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GOOD Magazine

I'm at one of my funkier clients the other day, a business incubator for social justice and environmental groups, and they have a stack of a new magazine, GOOD.  Free is free, didn't expect much of it.  Looked too slick to be useful.  Oh to my surprise, I ended up digging into it cover to cover.  If Dwell and Metropolis had a surrogate baby with Greenpeace, you might end up with GOOD.  More info than you ever knew you wanted about North Korea, five brilliant and actionable ideas for changing transportation in American cities, and a carnivore goes hilariously vegan for a month.  Wonderful diatribe on the abuses of environmental marketing by large corporations, paired with kudos to companies who are walking-the-walk without boasting about it.  All topped off with slick graphics that make you unsure whether you're looking at copy or ads, so you stop caring and just enjoy the flow.

Subscribe:  http://www.goodmagazine.com/.  Is wicked cheap, only $20, and you can direct your subscription price to one of twelve charities, from City Year to the World Wildlife Fund.  I look forward to their article on whether it's greener to read each issue online (wasting electricity) or in print (wasting paper, and transport costs).

Get thee to the Katzen!

American University's art museum at the new Katzen Center has settled in to a brilliant little groove.  Current shows include:

• the last sculptures of Jules Olitski
• tapestries created by contemporary artists in consortium with a Belgian tapestry maker, mixing computer technology and art
• prints from local collections
• new art from Northern Ireland

I went for the tapestries, assuming the Irish stuff would be a complete blow-off.  Instead, that is one of the best shows up in D.C. this year.  There's an amazing interactive piece that "reads" attendees in the gallery and changes the projection and audio to suit.  In an empty gallery it was sort of grey symbols and "bloops"; as I entered the piece the projection picked up the red and black I was wearing, and the energized colors started moving in sync with me.  It's like dancing with art; bloody brilliant.  If you can't get there during the day the piece is recorded to be projected on the Katzen's exterior after dark.  That animates Washington's normally staid Ward Circle.

End of May they're opening a show of Argentine designers Disegno Shakespeare, whose work I was able to use in Buenos Aires last year.  Go.

A lightning history of video games

I'm having a nostalgic moment after playing artist Natalie Bookchin's video art piece/computer game "Intruder" http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/intruder.  Bookchin tells a short story by Jorge Luis Borges via a series of nine video games.  The games begin with "Pong", and progress up through iterations of "Frogger", "Space Invaders", and other game technologies.  Written in 1998, the piece is an unintentional lesson in how far game design has evolved in the last decade (thank you, DVD's). 

That is all beside the point of the artist's original questions.  Why are we drawn in to shoot down opponents, collect falling objects, and help our hero/heroine vault over obstacles?  Why do we continue to aim and shoot when it becomes clear that there is no danger, no score, and we will hear the full story regardless of our lack of game skill?  How does it feel to realize that you have become one of the evil protagonists destroying the female lead, and no hero at all?  No answers here, but the action makes the questions much more interesting.

Bookchin's art has evolved forward using found video from public security cameras, among other sources.  "Intruder" has been widely displayed at art museums and alternative spaces, but rarely with the immediacy you can get playing her piece on your own "set".  Pick up a pistol and give it a shot. 

When is a flower not a flower?

When it's the BP/Amoco logo.  The Vienna-based philosophy/design group Monochrom asked people to draw, from memory, as many corporate logos as they could.  The results are surprising:

http://www.monochrom.at/markenzeichnen/index-eng.htm

Open the link and click on a logo, otherwise nothing really happens.  It's interesting how long some of our memories of logos are.  Check out the old star-shield of Philips, or the abbreviated-marijuana-leaf that once was Adidas. 

Tesselated geography

If you're interested in cities, maps, quilts, or photography, I can't recommend highly enough the work of Nikolas Schiller, www.nikolasschiller.com.  His images of altered aerial photographs are like taking a kaleidoscope to your favorite places.  Site won't show up in a Google search (why?  see the Washington Post 3/14/07), but is an interesting example of stealth web presence.

Twelve-story skyscraper, anyone?

