One-Way Street

North to Nimrod Nation

I'm off to Nimrod Nation for the next week or so. I will be back by July 10 or 11, depending.

Where's China?

The Summer 2008 issue of Film Quarterly is out with several interesting articles, including Leo Braudy on No Country for Old Men and Joshua Clover on Chinese cinema. I'm about to leave for vacation, so I can only point to these articles for now. When I return I want to say something about the "motiveless malignancy" of the Coen Brothers' film. Clover asks a question about the films of Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien: "Where's China?"

This is a huge question and one worth exploring more if I didn't have to pack right now. A short, privisional answer: How much does it matter? Outside of the so-called Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Feng Xiaogang, with their nationalist epics, Chinese directors outside the PRC have largely avoided questions of national identity. Edward Wang was famous for his lack of concern about a Taiwanese identity. Even his great theme, the problem of urbanization, rarely explored the impact of Westernization in any direct fashion.

Now that it's lost its colonial status, Hong Kong has become a kind of national empty space--not quite Chinese, but inextricable from it. Lacking the epic landscapes of mainland China, Hong Kong is a hive of people and praxis. Wong's and Hou's films explore new ways of being in the world; national and ethnic identities are just part of the mix, and not terribly important ones at that. An emblematic instance of this tendency is Juliette Binoche's blong wig in Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon, at once stressing her Western sexuality and rendering it inoperative. When you see a French actress wearing a Marilyn Monroe wig in a Taiwanese director's film, one is forcing to rethink what kinds of questions one should be asking.

As the Tower Turns

David Fisher has evidently given up on erecting the world's first whirligig building in Chicago. He will instead build his rotating tower in that magpie of cities, Dubai. The concept is simple: a seventy-eight story building, with each floor rotating 360 degrees at the whim of the unit owner, or nature, or the state of the oil futures markets, whichever. The promotional video is portentous, but it's vague on details. In Fisher's New York press conference he declared, "Today's   life is dynamic, so the space we are living in should be dynamic as well. Buildings will follow rhythms of nature. They will change   direction and shape from spring to summer, from sunrise to sunset, and   adjust themselves to the weather. In other words, buildings will be alive." But in the video says each floor will be fully controlled by its owner--presumably one per floor--even as the building rotates with drill team coordination. If the rotating tower has a practical application other than testing for motion sickness, it would be avoiding having to look out on the workers' slums on the outskirts of Dubai.

The rotating tower is a gimmick, of course, but a harmless one. We've been building static structures for several thousand years, so by now technology should allow us to construct dynamic buildings. Then again, it's not really clear why we would want our buildings to morph into shapes that signify nothing other than their ability to pull off the same trick indefinitely. We already have buildings that change form--stadiums and convention centers, for instance--so Fisher's idea isn't so revolutionary. He's created a new set of architectural tropes, and some interesting marketing material, but it will take an architect of greater imagination to make something more out of the dynamic building idea. Otherwise, it's a dead end. 

Graffiti on Trial

Graffiti art resides at the intersection of art and architecture. On the art side, it can be best classified as an emotive form; the formal qualities of the artwork are less important than the (often illegal) circumstances under which it is created. From the point of view of architecture and urban planning, graffiti is a sign of decay, of a building under duress.

Below is a video on the case of Mike Baca, a graffiti artist working in Brooklyn. He was arrested while shooting a documentary on graffiti. The exact details of his legal case are murky, but he seems to have originally been sentenced to seven years in prison on vandalism and trespassing charges. After a group called the Graffiti Research Lab intervened and arranged for legal support, his sentence was reduced to three months.

Addendum after accidentally posting this entry before I was finished: Can graffiti be art? We no longer have a reliable way to distinguish between art and non-art, but a whole class of art exists to pose exactly this question, and graffiti is certainly part of that class. My only equivocation is that graffiti art, it seems to me, is the only art form that is fully reducible to its act of creation. In this sense graffiti is closer to folk art than "fine" art, or whatever you want to call it.

And regardless of what the Graffiti Research Lab says, there's compelling evidence to suggest that the serious crime rate falls when minor crimes, like graffiti, are persecuted. Graffiti artists have been consistently vague about the boundaries between street gang tagging and serious graffiti art. Perhaps it's not in their interests to do so. In any case, Mike Baca seems remarkably amenable to a three month prison sentence, as if it's all part of a social contract undergoing constant renegotiation.

