Cerasee, balsam pear, asowosi–remed fey. WLRN (2016). IFAS. NIH.
Category: landscape
Learning from Las Vegas
Fifty Years of “Learning from Las Vegas” by Christopher Hawthorne. New Yorker, January 27, 2023.
The cool appraisal of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s revolutionary book has a lot to inspire the architects of today.
Most architecture students over the years have read the shorter second edition of the book, a paperback published in 1977, but the 1972 large-format hardcover version is the livelier and more revealing document, if also the more contentious editorial product. It is divided into three parts. The first largely reproduces the Architectural Forum essay and includes a close study of the Strip’s architecture, signage, and street furniture. The second provides an analysis of how trends visible in Las Vegas relate to larger developments in architecture and urbanism. This section is anchored by a tribute to “ugly and ordinary” architecture, including a now famous distinction between buildings that are “ducks,” which is to say, commercial structures that take the shape of what they’re selling—a Mexican-food shop in Los Angeles resembling a giant tamale, for example—and those that are “decorated sheds,” or expediently made buildings that gain energy from signage and ornament. In short, the duck is a symbol; the decorated shed applies symbols to a more conventional architectural frame.
[…]
twenty-first-century readers tempted to brush off “Learning from Las Vegas” as a neutral travelogue risk missing the real power of its analysis—and the ways in which its approach might make today’s architecture of activism and political urgency sharper and more effective. We forget it now, perhaps because the effort was so entirely successful, but the book’s larger goals went far beyond understanding the quickly growing cities of the American West. Scott Brown and Venturi also wanted to accelerate a changing of the guard in architecture. In that sense, the smoke screen of non-judgment allowed them to plausibly claim a kind of “Who, me?” innocence as they worked to make room for their own generation to start running things.
After all, their frustration wasn’t with the revolutionary nature of the modernist project so much as with how it had grown stagnant and pleased with itself. As they write in the acknowledgments of “Learning from Las Vegas,” “Since we have criticized Modern architecture, it is proper here to state our intensive admiration of its early period when its founders, sensitive to their own times, proclaimed the right revolution. Our argument lies mainly with the irrelevant and distorted prolongation of that old revolution today.”
OBM-PAMM billboard
Orange Barrel Media – Pérez Art Museum Miami
Le vrai bonheur
Untitled (Le vrai bonheur), 2017
HD Video, 20 min, 43 sec.
how can we discipline ourselves according to certain standards if we never think about them?
[…]Sometimes, in a happy state of intoxication, I imagine giving in to disorder: leaving the pots dirty, the laundry to be washed, the beds unmade.
[…]What’s important is I discovered that working isn’t difficult. I really enjoy it.
[…]I told her that happiness, at least as she imagines it, doesn’t exist
Forbidden Notebook: A Novel, Alba de Céspedes, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein.
Joséphine Baker, C’est ça le vrai bonheur (1955). Discogs.
Colazione sull’erba
‘The power of containing everything vanished in front of the impossibility of seeing everything at the same time.’ Seeing everything, or rather, seeing the things that others cannot — the poetry in the mundane, the beauty of the arcane — is the gift of some artists. It was one of Ghirri’s great talents, through his own inquisitiveness and a love for the ambiguous.
Luigi Ghirri. Aperture. ArtForum. Studio International. Mack.
AG2016_1060092a or a redistribution of subjectivity
In 2002, CABE [Commission for Architecture & the Built Environment] published their report The Value of Good Design: How Buildings and Spaces Create Economic and Social Value. Beginning with the Vitruvian triad as a sound basis for judging architecture ‘now as when they were conceived’, they offered a further disambiguation of good design: order; clarity of organization; expression and representation; appropriateness of architectural ambition; integrity and honesty; architectural language; conformity and contrast; orientation, prospect and aspect; detailing and materials; structure, environmental services and energy use; flexibility and adaptability; sustainability; rounding it all off with ‘a final point’ that a building is beautiful when ‘the resulting lifting of the spirits will be as valuable [a] contribution to public wellbeing as dealing successfully with the functional requirements of the building’s programme’.
The word ‘beauty’ appeared to be making a comeback, but only as an emergent property of the sound delivery of other things.
architect, verb, Reinier de Graaf, (Verso)
Much of the pure aesthetic pleasure of Leigh’s work comes from these unpredictable elements: the swirling colors of her glazes, the way they bubble and crack. But the emotional and intellectual force of the punctum lies elsewhere—in the small but noticeable drip of mossy green glaze hanging off the chin of an untitled bust in the first gallery at LACMA, or in the impress of a fingernail near the base of an ocher bust (also untitled) at CAAM. Details like these suggest something outside a flat binary of visible/invisible or seen/unseen. They suggest, to my mind, a redistribution of subjectivity—character, agency, will, private consciousness—away from the face and toward obscure or secreted regions of the body, where their meaning becomes less obvious but also more potent, no longer constrained or patrolled by a racist logic of surveillance.
Refusing the Eye, Anahid Nersessian on Simone Leigh, (NYRB)
AG2023_1150369a and foliage, not my own, seemed mine
There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man—
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
Dejection: An Ode, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Other Significant Others, Rhaina Cohen. (The Marginalian)
Abolish the Family, Sophie Lewis. (Verso) (Liber)
À Haïti, au cœur de l’enfer, La Libre, Reportages publiés le 13 août 2024.
Take this from my hand
I’ve never spoken to anyone about this. Until now, until you.
I slept once in a field beyond the riverbank,
[…]
a flock of nightjars watching over me.I gathered a handful of my coyote’s bones, his teeth,
and strung them all on fishing wire—
a talisman to ward off anguish. A talisman I hold out to you now.Please. Come closer. Take this from my hand.
Dolores, Maybe, John Murillo
A narrative poem, hard to quote. Very good.
“I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self.” The Archipelago Conversations of Édouard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist.