Engineer's Daughter

jørn utzon (1918-2008)

Jørn Utzon, the Danish architect with buildings in Kuwait City and Mallorca but most famous for the Sydney Opera House, died last week of a heart attack in his sleep at the age of 90.  The Opera House is widely recognized as a classic of modern architecture, but Utzon never actually saw the completed building after infighting and scandal led him to resign from the project and leave Australia for good in 1966.  In an interview with Katherine Brisbane that first appeared in 1970 Utzon described how he came up with the breathtaking design:

"It is typical Sydney. Because the site is one you go around, and even sail around, the building needed to be a sculpture, so I spread the two theatres, instead of putting them in a box, and put sails over them to keep the feeling of being on the sea. Underneath I placed this big platform fitting beautifully on the peninsula, repeating the effect of walking on the heads of Sydney harbour. When you see a hill before you, you want to climb up it, and so I put the wide steps in front of people leading into the foyer.
"If I had finished the building I would have carried through this sense of movement. It is treating space like music, almost nonexistent today in architecture."

In 1999 Utzon was commissioned to put his design principles for the Opera House on paper, the better to guide future conservation efforts and updates.  So even though he's gone now there's a healthy chance tweaks to the building will eventually restore Utzon's complete original vision.  See photos of Utzon and the construction of the Opera House in the gallery here.

fashion at the frieze

If I had gone to the Frieze Art Fair this year I suspect I would have spent the entire time sitting in the replica of Reykjavik bar Sirkus, drinking vodka with Adrian Searle and waiting for Bjork to show up (no word on if she actually did).  Plenty of other celebrities were in attendance, however, everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Charles Saatchi to George Michael.  Hadley Freeman reported on the people-watching:

'Who's here? Everyone!" chortles Roger Tatley, director of the gallery Hauser & Wirth, from within his bustling stand. The names being bandied around suggest he's right: Christina Aguilera is coming later! Dasha Zhukova has already been! Is that Roman Abramovich? No, but Kate Moss might turn up! Inside this white-tented temple to art, capitalism and celebrity, headlines about collapsing economies seem like ghosts from another world. Catalogues are filled with six-figure price tags and visitors stroll around in that art-world uniform perhaps best described as "discreet luxury": men in slick black suits or Prada cardigans, women in Jil Sander shift dresses and black Louboutin boots. Hermès and Bottega Veneta are the accessories labels of choice, and everyone, of course, is in black.

Hey if I had a ton of money I would dress in black Jil Sander all the time too.  Actually maybe more like Dries Van Noten and Three As Four and Martin Margiela.  Artist Grayson Perry, pictured above, rebelled against the unspoken dress code in his red pants, but otherwise you can see the many shades of Frieze noir in the online gallery here.

a century of the london underground logo

There has been many a time that I've been stumbling half-lost through an unfamiliar part of London when I have spied the reassuring shape of the London Underground roundel and suddenly all felt right in the world.  Not only does that bullseye signify the ability of the Tube to get me anywhere in the city I desire, but also the logo itself, a hundred years old this fall, is a small miracle of modern graphic design.  If you click on the picture at right you can just make out the original roundel as it existed in 1910, before transport manager Frank Pick commissioned calligrapher Edward Johnston to tweak it slightly until by 1917 it had morphed into the form that is still used today.  Jonathan Glancey declares it a certified classic of everyday design:

The roundel is a fine example of a logo or corporate symbol that has evolved over a long time while remaining one of the most effective, and popular, in use anywhere in the world today. The fact that it enters its second century in the spirit of creative art would have pleased its original creators no end. Pick wanted London's public transport system to be as much a work of civic art, and an inspiration everyone using it, as a quick, cheap and reliable method of getting from A to B - or, indeed, Amersham to Brixton.

The roundel was incorporated into Charles Holden's gorgeous Art Deco Tube stations in the 1920s, like the building at Arnos Grove, and also into the lust-worthy transport posters for which London remains famous.  Glancey talked in a previous article on the remodeled London Transport Museum about how Pick was again a visionary in the visual arena:

Pick wanted his organisation to be more than well run. He began with the commissioning of posters in 1908; as he gained confidence, he began touring colleges of art and commercial design, looking for the best new talent. Of course, some duds got through. But what impresses, even today, is the originality, energy and life of these eye-catching designs, from such talents as Edward McKnight Kauffer, Hans Schleger and Man Ray.

That Man Ray is a particular beaut, though I'm pretty fond of the Kauffer images too.  All can be examined (and purchased) on the Transport Museum's Web site.  You will probably at this point be unsurprised to hear that Pick was also responsible for another icon of the Underground, the map.  From an appreciative editorial in the Guardian:

Later he commissioned the diagrammatic tube map designed by Harry Beck, based on a circuit board and still in use in London, New York and Sydney. When the tube expanded in the 1930s, it was Pick who led expeditions to Europe to study modernism and returned to decree that every aspect of the new stations, down to the litter bins, should "conform with the architecture scheme". He left his imprint on everything from bus stops to tube trains, and happily it lingers still.

