Was orgasm reached more quickly with a recessed or overhanging binnacle?
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From the Speedbird monthly archives
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Just sending up the briefest of flares, here: if you’re into any of the urban computing stuff, you may want to keep your eyes peeled for a forthcoming volume called Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation.
I’m excited to be contributing a chapter on the South Korean experience, in collaboration with Jaz Choi, and the index is just thick with contributions from friends like Laura Forlano, Paul Dourish, Christian Nold and Mark Shepard. Should be pretty tasty.
Not too long ago, I ran the numbers on how often I engage my local car service to take me to the airport. The answer, it turned out, was something depressing like thirty times a year, plus or minus three - making me wish, inevitably, that Dial 7 had a frequent-flier program of their own.
There are a great many things that are less than ideal about this set-up, but one of the most galling is the utter hegemony of Lincoln Town Cars in the NYC car-service market. As off-brand as the Town Car is, you sure don’t see many alternatives hereabouts - there doesn’t seem to be an Addison Lee here, at least not in any price bracket I can afford. That’s why I sure do hope this isn’t a hobbyist’s one-off.
How cool would that be, pulling up to Terminal 1 Departures in a long, low, silent black car? Something that looked a whole hell of a lot more attractive than an old-school Town Car, and was at least nominally better for the environment into the bargain? I’d pay, jeez, a 10% premium for a service like that, and I can’t be the only one. Something tells me there’s a business model here for a canny entrepreneur.
Heh. Dig the new Mojo Cosmetics site: there’s a certain Rodenbeckian majesty to their sexy WWII-styled “propaganda.” And keep an eye peeled for the musings of some “beauty, utility and balance in design expert” (!) on the Press page.
Haters will grumble, but what can I say? I love Mojo, quite unabashedly. It’s great, thoroughly contemporary product…lightyears better than that nasty tin of Carmex you’ve been hauling around in your pocket lint since you were a high-school junior with a hand-me-down Honda CVCC.
Originally published 13 December 2001 on my old v-2.org site, this was my response to my first encounter with Hong Kong. I thought I’d dust it off and have a look at it now that Nurri and I are headed back. I’ve left everything intact as written, but in any event I hope you’ll agree that it stands up to the passage of six years pretty well.
1. on the risk and delight of cities
I’m acutely aware that I probably look like an Apple ad.
I’m sitting in a child’s tire swing, at a pocket playground wedged into the margins of a reservoir on a steep hillside overlooking Hong Kong Island, tapping away on my Titanium G4 as I listen to Lou Reed croon to the ghosts of his mid-1970’s “Berlin.” The view down the slope is nice, but the view isn’t the point (aside from using it as an excuse to briefly note that Hong Kong has more, and more exciting, recent architecture than Tokyo, or indeed anyplace else I can remember being. Even if “exciting” does sometimes mean “godawful.”)
No, the point is that, from this swing, I can look up and be struck with fifteen hundred things I want to say to you. Everything that meets my eye seems to be freighted with meaning - and this is without lysergic assistance. This is the characteristic effervescence of a true urban place. And what I’m finding as I mount the escalator/”travelator” network up into the hills of Hong Kong is that this city is alive to me, in a way that Tokyo or New York or London have ceased to be, at least temporarily.
As I rise, I peer down into the neighborhoods backed up against this oddball thoroughfare. Signs of life abound: laundry and untended plants on balconies, second-floor diners in a blue-lit modernist pizza restaurant, the haunting evensong of a mosque. There’s an offering of incense outside the door to the travelators’ maintenance room, hard by a bar spilling hulking, balding gweilos into the street. You’ve seen this, at least as Orientalist picturesque in the background of films like Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book and Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box.
Climbing through the living tissue (not to mention the interstitial waste spaces) of the Mid-Levels, it’s clear that in Hong Kong there’s still a hellbent love of the things that make a city, in both the risk and the return. More, the sheer verticality of modern buildings hasn’t lost its power to thrill or to inspire: they stand arrayed in ranks like the proverbial dominoes, pieces of the city itself tumbling away down the hillside.
