Kenneth Cobonpue’s Croissant table.

This post covers the second lecture in the Rice Design Alliance’s three part series, “FURNISH.” If this or our earlier post on Mike & Maaike captivate you, be sure to attend the final and not-to-be-missed lecture by Jurgen Bey.

Locally sourced. Organic. Sustainable. Hand-made. These buzzwords are now ubiquitous in every design discipline. And, at the RDA lecture featuring Kenneth Cobonpue, I heard them a lot. I started to wonder which came first: the design or the buzzwords? Is he following a deeply considered process or cashing out on a marketing trend?

Cobonpue grew up around design in the Philippines. His mother, an interior designer, worked with rattan furniture and even secured patents for a lamination process. In 1987, Cobonpue attended Pratt Institute, followed by a stint in Europe working through several apprenticeships. In 1996, he returned to the Philippines to take over his mother’s workshop. He found a much different world than the one of his education. Where Cobonpue had been trained to design for machine production, the Philippine workers offered him their hands.

Shiro Kuramata’s How High the Moon chair

Cobonpue's "Yin Yang" chair

Cobonpue's "Yoda" sofa

Cobonpue's Phoenix car

Cobonpue's Retaso table

Rendering of proposed Central Station by Snøhetta

On the evening of Tuesday, January 24, the Houston Downtown Management District, along with Metro and its design-build component, Houston Rapid Transit, hosted a public presentation of five proposals for the new “Houston Central Station.” They were the result of an invited competition whose impressive advisory panel featured among others the new, and apparently well-connected, deans of Houston’s two schools of architecture, Patricia Oliver of University of Houston and Sarah Whiting of Rice University. Entries were presented by Chris Sharples of SHoP Architects, New York; Paul Lewis of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, New York; Neil Denari of Neil M. Denari Architects, Los Angeles; Mark Wamble of Interloop—Architecture, Houston; and Craig Dykers of Snøhetta, New York and Oslo. (I would have liked to see women architects like Jeanne Gang or Toshiko Mori also included.)

They are all decidedly avant-garde, modernist firms who have begun in the last several years to build increasingly large and prestigious projects. Collectively, they tend to use computer modeling to create rather complicated swooping and angled designs that rely on the newish technology of digitally assisted, custom fabrication for their realization. As such, they tend to be highly regarded in architectural schools and in the architectural press where these techniques are the common currency in trade, though perhaps somewhat less by the general public who usually seems to be either awed, mystified, or repulsed by such work.

My initial fantasy image of fedora-clad Mad Men and buxom ladies in stiletto heels rushing to catch the midnight train in a moodily lit Central Station was quickly dispelled by the detailed introduction given by Lonnie Hoogeboom, Director of Planning, Design and Development for the Downtown District, who explained that, in fact, the project was for a modest open-air platform where two new light rail lines, the East End Line and the Southeast Line, intersect with the existing Main Street Line. The site is on Main Street between the existing Main Street Square Station and the Preston Station. It faces Houston’s great Art Deco setback skyscraper, the Gulf Building, completed in 1929, where the Sakowitz Brothers once had their department store. The Central Station will be inserted in the median between the existing tracks, and as a result, will only be about eleven-feet wide, but will run nearly the length of the block. The current budget is about $1 million, including design fees, and each firm was given a $20,000 honorarium for design and travel expenses. Once they accepted, they had about six weeks to design the projects they presented in Houston. That firms of such caliber enthusiastically participated in what is in reality a very small project is perhaps a signal of the clout of the advisory panel. The winning firm will subcontract to a local architect of record, selected by Metro, who will prepare the final construction documents.

Tuesday’s presentation was intended to gather public feedback, which will be given to the jury when they review the projects in the next few weeks. Just as impressive as the advisory panel is the list of jurors, which includes David Burney, FAIA, Commissioner, Department of Design and Construction, New York; Carlos Jimenez of Carlos Jimenez Studio, Houston; Michael Rock, Founding Partner & Creative Director, 2×4, New York; Carol Lewis, Director of Texas Southern University’s Center for Transportation, Training & Research, Houston; and Minnette Boesel, the Mayor’s Assistant for Cultural Affairs, Houston.

On to the projects.