Thank you, Frank Pick, for being the instigator of some of my favorite designs in the entire world.  For a nifty photographic tour through the many decades of the Underground roundel's history, please click through to the gallery here.

queens of egypt at monaco's grimaldi forum

This morning I point you to some tantalizing images from the (expensive) exhibition Queens of Egypt that just closed at Monaco's Grimaldi Forum.  The show focused on a topic near to my heart, the role of women in ancient Egypt, especially those who held positions of power.  Grégoire Allix talked with curator Christine Ziegler, formerly of the Louvre's Egyptian antiquities department, who attempted to balance scholarship with accessibility in the exhibition to highlight what we know about these intriguing women:

She believes that women enjoyed an unusual position in ancient Egypt. "Monogamy was the rule for ordinary subjects. Women... were allowed to work, own property and bequeath it, and they could be priestesses." But royalty was a masculine preserve. Only a very few, like Hatshepsut or Cleopatra, succeeded in rising to the rank of pharaoh and ruling in their own name.

I was obsessed with Hatshepsut when I was a little girl, and of course Cleopatra has fascinated authors and artists alike for centuries with her famous sensuality, so awesomely portrayed recently by Lyndsey Marshal in HBO's Rome.  I love the queens' depictions in the ancient art as well, so powerfully serene.  I think I might need to pop into the Art Institute's Egyptian galleries when I'm in Chicago next week...

work in progress: sagrada familia

If you know me you know I already have my travels tentatively planned out for oh at least the next five years.  This fall is Thailand, and then next year is Spain, specifically Barcelona.  And yes as a bona fide architecture nerd I will be seeing as much Antoni Gaudí there as possible (not to mention Jean Nouvel, Mies van der Rohe, Richard Meier, Herzog and de Meuron...).  I want to spend an afternoon exploring the nooks and crannies of Gaudí's Sagrada Familia, challenging my fear of heights by getting up into one of the blobby towers and then my claustrophobia by venturing into the crypt.  Construction on the church famously continues over a century after work initially began, and now a group of Barcelona artists and architects have voiced their concern over what they see as a blurring of Gaudí's intentions:

In a statement, the group said: "What stands out is the mediocrity of a group of technicians and developers who are well-meaning but full of an anachronistic paternalism in the best of cases and are once more using Gaudí to leave their personal mark on the building to the detriment of the original work."

It's forever causing problems, this church.  The unconventional Passion facade was unveiled to a storm of criticism in the 1980s, and just last year plans to construct a train tunnel yards away from the foundation was greeted by typically understated Spanish opinion:

Backed by local civic groups, the advisers to Unesco in Spain, and architects and engineers from 50 universities around the world, Jordi Bonet i Armengol, who has worked on Gaudi's daring [church] for 40 years, said yesterday: "I am astounded by this brutality. This is an attack on culture of the highest order, something one would only expect of a third-world country."

It will almost be sad when the building is finally finished, but I needn't worry about that for my trip next year.  The cranes will still be up.

britain's prehistoric rock art

I have always been fascinated by archaeology and looking at what ancient cultures leave behind, especially when there is an element of mystery.  For example, what compelled a prehistoric individual to inscribe those circular grooves pictured at right into a stone in Britain?  A new website called England's Rock Art has been created to catalog as many of the country's ancient carvings as possible, both to increase awareness about their existence and to preserve them for future generations.  From Jonathan Jones's Guardian blog:

As our gallery of rock art shows, we have for too long made too little of this ancient British art, much of which is found at exposed sites in Northumberland and County Durham. A lot of Neolithic art has been destroyed by quarrying, as if it didn't matter. In reality it is a national treasure, a unique window on the minds of our ancestors. Only through art like this can we connect with the imaginations and feelings, the psychic universe of Britain's early inhabitants. It's an art to search for in the countryside, perhaps even to discover unknown examples of. Don't you just want to put on your hiking boots and go looking?

I will never forget how awesome it was to walk amongst the standing stones when I had a chance to visit Avebury, imagining the people who put them there 5000 years ago.  I was also remembering the crazy Children of the Stones series that scared the tar out of me when it ran on Nickelodeon when I was a kid, but that's a story for another post.

snail space

When I'm traveling I love to wander around a city on foot and check out groovy architecture, so when I finally make it to Mexico City I'm going to do my darnedest to see architect Javier Senosiain's fantastical creations even if they're squirreled away in a private neighborhood.  Focusing on a kind of imaginative bioarchitecture that looks like the Mexican love child of Gaudí and Hundertwasser, Senosiain has created buildings in the shape of sea creatures (he lives in his own shark) and the god Quetzalcoatl.  Magalli Mayorga lives with her family in Senosiain's "Nautilus":

"The idea is that, just as a snail lives inside its shell, so our world is inside our house," Mayorga says of the ferroconcrete structure sprayed with polyurethane plastic foam, built for her family by Mexican architect Javier Senosiain. An admirer of Antoni Gaudí and Frank Lloyd Wright, he specialises in undulating, organic structures: "The concept of an organic habitat," he has written, "is the creation of spaces adapted to man that are also similar to a mother's bosom or an animal's lair."