That it’s impossible, unmanageable, infuriating is a given. It’s what we expect of a city, of living in anything that meets the minimum definition of a city. The flipside, and the thing we also take for granted, is that when you surrender yourself to the act of living in such a place, you are also opening yourself to the possibility of meeting a work of art, a cuisine, a sound, a momentary juxtaposition, or especially a person, that bears a nonzero chance of utterly derailing your life. In Hong Kong, at least for the Western visitor, these possibilities aren’t even submerged, they’re right there at the surface: vectors that could take you up and entirely out of the life you thought you were living, for better or for worse.
And it’s vital to remember this when we start to think about what kinds of options we have when confronted with the urban future and its manifold possibilities - a topic that’s assumed new immediacy since the eleventh day of September last. To break the question down to its essence: what kind of place do we want to live in? Is this a desirable thing, this sense of charged possibilities latent within the city, this bargain by which tolerating the existence of banal, wasteful or even fatal contingencies means giving rise to others which wait like catapults on the deck of an aircraft carrier, to fling us off onto new and unknown trajectories? Or would we rather live in ways that guarantee our security at the cost of the throb and churn of city life?
It’s not a rhetorical question: apparently, some of us very much would. I came to Hong Kong in the company of a woman for whom cities mean little more than concentrated opportunities for shopping. I found myself all lit up as we plied the streets in a wood-floored double-decker tram, craning up at the impossible verticality like any six-year-old might, truly geeking out on the mere fact of cityness, and I suddenly realized that my companion was sort of tolerantly ignoring my occasional awed outbursts. Not for her, the thrill and the tension, the sudden glamour of a perfect sky in the narrowest wedge of possibility between two edifices, or the delight at the thought of a matrix of bamboo containing a twenty-first century construction site. None of it.
So for her - take note, Rem Koolhaas fans - maybe a city really isn’t much more than shopping, that “terminal human activity.” And maybe she could easily enough stand more surveillance, more restriction, more control in the world, just so long as it didn’t interfere with her pursuit of a good meal and a great bargain.
There are things beyond shopping, of course. For me, cities are the way a crossing signal ticks more rapidly before a light turns green, the brass lettering spelling out BROADBAND on a concrete service-shaft cover that looks as if it might have been there since the 1920s, the abjection of a homeless person so broken and battered by the experience of citying that I couldn’t determine his/her gender and the strut of a Gucci-sunglass’d young lady so buoyed by the selfsame experience that you’d swear it added five inches to her height.
And finally, for me, cities are always, always about sexuality - not merely the predictably mercenary transactions in the shadows, or the ones that occasion passing through certain neon lit entryways, but that quickening of the pulse and all-but-imperceptible shift of pelvic geometry that accompanies walking alone through the streets of a city one has never before known. How can someone not get these things?
Well, obviously, a great many people don’t, and not merely here in Greater China. For them, we can only suppose, telemetry and surveillance, cordons and checkpoints and quarantines present no great affront. Possibly they’re an inconvenience, a stutter-step on the path to gratification, but that’s about it.
By contrast, for those of us for whom the city resides precisely in its not-terribly-submerged sense of risk, for whom the speed of life exceeds that of the milling crowds, to introduce this armature of mitigation is to kill the thing we love. Don’t we come here exactly because to do so is to be deprived of the guarantee of safety? I mean, this is one of the major reasons we left the suburbs, right, or made the trek here from the ancestral village?
And, yes, there is safety and then there’s safety. There is such a thing as reasonably weighing the upside of a good time against the potential of a freeway crash or a mugging, a sexual assault or a massive myocardial infarction: adults do this all the time.
It’s far harder, on the other hand, to apply this kind of calculus to risks like subway nerve gas attacks, or plummeting airliners full of jet fuel and terrified hostages, which is why the temptation is so strong to clamp down on all of the things which could potentially give rise to such baleful contingencies. When chances are so hard to game out and get a grip on, the absolute answer is the only guarantee of safety, and a great many people are not going to be interested in anything less than a guarantee. After 09.11, it’s hard to blame them.
I don’t have the answer. I think you can probably gather from my tone, though, that I believe any solution that puts too high an emphasis on security is likely to destroy all the things I love about cities. For my money, the contemporary civis is the highest collective artwork of our species: more impressive in its own tumbling and disorderly grandeur than mapping the genome, or putting a few Iowan golfers on the Moon. And at the end of the day, as long as we retain any recognizable vestige of humanity, the challenge is always going to be how to spend the hours of our lives in ways that engage, in ways that produce meaning and value. The city is not the only valid answer to this challenge, but it is a beautiful one.
