Heroes & Charlatans

Culture and Action in Greenpoint, Jan 28 - Feb 27

2012-01-27T19:21:00.003-05:00

Image by Erin Knutson

It's an especially active season of culture-and-community-meeting right now in Greenpoint, so we want to make sure friends and colleagues are fully aware of everything we know about that's coming up. In particular, we would like to encourage everyone to support the Greenpoint Monitor Museum folks who have put together a stellar three-day line up of events starting tomorrow commemorating the 150th anniversary of the launch of the Monitor, the ironclad Civil War ship built on our shore.

In addition, we want to call attention to a couple of recent initiatives in our neighborhood, including the Java Street Collaborative's efforts to create a community garden on city-owned property at 59 Java Street, and the new art space founded by Light Industry, Triple Canopy and Public School New York at 155 Freeman Street--also a potential place for community meetings.

Since we founded the Bring to Light project, there's been an incredible amount of new activity around the Greenpoint Terminal building, and we're encouraged that the historic landmark is being reclaimed for new uses, including all kinds of studios, rehearsal spaces, alternative spaces, and offices. Moreover, real estate development on the waterfront promises to finally make way for legal public access to the East River in Greenpoint, in accordance with the 2005 rezoning of the district.

This raises many vexing issues that will no doubt be explored at upcoming community and environmental advocacy meetings, many of them listed below. We are also working on a new set of documents--a kind of pamphlet containing up-to-date and detailed information maps of the district meant to serve as a tool for new cultural producers and advocates. It collects all of the publicly available information in one place about community-based projects, advocacy organizations, cultural initiatives, planning and urban design proposals, waterfront property ownership, and environmental conditions in our community, designed by Erin Knutson in collaboration with our wonderful colleague, architect and curator Jacqueline Miro. The documents will be released in the coming month as a contribution to the new online magazine RIPP, which focuses for its first issue on the incredible dynamic subcultures of Greenpoint. Look forward to announcement of a release party in the coming month or so, as well as, potentially, a new urban design competition for the WeGee waterfront district.

Apart from that, we would like to reiterate to all cultural producers that environmental-benefits grant programs are indeed open to proposals for cultural projects, so keep your eye out for announcements of new cycles.

Original C-Print by Bob Recine

UPCOMING EVENTS

Jan 28, 9 AM

Winter Bird Walk, Veronica People's Club
Join Greenpointers on a winter bird walk guided by Peter Dorosh, president of the Brooklyn Bird Club on January 28, 2012. Meet at 9am at Veronica People's Club. BYOB (binoculars) & the kids! Grab a coffee then we will begin the tour on the river to identify waterfowl, then head to McCarren then Winthrop-McGolrick Parks.Suggested donation: $5 (to be donated to Bird Conservation)

Sat - Mon, Jan 28 - 30
150-Year Anniversary Celebration of USS Monitor Launch
On Jan 30, 1862, the USS Monitor was launched from the Continental Works located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. 150 years later on Jan 28th, 29th and 30th, there will be a great celebration to honor this historic launching of the USS Monitor, the ship that saved the Union. We will honor John Ericsson, the inventor, Thomas F. Roland, the builder, the crew and the Continental Works workers who built the USS Monitor. The event is a Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War National Sesquicentenial Signature Event. The New York Department SUVCW, Oliver Tilden Camp #26, SUVCW, Co. I, 83rd New York Vol. (9th NYSM) Sons of Veterans Reserve, The Greenpoint Monitor Museum and the John Ericsson Society are sponsoring the event. The event is being led by the Oliver Tilden Camp and the Greenpoint Monitor Museum. Come out and be part of history!!!

Sat, Jan 28
History Fair – 10 AM to 3:30 PM, Capital One Bank (former Greenpoint Savings Bank)
Thomas Fitch Rowland, the builder of the USS Monitor, was a first Trustee of the Greenpoint Savings Bank
Concert – 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM Wine and Cheese
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM Civil War Concert at the Church of the Ascension

Sun, Jan 29
Memorial Service – 10:00 AM - Church of the Ascension
in Memory of the USS Monitor, her builders, her crew and John Ericsson
followed by coffee, cake, assembly for parade
Parade – 12 PM From Church to the Museum’s land
(Launch Site of the USS Monitor) land donated by Motiva Enterprises
Ceremony - at the Launch Site approximately 12:30 PM
Reception - at the Grand Prospect Hall

Mon, Jan 30 9 AM

Bus Tour of Civil War Historic Sites including Brooklyn Navy Yard’s New Bldg 92 Center
Laying of Wreaths - USS Monitor Statue at McGolrick Park,
John Ericsson Statue Battery Park, NYC

Mon, Jan 30 6:30 PM
Parks & Waterfront Committee Meeting, CB #1's District Office, 435 Graham Ave
The Parks & Waterfront Committee will meet at the CB #1's District Office, 435 Graham Ave (Corner of Frost Street) AGENDA: • Presentation: Proposal to Develop a Farmer’s Market in the Vicinity of McGolrick Park – by Ms. Miriam Haas, Director, Community Markets.

Mon, Jan 30 7 - 10 PM
Greenpointers Open Meeting, Cafe Royal
Greenpointers is a neighborhood website that serves as a communication hub for people who love Greenpoint. The more diversely and openly we can share our skills, ideas and information, the better we can support one another and grow as a community. Greenpointers is holding general weekly meetings on Monday evenings at 7pm at Cafe Royal for contributors new and old, to discuss ideas, talk, write, shoot, film, draw, plan and create content content for Greenpointers.com. Photographers, Writers, Artists, Organizers, Directors, Thinkers, Lawyers, Cartoonists, Accountants, Psychiatrists, Environmentalists, OTHER BLOGGERS, Chefs, Mechanics, Stylists, Animal Lovers, Bicyclists, Politicians, Children, Curators, Social Media Gurus, Illustrators, Designers, Bartenders, Fitness Instructors, ANYONE WITH ANY SKILLS to share or with something to say that is relevant to Greenpoint.

https://www.facebook.com/events/335961016426060/

Tue Jan 31, Feb 7, Feb 13, Feb 21, and Feb 28, 7-9pm
Tuesday Night Open Drawing Studio
Join Round Robin Collective members for a loosely structured studio drawing workshop where participants can come in and draw, discuss their work, hang out and learn about RRC and Arts@Renaissance. Some drawing material will be provided but participants are encouraged to bring their own.
For more info on this or other Hospitality events please visit www.roundrobinbrooklyn.blogspot.com

Thu, Feb 2, 7 PM

NAG State of the Neighborhood Town Hall, Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Holy Ghost,160 N 5th Street
If you could give the neighborhood a grade, what would it be? Join new and long-time community members as we discuss the crucial issues in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, like affordable housing, tenant rights, homelessness, transportation, safe streets, development, open space and parks and environmental justice. NAG will be presenting a Community Report Card reporting on where we’re at and where we’ve been on these issues. Community members can then discuss and decide on the main issues that are the most important; the issues that need action to make our neighborhoods more livable. After selecting what needs to be addressed at the State of the Neighborhood Town Hall come out to the State of the Neighborhood Forum on Saturday, February 4th, to discuss how we are going to take action and make changes in our neighborhoods!

Sat, Feb 4, 12 PM
NAG State of the Neighborhood Forum, Ground floor of NAG office building, 110 Kent Ave. (at N8th), Brooklyn, NY
How can you make a difference in North Brooklyn? The State of the Neighborhood Forum will provide new and long-time residents a space to discuss how to take action on local issues. These issues will be chosen by you at the State of the Neighborhood Town Hall on Thursday, February, 2nd. Come to the forum and meet with other community members to discuss how to make changes on specific neighborhood issues like affordable housing, tenant rights, homelessness, transportation, the waterfront, parks and safe streets. This will be a great opportunity to engage in community advocacy and activism in North Brooklyn, learn about the local issues, meet with your neighbors and take part in making a collective action plan for our communities.
Check www.nag-brooklyn.org for more details.

Fri, February 10-26
Opening Reception: Fri, Feb. 10th from 7-10 pm
Fowler Arts Collective, Of Mind, Body & Soul: An Exploration of the Personal, Greenpoint Terminal, 67 West Street
The exhibition presents works that address the theme of questioning and exploring the self, bringing together a diverse cross-section of the current Brooklyn arts scene. Each artist was selected for their singular approach to the title subject. Carolina Duque, Katya Grokhovsky, J.F. Lynch, Ellie Murphy, Caitlin Peluffo, Katarina Riesing, and Ryan Turley uniquely explore deep and critical relationships with themselves. These works, many of which were created specifically for this exhibition, allow for an insight into each artist's psyche, but they also pose broader questions of an individual's internal relationship with the self.

Wed, Feb 15, 6:30 PM
Community Board 1, Combined Public Hearing & Board Meeting, 211 Ainslie Street
Combined Public Hearing and Board Meeting, held at Swinging 60's Senior Citizens Center, 211 Ainslie Street (Corner of Manhattan Avenue) - to see agenda, please click on the "agendas" button.

Thu, Feb. 16, 6:30 PM
Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee, 329 Greenpoint Ave. (corner of Humboldt)
NCMC will be meeting with the NYC Dept of Environmental Protection on February 16, 2012 at 6:30 p.m. Meetings are open to the public and held at: 329 Greenpoint Ave. (corner of Humboldt). Enter the gate and go to the security booth to the left. Tell security you're there for the meeting and continue on to the administrative building, 2nd to last door.

Monday, Feb 27 at 6 PM
Newtown Creek Alliance Public Meeting, LaGuardia Community College, 31-10 Thomson Ave,
Room E500 (E Building), Long Island City

This meeting will feature a presentation on the AWISCO green roof, a DEP-funded Green Infrastructure project we are building this spring with Highview Creations. Come learn about the project, and of course get all the remediation and planning updates on the Creek. As mentioned at the December NCA meeting, we are convening workgroups around our growing program areas. The workgroups will be digging into Education, Bioremediation, Green Infrastructure and Workforce Development. NCA members who have indicated interest in these areas will be getting together between now and the public meeting. ***RSVP to kzidar@newtowncreekalliance.org if you want to join a workgroup!
NCA Workgroups:
Education – Tue, Jan 31 at 6pm, Pratt Institute, Higgins Hall North, Room TBA, Green Infrastructure – Fri, Feb 3 at 10am, Greenpoint Coworking, 240 N Henry Street, Workforce Development – Wed, Feb 8 at 10am, St. Nicks Alliance, 790 Broadway, 2nd Floor, Bioremediation – Fri, Feb 10 at 2pm, Greenpoint Public Library, 107 Norman Ave

Aberration on Hollywood Boulevard

2012-01-13T11:06:00.001-05:00

Enjoyed this talk on the theme of Aberration at Woodbury University School of Architecture's space on Hollywood Blvd. The school has smartly hired writer Mimi Zeiger to give itself a stronger identity within the field. Zeiger and Chicago-based designer Iker Gil of MAS Studio, who publishes the journal MAS Context, introduced what turned out to be very intellectual discussion on the theme, which is a good thing in this case. It featured a presentation by guest editor John Szot, architect and professor at Pratt Institute. You can download the journal as a PDF.

Szot's presentation on the issue and his own argument touches a soft spot for observational research-based urban thinking. Architecture has an immense capacity to recognize in physical form a world of politicized ideas, and Szot takes us on a journey through a set of "pathogical activit[ies] that present overpowering ideas that are captivating in their grotesqueness." He concludes with his own project for a hotel in Tokyo [truncated in the video above].

Contemporary architecture often references politicized ideas without being able to transform the economic conditions or consciousness through which new forms of the social are produced. The effect is often a rationalization of innovative form rather than an architecture that can conceivably offer a pathway to new social conditions: form we can believe in but not much change.

You Will Be Gentrified, In Good Fun

2011-12-26T23:10:00.001-05:00

The idea that some good could come from making designers active builders and developers may be overstated. Yes, it could allow them to profit more fully from their own work and make it possible to realize their own ideas without waiting to win competitions or being hired by a developer. But designer and USC real-estate development professor Liz Falletta, in her “How It Took Me Two-and-a Half Years to Draw Three Lines,” demonstrates what harm can be done by unchaining designers from the drafting table. Falletta’s self-initiated redevelopment project displaces four low-income tenants in El Sereno by converting their apartments into condos.

Falletta presented the development at Machine Project, an alternative event and educational space in Echo Park, as the first event of Boundary Pageant, a monthly series of talks organized by Rosten Woo. Cofounder, with Newark urban designer Damon Rich, of New York’s Center for Urban Pedagogy, which produces educational programs for underserved communities about how the urban environment is shaped, Woo relocated to Los Angeles two years ago and is teaching graphic design at CalArts in the spring and consulting with ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute), the company that invented GIS, to redesign its mapping software interface, along with other work for non-profits and advocacy groups. The Boundary Pageant series, a collaborative research and publication project exploring the political boundaries that shape how people live in Los Angeles, is his first self-organized public program in the city.

In an unusually aggressive demonstration of the outrages committed against people of lesser means on behalf of the college-educated urban elite, Falletta cooked up a scheme to profiteer from a loophole created by a new zoning ordinance in Los Angeles. The Small Lots Subdivision Ordinance is a discretionary statute that allows new property lines to be drawn within small lots, with the intention of creating greater residential density and housing affordability. Falletta picked a small rental cluster inhabited by a group of unsuspecting low-income tenants in El Sereno. Her aim was to convert the four rental units into single-family homes for a specially entitled class of creative types.

Through sheer chutzpah and a few slightly dishonest acts that she openly describes in her presentation--and that, in fairness, are probably typical of any real-estate development--Falletta bought the property and converted what were perfectly good if under-maintained affordable units into redesigned $250,000 to $300,000 condos for members of her own class. As Falletta describes the process, she talks about buying out the lease of a poor old lady who was paying $500 a month for her apartment for $14,000 ("the going rate," she says) along with the three other tenants. In order to sidestep a requirement to build a separate sewer system, which would have swallowed up her profits, a friend of a friend in the buildings department made a special call on her behalf and got the department of sanitation to waive it.

Falletta describes how a poor neighboring resident without a car traveled all the way across the city by public transit to testify in a hearing, fearing the project would cause undue construction noise. Falletta describes how she patronizingly allayed her concerns at the hearing, and after the project is rubber-stamped through the public approval process, drives the poor defeated woman home.

While Falletta pretends to have blundered her way through this process, joking about her naiveté and stupidity at various phases of the approvals, Falletta teaches students at USC how to engage in such villainous but completely normal acts of exploitation. Ostensibly a well-intentioned liberal-minded person typical of her class of unthinking educated urban elites, she goes so far as to half-jokingly rationalize the project by saying she did it because she has to support her lifestyle of refusing to have a full-time job.

The premise of "How It Took Me Two-and-a Half Years to Draw Three Lines" is that it took an extraordinarily long time to get a few property lines drawn, and the process reveals the cumbersome and unnaturally complex character of gaining approvals for buildings. But as much as this talk revealed the underlying urban processes at work in the formation of urban housing typologies, it boldly revealed the arrogance and self-importance of our new class of liberal ruling elites as they tyrannically rove through the city occupying neighborhoods and taking over space.

Falletta isn’t content to be an individual agent of gentrification—a word unusually justified in this case by her self-conscious intention to create a happy mini-community of bourgeois designer-artist-professional types. In El Sereno, she goes out of her way to spread the inequality. She argues in favor of increased density, but in the end, her project simply replaced four affordable rentals with four upscale apartments—estimated after taxes to cost more than $2,000 a month.

A generous interpretation of the talk, which was coded as a “performance,” is that it was Brechtian theater in the manner of The Threepenny Opera, and the audience was meant to revolt against the truth of this representation of itself. Several attendees, even in this seemingly complaisantly hip, horizontal LA audience —which, by contrast to New York, freely spoke back and forth with Falletta without the need to cosy up to power or establish their political bona fides—recognized the monstrous nature of her project and repeatedly demanded to know, in the kindest way, without getting a satisfactory response, what was the point of doing this?

Materials for Protest and Memory

2011-12-17T13:48:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles-based photographer Farrah Karapetian began making photograms in 2002 after a trip to Kosovo; an accident in the darkroom resulted in her first cameraless print. Photograms are photographic images created without a camera using photo-sensitive paper. Karapetian felt at the time that the photogram responded to her frustrations with the editorial assignment and the process of making prints.

The immediacy of that experience and the potential for experimentation made her stop using cameras. The resulting images bear a more tangible relationship with things in the world without the mediation of the camera apparatus; at the same time the technique abstracts the image, creating a haunted representational glow.

Her earlier photograms were more formal explorations of process, but as she began to apply her work to site-specific installations and re-enactments of news photographs, the one-to-one relation to material became a way of making the capture, printing and display a social sculptural act.

Accessory to Protest, her show of photograms and constructed negatives that opened December 16 at the LeadApron gallery on Melrose Place--a shopping-bag rich strip of high-end boutiques like Carolina Herrera, Diane Von Furstenberg, Helmut Lang, Vera Wang, et. al.--takes the everyday accoutrements of political demonstrations as a primary material and implicitly comments on the location of their display.

A pamphlet widely distributed in Egypt during the spring revolt instructed demonstrators on eight items of "necessary clothing and accessories" for participation in protests: goggles to protect against tear gas, a hoodie to protect your face, a scarf to protect your mouth and lungs, pot lids to use as shields against rubber bullets and beatings by security forces, thick rubber gloves to defend against tear gas cannisters, a rose as a gesture of peace, spray paint as self-defense, and shoes that enable you to run and move quickly.

Aestheticized and commodified through the act of exposure, processing, and display in a gallery on Melrose Place, the flyer becomes a questionable artifact of living history, and the photograms become documents of cultural contradiction, re-situated in a place where the demand for economic activity to drive job growth confronts the radical inequality pervasive in the existing liberal-democratic model.

As part of the Flint Public Art Project--the ongoing program to activate disused sites in the Midwestern city of Flint, Michigan through public art and urban interventions--Karapetian has proposed an installation on the Chevrolet brownfield site that would expose the memory of the former factories, whose outlines remain embedded in the landscape in the form of concrete foundations of demolished buildings.

She proposes to have workers and city residents engage in a series of tours of the site that would demonstrate the persistence of memory and the possible transformation of the site into a public space.

"The tours would have as their guide nothing, initially, but the stories and muscle memory of the people leading them. As these tours take place, a map of the stories would be made: who traveled down this hallway and at what time, who had a breakdown here and a laugh there, who was late to reach this point and whose office was he sent to for a reprimand. The maps would accumulate and intersect, re-writing the floorplan of the former factory. This would be a performance of memory that would write its own script."