I often need to research individual buildings for walking tours.  This can be a surprising challenge.  The big cities (Chicago, New York, London, Los Angeles) offer an embarrasment of coffee table book pornography, and a few brilliant overviews.  For the next tier one can usually find at least one decent historic record in print.  Often, though, I'm not looking up the Chrysler Building, but need to get the construction date on an annoyingly prominent but bland telephone company headquarters.  Small cities rarely have information outside the local building department, and the people who manage real estate know surprisingly little about architects and construction dates.  Current construction is even worse; it can be almost impossible to track down a project's architect once the tenants move in and construction banners come down.

What's an architectural historian to do?  Emporis, http://www.emporis.com/en/, has created a database of buildings around the world.  They've done a great job pulling together data from suburbs, small cities, and places generally overlooked.  They list buildings by city, and allow searching across architect/height/geographic region, with decent photos so you can be sure the entry you're looking at is the same condo tower that caught your attention last week in Dubuque.  Even better, they're capturing entries of buildings under construction now around the world, getting data from construction companies and as-built drawings to capture the status of works in progress. 

This is terrific resource, one I'll be using when planning future vacations. 

Want something more bricks-and-mortar visitor-friendly?  Try the Skyscraper Museum, http://www.skyscraper.org/.  After years as an online venue, in 2004 they moved into a nifty NYC location.  Check out their Skidmore Owings Merrill facility in Battery Park City next time you're in the City.

Steve Jobs recently made the case for releasing intellectual property controls on digital music, www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/.  The same day the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro brought that to my attention, the March 2007 issue of Vanity Fair arrived.  There, Steven Daly talks about Pirate Bay, who make copywritten video (think Hollywood movies and mainstream television) available over the web http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/features/2007/03/piratebay200703. 

Both pieces got me thinking about copyright and the music and film industries (increasingly the same corporations).  The "Industry" (for want of a better term) would have you think that downloading or sharing a song or movie is depriving Norah Jones and Brad Pitt of their livelihoods.  They're right, file sharing is not getting an infinitesimal residual to the performers and directors.  The big sufferers, however, are the entertainment conglomerates.  Steve Jobs makes clear in his piece that almost all music you're going to be able to hear is sold by four companies:  Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI.  I have a hard time crying for these guys.  Not only are they big corporations (always an easy target), but they're the folks who've tried to sell me the same content five times in my not-so-long life: on LP, 8-track, cassette tape, CD, and downloaded.  They're willing to force technology changes on the market, but are quick to scream foul when technologists outwit them for a few years (tape dubs, MP3 sharing).  They remind me angrily of the VHS library I dutifully and expensively collected and then abandoned.

Think about visual artists.  We produce a graphic design in paint, collage, pixels, or clay, and frequently and happily see it transformed into a mass-marketed image.  No one will complain when I rip Annie Leibovitz's photo of Jake Gyllenhal out of the same Vanity Fair and post it on my fridge, or scan it for a joke e-mail, or make a color copy to send Peg in Nashville.  As long as I'm not making money off it, this is fair game.  Is this "fair use"?  Probably not, but the art/publishing industry has long made peace with the reality of technological duplication.  Collectors, artists, galleries, and the lawyers who represent them know that Ms Leibovitz's hand-developed print is worth more than the one I ripped from the mag, and act accordingly.

The fuss seems to be an issue of corporations fighting to keep control over assets they never created (okay, I'm willing to give them The Archies, Milli Vanilli, and The Cheetah Girls).  Would I steal a Liebovitz photo?  Heck no, she deserves fair price for her work.  Conde Nast doesn't expect me to pay more to keep Jake around, and neither does Ms L.  The Sonys and Warners are trying to get law to do what they cannot do themselves: hold back technology until they personally find a way to benefit from it.

I've adopted Houston as a hometown-by-marriage.  I had extremely low expectations the first time I visited, and to my surprise saw those dashed with the surprises around each freeway exit.  It's all automotive, unzoned, and commercial; a pedestrian nightmare.  Those same forces make it dynamic, creative, and delicious.  The local American Institute of Architects handbook says that since everything is going to go, everything goes; Houstonians take pride in taking design risks secure in the knowledge that errors can be erased with the next hurricane recovery or neighborhood redevelopment.. 