The pictures of the Nautilus interior show an incredibly seductive space, all undulating surfaces and colored glass, with a garden in the living room and even space for a furry friend or two.  Total house porn.

postcards from the past

I have always had a love affair with postcards, both sending them and receiving them.  There's something so marvelous about getting a cool image in the mail, with a few fun lines on the back from a friend who was thinking of you.  A few months ago I posted about how much I was enjoying Postcrossing, but shortly after that I let my participation drop off as I was having trouble finding interesting things to say to complete strangers.  I still collect postcards obsessively though, especially artsy or unique ones, and these vintage cards are just awesome.  Men wearing barrels!  Hawaiian music girls!  Scandalous seaside imagery! 

In other news, the fabulous Timothy Buckwalter is running a series on his blog this week about the songs that get stuck in our heads, the earworms that we find ourselves having to listen to over and over again.  His first post features Paul Anka's groovy version of "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden, and there will be lots more good stuff to come in succeeding days, including a Q&A with yours truly about music.

vilhelm hammershøi: the poetry of silence

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Portrait of a Young Girl, 1885.  I had never heard of Hammershøi before I saw his paintings in the Guardian a couple weeks ago, but how could I not instantly fall in love with these cool grey meditative images?  The artist had moderate success in his native Denmark during his lifetime (1864-1916) and is currently being featured in a solo retrospective at the Royal Academy in London that seeks to introduce him to a new audience who like me was not aware of his existence.  I would kill to see these paintings in person and will definitely be making the Hirschprung one of my destinations when I visit Copenhagen in a few years, where Hammershøi's archive resides.  I love his motif of the woman with her back turned to the viewer (very Gerhard Richter!), and again his muted color palette is simply gorgeous.  The curator of the Royal Academy show is confident that visitors will appreciate the work:

"I think this exhibition will be a revelation," comments [Felix] Kramer. "It's not true that Hammershøi just stayed home and painted his living room. These are not grey paintings - there is a lot going on."

Look at some images from the retrospective here, as well as photographs of Hammershøi and his family which illustrate how deftly he pulled from real life.  I seriously want to curl up inside of one of those paintings and just stay for a while.

si vales valeo

I really had no business going to work today, since I spent the past two days suffering from a cold so bad I could barely feed and clothe myself.  But go I did, and somehow managed to put out all of yesterday's fires and today's new ones besides.  The goodies I had waiting for me in my mailbox when I got home were my reward for making it through:

• A Lonely Planet Thai phrasebook.  I'm fully planning to work my way through a good part of my Teach Yourself Thai CDs before my trip to Bangkok this fall, but Lonely Planet always includes the important things standard language courses don't cover, like how to explain that I'm a member of the Green Party or how to tell someone to piss off.
• A Postcrossing postcard from Beijing, featuring a photograph by David Shrigley.  I only got my first Postcrossing postcard yesterday (a kitty card from Germany!), so I feel lucky to have gotten my second one today already.  I'm newly energized to send more cards out too.  So far my own cards have reached Finland, Brazil, and Germany.
• Last but absolutely not least, the new SFMOMA calendar.  I already knew that the museum would be hosting the West Coast premiere of Eve Sussman's The Rape of the Sabine Women at the beginning of May, with a host of screenings of the film as well as a performance and panel discussion, and I'm eagerly waiting for tickets to go on sale for that.  But now I discover their May film series is going to deal with the 40th anniversary of the events of May 1968, and then oh my lord throughout June they are going to screen the entirety of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, divided up into 4 programs.  Yes I will be at all of them, though I'm going to have to miss Program 2 the weekend that I'm in London.  I suppose it's worth it.

Speaking of SFMOMA goodness, this last Saturday I attended a discussion there called Landscape Is Destiny that was organized in conjunction with the excellent photography exhibitions the museum has on display right now, and it was just one of those talks where I walked out literally vibrating with new ideas and connections.  All three of the speakers were Bay Area locals and shared unique perspectives about landscape gained through their art and writing, and I knew I was in the right place when they favorably name-checked CLUI halfway through.  I was already a huge fan of Rebecca Solnit's writing and activism and Michael Light's work with both lunar photography and images of nuclear test blasts, but now I can also add Trevor Paglen to the roster of my favorite local artists.  His work is difficult to classify but centers on trying to see things the government doesn't want us to see, whether the patches assigned to secret operations or the planes used to conduct renditions.  He has a solo show opening at the Berkeley Art Museum in June called The Other Night Sky which I think will be addressing satellites, and you can bet I will be checking that out.  Experimental geography?  Hot.