Writing & Design

My Postmodernists

2012-01-12T23:22:00.001-08:00

The online design blog I've been working on, TraceSF, has launched. I just posted an article on it, a memoir piece on my early encounters with postmodernists - one in St. Louis and two in the Bay Area.

SFMOMA's expansion

2011-12-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

I read that the expansion of SFMOMA will now include removing the dark stairway that dominates the Mario Botta-designed existing lobby. Botta designed a bank in Basel - I saw it by accident once while visiting that city - that is essentially the twin of SFMOMA. That's a tactic he shares with Arata Isozaki, who relentlessly exploits a formal move over a series of projects until he grows tired of it.* It's harder in the age of maximal documentation to get away with this kind of replication. The joke with Botta was his desire to realize the conceit of placing a ring of trees high up above the entry to these buildings. I think the Basel bank does this, but I'm not sure. He proposed it for SFMOMA, but it was turned down. (My friend Andrew Rabeneck, a former editor of AD in its heyday, called this, "Pussy in the Sky." He may have been quoting someone else.) I've always had mixed feelings about the Botta museum. It was taken up by Allan Temko, and Botta was briefly the man of the hour, but his moment has faded. In scale, it's good - it fits well in an odd context. Now that it's flanked by the dreadful W Hotel, it looks even better by comparison. Yet I wonder if SFMOMA shouldn't bite the bullet and let Snohetta have at it - redesign the entire building. They're clearly up to it. The result could be amazing.

*: Isozaki is much more formally inventive than Botta, and his variations are sharper.

Farewell to a difficult man

2011-10-06T17:32:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs reminded me of the only modern architect I’ve known personally who rivaled the Victorian ones in the totality of his vision, realized down to the tiniest details. (That architect is George Homsey. His partner Joseph Esherick said to me once that “it takes someone as pigheaded as George to do anything good." Norman Foster, whose HSBC Building in HK was described to me by Tunney Lee as "the last Victorian building," is another architect who resembles Jobs.)
    Jobs had many accomplishments, but what may stick is the understanding he gave us that anything good takes hard work. Much of what he did built on the germs of ideas that others attempted first. Jobs never attempted anything. He got it done. His failures seemed to fuel his desire to put his vision across. They also seemed to enlarge his vision.
    From the beginning, he saw that technology needs creativity to find its spark. SFMOMA has an exhibit of Dieter Rams’ work for Braun. That body of work is a precedent for Apple’s products, as are iconic “driver’s machines” like the BMW 2002. But there was always more to the story with Jobs, because after all he was an entrepreneur. The products are gorgeous, but they’re usually portals to content that Apple controls. Control may end up being the weak point in Apple’s strategy. It’s why Amazon and Google, both committed to openness, are its main rivals.
    Ever since it was announced, I’ve had reservations about Apple’s proposed headquarters, the design of which Foster generously attributed to Jobs. It perfectly embodies Apple’s culture, but this is not necessarily what it should do. To compete with its rivals, Apple may need to open up. Jobs' crystal palace may allow this, but it’s so singular - and insular - that it could end up feeling like a mausoleum. It will take real courage on Apple’s part to question it, but they should. One way to do this is to imagine a very different company, then ask if this is the building it would choose.

Dialogue Hits #20

2011-09-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

In 1999, my then-colleague Helen Dimoff and I had the idea of doing a magazine that would straddle the line between Gensler and its clients. Twelve years later, the 20th issue of Dialogue rolled off the press. Most design firm magazines die a quick death. Their sponsors underestimate the effort and cost involved. Editorial vision and the availability of suitable content are also a challenge. When we made our pitch to Art Gensler, he said that his goal for it was "to show our clients what we do." Gensler works across the world economy, so Dialogue achieves Art's goal by discussing the trends and issues that drive design in the different economic sectors the firm serves. We've never lacked for content. The Dialogue above is sitting on the laptop on which the magazine is edited in final form. If you'd like to see the issue, you can download a PDF of it. (The link takes you to the "Viewpoints" page on the Gensler website, where you'll see the new issue posted.) It's a work of many hands. See the masthead for the credits.

Trace

2011-07-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

Several years have passed since work began on Trace, an online journal that emerged from dissatisfaction with a previous one with less-than-supportive institutional ties. After various fits and starts, two younger collaborators joined. Their presence has been a huge help, and Trace is finally nearing its soft-launch. The focus, as with its predecessor, is the San Francisco region. While design is the main lens, there's a desire to address cultural and political issues, too. The previous regime was wary of controversy, so now we are independent. Our next step is to attract contributors and find an audience - a parallel effort, of course, as the first writers have to imagine a readership as well as help create it.

Writing again

2011-06-22T10:24:00.000-07:00

I have shamelessly neglected "Writing & Design" of late, but I am resolved to pick up the thread again. Something which interests me now is "writer process." I attended a panel on "design thinking" sponsored by Toronto's Rotman School of Business. I'm wary of design thinking, because it seems to fall into the traps that Horst Rittel pointed out about design methods in the 1970s, taking a naive view of problems and engaging in "magical thinking." (Rittel used to refer to that step as "the creative leap.") What interests me is the leitmotif of failure that runs through the design thinking discourse as the shadow side of the creative process. (Several on the panel noted that it's problematic to reward failure and that it can end in tears for the people involved.) Writers, especially novelists, deal constantly with failure. A novel is a real undertaking, so of course novelists are often quite invested in what they're writing. Yet every writer, to be any good, has to be prepared to start again (while, if they're smart, saving every scrap). I want to explore this, and I'll do so here (among other places, probably).

Grudin on digital photography

2011-02-25T17:47:00.000-08:00

Robert Grudin: view from a Maui deck

The humanist Robert Grudin recently gave a talk on "Digital Technology and the Imagination," identifying five major forms of meaning applicable to digital photography:

Analytical: concentrating on visual details that form part of a larger whole
Graphic: Capturing a vivid experience in a single moment in time
Elemental: Expressing what's distinctive about an object or living thing
Narrative: Implying that the subject is involved in a story
Allusive: Conveying a sense of the symbolic that refers to other topics.

A photograph can have more than one of these attributes, he added. Grudin helpfully put an illustrated summary of his lecture on the web. It includes some practical suggestions about how to realize them with a digital camera. (He uses what he called a "bridge" camera that is in between a point-and-shoot and an SLR in cost and features.)

Book received

2011-02-17T18:34:00.000-08:00

Two copies of New Airports by Giulio De Carli arrived from their publisher, 24 ORE Cultura of Milan. The book was published in record time just before the holidays. Gensler has four projects in it. The quality is better than I anticipated. Given what we were receiving by email in late November, I wasn't expecting much. Knowing how hard it is to assemble consistent metrics, etc., though, I'm impressed by how much they accomplished. The texts are simple - these aren't really case studies - and the image quality varies, but this reflects what they got from the participating firms. Given the short burn, a pretty good effort!

Collaboration

2011-02-05T12:02:00.000-08:00

I've been working on Dialogue 19, an issue focused on Gensler's design research program. Number 19 continues the collaborative editing approach that we began with Gensler's 2011 Annual Report. Vernon Mays developed the issue's outline and identified the outside respondents to be interviewed for the "roundtable." He and Matthew Richardson also oversaw several articles by other writers. Their own contributions were collaborative, too. Vernon used a second interviewer and Matt based his on a white paper that Vernon originally edited from a draft by a Gensler practice leader. We call this process the "editorial scrum." Of course, the gods weigh in, shaping the issue as they respond to it - first as text, then as an evolving design. As it neared its print date, coordination became crucial. With two designers and lots of moving parts, keeping it all straight was a challenge. We're looking at software to help ensure that the layout file stays current - it sometimes got away from us. Despite this, collaboration is the way to go - it keeps the project moving and leverages a virtual team that has other things to do.