The Contemporary Art Museum, CAM (http://www.camh.org/), is your best place to start.  This will get you into the Museum District, and give you an excuse to head out to Montrose and the collection of museums that is the Menil.  Take a non-rush-hour cruise around the inner loop, I-610, and see how America's 1950's automotive love affair was supposed to play out.  Pull off into the Heights for the James Turrell skyspace that is the Friends Meeting House (http://www.friendshouston.org/). . 

Hungry?  The commercial ethos of the city has allowed the growth of hundreds of ethnic restaurants with amazing quality, price, and portion size - there's a good reason Houstonians are America's fattest folks.  A lot of the best are scattered in strip malls around the city, but you can't go wrong with one of the ubiquitous offerings of the Pappas family (http://www.pappadeaux.com/pappasfamily.htm).  For the extra frugal, get a Fritos pie and Chicago dog at James Coney Island (http://www.jamesconeyisland.com/): better than what you'll get in either Brooklyn or on Randolph Street. . 

Rice University's Rice Design Alliance (http://rda.rice.edu/) is the local keeper of the design flame.  They've taken it upon themselves to explain Houston to themselves and to us beyond the bayous.  Their quarterly magazine, Cite, is the best ongoing analysis of the design and evolution of any American city.  To help you catch up, the editors put out a collection of Cite articles, The Ephemeral City, in 2003: I got it as a Christmas present, and have been devouring it ever since. . 

Houston's beauty doesn't come from the landscape (swamps), or a grand city plan (Daniel Burnham did not visit).  Instead, it grows from the desires of millions of Houstonians' to make money by making great places to live.  Followed across the country this would be a disaster, but as a municipal design lab, it's produced some unexpected greatness. 

This February most of us are thinking about HEAT, or, as my architect friends say, "mechanical systems".  Feeling the precious warmth leak from the window I replaced just three years ago makes me think about how to design comfort better.  We live in a world stuck in a 1950's paradigm: we heat/cool/humidify our entire house or apartment from one central control.  We're basically burning oil or gas in a closet and pushing it around with fans, water, or (howdy, Boston!) steam.  Seems a waste to me: the average under-2-people-per-American-residence are treating a whole chunk of air that no one would care if it was 40 degrees, as long as where we were sitting/walking/working was comfortable.  So, how can we design something better?

Looking pre-Eisenhower, we heated/cooled the rooms we needed, and let the rest chill out.  We also dreaded sitting on cold toilet seats and burned our sheets with bed-warmers.  A childhood of winter vacations in a New Hampshire summer camp rule out a turn that far back, but we could go much farther with zoned air solutions.  Ecologically-sound transportation solutions replace every-man-in-a-car with varied modes of transport networked together; so should mechanical systems.  Think electric blankets, heated floors, and back-up heaters to supplement an overall building comfort system.  Going further, how about a non-constricting comfort zone that surrounded our bodies just a few inches, like invisible pajamas?  Still requires dealing with the shock of touching a cold counter (or toilet seat <smile>).  There's gotta be a better way than treating the enormous air envelopes we call our homes, especially as those keep getting bigger and more costly to run.

Designers, are you out there listening?  For now, I'm pulling my cold fingers back into the comfort of my cozy quilt.

The Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York is hosting "Design Life Now: The National Design Triennial 2006", through July 27, 2007.  Compared to their previous triennials, this one is a chaotic disappointment.  The problem of theming a biennial/triennial deserves its own blog posting, let's just say that currency is probably the only thing the designers/products on view have in common.  Many fewer graphic designers, almost no software, limited furniture/housewares entries.  Lots of robotics and scientific equipment.  Sure, the robots may be amazing at what they do, but they don't look like much powered-down in a vitrine.  Likewise, the collapsible shelter system is probably great, but they would have done better to show it on the lawn rather than in a gallery, where most folks think it part of the installation rather than a displayed object. 

Unfortunate choices:  KidRobot's plastic Japanimation-based toys are better experienced in shops in Soho or on Madison than here; the giant rat-monster-chalkboard fails to engage.  And WHAT, aside from a product placement, is Boeing doing there?  The new 777 appears significantly less cool than the 40-year-old Concorde; it doesn't translate from the photos and hull panel on display. 

