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urban youth culture

ISSUE 001

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URBAN YOUTH CULTURE IN CHICAGO REDEFINING ARTISTIC EXPRESSION BY USING THE ENVIRONMENT AS A CANVAS.

DEPARTMENTS 12 14 18 22 24 26 80

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FOCUS BEHIND THE LENSE UP + COMERS FORMERLY FEEL THESE WORDS DEPTH EDITOR’S NOTE

FOUR M SEPT 2014 CHICAGO ILLINOIS

FEATURES 4 m .u r ba n you thcu ltu r e.com

24 VANDALS URBAN VANDALISM: GRAFFITI AS AN ACCEPTED PART OF YOUTH CULTURE. PETER YEUNG

32 FLIP SIDE DANCE CREWS TAKING THE CHICAGO SUBWAY BY STORM. SIAN DOLDING

38 ARCHIVE PHOTOGRAPHER CORINNE DAY BRINGS A HARD EDGED LOOK TO HER IMAGES. OLIVIA SINGER

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FOCUS

meet the homeless youths OCCUPYING chicago, illinois

PART OF BEING HOMELESS IS BEING LONELY & THAT’S ONE OF THE WORST FEELINGS. 12

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photo Michael Avedon

“Part of being homeless is being lonely, and that’s one of the worst feelings in the world”, says 19 year-old Jermire from a Chicago youth shelter. Jermire feels homelessness was a life-lesson and he’s glad he could make it through all the bad experiences. The good news is Jermire is going to make it. Even though he went through some of his high school years not knowing if he would eat or where he would sleep, Jermire’s attitude is strong and positive. Jermire lived on the streets since he was 13. As sad as that is, on May 27th Jermire is graduating high school. •

story Mark Horvath

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SPOTLIGHT ON THE HOMELESS YOUTHS OF INNER CITY CHICAGO; THEY’RE STRUGGLES, STRENGTH, AND ENCOURAGING WORDS IN HOPES FOR A BRIGHTER FUTURE.

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BEHIND THE LENSE

FROM , THE ASHES: ALEX LAU S PHOTOGRAPHY AS SOCIAL ACTIVISM

get better at photography. Maria Stenzel, a former photojournalist at National Geographic, was one of my biggest influences during my time at Emerson. Not only was she the driving force behind my From The Ashes project, she opened my eyes on what makes a great photograph. She also taught me that the realms of photojournalism and fine art photography don’t necessarily have to be kept separate, and often the best photographers are the ones that blend them together. My main interest when it comes to documentary photography is to focus on marginalized communities. Lynn, Massachusetts is a small blue-collar town

MAIN INTEREST DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY Emerson students know what they want to do from the get go, and will do whatever it takes to make that happen. While their photography program is still in its developmental stages, there are a few faculty members that I truly believe have helped me

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just north of Boston, and is also home to the third largest Khmer population outside of Cambodia. I myself knew nothing about the Cambodian culture prior to starting From The Ashes. What I did know was that they are rarely represented in American mainstream

media, and I felt that From The Ashes would be a great opportunity to showcase an immigrant culture that’s still trying to develop its own identity. I’m a firm believer in getting to know a person before I photograph them. The camera is a very imposing thing to point in the face of a person, especially to those who you don’t know. I would often hang out and interact with them for weeks before bringing out my camera. Once we had established a relationship, only then would I think about photographing them. This led to photographing a Cambodian gang member showing me his gang tattoos and bullet scars, a funeral in the middle of a three-day blizzard, and a spontaneous wedding ceremony. It was incredibly overwhelming meeting all of these people and hearing their stories on the Khmer Rogue and how it affected their family. Each of them had a sad tale, but what was remarkable was how they all managed to transcend that and become amazing people in the community. Well, right now I live in Brooklyn, which has a huge Orthodox Jewish community. Their culture seems to be so self-contained, which is odd in a melting-pot city like New York. I think my greatest challenge for that project would be simply figure out how to get my foot in the door. Another immigrant community that I would like to cover is the Mexican population of Los Angeles. The Mexican demographic is often overshadowed by the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, despite being the backbone of the city. I find Eugene Richards’s project Dorchester Days and Joe Penney’s work on uranium mining in Niger fantastic. Both of them have

photo Alex Lau

Emerson graduate Alex Lau’s documentary-based shots touch on an eclectic mix of US-centric subjects – from gang rehabilitation to immigrant communities to the humble peanut butter jelly sandwich stack. Initially drawn to photography as a teenager when he got his hands on a Canon Rebel, his primary focus was sport but since studying on Emerson’s photojournalism course, the Boston photographer has been expanding his ouvre. He’s only just graduated but Alex is already pursuing photography full-time so we caught up with him to talk shooting the juvenile delinquents of Boston and the push and pull of documentary photography.

