And not a moment too soon. I’m watching the year’s last light seep from the sky - happy to be at home with Nurri, grateful to be warm and surrounded by love.
We’ve cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, ordered for once all the mess and confusion. We’re as ready as anyone ever gets for whatever comes next. It’s as good a moment as any for a belated farewell to Brother James, and all those others we’ve lost this year.
As for 2007? My yearend wish for all of us: tomorrow will be less.
I suppose the idea behind The First Emperor was that, if you gathered talents on the order of Tan Dun (composer), Zhang Yimou (director) and Emi Wada (costume designer), and set all the assets of the Metropolitan Opera at their feet, they could not help but produce something legendary. (Actually, I suspect the real idea was to pull entirely new audiences into an institution otherwise demographically doomed, those audiences presumably being urged along as well by the ostensible marquee value of a Plácido Domingo.)
On paper, it all hangs together. But for Domingo, this was, after all, the same team responsible for the irresponsibly glorious Hero, one of my very favorite films and an experience of both poignancy and truly epic sweep. So you better believe we were looking forward to The First Emperor, as a year-end treat for ourselves and as welcome-to-NYC present for Nurri’s brother and his wife, whose first visit to the States this is.
The feeling of anticipation carried me through the middle of the first act, at which point I started to wonder when things were going to get good. At first, I was tempted to believe that my failure to really engage with any of what was happening on stage was a structural problem with opera in English, with the emotionally descriptive bandwidth of the language as sung. But then I thought (rather embarrassingly, in this context) of Evita, of West Side Story, even of Gilbert & Sullivan, and how each transcended whatever limits exist on the power of sung English to organize emotional response, and I realized that the real issue was that Ha Jin’s libretto simply sucked.
And then the whole enterprise kind of came undone - I stopped resisting the perception that what I was witnessing was actually bad, if not just short of kitsch. (The precise moment I started checking my watch was about ten minutes into Act II.)
This is a shame on so many levels, though I do want to give credit where it’s due: Fan Yue’s set design and staging was consistently satisfying, and at times ravishingly beautiful. Apart from that, though, Tan’s score - surprisingly, shockingly - never once caught fire, I never cared for a second about any of the characters, and even Wada’s costume designs seemed obligatory and phoned-in. I’m not competent to judge any of the singing, but not a note or trill stood out as obviously impressive, and ten minutes after it had ended I couldn’t remember a single passage. (For context, and what that implies about expectations, you should know that I listen to Tan’s scores for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and (especially) Hero often, and never find them anything but stirring, and I’ve always regarded Wada’s costuming choices as nonpareil.)
It may be that I’m not moved in the slightest by Plácido Domingo; it simply be that the formal constraints of opera worked against Tan. For whatever reason, though, The First Emperor has to rank as one of my greatest cultural disappointments in recent memory. It’s a shame, too, because at $70 in the nosebleed seats, the Met really had this one opportunity to convert me - to offer me something moving and memorable enough to make me want to return for more. If this painfully slow and unsatisfying effort is anything to go by, at least, I won’t be going back anytime soon.
Ordinarily, I tend to be highly skeptical of pseudo-trend-mongering pop psychology articles in New York magazine. They’re the precise cognate of the tripe the notorious Jennifer 8. Lee shovels out in the Times, in those foamy, zeitgeisty pieces where she phone-polls six of her overachiever pals over lunch, and proclaims their cozy consensus the new shape of the now.
I’m not, frankly, 100% sure Jennifer Senior’s piece on burnout is all that different. It sure bears all the hallmarks of a piece designed to offer the mag’s self-congratulatory readership the recognition and succor they demand from their media, even to the point of excusing their callous and narcissistic behavior as mere sentinels of an undiagnosed suffering. However much it hurts, though, I have to admit she’s onto something.
Salient aspects of my daily life are inventoried in the piece at a rate something just short of three times per page, in such an accumulation of detail that in reading it, finally, I could no longer pretend I didn’t recognize myself. (And not in that pubescent-hypochondriac-thumbing-through-the-DSM way, either.) The sense of continuous, all-out, Sisyphean effort for a payoff that is excruciatingly difficult to quantify? Check. The hopeless fantasies of moving to a village all bookstores, bikepaths and fresh baguettes, there to make a worthier and more organic life? Check! The awareness of how attention - how time itself - gets drawn and quartered, when the insistent little IM windows of project managers and potential clients blossom onto my screen within seconds of opening the laptop? Oh, roger that.