Those quibbles aside, the show is still worth seeing live; there's nothing like experiencing the new materials in the flesh.  Abhinad Lath's basement install of fiber-optic wall and floor tiles steal the show; walking or throwing a shadow on these causes ambient light to pop up in new places in the material, so your passage down the corridor is a sonnet of flickering interruption.  Tres cool.  Chip Kidd's book design also shows well, as does Christopher Douglas' "Knock-Down/Drag-Out" furniture for the chronically mobile.

The gift shop has sold out of the catalog; watch for it in the design section of your local bookstore and spare yourself the $5 reserve fee they're charging.  Smithsonian member?  Bring your ID, save the $12 admission.

Property Rights

Steve Jobs recently made the case for releasing intellectual property controls on digital music, www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/.  The same day the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro brought that to my attention, the March 2007 issue of Vanity Fair arrived.  There, Steven Daly talks about Pirate Bay, who make copywritten video (think Hollywood movies and mainstream television) available over the web http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/features/2007/03/piratebay200703. 

Both pieces got me thinking about copyright and the music and film industries (increasingly the same corporations).  The "Industry" (for want of a better term) would have you think that downloading or sharing a song or movie is depriving Norah Jones and Brad Pitt of their livelihoods.  They're right, file sharing is not getting an infinitesimal residual to the performers and directors.  The big sufferers, however, are the entertainment conglomerates.  Steve Jobs makes clear in his piece that almost all music you're going to be able to hear is sold by four companies:  Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI.  I have a hard time crying for these guys.  Not only are they big corporations (always an easy target), but they're the folks who've tried to sell me the same content five times in my not-so-long life: on LP, 8-track, cassette tape, CD, and downloaded.  They're willing to force technology changes on the market, but are quick to scream foul when technologists outwit them for a few years (tape dubs, MP3 sharing).  They remind me angrily of the VHS library I dutifully and expensively collected and then abandoned.

Think about visual artists.  We produce a graphic design in paint, collage, pixels, or clay, and frequently and happily see it transformed into a mass-marketed image.  No one will complain when I rip Annie Leibovitz's photo of Jake Gyllenhal out of the same Vanity Fair and post it on my fridge, or scan it for a joke e-mail, or make a color copy to send Peg in Nashville.  As long as I'm not making money off it, this is fair game.  Is this "fair use"?  Probably not, but the art/publishing industry has long made peace with the reality of technological duplication.  Collectors, artists, galleries, and the lawyers who represent them know that Ms Leibovitz's hand-developed print is worth more than the one I ripped from the mag, and act accordingly.

The fuss seems to be an issue of corporations fighting to keep control over assets they never created (okay, I'm willing to give them The Archies, Milli Vanilli, and The Cheetah Girls).  Would I steal a Liebovitz photo?  Heck no, she deserves fair price for her work.  Conde Nast doesn't expect me to pay more to keep Jake around, and neither does Ms L.  The Sonys and Warners are trying to get law to do what they cannot do themselves: hold back technology until they personally find a way to benefit from it.

Houston: A Designed Object?

I've adopted Houston as a hometown-by-marriage.  I had extremely low expectations the first time I visited, and to my surprise saw those dashed with the surprises around each freeway exit.  It's all automotive, unzoned, and commercial; a pedestrian nightmare.  Those same forces make it dynamic, creative, and delicious.  The local American Institute of Architects handbook says that since everything is going to go, everything goes; Houstonians take pride in taking design risks secure in the knowledge that errors can be erased with the next hurricane recovery or neighborhood redevelopment.. 

The Contemporary Art Museum, CAM (http://www.camh.org/), is your best place to start.  This will get you into the Museum District, and give you an excuse to head out to Montrose and the collection of museums that is the Menil.  Take a non-rush-hour cruise around the inner loop, I-610, and see how America's 1950's automotive love affair was supposed to play out.  Pull off into the Heights for the James Turrell skyspace that is the Friends Meeting House (http://www.friendshouston.org/). . 

Hungry?  The commercial ethos of the city has allowed the growth of hundreds of ethnic restaurants with amazing quality, price, and portion size - there's a good reason Houstonians are America's fattest folks.  A lot of the best are scattered in strip malls around the city, but you can't go wrong with one of the ubiquitous offerings of the Pappas family (http://www.pappadeaux.com/pappasfamily.htm).  For the extra frugal, get a Fritos pie and Chicago dog at James Coney Island (http://www.jamesconeyisland.com/): better than what you'll get in either Brooklyn or on Randolph Street. . 

