Month: May 2009

It has been a grim year for publishing, which accounts for the unusually restrained mood this past weekend at Book Expo America, the industry’s annual trade show. Attendance was down 17 percent compared to 2007, the last time it was held in NY. Among the absentees were big guns like Doubleday, Knopf, and FSG, the art-book house Phaidon, and indy fave McSweeney’s. “Whether it makes sense for us to be here is an ongoing question,” one publisher told me. I wonder about the future of the show. With so few booksellers left to sell to, it’s hard to see how the costs publishers lavish on their booths justify themselves. Which is why so many simply punted, opting only for basement meeting rooms and not major public displays. I didn’t hang around long: trudging the aisles is an enervating task even in the best of years. I did manage to see a few old colleagues, however, and to snag a few catalogs and advance reading copies. From what I saw, and it was an entirely random sampling, here are ten books (plus one) I’ll be reading this fall, in no particular order:

Continue reading BEA Report: 10 Fall Books (+1) for Your Library

The Magritte Museum opens next week on the Place Royale, in Brussels. For the past several months, as it was prepared for its unveiling, the building was cloaked by this brilliant trompe-l’oeil construction wall, very much in the spirit of the artist. (The house in the middle is Magritte’s home and studio, a few miles away on rue Esseghem.) I hope this painting will be on display inside, to double the pleasure:

It would seem there is a certain proclivity among Belgian-based artists for trompe l’oeil effects on their architecture. In the early seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens actually painted a series of faked sculptures around the courtyard of his house.

But that was just the beginning of his visual gamesmanship. On the garden facade of his studio, a building he designed himself, he painted a fake loggia, and then to heighten the apparent “realism” of this scene, painted a canvas that appeared to be hanging out to dry in front of it. (If you look carefully, you can see this composition on the far right of the second story in the blurry image above.)

Architectural camouflage, of course, is most often used in wartime, to ward off enemy aircraft. I can’t help but think of Jon Stewart’s running accusation that Dick Cheney had the Vice President’s residence obscured on Google Earth. It would be nice to develop some more inventive applications of these types of effects. Could they be used to test-drive projects in development? What if, one day, New York was dummied up to look like Paris? Or flipped around so the West Side was on the East Side? The mind boggles. Time for coffee.

It’s Memorial Day in America, so let’s talk for a moment about memorials. The other day I came across the image above, from an unveiling on a road outside of Detroit. Even acknowledging the centrality of the highway in American life, this seems a bit crass to me. (New Yorkers might think of the Ari Halberstam Memorial Access Ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, a tribute that makes a bit more sense, as Halberstam was murdered on the bridge.) The naming above was tied to the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, MI.

This is the museum, a work of architecture parlante by Neumann Smith & Associates. Here’s a bit of the firm’s description of the building: “The gray and blue striping on the second story reminds visitors of the camp clothing Holocaust prisoners were forced to wear. The cables criss-crossing the exterior brick represent concentration camp fencing. Even the shaggy greenery around the perimeter is reminiscent of the meadow grass that flourished near the camps. All of this uncomfortable imagery is deliberate to convey the great destructive force of intolerance.”

Do we really need buildings like this to educate? We have films and artifacts to teach the specifics—I think a showing of Shoah is enough to permanently instill the horror of the camps on any visitor.

The absurdity of the Detroit memorial museum only reinforces the manifold virtues of Peter Eisenman’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin. This seems to me everything that a memorial should be; physically and emotionally powerful, but not trite. Eisenman is the most cerebral of architects, and his gridded, Cartesian thinking here is still evident. But it is as much from the gut and the heart as from the head, a combination of humors that suits. If only we could have something so deceptively simple and powerful for Ground Zero. It’s a vast improvement over what we’re getting, to say nothing of this.

Meanwhile, in about an hour, a parade of fire trucks and antique cars will file through the quaint Berkshire town where I find myself this holiday weekend. I expect a fine turnout, and can’t imagine a nicer way to honor local veterans.

I’m a terminal equivocator, a chronic and debilitating deliberator. In the latest episode of CBC’s WireTap, “The Deciders,” host Jonathan Goldstein walks me through one of those difficult decisions we all are faced with at some point: Should I go to the doctor? Hilarity ensues as we review the pros and cons of my plight. Stay tuned afterward for Jonathan’s interview with author Jonah Lehrer, who knows from deciding. It would seem I’m a maximizer not a satisfizer. Or something like that. Whatever the case, you can maximize your satisfaction by choosing to turn your internet dial to the CBC.