Rendering of Central Station proposal by ShoP Architects

Section of ShoP Architects proposal.

Rendering of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis proposal.

Proposal by Neil Denari Architects

Detail from Denari Architects

Proposal by Interloop Architecture

Diagram of Snøhetta proposal

Aerial rendering of Snøhetta proposal

Rendering of Snøhetta proposal

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.

Take the Divis project, which spurred the most rousing moment of the presentation at the MFAH. An exploration of the natural splitting that occurs in wood grains, the table is comprised of a top, which is punctured by voids that represent “splits,” and legs that engage into those voids. The crowd delighted in Mike’s admission that the generous amount of negative space in the Divis tabletop — the very feature that drives home the wood grain allusion and generates so much aesthetic appeal — effectively renders the piece useless as a functional dining table. With striations that literally drop out from the slab of material running the length of the table, it’s easy to imagine a dinner party devolving into a messy affair. Plates sliding onto laps, food and wine going everywhere. But this is the best part, argues Simonian, with his brand of infectious playfulness: when the table was realized, the designers found they’d “inject[ed] characteristics that make the product misbehave” and that such misbehaving “serves a different function than being a practical, ‘good’ table.” Perhaps a table that safely accommodates a dinner service is, in a world where possibilities and discoveries rule, a staid convention. I couldn’t help but buy this ridiculous proposal.

Neither could Council, the San Francisco company that struggled with the curious design but was so glamoured by its whimsical attractiveness that it eventually put the table into production. Council turned out to be an important character in the story of Mike & Maaike, as Simonian shed some light on the disparate experiences of working with such a small production firm and heavy-hitting players like Herman Miller (where Mike & Maaike’s designs have also come to fruition). Energy and ideas can move much more quickly toward a project’s realization within a smaller outfit like Council. Many of the pieces Simonian introduced in the talk were rushed into production shortly after their conception for design trade shows like ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair), which can offer crucial exposure for design offices.

Juxtapose

ATNMBL

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.

While Serrano shies away from seeing her own work as confronting elements of class division, the work itself seems to address them. But, how are they addressed? Frederic Jameson’s “pastiche” may help to clarify. He writes: “pastiche is, like parody, imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry [emphasis added], without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter.” This, then, may cut to the heart of Serrano’s work. While the work’s “imitation” of a low socioeconomic urban environment may appear to be “neutral,” it produces a tension in the space in which it exists, the space of academia, where collars are white and freshly pressed. But again, we are left with a question: how does this tension function and to what end?

As one, looking for clues, continues to explore the installation, the paradoxical presence and absence of labor in Salon further obscures work of two kinds—that of the artist and that of the inhabitant (who interestingly is absent from the exhibition). The construction of Salon began six months before Serrano came to Houston from Los Angeles and continued on site for another full month. While the size and detail of the buildings that fill the space are impressive, evidence of the artist’s hand is hard to find in the work—as one looks at the leaves of potted plants sitting atop a half-built foundation, for example, their edges are mechanical in appearance. In fact, Serrano notes that while she draws the outlines of the plants by hand, the cutting is done by machines. The hand drawn lines were vectorized in Adobe Illustrator then laser cut at Rice University. This somewhat odd collision of the manual drawing and a technology that all but makes obsolete manual cutting seems to relate to a larger tension in the work, or more specifically, in the represented neighborhood and its relationship to the gallery in which it sits.

Although viewers indeed physically enter the space of this constructed working class Los Angeles block, they remain both within Rice University and outside of Los Angeles and any working class neighborhood. The installation sits behind a glass wall exposed to passersby, who, if they choose to do so, may enter the space and look around. It is this tension that I find to be so provocative in the work. It reproduces certain tropes of the neighborhood that it stands for, including barbed wire made from plastic zip ties, security bars over windows and doors, and a series of dissimilar businesses that juxtapose one another in interesting ways. So, there is a kind of layering of tension in the work, one internal between these buildings and a second at a more macro level between the working class neighborhood and the University setting. Perhaps, it is within these juxtapositions that Serrano’s work resists slipping into Jamesons’ “pastiche,” and instead disrupts the kind of carefree enjoyment of the vibrantly colored Disneyland ride.