Writing room

2010-12-28T21:03:00.000-08:00

Detail of my front window (photo by Elizabeth Snowden)

On summer weekend days and early evenings, I write almost exclusively in the barn, but at night and in the winter, I write mostly in an upstairs room. When I look up from my desk, I see these fabrics and the reed shade that obscure the front window. The room is filled with art and imagery, Buddhist objects, books, a 1950s radio tuned to a local jazz station, a stereo with two wonderful old KLH speakers, and my new Turkish carpet. The room is a little more than 12 feet square. Its motifs date back to my childhood, reproduced over time in an evolving but still recognizable form.

Density and Urbanity

2010-12-10T21:43:00.000-08:00

Living Urbanism, a New York-based organization, just published a short essay I wrote, "Density and Urbanity." It's an expansion of one that I published in Common Place 4 earlier this year (under the title "Place and Scale"). The new version will appear in an annual publication that Living Urbanism puts out. Mike Lydon, who blogs for Planetizen, was my contact, although others were involved.

Saltworks

2010-12-07T19:05:00.000-08:00

Architect's Newspaper just posted an op-ed piece I wrote on Saltworks, a proposal by smart-growth guru Peter Calthorpe to redevelop the salt flats adjoining Redwood Shores on the west side of San Francisco Bay. The gist: not a good idea, and a joke, really, to call it smart growth and to complain, as Calthorpe has, that no one can get higher-density redevelopment approved in areas that actually have transit and other infrastructure in place. Many beg to differ, including the San Francisco Chronicle in a recent editorial.

An essay posted

2010-12-01T21:43:00.000-08:00

A few weekends ago, I came across an essay I wrote in 1997, following visits to the National Gallery in Oslo. Newly revised as "Painting's Journey," the essay is now posted in the archive on my website. The main theme is the loss of narrative in painting, which was neatly captured by what I saw in Oslo.

The university and the city

2010-12-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

With my longtime writing partner, Richard Bender, I've been asked by Anthony Teo of the National Technical University of Singapore to contribute a 7,500-word essay to a book on the university and the city - a topic that Professor Bender and I last wrote about in Places (an article on U.C. Merced that was reprinted in arcCA with a rejoinder from that campus's planners, Christopher Adams and John Kriken).

Article on Mega-firms

2010-11-03T16:51:00.000-07:00

The Zweig Letter just published an article that looks at the A-E mega-firm phenomenon and its implications for owners, employees, and clients. The comparison it makes is with A-E firms that grow organically or are organized as stables of brands. I wrote the article with Ed Friedrichs, the former Gensler CEO and President - and now ZweigWhite Group chairman, and Amanda Walter, a Bay Area communications consultant who was a communications director at AECOM.

Iconic, et al

2010-10-22T22:11:00.000-07:00

Recently, I perused the texts of 170 award submittals, and was struck by the repetition of certain words. Iconic loomed large. Now, in the real world, how many icons are there, really? Big cities have one or two. Smaller cities have landmarks, and towns have places that root themselves in local memory. Iconic is a word that time attaches to a place. I don't think it's something that can be claimed at the start. Yet it was claimed constantly in these texts. Is it hubris, or has the word been so devalued that its former singularity has been lost? If the latter, too bad. If the former, it's time to use it properly, which I would say is exclusively past tense.

Edward de Bono

2010-09-23T18:44:00.000-07:00

I read a talk today on design thinking in which the writer - summarizing "the basic steps" that designer's take - mentions lateral thinking. Seeing that term reminded me that Edward de Bono deserves much more credit than he's been getting for this whole phenomenon. Back in the 1960s and '70s, de Bono wrote prolifically about breaking through to new ideas. He even developed a self-taught course on how to think outside the box. I have most of his books. They're really useful - more so, I would say, than the current ones I've read on design thinking. What de Bono particularly understood was how organizations with a thoughtless group process murdered new ideas in their cradle. One observation he made to which I often return is that the bridge to a new idea is frequently a half-baked one. Rather than rejecting it out of hand, de Bono encouraged people to say "Po" - as opposed to "No!" His "Po" meant "I don't see it yet, but let's keep going and see where it gets us." It's an encouragement to explore - an open-ended positive, not a turn-off.

The iPad (2)

2010-09-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

My colleague Dave Keller noted that slipping a case on it makes the iPad a different proposition from the product on its own. I agree. It feels more like a notebook that you'd naturally tote along - more resilient, less "precious," and perhaps less vulnerable to theft. I thought of getting one to take to Europe, but ruled it out, thinking it would just get stolen. In this configuration, it might survive. It's also easier to use, provided you keep it in horizontal mode. That may be a drawback of the case. The keyboard is idiosyncratic for a touch-typist like me, split vertically in a way that feels odd, although i got used to it fairly quickly. I wasn't able to touch-type. There are keyboards that pair with it, although none fold up quite as elegantly and compactly as the Palm accessory. I'd have to do a field test to see what it would be like to navigate a city with an iPad. The iPhone or iPod Touch may be the better choice, as you can keep it in a pocket.

The iPad

2010-09-05T19:32:00.000-07:00

I borrowed my team's iPad for a second weekend. The screen is amazing - very high definition and vivid colors. It loads files fast, lends itself to reading text, and shows real promise as a medium for design-focused content. As I write this, Apple's competitors are moving at lightning speed to get "answering" products on the market. Cost to value will surely become an issue very quickly. Then there's the question of Flash - e.g., some Youtube posts won't run on the iPad. That's a calculated gamble - one that competing products are already exploiting. Don't count on Apple standing still! Meanwhile, the iPad is on our map. It's a natural for design-firm business development.

Designers and Writers

2010-08-14T09:53:00.000-07:00

I was invited by Peter Weingarten, who - with Steve Weindel - leads the architecture studio at Gensler San Francisco, to participate in a recent retreat. I was reminded in the course of it that design and writing have in common a vast diversity of methods, as many as there are individuals engaged in both tasks. Reading Paris Review interviews of writers, I'm often struck by this. By the time they make it to that august journal, writers are pretty clear about how they work and how it relates to what they write. I work as an editor, and most of my "for hire" writing is done with teams. This is more like design in the studio than most of the writing that the Paris Review describes. In a studio context, there's likely to be a way of working that drives most projects. Finding the right team isn't just a question of personalities, but also of feeling at ease with the tempo of the work. Some designers are purely iterative, so almost useless on fast-burn competitions. Others excel conceptually, but are bored stiff by the details of implementation. Good firms help sort this out, but the main burden is on the individual. When I joined Gensler, I shocked the person who hired me by saying that it would be a mutual waste of time for me to be the director of communications. I'm just not cut out for that role. I can direct from an editorial standpoint, because that's a reviewing, mentoring, and influencing sort of role. My nature is receptive, I think, rather than creative. As my friend Julie Bartlett once put it, "Give John a sentence or two, the germ of an idea, and he can turn it into an essay." A separate subject, also relevant to designers, is how to figure out which projects fit best.

