Divis table designed by Mike & Maaike
This post covers the first lecture in the Rice Design Alliance’s three part series, “FURNISH.” If this captivates you be sure to attend the next two.
In the earnest tone with which he delivered his entire talk, Mike Simonian suggested on Wednesday evening that, in a given body of work, “if everything is perfect, then there’s a certain ugliness to all that beauty.” This, from the designer who made the XBOX console beautiful? You’d be hard pressed to find a blunder among the offerings coming out of Mike & Maaike, the San Francisco-based industrial design studio led by Simonian and his partner, Maaike Evers. By looking for one, though, you’d also miss the point.
Simonian and Evers, with the support of an international cadre of young interns, push their projects through a concept-driven, rigorous process and produce compelling works. A sort of completed perfection, though, doesn’t come across as the primary objective. The designs pose questions without declaring answers. They stir up trouble, find intrigue in uncertainty and sometimes fly in the face of staid conventions.
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Poet and Inprint Executive Director Rich Levy and novelist Farnoosh Moshiri
Yesterday evening, English + Associates Architects hosted the release party for Cite 87 at their offices in the Sixth Ward. Kathleen English gave a short talk on how she adapted the 120-year-old church building at 1919 Decatur. From the lowest floor, we could see clear through a hole cut in the floor to the beautifully exposed bow trusses. Gwendolyn Zepeda read from her article about growing up in the neighborhood, which she knew as Del Sesto. Her wonderful style is a form of social criticism through humor, keen observation, and generosity. The party seemed to fortify and refresh the spirits of the scholars, designers, novelists, poets, musicians, and artists there before the arctic blast welcomed us back into the purple night.
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Cover photo by Jack Thompson.
The Fall 2011 issue of Cite (87) was mailed and is arriving at the Brazos Bookstore, CAMH, MFAH, Issues, Domy, River Oaks Bookstore, and other stores. Below is a letter from the editor about this issue, followed by the Table of Contents.
The cover of this issue shows Dan Havel and Dean Ruck’s latest work, Fifth Ward Jam. Fashioned out of an old house, it looks like Houston’s culture—heterogeneous, exploded, twisted, improvised, and strangely beautiful. The editorial team was drawn to Fifth Ward Jam because of the way the splintered wood seems to focus a terrifying energy, like a plane crashed into the house and left a stage in the crater.
This issue of Cite features two ostensibly separate and unrelated sections. Guest editors Terrence Doody and Rich Levy challenged Cite and our readers to reflect on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks well after the flurry of television coverage has passed. The second section emerged from an effort led by Jane Creighton, Pat Jasper, and Carl Lindahl to commission writers who have insider stories about Houston places. No connection, right?
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Dockside Green, Victoria, British Columbia.
LEED certification is often a sham. The point system used by the U.S. Green Building Council is too easy to manipulate for the sake of marketing. For example, bike racks and showers earn points even if the building is sited on the edge of a freeway. The proximity of one bus line in the suburbs is equal to a downtown grid crisscrossed by public transportation. I’ve seen aerial pictures of LEED-certified, green-roofed buildings surrounded by moats of asphalt parking. The situation is perverse. Isolated features are used to green wash environmental time bombs—the architectural equivalent of putting a few pieces of organic lettuce on a factory-farmed beef patty.
A new type of LEED certification, LEED for Neighborhood Development or LEED-ND, promises to address some of these deep flaws. I attended a workshop on October 25 at CITYCENTRE, 14 miles west of downtown, to find out about the new point system. Douglas Farr, the original chair of the committee that developed the standard, gave the presentation.
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A two-million-square-foot building designed by WW Architecture. All images courtesy WW unless noted.
To introduce himself to the Glasscock School class for “Spotlight on Rice Architecture School,” Ron Witte said in comparison to his wife, Dean Sarah Whiting, his partner in their practice WW and the first speaker in our series, that she’s the more academically grounded and the more articulate before audiences. His historical knowledge, for example, comes second-hand and is “given to hyperbole.” His presentation on October 4—introduced by a survey of the transformation of Paris in the nineteenth century under Haussmann, and followed by a tour through a few of WW’s recent and ambitious designs—indicated, however, that he was only being modest.
The example of Haussmann’s radical excavation of the Paris cityscape served as a model for what Witte describes as a sort of civic hubris. It is all the more remarkable that today we do not tend to think of the city of Paris as an emblem of hubris, given how few towers it has (besides the Eiffel, obviously), how much walking and sidewalk culture it affords, and how moderate in scale are its residential, industrial, and commercial sectors.