"That script could have its own future: it could be recorded digitally, as a scan of the overlapping drawings and a transcription of the stories. This could be printed. If, as the Flint Futures Group develops and realizes one of its two proposals – Flintʼs Urban Riverfront or the Flint River State Park – the Group would like to see one of these maps made into a permanent part of the landscape, it would be very possible to integrate a full-scale rendering of the memory of former workers into the ground. For example, in the case of the Urban Riverfront, which calls for a containment of contaminants and a capping with concrete, the memory-made map could be etched with environmentally safe acid into the concrete, creating a two-dimensional path not unlike a labyrinth or a game of hop-scotch that would re-institutionalize the stories of local people into the land."

The Blue Light at Storefront

2011-11-29T08:36:00.021-05:00

At Storefront for Art and Architecture right now, there's a really special light and performance installation reminiscent of Fluxus artist LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House, the light and sound installation on Church Street established 18 years ago with help from the Dia Foundation. See a video of the performance here.

The installation uses an absorbing blue fluorescent light, sound, dance, and performance to literally play with the building. The dancers interact with the interior columns and the swinging walls to make it consciously present for the audience and passersby. The permeable facade was asking to be used like this some day.

As director of Storefront, Eva Franch is hosting some of the most visually exciting exhibitions ever seen in the space. She brings the same flair and willingness to take risks that she brings to the everyday with her self-consciously over-the-top style and self-presentation.

There are some questions that could be raised about the discourse in another place. I somewhat refuse to figure out what is meant by "pharmacophore," for instance.

During the performance, you see people on the sidewalk peering in with curiosity and interest. If I saw this event without knowing the people or the place I would be intrigued and entranced, but I'm not sure I would have the sense of entitlement to stay. I might assume, which is commonly true when happening onto random Soho fashion events, that it was an exclusive private party. That has become increasingly likely, for better or worse, in this weird in-between area where Kenmare feeds traffic onto the Williamsburg Bridge.

This is free and open to the public. Go see it. A lot of fun.

Proposed Action: Cut Down the Fence at Bushwick Inlet

2011-09-14T08:21:00.003-04:00

According to the public trust doctrine, the state holds public trust lands for the benefit of all of the people. The public has a right to fully enjoy them. Public trust lands include all land up to and beneath the high water mark in tidal waters.

"When the tide is in, he may use the water covering the foreshore for boating, bathing, fishing, and other lawful purposes; and when the tide is out, he may pass and repass over the foreshore as a means of access to reach the water for the same purposes and to lounge and recline thereon."

In Greenpoint and throughout New York City, this land had been previously sold to shippers, manufacturers, and industrial producers on the principle that it provided a public benefit: jobs, production of commodities, and the provision of essential goods and services. Now that these uses are no longer in effect, the land is disused and closed off from the public. The property is no longer serving its intended public benefit, and the ownership rights have been transferred to other entities. This property must immediately revert back to public use. (Sign and mail in a letter regarding Noble Street closure.)

Provide Immediate Pathway to East River at Bushwick Inlet ***

The citizens of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Maspeth and adjacent areas have a right to remove the fences blocking public access to the tidal waters of the East River. We invite the citizens of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Maspeth to immediately cut down the fences blocking Bushwick Inlet at Franklin Street from Meserole Avenue to North 14th Street.

Allocate Funds for Purchase of Bushwick Inlet South of Monitor Museum

The City of New York is in the process of gradually purchasing waterfront property (sign the petition here) from East River Park at North 9th Street northward to Bushwick Inlet: we demand that the city immediately allocate funds for the purchase of the land on the Bushwick Inlet itself not already owned by the nonprofit Greenpoint Monitor Museum.

Remove Threat of Eminent Domain

We demand that the city immediately provide a letter of assurance that it is not now and will not in the future seek to use the power of eminent domain to take property from the Monitor Museum corporation.

Revise Conceptual Plan for Bushwick Inlet Park

We demand that the city immediately remove the Monitor Museum property from its conceptual plan for Bushwick Inlet Park in order for the site to be independently developed by the Greenpoint Monitor Museum with support from the community. The threat of future taking of the site is impeding public access in our community.

Revise Development Plan for Bushwick Inlet Park

We demand that the city immediately revise its plan for the purchase and development of Bushwick Inlet Park to provide immediate public access to the East River at Bushwick Inlet to the underserved communities of Maspeth, northern Bushwick and Southeastern Greenpoint.

How Can We Use the Waterfront Now? A Greenpoint Community Meeting

2011-09-09T11:04:00.003-04:00

How Can We Use the Waterfront Now? A Greenpoint Community Meeting
Tuesday, Sep. 13, 6:30 PM
Polish National Home
261 Driggs Avenue, Greenpoint

Institute for Applied Reporting and Urbanism and the organizers of Bring to Light, the light- and projection-art festival planned for Oct. 1 in Greenpoint, invite you to join us on Sep. 13 at 6:30 PM at the Polish National Home for a meeting about realizing a shared vision for the waterfront in our neighborhood.

How Can We Use the Waterfront Now? will present plans for this year's Bring to Light festival, including the scope of the event and all of the ways the organizers are responding to concerns about noise, crowds, flows of pedestrians, bikes, and sanitation. We will give neighbors a chance to respond to those plans and share ideas about how we can improve the festival. We are also inviting a diverse group of community activists, designers, artists, officials, and leaders to provide a broader picture of plans in effect and under development for the transformation of the East River in Greenpoint into an active publicly accessible and sustainable environment.

We would be especially grateful for the participation of those of you who enjoyed the festival last year, as well as everyone who has concerns or misgivings about the role of artists and young people in our community. We believe that this event can only be a success if it models a better future for Greenpoint. We would like the event to be inclusive as possible and build consensus among all the groups that live in our community. We would like to come out of the meeting with an agenda on a number of related issues.

Last year, we produced Bring to Light through an accelerated two-month process of consultation with community activists, elected officials, parks advocates, the city administration, business owners, and neighbors. It was done on a shoestring budget, funded by donations and our own personal investment, through volunteer labor and the commitment of a few individuals. Your participation turned the American playground and Noble Street into a magical place filled with families, young people, and people who have lived in Greenpoint for generations.

Since the event last year, a new floor was opened for artist studios in the Greenpoint Terminal Market, Fowler Arts Collective has grown and prospered, new cafes have opened up along Franklin Street, a new pier was completed with ferry service connecting the neighborhoods along the East River, the Transmitter Park is nearing completion, planning of the the West Street Greenway was initiated, the Exxon-Mobil case was settled, and the Department of Environmental Conservation began consultations regarding the environmental benefits agreement for the Newtown Creek watershed. There was also a hugely controversial proposal for a Night Market on West Street that was rejected by neighbors and raised many fears about the future direction of Greenpoint.

We want to help create the kind of cultural life and waterfront access you envision for the area. We missed many of you during last year's community outreach process. Are there ways we can produce the festival that can be a tool of advocacy and an advanced front in waterfront access for the public? In the future, would you like to see a children's science center, a small burger stand on the edge of the water, a beer garden, or a protected wilderness for endangered species? A swimming pool in the East River, a place for small boats to launch, a museum dedicated to the industrial history of the area and its service to our country, a preserved historic site, affordable housing, or a place to play? In the absence of real estate development, we have an opportunity to produce the neighborhood we want now and fight for the parks and waterfront walkways promised by the city in its rezoning plan.

Join us in a discussion of the Bring to Light festival and how it can serve as an advocate for your interests, strengthen the community, improve its physical character, and expose the many initiatives underway to make the Greenpoint waterfront more publicly accessible, greener, more sustainable, and a better place for the everyone in the neighborhood. Although our festival is a one-night event, we want it to have a lasting positive resonance throughout the year.

Please forward to your mailing lists and to anyone who might want to participate, and share the invitation on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=110068532432233

When: Tuesday, Sep. 13, 6:30 PM
Where: Polish National Home
261 Driggs Avenue, Greenpoint

Why: To work together now to activate the East River in Greenpoint

Living (and Criticism) as Form

2011-08-07T01:14:00.031-04:00

Oscar Wilde wrote that all criticism is autobiography, but criticism can only bear to look at itself so closely. When an art critic or a curator trained in art history, or a curator with a background in art activism, compiles an account of socially engaged practices in contemporary art, he or she wears their personal story as a kind of badge of honor: I was once arrested for protesting against MTV's Real World, he might say, for instance, and references the World Trade Organization protests and Zapatistas of that era of activism as part of his argument. This gives a special authority, or at least particular reference point, to claims about the work being discussed. He's not interested in simple judgments--I like this, I don't like this--but he wants to take for granted, possibly, that any work making oppositional social and political claims is equally worthy of our attention. They're all equally legitimate examples of Living as Form, the name of a Creative Time program curated by Nato Thompson that examines art that models new ways of living. Nonetheless he's obligated to make choices about what examples are more worthy than others. This is his thumbs up--he puts the work on exhibit, invites a speaker, etc. Or in this case, he invites 20 curators to put the work on exhibit.

For Thompson's talk as a part of a corresponding series of engaging lectures examining work that blurs art and everyday life, he self-consciously raises all kinds of questions that are so much on target, without being quite satisfactorily addressed in so many cases. If art is being used to model new ways of living, one question is, where is the boundary of what's legitimately considered art, and does it matter? We're living in a world where everything is in a sense marketing, he says; from Facebook pages to life stories, our lives are terms of art tied in ever-more idiosyncratic ways to the production of economic value, and every personal exchange becomes a resume builder for the job of being ourselves.

