6 Open Eavesdrop

Blue and Bubbly On the Internet

A cozy bar in East Hollywood by Design, Bitches is a cider lover’s dream. Hear something? Say something: eavesdrop@archpaper.com

Alejandro Zaera-Polo Answered Back

Earlier this year, AN published reporting about the latest travails of Alejandro ZaeraPolo, including news about his pending lawsuit and online activities. Zaera-Polo, a former dean and architecture professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture, has registered his distaste for contemporary academia in two different courts: Last August, he filed a suit in Mercer County Superior Court against the Trustees of Princeton University, university administrators, and former colleagues Mónica Ponce de León, Elizabeth Diller, and V. Mitch McEwen, among others, alleging wrongful termination, breach of contract, discrimination and defamation, the creation of a hostile work environment, and other violations.

More recently, Zaera-Polo’s efforts are also being heard in the court of public opinion via a Twitter exchange with McEwen. In a multitweet reply to McEwen, Zaera-Polo led with an apology of sorts and encouraged his former colleague to publicly apologize for her comments in the Daily Princetonian . He added: “Lesson #1: free ride is over, from now

Adventures in Web Design

Already 2023 has yielded two improvements in architectural websites.

on white males answer back.”

After AN ’s article was published, ZaeraPolo chimed in on January 12 via Twitter to share his response: Despite not reaching out to him for a comment, AN did “a good job. Everything they write is true.” He continued: “In fact they have done such a good job that they disclose facts that are not publicly available yet. Which means that one of the architects’ defendants has been disclosing information to AN . To the Princeton legal team: you are leaking badly.” Reader, AN ’s sources only included publicly available information.

Zaera-Polo did offer a useful clarification. AN ’s reporting mentioned his Twitter profile picture, a Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta , which has become a symbol for anti-establishment movements, including the hacktivist collective Anonymous. He stated that the mask “has been there since 2013, when I was dean at the SoA, and I organized a conference called ‘Anonymous’, to which, whether you believe it or not, I invited Mitch McEwen. So it was not personal, and it is not a vendetta as AN implies… .” Point taken.

Alma’s 904 North Virgil Avenue Los Angeles

323-522-3362 almasonvirgil.com

Design: Design, Bitches

Early versions of the fermented apple-juice drink now known as cider were being brewed before Jesus Christ was born. Its popularity has waxed and waned over the millennia, but by the 1980s, the historic beverage had gained a reputation as a “cheap loony juice for teenagers to glug in bus shelters,” according to pommelier Jane Peyton. Thanks in part to the craft beer revival and enthusiasm for gluten-free vittles, today cider is one of the hottest beverages in the U.S. market, with more varieties and flavors than ever before.

The cider revival is in full swing at Alma’s, a Los Angeles bar designed by local firm Design, Bitches that squeezes more than 100 ciders into a 558-square-foot storefront in Virgil Village. The noirish, monochrome dark interior, assembled from three shades of blue, puts the focus on gold and amber bevs from all over the world.

Should the eye wander, there’s a parrot tank over the bar and miniature town dioramas under the street-facing seating fashioned by Alma’s co-owner Lee Briante to admire. Decorwise, bright cider bottles and cans shelved from the bar counter up to the wood-paneled ceiling are the center of attention, especially as seen from the clubby backless chairs at the curved wood bar. The funky labels on display are complemented by a space-age chandelier over the bar extension that sits across from a narrow, wallto-wall banquette lined with tables for two.

Although the space is small, it feels bigger and brighter thanks to diagonal mirrors in the corners that bounce outside light around, while the reed glass on the front door and one of the front windows keeps the coziness locked in.

“We were inspired by the quirkiness of the neighborhood and the owners to create a local bar steeped in references to East Hollywood past and present,” Design, Bitches cofounder Rebecca Rudolph told AN. “It was important to us that it be a world unto itself, brought to life through a monochromatic color palette and custom-designed pieces including three-dimensional dioramas, mirrors, and built-in furniture.”

Alma’s opened slowly and carefully, given the strictures of the pandemic. It quickly became a neighborhood favorite for its signature ciders as well as its hefty beer list and nosh, like cheese plates and mini waffles. “If you love getting drunk on cider, this is the best place in L.A.,” one Google review gushed. “So when the crushing weight of despair becomes too much to carry, head over to Alma's and find sparkling salvation in a bottle.” Audrey Wachs

Earlier this month, BIG debuted a new website. When announcing this update on Twitter, the firm noted that its original website was made during the 2000s Flash era. The new site marks the shift in the company’s direction since its founding. A statement on the website from Founder and Creative Director Bjarke Ingels said, “Our latest transformation is the BIG LEAP: Bjarke Ingels Group of Landscape, Engineering, Architecture, Planning and Products.” (Sustainability is listed on the page as one of the key disciplines of the firm, but this didn’t make it into the new acronym. �� )

True to the old website’s styling, where color-coded projects were represented by pictograms stacked in a Tetris-like, periodic table arrangement, each project on the new site has its own unique icon. The redesign also scuttles the Millennial loading screen, a display programmed in several iterations that spelled out “Loading” in block letters as a percent ticker below gradually inched up to “100%.” While the new site is an undoubted improvement that shows a serious portfolio of built and proposed work, the cheeky big.dk URL remains the same.

Herzog & de Meuron (H&dM) also has a new website design. At the top of the homepage page, site categories (news, projects, monographs) sit in solid oval bubbles above topics/subcategories (art space, sport, residential) in their own dotted-line ovals. On the old site, the menu was on the left side of the page, with projects in a nested menu.

H&dM’s website, topped with navigational “pills,” lands tiles in a grid, while BIG’s opts for the single-column approach. BIG uses custom icons for each project, while H&dM numbers everything in ascending order (they’re up to 578 so far). Beyond that, the home pages are mildly similar, with logos in black top-left and categories in the middle.

The sites compile hundreds of projects for design-forward companies that are now

XL operations: BIG has over 700 employees, H&dM more than 600. It appears that they’ve discarded their more oddball prior expressions for formats that are encyclopedic, professional, and handsome.

These improvements have Eavesdrop missing the early internet days of architecture websites. Who remembers the awkward art-project pages of yesteryear’s starchitects?

Alissa Walker wrote in 2010 that at the time only two of the most recent 15 winners of the Pritzker Prize had websites with “easy navigation and proper URLs.” Jean Nouvel Zaha Hadid, Renzo Piano, and OMA all had Flash-reliant websites that used “label-less maps, wordless grids, sketches and other graphic devices with rollovers as navigation, with no easy way to locate or share projects. Two sites took a full minute to load. One had–gasp!–a pop-up window. It was so 1998!”

In the 13 years since, some quick searches reveal that the situation has improved. Most extant offices have something , even if it’s a straightforward portfolio grid, and the more corporate outfits have massed impressive resources to showcase their work and tell their story. Holdouts remain. SANAA only has a single-slide placeholder. Amateur Architecture Studio doesn’t have a website, nor does Eduardo Souto de Moura. While Glen Murcutt also doesn’t have a website, there is a dedicated domain for his folio, a boutique treatment of his work published by 01 Editions. (The cheaper version is ~$1,250 plus shipping.)

Peter Zumthor, that Luddite, still doesn’t have an online presence. Zumthor.org is operated by one Thomas Bjørkan, who writes: “As an admirer of his works I found it suprisingly [sic] difficult to find good and coherent information online, so I decided to try and make his works more accessible through this private project.” A fan-curated Instagram account of Zumthor’s work has over 114,000 followers.

It’s now 2023. It seems the role of a website for an architecture office—much like that of a monograph or even a building—is in flux, just like everything else.