Designing for the other
90%
Breaking Through Walls of Bias
Echoes of Prayer & People Europe’s Wild Men
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editor’s note
breaking through walls of bias... We would love to hear from you! Find us on twitter @Encounter or email us at editorial@encounter.com.
Does experience matter? With twentysomething CEOs leading billiondollar companies and digital natives tutoring their elders, it does sometimes seem as if youth has all the answers. If only it were that simple. In an age of flux, it’s worth reminding ourselves that every day should be an education. The best CEOs recognize this, no matter how young (Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp and Mikael Hed of Rovio are in their thirties) or old (Mike Duke, the Walmart CEO pushing hard on its digital business, is 62). Which is why this issue features a slew of lessons from those three and scores of other leaders in widely varied industries.What lessons have I learned in 2012? Too many to catalog here, but a few jump out: You can’t keep up. There’s a feature in our Now section called “The Recommender,” where sources share their favorite new websites, apps, books, and more. I’m often asked what I look at, and my answer is: not everything. When I’ve tried to be “fully informed,” I just get frazzled. The trick, for me, is paying attention to the recommendations of my trusted network; those people do a good job of clueing me in to what matters. Trust your instincts. As a journalist, I’ve been trained to be a skeptic. But when it comes to Encounter’s business, we can’t always afford to spend months vetting new opportunities (as more traditional media operations might). We’re more likely to jump in and test things, as we did with flash-sale site Fab a year ago. We recently signed a licensing deal with a partner in Beijing to launch Encounter China, a Chinese-language edition. There are dozens of outfits we might have worked with, but when we found one partner who met our criteria, we jumped. If we have to adjust down the road, we will. Community is plural. I used to struggle to define Encounter’s audience, because it’s so broad--big companies and small, all industries, all ages. No more. Our audience is really a bunch of vibrant communities that don’t hew to the terms of traditional market segmentation. What matters is that they share something more sophisticated: a psychographic. There are no rules. In the face of constant change, we’d love to emulate models of success. But I’ve given up on that. The only way to learn from the successes and failures of others is to apply them to our own situation in nondogmatic, flexible ways. Leadership is more important than ever. When I set out to write my two Generation Flux cover stories (February and November), I knew a major theme would be the bottom-up power of networks, of crowdsourcing. I was surprised, however, to find that the role of leaders--to create and nurture environments where many contributions can be recognized and channeled--is more important than ever. Without it, bureaucracy stifles the new, and innovation goes unrealized. Business isn’t getting easier, but it’s getting more fun. Sure, competition in all industries is intense, and we are all only as good as our next product or service. But for me, that challenge is more exhilarating than exhausting. The businesses we report on here at Encounter have always got something to teach, and I’m still hungry to learn.
Best wishes, Gerry Martin
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key contributers
krassimir drumev
nesibe bat
Born in South Africa, Krassimir Drumev was an editorial cartoonist for several newspapers in that country before moving with his family to Bulgaria in 1990. He is now a freelance illustrator working out of Sofia. His editorial cartoons and caricatures are syndicated worldwide.
Nesibe Bat is a writer from Bursa who lives in Istanbul. He is a film critic for Eye Weekly and his arts journalism appears in The Globe and Mail, Toro, Saturday Night and Turkish Life. He plays keyboards in a band called the Two Koreas.
—bulgaria
—turkey
international contributers:
arabic: Mohamed Al Hammadi brazil: Matthew Shirts china: Ye Nan croatia: Hrvoje Prcic czechia: Tomáš Turecek farsi: Hiva Sharifi france: François Marot georgia: Levan Butkhuzi germany: Erwin Brunner greece: N. S. Margaris hungary: Tamás Vitray
olga valchyshen
erkki peetsalu
Olga Valchyshen works with Stephen Lewis, supporting him in his work as the UN Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa. Prior to that, she lived and worked in South Africa, most recently with Nelson Mandela and Graça Machel. She is a former managing editor of Time Magazine.
Erkki Peetsalu’s short fiction has appeared in various literary magazines, most recently in The Fed Anthology: Brand New Fiction & Poetry from the Federation of Writers (Anvil Press, 2003). He is currently at work on a novel and divides his time between Tallinn, Estonia and New Delhi, India.
—ukraine
—estonia
indonesia: Didi Kaspi Kasim israel: Daphne Raz italy: Marco Cattaneo japan: Shigeo Otsuka latin america: Omar López Vergara latvia: Rimants Ziedonis lithuania: Frederikas Jansonas netherlands/belgium: Aart Aarsbergen nordic countries: Karen Gunn poland: Martyna Wojciechowska portugal: Gonçalo Pereira romania: Cristian Lascu
delgerjargal anbat
sun-ok nam
Delgerjargal Anbat is a Mongolian freelance photojournalist, currently in the Middle East. His work has been published by, among others, the Journal of Palestine Studies and the Progressive.
Sun-Ok Nam is a KoreanAmerican photojournalist focusing on social issues and progressive change, who is currently based in Guam. He has worked and lived in Japan, the United States and South Korea.
—mongolia
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—south korea
russia: Alexander Grek serbia: Igor Rill slovenia: Marija Javornik spain: Josep Cabello thailand: Kowit Phadungruangkij
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contents
Encounter in this Issue departmentals 12
Designing for the Other 90%: The Q Drum
A simple, effective product design that helps improve the lives of millions. 16
Current Issues A look into the troubles and uprisings that Egypt has experienced since 2011, and where they are headed now.
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Encounter: Bahir A first-hand journey into India’s poorest state, Bahir. Meet the inhabitants of India’s slums and see what daily life is like.
22 No Reservations: Penang Anthony Bourdain explores Penang and some of the wildest quirks and cuisine’s it has to offer. In Penang, Tony Bourdain discovers a beautiful rice and shrimp dish wrapped in a banana leaf that he can’t get enough of, then eats fresh snapper on Monkey Beach which surprisingly lives up to its name.
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features
36 Breaking Through Walls of Bias Mugur Varzariu redefines the term Gyspy with his photos of Roma. The Roma of Baia Mare are impoverished. Although some work as garbage collectors or in a furniture factory, the pay is so low that you can barely raise one child, but certainly not six. Other Roma work sporadically as day laborers or re unemployed. Yet the Roma we meet are friendly and generous. They shared their food with us even they had very little, and shared their story with us. 12 | encounter.com
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Echoes of Prayer and People Relations between people’s faith and the structures that relate
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Wild Men Europe’s Wild Men: They live in the modern era, but they summon old traditions.
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design for the other 90%
the q drum
The Q Drum is the simple, durable, effective and user-friendly solution to this problem. A device designed to ease the physical burden and reduce the time spent collecting water; thus ultimately improving the lives and well-being of countless people around the world.
the problem The burden of fetching water, invariably over long distances by cumbersome and far too often, unhygienic means, is all too evident in developing countries.
the solution The Q Drum is user friendly and the unique longitudinal shaft permits the drum to be pulled using a rope tied through the hole. There are no removable or breakable handles or axles, and the rope can be repaired on the spot or easily replaced.
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versatile and tough The 50L Q Drum is manufactured from Linear Low Density Polyethylene by means of rotational moulding and has a high compatibility with foodstuffs and water.
efficient and fun Even a child can pull 50 litres of water over flat terrain for several kilometres without undue strain, and could shift the burden of water collection away from adult women.
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When full, the Q Drum holds 50 litres of water.
other uses: Camping and Outdoor Life - The drum can be used for transporting foodstuffs or drinking water. It can even be used a portable, manual clothes washing machine.
The Military - During times of conflict or of peace, the Q Drum can be used to ensure the easy handling and conveying of large volumes of fuel, oil, drinking water or dry foodstuffs in hostile and remote areas.
Agriculture - The drum can be used to transport fruit juices, wines, cooking oils and grains in farmlands. It can even, when full, assist in levelling land.
Mining - Water, fuel, hydraulic fluids and other liquids can be handled with more ease in the restricted spaces underground and on inclined slopes.
Harbours & Marinas - The Q Drum can serve as a floating device or buoy. Natural Disasters - The Q Drum can be used to assist in contingency plans executed by organisations or government bodies wanting to transport dry foodstuffs or carry water in affected areas. 16 | encounter.com
Aid - One Q Drum can transport 50 kg of food without the use of packets or bags which are in themselves, heavy to carry. Afterwards, it can be utilized for its original intended purpose and make a useful contribution to the worldwide campaign against pollution.
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no reservations
penang by anthony bourdain
Malaysia’s Food Paradise. You won’t go to this island for its beaches (unless you want to see monkeys), but you’ll stay for its colonial charm and tasty dishes.