story Dazed Digital

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HIS WORK FOCUS ON IMMIGRANT CULTURE, WITH THE GOAL OF BRINGING AWARENESS TO MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES BY USING PHOTOGRAPHY AS A MEANS OF ACTIVISM.

honed this talent of capturing a moment that transcends a single second. Inner city Weightlifting is a project that focuses on a nonprofit organization in Boston that takes in the city’s worst juvenile offenders and trains them in the sport of Olympic Weightlifting as a means of staying out of trouble. Gang rehabilitation is a topic that has always interested me, and to be able to see a foundation to use such an intriguing method of helping troubled youth made me want to see this for myself. This led to photographing a Cambodian gang member showing me his gang tattoos and bullet scars, a funeral in the middle of a three-day blizzard, and a spontaneous wedding ceremony. It was incredibly overwhelming meeting all of these people and hearing their stories. To be able to pick the brains of kids that have spent more than half their lives in prison was an incredibly mind opening experience. •

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GANG REHABILITATION ALWAYS INTERESTED ME — INCREDIBLY MIND OPENING EXPERIENCE.

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UP & COMERS

collaboration set to steal the scene: mike and claire

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PETRA COLLINS PHOTOGRAPHS YOUNG NEW YORK-BASED ARTISTS MIKE BAILEY-GATES & CLAIRE CHRISTERSON AS THEY SHARE THEIR SURREAL, COLOUR-SATURATED VISION

As part of our new digitally-led US project States of Independence we’ve invited our favourite 30 American curators, magazines, creatives and institutions to takeover Dazed for a day. It only seemed right to hit up New York’s art ‘it girl’ Petra Collins for an insider take on US creativity right now. In this fivepart series, the prolific photographer shoots and interviews her favourite underground creatives set to steal the scene stateside. Young New York-based artists Mike Bailey-Gates and Claire Christerson have been sharing their colourful, surrealist visions for the past three years. The pair met at Manhattan SVA art school, where they realized that despite differing styles and practices they should buddy up. Visually vibrant and often comical, Mike + Claire combines the internet imagery of Tumblr, Myspace and earlyFlickr communities. There’s an old New York quality to their work – silent film tropes often feature, blending old and new aestheticism to produce original and often bizarre creations. Despite a hyperactive, kid-in-a-candy-shop approach to mediums – hopping from GIFs to videos, costume and production design to character-based performance art, their work is indefinably unique.

INDEFINABLY UNIQUE. 18

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WHEN WE REALIZED YOU CAN CREATE CHANGE & REVOLT THROUGH JOY [...] THAT WAS A GAME CHANGER FOR OUR PROCESS.

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Your practice focuses on creating characters. Do you think this makes it more approachable for the uninitiated? M: When people are made it’s always been from sex, but characters are made from something else. Characters are made to help tell a story, but they are alive. C: I don’t really know if we’ve ever thought about whether our work is approachable or not. For us it’s just really fun to create these personalities and see how far we can explore. We’re just interested in telling stories.