How much should we demand of art by way of proof of its alternative possibilities, or its possibilities of resistance, to use a phrase once favored in academia? If an art project claims to be plotting a new mode of economic exchange, should we judge it based on its viability? Or should we all just agree that artists are too naive and ill-trained in social and economic theory--lost in misconstrued French socialism of the 1960s usually--to be using these big words but it was fun anyways?

What about claims that art can benefit a place by attracting economic revenue--in what Thompson sharply describes as the hipster bedtime story we tell ourselves, having assimilated Richard Florida's theory of the Creative Class. Yet city agencies, foundations, and cultural institutions are constantly making claims about the multiple million dollar economic impact of the art economy, arts festivals, art programs, and art institutions. It's especially striking how little art critics and curators are equipped to judge the effectiveness of work making social and political claims given that the standard criteria of foundations and grant-makers require the artist to ascribe impacts on communities. Creative Time was obviously founded and supported for decades on the basis of these claims, which have been substantiated, possibly, by the city's ongoing accumulation of value.

How can we reconcile the assumption that art is always supposed to be functioning as a tool of economic growth with the deep questioning of the economic system underlined by Thompson's appreciation of the Zapatista's anti-free trade movement, the carnivalesque Seattle protests, and his approving use of terms like "neoliberal." A dismissiveness about the use the market as a tool of social progress is taken for granted in artistic communities, without ever needing to be examined.

When Thompson concludes by saying it's "not just the charge of artists, but the charge of everyone on this planet trying to make sense of a coercive, dominating political system,” it signals both a desire to make art accountable for making a difference in the world and a totalizing view of political power. This view of power conflicts with his own observation that power is being constantly mediated through a circus of claims and counterclaims. It doesn't matter how faulty or absurd the argument, how misguided the economic theory in the world of the media circus. As long as it can occupy a few weeks of the 24-hour news cycle, with or without the support of the public, it can sway the terms of debate and produce debilitating changes to the social and economic order. The abandonment of the responsibility to judge consequences or effectiveness is shared by the art critic, the curator, the reporter, and the political leader: it's too complicated, and our only professional obligation is to focus on affective responses. We adhere to the truthiness standard of social and political judgment.

It's worrying when a really careful critic like Claire Bishop rejects any judgment of social and political work based on effectiveness because it's just too complicated to evaluate. It suggests that she's relying on academic training in a field that has never had to approach art as a tool and has no resources to evaluate social, political and economic ends. To abandon this realm of judgment as simply unknowable is to suggest that art criticism is not equipped to take social and political work seriously.

Artists are not technocrats, and they can't be expected to function like an NGO. But we have to take the claims that people make seriously. Artists can't be expected to understand economics enough, perhaps, to put together a thorough analysis of markets and then create an entirely new model of economic exchange. Yet this is precisely what the category of art described in Living as Form is frequently trying to do. The unwillingness to take their claims seriously may be a defense against the embarrassing fact that so often these are lovely experiments, great to participate in, but totally inconsequential unless you consider the economic effect of the artists themselves as consumers and attractors of consumption.

It remains true that everywhere the artist goes, he or she, often inadvertently, attracts capital around him or herself and produces increased value. It may have a minor effect, as so many isolated projects do, or it may be really consequential, if it can draw a critical mass of resources to a place that had previously been subject to neglect. This standard of social and economic impact would be difficult to accept if you presumed an oppositional relation to existing forms of economic exchange.

The art world lives in a contradictory bubble; it wants to claim social and political effects, wants to remodel the world, but is unwilling to look at its real economic effects through available tools of measurement. The anti-capitalist economic theory prevailing in the art world allows it to continually create work in an economic bubble produced by its own presence without ever having to be conscious of the profound inflation of value around itself. Institutionally, producers are often unable to move resources out of that asset bubble; the institutions continue to exist, in large part, to prop up and reproduce their own value.

Guggenheim Urbanism Lab

2011-08-03T11:52:00.003-04:00

The New Midwest: A Day on a Bike in Flint

2011-05-30T10:07:00.002-04:00

In New York, around 600 people are murdered every year. Flint is statistically more dangerous because there were 20 killings in the first four months of this year. The news of its danger dominates outside perception of the place, rather than the everyday normalcy of the way that people live in the city.

On a recent bike ride through this most-dangerous-city in the country, the air was filled with the smell of a landscape that was alive; lawns were being mowed, a man was painting the awning of the Vegan Soul Hut, a health food restaurant he had just opened on Flint Park Boulevard and MLK Avenue. His wife Regina was promoting the Esau Lentil Burgers as "so good it will make you sell your birthright." She said they were bringing an awareness of good food back to Flint. "It's vegetarian food for meat lovers. Because of the look, the texture, the taste, people think they're eating meat. Now I don't have to eat meat," she said, "Let the little chickens live!"

A group of young men were chatting around a gold-painted Buick Regal that had been installed with a lifted suspension, men and women waved as they sat on their steps or tended their gardens, children laughed as a reporter rode past on a bike with tall handlebars dressed in skinny black jeans and ankle boots.

Well-cared-for churches abounded, closed-down school buildings were outnumbered by working community schools, countless blocks were immaculately cared for, there were signs for block associations on corners. The Carriage Town Historic Neighborhood Association had put up signs throughout the area northwest of downtown recognizing the value of the place's Victorian homes. You could find abandonment and neglect, stretches of homes that were rotting, evidence of arson; you could also, if you were looking for it, see a living city.

At night the downtown strip was buzzing with bars and clubs: it was the last night of the Flint City Theatre's production of Macbeth at the Buckham Gallery; Rasberries was charging a ten dollar admission to the African American kids driving in from the suburbs to dance and socialize in an upscale discotheque; the Torch was filled with burger-eating beer-drinking intellectuals; another crowd of younger people were hanging out at the bar in Churchill's.

It was someone's birthday party; rows of cupcakes were lined up on the table, and a few heavyset men and women were twirling to a 90s techno hit. It was no exclusive bar being promoted by celebrity publicists; it's also not a dangerous hell on earth.

In Flint and other areas of the Midwest, job losses and reports of decline predominate the image conveyed to the outside, rather than parallel processes of restructuring and rebuilding that are adapting the cities for new uses. Instead of looking at the past, the Public Art Project tries to look at Flint and other cities in the region as they are today, and how they're actively producing a new city.

The Flint Public Art Project: Flint Meetings

2011-05-17T10:09:00.022-04:00

This March, during a week-long visit to Flint, Michigan, the idea of a wide-ranging experimental public art and urbanism project that had been circulating privately during the previous year, posted publicly in January on this site, started to take on a more tangible form. In a series of conversations and meetings with residents, and business, institutional and political leaders, it became clear that there was a broad receptivity to the idea of a collaborative public art project with a group of invited artists from New York and around the country. They were excited about the idea of visiting artists and urbanists arriving this summer to team up on community-based public projects in Flint's amazing industrial ruins, renovated downtown, and historic landmarks. The main doubt seemed to be whether prominent artists would really want to come there.

Tim Herman, CEO of the Genesee Regional Chamber of Commerce, said "What can I do to help? If you want to use storefronts on Saginaw Street or lofts upstairs, just let me know." Doug Weiland, director of the Genesee County Land Bank, said there was all kinds of property all over the city we could have access to. The former McDonald Diary, in particular, had been recently closed down and was completely unprogrammed; it would be a good site to explore.

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Gary Hartley, a retired police officer who owns two historic fire stations in the Grand Traverse neighborhood--one right on the Flint River--told me about his dream of an ice cream parlor where kids would dock their canoes and come up for ice cream and sit on benches by the restored waterfront.

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Nearby, he showed me the Indian burial ground discovered when the Genesee County Land Bank started digging foundations for infill housing. It was claimed by the Saginaw Chippewa tribe and is surrounded by a fence for a future memorial.

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The other fire station has massive open spaces on the second floor with wooden floors and views of downtown Flint that would be perfect for experimental dance and theatrical performances.

The outreach office at the University of Michigan-Flint was willing to enlist its student body in the project. Cade Surface, an interdisciplinary urban design student at U of M-Flint saw the blog post and sent a note offering to help. I met him in the Good Beans Cafe near the Grand Traverse fire station. Andrew Morton, a British U of M-Flint theater professor, was producing a site-specific production about arson based on interviews with people affected, and offered many helpful suggestions and references.

Artistic director designate of the Flint Youth Theatre Jeremy Winchester was enthusiastic about contributing to the project and supporting in whatever way possible, including as a fiscal sponsor. John Henry, director of the Flint Institute of Arts, loved the idea immediately and wanted to be a part of it. The Flint Institute of Arts had finished a $20 million renovation by Frederick Fisher and Partners in 2006, was aggressively adding to the collection, and his son is a young sculptor based in Bushwick.

John Gazall, of Gazall Lewis Architects, director of the American Institute of Architects-Flint, and George Ananich of THA Architects showed me the boards of an architecture competition they had launched for the Genesee Towers building, a disused 19-story building that the city had been trying to demolish since 2004, at enormous expense to taxpayers. They wanted to show that the building--the tallest in Flint--could be saved and made into a great asset for the city. They had managed to draw imaginative and practical submissions from around the country to prove it.

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Gordon Young, a Flint native reporter for national magazines based in San Francisco with a blog called Flint Expats, was working on a book about the city and met with me at the Brown Sugar Cafe on his way to a meeting with the 37-year-old mayor, Dayne Walling. Young was interested in reporting on the project. Mayor Walling had already offered extremely insightful suggestions and put me in touch with a program officer for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, who was enthusiastic about the idea.

