A edição de Dezembro da revista Vida & Viagens inclui o meu artigo sobre Montreal, que escrevi após passar uma semana na capital maior cidade do Québec em Maio passado. Fica aqui a introdução.

Há destinos que apenas se visitam uma vez na vida. Uma ilha deserta no Pacífico, um templo inca, a floresta tropical do Bornéu, o monte Kilimanjaro ou um sítio qualquer acima do círculo Polar Árctico. As cidades, porém, foram feitas para ir e voltar. Mesmo que as contingências da vida falem mais alto e nos impeçam de regressar às ruas e praças e a todos aqueles lugares que fazem de uma cidade uma cidade, somos sempre levados a pensar que não vimos tudo, que falta ir àquele restaurante, ao museu que estava fechado para obras, ou ver um tal edifício, mas sem os tapumes. Visitar uma cidade não é fazer uma lista de «está visto», não é juntar cromos à caderneta, nem carimbos ao passaporte. Por muito remota que seja a possibilidade, queremos sempre poder não ver, mas viver de novo a cidade que visitamos agora.
Daí ter pensado não em contar como foi a minha primeira visita à cidade de Montreal, mas sim fazer a minha própria lista de coisas que me fazem querer lá voltar. Tão breve quanto possível.

Wild Bar

Whether you missed breakfast, need a workout power boost or a mid-afternoon snack, there’s always a cereal bar to get you going.  Despite their crunchy, hippie origins, cereal, granola or power bars are today a billion-dollar industry of highly sophisticated, designed foodstuffs. But what does this food group really look like?

Norwegian confectionery manufacturer Freia introduced its Melkesjokolade bar in 1906; the first industrially produced, individually wrapped, one-portion chocolate-coated candy bar defined the product’s typeform. Its scale, ingredients and packaging made it easy and cost-effective to manufacture, store and sell (or, in the case of troops who later carried candy bars to the battle field, distribute) on a massive scale.

Tiger's Milk

It was only in the 1960s however that candy bars began to be thought as more than just a sweet snack. On the chocolate bar front, canadian bodybuilder and fitness expert Joe Weider came up with Tiger’s Milk bar, “America’s Original Nutrition Bar.” Packed with protein, vitamins and minerals, Tiger’s Milk bars became popular as a more nutritionally balanced option to the candy bar. At the same time, Granola (a turn of the century, American invention) was witnessing a revival as an increasing number of Americans started adding dried fruits and nuts to the baked cereal, making it the breakfast option of choice of the hippie movement.

In 1975, 17-year old high-school senior and health food enthusiast (but no hippie) Herrick Kimball of Moravia, NY thought making bars out this mix was a good idea. Kimball has since been fighting for ownership of this idea, attributed by several sources to American inventor extraordinaire Stanley Mason. Regardless of their inventor, cereal bars are today an integral part of our culinary, nutritional and material landscapes: several brands and hundreds of varieties fight for shelf space and taste buds in the USA alone.

Clif Mojo

The following observations are based on an analysis of over 40 individually-wrapped, one portion bars sold in three supermarkets, one health food and one vitamin store in New York City.

The average bar weighs about 2 ounces and is roughly parallelepipedic in shape; it is also wrapped in the same plastic foil material (in general polypropylene) used for candy or chocolate bars, known in the industry as fin-seal over wrapping, flow wrap or candy wrap.

Kind Bar

Once you tear open the wrapper, the cereal bar inside should derive from one of two processed food typologies, declinations of the aforementioned snack bar inventions: the “mysterious, nutritious chocolate bar” family – known to power food/fitness/bodybuilding fans and lovers of guilt-free sweet snacks – and the “natural and exposed” variety – heir to the granola/health food strand of nutrition.