Lee Siegel has a wonderful piece in today’s WSJ on the history and decline of the muse in art. “Poets stopped invoking the muse centuries ago—eventually turning instead to caffeine, alcohol and amphetamines—but painters, musicians, and even choreographers have celebrated their actual female inspirers in their work up until recent times,” he writes. The roll of the muse was to imbue the artist with creative vision; that is, to serve as something more than pure “exemplar[s] of style”—which is how he sees today’s couture model. I suspect there are fashion designers who would disagree with this contention. My only quibble, and it’s not really one at all, is that there’s no mention of Rubens and his wife Helena Fourment, inarguably one of the great muses in art history. Rubens married her when she was just 16 and he 53, and they had 5 children together, including one conceived just a month before his death; he was nothing if not ardent. At their wedding, his brother celebrated his fine catch. “He now owns the living image of Helen of Flanders, who is far more beautiful than her of Troy….The beauty of her shape is surpassed by the charm of her nature, her spotless simplicity, her innocence, and her modesty.” Rubens painted her endlessly, both as herself and as any number of mythological figures; sometimes she appears numerous times in a single painting. In his most famous portrait of her (above), she appears as Venus in a fur wrap. Hot stuff.

In the New Yorker this week, Jonah Lehrer writes about a psychological study suggesting that self control, or the ability to delay gratification, more strongly correlates with long-term success than intelligence, and that we’d do well to inculcate this trait in children. Some of the more progressive schools in the country, public and private, are working to do this, but it’s tough going. Our consumer culture seems to be ever pushing us to instantly fulfill even our smallest desires. It wasn’t always thus. Reading the article I could not help but think back to Peter Paul Rubens, whose Jesuit education was very much directed at instilling intellectual discipline. Although the Baroque is commonly understood as a time of extraordinary excess (and no painter was more excessive than Rubens), for the most part that excess was reserved for those at the very top of the social pyramid. For everyone else—that is, those subject to royal excess—it was a period of intellectual stoicism. Wars were fought on whim. Harvests ran thin. People died young. It was a tough, bitter world, and popular philosophy was aimed at helping people cope. The foremost thinker of the era was Justus Lipsius, a man largely forgotten today, who advocated a form of stoicism—”constancy” was his term—in the face of adversity. Rubens admired him enormously, and had a close personal connection; his older brother, Philip, was Lipsius’s protege. In the image above, Philip, holding a pen, sits at a table next to his stone-faced mentor, with a bust of Seneca, their stoic forebear, in a niche above. Rubens himself stands at the left—a rare self-portrait. The fourth man is Jan van den Wouvere, another Lipsius acolyte, and close friend to the Rubens brothers. This was a memorial portrait; both Lipsius and Philip Rubens were recently deceased, which accounts for the dour face on the painter. I suspect he would have scored quite highly in the study that is Lehrer’s subject, for Rubens was a man of immense will power, and this certainly contributed to his considerable success not just as a painter but as a businessman and diplomat. Rubens was expert at delaying his personal satisfaction, but even better at giving it to others.

Over on the Itinerant Urbanist, Karrie Jacobs recently wrote about her first impression of Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in San Francisco, a tilted black cube wedged between two older structures. “This particular building seems uncommonly dated….a souvenir of a place we’ve visited and to which we’ll not be returning any time soon.” I’ve had similar feelings about Thom Mayne’s new student center for Cooper Union, going up on Third Avenue in Manhattan. It’s not so much that it’s a bad building—a recent tour of the exterior (see above) and some new photos on Curbed suggest more than a few dramatic, well-considered spaces, and it’s a hell of a lot more inventive in form and material than Charles Gwathmey’s Astor Place dud across the street—but it does seem to me a building very much of a moment that has passed. The shifts, cuts, and slippages that read as “Decon” are by now several intellectual cycles behind the state of the theoretical/stylistic art. (Today, everything is green, green, green.) Ambitious architecture often suffers from some lag; it’s the product of the long time between a job’s commission and final realization. It’s hard to stay ahead of the curve. This building has a big one.

There’s a piece on Oobject today that lists what that site claims are the fifteen worst “housing projects from hell.” Tbilisi’s Hotel Iveria, which was never really a housing project in the formal sense, clocks in at #3. “It demonstrates perfectly how people will do anything to individualize an oppressive modernist space with no identity,” the editors write. Well, that’s not really true. When it opened, in 1967, the Iveria was the pride of the Georgian Intourist system, an elegant slab with spectacular views across the city and the Mtkvari river. (The architect was O. Kalandarashvili.) It was in the International Style of modernism, but the distinctive balconies ringing its shaft were drawn from Tbilisi’s vernacular tradition, where such balconies are a standard. (A whole neighborhood of these balconied buildings occupied the site of the hotel—at the foot of Rustavelli Avenue, the Champs Elysees of Tbilisi—and were demolished to make way for it, but that’s another story.) It’s worth noting that Tbilisi has a good deal of inventive Soviet era architecture, with the 1974 Ministry of Highways building (below) being only the most distinctive example.

Continue reading Tbilisi’s Hotel Iveria: A Defense