On Monday April 30, Columbia University’s Studio-X NYC is hosting the final panel to wrap up the Breaking Out and Breaking In distributed film fest.

The discussion will bring together film, architecture, crime, history, and the FBI. Panelists include special Agent Brenda Cotton, Bank Robbery Coordinator for the FBI’s Bank Robbery/Kidnapping/Extortion Squad; Thomas McShane, Retired FBI Special Agent from the Bureau’s Art Crime Team; Scott Macauley, editor-in-chief of Filmmaker Magazine, co-sponsors of the Breaking Out and Breaking In film festival; Matt Jones, designer and principal at BERG; and myself. I’ll be speaking about some of the topics discussed during last year’s Fugitive Geographies symposium and the research colloquium Space, Crime, and Architecture. I’ll also probably talk a little about Walter Benjamin as detective, Clive Owen as reverse-fugitive, and the criminal act as a particularly transgressive mode of architectural criticism.

Recapping:
Breaking Out / Breaking In panel discussion
Studio-X NYC
180 Varick Street, Suite 1610
April 30, 7pm
free and open to the public, so please come on by!

Life Without Buildings

[Michelangelo's David being scanned by The Digital Michelangelo Project]

Last week a crotch-shot appeared in my twitter stream. Now, this isn’t normally the type of thing I’d write about but this particular crotch belonged to Michelangelo’s David, the sculpture that wikipedia tells us, has “become iconic shorthand for ‘culture’” ( and if wikipedia’s validation isn’t enough, David was also the central focus of a Simpson’s episode, thereby cementing its place in our [pop]cultural canon). Yet the tweeted crotch didn’t belong to that David, but rather a golden, double-sized duplicate resting horizontally on a lowboy trailer driving through New York City.

Lookin’ good David (Inspired by Michelangelo) fb.me/17u9CgUGP

— Storefront NYC (@storefrontnyc) March 6, 2012

The enormous reproduction –officially known as David (inspired by Michelangelo)– was created in 2005 by conceptual artist Serkan Ozkaya and, more recently, served as the figurehead of a one-day event at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Though it was only in the city for a single day as a stopover en route to the 21c Museumum in Louisville, Kentucky, it seemed like David’s golden loins were in every new browser window I opened. The ubiquity of this project in all my social media streams got me thinking about my own experience with the original sculpture.

Live streaming of DOUBLE is available at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/double-david.

[David (Inspired by Michelangelo) at Storefront for Art and Architecture]

Outside the Galleria dell’Academia in Florence, home of Michelangelo’s David, I was standing in a cue that stretched along a stone wall covered with graffiti. It gave me something to read while I waited in line: “Robinson was here” and “Jack loves Diane” and “David is gay” and dozens of other scrawled declarations of identity. Nearby, buskers busked and hawkers hawked novelty boxer shorts strategically printed with images of David’s sling and stones. Thousands of partial reproductions, distributed across the world straight from the source.

Follow David (Inspired by Michelangelo) by Serkan Özkaya on twitter (@storefrontnyc #doubledavid) on March 6th starting at 11am as it tours New York City.

20 minutes and 10 Euros later, I was inside the Academia and the world fell quiet. There he was. The slayer of Goliath standing at the center of the Tribuna, an extension to the gallery designed specifically to house Michelangelo’s masterpiece. During the nine years it took to build the Tribuna, the David made a treacherous journey of his own. Covered in scaffolding for nearly a decade, he was slowly moved along a rail system created just to transport him from the Piazza della Signoria, through the streets of Florence, to the Academia. The original mobilized masterpiece. It was worth the effort. The scale and proportion of the Tribuna are the perfect complement to the sculpture. The light in the room accents every muscle and vein as it struggles against the marble. Even though there are hundreds of reproductions in museums, galleries, hotels and casinos around the world, seeing the authentic David is a visceral experience. I couldn’t suppress the stomach flutters and the dizziness that overcome me every time I see a true masterpiece. It’s humbling. Staring up at him, trying to come to terms with these feelings, I heard a man whisper to his young daughter, “no matter what happens, this is now part of your life.” That was it exactly. This experience, this work of art, was now part of my life. But more than that, it was part of me. It’s a strange thing. Why it should feel –and “feel” really is the best word; you can actually feel the original David– any different than standing in front of an exact replica is a mystery. Perhaps it’s the space. Perhaps context is everything. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that what I’m seeing was sculpted by the hands of a Renaissance master more than 500 years ago. Or perhaps its all in my head. But for whatever reason, the aura of the sculpture is undeniable.