So, yes, absolutely, there is logic in distributing and decentralizing the functions of the city, as has been suggested in various quarters as a forestallment to terror, but it’s a cold and a fundamentally unsatisfying one. Scattering all the things a city is and does to a cluster of tastefully hardened and hardwired New Urbanist outposts would probably prevent the Aums and the Al Qaedas and the Timothy McVeighs of the world from achieving their operational aims, but it would also sunder that tissue of connectivity and potential that results in business deals, and innovative inventions, and especially in your getting laid this Friday night. Is this how you want to live? I didn’t think so.
2. on the village as blanket
Sitting here under the reassuring bulk of Sir Norman Foster’s HSBC Building, with the ground undulating away under me in crisply pleated ripples - are these the folds so beloved of D&G-besotted architheorists and so manifestly otherwise absent from Foster’s oeuvre? Knots and circles of Filipina domestics are gathered at the foot of each mighty pillar; apparently the local tradition of Maids’ Day Off (and what horrors are enfolded in that very nomenclature!) extends to the evening before.
This is the Filipino diaspora in full flower. I am the only non-pinoy present, and the only male save the fellows trying to peddle low-quality wares to the assembled women. They lie on spread sheets of newspapers and magazines and brochures: reading, playing cards, talking on the cellphone (to whom? to where?), lost in fogs of exhaustion or prayer. They’re almost all, at a guess, between thirty-five and forty-five, although hard life does have a way of prematurely aging one. Am I intruding? I doubt it, actually. Not so much as a raised eyebrow.
Here’s an African fellow trying to shift some unbelievably cheap-looking 14K chains.
Circles and knots. Settling into the easy rhythms and comfortable routines of village intimacy, here so far from home; if they were Japanese, I’d imagine a crooned “mmmmm, kimochiiiiiii” rising from these pillars and corners. (This is, of course, the kind of unwarranted extrapolation from the evidence for which an ex-girlfriend tore me a new one, one time on the uptown 1 train.) Has history dealt these women a bad hand, or a passably playable one? They have - in each other, and in their ability to send money home and support a village, and never least in their faith - something that I do not.
Is this how history, then, turns out? Expatriate servants pulling the village back around their shoulders, underneath what was not too long ago The Most Expensive Building In The World? The building’s belly swells with a curve whose index suggests, at most, the third month of pregnancy, but these women have gone the distance and lived to tell it. And here I am among them, listening to a ska-punk band from good old Berkeley, California, complain about artificial life from the speakers of my laptop computer.
What does any of this tell us about the global movement of capital? What does this tell us about the deep communicability of human experience, or conversely, about its literal idiocy? They say any two people of different “races” may have more in common genomically than two nominal members of the same race, but surely these women all share something that no one of them shares with me?
What do they see when they see a billboard that says “Where is the MPF provider you can rely on?” in clean Univers, black on Pantone orange 021C? What do I see when I see a hundred white-socked feet, each pair close by its sensible flat shoes, and a woman reading the paper with an air of vaguely miffed engagement that belongs for all the world in an Upper West Side bagel-and-coffee joint? (Just that, maybe, in either case.)
What would I feel, do, think, how would I react if I had to fly thousands of miles from home and undertake what is in every statistical probability an utterly thankless task, for people who had every likelihood of treating me shabbily, just to eke out a living? It’s getting dark under here.
3. on private currency and its uses
I had no idea that Hong Kong used private currency. There are apparently three different banks authorized (by whom?) to issue bank notes here, and the notes are themselves copyrighted. The HSBC bills are pretty enough, but except for some embedded threads they look like someone ran them off on an inkjet.
And these maids - it’s a full day later, now: Sunday - seem to have enough of them to spend. Any casual inspection of their numbers, strewn out along the science-fictiony skyways of Central and Admiralty, reveals something that skews any calculations of desperate exile: late-model cellphones, shopping bags from Prada, the occasional pair of kicky DKNY boots.