I feel raw and ablated and exhausted, almost all the time. Perhaps most embarrassing of all is the knowledge that I am experiencing this, even as it’s objectively true that my life is a whole lot better upholstered than that of your average, underpaid and underappreciated Manhattan home health aide or nanny. I may have reason to complain, but, let’s face it, no right to do so. It’s in the worst possible taste, for someone as graced with good fortune as I. (And let’s not forget the counsels of that pernicious little voice inside, reminding me that letting on too publicly about any of this is no good for one’s career.)
And so it’s bite down, suck it up and soldier on. Bike rides help, a little. Time with my friends (and you know who you are) helps a lot. Time with Nurri helps more than words can convey. Even so, it’s a rare day on which the odor of burning metal doesn’t waft through the metaphoric windows. How about you?
Came back from my beloved Urban Center Books the other day with a stack of tasty new treats, including Per Mollerup’s Wayshowing - about which M is definitely TK - and Self-Sufficient Housing, a rollup of entries from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia’s competition of the same name.
It’s the latter that I’m having a hard time with, for reasons that will become evident. By all rights, a volume presenting a wide range of current advanced student projects, each of which takes the challenge of resource independence (and to some extent, Ken Yeang’s ideas about bioclimatic architecture) as a rough point of departure, should be a no-brainer to recommend.
And while there are in fact a great many insights to be found here, from a pleasing diversity of perspectives, I can’t quite bring myself to recommend the volume as a whole - not unless you’re either utterly fascinated with the topic, or otherwise prepared to suffer a fair deal of frustration on your way to the good stuff. For starters, it’s put out by Actar, a press which has the infuriating habit of releasing fascinating titles in (admittedly innovative, and frequently gorgeous) formats that make them nearly impossible to actually read. A 16 x 12 cm page is a pretty paltry landscape on which to present detailed plans and flow diagrams to start with, and the issue is only exacerbated by idiosyncratic type choices, a muddleheaded practice of indexing by project number, and an unacceptable number of typos and other errors.
But what about those projects? A few basic typologies emerge from the scrum:
- Quiet, detailed proposals that have less to do with form, mass and envelope, and more to do with ethnography and the pragmatics of use. An important subset consists of sincere attempts to mitigate the damage done by events like the Hurricane Katrina and the 2004/5 Asian tsunami with sensitive architectural interventions, tending to rely on an off-the-shelf, kit-of-parts approach for rapid “mainstreamability”;
- Strap-on, bolt-on, parasitic and otherwise retrofit projects aimed at capturing whatever resource economies can be gleaned from the contemporary architectonic, the “installed base” as it were;
- Abstractions and purely conceptual studies;
- A handful of projects whose “green” attributes appear to have been foregrounded for the presentation at hand, but which are otherwise entirely conventional (and which probably originated as responses to other briefs, competitions or requirements);
- Lest you think it had been done to death (most famously by LOT/EK, of course, but there are literally hundreds of other such on the books), we have no fewer than three iterations of the everpopular shipping-container-as-plug-in-apartment scheme;
- Superkool and frankly science-fictional urbscapes in which rhizomorphic, even nanotechnological structures imbricate, invaginate, involve and otherwise insinuate their way into the terrain, with their human residents very much an afterthought. Some of these are in fact very little more than formal studies - blame Greg Lynn and/or bootleg copies of 3D StudioMax.
With regard to the container-based projects, I am of course sympathetic to the idea that there exist in the world not merely a large number of extant containers but a whole infrastructure dedicated to moving them quickly from place to place, and wouldn’t it make sense to adapt this set of facts on the ground to the needs of shelter? My objection centers on the evident fact that - despite the best attempts of two generations of architects - nobody has yet managed to do so in a way that makes sense either economically or experientially; at some point, you’d think there would be almost a fiduciary duty on the part of instructors to quash container-based student projects on the spot, unless some glimmer of genuine novelty came to light.
