S K Y L I N E | 49 | Looking back to look forward
The end of the year approaches.
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In last week’s SKYLINE, ANNA TALLEY asked how we might look to the facts of history to more consciously shape our built environment. It’s a tempting premise: we know history, the cumulative effects of decisions over time, shapes our world more than any one person’s individual will. How, then, might we respond to it so that we condition future history, rather than allowing it to condition us?
In this week’s SKYLINE, writers engage with lectures and events that, whether directly or tangentially, pose the same question. DAN ROCHE spoke with the curators of an exhibition in Boston that looks at the history of an architects’ cooperative. NICHOLAS RAAP reports from an opening at Storefront and ANNA GIBERTINI from a lecture at The Architectural League. VIVIAN SCHWAB sends a Dispatch from a lecture about the history of development in Oakland, California. And, kicking it all off, JACK MURPHY considers how Wes Anderson’s films might suffer from post-modernism’s self-referential anti-history.
It’s easy, at the end of a year, to get sentimental, to look back wistfully. How do we look back unsentimentally, though not without feeling, so we can see more clearly where to go? The year is winding down, and events calendars are getting slimmer, but next week, Person Place Thing will host TOD WILLIAMS and BILLIE TSIEN (sponsors of NYRA), who will surely lean on their extensive body of work to tell a story about where they’ve been and where we are going. At Cooper Union, FOREST YOUNG, the senior director of global design at the electric truck builder Rivian will give a lecture evocatively titled "Auto-Reverse: A Blueprint Of Future Past." They might have some answers.
— Marianela D’Aprile
REVIEW
In the twenty-plus years since Wes Anderson’s Rushmore established the director’s style, popular culture has grown only more intensely image-focused. Similarly, as Anderson’s career has progressed, his films have become more ornate in both scenery and plot and more heavily staged through visual devices. His latest, The French Dispatch, is about a magazine of the same name, modeled on The New Yorker, operating in the fake French city Ennui-sur-Blasé, modeled on Paris. Led by charismatic editor Arthur Howitzer Jr., played by Bill Murray, the film skips forward and backward in time, showing both writers at work and, later, the staff gathered after Howitzer’s death, when the publication is scheduled to shutter.
Rather than one long plot arc, four closed loops tell the story of individual articles, held together by a combination of editorial processes and flashbacks. This structure is matched by a heightened bag of visual tricks to tell the stories, including, in one instance, an extended animated chase sequence. Anderson has long practiced sectional thinking — his movies include dollhouse-model views of boats, trains, hotels, and, now, planes — but this is a busy bundle. Each story is nuanced in plot and imagery, but it all doesn’t quite hold together. We meet groups of characters, but only briefly. It feels like we are expected to mourn Howitzer’s passing alongside his writers, but we didn’t really get a chance to know him, other than secondhand or through quick scenes. Here, due to their limited screen time, the characters are rendered with a flatness more appropriate for the surface of a page.
There are no soundtracked moments of badassery or longer treatments of intergenerational family strife, romantic turbulence, or existential crisis. And while Anderson’s films are frequently crowded, there are usually a few characters that get a chance to shine. Maybe the stories become shallower as a result of his deepening talent pool; Asteroid City, Anderson’s current project, is said to have a cast that’s even larger than most of his prior films. Above all, his recent work embraces a sense of total design, affecting every fabric selection and textual element. The result is films that make and inhabit their own worlds, transforming reality into images and fragmenting time into a series of perpetual presents — which, of course, is how the literary critic Fredric Jameson describes postmodernism.
Anderson is from Houston, a place where postmodernism ran wild: the same year he graduated from high school, a Hard Rock Café designed by Stanley Tigerman opened in town. “When I was really young, I wanted to be an architect,” Anderson wrote about Bar Luce, the cafe he designed for the Fondazione Prada in Milan, so the chance “to be a real one [was] a childhood fantasy come true!” But he knows there’s more to the job than theatricality: “there is no ideal perspective for this space. It is for real life, and ought to have numerous good spots for eating, drinking, talking, reading, etc.”
