modular, method he would use, which is untested at that height, could cut construction costs in half by saving time and requiring substantially fewer and cheaper workers. And the large number of buildings planned for the $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards — 16 in all, not including the Nets arena now under construction — could also make it economical for the company to run its own modular factory, where walls, ceilings, floors, plumbing and even bathrooms and kitchens could be installed in prefabricated steel-frame boxes.

Never let it be said that Bruce Ratner is not an avid follower of architectural trends. With this latest iteration of building at Atlantic Yards he swaps titanium for brown paper, correctly sensing that, post-recession, prefab is more palatable than starchitecture. Where once the Faustian bargain he offered Brooklynites appealed to their old school pride (a real city has its own sports team) and new Brooklyn snobbery (we could have had a Gehry before Manhattan), the new one is more pragmatic. Do you want affordable housing now, built fast and cheap, or later, when I wring a reduction in the number of promised units from the state?

Reading Out Loud

Writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab blog earlier this month, Justin Ellis called The Goods, “McSweeney’s latest love note to newspapers.”

If I was looking for an easily identifiable trigger for my love of reading, it would most likely be devouring Peanuts (and later Calvin and Hobbes) in the Sunday Star Tribune as a kid.

Mac Barnett, the editor behind McSweeney’s The Goods, had a similar experience. “One of my big memories as a kid, on Sundays, my dad would peel off the funny pages as he would read the newspaper,” Barnett told me. “I think that trained me to have a certain fondness for the newspaper. I don’t think kids have that now.”

The Goods is a half-page weekly comics section, to be edited by McSweeney’s and distributed via Tribune Media Services. The idea is to appeal to get kids reading the newspaper, any part of the newspaper, as well as to get their parents to keep buying it.

Something Old, Something Green

Last month I had dinner at Seersucker on Smith Street, a restaurant that manages to deploy all the cliches of New Brooklyn restaurant design: Futura lettering, graphite type, retro and Southern menu items, rusticated surface treatments (isn’t that part of a barn?). The wall separating kitchen from dining room is wire glass, the better to backlight a set of two-gallon jars of chromatic pickles. And the water glasses? Ball jars.

ISO The Digital Sidewalk Critic

Last week Slate ran an example of the design criticism I am missing: “I hate my iPad,” by John Swansburg.

I admit that I bought my iPad for the wrong reasons. I got one because it seemed like everyone I knew had gotten one for Christmas and, well, I felt left out. I didn’t think about how it would fit in with the gadgets I already owned (laptop, Kindle, iPhone), and I didn’t borrow a friend’s and take it on a test drive. Now I just feel annoyed, having spent $600 on a device that hasn’t done anything to improve my life. A salad spinner would have been a better investment, and I don’t even eat that much salad.I don’t think the iPad is useless.

There’s no question that it makes browsing the Web while sitting on the couch easier. Though I have a relatively svelte laptop, it’s kind of a pain to tote around the apartment. But am I the kind of person who pays $600 to save the effort of detaching some USB cables from time to time? I don’t want to be that kind of person.

And so on. Swansburg disusses the tablet’s browsability and readability, distractions of the internet and requests for payment from iTunes. Then he gets into an IM duscussion with his tech-loving colleagues, and wins a few points.

Neat Freaks

I just pitched a story on one of my favorite Tumblrs, Things Organized Neatly, but Rob Walker, in a lovely final Consumed column in the New York Times Magazine, beat me to it. His theory of TON’s appeal is that looking at organized stuff allows us the vicarious pleasure of ownership — without the storage and consumer guilt. I thought that was the purpose of failed EBay bids (I am usually glad, in the end, that I didn’t win) and the proliferating social shopping sites: Polyvore, Svpply, and so on. So maybe all the eye candy, none of the bills, is the mode of the moment. Since Walker’s new projects (sign up for his newsletter here) include the Tumblr Unconsumption, he’s obviously betting on reduce-reuse-recycle.