Praise for Kenneth Caldwell

2010-08-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of life is to read new work by my writer friend Kenneth Caldwell, including his wonderful blog, Design Faith; articles for Architect's Newspaper and arcCA, like his recent review of Design on the Edge, the anniversary publication of U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design; and other pieces like the Barry Elbasani interview he posted on ArchNewsNow, originally written for a monograph on Elbasani's firm, ELS. It was at Kenny's urging that I wrote a polemic on the 555 Washington Tower for A/N, picked up by ANN. His input, along with that of another attentive reader, helped me shift its focus to the larger issues that the tower proposal raised. Kenny also got me started reading the Paris Review, which I recommend especially for its interviews with writers. Like me, Kenny worked as an architecture firm marketer. We both continue to write "for hire," so what we write on our own account is from the heart, I think, reflecting our lives and interests. Kenny is more often on the road than I am, camera in hand. Now we get to tag along.

Article for ZweigWhite

2010-08-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

I'm writing an article with Ed Friedrichs, ex-god of Gensler, and Amanda Walter, a Bay Area-based communication consultant, previously with AECOM and EDAW. It will look comparatively at three or four models of AE/AEC organization from the standpoints of clients, owners, and employees. We're writing it for ZweigWhite, where Friedrichs is now chairman. Look for it sometime in the fall.

Les Ateliers Jury

2010-07-31T22:18:00.000-07:00

I've been invited to be a juror for the 28th Summer Session of the International Workshop of Planning and Urban Design at Cergy-Pontoise, just outside Paris, 20-24 September. The topic is "The rural/urban interface of the great metropolis." Les Ateliers is the successor of the planning office at C-P, a 1960s French new town, one RER stop past La Defense.

New "Common Place"

2010-07-31T13:08:00.000-07:00

I posted a new issue of Common Place (no. 4) after a considerable hiatus. Some new things along with reprints, including an essay on "Place and Scale."

Segues

2010-07-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

Reviewing a laid-out, early-stage version of a current project, I was reminded of the importance of segues in a multi-page document discussing a variety of topics. Picture a freeway in which the first sign for an off-ramp is set on the ramp itself and you'll get the idea. Without an effective segue, you're a quarter mile down the road before you have a glimmer of an idea where you are. One reason to lay things out early is that it makes the problem obvious enough that you can't ignore it.

94708

2010-07-10T22:32:00.000-07:00

I started yet another blog at the end of June, in an effort to make myself take photos. (I own four digital cameras, two still unused.) Focused on my zip code, it began in a travelogue mode, but has moved into design criticism. My photos are (to me) slowly improving. What's better is the composition - I have yet to figure out the countless features of even my oldest camera. The newest two have such daunting instruction manuals that I put them back in their boxes. Technical descriptions, much like tax forms, make my eyes glaze over. A photographer friend offered to help me out. I'll have to take him up on it.

The text

2010-07-07T23:28:00.000-07:00

"No one actually reads these things," the gods said. Yet these things have a text, and often I'm writing it. There has to be a storyline or people will get lost. The text can feel like blocks that the designers move around, deciding their weight on the page. I often write to fit - one of the easiest ways to write, actually. Sonnets are like that for me, with their 10-syllable lines and their rhyming pattern of ABABCDCDEFEF, GG: 12 lines and a 2-line coda (in one case; the pattern can vary). So I write, although the gods say that no one will read it, "or only a few." Well, then, I guess that I write for them.

Social Media

2010-07-02T22:28:00.000-07:00

A conversation yesterday about HOK's "anything goes" approach to social media. I was impressed by the crowd-sourced nature of what they do (and how they got it going). It's clear that blogging depends on a "big tent" (as the political parties say, although rarely do) of contributors. What can look chaotic - a profusion of blogs on different topics - maps with Rick Klaw's comment that successful blogs home in on a specific topic. I once saw an SOM partner wax poetic on curtain-wall design to an audience of visiting curtain-wall manufacturers from Japan. It was a love-fest, basically, and specialized blogs cater to a like desire. Prospective hires are an important audience for HOK. Presumably, they find their own communities within this chaos and are drawn in.

Backtrack

2010-06-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

The gods of Apple revised their opinion of a graphic novelization of James Joyce's Ulysses that featured a naked woman, deciding that it was art after all. (This according to the NYT.) Glad to hear it. Censorship puts you in some really bad company. It's not a business Apple should be in.

Made for China?

2010-06-11T23:47:00.000-07:00

The gated world of the iPad is, I realized today, perfectly suited to the Great Firewall mentality of a web-wary China. In the world of "control," this is the ideal instrument. How quickly we all fall in line! The seduction continues, with the mouth-watering Time demo. The goal is to ring-fence content so it can be monetized, but laundering it is also possible. A new slogan for the iPad age: Information wants to be freed.

Places

2010-06-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

What Nancy Levinson is doing with Places is astonishingly good. While the stampede is on to the iPAD's gated world, blog journals are coming into their own. The media wants to monetize content, which is understandable, but journals like Places can't survive without a subsidy. For them, a blog represents both a vastly larger audience and a more fluid medium. Places is simply more interesting than it was.

New article

2010-06-06T22:08:00.001-07:00

My article, "Four Kinds of Fire," appeared in a new Arcade edited by Kelly Rodriguez. This is the fourth issue on "alchemy." Each is focused on a different element. I really like Arcade, a "regional" mag that transcends the category. (Laid-out versions are in the archive on my website. Note that the article is a tabloid-size, two-page spread.)

Memoirs

2010-06-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

In an interview in today's NYT Sunday Magazine, Christopher Hitchens says tartly that he wrote a memoir, not an autobiography, implying that the former is properly selective, not the life in full. He was responding to the interviewer's hostile point that he omits his wives and children in favor of a few of his male friends. The interviewer goes on to note his inclusion of two homosexual affairs. He replies that he wanted to be honest about the fact that homosexuality is part of everyone's makeup, adding that it's as much about love as sex. "Not everyone's!" the interviewer answers back. This contrasts with Charles Blow's noting, in Saturday's NYT, that acceptance of gays has passed the halfway mark among American men. Blow attributes this in part to the recognition that homophobia has proven to be repression in a number of well publicized cases. Meanwhile, most straight men have gay friends and colleagues (and memories of their own youth). I agree with Hitchens, and I think Blow makes his point.

A Memoir in Time

2010-05-31T21:40:00.000-07:00

I started writing what I described below as "an autobiography with time," but a memoir is more like it. It's now "in time." The idea is to place the personal within an unfolding context and note, when possible, how it influenced personal experience and, equally, how it was understood in light of personal experience. Reading my daughter Elizabeth Snowden's senior project, On the Verge, inspired me to start working on it. (I've posted some excerpts from her project on Notes: Projects.) I finished the prologue and the first section, and am now in the midst of the second. This may end up in Common Place, the fourth installment of which is overdue.

Palladio's sketchbooks

2010-05-30T00:45:00.000-07:00

While staying in Manhattan, I walked over the Morgan Library and saw an exhibit on Palladio that included pages from his sketchbooks. In a review in the Wall Street Journal, Ada Louise Huxtable expressed her pleasure in these pages. I felt it, too. There is an immediacy to them that brings Palladio back to life. In Philadelphia a few days earlier, I found an amazing terracotta bust of a man, dating from the 1400s. It was so lifelike that the man could have sprung to life and it wouldn't have been so surprising. The sketches are like that - they seemed present in a way that the other artifacts did not. Later, having lunch at the cafe, I thought about how my opinion of Piano's reworking of the Morgan Library has grown on me. I remember writing to an acquaintance in New York that I didn't like it. I felt that Piano had undermined the sequence of the older buildings and taken away too much exhibit space in the process. With time, however, the new sequence now makes its own sense. I'm still not sure about the elevators, which are gorgeous and voyeuristic, but also extravagant, excessive even, and possibly eroding of the space for exhibits. Still, apologies to my correspondent for my early and now revised view. I'm like this with music, too.