[image of the Digital David via The Digital Michelangelo Project]

The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover… – Walter Benjamin

Or maybe not. Because for many visitors to the Academia that day, more attractive than the celebrated work of art was the small console that stands just yards away. It looked like a pub golf game but was, in fact, David 2.0. Created by Stanford labs, the digital David is a “perfect” 3D model that art-users can rotate and manipulate to examine the sculpture in much closer detail than the would be possible with the original. From six tons to thirty-two gigabytes, the digitized replica of a masterpiece can now be reconstituted in the studio of anyone with a high-speed internet connection and enough hard drive space. Fine art on demand. And since the digital Davids are perfect replicas of David as he existed during the original scan, all physical traces of history present on the surface of the original will be present in future reproductions. Can a reproduction at this level of detail include the aura of the work along with the nicks, scratches, and imperfections? I doubt it. But the flexibility afforded by the digital model creates the possibility for entirely new experiences. Like seeing a 30-foot-tall David in a Manhattan traffic jam. A reproduction that is further reproduced as we retweet camera phone photos of a that David-double lying on a lowboy truck as its transported through New York City. Digital, mobilized reproductions of a mobilized digital reproduction. Perhaps now more than ever, David is, in fact, our iconic shorthand for ‘culture’.

Life Without Buildings

Augmented reality technology may soon be the newest gadget available to crime scene investigators. A researcher at the Delft University of Technology is developing a system to allow police investigators to construct three-dimensional virtual models of crime scenes and support field agents with augmented reality information. Augmented reality (AR) is a relatively recent technology that integrates information and graphics into mediated representations of the built environment or natural world, blurring the line between the physical and the digital. Currently, it almost exclusively exists as a Smartphone novelty –see yelp’s “monocle” feature on their mobile app or the augmented reality browser Layar– but the technology may soon become more integrated into our daily lives through the use of AR-enhanced glasses. Most notably, Google seems to be making a move toward the creepy convenience of wearable computing. The New York Times recently reported that Google is developing glasses that “will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby….” Essentially, in the near future, we’ll all have Terminator vision. The Delft project aims to use the technology as more than a novelty, giving CSIs the capability to tag objects such as bullet holes or blood splatters in a virtual representation of the crime scene built from the data collected by investigators. It also allows the investigators to consult experts back at the precinct –or on the other side of the world– who, via a live video feed from a camera mounted on the glasses, see what the investigators in the field see. The system stores all the gathered evidence and information as part of the 3D model, which is itself admissible in court as evidence.

Crime is confronted by and pursued from its physical traces. But these traces, these vestiges of a transgressive moment, have a limited lifespan and can be accidentally corrupted by investigators in the field. With augmented reality crime scenes, however, that’s not the case. The technology allows pristine spaces to be digitally preserved indefinitely. But more than that, it makes it theoretically possible for the entire investigative process to be outsourced. Space is becoming as malleable and fluid as photographic images. We can know everything now. Everything from everywhere at anytime. The notion of the mysterious or the unknown is fast becoming a nostalgia. While the romantic may lament the loss of the unknown, the detective celebrates it, for it is his job to discover the unknown and reveal the latent messages encoded in space.

While certainly invaluable as field tools that optimize a police department’s resources, the information collected from augmented reality crime scenes will also make an incredible training tool for new investigators. Though AR is on the bleeding edge of forensic investigation technology, it shares a premise with a more archaic method developed in the early days of forensic science when reconstructed crime scenes, built at the the scale of a dollhouse, proved to be valuable training tools for the earliest investigators. These tiny models were created by millionaire heiress Frances Glessner Lee. She called them The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

Glessner Lee, who grew up in the fortress-like Glessner House in Chicago, had an unusual hobby for an early twentieth century society dame. Using police reports and witness statements, she constructed composite models of crime scenes at the scale of one inch to one foot. Matronly Glessner Lee –who some speculate was the inspiration behind Angela Lansbury’s character in Murder She Wrote– was passionate about police work and believed in the need to improve training for those investigating violent deaths. She also believed through careful observation and evaluation of a space, indirect evidence will reveal what transpired within that space. Her models present uncorrupted crime scenes generated from evidence, extrapolation, and Glessner Lee’s own penchant for interior design. Architect and educator Laura J. Miller writes about The Nutshell Studies in her essay “Denatured Domesticity: An account of femininity and physiognomy in the interiors of Frances Glessner Lee.” She describes how Glessner Lee subverted the notions of domesticity typically enforced upon a woman of her standing by using the skills she learned as a young woman to educate and entertain police detectives instead of debutants or tycoons. But the Nutshells are more than useful tools for the study of forensic investigation. Miller writes that Glessner Lee’s dioramas “peel back the domestic scene’s veneer of privacy, propriety, and routine, opening the home to reinterpretation through its exposure as the scene of a crime.” Though the essay focuses on the domestic interior, such observations ring true for any architectural space. Her descriptions of domestic space as a conflict between cultural scripting and natural behavior reveal an implicit, though rarely discussed facet of architecture: it’s naive optimism. Or perhaps egotistical expectation. That is to say, the notion that a space will be used as intended by its architect. Programmed space constructs behaviors. The criminal act violates those constructions, revealing them to be fictions. From this initial transgression, the investigator constructs his own fictions – speculative narratives to explain the crime and locate the criminal.