Your art practice works on, with, for, and because of the Internet. What aspects of your work are “analogue”, still? C: Though a lot of our work is made for the screen, a lot of what we do is inspired by theatre and cartoons. Anything that we can do by hand, we do, from our props to our costumes. For us, it’s about bringing elements of the human to the machine. We don’t want to be limited to one medium, but would like to move into sculpture and performance. M: We’ve been experimenting a lot in the past year or so and we’ve realized that doing as much as we can “in camera” keeps our work faithful to our style. For me, I need to have people be painted on set, or have a glass smashed over someone’s head in real time. I want to see it for myself. I think we are both very selfish in that way, where we want to see the magic happen in front of us, rather than afterwards. As for the internet, for all artists today it’s a major part of their process whether they want it to be or not, because it’s how work is shared. •

photo Petra Collins

How has your process of working together changed from those early days, to now? How are you different from each other in your processes? C: When we became friends we would help each other a lot and it became a natural collaborative friendship. We did so much together before that it only made sense to team up and tell stories together. We balance each other well, sometimes I can get really crazy because I get so excited about doing lots of projects and Mike is good at taking things one step at a time. M: In the early days I would just go upstairs to claire’s apartment and spend everyday making stuff. Clothes, props, putting makeup on for quick selfies. Our work started off very playful because we were tired of looking at cynical views. When we realized that you can create change and revolt through joy or through being happy, I think that was a game changer for our process. We’re slowly developing a language for our work where we can be aggressive, but also be true to our style.

You have been known to work with GIFs, for example in your Witch GIFs. Describe your views on GIFs as a fine art medium – what is unique about them, and what are their limits? M: No one took color photography seriously until Egggleston showed his work at the MOMA in the 70s. Color photography was a gimmick, or something exciting to share. It’s the same way with GIFS today, they are usually viewed as something trivial like a cheap party trick. GIFS are made of frames, so you’re working with individual moving frames, just like in early cinema. It’s a new medium that uses an old idea, which is really exciting to us. C: GIFS are moving images that help tell the story of the image in a way that a still can’t. Something that can be limiting when working with GIFS is the size limitation, which can be fun because it challenges you to have to work around certain constraints. I like GIFS because they push you to make more intricate stories.

story Petra Collins

I THINK WE ARE BOTH VERY SELFISH IN THAT WAY, WE WANT TO SEE THE MAGIC HAPPEN IN FRONT OF US.

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You’ve collaborated for some three years. What are the benefits of collaboration? M: I moved to NYC to be an artist but forgot about the reality of it all. It’s easy to fall off-track or suddenly find yourself doing something you hate just so you can make rent. Claire and I have always supported each other with the push and pull of making art and dealing with reality, and reminding each other about what’s really important. C: From working with Mike I love seeing how the work between us has grown. We’ve watched each other change and find new inspiration from being friends. It’s cool to be able to trust each other and see how the collaboration grows.

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SAM NIXION FILMS THE HYPERACTIVE GUERRILLA DANCE CREWS TAKING THE CHICAGO SUBWAY BY THUNDER STORM. story Sian Dolding

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photo Sam Nixon

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Meet the teens taking over NY’s tracks with their itchy feet. Boom boxes at dawn as Sam Nixon shoots the hyperactive guerrilla dance crews taking the NY subway by storm. Fresh from shooting our Autumn issue story with K-Rizz and Princess Nokia, Sam Nixon’s Showtime series puts fashion on the back burner as he tails the guerrilla dance crews infiltrating New York’s subway system.

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When architecture enters the realm of museum display, it generally arrives small, smooth, and flat. Drawings, photographs, computer images, video, and scale models are the usual media; however well they communicate information (and however beautiful they are), they can only approximate such phenomena as materiality, sound, and inhabitable space. For people not trained in the codes of architectural representation–most of the museum-going public–comprehension, too, tends to be approximate. In the last fifteen years or so, installation architecture has come to offer an alternative: the construction within a gallery of temporary, full-scale architecture that creates spaces, programs, and experiences. The best of this work not only occupies but also affects its surroundings, exposing something of the conventions of museum and gallery display and revealing latent possibilities of the space it inhabits. Fabrications, an ambitious, three-venue exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, aims to use installation to draw a diverse audience into a serious, immediate encounter with contemporary architecture. Organized by the three museums’ curators of architecture–Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbins, and Terence Riley, respectively–the show presents twelve installations (four at each venue) that, according to its press materials, “offer an immediate experience of architecture while revealing and addressing ideas about current architectural production, new materials, and making space.” Many of the pieces provide opportunities for direct physical contact; among the twelve projects you’re invited to sit, climb, hide, lay down, pull, and gently drop (while bemused museum guards do their best to remain impassive). Most also strive for immediacy by exposing or exaggerating their tectonic gestures, acting as a kind of large-print version for those not accustomed to reading architecture closely. But if the installations get the “immediate” experience right, they’re not all as successful at dealing with the capacity of architecture to mediate: fewer than half of the projects present themselves as devices for reinterpreting