555 Washington's denouement

2010-05-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

More than a month has passed since the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously decertified the EIR for the 555 Washington Tower, killing the project off. Next up, hopefully, is a reconsideration of the planning context of the city's downtown retail and financial districts and the neighborhoods that adjoin them. Among the wild cards is the "central subway" that will connect the Caltrain station at Fourth & King with Chinatown. Some argue that it will result in the obliteration of Chinatown. More likely Chinatown will survive in a form similar to the antiquarians' row on Jackson Street. The real issue, I think, is what happens to this transitional area as a whole. The risk is that denser development will surge haphazardly north across the current Washington Street divide, with pockets of "history" embalmed within it. Absent a new plan, or the affirmation of the current one, a resurgent economy will generate a renewed push north - and spot zoning will again raise its ugly head. A new plan could focus attention on the transit-served heart of the core, and ideally reaffirm the limits of high-density redevelopment to the north.

DIA Beacon

2010-05-25T21:43:00.000-07:00

Driving to Bard College last week, I saw a sign for Beacon and made my way to DIA. This expansive, naturally lighted ex-factory houses quantities of installation art. (On a sunny day, the natural light is oppressive.) The Robert Irwin-designed garden, overlooking the Hudson, has a formality that feels right for the setting. Most of the collection is a time capsule, but a five-element piece by Richard Serra retains its power. The basement is like a carnival's haunted house. A few days later, crossing the railroad bridge at Rokeby Farm in Barrytown, the Serra came back to mind: same color.

Leopold Kohr

2010-05-06T21:41:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I read a talk given by Ivan Illich on Leopold Kohr, who argued that everything on the planet has implicit limits, which he called their proper proportions. He argued from morphology, which found, for example, that the basic form of a mouse has an upper limit, at which point it can't carry its own weight - its legs are too spindly. I'm writing a paper that applies his idea to urban density. I think that proportionality may be the way to go where the issue is how to transition from one density to another. There's also an absolute limit to consider. In his new book, Design and Truth (Yale, 2010), Robert Grudin describes in passing the shortcuts that were taken in New York's World Trade Center towers to increase their height and floor area without increasing the construction budget. He stops short of saying they were too high, period. Yet a number of buildings now exceed them. Perhaps the true limiting factor is risk, real and imagined.

Trace

2010-04-19T20:47:00.000-07:00

A first meeting with a larger group of potential contributors to Trace, a San Francisco-focused blog that will pick up where LINE left off, discussing design, culture, and urbanity in the city and region, but without the luggage of institutional affiliation. Some interesting comments and suggestions. This is a good moment for it, one person said - there's an hunger for real (and critical) coverage, which no one is providing.

Autobiography with time

2010-04-11T17:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why I think this phrase, which came to me late this afternoon, is any different from "the life and times," but - thinking about memoirs and the like - I wondered how to avoid the solipsism of that genre, and also how to give the dimension of time within life its due. We react to people and places, but it's time that tempers our reaction, not least by showing us different aspects of them. We are variables, too, of course, but our central illusion has us otherwise.

The AIA's taint

2010-04-10T22:43:00.001-07:00

At lunch on Wednesday, I asserted that the AIA's involvement with whichever national magazine it sponsors inevitably results in its vulgarization. I was assured that the AIA has no real influence on its affiliated magazine, but I don't think it's as direct as that. It's more of a taint than an influence, something to live down rather than live up to. (I don't think this phenomenon is limited to the AIA, but is the norm for institutions, which, despite the presumed high hopes of their founders, fall rapidly to a level of relative mediocrity. Yet they live on, subscribed to even by those who dismiss them, since they issue badges of belonging and honor.)

555 Wash Update (3)

2010-04-10T11:37:00.000-07:00

It now proves that the 555 Washington developer owes money to SF's planning department, and they want to be paid immediately, since he's threatening to pull the plug if the Supervisors turn back the project's EIR. In consequence, the item is off the Board's 20 April agenda. The bigger issue - the absence of a viable development framework for downtown SF and vicinity - is still before us. Now's the time.

555 Wash Update (2)

2010-04-06T21:48:00.000-07:00

Aaron Peskin sent a blog post by John Cote on SFGate noting that the big 555 Washington showdown is now at the SF Board of Supervisors meeting on 20 April. Supervisor Peskin explained in a follow-up note that if an issue - in this case, appeal of the EIR's approval - is being heard by the Supervisors, the Planning Commission hearing is postponed.

Mountain Lakes

2010-04-04T12:05:00.000-07:00

For the next issue of Common Place, I'm thinking of writing a memoir of the New Jersey town - 28 miles west of Manhattan - where I grew up. I was last there in 1966. Sometime in the 1990s, a new owner tore down the midcentury-modern house my parents built at 47 Powerville Road. Recently, I bought a copy of a 1951 book on modern houses published by McCall's. My parents chose the design from this book and had the architect modify it slightly: a bigger garage and an enclosed den rather than a semi-open porch. News of its destruction made me decide to rely on my mind's version of the town, so this will be an account of that semi-fictional place.

555 Wash op-ed revised

2010-04-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

Architect's Newspaper has linked the revised version of my op-ed on 555 Washington. The next hurdle is really on 20 April, when it goes before SF's Board of Supervisors, but of course it would fabulous if that fourth vote materialized and the tower died on 15 April at the Planning Commission. (Thanks to Sam Lubell for the link.)

Sensing the fabric

2010-03-28T17:37:00.000-07:00

What made you aware of the impact that development has on what surrounds it? A reader of my recent op-ed piece on 555 Washington asked me this. I replied that my time-lapse sense of Tokyo, which I've visited every few years since 1989, might be one root of it, but I thought later that walking with my father to our hotel on St. James Place in London in early 1953, seeing the missing teeth on that block that reflected the German's wartime bombing of the city, gave me an early sense of what constitutes fabric.

The pattern persists up to a point, as St. James Place revealed. Urban renewal and its successor, the consolidation of smaller sites to facilitate larger-scale redevelopment, supplant the fabric. They often wrench the present from all connection with the past as a repository of local acts over time. This is why redevelopment can be so destructive.

In Tokyo, I was struck by how good the fabric was, and how little the locals understood what they had, even as they were losing it left and right. I'm not opposed to higher-density redevelopment, but it so rarely shows any real imagination or the slightest interest in regaining, at a new scale, the salient features of what was there before. Perhaps this is impossible, but it would be interesting, not to say responsible, to make the attempt or, if it really can't be done, to limit the damage by putting most of the existing fabric out of bounds.

SF's central subway

2010-03-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

Howard Wong, a fellow member of SPUR's project review committee, sent me an email today about the proposed central subway, which would run up 4th Street, linking the CalTrain Station at King Street in Mission Bay with Market Street, Chinatown, and North Beach. He included a handout quoting Allan Jacobs (emeritus urban design professor at U.C. Berkeley and former SF planning director) warning that new stations in the latter two areas would spur redevelopment that would change them beyond recognition. I haven't studied the issue, but it looks like another reason to do a new plan now for SF's urban core and the districts that adjoin it.