In approaching the space from an objective perspective, the detective sees architectural space more purely than the resident, and perhaps he even comes to understand its use and affordances in ways unanticipated by the architect. “The forensic investigator,” Miller writes, “takes on the tedious task of sorting through the detritus of domestic life gone awry….the investigator claims a specific identity and an agenda: to interrogate a space and its objects through meticulous visual analysis.” There are specific methods –geometric search patterns or zones, for example– by which the forensic investigator completes his analysis of a space. There’s an elegant logic to these methods, as they were have been refined over more than a century to ensure complete coverage and to maximize resources. But if the augmented reality future ever comes to pass, these methods will have to be completely rethought. The aesthetics of search will be redesigned around virtual representations of space. It’s not difficult to imagine a future where a preserved crime scenes is something like a reconstructed photosynth, built from the assembled images and data gathered by multiple officers and investigators, each with their own unique objectives and predispositions. Whereas the painstakingly crafted Nutshell models reveal Glessner Lee’s own biases and beliefs, such AR composite models are near-instantaneous, collective representations that make the detective’s “meticulous visual analysis” a desk job.

Both Glessner Lee’s models and the AR crime scenes present a subversive view of architectural space. With these models, be they physical or virtual, representation functions not just as illustration, but as revelation. In “Denatured Domesticity,” Miller writes that “The diorama’s removal of one wall of a room emphasizes the absence of a critical mediating boundary and destabilizes conventional understandings of interior and exterior, and therefore, the coding of private and public space.” The space of a crime scene is defamiliarized by the view afforded by the removal of this wall. A virtual model essentially removes all walls, exploding the crime scene to be reassembled at the investigator’s will. By now it’s largely accepted that new media technologies denigrate, if not completely eradicate, the boundaries between the interior and the exterior of our everyday lives; a process that continues with each new device and piece of software. As the walls surrounding our own environment collapse and our lives are opened to new investigations, I’m reminded of the words of German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. In his essay “A Little History of Photography” Benjamin writes, “But isn’t every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit?”

As for the Pink Bathroom…

[Note: Though the date has been altered, the Witness report and the original image of Glessner Lee's model of The Pink Bathroom were excerpted from The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death]

Life Without Buildings

["Massimo Scolari, Dream of a Shadow, The Man (2011), reimagined as a vintage science fiction book cover because that's exactly what it looks like."]

Italo Calvino did not necessarily listen to everything Massimo Scolari said when he spoke to him about architecture, but the attention of the Italian writer was captured when he learned that the young man was also a painter. In the lives of writers there is always a moment when, confronted by a reader, conflicting imaginaries must be reconciled. The writer is called upon to explain or defend what is, to him, intuitive and personal. But when Calvino met young Scolari on that fateful New Year’s Eve, he was met with a strange request: to depict the Invisible Cities. The obvious problem, which the writer was quick to point out as he politely rejected the painter’s inquiry: The cities were invisible. They existed only within the mind. Yet in Scolari’s pleas, Calvino was able to discern an urgent need that could only be met through a narration of walls and towers destined to crumble and the writer promised to send him descriptions of visible cities, intended to be given form and color. Their construction was sadly preempted by the writer’s death, yet the painter continued his pursuit, conjuring a world of cities impervious to history.

Cities & Cocktails 1

Now I shall tell of Rudolfia, a city formed of stone and memory, whose great cathedral was mined from a mountain beneath the ocean. The traveler who enters Rudolfia must pass through an invisible gateway between the church and its archive, incomplete after more than a century of construction. Upon crossing this threshold, my companions and I found ourselves unknowingly indoctrinated into the beliefs of Rudolfia and welcomed within the sacred edifice where drunken priests led us through labyrinthian chambers designed to retain their voluntary prisoners. After wandering for hours through the sanctum sanctorum, we entered into a ballroom wrought from the most brutal of materials, yet emitting a comforting glow of deep amber and the unmistakable din of scholars in revelry. Surely this was a feast day celebration.