It would be easy to conclude from the headlines of reduced minimum wage and official disrespect that this is an open-and-shut case of mass human exploitation, but something else is happening here, too. This is the T’ai Chi Garden of Hong Kong Park: the corporate monoliths soar and glitter above the stones and the moss, young brides in unbelievable white get-ups throng like sugary phalaenopsis petals colliding in the surface tension atop an overfull basin.
It is romantic, in its way, and it certainly sets forth clearly the standard the young men and women of Hong Kong are expected to meet or exceed in their nuptials. One more thing to spend those banknotes on, I suppose.
4. on the Maids
I only thought I had seen this; the truth is, it’s a damn good thing that I thought to swing back by HSBC on my way to dinner. Maid’s Day Off is in full flower, and it’s like a deafening aviary under here: the unique rhubarb of a crowd where every raised voice sounds at the precise frequency of Filipina delight.
The paltry few blankets of last night, at the bases of the pillars, have spread until they cover the entire floor except for a narrow thoroughfare. I’m willing to bet there are neighborhoods in this ecology: here Metro Manila, there Cebu. It’s like a happy refugee camp, that smells tantalizingly of good, greasy food, noodles and rice and pork. And here I am amidst this, overhead: sitting atop a stilled escalator, the corrugated armor closed and making a roof inches above me. Sarsi, San Miguel, MoviStar.
Talk about “womenspace,” too: it’s not that men are unwelcome here, they’re simply and vastly irrelevant. Women cackling, stirring pots of stew, playing Scrabble and braiding each other’s hair. Who needs men?
I thought these cops were coming to bust me but it looks like they’re, instead, cleaning up the dishes and cups of their own blanket amidst the wards and sectors of the crowd. Either I’m completely misinterpreting what I’m seeing, or I’m looking straight at some of the most enlightened policing I can imagine.
Which raises further questions, of course: how did this get started, why didn’t HSBC put a stop to it as they presumably so easily could have? Or did they try, only to resign themselves to the understanding that their efforts were futile, and that if two thousand or so lively domestics wanted to renact a Mindanao village in the lobby of their gigadollar bank building one day a week they were damn well going to?
5. on the pleasure of nature, and the nature of home
In the Aviary, and marveling at all of this so very close to the towers of commerce. This feels like a triumph of urban civilization, actually: to all appearances, the deep complexity of a rainforest ecosystem in all its tumble and cascade of foliage has been preserved in the heart of the city.
It’s almost unbearably relaxing being in here, the absolute antithesis of the commercial gantlet atop the Peak, with its ticky-tacky giftshops and come-ons for Planet Hollywood, featuring the ever-unattractive Demi Moore and that grimace that Sylvester Stallone wears when he wishes to look intelligent. Contrast that to the beauty of birds’ song, the constant whitenoise of a downrushing stream, cooler and cleaner air - although one can still sense the low-frequency throb and monoxide stink of bus traffic in the surrounding streets - all of this separated from the city beyond by the merest membrane of netting.
Some bird out there is issuing an amazing sound, something like a recalcitrant hard drive spinning up.
Nature really is incomparable, it never disappoints. Let’s compare the feeling of ascending I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower in plastic and chrome elevators, to the drabbest of hallways some 65 stories up - where I encountered a stanchion whose bare plywood back nobody had bothered to sheathe, dust and bad carpeting - to a few simple minutes communing with the carp in the fountain at the tower’s base.
Which was more satisfying? Which experience made promises it could never deliver on, which offered nothing but some fish in a pool and yet brought me happiness and a sense of stillness, however momentary? Fish and birds, rock on.
I’m back at Narita now - or leaving it, more precisely, the limousine bus making its ponderous way out to the expressway and towards the ANA Hotel in Akasaka, from where I will hump my gear home.
“Home.” This is suddenly a strange and slippery idea. Where is home, precisely? My few days in Hong Kong reminded me that I am not precisely at zero, here in Japan. My understanding of nihongo even now exceeds any mastery of Cantonese I may ever attain, I can read a few of the glyphs lining the walls and corridors of the airport, I am well on my way.
Does that, combined with the fact that I have a bolthole of an apartment here, and some percentage of my precious things, does any of that mean that Tokyo is home? I’ve been reminded so often since flying to HK of a hippy-trippy illustration I saw as a child in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, of a long-haired and bearded traveler between dimensions, and especially the last codicil of its caption, almost an afterthought: Neither dimension is ours.