Monday’s episode in Penang is, in my opinion, one of the best shot, best edited episodes ever. It helped that we were in what cinematographers call a “shot rich environment”—where it seems that everywhere you point, there are bright colors, characters, beautiful things. The food is generally thought of (even by many proud food nerds in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur) to be among the very best in the Straits— and I think you’ll see why. Penang is the kind of place that ruined me for an ordinary life. I feel inexorably attached to Malaysia for many reasons, but one of them is that I got there early in my career as a traveler, wasn’t really ready for it, and was changed by the place. It seduced and overwhelmed me at the same time. The smells and colors and flavors—the look and sound of the place, the at times impenetrable mix of Indian, Malay and Chinese cultures—it screwed me all up. I tried to capture that in the first scene—a shot of a woman’s fingers, unwrapping nasi lemak from its traditional banana leaf package. That’s a particularly vivid image for me, and it’s yet another testament to the ZPZ crew that they were able to recreate it so perfectly. Scenes like this matter to me. And the ability to imagine a thing—and then see it executed brilliantly, that matters too. It was never my intention on NO RESERVATIONS to be a reporter, a critic, an advocate. It was also never my intention to provide audiences with “everything” they needed to know about
a place—or even a balanced or comprehensive overview. I am a storyteller. I go places, I come back. I tell you how the places made me feel. Through the use of powerful tools like great photography, skillful editing, sound mixing, color correction, music (which is often composed specifically for the purpose) and brilliant producers, I can—in the very best cases—make you feel a little bit like I did at the time. At least I hope so. It’s a manipulative process. It’s also a deeply satisfying one. As you may or may not have heard, at a point in the not too far away future, the Zero Point Zero team and I will be moving on to do what we do elsewhere. We recently filmed the last shot of our last episode. That means you’ve got 9 new episodes of NO RESERVATIONS still yet to be edited, or waiting in the pipeline to be aired. We have yet to shoot 10 new episodes of THE LAYOVER, which we’ll do this June and July. After that, I’m planning on taking my first extended break in eight years. A “normal” family vacation—where I plan to putter to excess, dote on my daughter—and do what people are said to do on vacation. Also, I’ll be writing a book. Rest assured that whatever ZPZ and I do in the future, we will not be dumbing it down, we will not change our basic natures, we will not be morphing into something we are not. We will continue to do what we do. And have a hell of a good time doing it. —Anthony
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WILD MEN By Rachel Hartigan Shea
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Photographs by Charles Fréger
They become bears, stags, and devils. They evoke death but bestow fertile life. They live in the modern era, but they summon old traditions.
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. 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 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,
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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 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 the architects 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 with the dining, work, and
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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. 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-crescent-shaped Slow House, an unbuilt project for a site on Long Island, 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. 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.) 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. ° rs
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echoes
of prayer and people By David Gonzalez Photography by Kenro Izu 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 15 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 12 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 12 projects you’re invited to sit, climb, hide, lay down, pull, and gently
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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 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 Wexner 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. Mockbee/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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Erola #460, Maharashtra, 2010.
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. 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,
Hampi #485, Karnataka, 2010.
“ If you build a temple it does not have to be majestic. You can build a house, but once people come in and make an altar and start to pray, then it becomes a temple or church.�
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Dwarka #433, Gujarat, 2010.
Dwarka #432, Gujarat, 2010.
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“ I am more interested in the humans who go into these structures. That is where the spirit is. Without the people who pray or offer flowers, it’s just a structure.” 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 + 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 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 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 interventionist 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 dA 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–among the Judds and Giacomettis–it risks misreading as a none-too-handsome 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 + 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 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. ° dg
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Children playing on May 1. Ten days later, the mayor of Baia Mare, running for re-election, set in motion eviction, demolition, and temporary relocation plans for the Roma of Craica.
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The Roma are often referred to as Gypsies, a term many consider offensive. Their ancestors, who came to Europe from India, have faced oppression and violence for centuries in Europe. They share language, culture and—until the 20th century— a nomadic way of life.
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“ Watch out! Gypsies steal little children.” That’s what Mugur Varzariu was often warned when he was growing up in Bucharest, Romania. Years later, working as a marketing strategist, he regularly heard — in “polite society,” no less — that the Roma people were lazy or criminals. The Roma are often referred to as Gypsies, a term many consider offensive. Their ancestors, who came to Europe from India, have faced oppression and violence for centuries in Europe. They share language, culture and — until the 20th century — a nomadic way of life 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 most dollhouses do, a level of fantasy that makes it possible to experience the physical sensation of being in a new and yet very 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. 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 spaces and that find a place for the virtual world in the home. Like a computer, the contemporary house concentrates,
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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 largeformat 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 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 the architects 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.
Children play in a Roma settlement in the village of Baia Mare, Romania. Some of these settlements date to early 1990s and have been tolerated by the authorities. Today, however, some of the same authorities plan forced evictions.
Varga Alexandra Argentian, middle, and Varga Adnana Ribana, a few 40 |right, encounter.com days before being forcibly evicted.
Roma are the second-largest ethnic minority in Romania, after Hungarians.
A boy sleeps with his chicken, which he raised from the egg.
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Children busy with homework in their oneroom apartment in Baia Mare.
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 shojiscreen 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 with the dining, work, and living areas, below
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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. 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 halfcrescent-shaped Slow House, an unbuilt project for a site on Long Island, features a video camera that records the view through the
The name of this settlement is Craica. Rising hard-right sentiments across Europe have stoked fears in the Roma community of ethnic cleansing.
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. 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 boxedoff 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.)
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. ° je
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