The walls of the cathedral were not adorned with tapestries or colored glass, but with glowing windows looking out toward hidden cities and kingdoms unimagined. They were unlike any places our well-traveled party had ever seen, yet vaguely reminiscent of a builder from the land of Marco Polo. Like Rudolfia itself, the world behind the glass was made of ruins that have somehow slipped the shackles of time; ruins that remain untouched by the ravages of nature and unaffected by the fragility of memory. We saw Building Mountains shape the sky and Ozymandias waiting to be remembered while long-dead painters searched for Biblical cities sculpted from desert sands. Though each view revealed a different city, they shared one mysterious feature: the presence of a single traveler, flying through the air on a strange wooden glider. He was a kindred spirit, of this I was sure, a fellow explorer in service to his own king.

It was said that these windows, these portals through space and time, presented cities imagined by a brilliant architect whose designs evoke both flood and flight, whose life’s work spans centuries that pass in decades. His is a world where thought manifests as pure form and color, destined to remain unconstructed in ours, though no less real. Surely such a place should exist only within the pages of an illuminated manuscript, yet by some mystical transmogrification, they are brought into existence by the presence of the revelers themselves. For in Rudolfia there is a magic, or perhaps a science, that causes memory to be made corporeal. A careless word can conjure ghosts or manifest castles in the air. Such risks are necessary, it was revealed to us in secret, for the great stone cathedral of Rudolfia is built on glass foundations and the clinking of glassware joined with the repetition of incantations reifies the city’s architecture.

As my companions and I departed from Rudolfia, our spirits high and minds cloudy, I happened to glance back for a final look at the massive, brutal cathedral. To my surprise, as the night grew long and the sounds of revelry grew fainter, the cathedral itself began to dematerialize. Where it once stood, a raven glider built from the remnants of a bridge or ship soared into the night sky, its faceless traveler freed from the mind and the page of the architect. A silent, nocturnal herald of The End of The City.

[Massimo Scolari: The Representation of Architecture runs until May 4, 2012 at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery]

Life Without Buildings

[Robert W. Tebbs, photographic survey of a Louisiana Plantation (1926); via]

I’m currently reading William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! It’s a incredible book. A visceral portrait of a haunted, Civil War era American South. I haven’t finished it yet, so this post is pretty much spoiler-free, but I was so impressed with the depictions of the mansion around which most of the story’s central tragedies unfold that I couldn’t wait to post its description. Known as Sutpen’s Hundred, the 100 acre plantation is imbued with a personality and life that reflects the disposition of its builders and the futility of struggling against the destiny it inflicts upon its unfortunate occupants.

…and so into the house (somehow smaller than its actual size –it was of two storeys– unpainted and a little shabby, yet with an air, a quality of grim endurance as though it had been created to fit into and complement a world in all ways a little smaller than the one in which it found itself) where in the gloom of the shuttered hallway those air was even hotter than outside, as if there were prisoned in it like in a tomb all the suspiration of slow heat-laden time which had recurred during the forty-three years… [p06]

He lived out there, eight miles from any neighbor, in masculine solitude in what might be called the half acre gunroom of a baronial splendor. He lived in the spartan shell of the largest edifice in the county, not excepting the courthouse itself…without any feminized softness of window pane or door or mattress.

[Sutpen's] presence alone compelled that house to accept and retain human life; as though houses actually possess a sentience, a personality and character acquired not from the people who breathe or have breathed in them so much as rather inherent in the wood and brick or begotten upon the wood and brick by the man or men who connived and built them – in this one an incontrovertible affirmation for emptiness, desertion; an insurmountable resistance to occupancy save when sanctioned and protected by the ruthless and the strong. [p67]

As this house is given human characteristics, Quentin Compson, the reluctant historian burdened with this tale of woe, is himself transformed into a historic setting:

His very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, entity, he was a commonwealth.

And of course, the story of a house is incomplete without the story of its architect. Excluding a few period details, Faulkner’s description of the French architect, whose passion and mirthless determination drives him to complete the work at the cost of his own personal wellbeing, could very well be that of a slightly eccentric contemporary architect:

…a small, alertly resigned man with a grim, harried Latin face, in a frock coat and a flowered waistcoat and a hat which would have created nor furore on a Paris boulevard, all of which he was to wear constantly for the next two years –the somberly theatric loathing and the repression of fatalistic and amazed determination– while his white client and the negro crew which he was to advise though not direct went stark naked save for a coating of dried mud. This was the French architect. [p26]

…the architect in his formal coat and his Paris hat and his expression of grim and embittered amazement lurked about the environs of the scene with his air something between a casual and bitterly disinterested spectator and a condemned and conscientious ghost…[amazed] at himself, at the inexplicable and incredible fact of his own presence. But he was a good architect….And not only an architect…but an artist since only an artist could have burned those two years in order to build a house which he doubtless not only expected but firmly intended never to see again….only an artist could have borne Sutpen’s ruthlessness and hurry and still manage to curb the dream of grim and castle like magnificence at which Sutpen obviously aimed, since the place was Sutpen planned it would have been almost as large as Jefferson itself at the time; that the little grim harried foreigner had singlehanded given battle to and vanquished Sutpen’s fierce and overweening vanity or desire for magnificent or for vindication or whatever it was…. [p28]