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and rearranging architectural space. It’s hard to know why this is; maybe it’s because most of the architects in the show are more used to building big than thinking about museum installation. But why fabricate an interesting architectural object for a show without also making an interesting claim about its setting, about the institutional and spatial conditions of its display? Across the three venues–the sculpture garden at the museum and the galleries of the Wexner–three basic strategies are used to make the installations “immediate”; they might be called mimetic, interactive, and interventionist approaches, and the projects divide up neatly into four per category. The mimetic works present small if nonetheless full-scale buildings or building parts that take a fairly uncritical stance to the constraints of museum display. Patkau Architects’ Petite Maison de Weekend, revisited, at the beautifully installed the site, is a complete wooden cottage for two. Well crafted, if didactic in its demonstration of “sustainable” construction, it presents such features as a deep storage wall, photovoltaic roof, composting toilet, and rain-collection system; after the exhibition, it is meant to be relocated and to serve as a prototype for other such houses. Coker Architects followed a similar strategy, also at the Wexner: the firm built a passageway-cum-porch of different woods, cables, window screen, cast concrete, tree stumps, blue glass bottles, and other materials drawn from the vernacular architecture of the rural South; it will be attached to a home in Alabama after the exhibition ends. Given these architects’ interest in reusing their objects elsewhere, it’s not surprising that the installations remain aloof from the museum. The Somatic Body, Kennedy & Violich Architecture’s installation at the museum (where each of the show’s architects worked on each of its pieces at a different stage; the architect or firm that produced final working drawings for a piece is identified here as its author), presents a wall in the process of delamination and eruption, a tumbling swell of gypsum board, plywood, lath, and wire. Positioned near the entry, it has an interesting annunciatory presence but misses the chance to reorganize passage into the gallery; worse, the pseudo-sculptural stacks of drywall end up offering a banal display of common building materials.

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Munkenbeck and Marshall Architects built a structure that recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion above the garden’s reflecting pool. In a setting so infused with the spirit of Mies (the garden was designed, after the master, by Philip Johnson), this little hut intelligently and ironically captures his aesthetic in condensed form, and brings an intimate architectural scale into the garden, but otherwise doesn’t do much apart from showcasing two gorgeous hanging panels of woven steel.

THEY’VE LEARNED TO USE THE TRAIN AS AN EXTENSION OF THEIR BODIES. The four interactive installations focus on the demonstration of physical forces. With Dancing Bleachers, Eric Owen Moss draped wishbone-like pieces of steel over the Wexner Center’s beams; these gigantic, limp-looking forms were originally meant to be climbed so people could reach viewing platforms some 20 feet above the gallery, but institutional anxieties prevailed, and the hands-on elements (treads and rails) are vestigial. Still, the piece has an undeniably exciting presence and carries muscle enough to confront the idiosyncratic spaces and ornamental structure of Peter Eisenman’s architecture. Two museum installations practically insist on physical interaction, but don’t go far enough in uncovering what Betsky, in his curatorial statement, rightly calls the museum’s “protective skin”–the ways it relies on its apparent physical “neutrality” (white walls, silence, concealed building and security systems, and so on) to veil its own interpretive practices and modes of spatial control. The Body in Action, by Hodgetts and Fung Design Associates, gathers air from the museum’s ventilation system into an enormous sailcloth “lung” that feeds into a bowed wooden mouthpiece; handles invite visitors to open the mouth and feel the rush of air. The Body