Further Reading

Aaren Pastor, “Salon of Beauty opens in Rice Art Gallery” The Rice Thresher (September 30, 2011), accessed October 10, 2011.

Douglas Britt, “Installation brings an urban flavor to Rice Gallery,” Chron.com (September 27, 2011), accessed October 10, 2011

Tyler Rudick’s “A guide to Museum District Day for all types: From hardcore art lovers to science buffs to parents with curious kids” Culture Map Houston (September 16, 2011)

“Cardboard cityscape an artful endeavor at Rice Gallery” Your West U News online (September 27, 2011), accessed October 10, 2011. See ricegallery.org for information on Serrano’s installation and links to these and other reviews of her work.

Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991) 17.

About the writer:
Philip Kelleher is a Core Fellow in Critical Studies at the Glassell School of Art.

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.

Line at the Pablo Ferro talk

In his appearance at the MFAH, Ferro alternated between telling funny anecdotes, talking about his creative production processes, and reminiscing about his adventures with the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Hal Ashby and even Michael Jackson in his video for Beat It. A font of advice, jokes, and clever turns of phrase, Pablo Ferro was imminently charming. While on stage, he (and later his loquacious son) showed a variety of short videos of his work, displaying the graphically complex visuals and typographic high-wire act for which he’s best known. It was a casual tour through an incredibly full career. One story he didn’t tell at the MFAH is why he wears his iconic red scarf. In an interview, one of the directors of the upcoming documentary on Ferro, Richard Goldgewicht, tells the story:

[O]ne day, [...] a hit man shows up and BANG!: shoots Pablo straight up, pointblank. Pablo closes the metal door of the loft and half of the bullet splinters off, ricochets in three different walls and hits him in the neck. The loving-hippie, the ringleader, the good guy comes crashing down, and somehow, miraculously survives after a series of operations. When Pablo wakes up from the nightmare, he can’t at all explain what happened — it could have been a hit man sent to the wrong door, the drug-lab upstairs perhaps, or “just another New York story.”

And so, the red scarf becomes armor and a witty come-back to a hostile world, an entirely Ferrian response to tragedy: allowing problems to drive the creative process. Ferro is a startling mash-up of contradictions and ironies: an ardent experimentalist best known for his commercial work for advertising companies and movie studios, a dyslexic title designer who can’t spell, a Cuban immigrant who came to define the aesthetic feel of sixties U.S. visual culture. And it seems we’re just beginning to appreciate him.

Chapbooks by Beverly Dahlen and Jamie Townsend

Everywhere, a surfeit of essays and articles bemoan the declining fortunes of the book and the publishing industry’s deepening crisis. Even though there have been some recent hopeful reports of better times ahead, overall, the news is: the book is dead, there’s no hope. Get. Out. Now.

Despite this bleak outlook, there’s been a huge resurgence in the last few years of small, often experimental, publishers committed to the art of book-making and also excited by the technological innovations driving the written word forward into new venues, platforms, and futures. Each time one person or a few decide to launch a new small publishing venture, it feels like a mini-revolution, a stand against the pessimistic future envisioned for the book itself.

One of the local manifestations of this international movement in book design and publishing is Little Red Leaves. Little Red Leaves began out of San Marcos, Texas with a collectively-edited journal of writing that takes risks. They also began to publish E-books by innovative writers like Matt Timmons and Yedda Morrison (who used erasure to revive nature in her book Darkness). These E-books are available for free on the website as a PDF or also can be ordered physically through Lulu.

A local Houston writer and book devotée, Dawn Pendergast, pitched the idea to Little Red Leaves last year to do a series of handmade textile chapbooks as part of the LRL line. They took the bait and the rest is happening right now, right here in Houston as Pendergast plays her small part in the micro-publishing revolution with her LRL Textile Series. OffCite sent her some questions to find out what motivates her work, what she’s publishing, and what her thoughts are about the much-heralded demise of the book.

OffCite: How did the idea for LRL Textile Series come about?

Dawn Pendergast: The textile series grew out of a love for technology and chapbooks.

First, chapbooks. I love the form. The length, size, and feel of a chapbook is sort of special/singular/intimate. It’s a little appetizer. It’s a dose. Some poetry chapbooks are intervals on their way to full-length books, others are jaunty little cul-de-sacs. Either way I’m celebrating them in their them-ness, on their own little shelves, sans UPCs.