Faulkner’s writing evokes a true sense of time and place. The well-constructed narrative communicates the tragedy and history of Sutpen’s Hundred. I don’t see any reason why such a method couldn’t be used in architectural criticism. Though of course, such an experiential recount of a building would be personal rather than universal. But that may not be a bad thing. After all, aren’t best songs and stories –those that resonate most with us– true accounts of personal experience? Don’t we project ourselves into that narrative? Perhaps a more narrative criticism would allow the public to connect with architecture in a more meaningful way. Beyond criticism though, I wonder how such evocations could actually inform the design process? Could architects more explicitly use narrative as a design tool to create places that more deeply resonate with us?

[Note: page numbers reference the Vintage International Edition of Absalom, Absalom! (November, 1990)]

Life Without Buildings

[still from Groundhog Day, dir. Harold Ramis (1993)]

The same things happen. The spray-painted tag was written on a crumbling wall in New Orleans and it immediately struck a dissonant chord in me. I kept walking, staring down at the fractured sidewalk pavement. I kept walking and when I looked up, I saw a nearly identical brick wall and the words scrawled on it: the same things happen. I kept walking. Though it’s been almost 10 years since I saw that graffiti, it’s burned into my mind. The same things happen. Perhaps it haunts me because I realized at that moment that yeah, the same things do happen. History repeats itself at global scale but also at a personal scale. Over and over. It’s a depressing epiphany. The same things happen. The repetition of this tag throughout the city only makes it worse, charging the words with the power to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, nurturing paranoia and dooming me to a Groundhog Day loop.

Speaking of Groundhog Day I’ve been thinking a lot about repetition lately and what better time to share some of these thoughts than on the day Punxsutawney Phil has doomed America to six more weeks of Winter? A larger essay on the topic is in the works, so some or all of what follows may, appropriately, repeat in a later piece. Or this post might just evolve from a nascent collection of thoughts into something more fully-formed. Anyway, back to Groundhog Day. The movie has proven so popular that it has transformed the nature of Groundhog Day from a simple human interest story about a weather-predicting rodent into a television trope describing temporal recursion; this is usually done for comedic effect. Setting aside my irrational fear of personal stagnation, what makes Groundhog Day so compelling is its expression of the comedy of repetition, which lies in the expectation that something is going to happen and the inevitable resolution: a setup and a punchline.

But what happens when that punchline doesn’t come? The notion of Repetition ad absurdum is explored in a hilarious segment in the Radiolab episode “Loops” that examines a performance by comedians Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler.



After a brief setup about an old sketch they did on a kids show, Schaal starts galloping in circles around the stage while Braunohler hollers: “Kristen Schaal is a horse. Kristen Schaal is a horse. Look at her dance and look at her go. Look at her dance like a horse” (listen to the clip above, it’s funnier than it sounds). The first verse is silly and strange. But then it repeats. And then it repeats. And again. And it becomes funnier. But it repeats again. And again. And again. Until it’s just not very funny anymore. But! Then it repeats again. And suddenly, for some indeterminable reason, it becomes hysterical. Braunohler explains:

…then you get this next level that’s like ‘You can’t continue doing it.’ And then you do continue doing it….

What I love about it is that your brain is trying to make it into what you want it to be, which is a joke. but there is no joke happening. What these two people are doing is creating the expectation that the expectation is going to be broken but then breaking that expectation that the expectation is going to be broken.

So if repetition is a setup and humor comes with its disruption, then the case of “Kristen Schall is a horse” is something of a paradox. The repetition remains uninterrupted. It concludes with relatively little ceremony and no real punchline, yet the humor comes from the very lack of the expected disruption. So perhaps then there is comedic value inherent in repetition qua repetition.

But in the architectural world, repetition is anything but funny. It’s most commonly found in Classical Architecture (have you ever seen a Classicist laugh about architecture?), where it expresses man’s intellect, logic, and dominance over nature; and Modernism, where it’s typically understood as a symbol of equality and egalitarianism or efficiency in production. Modernism taught us to expect each component to be identical, the train to leave at the same time every day, and each product off the assembly line to be indistinguishable from the last. So in this world where Modernism and repetition have become inextricably associated with one another, how can the humor of repetition be communicated in built form? This is my question.