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Finally, a group of around a dozen residents, including community advocates, college professors, artists, Tim Monahan, head of the Carriage Town Historic Neighborhood Association, and Catie Newell, an architect teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, came to a meeting in an unfinished second-floor space on Saginaw Street owned by Joel Rash, a former hardcore punk show organizer who led the facade improvement program in downtown Flint. I got to meet Nayyirah Shariff, who had grown up in the suburbs, worked as a community activist, and started a baking company called Revolutionary Bread, and had been recommended as a possible local program manager. Tim Monahan wanted to bring our attention to Spencer's Funeral Home, a historic building that the city was planning on demolishing and he wanted to turn into a collective art space.

Guy Adamec, a ceramics instructor at Flint Institute of Arts, came with a group from the Buckham Gallery's board meeting, along with Margo Lakin and John Dempsey, an artist and teacher and Mott Community College. Alan Harris came on behalf of the Creative Alliance, a large group of young artists in Flint that collaborates on initiatives and productions. They spoke about their interests and concerns, how the project could potentially be of use, and what the dangers might be if it weren't done in an inclusive way.

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Not only was it clear there was a large receptive group of collaborators, there was an enormous amount already happening: studies of former factory sites commissioned, redevelopment plans for the Flint River investigated, federal funding for dam reconstruction and riverfront restoration allocated, a landmark hotel successfully converted into condos, highway overpasses remediated with streetscape improvements, a master plan for the University of Michigan-Flint's connection to the downtown area starting to be implemented, construction underway on a new all-ages show space downtown, and countless other projects initiated. Flint was not a blank slate but an immensely engaging partner that could be a great host and collaborator to visiting artists. I returned to New York to share the information with invited participants.

A Beautiful Ruin: Producing the New City

2011-05-16T22:26:00.011-04:00

Sail, 1974, by Jim Burton and Anne Healy. Photo by Mariette Pathy Allen, courtesy Creative Time.

In New York, we have an overabundance of artists, architects, designers, and urbanists drawn from all over the world by its cosmopolitan culture, creative freedom, money, dense history, universities, underground and pop cultural heroes. It starts to seem like we're all patting each other on our backs, talking to each other about the great city we've created.

Outside the New York bubble, outside the art bubble, outside the architecture bubble, few people know or care very much about all of that.

New York is a tourist destination. Times Square, with its bright lights, advertisements, skyscrapers, chain stores, live television studios, and over-the-top musical theater productions, is a great attraction, recovered from a half-century of neglect and underinvestment. Tens of thousands pay to take an elevator and gawk at the city from the top of the Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty is the great symbol of America, embodying the spirit of a Nation of Immigrants. Does it matter if the rest of the country wants to close the border to Mexican migration? Give us more of them. They have enlarged the soul of the city and the country.

New York is thought to be an exception. City planners call it a "superstar" city, like London or Tokyo. The scale of its buildings cannot, mostly, be attempted in other places. Its 8 million residents produce a density and diversity of experience that keeps it in an inexorable state of creative destruction, new businesses, shops, bars, restaurants, apartment buildings, highrises erasing places that six months ago were novelties.

It wasn't always the case. Other cities and struggling suburbs can learn from the rebirth of New York.

A Beautiful Ruin: The Rebirth of New York, 1975-1986 is the story of the generation of immigrants and college-educated kids who came to New York when it was said to be dying and made use of it as they found it.

They took burned-out lots and planted them with gardens. Abandoned industrial ruins invited sculpture on a monumental scale. Unheated warehouses became open plan modern living spaces illuminated by walls of windows with no division between kitchen, workspace, and bedroom. Closed-down public schools were installed with ad hoc exhibitions and made into museums of experimental culture. They sawed abandoned buildings in half and blow-torched gaping holes through three-story warehouses for fun and sport. They performed dance and theater on streets and sidewalks as if they were rented ballrooms. They created previously unimagined clothing styles and genres of popular music, tough, dirty, full of attitude and personal expression, telling stories of a violent world that was ironically filled with excitement.

In uneasy parallel, sometimes in conflict, often in concert with this artistic transformation, in Chinatown storefronts, Lower East Side tenements, reclaimed East Village schoolhouses, and Bronx public housing community centers, a new generation of Americans banged out what it meant to be Puerto Rican or Asian or Jamaican in the United States.

The nation had just gone through radical legal reform that had forced it to demolish the century-old survivals of a feudal system of legalized slaveholding. The social consequences of this legal revolution remained unresolved, and coincided with a fissure between the city and the country. The destabilized society of the post-Civil Rights movement-era pervaded the perception of the city. In common usage, urban had become a code word for places where non-white immigrants and ethnic communities that had endured European colonialism, imperialism, and the Atlantic slave trade predominated.

In the decades that followed, through the popularization of their music, the publicization of their lifestyles in films and TV shows, the commercialization and worldwide distribution of their artwork, the commodification of their fashion, the development of new modes of real estate production that replicated these ways of living in modern building forms, the assimilation of their culture into the mainstream of American and global culture permitted a new model of urban life to emerge from the ruins of the previous century.

The postsuburban, post-Baby Boom, post-Immigration Reform Act, post-Civil Rights movement generation fashioned a new culture of the city that displaced the suburban ideal of post-World War II America. The housing industry, banks, and government policymakers have barely begun to recognize how completely this new way of living has modeled a newly productive economy of urbanism that extends beyond the Superstar Cities throughout the world.

The Unbearable Density of Images in the Age of Free Economies

2011-03-07T08:41:00.025-05:00

It’s important to move at a steady pace through Art, stopping only when something attracts your attention. I don’t believe in spending too much time contemplating abstractions or searching for meaning that isn’t handed to you explicitly. I don’t have time to do the artist’s work and explain their half-articulated ideas. It doesn’t have to compel you—it just has to stand out enough to make you wander toward it for a second and take a quick picture, maybe attracting the attention of gallerists if you’re wearing a press badge, who will quickly give you a few snippets of information as you try to keep your pace—have to keep moving.

I always find it amazing to walk around art fairs with other people, especially after I have already made a tour. Inevitably they walk too slowly and constantly stop and point out things that I don’t see. I went with a buddy a few years ago who noticed every cute animal and brightly colored object in the hall. It’s not that the color hadn’t attracted my attention. Whatever idea or image it contained did not register with things that were framing my experience, the categories that make things intelligible to me, available to my understanding, render things meaningful.

Every year the same complaint from sort-of-would-be insiders: not enough good work at the Armory Show, say, and wow, you must see the Independent, or some other novelty that the art elite has decreed will displace the official center that opens New York’s spring art market. Often this other thing is meant to be independent of the marketness of the art market, which is still, always, supposedly a bad thing, no matter how poor the artists and critics are becoming, and no matter how many times sociologists and historians and political scientists or self-conscious critics force the point that art is and always has been encompassed by and drenched in marketness, even when it’s not.

I’m struck by the backwardness of this ongoing preoccupation as a citizen of the contemporary free economy, in which much of the work you do, even when valuable and recognized by colleagues and peers, does not have a monetary value. On Thursday, the market went up nearly 200 points. I turned on Bloomberg to find out why. On Bloomberg they were betting on the price of commodities. Wheat, corn, soybeans, and oat had nearly doubled in a year, oil was above $100 a barrel, but rice had only gained five or six percent. Did that mean you should be betting on rice? Droughts were going to put pressure on future supply in the coming year, a hopeful sign for traders. It was only last year’s bumper rice crop that had kept the revolts against dictatorships in North Africa and the Arabia Peninsula from spreading throughout Africa and Asia, and prevented good money from being made by rice traders. Sugar and coffee are untouched by this inflation. Agricultural subsidies, I presume. Hogs and cattle anyone?

Meanwhile, here in New York, it seems that everyone is busy from predawn to the Jon Stewart show doing free, unpaid work. So busy they can barely find time to eat. They cook all their food themselves now. (The quality of restaurant cuisine too is astonishingly good and innovative. Who goes there apart from the critics? Someone must have money.) They put enormous care in the buying and making of food. There’s a concern for the relationship between the individual practice of making and eating and the broader impact of consumption on the global market. It’s probably just a preoccupation of the urban elite. But you can see it trying to colonize the heartland; Jamie Oliver proselytizes good food on network television, movies like Food Inc. expose the commodification of eating, the federal government begins to do its rightful job of creating market incentives that originate in the moral decision to preserve life rather than inducing better profit margins for agribusiness. It’s still lagging pretty far behind.

As a member of the press, I enter the Armory Show for free, rather than paying the $30 entrance fee. That’s worth noting to start. I presume the enterprise is paid for mostly by fees from vendors, so I’m not worried about it. For images I relied on the free Philips camera I got five years ago test-driving Lexus hybrid SUVs at a press event during the NY Auto Show.

More than the work, I stop to greet friends and acquaintances, talking business mostly; I have my own for-the-moment-free projects that I’m investing hundreds of hours producing for free, and working hard to induce others to contribute their own free work. I ask myself, how is it that value is created? How is it that it is sold? I am convinced that this work has an enormous value, that it’s an investment, but I don’t see clearly exactly how it will produce revenue on the back end for me. I have seen it do so forever—everywhere this activity takes place, it attracts consumption, it brings bodies, it creates agglomerations of development, real estate profits, tax revenue, business for corner stores and restaurants and boutiques. But is there any direct revenue for cultural producers? When and how? I think we all believe that this investment is going to be paid back in the future in the form of recognition that will translate into paid work and an increased value of that work. In any case, I don’t have a choice. I had an idea, I am compelled by it. I must do it.