Not only is the chapbook a wonderful form, but it lends itself to handmade, homegrown, micro-production. Anyone with a printer and a stapler can publish a chapbook. Anyone. My collection reflects lots of different approaches to chapbooks, some traditional letter-pressed beauties and others of the off-the-wall variety (think, bracelet book). I love what the physical book can do to frame your experience of its content.

The odd thing about my love affair with handmade chapbooks is my mutual love for all that is digital. I love my laptop(s), my Kindle, my iPhone. (Yes I do) love reading PDFs. Do I mourn the death of the book? No, I do not. Because most of this dying is already dead. Here’s my thinking: With our ebooks on our e-shelves, our ‘real’ bookcases will no longer sag with row after row of standard sized, glued-together paperbacks. NO! Our future shelves will have/hold only those books that are really books; the ones that embrace their thingness; that explore the page, test its boundaries; the ones that are more than merely text delivery systems.

Off of these ideas bounced the textile series. A series of chapbooks that are comfortable (dowdy even), ramshackle things. My goal was to make something that people would want to hold in their hands. Something that could be passed around. Something both manufactured and made by hand. An ode to the machines that make production possible, to the errors permeating its materiality.

OffCite: What kinds of literature are you drawn to publishing as part of the series? Is there a particular aesthetic or concern in the writing?

Dawn Pendergast: The textile series is an aesthetic stepchild of Little Red Leaves, an annual online journal and ebook series that’s been publishing a range of innovative writing since 2005. LRL textile series is dedicated solely to experimental poetry. Our writers range from established literary figures like Beverly Dahlen to emerging poets like Jamie Townsend. I wish I could describe an overarching aesthetic. We read with our ears and love with our eyes. The writerly, the anti-writerly, the surprising, the concluding, the atoning, the coughing. It’s a very mixed bag. If there’s a principle guiding our selection, it’s probably a power animal like a goat. I love goats.

OffCite: How many books have been published so far? What are the plans for the series going forward?

Dawn Pendergast: The series kicked things off in April of this year with Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading: Birds published in an edition of 50. The chapbook was only offered online and sold out in 3 weeks! We’ve since published a second printing (50) of the book. All runs are 50. There are currently two other books available on the website for purchase or free on-line reading: MATRYOSHKA by Jamie Townsend and An Antenna Called the Body by Sarah Mangold.

We’re also starting to get calls from bookstores and libraries that will begin stocking our little chapbooks. We’ll be posting these locations online.

FYI – The LRL Textile Series is now accepting submissions for their 2012 line of chapbooks. If interested, see here for more information about how to submit.

Detail of Schindler House, Wikimedia Commons

When you first walk in, there’s a man, blindfolded and gagged with his hands and feet cuffed to parallel leather rods holding him in place in his chair. Two women in another room are knelt over blankets, sewing strings onto an accordion-folded long sheet of paper, with printed repeated images of rectangles at odd angles. Soft twenties jazz is playing on a record player. In the bathroom, an oracle intones softly through a tube coming through the ceiling; the female voice describes your own identity (past, present & future) by reading the characteristics of your particular bird-spirit. In the vitrine at the back of the house, something similar to a woman’s body contorts within the confines of a red, fabric bag.

Jen Hofer and Myriam Moscona. Photo by Rob Ray.

You’ve stumbled into an evening of performances called Both Sides and the Center organized at the Rudolph Schindler House in West Hollywood, California on the third weekend in August of this year. An innovative publisher, Les Figues Press, worked in conjunction with the MAK Center, which is dedicated to preserving Rudolph Schindler’s Modernist legacy in Los Angeles, to put together this festival featuring readings and performances by writers dealing with various experiences of proximity, intimacy, and distance in relation to the famous dual-family home.

The first night of the festival, there was a more traditional reading in one of the exterior spaces on the rear side of the house framed by two wings of the building. On the second evening, writers from L.A. and cities further afield (Mexico City and London among them) were invited to engage with the space and to perform work considering the architecture. As the Les Figues event info stated, these writers were asked to think about: “the physicality of space, house as stage, voyeurism, private as public, the strangeness in the familiar and the brutal nature of domesticity.”