The video is courtesy of Current Media.

Towards an Ethical Architecture

Is it okay for an architect to design a building in a country ruled by an autocratic government? "It's complicated," Thom Mayne says. And indeed, it is. Daniel Libeskind recently denounced his fellow architects for working in China, and others have complained about Western architects aiding and abetting Dubai's building frenzy. If there's a conclusion to the debate outlined in Robin Pogrebin's New York Times article, it's that architects can accept commissions from autocratic countries if the end product expresses a popular longing for democracy. The building should not endorse or reflect the values of the autocratic regime itself.

All kinds of ambiguities emerge from this position, so it's worth consulting Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, a book I discussed at length earlier. Badiou argues that we only have an ethical obligation to the truth. He rejects ethical positions founded in adherence to abstract ethical law or respect for otherness as conformist at best and nihilistic at worst. Conventional ethics, Badiou says, merely flatter our own beliefs and preconceptions while treating the victims of evil with condensation, even contempt. You can see these attitudes in many recent discussions of the tremendous growth of developing world cities: essays on the new urban hypermasses are full of terrifying statistics and hand-wringing pity. "We're all in this together!" is the general refrain, but the squalor is always somewhere else, in less well-managed--and less virtuous--portions of the world. Meanwhile, in the West we're keeping our part of the planet tidy. We're buying hybrid SUVs; why can't they show the same self-restraint?

The essential divisiveness of conventional ethics is exactly what Badiou attacks. An ethics of truth involves compiling the concepts that speak to and for everyone, regardless of their interest, privilege, or national identity. In order for something to be true, it must be true for everyone. But preconceptions like the universality of human rights must also be put aside. The ideal of universal human rights, Badiou claims, begins with the assumption that people are victims. Life doesn't produce anything affirmative or new; it's merely the postponement of death.

Once we bracket human rights, respect for otherness and all the other idealist baggage, we can see our situation clearly as something unique. Badiou wants us to have fidelity to a situation and to its supplement, the event, which Badiou defines as a break with the past.  The event, Badiou writes, "punches a hole" in conventional knowledge. Not only does the true event disintegrate our preconceptions, it also creates us as subjects. We're no longer just bodies huddling under the protection of human rights. The ethical subject follows Lacan's injunction to keep going, to never give up on one's desire. This does not, however, mean a desire for a elegantly-designed building in some Asian generic city. Because Lacan argues that desire is something we can't ever fully know, consistency means never giving up on what one doesn't know about oneself.  One must leave behind one's own interests, which are shaped by our cultures, and give oneself up to future consequences.

What does this mean for an ethical architecture? After reading Badiou I would argue that simply holding oneself above mere politics is evasive. A more ethically truthful practice, one that's more oriented toward the real, is to consider each project as an event with unforeseen consequences. Jacques Herzog is closer to this position when he argues that his Olympic stadium in Beijing, designed with Pierre de Meuron, "will change radically — transform — the society." He asserts, "Engagement is the best way of moving in the right direction."

Herzog and de Meuron earned a lot of money ($13 million, or thereabouts) for their Beijing stadium, and they had to undergo some humiliations to land the commission, so their position could be dismissed as a rationalization. And yet, by simply categorically refusing to build in countries that do not conform to some undefined standard of governmental behavior is to leave change to others, which is the same as denying that it will happen at all. Herzog makes an extravagant claim when he says  single building will radically transform a country of nearly a billion and a half souls. But drop a giant bird's nest in the ancient imperial capital and something is bound to happen, even if the result doesn't fully conform to the norms of universal human rights. Without engagement, nothing will change.

The Triumph of Brutalism

The Yale School of Architecture is finally remodeling its irascible building and renaming it after its original architect, Paul Rudolph. The remodeling project includes an annex designed by Yale alum Charles Gwathmey.

Brutalist buildings like the Yale arts complex look like they will last for ever, which is a blessing or a curse, depending on how you feel about them. And yet, they need upkeep like any other building--maybe more, since they are rarely the objects of loving attention. Even though it's located on the campus of one of the wealthiest universities on the planet, the Rudolph building has suffered neglect, some half-hearted remodeling efforts, and an arson attack.

