Bienal Building (Óscar Niemeyer)

I visited the São Paulo Architecture Biennale on the 12th and 13th of November, while spending a week there to attend  TEDx São Paulo and interview people for my MFA thesis, Alvorada.

Before leaving New York, I pitched a review of the Bienal to Kieran Long, then editor-in-chief of Architecture Review. He commissioned me a 750-word piece, which I duly delivered. The following month Long told me he had left the magazine, but that the article would be published in the January 2010 issue of AR. It was indeed, but instead of around 750, it had been cut down (and very well, I may add) to just over 300 words.

For the sake of my own archive, I chose to have the whole, submitted piece here and show what bits were edited out.

Vista da exposição, © Susana Pomba

A minha recensão da exposição É Proibido Proibir do MUDE está desde hoje online no site Artecapital.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) (1887-1965) Still-Life of the Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau, 1924

This morning I visited the Art Deco, 1925 exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. This world-class, exquisite show would surely please Calouste Gulbenkian, the Armenian-born billionaire to which Portuguese science and culture (and myself, as a FCG/FLAD grant holder) owe so much. His famous motto, “only the best”, made the museum and foundation that bear his name two of the world’s most respected and sophisticated institutions.

Curated by Chantal Bizot and Dany Sautot and masterfully designed by Mariano Piçarra and Ricardo Viegas (graphics), the exhibition is a true arts décoratifs treasure trove. From carpets to glass, jewellery to books, it presents a wide range of (mostly applied) artworks that mirrored the prevailing message of 1925′s International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts: the triumph of the ensemble as an expression of industrial and artistic progress.

Alfred-Auguste Janniot (1889-1969) "Homage to Jean Goujon", 1919-1924

There were however dissonant voices at this exhibition of luxury and excess by the Seine. In the pavilion Le Corbusier designed for L’Esprit Nouveau, the magazine founded in 1919 with Amédée Ozenfant and Paul Dermée, he rejected the notions of ensemble, luxury, even craftsmanship, in order to design an industrially-made building and furniture (even if this ended up being easier said than done, as the only really industrially made object in the pavilion were the Thonet chairs). In this pavilion, art would not be subservient to decoration, but would regain its independence from it. The controversy and rupture created by Le Corbusier at what became known as the Art-Deco exhibition is well explored by Nancy Troy in her book Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France, where she reveals how this exhibition was as important for affirming the style as for Le Corbusier’s stance against it.

Such controversy is virtually absent from the Gulbenkian exhibition. There is a mention to the pavilion in its newspaper-like handout under the “‘Modern’ Pavillions” section: “this highly modern pavilion was not well received by the public or by official authorities. Following a delay in its construction, it was enclosed with a fence over 6 metres high and it was only inaugurated later on July 14th [three months later] by the Minister for Fine Arts.”

Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, interior (via retropolis.net)

Then there’s the caption to Le Corbusier’s sole artwork in the show. This painting was part of the pavilion’s interior, as shown above – a part of it can be seen on the right edge of the photo. Like the rest of the exhibition’s contents, the caption was written in Portuguese and English. The Portuguese one, on the left, includes the sentence “Mas Le Corbusier foi longe demais para o seu tempo, suscitando críticas severas que vão mesmo ao ponto de entaipar o pavilhão que só seria inaugurado três meses após a abertura da exposição.”, which I’ll translate as “But Le Corbusier went too far for his time, provoking severe critiques that go so far as to board up the pavilion that was only opened three months after the exhibition’s opening.”. On the right, the English text read: “Le Corbusier’s work was way ahead of his time and it received harsh criticism. The situation reached the point where the pavilion was fenced in and it was only inaugurated three months after the Exhibition’s opening day.”

Okay, it took me a few paragraphs to say this is a terribly conservative show. This was an impression I got as I walked down the exhibition hall, but after I read this caption I didn’t need to go any further. By using the expression “longe demais/too far” in the Portuguese caption (the English one is much less opinionated), it’s as if the curators are saying Le Corbusier’s reaction to the “sugar cubes with honey on top” aesthetics of Ruhlmann and the like (to paraphrase design historian and d-crit faculty Russell Flinchum) was not only misunderstood at the time – it was deservedly boycotted and lambasted.

Or am I overreacting and this is just a question of translation?
Knowing both curators are of French origin, one can only guess what they originally meant. Either way, if this exhibition takes sides, it’s definitely not L’Esprit Nouveau‘s. Which is fine. It’s still a great show on what was an important landmark for applied arts and design in the 20th Century. The term design, by the way, is nowhere to be found in the exhibition.