The work that grabbed my attention were heavy images. None of it was particularly useful for my own free project; work that would activate a city, create public space, bring people into the streets, spur economic developments, define the identity of a place. There’s some fine line in social and political art between the cloyingly explicit and the suggestive and seductive, and I don’t want the work to be so explicit that it tells me what to think. I want it to please my sensibilities first, but also perform some conscious act of producing meaning alongside the pleasure of sensible experience. Despite that I couldn’t avoid dealing with one image. It was the most unbearable of the heavy images at the Armory show. It was a photo by Jodi Bieber of a woman disfigured by her husband in Afganistan. Her nose and ears had been cut off. It was a portrait of this disfigured woman, printed about 2 ½ feet in height, placed in a corridor and impossible not to notice. My first impulse was to run away, to walk fast past it. Then I had to turn back and confront it. What was this image representing? What had happened to this woman? There was a story next to it, and fortunately there was some redemption in it, at least for her; she was in the U.S. for reconstructive surgery. She would be made more whole again. Brutally heavy image. This is, in short, why we fight.

Nothing else in the show compares, but a few others registered in some way, they were complex but straightforward, I understood them immediately but they lasted a little longer. There were probably a dozen pieces that were pleasing or meaningful or registered in some technical way as innovative. At first I walked right past the paintings by Ronald Ophuis of Africans holding weapons. They’re rendered in thick textured paintings with muted colors that recall the expressionism of Egon Schiele combined with the dense surfaces of a late-20^th century abstract painter like Anselm Kiefer. The tension between the two made me stop and turn back and look. It’s uncanny to see an African woman wielding a machine gun rendered in a media so identified with high European modernism, and it makes you question those relationships and categories. Strange intentional aestheticizations of violence.

A lot of the work that registered to me was of this nature, confusing categories in a simple pleasing gesture. Images of different types embedded in the same frame—an urban scene photographed from a hilltop by Gianfranco Faschino: from time to time a little movement appears within the otherwise still photograph. A woman appears in a corner of the frame and shakes out a tablecloth on a balcony. A plume of smoke from a chimney, a cow hops down a narrow street, a boy runs in the distance and then is hidden by flimsy hillside dwellings.

I walked past an image of men carrying bags up a hill. Agitprop I thought. Then the shimmering light stuck with me, displayed as a lightbox with chromogenic transparency. I turned back and looked at the gleaming gold on every part of the image: the burlap sacks, the shoes, the dirt, the bodies. Gold mining by Chilean photographer Alfredo Jaar. The content makes you think too about the material in the photograph itself, the silver emulsion in the color photograph. They might as well be carrying the photograph on their backs.

There’s a compelling photograph by Isaac Julien, at first just a sparkling image of modernity, the top of a glass tower and glimpses of a new city in the background, in the foreground there’s the calm rationalism of a modern hotel room with glass windows, and a woman standing in front of them, gazing out. She’s wearing a neat, modern printed dress, she’s pretty, Chinese, maybe. By a British photographer of African descent who established himself as an artist addressing questions of postcolonial black identity, it’s a strikingly cosmopolitan image that reflects the emergence of a new historical age. What does it mean? Where is all the money coming from, and where is it going?

There were also a series of technically interesting images: James Casabere’s photographs of models constructed to create imagined landscapes. They so closely resemble the real that my friend claims to have heard a couple trying to figure out if it was Ireland.

Leandro Erlich’s subway car installation presents a flat video image of a modern R160 car in New York framed by a door, as if you’re peering through the end of the car at passengers. Again, the stillness is interrupted by small movements.

Scott McFarland’s digital composite of a lake scene captures the capacity of the eye and the mind to take in a big scene and process it so that multiple depths of field and peripheral information are all thrown together in one immense sense of worldness that photography always has to crop and frame. Here it’s seamlessly merged in one uncanny image that could seemingly go on forever.

Gregory Scott plays with stillness and movement by embedding video screens within the frame of still photographs of a man looking at paintings in a museum. But the paintings gets picked up and carried away, in a funny technologically enhanced version of a trompe l’oeil painting.

Vitali Massimo’s image of a square filled with tens of thousands of people partying, presumably on New Year’s Eve, gets some of its density by contrast with recent images of similar masses in Cairo and Tunis participating in political revolutions. You have to take a moment to take in these masses of people congregating, awe-inspiring even if they’re merely participating in infamous acts of Western consumption. In consumer-democratic societies, we get our revolutionary moments by small acts of quasiresistance, by buying organic vegetables and doing work that we’re convinced has a value, rather than spending the enormous time it takes to press it into the narrow form that makes it pay.

A dollar used to be the going rate for words in some print magazines; now it’s less in most places. Tant pis--it was always worth more and the work often suffered for it. Why bother to sell it when you can easily give it away for free. I'm grateful to one colleague I ran into, the photographer Magda Biernat, who reminded me that part of the value of this kind of work, undervalued, free, or grossly overpaid, is being able to go to a place and gain access to experience, which is refreshing in a place where you can sometimes get an impression that, much more than the market or money, art is a competition for accumulation of status.

Greenpoint Community Meeting

2011-03-02T15:09:00.032-05:00

The Greenpoint Community Meeting is a conversation between community advocates who have spent most of their lives fighting for North Brooklyn, area artists whose work is deeply connected to sense of place and transformation of space but who rarely attend advocacy and political meetings, and professionals in design, architecture and landscape architecture whose work integrally engages and serves communities. The meeting was organized by Stephen Zacks as an initiative of the Institute for Applied Reporting and Urbanism with support from Susannah Drake of Dland Studio, at Greenpoint View, a gallery at 82 Oak Street owned by sculptor Stephen Balamut and run by Sascha Asher, an interior designer specializing in textiles.

Greenpoint View gallery

The discussion started with a salute to the heroes of Greenpoint who have been advocating for issues of public concern since long before I ever heard of the place, and a few words about the desire to introduce innovative thinking that I've reported on at Metropolis and other magazines and to collaborate on a vision for the neighborhood that would help projects achieve multiple purposes and maximize their cumulative effect.

Newtown Creek Nature Walk

I asked Christine Holowacz, one of the longest-serving and most well-respected community leaders, to begin by talking about her activities and priorities. It was a huge honor to have her there, a resident who emigrated from Poland as a teenager and has worked as a community advocate for more than 30 years. I first met Christine at a meeting of the Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee in 2001, where she works as a community representative and helped lead a fantastic renovation of the sewage treatment plant by Polshek Parnership, featuring a waterside nature walk by George Trakas and a sculptural installation by Vito Acconci. She expressed a preference for projects that would improve waterfront access, in particular rebuilding the bulkhead at the mouth of Newtown Creek to create a boathouse next to the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center at the end of Manhattan Avenue.

Bulkhead now and drawing after rebuilding

A central concern for the past several months in Greenpoint has been how to create a process to make the best use of a $7 million environmental-benefits agreement from the Department of Environmental Conservation and a $19.5 million community-benefits settlement won from ExxonMobil as part of its compensation for the massive 17-30 million gallon underground oil spill discovered by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1978. We were lucky to have Phillip Musegaas of Riverkeeper, a watchdog organization for New York's waterways that was the driving force behind the lawsuit against ExxonMobil, in attendance to speak about the process.

Musegaas emphasized that the lawsuit puts no cap on the amount of money the company is required to spend to clean up the oil spill; the environmental-benefits-projects compensation is a separate fund that will be used however the community decides, through a process that is just beginning. The first step is the selection of a consultant to develop a grant-proposal framework to administer the money according to priorities that will be determined in community meetings. The rest of the conversation was recorded and can be listened to here in sections or downloaded.

Musegaas responds to my question about Riverkeeper's priorities, his own personal wishes regarding the use of the ExxonMobil funds, encourages people to get involved with the Newtown Creek Alliance community organization (you can sign up to receive email updates), and talks about the declaration of Newtown Creek as a Superfund site, a separate process that will bring revenue from the federal government for environmental cleanup. Christine Holowacz clarifies the relationship between different aspects of the Newtown Creek. Musegaas expresses a preference for projects that will remediate stormwater overflows into the water and points out that there's an application process open for grants, with a deadline extended to the end of April.

We were also thrilled to have another neighborhood hero, Stephanie Thayer, director of the Open Space Alliance of North Brooklyn and administrator for the Parks Department, in attendance to say a few words about her work and how waterfront parks under development and arts programs she helps facilitate figure into the vision for the future of Greenpoint's ecological infrastructure. She points out that the new city guidelines for high performance park design in the 21st century already is pushing for projects to incorporate features such as stormwater remediation in waterfront projects.

Christine Holowacz (middle) and Laura Hofmann (right)

Laura Hofmann, a stalwart activist in the community who has lived in Greenpoint her whole life and is a member of nearly every neighborhood advocacy group, another true hero, also graced us with her presence and gave her perspective on what kinds of projects she would like to see funded. She points out that the 197a plan led by the Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Parks and Planning, passed by the Community Board in the late 90s and approved by the City Planning Commission in 2002, which she was heavily involved in producing, already describes a broader vision for the neighborhood and it's just a matter of actively implementing the guidelines. The only way to really do that and find interconnections between the projects is by going to all of the various meetings. She expressed a preference for parks projects and waterfront access that would have specific environmental benefits and provide additional programming space for the arts.