In Hong Kong I spoke naturally, or at least felt a lot less guilty about not speaking the local one. In Hong Kong I ate real Thai food and Mission-style burritos, with zest, stuff I simply cannot get here in Tokyo, and felt more or less justified and at ease (if a little privileged) talking to shopclerks etc. in my Californian English. Wow, right on, cool.
But here I am at quarter to ten on a Tuesday evening, on the freeway between Tomisato and Shisui, and something about this feels glove-comfortable. I know this bus as well, or better than, the Carey bus that takes you rattling in from JFK to Grand Central, the lights and the signs and the license plates by now look familiar to me in their form and meaning. I’m headed towards my bed fourteen concrete floors above Kamiyacho, the place where I read and dream and pull the covers up to my chin in the soft chill of the deep middle night.
And tomorrow morning I will head down the elevator - probably too beat to ride my bike, I’ll allow myself the Hibiya-sen - and I’ll go whistling off to work for a company that embarrasses me in everything that is most Japanese about it. The smell of stale smoke and middle-aged men who drink too much and wear the wrong colognes. The paperwork and the spirit-crushing rituals of meetings and the inability to give a fact its true name, and above all the mandatory and empty greetings called aisatsu.
HKG-NRT. Neither dimension is ours.
On his Tecznotes blog, good ol’ Mike Migurski has a neat practice called “Blog All Dog-Eared Pages” (e.g.). Well, as it happens, I tend not to dog-ear my books: although Nurri insists that the true mark of respectful engagement with a book is precisely to mark it up and crimp it and generally leave it bearing obvious signs of the encounter, I was raised to treat books as something close to holy.
So dog-earing is out. Nevertheless, the sentiment is correct, and I’m straight-up ganking Mike’s trope to get into a little more detail on Phaidon’s excellent book on Naoto Fukasawa, mentioned here just the other day. You probably won’t be surprised that just about every page provokes some thought in me, so consider these merely a first installment:
- Page 21, the celebrated Muji “window fan” CD player
Apparently, there was quite a struggle getting the engineers to accept that a more traditional precision short-pull switch was all wrong for this device. As Fukasawa understood and successfully argued for, there’s a deep relationship between form, the other experiences with which that form resonates, and the interaction quality suggested by those resonances. The man prevailed, and a “clunky” long-pull switch was selected for the final production version.
Anybody who’s ever worked on a Japanese product-development team will understand precisely what was at stake here, and how subtle Fukasawa’s efforts at persuasion must have been. I’m in awe, reminded of a long-standing wish that I knew how to be more effectively persuasive when working on a design team, without losing my cool. I can’t tell you how many projects I’ve worked on where my sense of the correct measure was equal to Fukasawa’s here, yet, whether through overstating my case, or failing to make it in the first place, my viewpoint was overruled. It’s all well and good revelling in the putative independence of “not being a team player,” but sometimes the design suffers for that vanity.
- Page 22-23, “Erasing physical existence” (!)
With the mundanely gorgeous INAX Tile Light, Fukasawa engages the single most pressing issue of design for the everyware age: what is the designer’s responsibility when an object’s functionality is absolutely impossible to determine from its form or appearance?
The Tile Light is an incandescent lighting element indistinguishable, in its unlit state, from the other standard white ceramic tiles surrounding it, and I am cleaved in half temperamentally by the problems it raises. As designed object and intellectual object both, it derives all of its substantial power and beauty from the fact of this indistinguishability, to the point that any intervention whatsoever intended to announce its presence or explain its use would be to miss the point entirely. In Fukasawa’s words, “when the light is not on, it goes back to being a tile”: it fades away, it’s anonymous, that’s why it’s beautiful and, to my mind, there’s almost no better concrete illustration of Mark Weiser’s idea of functionality that’s “invisible, but in the woodwork everywhere.”
But - and isn’t there always a “but”? - this anonymous quality is also the Tile Light’s Achilles heel. Assume for the sake of argument that the tile really is effectively indistinguishable from its peers on visual inspection. How do you know which one to pry out when the lightbulb dies? Still more problematically, should such funtionality be actuated not by an external switch but by some embedded (pressure, capacitance) sensor, how do you even know it’s there and available to begin with?