The former typology is made up of more or less lumpy bricks and sticks coated in chocolate on all sides, revealing nothing of its contents. The latter is actually divided into two sub-categories: one, which can be named “grains and fruits and nuts stuck together”, produces photogenic conglomerations of seeds, nuts, and dried fruits prodigiously held together by an unidentified thin mortar. The other, “dense concoctions of goodness”, seems to be made up of pure mortar: lumps of dense, pounded vegetable matter that contain a myriad of nutrients from seeds, exotic algae or tropical berries, but resemble things like solidified mud, batteries, chipboard or human stool.

Detour

While they may be sold as a natural product, these bars don’t grow on trees or sprout up from the ground. They’re manufactured by industrial food processing machines that churn out thousands of one-portion, individually wrapped bars per day. Even if the end products are ugly, this is no doubt a designed food group; each of these bars is thought out in its ingredients/components and in what is necessary for it to be made, distributed and sold.

No one really knows what a granola, candy or cereal bar looks like. When we look closer, some don’t even seem edible or appetizing. Even if we care (or worry) about what these bars look like, it doesn’t matter: once the wrapper is open, it’s gone in minutes. So what makes us eat – by the millions – these generally unattractive, yet nutritious morsels? Something must call to our taste buds and inform our choices. As with so many other industrially produced products, it’s all in the packaging.

Regeneration's Anti-Aging Bar

On my research I grouped the bars in seven packaging subcategories. “Serious business”, largely made up of wrappers that mimic the design of nutritional supplements, gym equipment and bodybuilding publications as to appeal to a specific audience. Bold, flashy lettering, plenty of gold and silver outlines, extreme product close-ups, big (usually big on protein) claims. These bars, of which Detour is surely the king at 30g of protein a pop, would advertise steroids if they could.

“Active Types” bars show a more discreet and wholesome approach to energy-rich snacks aimed at fans of the outdoors. One of these, the Clif Bar, comes in several varieties and is made with organic ingredients.

Lärabar Jocalat

The “No guilt dessert” group includes scrumptious sounding, often chocolaty offerings that claim to be both delicious to the palate and friendly to the physique (kind of). Lärabar bars for example come in a whooping variety of 24 alluring flavors.

For the real health-conscious the “Mens sana in corpore sanum” kind of bars offer functional ingredients and are high in fibre, antioxidants and other exciting components, such 500mg of spirulina in the case of Odwalla’s Superfood bar.

Odwalla Superfood Bar

Some bars claim to be both good for you and “Tree-hugging good”; organic, fair-trade ingredients from remote parts of the world come together in sometimes cute, sometimes “granola hippie” wrappers, such as Greens+ High Protein bar.

Greens+ High Protein

Luna bars, marketed to women by the makers of Clif Bars, are the best example of “One for the ladies” category. They’re 70 percent organic, high on folic acid and the company gives a portion of its proceeds to eliminating environmental causes of breast cancer. Lastly, it’s never too early to discover the joys of a cereal bar, so both Lärabar and Clif have “Kiddie Bar” varieties with colorful, bouncy graphics.

Luna Sunrise

Lärabar Jamfrakas

What gets the business of cereal bars going is not our obsession with nutrition, power or sugar. It’s rather our continuous search for ways to define our lifestyle; just as these bars are individually wrapped, also we have our own ways of presenting and projecting ourselves.

Andrew Weil MD Goji Moji Bar

So either we look for extreme contents (as in Pure Protein’s 32g of protein), exotic ingredients (Regeneration’s Anti-aging endless list of extracts and blends), professional assurance (as in Andrew Weil M.D.’s line of bars for Nature Path) or personal stories (such as Gary’s, the creator of Clif Bar), we know what the right bar for us should be. At the cereal bar aisle or in front of the snack bar counter, things get personal: cereal bars may not be that different on the inside, but they all speak to us differently in their own voice. We just need to find the one that shares our needs and beliefs.

Eu tive o prazer de escrever o texto que acompanha a peça do atelier Miguel Rios Design nesta exposição, a qual traz à mesma sala – e à mesma mesa – uma artista (Ângela Ferreira) e um atelier de design.