The Hylozoica (Newtown Creek) Study 5 (detail) 11.15.10 Ethan Pettit

Brooklyn artist and hipster pioneer Ethan Pettit, whose history of cultural activity in the neighborhood goes back to the first groups that began reclaiming postindustrial spaces and producing ad hoc public art in the post-fiscal crisis period, spoke up in defense of a broader role for art in shaping the landscape and questioned how these activities--a key to the revival of the area--would be incorporated into funding for community and environmental projects. This became a great entree into a discussion about the relationship between the arts community and community activists in Greenpoint, and whether there could be a better collaboration outside the normal channels of advocacy meetings already tied into political allegiances and ongoing turf battles. Katie Denny, director of special projects for the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and head of the North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition, talked about how these funding priorities would be incorporated into the guidelines during community meetings. A real take-away of this question is the need for artists to be actively involved in these meetings to make sure that programming and support for the arts community gets incorporated into the framing ideas and guidelines.

Artist Phyllis Yampolsky, another neighborhood hero, led the effort to preserve McCarren Park Pool (now on track to reopen in the summer of 2012) when it was going to be demolished in the 1980s. Known as the Joan of Arc of McCarren Park, Yampolsky made a wonderful pitch for reviving the historic scenic beauty of the neighborhood, turning it into a leader in sustainability, and issued a poetic call to "make Greenpoint green."

Susannah Drake, a leader of landscape architecture and ecological urbanism in New York City and key advocate for the role of design in transforming the city's quality of life and sustainability, picked up on the question of coordinating a larger vision for the neighborhood and tying together projects, based on her experience putting together the Sponge Park project in Gowanus.

By appealing to various agencies, constituencies and interest groups, and understanding the ways that projects can tap into multiple existing needs and programs, she put together a project for which there was no single adequate source of funding. This steadfast work of building consensus and creating alliances between agencies is over-theorized in the field of architecture but sometimes under-put-into-practice.

Alleyway of From the Source gallery during Bring to Light festival

I was also heartened by the presence of Chris Lenard, who works at the furniture company From the Source on Franklin and Oak Streets. From the Source has been holding down the fort manufacturing in the Greenpoint Terminal Market building for more than a decade, and was a big supporter and key component of the Bring to Light art festival I co-produced last fall on the edge of the waterfront. Lenard brought in the perspective of a newcomer to community meetings, frustrated with how long it's taking for Greenpoint to get a piece of the promised stretch of waterfront greenway that appears in all of the planning and zoning maps of the district. That brought lots of knowing laughter.

Drawing of future Bushwick Inlet Park

Stephen Whitehouse from Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects, former chief of planning for the Parks Department in the 80s and 90s and a designer, with Kiss + Cathcart, of the Bushwick Inlet Park--another park underway in North Brooklyn that's underfunded and hasn't quite reached the Greenpoint side of the area--told a great anecdote about the bizarre reasons why otherwise impossible things sometimes get funded in the city. He recalled how back in the day he took the then Parks Department chief of operations to the site of Transmitter Park--due to be completed next winter--to push for the site to be converted into a waterfront park. The site contained a radio tower for WNYC and the chief liked the idea of having a transmission tower for Parks Department radios, so he allocated the funds. Twenty years later, the technology completely outmoded, it's nearing completion.

Another professional in the field of design who does community-based projects to engage neighborhoods in discussions and activities to think about the ecology of the city and works in the Urban Landscape Lab at Columbia University, Janette Kim put together a sketch of the intersection of various interest groups and how they relate to different kinds of projects as a way of illustrating both how complicated it can be to create consensus around an issue and as a map of different ways it can be achieved.

Installation by Rosa Valado

Beth Goldowitz, a found-object sculptor and partner in the Greenpoint View gallery, called for a more participatory process that would enable artists to be more involved in the conversation. Whatever consultant is chosen to administer the environmental settlements needs to be particularly adept at creating an inclusive conversation that allows everyone to feel that their voice is being heard. And Rosa Valado, a long-time Greenpoint-based installation artist and organizer of the nonprofit Woven Spaces, which does public art programs in North Brooklyn, took a break from installing her work for an exhibition in Dumbo to attend the meeting. She waited until nearly the end of the discussion to make a beautifully articulated plea for the struggling artists in the neighborhood, the importance of supporting them, and called for us to really start collaborating on a vision for the neighborhood together that would include the arts community.

Finally, we talked about ways of spurring production of open spaces on the waterfront in the absence of market forces and setting the stage for better quality design of the highrises than were built Williamsburg and Long Island City once the market returns. Another neighborhood activist asked how we can create buildings that are more responsive and connected to the community and how to design them so that they attract new residents willing to participate in the existing culture of Greenpoint. We talked about mapping all of the projects planned or underway to get a better picture of how they all fit together into a vision for the future of Greenpoint. These are all projects for the days, weeks, months and years ahead. -STEPHEN ZACKS

The Flint Public Art Project

2011-01-04T06:45:00.162-05:00

Downtown Flint (photo: Lisa Zacks)

Purpose

The Flint Public Art Project seeks to produce new images, temporary programs, small-scale installations, and permanent projects at strategic sites in Flint in collaboration with local artists, community advocates, cultural institutions, neighborhood associations, businesses, real-estate developers, and political leaders in the city. The project will capture and broadcast the identity of Flint by recognizing key features of the urban cultural landscape and connecting them to a larger narrative, transforming the street life and propagating new ideas for living in the city. We plan to produce a phased series of collaborative and community-based participatory cultural events, installations, demonstration projects, identity concepts, and programs for future institutions. The events and programs will contribute to the local culture, its community organizations, and its integral connections to contemporary practices in art, architecture, performance, urban design, landscape architecture, planning, and economic development.

The project intersects with the formal master planning and visioning process being undertaken by the city government. The result will be experimental formations of public space at strategic sites throughout the city through participatory installations and performances, an overall vision for Flint, a permanent small-scale installation, and a concept for a large cultural project that can represent an image of the city and a possibility for the future. Outside of Flint, we plan to produce a traveling exhibition that uses multiple art practices and design disciplines to examine the specificity of its urban condition and display proposals for its continued transformation.

About the Project

The project looks for ways to form connections between existing community groups, cultural institutions, historic landmarks, industrial brownfields, natural features and pieces of infrastructure, locating them as reference points in the landscape that together embody the identity of a place. It assumes an expanded concept of the downtown area that extends from Grand Traverse and Saginaw, the main streets through the center of town, past the Flint River to the site of the former Buick City manufacturing facility, and along Kearsley and Court streets from the University of Michigan Flint and Mott Community College to the former Chevrolet-Fisher Body factory. Between these areas, underdeveloped neighborhoods and highway overpasses form physical and psychological barriers that are potential sites of intervention or remediation.

Few reference points are available to situate the place. The film by Michael Moore, Roger and Me, about the closing of GM auto factories in the 1980s, is the most important one. While it may have left a negative image of the city, it also identified the place with an independent filmmaker who popularized the documentary form through a single-minded confrontation with power and personalized advocacy for fairness and economic justice. Many people recall having driven past Flint on the highway. Nothing they will have seen, no sign visible from the road, no institution recognizable to outsiders, no cult landmark motivated them to get off the highway and stop. Most young people leave Flint for college and never come back. This project will create a temporary destination and build foundations for landmarks that will truly reflect the history and future of the place.

The Flint Public Art Project is meant to be partly critical, partly conceptual, partly pragmatic, and partly performative. It recognizes that there are deep, very real structural, economic, and geographic problems that cause Flint to remain isolated from cosmopolitan culture and the new economy. While manufacturing has continued to steadily decline, a number of auto parts plants, GM truck factories, and other remnants of the industrial economy have survived, and these remain central to the local economy. Although unions are seen as an impediment to companies seeking to establish new businesses in Flint, the unions associated with every auto facility are also part of the historical, cultural, and social fabric of the place. We are looking for ways to take advantage of existing institutions, historically important sites and special places to create new opportunities for transformation, ways of introducing connections to the outside and instigating cultural and economic development practices that have been effective in other places.

Location
Flint is located approximately an hour’s drive from Detroit (the major city and metropolitan area), Lansing (the state capital and location of Michigan State University), and Ann Arbor (University of Michigan).

It has a small revived downtown area with a traditional main street, Saginaw Street, a historic landmark theater, the Capitol, an alleyway with a few bars, the Torch and the Loft, the campus of the University of Michigan-Flint, and a small riverfront park landscape-designed by Lawrence Halprin.

Local institutions such as the Flint Youth Theatre, Buckham Gallery, the Buick Gallery, the Flint Institute of Arts, and Local 432 are anchors of cultural life in the downtown area. The Farmers' Market is an essential gathering place three days a week on the edge of downtown. The Edible Flint Coop is an urban farming initiative that grows organic food in the city.

We take areas of the city from Atwood Stadium and the Flint Farmers' Market to the north, Kettering University and the site of the historic Chevrolet-Fisher Body sit-down strike to the East, the Durant-Dort Carriage Factory and Saginaw Street in downtown Flint, and the former Central High School and the Buick Gallery in the Cultural District as sites for research, installation, programming, and performance.