You might say that here’s where the minimalist aesthetic I cherish crashes directly into the humanist usability practice I champion - and if things were really that simple, I’m afraid there would be no contest between the two. But part of Fukasawa’s point, as it was part of Weiser’s point, is that the disappearance from view is itself a humanist gesture: it reduces clutter, distraction, psychic overload and the very real risk of option fatigue. No easy answers here, but the provocation is at least bound up in something surpassingly lovely and humble.
- Page 48-49, KDDI Ishicoro mobile phone
On its face, there’s nothing wrong with the idea that a phone should be designed to afford moments of pleasure when worn, carried, held or (as can be the case) unconsciously stroked. Nor is there anything amiss, at first blush, with the form factor Fukasawa’s chosen here, one with the smoothed heft and concavity of a river stone - Nicolas Nova will confirm that I once stole just such a stone straight off a Geneva table, because I’d spent the entirety of a long happy dinner compulsively burnishing it with the ball of my thumb.
Two things come to mind, though. One is the practical blobjection that the Ishicoro, like any irregularly convex lump, doesn’t play very nice with the other, predominantly flat-surfaced things we use and carry. It’s not stackable, it doesn’t balance, and, well, is that a river stone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
The other thought is a little harder to pin down. It has to do with the commodity nature of mobile phones: is it even fair for the form factor of something you’re inevitably going to trade out in a year or so to suggest timelessness (and invite longterm sensual engagement)?
- Page 59, Muji air cleaner
“The remote-control unit that comes with the air purifier is the same size and shape as a cigarette pack, and the buttons are the same circumference as a cigarette”: this strikes me as a rare instance of Fukasawa getting a little overinvested in a conceit. It’s, at best, a stretch.
Of course, unless there’s some countervailing standard, or argument from human factors, there’s no reason why the controls shouldn’t be shaped this way. But I’m not overjoyed when designers indulge themselves in this kind of cuteness, for the sake of a hermetic in-joke that makes sense only internally. I’m occasionally guilty of this as a writer, I always know when I’m doing it, and the bad faith always makes me cringe later.
- Page 70-71, on the +/- 0 mindset
“In the twenty years since 1980, I have, as a product designer…” Wow, I hadn’t understood he’d been working that long.
“A load was taken off my mind when I understood that there’s no one shape that appeals to everyone, and that there’s no such thing as ‘good’ shape in isolation of function…I believe that designers had begun to realize that design for the sake of changing something or to give meaningless form to things was somehow not right.” [Stormy, prolonged applause.]
- Page 84-85, Assimilating into the surroundings: +/- 0 Coffee Maker
“The corner radius of the bottom of this square coffee maker matches [that of] the tray that specifically goes with it. When the legs for the tray are attached, it becomes a small table.” This strikes me as being overly brittle design. I’m not so comfortable, in fact, any time something is precision-machined to mate with another non-mission-critical component that “specifically goes with it.” The coffee maker, yes, goes with the tray…but then the tray is broken, damaged, misplaced, or lost. (This goes double for the tray legs.) And then, forever after, the coffee maker doesn’t “go with” anything else quite as nicely. I almost feel like this is a physical argument for open standards.
- Page 102-103, +/- 0 Cordless Telephone
If Dieter Rams had been born Japanese.
More to come.
Along with everything else that I’ve been neglecting this travel-scarred year - little things like exercise, proper nutrition, my apartment, the cultural life of my city, and like that - I also haven’t had much time to tackle the towering stack of books that teeters at bedside. Not, mind you, that I’ve stopped buying them: no, they continue to accumulate. I just haven’t been able to spend any time reading them, thinking about what I’ve read, or putting what’s contained in them in the context of the other things I think I know.
Here are no fewer than nine books I’ve picked up since July, with all of which I have at best the kind of cursory acquaintance you pick up from a single rapid read-through. (I’ve spared you thoughts on the eight others.) I’m going to hit “publish” now, brew another pot of coffee, and try to spend some quality time with one or two of ‘em; meantime, I thought you might be interested to see what’s furnishing my mental landscape during those moments I’m able to have one.
- Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance
Mandatory after seeing Anton Corbijn’s luminous Control, long stretches of which are largely derived from it. It’s true that he’s not around to answer the various charges his widow Deborah lays against him, and just as true that he was clearly laboring under significant physical and psychological damage; I suppose, all Rashomon-like, that anyone not present never will know for sure just what transpired between the two of them. But the incidents related here have a certain ring of truth to them, and for anyone who grew up on Joy Division like I did, it’ll be tough coming to terms with just how much of a dick Ian Curtis turns out to be. It’s a slim volume, unforgiveably padded out with discography, lyrics and gig listings, but Touching from a Distance nevertheless strikes me as very much worth owning and reading if you’ve ever been moved by Curtis or his music.
- Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
Mike Davis is a crank. I know this and love him anyway. Here he’s curated a collection of essays from various contributors - including China Miéville (!) - on the archisocial depredations wrought by untrammeled glomocapital, perhaps best thought of as a companion volume to Keller Easterling’s Enduring Innocence. I’m hoping that this book will function as an overdue corrective to the largely uncritical embrace of the conditions it describes in many of the architectural circles I’m aware of.
This is particularly so as regards places like Las Vegas and Dubai, where a wide-open, anything-goes ethos, fused to the perceived necessity to outdo each successive spectacular project, and lubricated by seemingly bottomless reserves of cash, has given many young practices the chance of seeing even their more experimental work realized. As it happens, I know one or two things about the Faustian condition, and don’t have any room to sit smugly in judgment of those practices. Nevertheless, I’m glad that we’ve got a Davis to assemble voices like these and remind all and sundry that it’s Not necessarily OK, and that every architectural dream complex realized under such circumstances has a punishing human cost.
- Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind
It seems that I re-immerse myself in the Gulag literature every year around this time, but there are only so many times you can return to Solzhenitsyn. (You know something’s wrong with you when you find yourself stumbling on familiar passages deep, deep in the second 900-page volume of The Gulag Archipelago.) The Ginzburg is something that I remember seeing cited in Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread - a book I quite like, by the way - but had never stumbled across until now. A real find, and perfect for these ever-lengthening evenings. If, that is, you’re messed up in the same way I appear to be.
- Holl, Pallasmaa, Pérez-Gómez, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture
This is a new-ish and very beautiful edition of a 1994 collection of texts arguing that architects should devote more sustained attention to the sensual and experiential dimensions of their work. It amounts to a welcome “re-assertion of the human body as the locus of experience” in the face of architecture’s decade-and-a-half-long love affair with digitally-driven formal experimentation.
I have to admit that I was never a big fan of Holl until Nurri and I found ourselves completely blown away by our few hours walking around Helsinki’s Kiasma - a building which not merely epitomizes so many of the numinous qualities lauded in Questions, but demonstrates to my complete satisfaction that Holl is that rarest architectural thinker able to translate theory into coherent (and deeply rewarding) built space. There’s no question that our fondly remembered, moment-by-moment experience of that building winds up underwriting the assertions made here.
- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
My friend Shanthi recommended this to me over the summer. Knowing that - with the exception of a perverse and inexplicable fixation on baseball - Shanthi’s got unimpeachable taste, I’m more or less willing to follow her anywhere she goes. This and the Peace book below got packed for next week’s flight to Hong Kong. (UPDATE: Holy smoke, this isn’t the same David Mitchell that wrote Black Swan Green, is it? That was the first media property I was ever peer-Twittered into checking out - The Wire being another - and I loved it. I sure hope I wasn’t Blue Anted, but in a sense, so what if I was?)
- David Peace, Tokyo Year Zero
Even though I wasn’t particularly fond of his debut Nineteen Seventy-Four - a fairly bald attempt at out-Ellroying Ellroy, without the master’s impeccable sense of proportion and timing - I’m once again willing to give Peace a chance. If for no other reason than that setting a noir amid the grotesqueries of Occupation Tokyo makes perfect sense to me - in fact, I’m surprised it hasn’t been tried before. At any rate, I find myself rather looking forward to this one.