Konstantin Grcic’s 360ºC chair for Magis is a product that defies classification. It’s a chair that doesn’t look like anything we have around us these days. It’s a bit like stool, but it has a sort of a small back. It looks hard, but it’s actually much softer to the touch than one would thing. As with other of Grcic’s creations, it doesn’t look pretty, luxurious or particularly comfortable.

After it was launched in Milan this year, the 360º chair received a considerable amount of press, but I would say only got two relevant, considerably different reviews. Sam Jacob’s brilliantly funny and insightful review in the September 2009 issue of icon magazine highlighted the chair’s physical and mental impact on the user: “Sitting here is conceived as an active state – a constant psychological state of agitation.”

Abitare approached it from a very different angle: taking advantage of the chair’s April launch in Milan, it gathered not only the designer and manufacturer to talk about it, but also called other people to the discussion, which it called “design trial”. Placing the 360º chair as the defendant, Abitare design and architecture editor Anniina Koivu called American designer Jonathan Olivares for the prosecution, MoMA’s curator of architecture and design Paola Antonelli as the defense attorney. The chair’s designer Konstantin Grcic and manufacturer Eugenio Perazza (Magis’ charismatic CEO) were called in as witnesses.

The court session can be seen in part on YouTube; its transcript was published in June of 2009 in the printed version of Abitare and can be read in its entirety on the magazine’s website – where there is even the option of downloading a pdf of the article’s pages. This is an extremely entertaining and thought-provoking piece of design criticism. The chair is placed in its historical, use and environmental context; it’s talked about as if it was a real, living being, as it is accused – particularly on the environmental impact of its parts and materials – and defended – the strongest arguments being it’s a new way of sitting and a new interpretation of office furniture. In the end, the defendant is found “Not Guilty”.

Design on trial is a phenomenal, engaging way to observe and critique designed objects – and I assume it would also work for built environments – that goes well beyond the usual test-based review. So far Abitare has not published another design trial, but I look forward to the next court session.

—

I wrote this post as an assignment for the ‘New New Media’ D-Crit course, taught by Elizabeth Spiers. This was supposed to be a segment of a larger assignment, called Reading Room, an online venue for discussion and critique of design and architecture magazines. This post and the Metropolis magazine post were examples of content created for different sections of this website. This one is dedicated to innovative magazine sections and writing formats, the other to the design and redesign of magazine. Other sections include “Popular Subjects” (where one subject, product of person that having widespread coverage in magazines around the world would be regularly picked in order to analyze/discuss the way it has been talked about offline and online) and Editors, dedicated to the figure of the magazine (something I’m quite obsessed about) and how a publication can become a mirror of its editor’s personality and preoccupations, or completely  change from one editor’s tenure to the next. This section would be made up of a series of interviews with living editors on how they do what they do, and discover the people, the work and the legacy of historic and influential past editors. Reading Room would actually be something I’d like to actually turn into a reality, but maybe when I’m done with my thesis…

O Ricardo Hartmann mandou-me ontem a letra deste dueto entre a Rita Lee e o João Gilberto, para inspiração. Entretanto encontrei a música. Beleza. Valeu Ricardo!

Quando Cabral descobriu no Brasil o caminho das índias
Falou ao Pero Vaz para a caminha escrever para o rei
“Que terra linda assim não há
Com tico-ticos no fubá
Quem te conhece não esquece
Meu Brazil é com S”

O caçador de esmeraldas achou uma mina de ouro
Caramuru deu chabu e casou com a filha do Pajé
Terra de encanto amor e sol
Não fala inglês nem espanhol
Quem te conhece não esquece
Meu Brazil é com S

E pra quem gosta de boa comida aqui é um prato cheio
Até Dom Pedro abusou do tempero e não se segurou
Oh! natureza generosa
Está com tudo e não está prosa
Quem te conhece não esquece
Meu Brazil é com S

Na minha terra onde tudo na vida se dá um jeitinho
Ainda hoje invasores namoram a tua beleza
Que confusão veja você
No mapa-múndi está com Z
Quem te conhece não esquece
Meu Brazil é com S.