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in Equipoise, by Rob Wellington Quigley, is a kind of gangplank made of wood, cables, pink stretch wrap, bungee cord, steel tubes, and other materials; as people walk along its and other materials; as people walk along its surface, they reach a point where their weight causes the floor to slightly drop. Both pieces subvert our expectations of architectural surfaces, but fail to get at the political dimension that Betsky suggests. At museum, Ten Arquitectos with Guy Nordenson removed a portion of the venerable garden’s marble paving and inserted a wooden ramp/seat assembly in the rubble facing Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac. Visitors descend through the ground plane, sit in the chair, and look up to a lean, cantilevered glass canopy inscribed with an unidentified fragment of art historical writing. The reference is so obscure, and its presentation so indirect, that you can’t tell if it has been invoked ironically, respectfully, or gratuitously; meanwhile, the power and immediacy of the excavation gets undermined. It is the four installations that pose genuinely interesting arguments about conditions of architectural exhibition and museum display along with more “immediate” aspects of construction and experience. At museum, Office erected a stair-like structure of perforated, folded sheet steel that leaps, from stiletto feet, beyond the garden’s northern wall, suggesting the interpenetration of museum garden and urban fabric. Despite the fact that it risks misreading as a none-toohandsome sculpture, it nonetheless makes a strong urban gesture, both within the garden and when seen from 54th Street. Along part of the glass curtain wall on the opposite side of the garden, Smith-Miller and Hawkinson constructed a quiet but pointed critique of the wall’s way of framing and separating garden and museum. Among other elements, a folded plane of plywood steps up from the garden floor, meets the glass, and then continues inside, effectively bringing the outdoors in. Also outside, a large black panel attached to steel columns blocks the garden view and reinforces the windows’ mirror effect. Reflected images and abstract forms crisscross the glass boundary, entangling viewer and viewed in a nuanced spectral play. The other interventionist projects actually introduce new programs, and both would make welcome permanent museum installations. At the Wexner, Stanley Saitowitz

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

While some might shun the hustling, flash mob effect, it’s fast becoming a legit career on the tracks for teens with itchy feet – crews can perform up to 20 sets an hour, raking in $150 a day. “I’m immensely thankful that the performers pulled me along for the ride and let me into their intimate sphere” says Nixon, “ And I’m glad that I was able to display their world in an alternative light”.

intensified a rather bland space that has been used as an informal seating area and passageway with Virtual Reading Room, a lovely ensemble of clear acrylic benches, reading lecterns, shelves, and horizontal planes suspended from cables. The work not only adds architectural definition with subtle optical and acoustic effects, but also offers people the chance to sit and read–a rare accommodation in museum galleries. With The Body in Repose, Kuth Ranieri replaced a perimeter wall at museum with a sexy new skin; its layers of industrial felt have been clamped, clipped, tatooed, and cut to make little invaginated nooks at the edge of the gallery where you can sit or lie down. From this wonderful position of interior exteriority–you are simultaneously inside and outside the gallery, suspended in a layer of interstitial space–other things become apparent: the messy innards of the building wall, the fact that people usually stand in

museums, and the enormous potential of the gallery wall freed from the institutional imperatives of the smooth white plane. To the extent that Fabrications can legitimize and promote installation as a form of architectural practice, it marks a significant moment in the development of contemporary architecture. The show demonstrates a broad range of innovative formal strategies and materials while, at its best, showing us–even the novices among us–something of how architecture can change our relationship to the world. Despite the uneven results of the first experiment, an ongoing, periodic forum conceived along these lines could move inventive architectural thinking beyond the design community to a broader, influential, and potentially interested public. As a model for future events, then, Fabrications promises something great: a chance for contemporary architecture to reveal–and stretch–itself. •

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vandals THE ATMOSPHERE, EMOTIONAL TENSION, PASSION AND TEAM WORK SUPPORTING EACH PERFORMANCE OF URBAN VANDALISM. story New York Times

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photo Niles Gribb, Keegan Gibbs