Aftershocks

2010-03-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, an image of the 555 Washington Tower showed up on the front page of the Bay Area section of the Chronicle today (22 March 2010), with a quote from one of San Francisco's dissident planning commissioners to the effect that the building will be "a death trap for birds." The image reminded me again how derivative the tower is. In plan, though, it rises from a square shape before becoming conical - something that the drawings don't show very well. I wonder how it will actually look at street level. My opposition is not to the tower's design, however, but to its potential implications. Even if Renzo Piano were designing the building, at this scale it would put the same pressure on the district to the north. That district is essentially unprotected now, since everything is being decided case-by-case. Until that stops and there's a new plan that can guide the destiny of the area for another generation, it's "up for grabs," as John King noted.

555 Washington

2010-03-18T23:07:00.000-07:00

I went to my first SF Planning Commission hearing today, spending three hours listening to the commissioners debate the 555 Washington EIR. In the end, they certified the EIR, with only three votes against. It was my sense early on that the vote was in even before the meeting started. There are several shills among the commissioners, along with others who are clearly principled, intelligent, and hardworking. Those others must be intensely frustrated. Consideration of the project proper was continued to 15 April, owing to a glitch in the public noticing. My sense is that the deal's been done, unless one more vote can be found. SPUR was MIA and John King, who weighed in months ago, was silent. I hope he finds his voice before the next hearing, or this thing will be entitled.

Viral, baby!

2010-03-17T23:36:00.000-07:00

When my op-ed piece on the 555 Washington Tower in SF was picked up - with commentary - by CurbedSF, a friend wrote "You've gone viral, baby!" I sent it to ArchNewsNow and Planetizen when it appeared, but it showed up spontaneously elsewhere (including archBoston.org's bulletin board). SF Supervisor Aaron Peskin called me on Tuesday, asking if he could reprint the piece and distribute it in his district. (I referred him to Sam Lubell, editor of the CA edition of Architect's Newpaper.) The SF Planning Commission will take up the 555 Washington Tower again tomorrow (18 March 2010) at 11 a.m. (Rm. 400, City Hall).

Op-ed in A/N

2010-03-16T12:41:00.000-07:00

Architect's Newspaper just ran an op-ed I wrote about the 555 Washington Tower in San Francisco.

Off to Seoul

2010-03-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

I've been working on two Gensler monographs in concert with the designers Mark Jones and Peiti Chia. (Also on the team are Mark Coleman, creative director, Katya Black, manager and photo editor, and Linda Bouchard, copy editor. Vernon Mays, Dave Keller, and Erin Luckiesh all pitched in at different points.) The final files went off to the printer in Seoul late Friday (12 March 2010). The color work, no small matter, continues. The books are the work of many hands. They include case studies of Gensler projects, and the teams that worked on them were very responsive. However, they needed to see the case studies brought to a certain level of specificity before they really understood our intent. Once they did, new materials and thoughtful comments poured in.

Bruce Graham

2010-03-10T23:21:00.000-08:00

Bruce Graham spoke at Washington University's School of Architecture when I was a student there in the second half of the 1960s. He was cosmopolitan, not the terror I've heard described subsequently. He talked quite a bit about Latin America as a market. (He was born there, but it may have been the China of that era: Maki came by the school, too - on his way back from Latin America.) Graham had a late period that included a respectable tower in Barcelona (built during the Olympics) and Exchange House at Broadgate in London - a remarkable office tower that spans the tracks at Liverpool Street Station with its bridge-like structure. Both buildings were an anomaly for SOM, which was mired in (mostly bad) postmodernism at the time. His Inland Steel Building (designed with Walter Netsch) always struck me as the best of the three "towers" (with Crown Zellerbach and Lever House) that put SOM on the map in the 1950s.

In awe of copy editors

2010-03-08T21:09:00.001-08:00

I spent today on the second round of pickups for two books I'm editing, going through the copy editor's comments. The modifier holographic came to mind as I marveled at how this person surfaced the tiniest details for inspection. Putting these books together is like working on a Ducati - not that I've ever done so myself, but an amateur mechanic of my acquaintance once told me that rebuilding one was his most daunting project: "A lot of moving parts."

In praise of copy editors

2010-02-23T22:38:00.000-08:00

We're in the final stretch with two monographs. Today I went through the copy editor's review of one. Although doing the pickups is laborious, it's obviously far better to deal with them now than to wince in pain discovering them later. Through painful experience, we've learned to build in time for not just one, but at least two and sometimes three rounds of copy editing, depending on how much the text has changed. Two rounds are the minimum because the process of ragging the text (on the layout) often introduces glitches that are not apparent beforehand. (By the time we're done, we will have gone through four rounds. The goal is to minimize if not eliminate changes while the books are on press.)

Another blog

2010-02-20T23:59:00.000-08:00

Earlier today, prompted by a comment made by an editor at Arcade, I started a new blog, Quotes & Thoughts, that continues a compendium that I mostly wrote in Spain in April 2008. (Found in Common Place 1, if you're interested.) The theme of Q&T is "commentary on things read and heard."

Sonnets

2010-02-20T23:52:00.000-08:00

Last week, I went to hear the poet Charles Stein read at Moe's Books in Berkeley. He's my daughter's neighbor, so I had an introduction. Talking with him, I mentioned that I was writing sonnets. "When I was in college," he replied, "my roommate and I used to compete to see who could write them faster." Stein writes remarkably long, convoluted, and difficult poems. He's also translated the Odyssey, which I really liked.

Polemics (3)

2010-02-20T23:42:00.000-08:00

I rewrote my polemic, and then revised it again for blog use. I realized after doing this that I preferred that version, whether it appears in a blog or in print. It gets to the point faster. My writer friend Kenneth Caldwell was kind enough to offer editorial advice along the way. It's always interesting to see how others look at something I've written - what they question, and what they feel are the main points. I wrote something for Arcade recently. Sending it off to the editor, I realized I had no idea if it was any good. She thought it was. Others will have to weigh in when it appears.

Burj speculation

2010-02-17T21:24:00.000-08:00

The "Eavesdrop" column of the current Architect's Newspaper (NY edition) mentions Adrian Smith's complaint that SOM is failing to credit him as the design partner for the Burj. My own theory is that the NY office felt that the Burj was a dog, and were therefore content to let Smith have the credit and take the fall. When it unexpectedly proved to be a hit, NY moved quickly to erase Smith from the picture. The obvious question AN should pose back: So who designed it, then?

Polemics (2)

2010-02-17T21:20:00.000-08:00

Although tempted to send off my revised polemical piece, I decided (quite uncharacteristically) to let it sit for 24 hours, and saw another way in to the topic that seems better. In the meantime, an editor who'd seen the previous two drafts asked if her publication could run it. Not quite sure what lesson to draw from this, other than the perennial one that it takes time to develop an argument, let alone argue it persuasively.

Polemics

2010-02-15T21:48:00.001-08:00

I wrote an opinion piece today about a proposed tower in SF. My first draft lit into the architect, a fount of mediocrity. After considering the actual audience I'm trying to influence - planning commissioners - I rewrote the piece to give them a reason to stall. I felt, in between the two versions, that the first was playing to the gallery, and its polemical opening would be brushed off as "beside the point." Design quality is strictly optional in most development in SF. The tower ignores a lot of zoning strictures, which the architect says are unwarranted constraints in 2010. Fine, I now argue, let's address that issue first, then we can look at your tower.