- Phaidon, Naoto Fukasawa and Tokujin Yoshioka Design
These are admittedly coffee-table books, but finding any extended consideration of my hero Fukasawa’s work in English has been impossible up until now. It’s particularly instructive to consider his oeuvre against that of his more sensual near-contemporary Yoshioka, whose work is less well-known outside of Japan.
If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said I’m not that into Yoshioka, despite the delight I’ve taken from his Tofu lamp since splurging on it the very day I started to furnish my first Tokyo apartment. What the Phaidon book succeeded in doing was reminding me that I’ve actually been really stoked by a great many of his projects, from the A-POC Aoyama space to the Media Skin phone.
By contrast, Fukasawa seems to have lost his way these last few years - as awe-inspiring as I’ve always felt his work to be, I’ve been utterly unmoved by anything I’ve seen of his since about mid-2005, especially the furniture. That’s why I’m so glad that Naoto Fukasawa isn’t just a pretty picture book: there’s a detailed exploration of his gift for insight into the everyday and the thought process that made him, at the peak of his powers, the most important working designer in the world. In some ways, even, this is the book that Moggridge’s Designing Interactions should have been. Strong buy.
- Reiser + Umemoto, Atlas of Novel Tectonics
I’ve been avoiding buying this book for a long time, primarily because it’s at least superficially the precise inverse of the Holl volume discussed above: Reiser + Umemoto have always struck me as devotees of the abstract diagram, architects whose work privileges the (real) intellectual pleasures of post-Deleuzian theory over anything that might make sense at the level of lived experience. Ironically or not, though, Atlas also happens to be a gorgeous instance of the bookmaker’s art - deeply pleasurable to hold, to look at, and to read - and its seductions were finally too much for me to resist.
In the end, I do think Reiser and Umemoto are probably a little too clever for their own good, although it’s undeniable that an honest appraisal of their thought awaits the experience of its manifestation in concrete form. (Or is it? Undeniable, I mean? One might equally validly make the case that the importance of a whole phylum of architectural talents, from Hugh Ferriss and Antonio Sant’Elia to Archigram straight through to Zaha Hadid, lies not nearly so much in their built work, if any, as in the images they produced.)
Can you tell that these guys leave me ambivalent, that they make me uneasy? That’s not such a bad thing. It’s salutary to not know just what you truly think and feel about a practice.
OK, that’ll do. Off now to brew, to read, and perchance to think.
So I remember having promised you, before leaving for Bali, that I’d soon be able to spill the beans regarding a special project I’ve been working on with Mark Shepard. And, well, “how soon?” is now.
It is my great pleasure and privilege to invite you to a discussion event on “Urban Computing and its Discontents” at the Architectural League on Friday evening, the 14th of December, to mark the publication of a pamphlet of the same name. We’re imagining this as a further exploration of and commentary upon some of the themes which arose in the course of last year’s Architecture and Situated Technologies event.
If it goes even half as well as our panel with Jan Abrams at Conflux last month, this should be all kinds of goodness in and of itself, the former having left me with about the best feeling I’ve had coming off a stage since…jeez, since last year’s Conflux. But it isn’t simply a launch party for our own joint. No, this is the kickoff for an entire series of same Mark’s lined up, featuring an ferociously talented panoply of our friends and co-conspirators - it’s a testament to Omar, Mark and Trebor’s prescience in framing the original event that there is still so very much material for fruitful inquiry in the topic, and I promise you that you are in for some significant treats as the series unfolds.
Hopefully, you’ll think the same of this evening event. I would venture to guess that if you’re even remotely interested in
- how to distinguish between “responsive” environments, and those which are merely reactive;
- what happens to the profession of architecture as it is increasingly forced to cede its sovereign prerogative of authoring space to communities newly empowered by this responsiveness;
- what happens to cities, structurally and experientially, when information processing tools and metaphors both begin to permeate them;
- how they continue to function as platforms for engagement with the Other, or fail to do so, under such a condition;
- how they might better support conviviality or, alternately, be designed so as to intentionally suppress freedom of association and the untrammeled ability to otherwise make use of them; and especially
- what a true “read/write urbanism” might look like…
then this is something you won’t want to miss. At any rate, Mark and I certainly look forward to seeing you at the Architectural League on the evening of the 14th - and keep an eye peeled for the forthcoming pamphlets in the series.