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Everyone loves an architecture show about houses because all that is required of someone looking at a house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “the ability to transcend our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter [and] all the houses we have dreamed we live in” — beginning, of course, with the house we first lived in. Although visitors may appreciate the solo exhibition of a major architect, they are not usually as intimately involved in the thought processes behind the design of a concert hall, for example, and are likely to give up on reading detailed drawings. But presented with the plan of a house, people immediately walk through it in their imaginations. And architects’ models of houses spark, as dollhouses do, a level of fantasy that makes it possible to experience the physical sensation of being in a new and yet familiar space. Also, house exhibitions are more about the future than they are about the past. When Barbara Jakobson (using the name B.J. Archer) staged “Houses for Sale” at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, she invited eight international architects to design private dwellings, showing the form to be fertile ground for architectural invention — “a geometric object of balanced voids and solids to be analyzed rationally,” as she wrote in the catalogue. Isozaki’s House of Nine Squares foretold his Palladian classicism, and Emilio Ambasz’s Arcadian Berm House spoke of that architect’s concern for the environment and interest in solar energy. In 1985, the winning designs on view at the Boston Architectural Center, from a Minneapolis College of Art and Design competition called “A New American House,” dealt with community life and the need for cluster housing that could provide work spaces at home as well as convenient child care. These houses, with backyards and gabled roofs, lent an aura of traditional reassurance to new social trends.

GRAFFITI WAS AN ARTFORM. This year, with “The Un-Private House,” the Museum of Modern Art is displaying 26 houses designed since 1988 — all but six of which have been or are being built. The show deals with new social patterns that call for fresh architectural solutions, in particular ones that combine working spaces with living

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spaces and that find a place for the virtual world in the home. Like a computer, the contemporary house concentrates, according to the museum, on transmitting signals to the outside world at the cost of intimacy and privacy. Also, in a reversal of the norms of the “family room” era, children are frequently banished to separate quarters, and clients are just as likely to live alone or in same-sex relationships as in traditional nuclear families. Terence Riley, who organized the show as chief curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, poses the main question in his catalogue essay: “If the private house no longer has a domestic character, what sort of character will it have?” The answers come from a diverse group of architects, some better known than others, representing Europe, South America, Japan, and the United States. One curious aspect of the exhibition design is the selection of the old-fashioned William Morris Larkspur pattern as the wallpaper backdrop for the show’s large-format photographs and drawings. The Arts and Crafts movement as defined by Morris took inspiration from a romanticized past — but perhaps the contrast is the point. The wallpaper does suit the heavy worktables, beds, bookshelves, and other comfortable objects provided by the Furniture Co. that serve as ready-made pedestals for the models and that give a workmanlike quality to the galleries, as if these rooms were part of an architect’s studio and home combined. On the whole, the houses and loft apartments on view are anything but cozy. Rather, the architects are committed to design whose appeal lies in its response to and integration of advanced technologies and new materials. Sleekness here runs more than skin deep. After years of

GRAFFITI TODAY IS SUCH AN ACCEPTED PART OF YOUTH CULTURE.

with the dining, work, and living areas, below ground level. This courtyard and two other light courts are open to the sky, so that in passing through them, one is exposed to the weather as in a traditional Japanese house. The rectangular rooms, upstairs and down, run between the light courts in a configuration that limits privacy within the house — although the streetscape is effectively screened out. Two row houses on Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam by MVRDV, meanwhile, play with transparency and opacity on a large scale: one presents a glass facade to the street, behind which most of its rooms are boxed off by inner walls; the other hides behind a traditional masonry facade but reveals much of its interior through a glass wall running along one side. (The pattern of boxed-off and exposed rooms recalls the vertical grid of Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht, a model of which is conveniently on view, along with one of Mies’s Tugendhat House, in the top-floor architecture galleries.) Now under construction in Napa Valley, California, the Kramlich Residence and Media Collection, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, features an angular, flat-roofed Miesian glass pavilion over a series of subterranean galleries, including one in an underground garage, for the couple’s collection of electronic art. Even the curved inner walls of the pavilion function as screens for video, films, and digital art, which compete with the view of nature beyond the structure’s glass walls. In the same vein, Diller + Scofidio’s half-crescentshaped Slow House, an unbuilt project for a site on Long Island,