Books and e-books

2010-02-10T20:04:00.000-08:00

Tuesday's FT had a full-page discussion by David Gelles and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of e-readers, e-books, and the publisher revolt against Amazon's loss-leader strategy to hook people on its Kindle. The gist: Publishers are ecstatic that Apple has entered the fray. They want competition, and they're trying to force Amazon to accept the bookstore pricing model, which gives most of the money to them. The dust-up between Amazon and Macmillan was the opening move. (Amazon blinked.) Now Rupert Murdoch, owner of Harper Collins, is weighing in, criticizing Amazon's below-cost pricing. The question for me is, where does this leave bookstores? The FT writers say that "this will kill that" (to quote Victor Hugo) - e-books will wreck the bookseller model. But they note that publishers want bookstores to continue, because they're a known commodity. From my own involvement with a Berkeley bookstore, I would say that the terms of trade for smaller bookstores especially is highly unfavorable. What will publishers do to help them endure? One thing that comes to mind is a "Buy the book, get the download free" offer. This might be especially attractive to an academic audience.

Shoptalk

2010-02-07T11:20:00.000-08:00

My Brooklyn-based writer friend Christine Van Lenten, noting that Writing & Design is about "shoptalk," recalled that when Picasso was asked what he talked about with other artists, he answered, "Where can I get some really good blue paint?"

Bill Stout & Peter Miller

2010-02-03T21:46:00.000-08:00

I went to a talk on Tuesday (2.2.10) in SF with the booksellers Bill Stout (of SF, also a publisher) and Peter Miller (of Seattle), both specialists in architecture and design. Although Bill out-talked Peter 6:1, Peter made the point that the iPad, etc. may end up turning everything ephemeral that's now in print into digital form. The analogy (noted later by Mark Coleman) is direct-to-DVD movies. That would leave print as "discernment," with publishers doing the heavy lifting. In other words, printed books and journals would be keepers. Everything else would be through-put. I liked this.

Studying Writing (3)

2010-01-31T20:27:00.000-08:00

An interview with Mary Karr in Paris Review 191 makes the case for writers' programs. She certainly benefited from hers, both from the instructors and from her fellow students. In the same issue, there's an interview with Ha Jin in which he says that if he had to write for money, he'd never have become the writer he is. Mary Karr set out to be a writer, whereas Ha Jin studied to be a translator and then, coming to America, "made a living" until someone read his work and helped him get published (in the Paris Review). His account of how he teaches writing also shows the value of working with a writer like him. If you can find someone like him, go for it.

Writing sonnets

2010-01-29T22:32:00.001-08:00

After reading Mary Oliver's book on poetic structure, Invitation to the Dance, I started writing sonnets. I picked a rhyming pattern from one by Shakespeare, noting that his patterns vary. (In one, almost all the lines rhyme.) To my surprise, the process of rhyming came easily to me, and the sonnet form seemed to sharpen rather than hinder my thoughts. It reminded me of giving talks in Japan in which I was asked to pause after three or four sentences for the translation. I once gave one more or less extemporaneously, using each pause to come up with the next brief increment. Some modern sonnets don't rhyme. (Frederick Seidel has an example in My Tokyo, for instance.) Rhyming, to me, is the point - or one point - of writing sonnets.

Editing two books

2010-01-28T23:15:00.000-08:00

Since before the break, I've been editing two monographs. The last few weeks, it's become more intense, working with the texts (and their respective writers, one of which is helping out with the editing) in relation to the evolving layouts. There are a lot of moving parts. Today's adventures included giving one text a new ending and reorganizing the other to give it a new opening and, partly to make it fit and partly to eliminate repetition, to cut it in half, roughly. At the end of the day, I felt like steam was pouring out of my ears. And there are still several more rounds of editing until everything goes to the copy editor in mid-February. It's a necessarily incremental process: I think I'm catching everything, but actually I'm just focused on the standout issues, so much else gets by me.

Studying writing (2)

2010-01-16T11:38:00.000-08:00

I am skeptical of writing programs, despite their obvious appeal. I don't think it's a good idea to make writing a field of study. I realize that the whole idea of fields has been completely transformed since I went to university - indeed, it was changing while I was in graduate school as specialization took hold of the curriculum, even in architecture, and so-called fields arose around academic entrepreneurs (as we might charitably call them). Just to say it, I think that writing is an accompaniment to work and life, even for a writer. Studying with a writer may have some value, but it seems crazy to call that a field and give degrees in it.

Richardson on Emerson

2010-01-16T11:23:00.000-08:00

As noted previously, I read Richardson's new book on Emerson and writing last weekend. While the book has some good moments, I was surprised how badly edited it is. It's clearly a compendium of pieces that Richardson wrote on other occasions, but there's no evidence of an editorial hand pulling them together and eliminating the substantial overlap that crops up in the published edition. The same Emerson quotes reappear from section to section. While they're interesting, they're less so on second or third encounter. For such a short book, especially one on writing, the forgetful quality of the text, like being in the company of someone whose memory is going, is unfortunate. One reason for editors is to save writers (and readers) from that affliction.

Studying writing

2010-01-16T00:27:00.000-08:00

Fresh from reading an issue of Poets & Writers: Can writing be taught? Discuss.

Emerson on writing

2010-01-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

Earlier today, I bought Robert D. Richardson's slim volume, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (University of Iowa - 2009). A writing tip from the master: "The first rule of writing is not to omit the thing you meant to say." And some advice about getting it done: "The only path of escape...is performance. You must do your work before you shall be released."

A gardener's year

2010-01-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

Looking ahead, I took away (from the hours in a year) the time spent on subsistence, errands, commuting, and paid work. That left about the same number of hours for "other" as for work. This made me think about what falls in the category of "other," and how, because a job, like school, provides a built-in structure, what falls out of it is "time off," often unstructured for this reason. Not everything has to have a structure, of course, nor is "other" always work, but there's a benefit to thinking about it. The gardener's year is one analogy that came to mind. Another is the liturgical year, which has its seasons, its saints' days and feast days. Something of a mix, I thought, might be helpful to shape time, a dimension that grows more valuable as I get older.

The aesthetic

2010-01-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

Terry Eagleton: "As artistic production is gradually separated from other kinds of social production in the modern period, the discourse of the aesthetic becomes correspondingly narrow. In the twentieth century, after modernism, it ceased to be a concept of political relevance. In fact, modernism is the last moment when the aesthetic can still be political. After that, the discourse passes into the hands of the academics and the specialists ... It has become a technical concept, but that's not the way it started. The aesthetic began in the broadest possible way as a concept covering the whole of our bodily, sensual life. Indeed, it was not about art at all when it first appeared." (From Eagleton and Beaumont, The Task of the Critic, Verso, 2009, pages 225-226, condensed/reordered)

LV versus NY

2009-12-31T00:21:00.000-08:00

I was interested that the opening of CityCenter in Las Vegas prompted comparisons with the World Trade Center. The collaborative love-fest among the starchitect participants in CityCenter was also contrasted with the various forced marriages that have dogged the WTC since Herbert Muschamp first convened his ideas competition. As I recall, the strongest entry was Norman Foster's twin-tower "kiss" - produced without partners. Other pairings, right up to the Freedom Tower and its proposed neighbors, seem stillborn in comparison. And almost nothing has been built. Meanwhile, MGM MIRAGE got CityCenter done in five years. Of course, Las Vegas is a completely different development context from New York. (Ironically, I remember listening - in 1999 - to the real estate honcho of a big German bank wax nostalgic about how easy it was to build in Manhattan compared to Frankfurt. I guess these things are relative.)