Seeing the city (or history) as a staged tableau reduces our chances of understanding it as a set of power relations — politics — which establish the conditions of appearance within. Lately, we're still postmodern, as we haven’t advanced beyond its paradigms of neoliberalism, irony, and referentiality. The French Dispatch might be to real life as Portoghesi’s Strada Novissima was to any actual city. The film romps through the mid-20th century, hoovering up even the uprisings of 1968 as a background for awkward intimacy. The end doesn’t bring a sense of resolution, other than the commitment to make the last issue of the magazine. That set-up would be fine in print, but it doesn’t work on screen. The film’s four linked set pieces deliver inventive scenes without a cumulative effect. Maybe this is where the formats of magazine and movie part ways: in The French Dispatch, the act of storytelling overwhelms the stories themselves.
— Jack Murphy
INTERVIEW
Last Friday, December 13th, the exhibition The Architects Collaborative, 1945–1995: Tracing a Diffuse Architectural Authorship opened at pinkcomma gallery in Boston. Dan Roche spoke with the curators — GABRIEL CIRA, JAMES HEARD, and EMMA PFEIFFER — about the project.
Your exhibition focuses on production by The Architects Collaborative (TAC) between 1945-1995. Why are you doing a show about them in 2021? Why now?
TAC has really not been well understood, even here in its own local context. On one hand, we have really just filled in a missing historical record and corrected some common misconceptions. But, on the other hand we also wanted to make a plea for the humble rather than the heroic, as preservation discourse around concrete architecture and embodied carbon is evolving here in Massachusetts as well as more broadly.
In terms of the role of architectural practice within the world, if TAC is an inspiration for us, there is definitely an asterisk there, as there should be with any precedent. I think their story is very instructive for young practitioners today.
TAC was novel for their time in a few ways. For instance, two of the eight original partners in 1945 were women. The office was cooperatively run and several partners were a part of the antiwar movement, contributing to TASK, an anti-fascist magazine. Their early engagement with public schools is also worth noting; they viewed public education as a cornerstone of a democratic society, and from their earliest stage were actively constructing public school buildings and innovating the type.
They hitched their wagon early to state-funded architecture and became reliant on those commissions, which guided the domestic practice for decades but ultimately became perilous. As the federal government subsidies began to shift away from education toward correctional facilities and defense in the 1980s and 1990s, the practice followed that money. One of their first projects overseas was the University of Baghdad, which led them into a lot of big government commissions in Iraq and Kuwait, and in some instances communicating with the large oil companies there.
When TAC closed its doors in 1995, the firm had been taking projects that were clearly antithetical to its founding principles. It was in dire financial straits, but the surviving original partners really made a deliberate decision to shut down TAC at that time. The internal tensions within the office, the generational differences, the decisions they made with good intentions—these are the lessons of TAC that are most telling for young practitioners and architectural collectives today. The research we’ve done carries great optimism but also cautionary tales.
This is an excerpt — read the full interview here.
DISPATCHES
12/4 – “The Great Ruins of Saturn”
The architetturati descended upon STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE Saturday evening for the opening of the exhibition Alvaro Urbano: The Great Ruins of Saturn. Transforming the gallery into a cavernous theater for shadow puppetry, URBANO, an artist and professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, has created an installation and film which reimagine the iconic New York State Pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair designed by Philip Johnson, still standing today in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.
Entering the curtained space presents whirling shadows of grotesquely rendered mid-century symbols. In an inversion of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, they become the tool to question, as the wall text says, “the spectacle of “man’s achievements”...progress, optimism, power,” that the pavilion symbolized upon its completion, speculating instead on alternatives which “escape the shadows formed by the still-thriving promises of a techno-capitalist future.”
Fittingly, the opening continued past sunset, extending the shadowy environment of the interior out into the Bowery, and hopefully allowing its viewers to see their built environment in a new kind of light.
— Nicholas Raap
12/7 – Barefoot Social Architecture
At a recent Current Work lecture hosted by The Architectural League, architect YASMEEN LARI asked: “Why is it that architects think they don’t have something to offer to the marginalized?”