Brazil - Temperature and Precipitation from Map No. 503241 1977, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, Univ. of Texas

When we met a few weeks ago, Susan Yelavich suggested I read Cornel West’s essay “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” (October, Vol. 53, Summer 1990, pp. 93-109), as part of the research for my Master Thesis on contemporary Brazilian product design. I found it truly inspiring, especially this paragraph:

The time has come for critics and artists of the new cultural politics of difference to cast their nets widely, flex their muscles broadly, and thereby refuse to limit their visions, analyses, and praxis to their particular terrains. The aim is to dare to recast, redefine, and revise the very notions of “modernity,” “main-stream,” “margins,” “difference,” “otherness.” We have now reached a new stage in the perennial struggle for freedom and dignity. And while much of the First World intelligentsia adopts retrospective and conservative outlooks that defend the crisis-ridden present, we promote a prospective and prophetic vision with a sense of possibility and potential, especially for those who bear the social costs of the present. We look to the past for strength, not solace; we look at the present and see people perishing, not profits mounting; we look toward the future and vow to make it different and better.

More “Alvorada” (the working title of my thesis) thoughts and notes will be coming to this space regularly from now on.

I made this 30x30cm image in 1998, as part of a visual concepts alphabet exercise on my 2nd year in university. The word for S was "simples".

a few more images of one of my favourite school assignments ever after the jump.

D - Dúvida (doubt)

E - eco (echo)

G - gesto (gesture)

H - harmonia (harmony)

J - já (now)

L - liberdade (freedom)

M - máquina (machine)

N - não (no)

O - ódio (hate)

Q - quase (almost)

U - urbano (urban)

V - viceversa

X - xequemate (checkmate)

I have to say there is something special about this place.
Merry Christmas.

“There are times when we are perhaps visited by a mild nostalgia for the harmless and leisured times before the advent of advertising. yet if we considered how the world would look without advertising, we should certainly have to admit that it would lose much of its form and color. that we should no longer see the faces turned towards the bright displays, nor the eyes that sparkle in the light of illuminated advertisements. The walls would be monotonous, the streets emptier and duller; there might be unemployment, there might be even misery. And above all we should not see our own progress, for advertisement is nothing if not a manifestation of progress.”

Carlo Dinelli, “Advertising Art in Italy”, Graphis, #33, 1950

I chose 12 Proprietary Eponyms out of all these suggestions that arrived from all over the world to my inbox: Kodak, Xerox, Bic, Aspirin, Q-Tip, Styrofoam, Windex, Ketchup, Post it, Nescafe, Nesquik, Spax, Google, Rolodex, Filofax, Tupperware, Walkman, Phillips Screw, Lego, Pampers, Black & Decker, Vespa, Fridge (Frigidaire), Keds, Band-Aids, Cellophane, BMX Granola, Zipper, Yo-Yo, Nicorette, Nutella, Tampaz, Sharpie, X-Acto, La-Z-Boy, Velcro, Play-Doh, Zambuk, Lip Ice, BluTack, Chapstick, Skype, FedEx, Kraft Dinner, Tippex, Disprin, Dettol, Chupa Chups, Hoover, Jeep, Rollerblade, Gillete, Kispo, Formica, Cool Whip, TiVo, Linoleum, Guiness, Coke, Plexiglas, ZipLock, Saran Wrap, iPod, Frisbee, UHU, Tixo, Obi, Goiserer, Tesa, Patez, Tempo, Philadelphia, Zippo, Stanley, Scottex, Frigo, Sopalin, Vaseline, Chiclet, Labello, Cimbalino, Zewa, Edding, Nivea, Speedo, Slinky, Gladwrap, Sunlight, Prestik, Kreepy Krauly, Radenska, Superga, Spa, Stanley Knife.

Here is the result.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freduarte/sets/72157608708661776/

Thank you so much to everyone who sent their suggestions.