But my real frustration with the book is actually a frustration with the contest, or its jury: the projects that won in each category are far from the strongest in competition. In particular, Sung-yong Park’s Under-space and Nigel Craddock’s lovely House in Bangladesh strike me as very thoughtful, sensitive and well-worked-out, far more interesting than the winner in their category.
Work that actually wrestles with the place of architecture in a delicate and dynamic ecosystem, and privileges that thought over sexy renderings - Asaduzzaman Rassel’s Housing in the Delta, Bercy/Chen’s Solar Down & Out House - is equally bypassed here. And while Damien Mikolajczyk’s T2ower admittedly sketches in its bioregenerative functionality more or less as a black box, it’s one of the only projects on review which articulates a convincing public space - you know, with people in it!
Meanwhile, and across the board, the less said about the winners, the more diplomatic. About all I will say is that I actually do think I understand why self-evidently stronger work didn’t necessarily rise to the top.
Consider the following a guess: my experience as a juror in a not-so-dissimilar competition reminds me that an artifact of voting systems where one allocates a spread of points among entrants is that strong but sharply polarizing contenders may well wind up with a lower overall score than merely so-so ones that manage to attract some points from most jurors. I could well be mistaken, but the winners in Self-Sufficient Housing seem to me to have just that aura to them.
Which is too bad, because for all the lazy rhetoric and 1997-stylee chartjunk devoted to “ecosystem injections” and whatnot, there is some very clear, very strong work to be found in these pages. And while I am certainly grateful to both publisher and jury for having brought these young talents to my attention, many of them deserve much better than the real-estate this book gives them.
For me, two clear highlights of ITP’s recent Winter Show were Anh Nguyen’s Meditation Chamber and Demetrie Tyler’s Hypothetical Drawings About The End Of The World.
That these two very different projects, with their utterly different aims, ambitions, scales and strategies, could both emerge from one program - and both reach such a relatively high level of clarity in execution - says something very encouraging about both students and instructors.
The fundamental conceit of Tyler’s Hypothetical Drawings is that text resembling conversation has been scraped from the Web and algorithmically grouped into clusters of relatedness, which are then represented as delicate drawings of a spidery cityscape whose apartment-bound residents connect - or more often, fail to connect. I liked just about everything about this project, from the sensitive type, color and line-weight choices, to the convincing sense of mutual alienation they all add up to produce (and which is justified to a great degree by the actual content of the text). It works on a few different levels, and generally just strikes me as very well-resolved for a student work.
Meanwhile, like I say, Nguyen’s intervention is so different in so many different registers, and yet equally pleasing. It’s a self-inflating, minimally-articulated space with a surprisingly effective calming quality, given its utter punkrockness of material execution. (Whether that space is one of solitude or intimacy is up to the user/s.) Once inside, there’s nothing to do but sit and breathe and enjoy the sense of being in a place apart, even if that place is separated from everything else by a membrane of a millimeter’s thickness. As a further wrinkle, a warmly tactile biometric sensor measures your heartrate and causes a band of LEDs to flash on and off in (slowed) synchrony.
What was particularly surprising to me was how fresh and restorative the air felt, given that I was basically inside a plastic trashbag. I have a few quibbles about Nguyen’s settings of attack and decay on the LED lighting, but they’re just that - quibbles. I could very easily see a just slightly more elaborate version of his Chamber doing very well as a collapsible space of shelter, contemplation and consolidation for frazzled urbanites with tiny apartments - maybe the very urbanites depicted in Tyler’s drawings.
Top marks to both Nguyen and Tyler. Their efforts leave me with a redoubled enthusiasm to see what our own students come up with next semester.
“Since our last report many things have changed; indeed, it would be foolish to assume that they could be otherwise…”
Humanity is becoming most urban at the precise moment in which, at least in the developed nations, the primary driver of urbanization - service-ecology diversity achieved via physical aggregation and density - is being undermined by networked informatics.
Oooh, check out these lovely Dutch-style city bikes from the Canadian Jorg & Olif collective - they really do seem to have captured the essence of the classic European commuter.
I’d have to actually ride one to be sure, of course, but the designers would appear to have found the next sweet spot on the retro cycling curve - fixies, after all, aren’t for everyone. In a better world (and how often do we even bother to articulate visions of same, anymore?), more people would get around town on steeds like these.