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the decorative pastiche associated with Post-Modernism, it came as both a surprise and a relief that the reigning influence in this exhibition was Mies van der Rohe and, in particular, the Farnsworth House, which the architect designed some 50 years ago in Plano, Illinois, as a weekend retreat for his close friend, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. A glass box with a flat roof and evenly spaced structural steel I-beams painted white, the house dematerializes at night (even with the draperies closed) into a cube of light. There have been many copies since, but thearchitects in the museum show are creating radical variations on the theme, skewing the form by selecting and developing only certain aspects of Mies’s design to advance new ideas about the configuration of rooms and the requirements of the electronic age. Two houses in Tokyo by Japanese architects are among the most exciting. On one of Tokyo’s eclectic and densely packed streets, Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House juts out on a corner like a billboard for Modernism. In reversing the fundamental order — by hanging glass inside and curtains outside — the architect explores the formal possibilities offered by the traditional Japanese shoji-screen house, where translucency is valued over transparency. The glass sits in sliding panels and retracts into corners of the house, and once drawn, the sailcloth curtain (besides making an obvious but witty allusion to non-load-bearing walls) provides shade during the day and privacy at night. More in keeping with Mies’s courtyard houses, the M House by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa is separated from its residential street by a wall of perforated metal, behind which translucent polycarbonate windows filter light into a two-story central courtyard that is sunk, along

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features a video camera that records the view through the house’s immense atelier-style picture window and allows for instant replay on a monitor inside. And the main walls of Hariri & Hariri’s project for a Digital House feature liquid-crystal displays that allow for videoconferencing with virtual guests in the living room and cooking lessons from a televised chef in the kitchen. Whether Riley has proved his theory about the loss of privacy is questionable. Despite the intrusions of the outside world through glass walls and electronic hookups, people still retain the option of turning off their computers or otherwise retreating — and many of the architects represented in the show have proven adept at helping them do just that. Perhaps it is the incursion of professional work spaces into private homes and the concomitant loss of the “study” as an arena for contemplation (Riley calls it a nineteenth-century room) that is more indicative of the loss of privacy. But even some of the houses in the show offer this kind of refuge: The T House by Simon Ungers with Thomas Kinslow, for example, has a separate library tower of weathering-steel plates that can fit 10,000 books as well as a reading area. And there is also Rem Koolhaas’s Maison à Bor-deaux, where the wheelchair-bound owner can sit at his desk on an open elevator platform while it moves along a threestory wall of bookshelves — an expanded notion of the study, perhaps, but still a solitary place to think and to dream. •

SOME SAW IT AS VANDALISM AND A SYMBOL OF URBAN DECAY.

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Photography by Keegan Gibbs Shot throughout Chicago, Illinois August of two thousand fourteen. Urban Graffiti art courtesy of the gold crew, the central Graffiti gang of Chicago at the time. Yet today, graffiti etched with acid can be seen on subway windows, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s alive and well on buildings around the city. And thanks in part to the Internet, which teems with graffiti Websites, it is a worldwide phenomenon in every language.

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PHOTOGRAPHER CORINNE DAY BRINGS A HARD EDGED DOC LOOK TO HER IMAGES, HER WORK DOESN’T NEED WORDS — IT JUST STANDS ON ITS OWN. story Olivia Singer

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photo Corinne Day

Corinne Day (b1965) is a British photographer whose influence on the style and perception of photography in the early 1990s has been immense. As a self taught photographer, Day brought a more hard edged documentary look to fashion image making, in which she often included biographical elements. Day is known for forming long and close relationships with many of her sitters, which have resulted in candid and intimate portraits. Days approach within the lifestyle and fashion magazines of the 1990s, came to be known as grunge and grew into an international style.

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Corinne was diagnosed with a slow growing, grade 2 brain tumour called an Oligo Astrocytoma in November 1996 at the Bellevue hospital in New York, after which Corinne returned to London for brain surgery at the Whitechapel hospital in December 1996. The surgeon and oncologist then gave Corinne a prognosis of 8 years left to live. Corinne was not expected to live past 2004. However Corinne outlived this prognosis by over 6 years, passing away in 2010.

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SHE LOVED THE FLEETING MOMENT.

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THEY GAVE US ABSOLUTE FREEDOM, HER WORK WAS SO ENTIRELY FRESH. SHE WAS MY BEST FRIEND.

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Photography by Corinne Day. Accompanying the exhibition is a new publication of the same name by Morel Books. Edited by Mark Szasay and Tara St Hill, this book documents Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s progress from early to mid nineties and stands as the first work since Diary. May the Circle Remain Unbroken Words by Ana Bang.

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CHICAGO, ILLINOIS