All will be well, however, once Gwathmey applies his light touch to Rudolph's confrontational building, infusing it with a post-industrial cool that the expressionist original lacked--and never wanted. The project is more than just a gentle corrective measure, though. It also marks how much architecture in the academy has changed since the Yale building was completed in 1964. At that time Rudolph was the architect-rebel imposing his vision on a disorderly and hostile world. He's been succeeded by Gwathmey, the starchitect burnishing the Yale brand.

When Rudolph was dean of the Yale School of Architecture in the late 1950s and early 1960s, architecture was still in the process of professionalizing. Like the legal profession before it, architecture was moving from an apprentice system to a professional training one. Brutalism fit perfectly into this transformation. It was counter-intuitive--there was beauty, or at least dignity, in concrete--in the same was physics had been since Einstein. Architecture in the academy acquired the same cutting-edge mystique as the hard sciences and, as a result, assured its own place in the university.

Charles Gwathmey is the product of that transformation, but the transformation itself is complete. Because he's designing for a self-confident institution, Gwathmey's architecture is much more experiential and sensual. It offers a tour of all the pleasures high-end architecture now offers. So with the remodeling, Rudolph Hall will change from an emphatic statement to a historical narrative.

Save the Sentence!

As part of my occasional series on the ongoing death of Western culture, today I'd like to warn you about the death of the English sentence.  This dire news comes from the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, who evidently doesn't have enough to do.  "I see creeping inarticulateness," he tells the Washington Post's Linton Weeks. He explains, "We are moving toward the language used by computer programmers and air traffic controllers. Language as a method of instruction, not a portal into critical thinking."

Uh, isn't that last clause a sentence fragment?

Anyway, evidence for the death of the English sentence can be found everywhere. In my job I expend more mental energy decoding emails than anything else I do.  My all-time favorite was this gem from a senior vice president. I'd emailed a request to purchase a piece of software that we needed to complete a project on time. There was some urgency to the matter, I stressed. Her response, in full, read as follows: "Decision=ASAP."

Spoken English is even worse. I work with a lot of computer programmers, many of them from Chennai. Developers, like most technically-oriented people, tend not to have strong language skills, even in their native language. Many of the Indian developers speak in a odd polyglot consisting in equal measures Britishisms ("I'm not going to the company Christmas party. I'm not doing any bum dancing!") and Americanisms (lots, and lots, of "likes"). One distinctive speech pattern is the present progressive tense, which appears most often at the end of a sentence: "Somewhere there is a problem we are having."

Still, from what I've seen the state of the sentence isn't as dire as the state of the proper noun. The enterprise edition of Microsoft Office contains a random capitalization feature in which ordinary Nouns are suddenly and Unpredictably converted into Proper Nouns.  Sometimes after reading a business case from an MBA I picture that person going home and telling her spouse, "I love you, First Husband!"

People have been complaining about the decline of English since the 18th century, when the language was first codified and standardized. Elizabethan England, one of the most glorious periods of speech and writing in the history of the English language, was almost entirely ignorant of standardize spelling and punctuation. The Jacobeans didn't fret over the decline of English from its 16th-century high point; they had no standardized version with which to compare their speech practices. Amelia C. Murdoch, president of the National Museum of Language in College Park, Maryland, reminds us, "Language, all language, undergoes constant change. And technological developments that impinge on language inevitably cause changes in language, all kinds of changes." 

Billington and the decline of English crowd aren't just ignoring the history of the language. Disparaging a particular language practice is the same as disparaging the people who practice it. The self-appointed guardians of culture are constantly warning us about the unlettered masses trying to deprive us of what makes us human--the ability to think. This belief leads to one conclusion: Only the guardians of culture know the proper way to think. But history shows that what binds us together as people is the varied, ever-changing, imprecise language of everyday speech.

Rethinking the Chick Flick

The wild success of Sex and the City and the imminent release of American Girl have raised hopes that Hollywood finally understands the box office power of women. Sex and the City and American Girl create worlds at once contrived and heart-felt. Other than that, though, they have little in common, and two films don't make a general trend. Nevertheless, appearing at the elegiac close of the first serious presidential campaign by a woman, these films remind us that woman are to Hollywood what African-Americans are to the Democratic Party: its most loyal constituency, and its most taken for granted.