I was fortunate to be able to attend these performances of potential answers to a number of questions: How is it possible to build a conversation between the literary arts and architecture? What is the history of this conversation? Its present? Its future? I especially found the performances compelling, because they moved beyond the writer-artist dichotomy that usually informs interactions between the visual and literary arts, i.e. the writer is there to comment, to reflect, to meditate, to ponder, to think about the art, but not to make art herself. This event suggests a different relationship: one based on writers as producers of art themselves, not merely commentators or critics.

The event functioned within a broad definition of literary arts as building a landscape of words spatially, or more broadly, as any kind of textual or linguistic interaction in space. And so if architecture means the construction of spaces through materials in the landscape, then the potential for interaction and conversation is much broader than previously thought.

Of course, the location of this festival was supremely important. The architecture of Rudolph Schindler⎯the father of Southern California modernism⎯has come to define a utopian aesthetic that is foundational to the image of Los Angeles architecture worldwide. Think Julius Schulman’s iconic image of two women perched in a Modernist home above Los Angeles.

Originally sent to work on homes in LA by Frank Lloyd Wright, Schindler stayed in the city and established his practice there in 1922 with his home on Kings Road, designed as a live-work space for two couples. Schindler went to work on over 400 projects, 150 of which were built, many of them low-cost homes for progressive clients.

The event pushed disciplinary boundaries constantly as it invited writers to do site-specific performances that reflected on architecture and space. Each writer responded in unique ways. Mexican poet Myriam Moscona and translator-poet Jen Hofer worked together on an intimate level, squatting and kneeling on the floor of one of the rooms. They’d laid down blankets and together sewed figures into a long accordion-folded single paged book, while music from the early twentieth-century played on a record player.

Anna Joy Springer turned a bathroom into an oracular chamber, in which a listener could hear their identity read through a particular bird-spirit. Michael du Plessis sat in a chair by a table with various knicknacks displayed and took requests for him to read individual endnotes from a recent book while in various states of self-inflicted bondage with leather straps, bars, blindfolds, and gags. Vanessa Place read passages from the SCUM Manifesto while Kim Rosenfeld typed it out like a secretary doing dictation for a demanding boss.

In what for me was the most emotional of the performances, Bhanu Kapil set up a table in a vitrine structure in one of the wings, wrapped herself in a red cloth bag and moved jerkily and slowly as a recording of her reading her text, Schizophrene, was played. The text moved between a butcher store in London and a park with South Asian immigrants as it thought critically about violence, imperialism, and the family. The recording repeated continually for the course of the final hour of Saturday evening.

Bhanu Kapil performs Schizophrene at Schindler House. Photo by Harold Abramowitz

Magic Island site at Southwest Freeway and Greenbriar Street. All photographs Paul Hester.

Paul Hester’s retrospective Doing Time in Houston at Architecture Center Houston—culled from his extensive archive documenting Houston’s architecture through all its transitions over the past 45 years–invites the viewer to contemplate all that has ever stood on this viscid alluvium we call home. Row houses razed to make room for rows of gated townhomes; first ring suburbs mowed down to clear space for skyscrapers. Here, a saddlery turned ballet parking lot; there, a sea food market turned newspaper headquarters. Even the buildings left standing have been stripped and fused and cloaked in marble panels or kitschy Egyptian temples (see my “Ancient Curse of Freeway Frontage Excavated from Archives,” Cite 81, Spring 2010).

Combination of Cecil Thomson (1925) and Paul Hester (1990) photos

And at the center of our Ephemeral City is Market Square, which Hester has been researching and documenting since at least the 1980s. Aside from the produce stands it was named for, Market Square has been home to the Republic of Texas capital and three Houston city halls–the last city hall located there was repurposed and used as a bus depot for twenty years–before its first iteration as a public park in 1976.

Hester’s documentation of Market Square calls to mind a passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities:

[T]he traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old post cards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. Beware of saying to [the inhabitants] that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves.

Even as Market Square Park, that one block has been fully redesigned three times in the 35 intervening years, and Hester’s research and photography was a main feature of the second-most-recent design. Hens…bus stations…bandstands…young ladies with parasols…all have occupied/do occupy/will occupy Market Square.