Decade Top 10

2009-12-30T23:28:00.000-08:00

Various architecture critics have been running "decade top 10" lists. I went through John King's yesterday, focused on San Francisco. This decade has produced oddities like David Chipperfield's revival of the stripped-down classicism so popular in fascist circles in the 1930s (and later with Philip Johnson). I wonder if the Burj won't be the signature building of the decade when historians look back at it, the way the Empire State Building came to epitomize the 1930s? Design per se isn't really the deciding factor - consider the popularity of SF's Transamerica Pyramid. Despite their mediocrity, these buildings capture the Zeitgeist. That happens less frequently than once a decade, I imagine. SF's Ferry Building (1904) is another that does so, which suggests a much longer cycle (per city).

Blogging away

2009-12-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

Six months have passed since I started Writing & Design. It began as a place to write notes and observations about "design writing," but has evolved to take in topics like the fate of print and the nature of design criticism. It's still one paragraph at a time, I note - that format seems to work best for me in this medium. My entries ebb and flow, but I enjoy writing it. It's hard to know who reads it - it gets hits from all over the world, but there's never been much feedback. (I'd be glad to get it: j2parman@gmail.com or post a comment.)

Design Vanguard

2009-12-09T23:11:00.000-08:00

The 12/09 issue of Architectural Record includes a survey of "emerging talent" that's really good - new faces, strong work. I'm really glad to see it. What's especially nice about it is the amount of space they give some of the practices, so you get a sense of their body of work, not just single projects. There's also a thoughtful essay by Martin Filler that relates to the survey theme by discussing the perils of youthful fame and, in the case of Frank Gehry, of late blooming. Filler, who writes for the New York Review of Books, is always worth reading. I wish they'd have him more regularly as their essayist. Anyway, bravo! I was starting to lose hope.

Print, RIP?

2009-12-06T21:13:00.000-08:00

Jeff Bezos is interviewed in this Sunday's NYT Magazine, and he pretty much predicts the demise of books as we now know them. I wonder. Bay area booksellers like William Stout and University Press Books say that Amazon is what's killing them, turning their stores into Mr. Bezos' showroom. I can see the point of digital books if the content is inherently ephemeral - like textbooks that are constantly revised. There's a big push on now by Murdoch and others to grab digital space for magazines, but again I'd make a distinction between those you toss away and those you don't. There's Gourmet, of course, a mag with such a devoted audience that it would probably follow it into any medium. Watching Gourmet in use in the kitchen, I picture a lot of greased-spattered Kindles. (In the interview, Bezos claims to read in the bath, his Kindle safely inside a Ziplok bag. Sounds like Martha Stewart.)

Built time

2009-12-06T18:18:00.000-08:00

A lot of postwar buildings, especially in places that were decimated in the war, physically and economically, were built for the short term: get 'em up. Yet the immediate work, especially some of the civic and institutional parts of it, was good, even great, reflecting the influence of movements like CIAM that enjoyed a rebirth in the first decade after the war. What's being torn down in the UK now is mostly the work of the 1960s and 1970s. Not everything "Brutal" was bad, but the UK had more than its share. A lot of it was also put up with the expectation that it would be pulled down when the lease expired in 20 or 25 years. That's not true, of course, of civic and institutional buildings, often equally dreadful. Does dreadful deserve a place in preservation? We preserve a lot of older buildings of no special merit, considering them part of the fabric of the city. Is this an argument for preserving more recent ugliness, or is it better to acknowledge the blight and get rid of it? (But is blight not also an inherently subjective word? Should we save some of it just to find out if someone else will like it better?)

Dubai

2009-11-30T23:19:00.000-08:00

The well-publicized troubles of Dubai have drawn renewed attention to what's been built there. Much of it reminds me of what Marx called "the fetishism of commodity," buildings detached from any underlying purpose and made pure vehicles of (apparently idle) speculation. Not every development in Dubai fell in this category, but the emirate had more than its share. Even when Las Vegas was in its thematic phase, there was method to the madness.

Awards (2)

2009-11-25T19:28:00.000-08:00

Architect still does the PA Awards, which focus on unbuilt work, perhaps the only category that can still produce surprises. (The Aga Khan Awards, because of their non-Western focus, sometimes do so, too. I miss the foundation's mag, Mimar.) The jury comments in the latest Architect built work troll, especially Aaron Betsky's versions of "rock my socks," were not very interesting, but this is typical, I think, of remarks made in the moment. The SOM Journal juries are a notable exception - the transcripts of their comments are consistently good reading. Perhaps what makes them so is the knowledge that they'll be published.

Awards

2009-11-21T00:03:00.000-08:00

I just read the current Architect, which documents an awards program. The jury was fine and its choices reasonable, but what's there isn't all that interesting. A while back, Architect took a step out of the "biggest firm" box by asking some new questions that might point to influence, not just heft. Perhaps an awards jury could be convened where each member brings her own candidates forward and makes a case through them for what might deserve our appreciation and why. No prizes, then, but a discussion worth reading about work worth noting.

Blog notes

2009-11-18T23:53:00.000-08:00

I spent 90 minutes today discussing the front end of a new blog that I'm helping to launch. The project is a recasting of an online design 'zine - web-delivered, but with a magazine format. While freed of the cost of printing, it was very time-consuming to put together. Those of us involved with it found it difficult to put out more than one or two issues a year. (It reminds me of the cooperative preschool my oldest son attended as a tot: more about process than product.) Blogs devolve a great deal to the contributors. The editors act as impresarios and curators, but within a context of improvisation rather than design. This makes it easier to attract contributors and to keep the flow of content going - at least, that's the hope!

Reputations

2009-11-15T10:50:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a reprint of the 2nd edition of Theodore Redpath's discussion of John Donne's "songs and sonets." One remarkable thing is how low Donne's reputation sank in the 19th century, almost falling out of the canon. Yet he now ranks as one of the landmarks of English poetry and prose, up there with Shakespeare and Milton. This made me think about architecture: what remains or is allowed to remain. In England, a considerable part of the built legacy of the postwar period - some arguably monstrous buildings by our current lights - is being demolished. Will the surviving remnants find adherents later, regretting the lapse in taste of an intervening generation, or are these buildings no longer useful? In a talk I heard last week, DEGW's Frank Duffy said that a building is "built time" - that is, it embodies a useful life. And the useful lives of many postwar buildings were often very short.

According to Fowler

2009-11-14T19:31:00.000-08:00

Earlier today, I bought an Oxford reprint of the original edition of a dictionary of sorts on English usage by Henry Fowler. Both the introduction and an appendix note how many of Fowler's pronouncements (circa 1925) have been supplanted. Reading it, it's clear that yesterday's low-class howlers are often today's standard English. Pronunciation is also a moving target, with Fowler's preferences frequently giving way to the alternates he deplored. It must be a useful book, though, for those who coach actors on period speech. For the publications that I edit, I use a copy editor, Judith Dunham, who channels the Chicago Manual of Style. I've always found CMS baffling and hard to use, but I've absorbed a great deal of it by reading through Dunham's corrections. (Then I read the London Review of Books and absorb quite the opposite!)

Literate cities

2009-11-05T20:34:00.000-08:00

Both the NYT and WSJ are making a play for Bay Area readers. While this reflects the wobbling state of the SF Chronicle (which delivered papers gratis to my north Berkeley neighborhood last week, pitching for subscriptions), it also speaks to the region's connection to New York as a center of the written word. (DC is more a center of the talking head.) We're emerging from a period when many periodicals sought to be "entertainment." Some were better than others, but ephemeral was the operative word - and ephemeral has left the building. So will the NYT go the way of Le Monde, focusing on politics and culture, and catering to the cognoscenti? The WSJ under Murdoch is a livelier read than it was, but more and more like other Murdoch papers in look and feel - a blend of Murdoch's instincts and the WSJ's biases, sometimes convergent, but often not. (It's refreshing to find, as I did last night, a WSJ columnist trashing Fox News.) Barron's, part of Dow Jones, seems to fly under the Murdoch radar. I've always liked its mix of cynicism and hucksterism, each well-labeled. The design press would do well to be as forthright.