And yet, the complaints about Hollywood's gender bias, while justified, are often oversimplified, even naïve.  Take, for instance, this broadside by LA Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz, related in the breathless style of a gossip columnist. The attack is scattershot, rehashing a number of old grievances. I'll take up a few of the most provocative ones, voiced either by Abramowitz or one of her sources:

"I hope ['Sex and the City'] will at least bring about more of a trend toward films made specifically for adult female women": So none are made now? Really? People are always saying that Hollywood doesn't make enough films for women, but they never have any number to back up their claims. What's the ratio of films made for men versus the films made for women? At least one major genre, the romantic comedy, is aimed primarily (although not exclusively) at women.   Hollywood is skewed more toward youth than toward gender. If you're over 34 years of age of either gender, the pickings are pretty slim. And what, exactly, are the defining qualities of a specifically for adult female women--and them only? Which brings me to my next point.

"We want to see ourselves on screen the way we actually are, not some bad Xerox versions of ourselves": Fair enough, but how do you define, let alone depict, the way women really are? I don't think anybody would seriously claim that the four main characters in Sex and the City represent the true face of American womanhood. They may speak to the desires of a portion of middle-class white women in this country, but that's not the same thing. You could argue that the desires are real because they inform the activities of real-life women, but even here questions remain. To what degree is a woman's life governed by a wish to possess Carrie Bradshaw's shoes? The weirdness of her outfits, I would argue, externalize the lack of comfort and authenticity many women feel when they wear runway fashions. I've always wondered how truly deep the affinities ran between SATC and its audience. Our desires aren't necessarily our own. We get them from the movies, among other places. In any case, early feminist film scholars struggled with these same questions in the 1970s before finally giving up. That's why Women's Studies is now generally called Gender Studies.

"[Women] made such Judd Apatow films as 'Knocked Up' and 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall,' whose protagonists might be oafy guys but whose audiences, according to Universal, were 57% female": This figure isn't as shocking as it might appear. It's possible for a woman to derive pleasure from a text even when it's oriented toward men. I've already told the story of a commitment feminist intellectual with a passion for Led Zeppelin, the avatars of male adolescent desire. I've known female professors of film studies--women who probably read The Second Sex by the third grade--who genuinely enjoyed Spider-Man and The Terminator series. To claim that women can only enjoy films narrowly focused on them--or will automatically enjoy those that are--is to underestimate the sophistication of American films and the women who watch them.

 

The Instant City

Nicolai Ouroussoff's contribution to the New York Times' Magazine special issue on building the "next city" focuses on the design challenges posed by cities today. His point of departure is Rem Koolhaas's concept of the generic city. He begins with something that Koolhaas told him 20 years ago. "Don't tell anyone," Koolhaas said while driving through Manhattan, "but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it."   Indeed, reading through recently published discussions about the future of the city one is struck by how irrelevant premier 20th-century cities like New York and Paris have become.  The focus is now on the boom cities of Asia and Africa. Ouroussoff looks at Shenzhen (photograph above, taken by Sze Tsung Leong for the New York Times) and Dubai, two cities that look like they just came out of a microwave oven: dry and gray, with a faintly noxious smoke emanating from them.

Architects are flummoxed about how to design for these places, leaving one to wonder how one actually lives in these instant cities.  The situation architects face at the beginning of the 21st century recalls the situation architects faced during the 19th century.  At that time, architects were also designing for instant cities on the edge of nowhere such as Chicago and St. Louis.  Furthermore, a loss of faith in Renaissance humanism and 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism led to an aesthetic crisis as one form of historical revivalism competed with another.  The crisis was exacerbated by new building types that had no clear historical precedent.  Most notable among these new building types were the railroad station and the skyscraper, neither of which the Romans built.  Finally, there was new money in town: rich industrialists commissioned buildings that glorified the source of their wealth.  The dehumanizing aspects of the Industrial Revolution led to a humanist counter-reformation led by William Morris and John Ruskin, each of whom espoused an historical revivalism of one kind or another--leading architects right back to the place at which they began.

Similarly, contemporary architects have no clear model about how to deal with the brute fact of the enormous size of the 21st-century generic cities.  With no clear hierarchy between center and margin -- they are equally dense everywhere -- it's difficult to know where to begin: should I build a downtown modernist tower or pre-Modernist garden suburb?  The grand gestures of Modernist urbanism are lost when everything is big, when a city contains a dozen Rockefeller Centers. "We are in a condition we don't understand yet," Koolhaas remarks.