Lari is right to point out the effectively indifferent attitude towards these populations. It is currently estimated that 2% of the world’s 7 billion people are homeless (about 154 million). Another 1.4 billion people live in homes with dirt floors, 4.5 billion without toilets. This level of poverty is primarily located in the Global South, where Lari predominantly works, but not confined to it.
After a long and prestigious career as Pakistan’s first female architect and a Brutalist starchitect, Lari felt compelled to atone for her own indifference to the poor in her home country. Since retiring in 2000, Lari’s Heritage Foundation practice has used vernacular forms, local materials, and sustainable design practices to elevate Pakistanis—notably women—out of poverty for more than 20 years. Lari’s Heritage Foundation practice has been awarded the U.N. Recognition Award, and she has won both the Fukuoka Prize and the Jane Drew Prize.
Lari is a rare example of what architects can do to design the world for the better, if the right conditions have been met. The problem for most architects is not that they lack the vision to better the world through their skills, as Lari’s question seems to suggest. It is that they are constrained by the realities of their profession: government bureaucracy, developer predation, and the ever-grinding wheel of capitalism.
— Anna Gibertini
12/8 – Development and Disruption
A conversation between two California College of the Arts faculty members and long-time Oakland residents and, MITCHELL SCHWARZER and CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON, “MITCHELL SCHWARZER - HELLA TOWN : OAKLAND'S HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT AND DISRUPTION,” hosted by CCA’s’ History of art and visual cultures department, gave the audience a non-linear tour through Oakland’s fraught urban history. “The major distinguishing characteristic of Oakland is its distribution of class, caste, and wealth by topography.” As transplants to “The Town,” Schwarzer and Johnson discussed their first impressions, lived experiences, and the lasting consequences of a local wealthy, white power structure that reigned from 1915 to 1970. Through a series of anecdotes, Schwarzer highlighted the short-sighted and self-interested decisions that facilitated a transition from de jure to de facto racism, a reliance on the automobile, and a scarcity of public spaces and public housing. These anecdotes are a reminder of the need for equity and stakeholder empowerment at the center of urban transformation. Reflecting on contemporary activism, Schwarzer and Johnson share an optimism and enthusiasm for an Oakland shaped by investment in community arts and culture through models of collective ownership.
— Vivian Schwab
EYES ON SKYLINE
(The most-clicked links from Skyline 48)
Readers really wanted to get their eyes on a literal skyline: Gowanus’s.
IN THE NEWS
Governor Hochul’s $7 billion plan to redevelop Penn Station and its surrounding area, including ten new towers, is meeting resistance, especially as it includes the demolition of a 150-year-old church and one of New York’s historic skybridges (in addition to last year’s removal of the Met-Life skybridge). As plans solidify to demolish other historic buildings in the area, in an ironic twist a state agency is recommending that Madison Square Garden itself be added to the national register of historic places.
In Nashville, the monument to the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan has finally come down.
Aggregate Architecture, the architectural history and theory publication, has just published a book, Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century, building on Michael Osman and Daniel M. Abramson’s 2017 article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, “Evidence and Narrative.”
Oliver Wainwright has found the light in a new affordable artist housing development in East London: “There is a reason this project differs from the norm, but it shouldn’t be allowed to remain an anomaly…. The building is a bold arrival, standing on the edge of Barking town centre as a stark stack of chiselled concrete forms.”
Katie Mazade grapples with Virginia Woolf in her review of a Room of her Own for Madame Architect.
Conservative media finds a thunderstorm in a teapot as a rumor about interior alterations in the restoration of Notre Dame gets out.
Pritzker prize winner and Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi wins the RIBA gold medal.
NYRA Holiday Cards!
The ultimate mailbox stuffer. And we still have some left! Secure your set here.
DATELINE
The week ahead...
Monday, 12/13
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien: Person Place Thing with Randy Cohen
6:30 PM | Center for Architecture
Tuesday, 12/14
AUTO-REVERSE: A BLUEPRINT OF FUTURE PAST with Forest Young
7:00 PM | Cooper Union
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
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For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Thomas Phifer.
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