“The Aleph,” a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, opens with the narrator lamenting the appearance of a new billboard on the day his beloved dies. “[T]he fact deeply grieved me,” he says, “for I realized that the vast unceasing universe was already growing away from her, and that this change was but the first in an infinite series.”

This nameless narrator befriends his beloved’s cousin, a third-rate poet who, by way of the Aleph he discovers in his basement in Buenos Aires, “proposed to versify the entire planet.” He ingratiates himself to this cousin and finally wins an invitation to behold this Aleph for himself. “[A]n Aleph,” he tells the reader, “is one of the points in space that contains all points…the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.” There he finds himself at a loss for words, for “how can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?…[T]he central problem–the enumeration, even partial enumeration, of infinity–is irresolvable…What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive.”

The Aleph, thus, becomes a fitting metaphor for this collection of photographs, this retrospective, this looking back which spans 45 years yet may conceivably be viewed within five minutes. The 68 photos are grouped together by decade, but the cumulative effect of the whole exhibition subverts the very notion that such temporal groupings are of any account. Change is the only constant: motion, captured, and fixed on light-sensitive paper for decades.

Nina Cullinan House, 1980

A three-legged desk sits forever atilt in a threadbare concrete bunker.

The true mass of an airplane becomes evident only when it’s pinned beside evanescent clouds in a washed-out sky above a townhome development under construction where a man stands atop a five-story scaffold that casts the deepest shadows. He is painting the siding. There is a pile of dirt, and the rebar that will support the future brick wall stands exposed.

Looking down on a vacant parking garage and out toward the Williams (nee Transco) Tower, fluorescent light tubes—reflected in the invisible window of what could only be the most nondescript office—cut across the all but vacant horizon.

Looking south down Post Oak Avenue from another office building we see a courtyard reflected in an obsidian skyscraper. Traffic islands take on the appearance of amoebas from this perspective.
You might say that each of these photographs is a timeless document with the “eternal present” as its true subject (except, of course, those showing indoor ashtrays and dated clothing styles), but it is the photographs of construction and demolition sites which retain the most currency.

The high contrast night-time shot of a demolition downtown in the 1980s section looks very much like it could be a depiction of the YMCA demolition just a few short weeks ago. Nearby, the gray rendering of the excavation of the Weslayan Tower foundation (also from the 1980s), if framed just right, could be a shot of the excavation currently underway along Brays Bayou near SH 288.
The multiplicity and simultaneity implied by the juxtaposition of these fleeting moments becomes most apparent in the final grouping where, under the banner “Wrinkles in Time,” Hester has layered images in photo mash-ups of singular points in space taken from different moments in time. This digital layering is a continuation of such juxtapositions as those on his Market Square tiles dating back to 1990, two of which are displayed here.

Ghost of Shamrock Hotel

He shows us a black and white ghost of the Shamrock Hotel towering over the parking lots which replaced it, rendered in color. We see the before and after photographs of the “Indeterminate Façade” Best Products Showroom, which was altered in 2003 to lop off the “crumbling” features that once made it singular. We see the Wilson Furniture showroom beneath Magic Island, an art-deco Walgreen’s on Main at Elgin with the light rail going past, and the original location of the Menil Collection beside the Rice Media Center. We see St. Agnes Academy on Fannin at Isabella where a monstrous three-story apartment block now sits.

For some viewers, the bulk of these photographs may engender a sense of loss—the loss of bygone aesthetic styles and respect for history in favor of cheap, mass-produced, prefabricated dreck. For those viewers, one photograph in particular might provide a (fleeting) sense of just desserts: it shows a townhome, abandoned before its construction was even complete, wrapped in tattered Tyvek. The only part of this shell-of-a-townhome that retains its integrity is the strip of glossy advertising photographs across its face which show what it was supposed to have looked like, and according to Hester, that never-built building, too, was torn down soon enough.

Individually, Hester’s photographs reveal that, in the words of poet A.R. Ammons, “we are rippers and // tearers and proceeders,” yet, taken cumulatively in this temporary, scaled-down version of a Houston Aleph, they capture “the stillness all the motions add up to.”