Right now I’m thinking that the answer will be found in Postmodernism. It is, after all, often seen as the tonic for the spartan rigor of Modernism. And, I reluctantly admit, it’s often considered a joke. But can’t that joke be a good thing? Can’t humor be used more productively? In Log 22 architect and educator John McMorrough describes difference –the expectation of which, realized or not, creates the humor of repetition– as being precipitated by changes in either space (i.e. context) or time (i.e. history). So Postmodernism is uniquely suited to tackle this issue because what does it do best if not context and history? But now I’m reminded here of another quote about context, history, and repetition ad absurdum; this one from Sam Jacob’s article in the the Radical Postmodernism issue of AD (I seem to be quoting that issue a lot lately, but I think it’s an important text):

Marx argued that history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce. But Marx never had cable TV or he would have watched history repeating endlessly. In the age of digital information….History repeats first as tragedy, then as farce, and then as tragi-farce-romcom-porno or slasher-drama-chic-flick-docudrama.

Jacobs goes on to identify Postmodernism as the farce to Modernism’s tragedy, but argues that with digital technologies, space and time have contracted and history no longer repeats so much as it happens all at once, splintering into “kaleidoscopic genre-Moderns”. The same things happen. Everywhen. Modified simultaneity is the new repetition. Perhaps what contemporary Postmodernism (I still can’t bring myself to say “Radical Postmodernism”) does best is context and history and tragi-farce-romcom-porno-etc. But I’m veering into some unstable ground here in trying searching for a revised understanding of Postmodernism, so let’s bring it back to something built, rather than conceptual repetition.
[Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, Sainsbury Wing, London (1991); image via VSBA]

The first real example that comes to my mind, and I hope to elaborate on this later, is the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, designed by Venturi Scott Brown and Associates. The syncopated rhythm of the pilasters on the front facade acknowledges, while undermining, the sequence of Classical columns from the original building. It’s just funny. Venturian wit at its best. Or is the humor of architectural repetition found in the commercial franchise, whose interiors are identical in Berlin and in Burbank? Or the unexpected “copy” – such as the black Villa Savoye found in ARM’s Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra. But is this truly repetition? More importantly, is it funny? I don’t know what the answers are yet. If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, I’d love to hear them in the comments or on twitter.

In lieu of any proper conclusion to these errant ponderings, I’ll leave the final word to Steve Martin, who in his 1978 album A Wild and Crazy Guy, opens his act by reflecting on the end of his multi-night run of performances in San Francisco:

I think there’s nothing better for a person than to come out and do the same thing over and over for two weeks. And this is what I enjoy, so I’m just going to do the same thing over and over and over. I think rather than do it just twice, I’m going to do it over and over. I’m going to do the same joke over and over. In the same show.

This will be a new thing.

Life Without Buildings

What does a heist reveal about bank design? What can architects learn from a prison break? What happens when we view the criminal act as an especially transgressive mode of architectural criticism? Crime has the potential to reveal new facets of architecture. It exposes unexpected spatial narratives and subverts conventional readings of the designed environment. Crime undermines the implicit formal and programmatic optimism in any architectural plan or program. It also makes for a hell of a movie.


The relationship between crime and architecture is an issue I’ve been exploring over the last year in both my personal work and as co-organizer of the 2011 Yale School of Architecture research colloquium Space, Crime, and Architecture, as well as its complementary symposium, Fugitive Geographies. While there may be countless articles and theories dating back to at least the 18th century that explore these issues, in my experience one of the most effective –and fun!– ways to discuss them is through an analysis of their depictions in popular media. So I’m really looking forward to Breaking Out and Breaking In, an architectural “distributed film festival” of Prison Break and Heist films sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X:

Watch the films at home—or anywhere you may be—and then come back to discuss the films here on BLDGBLOG. It’s a “distributed” film fest; there is no central venue, just a curated list of films and a list of days on which to watch them. There’s no set time, no geographic exclusion, and no limit to the food breaks or repeated scenes you might require. And it all leads up to a public discussion at Studio-X NYC on Tuesday, April 24.

The overall idea is to discuss breaking out and breaking in as spatial scenarios that work as mirror images of one another, each process with its own tools, techniques, and unique forms of unexpected architectural expertise.

How do prisoners and burglars reinterpret the built environments around them? Where does this more aggressive understanding of space differ from the constructive insights of an architect—and how can a building be strategically unbuilt so as to get at what lies on the other side? What particular kinds of spatial and temporal knowledge—where to tunnel, when to go—do these other users of buildings need to develop?

Breaking Out and Breaking In is currently underway but it’s not too late to follow along! I expect to be joining the conversation in the comments section over at BLDGBLOG and, in a few weeks, will hopefully have an essay or two of my own to contribute in a more official capacity. For more information on the event and examples of architectural heists see the full announcement at BLDGBLOG.