"Art Deco and its Enemies" @ Folhagem Vermelha

Earlier this year, in the galleries of Lisbon’s Berardo museum that previously housed Francisco Capelo’s design collection (which now make up MUDE, Lisbon’s design and fashion museum), the exhibition Art Deco and its enemies went further. By featuring many of items from the most important décorateurs of the period that make up another millionaire’s (Joe Berardo) collection, it showed, according to its in-room handout, ”Art deco at its most successful”. But it also presented “the reaction from Art deco’s detractors, like Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Marcel Breuer and Jean Prouvé.” The best thing in the exhibition was not even a piece of furniture, but Marcel Herbier’s delirious film L’inhumaine, sadly shown in conditions only adequate for today’s Youtube generation.

Much less sophisticated in presentation than Gulbenkian’s, this exhibition had no wall texts and virtually no extended captions. That made for cleaner walls, but also caused most people to walk, unattended and uninformed, through a gallery split in two sections: Art-Deco-like stuff and modern-like stuff (I’m aware of how loaded both terms are). No context, no explanation, nothing. I found this baffling – it was like walking through an antique store with a “vintage” section. I understand the museum may reserve its right to inform the public about the contents of its exhibition in the handout sheets made available to visitors (and the 214-page catalogue dedicated to Berardo’s Art Deco collection). But this is clearly not enough.

Applied art (and design) is not art. So (extended) captions are not optional – they’re fundamental. Even Konstantin Grcic knows this when he removes them from the gallery floor, only to extend their content on the website for his recent show, Design Real. In historical applied art/design exhibitions such as these two (no, neither of them have a website) context, explanation and a point of view matter. Otherwise we, the visitors, are left gazing at decorative, precious, priceless antiques collected by rich men.

Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives archivist, Beth Kleber, and the Pan Am Portugal poster

My research project on Ivan Chermayeff’s posters for Pan Am has just had its fourth incarnation: after presenting my findings in an in-class presentation and on a poster (after the jump) for Steven Heller’s D-Crit course, I later pitched the story (on Heller’s and Alice Twemlow’s reccomendation) to John L. Walters, eye magazine’s editor-in-chief. My article, Flight of the Imagination, came out on issue #73 of the magazine in October. This week, the follow-up post I wrote on the process was published and fully linked on the eye blog. This has been a truly exciting project to work on, and I am looking forward to future incarnations and encounters that may happen.

The poster I designed for my 3000-word essay

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…

Metropolis magazine, September 2009

The printed version of Metropolis magazine has shrunk as of last September. The result of a publishing crisis-induced redesign (in corner-cutting times, every inch counts), the magazine’s new size did not resolve its two other most pressing ills: an unclear international ambition and an art direction that doesn’t seem to know its place.

Metropolis was founded in 1981 as a large format, black and white tabloid newspaper with an ambitious subtitle: The Architecture and Design Magazine of New York. In 1999 both size and subtitle changed: following Paula Scher’s redesign, the magazine lost a few millimeters off the top and off the side, a trim deemed necessary for its newsstand success, but gained the Bodoni Book and News Gothic Condensed look that lasted for several years. By then Metropolis was about “Architecture, Design and a Changing World”, but it tough the world kept changing its subtitle remained the same from 2000 until this year: “Architecture < Culture > Design.”

Under the title “What is Good Design now?”, the March 2009 issue was one of the magazine’s best yet. The collection of essays from writers such as Deyan Sudjic, Peter Hall, John Hockenberry, Bruce Sterling, Niels Diffrient and Karrie Jacobs made it worth reading, not to mention contributions from the magazine’s editors and writers. This issue showed how Metropolis could instigate a broad, timely debate over the state of design six months after the global financial crisis started. It was an example of how a magazine can influence law makers, inspire professionals and educators, nurture students. It was also a good initiation on what design is for the common man. It was something you save from the bookshelf in case of a fire.

Metropolis, March 2009

Regardless of its content, this issue was also the epitome of Metropolis’ growing graphic mess. From Gail Anderson’s crazy busy cover to the magazine’s interior spreads, it seemed there were no graphic gimmicks left unused, no visual tricks left in the bag. There were tons of illustrations, color bars everywhere, oversized photos, (Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif coming out of the page!). There is hardly any publication that does not go through a slow and destructive process when it comes to its design; like anything else on Earth, magazines—but also newspapers and websites—are also victims of entropy. By this issue there was hardly anything left of Paula Scher’s design, apart from the Bodoni Book typeface used in most of its text. Until last month.