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The fact that architects have been fascinated with prefabrication is no secret. Over the past 90 years, such luminaries as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Yona Friedman, Team X, and Jean Prouvé engaged in the dialogue. Modernists found it to work in their system of the free plan. Megastructuralists became fascinated with the repetitive unit that the individual could customize after construction. Projects such as Moshe Safdie’s Habitat at the Montreal Expo in 1967 and Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation imagined a new way of building and inhabiting space.
Recently, firms and companies such as Blu Homes, Marmol Radziner, and Alchemy Architects (with their weeHouses) have reopened the discussion of prefabrication, specifically with single family homes. Add Lake Flato Architects to the list. Based out of San Antonio, David Lake and Ted Flato decided to use the recent economic downturn to investigate potential lines of thinking they would not normally have time or energy for. From these explorations the “Porch House” was born. While the aforementioned architects focus on an already miniscule niche of homeowners looking for non-custom high-end homes, Lake Flato noticed a different angle.
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Rice Solar Decathlon House on National Mall. Photo by Eric Hester
The third session of “Spotlight on the Rice School of Architecture” featured Nonya Grenader and Danny Samuels who co-teach introductory courses at the Rice School of Architecture and lead the Rice Building Workshop. (See all posts in the series here.) The workshop is an advanced practicum for undergraduates and graduate students that produces buildings from design to completion. In other words, students donate their labor to a building project and experience first-hand all the logistical, practical, and budgetary challenges that builders face when attempting to execute an architect’s plans. The result is that Rice’s architecture students gain a sure sense of how plans and ideas actually manifest in the real world.
Samuels and Grenader attribute just 15 percent of total effort in any given architectural project to the design process. The other 85 percent goes into actual construction “outside the studio”: meeting budgets, adapting to weather conditions, complying with municipal permitting, communicating with contractors, and collecting and deploying available resources, including materials and labor. “Design is a continual process,” said Samuels, “with problems that have to have design solutions throughout the building process.”
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A general assembly of Occupy Houston at Tranquility Park
Mic check?
Mic check!
MIC CHECK!
MIC CHECK!!!
Such is the call-and-response that kicks off every General Assembly at Occupy Houston. Organizers have chosen to forego the permitting process which would allow for amplified sound in favor of this technique, where speakers talk slowly, one short phrase at a time, and the crowd repeats those snippets of sentences to amplify that voice using “the people’s microphone.” It makes communication a little slower, a lot more painstaking, but that’s part of the point—democracy is a slow process.
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Detail from Ana Serrano's Salon of Beauty, all photos by Nash Baker
“Vibrancy” — the first and too often the last word that comes up when considering Ana Serrano’s Salon of Beauty, installed at Rice University Art Gallery. The brightly-colored buildings that make up the slightly-smaller-than-life-size cityscape are indeed at first glance “playfully vibrant” as one reviewer writes. The installation, a (re)created blue collar neighborhood from Los Angeles, is comprised of a flower shop, strip club, beauty salon, liquor store, bakery, and the like. Each building is made from wooden frames enclosed in painted cardboard that bring to mind a fantastical, “vibrant,” Disneyland-like aesthetic. It is in this contradiction, between the working class roots of this neighborhood and its aestheticization, that I am interested.
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Fernando Brave, Pablo Ferro, and Craig Minor
Apparently, a whole army of people in Houston know who Pablo Ferro is and love his work. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston event (co-sponsored by the Rice Design Alliance and AIGA) was packed for the sold-out presentation of the title designer, movie director, animator and all around Renaissance Man. The crowd was a heady mix befitting of the presenter himself: a slew of hipsterfied young graphic designer nerds mixed with older film buffs, advertising professionals, architects, and typography geeks. The eclectic audience was an indication that Pablo Ferro has been fully rediscovered (if he was ever really forgotten).
Love of Pablo Ferro, the cult figure, has been growing for some time now. The rebirth of interest in him has been driven by a large, impressive and always surprising body of work (and its recent appearance in easily searchable YouTube videos): the skinny, sexy film titles of Dr. Strangelove, the boxy split screens of The Thomas Crown Affair, the flipped Я of The Russians are Coming, and the quick-cut, psychedelic weirdness of the Clockwork Orange trailer. Ferro created an aesthetic for an era and laid out an array of visual techniques that would be copied and reworked for decades. In recent years, he’s received a series of well-deserved awards from prestigious organizations, including the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. There’s also a documentary film in the works that combines animated sequences with celebrity interviews (e.g. Anjelica Houston and Jeff Bridges) to tell the story of Pablo’s unconventional life: his road from Cuba to working with Stan Lee and Disney in New York to Hollywood studio work and finally to a humble garage in L.A. where he lives and works to this day.
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