Life Without Buildings

The Maurizio Cattelan exhibition ALL ended its run at the Guggenheim last weekend and I wanted to share some quick thoughts about the show, especially in light of what seems to have been a mostly negative reception from some of our more prominent art critics. But more than that, I’m also hoping that by posting what is little more than a few ill-informed observations jotted down in a notebook about an artist whose work I had never seen before stepping into Frank Lloyd Wright’s atrium late last year, I’ll instigate a bit of a sea change for Life Without Buildings. Basically, I want it to be more fun. After years of hard work and school, writing architectural history has actually become an honest-to-god, bill-paying job and now more than ever I need a place to experiment with different forms of criticism and documentation, to work out new projects, to make mistakes, and to write about things that are little less serious. This will be that place. So that’s happening.

But back to the Cattelan show. I loved it.

I kept thinking to myself, ‘this is the ultimate Postmodern exhibition.’ Naive? Probably. An exaggeration? Definitely. But I’ve had Postmodernism on the mind a lot lately, due in no small part to both the recent Reconsidering Postmodernism exhibition and the excellent Radical Postmodernism issue of AD edited by FAT and Charles Jencks. All embodies those peculiar qualities that we have come to know and love and associate with Postmodernism. It was an autobiographic, end-of-career retrospective that was not only incredibly contextual (more on that in a second) but also de-familiarized the artists’s oeuvre –for those familiar with it, I suppose– by re-presenting and juxtaposing formerly independent, site-specific works. On paper, it looks like a terrible idea, and if the critics were to be believed, maybe it was. But it was also a hell of a lot of fun and something that anyone who walked in could enjoy.

For me, All read like an exploded novel whose pages kept rearranging themselves, revealing and concealing and re-revealing plot threads until some semblance of a narrative –or narratives– seemed to emerge as I slowly spiraled down the ramp of the Guggenheim. Cattelan’s world proved to be one where where scale is mutable and hearts are on felt sleeves and the uninitiated viewer is left to make sense of the artist’s entire life. As Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by de Kooning, Cattelan seems to tackle similar issues by hanging (twice!) what appeared to be effigies and invocations of Joseph Beuys. Perhaps that’s not entirely fair because everything was hanging – suspended from the ceiling of the Guggenheim, cluttering the museum’s atrium while the walls remained bare. By no means was this the first show to build in the atrium space, but it was surely one of the best I’ve seen (excluding those that involved climactic cinematic shootouts). It was also the first exhibition I’ve seen with an accompanying iPad app, though I’m sure that will soon become de rigueur if it’s not already.



It was a stunning use of the space. The museum turned inward and I caught myself looking at the other visitors as much as at the work and falling in love no fewer than six times and eavesdropping on conversations that went something like this: “that’s so weird! you’re looking at the same thing but it looks different!” EXACTLY. That simple comment prompted me to tweet the following:

If the Guggenheim did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. twitter.com/LifeSansBldgs/…

— Jimmy Stamp (@LifeSansBldgs) December 17, 2011

Again, this is perhaps a slight overreaction, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t mean every word of it.

Life Without Buildings

Last weekend I attended Reconsidering Postmodernism, a two-day conference in New York City organized by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. The event was convened in an “attempt to illuminate postmodernism’s overall cultural impact.” Whether or not it achieved that goal is debatable – but unfortunately, it wasn’t often debated, as you’ll see below. I’ll be writing a couple articles on the event later, so what follows is really just an informal summary via tweets, retweets, and a little additional commentary. This is also a bit of an experiment, as I’m using storify for the first time to put everything together.

Life Without Buildings

The following post was originally written as an entry to McSweeney’s 2011 Column Contest. It didn’t win. But I had a lot of fun writing it so I thought I’d post it here. As proposed, it was an architectural criticism column written from the perspective of a somewhat emotionally dysfunctional critic who sees his own failures in the monumental structures that obsess him. In the resulting reviews, personal narratives converge with professional critique. Descriptions and opinions of the buildings emerge through seemingly inadvertent revelations of his personal crises and social conflicts. Over the course of the columns, a larger narrative is revealed in which the reader learns more about the critic – his failures, fears, aspirations, and his romantic and professional pursuits. In this introductory column, your critic experiences the five stages of grief –denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance– in his critique of the Lower Manhattan skyscraper New York by Gehry.