March 2009 was also the month Metropolis started calling itself “The Magazine of Architecture and Design”, a title it has carried through the September redesign. A rather pompous, if ambiguous title at that: is it New York’s, USA’s, the World’s magazine? Where does this ambition or quest for authority come from? Despite covering subjects from all over the world, there is an undoubtedly American (not to say New York-centric) tone to Metropolis. A clear example of that is Suzanne LaBarre’s (excellent) cover article on Emilio Ambasz, where one reads: “The green-building movement has enjoyed a meteoric rise, evidenced by government subsidies and LEED’s dizzy growth, but it lost an art component around the time green ceased to be a color and instead became a metaphor.” LEED, an US environmental standard for buildings, is not contextualized in a piece about an Argentinian architect and his most recent building in Italy. So what is Metropolis talking about, or talking to?

Emilio Ambasz story. Notice the byline placement

Also, in her September editorial editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy’s mentions the several virtues of the redesign, which include increased white space and an integrated approach to sidebar design. She says, “We think it works particularly well with this [Ambasz] piece, which goes deeply into the reclusive designer’s poetic aesthetics. You’ll also note that the outside margins—the seventh column—are sometimes used for factoids related to the story.” In the case of this article, some of the factoids include thumbnail photos of 1960s Italian furniture, whose connection to the story is esoteric at best.

Emilio Ambasz story. Why the chair and the lamp?

Granted, Metropolis does look a bit cleaner and “tamed”, but creative director Criswell Lappin still seems to be allowed the occasional graphic folly and typographic gimmick. He seems to have most fun in placing the article’s byline; it surfaces in the most unexpected, usually absurd places, ruining photographs and type treatments. Another example is found in the six spreads containing Julie Taraska’s article “Is the Death of American Design Greatly Exaggerated?.” Again, a great text accompanied by photos of images of chairs, lamps and tables arranged in pathetic, starry kaleidoscopic patterns. For a piece of writing that attempts to find some kind of future for US design, a more dignified treatment of its outcome would be expected…

The star-studded death of American Design.

I have to say I’m a big fan of Metropolis. I was a subscriber for several years, and am a frequent reader of its insightful writing, highly researched features on iconic designers and architects, not to mention Karrie Jacob’s excellent America column. I acknowledge its role as a champion of sustainable architecture and design practices, and find it a great source to understand American design.

But Metropolis is not an international magazine; it’s not made by an international team, and is not even aimed at an international readership. That is made clear also by the magazine’s advertising, largely made up of ads for American contract furniture and lighting companies and other architectural suppliers. These ads, (in their vast majority, far from attractive), which the magazine’s publishers have not been able to deter advertisers from placing on most desirable, right-hand pages, make for a choppy reading, made worse in the front of the magazine as editorial content shares space with half-page ads.

But then again, you don’t even need to buy Metropolis and be troubled by its printed advertising. You can find both full articles and ugly ads online at metropolismag.com. The magazine’s website, where virtually the whole issue’s contents can be found, read and shared, offers little else than the visual chaos of its printed version.

All in all, the renewed (not new) Metropolis is an improvement. Julie Taraska, one of the magazine’s contributors, summed it up nicely on a recent tweet: “Metropolis magazine’s redesign: Small trim size, clearer font, more white space, fits better in the tote bag.” But despite the therapeutic nature of its redesign it still seems to be suffering from chronic grandness and horror vacui. Publishing may be a tight business these days, but we all can use a little more space to breathe and think. If less paper and more white space prove to be good for Metropolis, further constraint and humility can be a lot better.

—

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 360ºChair post were examples of content created for different sections of this website. This one dedicated to the design and redesign of magazine, the other to innovative magazine sections and writing formats. 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…

I first wrote a 600-word review of Speed Limits for icon magazine in late May of 2009. It ended up being edited down to just over 450 words, losing in my view some of the details that I liked best. In late June I sent my original piece (with a few changes) to the frieze Writer’s Prize, a yearly award for art criticism. I had previously asked the editors of frieze (who don’t usually accept design exhibition reviews) if Speed Limits would be eligible, as it had as starting point Marinetti’s manifesto. They agreed, and I sent it. In late August I got news from Jennifer Higgie, who said I had been selected, among over 300 entries, as one of the jury’ 8 commended writers.

Both texts are now available here, the first under icon, the second under unpublished.