But if modernism clearly isn't the perfect model for these new urban conditions, postmodernism has nothing to contribute.  What possible meaning could playful historicism have in Shenzhen, a city barely a generation old?  Architectural postmodernism, for all practical purposes, is dead.

Perhaps the most interesting observation in the article comes from Steven Holl, a New York architect with several large projects in China, including Linked Hybrid, a series of modernist slabs linked by pedestrian bridges, something movies have long been telling us is on the way, but has never arrived in American cities. He tells Ouroussoff,

In America, I could never do work like I do here. We've become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look new. This is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century their century. For some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think we somehow lost our nerve.

A loss of nerve in the West and giddy optimism in the East pretty much sums up the current state of the global economy--band, to a significant degree, the current state of architecture in the United States.

In the Future, We’re All Going to Be Dutch

I'm still making my way through the New York Times Magazine's "The Next City" issue after a wild weather weekend, but here are some notes on what I've read so far.

The first full-length story, "Face Value," looks at an interesting subspecialty in architecture: façade design. The subject of the story is an engineering firm called Front, as if the firm were a high-end restaurant. The technical challenges of cladding a library in glass is interesting--I wonder who had to tell Rem Koolhaas he couldn't make the exterior walls of the Seattle Public Library structural--but while the Front engineers are ingenious, they don't really have much to tell us about how cities will be built in the twenty-first century.

Note to editors: I know it's the end of the year and everybody is rushing to get their projects in before the summer, but a little context-setting would have helped here.

Next up is Darcy Frey's look at a Dutch whiz-kid architecture firm called MVRDV that designs unusual boxes. They're severely theoretical--one of them once worked for Koolhaas--and they like to keep their interlocutors off balance with questions like "Can you imagine if we grew our tomatoes 10 kilometers high?" They think a lot about cities, gathering their thoughts in books like KM3: Excursions on Capacities, which is largely a paean to data, "huge, pure data."  Their conceptual masterwork is something called Datatown, a SimCities-like experiment that crams every American into Georgia--one gigantic Atlanta. The architects then ran a software program to answer questions that I guarantee you wouldn't be uppermost on Americans' minds if we all had to live in Georgia:

What if all the residents of Datatown wanted to live in detached houses? What if they preferred urban blocks? What could be done with the waste? (Build 561 ski resorts.) What kind of city park would be needed? (A million Central Parks stacked up over 3,884 floors.) "The seas, the oceans (rising as a result of global warming) the polar icecaps, all represent a reduction in the territory available for the megacity. Does that mean that we must colonize the Sahel, the oceans or even the moon to fulfill our need for air and space, to survive? Or can we find an intelligent way to expand the capacities of what already exists?"

The buildings that emerge from MVRDV's obsession with data are a combination of Silicon Valley data mining, Dutch pragmatism, and Middle America big-box retail design. A representative building is the Mirador, built in a drab corner of Madrid (image above, from the NYT article). MVRDV's apartment block is a preening swan among ugly ducklings, but it's part of the flock nevertheless. Evidently, the numbers still say pack people up in boxes surrounded by bleak wastelands, just as the numbers indicated in the 1950s. The cutout terrace is an attractive novelty, but it's an incomplete solution to the problem of integrating nature into the urban.

Maybe in the future, when we're all living in megacities, the closest we'll ever get to nature is a wind-swept container park, at which point it will be tempting to give up on the whole idea of bringing nature into the city as just a lot of bother. Connecting to nature will be one of those outmoded ideologies we need to prepare ourselves to abandon.

Or maybe we will discover that a small green terrace will do quite nicely, especially at a time when global warming is changing our relationship to nature. If the Dutch, stranded between an implacable sea and the continental hypermasses, can teach us anything, it's that the city of the future isn't going to conform to current notions of ideal urban space. The next city isn't going to be a cross between Tribeca and Walden Pond; it's going to be completely unpredictable and unmanageable, vulnerable to the heightened forces of nature and global economy.  As Winy Maas, the "M" in MVRDV says, "There is this beautiful German word, Trost. It means empathy, or solace, or maybe consolation. I think that is what our building meant to express. You know, if the waters are going to come, let them come. Let's do it. Let's just turn and face it." In other words, in the future we're all going to be Dutch.