In praise of Catherine Slessor

2009-11-03T21:57:00.000-08:00

Catherine Slessor writes (beautifully) for Architectural Review. Here's a snippet from a review she wrote that appears in the current issue (no. 1353, 11/09, page 57):

An hour and a half by train to the southeast of Paris, Troyes is a former textile-making town, now stoically enduring the collapse of its industrial base. Prosperity as a trading center during the Middle Ages (the town gave its name to the troy system of weights still used for precious metals) accounts for a conspicuous legacy of half-timbered houses. Within a tight maze of streets, the narrow colombage structures sway and collide like a crowd of elegantly dissipated drunks, heightening the sense of period drama. // Shaped like a champagne cork, the medieval core swells out and around the 13th-century Saint Pierre-et-Saint Paul Cathedral. On its tumescent east, the core is bounded by the Seine, linking Troyes with Paris. Nudging towards the edge of the cork where the urban texture is looser and less homogenous, Lipsky+Rollet’s site lies in the lee of the cathedral, next to the bishop’s house (now converted to an art museum). Yet despite this proximity to the town center, the site was curiously isolated and plain.

A lot of reviewers would give you that last phrase - and let it go at that. Look how much "back story" is packed into these two paragraphs (and with such evocative phrasing)!

Edting film

2009-11-01T21:22:00.001-08:00

Walking back from the Berkeley campus earlier today, I stopped in at Analog Books and bought a copy of Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (Knopf, 2004). Film editors work from several sources - the screenplay, the rushes, and perhaps a novel or a play from which both derive. They're piecing together a story that has to be told visually and through dialogue, on and off-camera sounds, and music. I never studied film, so I'll be interested to see how Murch approaches it, and also how he compares the editor's role with the director's.

New op-ed piece

2009-10-31T22:29:00.000-07:00

An op-ed piece on the cityscape that I wrote for the West Coast edition of the Architect's Newspaper has just been posted on the AN blog.

Electric Literature

2009-10-28T23:29:00.000-07:00

The NYT (28 October 2009) profiles this new literary magazine, which aims to leverage the augmentative possibilities of digital media. Electric Literature (EL) is available as a print-on-demand publication, and also on Kindle, etc., the iPhone, and as an audiobook. There are related YouTube posts and haiku-like Twitterings. Yet EL is running a 12,000-word story ("a bit long for a conventional literary magazine," says the author, Stephen O'Connor), so it's not all concision, despite the editor in chief's assertion that "everyone is reading short-form text." EL has 800 subscribers, which is pretty good for a mag with one issue.

A class (2)

2009-10-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

As the date of my participation in Topher Delaney's class on "writing about place" draws nearer, I've been thinking about how writers translate the sensory, as for example with discussions of music and wine. So while I will provide some examples that are place-specific, my theme might be better entitled "the writer's dilemma."

A class

2009-10-19T21:58:00.000-07:00

On 3 November, I am to participate in a class that the landscape architect and artist Topher Delaney has organized on how place is depicted in literature. I have to organize my thoughts. When she first mentioned it, I remembered the scene in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa Dalloway goes out to buy gloves. Lampedusa's The Leopard is another example - chock full, in fact. Place is ubiquitous in literature, needless to say, but I need examples that add up to a thesis.

Things read

2009-10-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Clifford in the NYT (national edition, 14 October 2009): Online magazines are now eligible for awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). "Just what defines an online magazine will largely be left up to the publications and judges, she writes, citing ASME chief executive Sid Holt. "If it defines itself as a magazine, we would accept the entry," he said of the Huffington Post.

Two new articles

2009-10-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

Just published: an article on Shanghai as a global financial center (with Gensler's Michel St. Pierre) in Urban Land 9/09; and a review of the four "Waste" issues of Arcade, the Seattle design mag, in arcCA 09.3 - excerpted in print, with the full text as a PDF online (a likely sign of things to come).

Counter-narrative (2)

2009-10-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

A counter-narrative would ask, Why do most new highrise towers resemble each other? The narrative points to what it considers exemplary, but this is the tip of a huge, unexamined iceberg. By understanding what brings it into being and perpetuates it, those who labor in these vastly broader fields might discover avenues of difference, possibilities of breaking through by tackling received wisdom in its own terms.

Editors

2009-10-11T19:17:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation with the man behind the counter at University Press Books in Berkeley, who said that editors must need a lot of empathy to work with writers who are often difficult or reclusive. (This is obviously less true of journalism than more rarefied forms of writing, like poetry. We were discussing Frederick Seidel, who mostly shuns publicity, but agreed to be interviewed by his publisher. My impression from the interview is that Seidel edits himself. His depiction of how he writes sounded a lot like how I write, whereas James Ellroy's description, in an interview in the same issue (190) of the Paris Review, absolutely didn't, unless you count storyboards or a list of a few would-be section headings.) Editors are impresarios: they create occasions for writers. They also have to get those occasions out the door, which means, besides empathy, they have to be able to cajole.

Seidel on form

2009-10-10T21:10:00.000-07:00

"The minute you use rhyme, or regular meter, you are doing things to the subject matter. Just as you might very much, even desperately, want to get into your poem the astonishingly gray eyes of the person you're writing about but find the poem doesn't really want those gray eyes, or maybe doesn't want eyes at all. That sort of thing. The poem is making its demands of you as you make yours of it. All the while in this process something is being made, a thing is being made." (Frederick Seidel, Paris Review 190, page 155.)

Computers and writing

2009-10-10T21:01:00.000-07:00

Frederick Seidel (in the Paris Review 190, page 163): "It's my feeling that working on the computer puts less distance between me and the poem I'm writing than my own handwriting does. The computer is nearly transparent to me. The more important thing is that it allows me to see the poem on the screen and, immediately after, on the printed-out page, much more quickly than when I was using a typewriter. I revise endlessly, and print the poem out as it progresses hundreds of times. How the lines look, how the stanzas look to the eye, is an important part of weighing them, hearing them, getting them to balance properly."

A counter-narrative of architecture

2009-10-10T00:45:00.000-07:00

What would it be like? It could begin by admitting that very little of what's labeled architecture really is. Perhaps a counter-narrative would blow the category open. Or it might limit itself to the real thing, but take the rest seriously enough to ask why we get it more often than not, even when real architecture seems appropriate and desirable. It might note if architecture sometimes answers a question in a unique way that needs to be respected, even if we don't understand the question anymore, or it's lost its original meaning. Needs to be respected: so the counter-narrative would say so with real force: Don't be an idiot! It would condemn architects for their hubris, not just for their delusions. And it would do so in time.

Peter Gowan, RIP

2009-10-08T19:51:00.000-07:00

The current issue (59) of the New Left Review has an interview with the late Peter Gowan, born a year before me (to the day), and dead from an asbestos-derived cancer "probably contracted in the ramshackle postwar building that housed Barking Tech" where he taught early on. (I was reminded of this, glancing at an article in the New York Times today about the ill effects of Chinese drywall.) Gowan described his work as an "effort to perceive what's going on in the world from a non-provincial perspective: to try to make sense of it from the angle of the great mass of the world's population." Buildings have consequences, but then so do markets, ideologies, and fears of the loss of hegemony. To read Gowan is to read a counter-narrative. Cities need one, too, and architecture perhaps most of all.