Stop in soon to catch a glimpse of Paul Hester’s Houston Aleph. It may indeed capture the eternal present, but after Friday, August 12 it, too, will be taken down from the walls of ArCH to make room for their next show.

*One final note: Viewers may recognize the interior shot of the Philip Johnson designed Republic Bank (now Bank of America) lobby. That vast emptiness appears in the recent Terrence Mallick film Tree of Life—yet another meditation on the singularity of all existence.

Cover image cropped from Monu issue #14.

Houston has always had a tricky relationship with historic preservation. Unlike numerous other global cities, Houston often allows its older structures to grow over with weeds or be demolished, eventually making way for new development. Traditional preservationism would imply that this approach is morally wrong: not to preserve architectural history is to lose it forever.

Yet both the new issue of MONU: Magazine on Urbanism and a recent show called Cronocaos, curated by Rem Koolhaas at the New Museum in New York, question our common approach to preservation. Should old buildings be preserved in a pristine state forever, or should they be allowed to remain an active part of a city, even if they continue to deteriorate from use? Has historic preservation done more damage to cities than good, by airbrushing and sanitizing them for tourists and the wealthy, while making them less accessible and useful to citizens? The image portrayed by Koolhaas is of preservationists cleaning facades, scrubbing interiors, and then putting up metaphorical velvet ropes that prevent users from getting too close to the architecture—”please do not touch. Even clean hands can harm the art….etc.” Even the term preservation implies an object sealed off from the effects of time, petrified, as it were.

In his work and in his New Museum show, Koolhaas attempts to re-set our thinking regarding preservation. A few years back, in his competition entry for the deteriorating Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, he proposed letting the sprawling museum continue to exist in a state of decay. He suggested, in effect, that the museum do nothing. Peeling paint and piled dust would remain as an artifact of aging and the toll of time. Artworks would hang within the ruin. The entire museum would exist as a marker of its own placement in history. The proposal ran counter to the cautious, pristine approach advocated by traditional preservationists. Nicholas Ouroussoff says, “in the realm of preservation, as in so much else, we seem to have become a world terrified of too much direct contact with reality.”

As a city, Houston seems to support Koolhaas’s approach, a kind of a counter-argument to rehabilitation. Where other cities often preserve even buildings of minor importance, Houston allows or encourages the demolition of structures that have fallen out of use. The result is an urban fabric full of vacant lots but also potential. This lack of planning (and of zoning) creates unexpected diversities, not only demographically but architecturally. Many Houstonians lament the fact that we don’t have better protections for our historic buildings, both notable and marginal. But maybe Houston doesn’t need the same preservationist approach followed by Paris or Philadelphia or New York. Perhaps it needs an approach to history tailored to this city: not the blanket preservation of historic structures but, as Koolhaas implies, a better sense of what we’re willing to give up. This would entail a theory of preservation’s opposite.

The Dutch urbanism journal MONU: Magazine on Urbanism raises similarly provocative arguments. This month’s issue, Editing Urbanism, questions the ways in which cities deal with their existing fabric. Koolhaas has an article here that covers much of the same ground as his Cronocaos show. In another essay, Felix Madrazo argues that architectural publications are to blame, by not publishing the work of preservationists and designers interested in renewal. And Lucas Dean proposes a kind of programmed urban death, in which parts of cities would be allowed to constantly undergo a process of rejuvenation.

Here’s MONU editor Bernd Upmeyer commenting on this month’s issue:

Despite the current urgency to deal with the enormous potential of the already-existing urban material as Urban Editors, there seems still to be a lack of interest in topics such as urban and architectural restoration, preservation, renovation, redevelopment, renewal or adaptive reuse of old structures among architects and urban designers. But ignorance in this matter can only be dismissed as socially irresponsible and economically and culturally unacceptable. But what might the reason be for the prevailing ignorance? Who is to blame? Why is Urban Editing considered so utterly unattractive?

You can browse the whole of MONU issue #14 on Youtube.

Yasufumi Nakamori gave a talk at the Architecture Center Houston. Photo by Hank Hancock.