New York by Gehry. The building’s name says it all: built in the greatest city in America and designed by the country’s best known and most influential architect since Frank Lloyd Wright. Its unabashed moniker cements the notion of architect-as-brand more than any other building in recent memory. And Frank Gehry’s well-established brand identity is in full-effect in this, his first completed skyscraper project. His signature curvilinear forms manifest as a billowing steel facade that stretches a brazen 780 feet into the sky. It can’t be denied that the sight of the building in the Manhattan skyline is especially magnificent from Brooklyn, where it seems to hang over the city like a rippling stage curtain for a space opera or a metal sheet draped over a more conventional Financial District high-rise that recalls the silver-sequined ghost costume worn by a certain dilettante hipster ex-girlfriend to a Williamsburg Halloween party last year where she drunkenly proclaimed herself the ghost of Marc Bolan while flirting with some asshole dressed like Ziggy Stardust era David Bowie. For example.

The overall effect is quite powerful, yet many traditionalist New Yorkers are angered by the building’s stark contrast from other Financial District towers. The architect, however, believes the aesthetic disparity informs a “lively conversation” with nearby structures, including the landmark 1913 Woolworth Building, designed by Cass Gilbert. But that conversation seems to be less of an amicable discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of embracing centuries of history and finding common ground, and more of a godforsaken bitch of a building annoyingly shouting while the other is patiently trying to make a valid point about how its not fucking cool to flirt with other guys in front of your boyfriend goddammit!

Maybe that’s a bit harsh. A spectacle is sometimes welcome, and sometimes even necessary, but a good relationship is about compromise. A rich history is a strong foundation on which to build. There’s something valuable to be learned from a shared past. The building’s slogan, “never yesterday”, is intended to be progressive, but to this critic it sounds like naive bullshit that someone might use to rationalize a breakup. Of course, people can change – buildings, that is, can change. Although it often feels like only one person, one building, – it often seems like only one building is doing all the compromising and bargaining while the other remains unreasonably obstinate. New York by Gehry –also known more modestly as 8 Spruce Street– makes plenty of compromises. While its glamourous north façade will surely get the camera-phones snapping, the opposite side is a completely flat, modernist surface with nary a curve nor ripple to be seen. One side of the building seems to nod to the past while the other is a purely twenty-first century creation. The architect claims this duality is a choice, but many of the building’s detractors suspect a more practical explanation: financial and aesthetic compromise.

Most disheartening of all is the pediment on which the already-iconic tower sits. The effect of the building at street-level is one of complete and utter banality. Sure, from a distance everything looks great – intriguing, attractive, maybe even happy. But the facade is just that. Up close, it disappears. Literally, the facade never touches the ground. It’s like trying to find the end of a rainbow. Gehry’s breathtaking sculpture instead sits on a completely banal orange brick building that looks like a converted textile mill. One compromise too far. The five-story structure will one day house retail space, doctors’ offices, underground parking, and a public school. But there’s no architecture there. There’s nothing to engage the visitor. Cracks are revealed what once seemed strong just sort of falls apart. There’s no excitement anymore. The only sign of the grand design is a literal sign highlighting the building’s impressive presence on the New York City skyline, presumably to remind potential residents that, yes this is a Frank Gehry building and though it may not look great from here, you’ll be the envy of your friends who only see a glistening steel facade from their shitty apartments uptown and imagine those living inside to be educated, funny, and brooding, instead of pretentious, neurotic, and depressed.

Somewhat surprisingly, the folding, torquing facade conceals mundane apartments in which it’s likely the young and rich Wall Street elite will live out their meaningless existence, or broken hearted architecture critics will stare at the phone for hours, willing it to ring. But there are worse places to slowly die of sadness than a building that offers such amenities as a swimming pool, spa, fitness club, private dining room, and even a screening room. Alternately, the larger units would be ideal for that young couple stupid enough to be in love when all empirical evidence suggest that their relationship will end in disappointment, resentment, and crippling depression. The apartments are beautifully crafted with oak floors and stainless steel appliances perfect for reheating takeout and eating alone, barely able to remember the last time you enjoyed a nice quiet evening with the only person that used to mean anything in your otherwise hollow life. Great views though.

Ultimately, New York by Gehry will be judged, valued, and accepted as a important contribution to the New York City skyline. Its strength comes from its assertion of a unique individuality; something to challenge and provoke, perhaps even something others can aspire imitate. It’s a building that understands the worth of an individual. While not completely free from the baggage of its historic relationships, New York by Gehry embraces the future with a pioneering design that celebrates the possibility of new digital fabrication technologies and will surely influence construction in Lower Manhattan for decades. The potential now exists for new, unexpected relationships. There’s a lesson for the rest of us too: learn from the past but embrace life on your own terms. Maybe do some traveling or learn something new or just throw yourself into your work and rekindle that passion that made you become a writer. For the first time in ages, this critic is feeling pretty good about the future. Perhaps ‘Never Yesterday’ isn’t such a naive idea after all.

Life Without Buildings