Rice University's Rice Design Alliance (http://rda.rice.edu/) is the local keeper of the design flame.  They've taken it upon themselves to explain Houston to themselves and to us beyond the bayous.  Their quarterly magazine, Cite, is the best ongoing analysis of the design and evolution of any American city.  To help you catch up, the editors put out a collection of Cite articles, The Ephemeral City, in 2003: I got it as a Christmas present, and have been devouring it ever since. . 

Houston's beauty doesn't come from the landscape (swamps), or a grand city plan (Daniel Burnham did not visit).  Instead, it grows from the desires of millions of Houstonians' to make money by making great places to live.  Followed across the country this would be a disaster, but as a municipal design lab, it's produced some unexpected greatness. 

A Condemnation of Mechanical Systems

This February most of us are thinking about HEAT, or, as my architect friends say, "mechanical systems".  Feeling the precious warmth leak from the window I replaced just three years ago makes me think about how to design comfort better.  We live in a world stuck in a 1950's paradigm: we heat/cool/humidify our entire house or apartment from one central control.  We're basically burning oil or gas in a closet and pushing it around with fans, water, or (howdy, Boston!) steam.  Seems a waste to me: the average under-2-people-per-American-residence are treating a whole chunk of air that no one would care if it was 40 degrees, as long as where we were sitting/walking/working was comfortable.  So, how can we design something better?

Looking pre-Eisenhower, we heated/cooled the rooms we needed, and let the rest chill out.  We also dreaded sitting on cold toilet seats and burned our sheets with bed-warmers.  A childhood of winter vacations in a New Hampshire summer camp rule out a turn that far back, but we could go much farther with zoned air solutions.  Ecologically-sound transportation solutions replace every-man-in-a-car with varied modes of transport networked together; so should mechanical systems.  Think electric blankets, heated floors, and back-up heaters to supplement an overall building comfort system.  Going further, how about a non-constricting comfort zone that surrounded our bodies just a few inches, like invisible pajamas?  Still requires dealing with the shock of touching a cold counter (or toilet seat <smile>).  There's gotta be a better way than treating the enormous air envelopes we call our homes, especially as those keep getting bigger and more costly to run.

Designers, are you out there listening?  For now, I'm pulling my cold fingers back into the comfort of my cozy quilt.

National Design Triennial 2006

The Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York is hosting "Design Life Now: The National Design Triennial 2006", through July 27, 2007.  Compared to their previous triennials, this one is a chaotic disappointment.  The problem of theming a biennial/triennial deserves its own blog posting, let's just say that currency is probably the only thing the designers/products on view have in common.  Many fewer graphic designers, almost no software, limited furniture/housewares entries.  Lots of robotics and scientific equipment.  Sure, the robots may be amazing at what they do, but they don't look like much powered-down in a vitrine.  Likewise, the collapsible shelter system is probably great, but they would have done better to show it on the lawn rather than in a gallery, where most folks think it part of the installation rather than a displayed object. 

Unfortunate choices:  KidRobot's plastic Japanimation-based toys are better experienced in shops in Soho or on Madison than here; the giant rat-monster-chalkboard fails to engage.  And WHAT, aside from a product placement, is Boeing doing there?  The new 777 appears significantly less cool than the 40-year-old Concorde; it doesn't translate from the photos and hull panel on display. 

Those quibbles aside, the show is still worth seeing live; there's nothing like experiencing the new materials in the flesh.  Abhinad Lath's basement install of fiber-optic wall and floor tiles steal the show; walking or throwing a shadow on these causes ambient light to pop up in new places in the material, so your passage down the corridor is a sonnet of flickering interruption.  Tres cool.  Chip Kidd's book design also shows well, as does Christopher Douglas' "Knock-Down/Drag-Out" furniture for the chronically mobile.

The gift shop has sold out of the catalog; watch for it in the design section of your local bookstore and spare yourself the $5 reserve fee they're charging.  Smithsonian member?  Bring your ID, save the $12 admission.