On Wednesday, April 20, Yasufumi Nakamori, assistant curator of photography at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, spoke about his recent scholarship to an audience invited by the Houston Public Library and hosted by Architecture Center Houston (ArCH) downtown for their series “Authors in Architecture.” Nakamori, having just hours earlier returned from Japan, presented an informal survey of Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture; Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro, the catalogue for the Summer 2010 MFAH exhibit.

Katsura book cover

Ishimoto’s photography is familiar to museum visitors through his photographs of Chicago streets, stairwells, and children, responding in part to the “New Bauhaus” aesthetic flourishing there just after World War II. Born in San Francisco, raised and schooled in Japan, he returned to the states to study architecture and then was put in an internment camp for two years in Colorado, where at age 21, he took up photography. With his dual cultural and geographical identity, Ishimoto quickly made a name for himself in Chicago, placing work in exhibitions, winning contests, publishing photos in Life magazine, and winning significant commissions, including one for the landmark “Family of Man” (1956). Nakamori identifies Mies van der Rohe and photographer Harry Callahan as formative influences for Ishimoto Yasuhiro.

Nakamori, assisted by a slide show featuring many of the plates from the catalogue, explained how Ishimoto returned to Japan in 1953 and 1954 to photograph Japan’s pre-modern architectural treasures and became particularly absorbed by the seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. Ishimoto documented with an eye toward material surfaces, the striking convergence of the garden and the palace, and decontextualized architectural detail, not to mention his ongoing interests in ephemeral detail as in the cast of sunlight and the shadows of trees on the grounds. Katsura had long been a subject of study and discussion, but it gained new significance in post-occupation Japan’s “tradition debate,” (dentō ronsō), wherein the villa no longer stood for timeless tradition, but as a means to understand Japan’s modernity. This was especially true once Walter Gropius visited the site and said as much himself. Ishimoto, on his own, had made explicit comparisons between the villa and Piet Mondrian’s groundbreaking forms.

Aiming simply to publish a book of photographs of Katsura, Ishimoto requested from Tange Kenzo, ten years his senior and by then a towering figure in Japanese architecture, the contribution of an accompanying essay. Tange was also an avid photographer, and he perceived many similar interests and aesthetic approaches with the young Ishimoto. He went much further than contributing an essay, ultimately taking control of the book project to pursue his own statement about modernity and tradition, his turn toward structuralism, and a need to disentangle the traditionalist from the imperialist. He considered the camera as a central part of architectural thinking. Tange once described Katsura, despite its central place in his thesis, as like a beloved woman who is beautiful in photographs but less impressive in person. Photography made it possible to think about tradition and modernity as part of an “internal reality.”

Tange took charge of Ishimoto’s photos, cropped them “drastically,” hired Bauhaus graphic designer Herbert Bayer to plan the layout, and then went on to fire Bayer so that he could select and sequence the photos himself, contracted with Gropius for another essay, and then released the book Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture in 1960, by which time Ishimoto had fairly disengaged from the whole project.

The book continues to enjoy its status as the foundational text in modern Japanese architecture. Nakamori pointed to the ArCH’s concurrent exhibit “Parallel Nippon: Contemporary Japanese Architecture, 1996-2006,” which was hung on the walls of the large multi-purpose space where the talk was held. It showed work by dozens of firms and designers, saying “All these architects, if you asked which is the one book that sets the stage, this one would be it.”

Nakamori’s MFAH exhibit and his own book for the first time fully showed Ishimoto’s photographs according to his own vision. Nakamori helpfully held the 1960 book and his own side-by-side, confirming their inter-relationship: they were identical in size and shape and share several font choices. (Nakamori’s book was designed by Daphne Geismar.) Both were published by Yale University Press.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that Tange’s “incredible interventions” somehow distorted or damaged Ishimoto’s work, as several questions from the audience seemed to presume. Ishimoto, who became a naturalized Japanese citizen in 1961, actually shared many of Tange’s ideas about photography and architecture, and the photos may even have helped Tange to clarify his own theoretical program. Ishimoto himself has made contradictory assessments of the book over the years, that his vision was obscured or that it was honored, and will admit that the Tange book helped to confirm his place as a leading Japanese photographer, whose long career we continue to study and discuss.

Uncropped photo by Ishimoto Yasuhiro

Related Link

Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture Wins CAA Prize
An MFAH interview with Yasufumi Nakamori (March 10, 2011)