Research Information for Participants

Flint-Genesee County Regional Economic Development Playbook (multiple planning documents)

Flint River Corridor Alliance Planning Study - Sasaki Associates (PDF)

Reimagining Chevy in the Hole - Chevrolet factory site study - Flint Futures Group, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan (PDF)

AIA-Flint Guide to Architecture (PDF)

Flint River Regional Trail Plan (PDF)

Housing and Urban Development Neighborhood Stabilization Plan/ NSP3 (PDF) - Federal Demolition, Rehabilitation & New Construction Grant (Flint Journal report)

Project for Public Places Study (PDF)

Flint River Restoration Plan (PDF)

Recent News

Mayor Wants to Pass Millage to Reopen City Jail

Kiplinger Business Magazine Lists Flint as "Comeback City"

Harvesting Earth Educational Farm Wins USDA Award

Mayor Needs Concessions to Balance Budget

Genesee Towers architecture Competition

New U of M-Flint Bike Sharing Program

Downtown All-Ages Club Begins Construction

State Funds Streetscape Improvements in Cultural Center

Media Tower Proposal Wins Architecture Competition

Mayor of Flint Discusses Positive Economic News

Community-Based Theater Production about Arson

Images of Architecture Competition for Downtown Skyscraper

City Takes Control of Former Chevrolet Manufacturing Brownfield Site

RPF for New Planning Officer Position

Flint River Farm Starts on Southside

Architectural Paean to Ruin-Porn and Decline

Sale of 58 Flint Houses on Ebay

Successful Redevelopment of Landmark Hotel into Condos Downtown

New GM Manufacturing Jobs Spurred by Economic Growth

U of M-Flint Course on History of Downtown

New Wine Bar Opens in Downtown

Mott Community College Opens Digital Fabrication Lab

Mayor Confronts $17 Million Budget Deficit

Blight Elimination Officers Survey Neighborhoods

City Wins $1.5 Million HUD Planning Grant

Edible Flint Co-op Sells Locally Grown Produce at Farmer's Market

Map

This link references a map of the broader downtown area. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=s&ie=UTF8&ll=43.018658%2C-83.685007&spn=0.007562%2C0.027294&t=h&z=16 On the left side of the map, Saginaw Street is the main street through the downtown area, and the Cultural Center is to the right on the opposite side of the highway. If you toggle the map to the left, the large gray empty lot is the site of the former Chevrolet - Fisher Body plant, the site of the 1937 sit-down strike that resulted in the formation of the UAW. If you toggle to the north, you can see the site of the former Buick City manufacturing plant, the biggest brownfield site in the country.

Chevrolet-Fisher Body factory site (photo: Lisa Zacks)

Program

Proposals may take the form of site-specific artistic interventions, sculptural installations, performance art events, classes and workshops, lectures, designs for new buildings, streetscape and billboard graphics campaigns, proposals for reuse or transformation of abandoned or underutilized buildings or sites, or urban design and landscape urbanism plans.

Process

An invited group of artists, performers, architects, urban designers, graphic designers, and landscape urbanists will participate in a scouting and research expedition in which we tour sites, meet with groups of residents, community organizations, artists, and institutions, and spend time exploring the area.

Participants will be paired with local artists, small businesses, college classrooms, municipal agencies, cultural organizations and institutional partners to collaborate in the generation of programs for installation, performance, education, building design, or urban design. The projects can be realizable in any media to interact with, provoke discussion about, or permanently impact the urban context.

A weeklong series of participatory events will be organized to engage the community in rethinking areas of the city and engage the local community in contemporary art and architecture practices. The performance/ installation component will be open to proposals and encourage a wide range of voluntary responses by local, national, and international artists and designers.

A second phase will develop one or more of the proposed projects into a small or larger-scale permanent installation.

Schedule

First phase

Winter 2010/11 – Invitations to participate/ Initial grant applications

May 21 through June 21 – Site tour & call for proposals

July 1, 2011 – Preliminary project proposals

Summer 2011 – Project-based grant applications and fundraising

Labor Day through November 11, 2011 – Participatory events, discussions, temporary installations, performances

November 8, 2011 – Announcement of permanent installation/ sculpture/ building /urban design project to correspond to 100-year celebration of Chevrolet

Second phase

Winter, 2011/12 – Design and fundraising for selected projects/ touring exhibition/ book production
November 8, 2012 – Break ground on permanent small-scale installation

Third phase

November 8, 2013 - Announcement of program for large-scale cultural project

Buick Gallery (photo: Lisa Zacks)

***NOTE: Many of the invited participants, collaborators, partners, advisors, grant sources, and sponsors listed below are unconfirmed, though most of them have been initially contacted and expressed an interest in participating. This project is open to other participants; please write to info@flintpublicartproject.com if you are interested in joining the research process or proposing something as a part of the program. This is a tentative draft proposal.***

Invited Participants

Tobias Armborst, Daniel D'Oca, and Georgeen Theodore of Interboro Partners

So-Il / Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu
Srdjan Jovanovic-Weiss, Normal Architecture Office/ School of Missing Studies

Susannah Drake/ Dland Studio

L.EFT Architects

Behrang Behin/ Ennead

Garret Linn

Center for Urban Pedagogy/ CUP

Damon Rich

Nsumi Collective

Vincent Appel, Medium

Thaddeus Pawlowski, urban designer

David Bernstein

Quilian Riano/ DSGN AGNC

Cathlyn Newell, University of Michigan School of Architecture

Francisca Benitez

Anne Renee Trumble/ Emerging Terrain
Min | Day + FACT

Kate Orff/ Scape
Matthias Neumann

Swoon/ Swimming Cities

Bruce High Quality Foundation

Jeanne Gang/ Studio Gang

Mitch Cope and Gina Reichart, Design 99

Nahyun Hwang, University of Michigan College of Architecture

Andrew Herscher, Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, University of Michigan College of Architecture

Deborah Gans

Trevor Paglen

Associated Fabrication

David Cook/ Grimshaw Architects
Jon Lott, Para Project
Michael Haggerty, urban planner

Diego Fernandez, artist
Dan Rockwell/ Studio 804

Andrew Zago

Gregory Tom

Hashim Sarkis, Harvard GSD

Skart

CityBuild Consortium

Center for Land Use Interpretation

Madagascar Institute

Los Angeles Urban Rangers

James Rojas

Crimson Architectural Historians
Julia Czerniak/ CLEAR

Pierre Huyghe

Olafur Eliasson

Tino Seghal

Jiang Jun/ Urban China

Raf Kelman, performance artist

Sophia Cleary, performance artist

Noah Sheldon, photographer

Sean Hemmerle, photographer

Magda Biernat, photographer

Armin Linke, photographer

Allison Danielle Behrstock, artist

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere, Neurotransmitter

Lize Mogel, artist

Cassie Thornton, artist

Anthony Hamboussi, photographer

Tribeca Lab

Hungry March Band

Teresa Herrmann and Pepin Gelardi, Contrail

Anne Marie O'Neill, artist

Wes Janz, architect and professor, Ball State University

Raphaele Shirley, light and installation artist

Peter Kyle Dance, choreographer

The Hinterlands

Craig Wilkins, Detroit Community Design Center, University of Michigan College of Architecture

Museum of Contemporary Art - Flint

Dennis Maher, University at Buffalo SUNY, Department of Architecture

Sarah Palmer, photographer

The Torch, in Buckham Alley (photo: Lisa Zacks)

Flint Artists and Collaborators
Joshua Kraus, artist, student

Freeman Greer, GAV & Associates, architecture professor, Baker College

Cristen Velliky, Assistant Professor of Art, UM-Flint; Director, UCEN Gallery
Jason Galvas, Flint Club
George Ananich, Architect, THA Architects
John Gazall, Gazall, Lewis & Associates
James Thigpen Jr., Closet Studio
Tim Monahan, Carriage Town Historic Neighborhood Alliance
Alan Harris, Creative Alliance
Guy Adamec, instructor, Flint Institute of Arts
Jessica Back, artist
Nayyirah Shariff, artisan and community advocate, Revolutionary Bread

Cade Surface, urban designer

Michael Ramsdell, Under the Hood Productions

Janet Haley, assistant professor of theater, U of M Flint

Stephen Landon, theater design professor, U of M Flint

Shaun Smakal, landscape and urban designer

Ryan Eashoo. talk show host

John V. Dempsey, painter and art professor, Mott Community College

Sarah Reed, photographer

Ben Hamper, writer and DJ

Jeremy Winchester, artistic director designate, Flint Youth Theater

Joel Rash, Local 432, music producer

Tom Hall, film festival producer

Jen Sikora, Buckham Gallery

Joanna Lehrman and Erin Caudell, Edible Flint Co-op

Natasha Thomas-Jackson, RAISE IT UP! Youth Arts & Awareness

Pharlon Randle, Bangtown Productions

Michael Moore, Dog Eat Dog Films

Flint Institute of Arts (photo: Lisa Zacks)

Local Partners
Flint River Watershed Coalition
Flint Urban League
Genesee Regional Trail Council
Grand Traverse Neighborhood District
Flint River Corridor Alliance
Greater Flint Arts Council
American Institute of Architects-Flint
Carriage Town Historic Neighborhood Association
Creative Alliance
Genesee Regional Chamber of Commerce
Uptown Developments

Buckham Gallery

Edible Flint

Genesee County Land Bank

Flint Planning Commission

Flint Community and Economic Development

Flint Farmers' Market

Flint Youth Theatre

Buick Gallery

Flint Institute of Arts

Flint Art Fair

Flint Greek Festival

Michigan Renaissance Fair

Crossroads Village and Huckleberry Railroad

University of Michigan-Flint

Kettering University

Mott Community College

Baker Community College

Dayne Walling, Mayor’s Office

Flint Local 432

UAW Local 598

UAW Local 599

UAW Local 659

UAW Local 651

Federal Building, 600 Church Street (616) 456-2367

Social Security Administration Building, 929 Stevens Street (616) 456-2367

Flint Truck Assembly

Flint Metal Center

Flint Tool & Die

GMPT Flint Engine South

GMPT Flint North

Grand Blanc Weld Tool Center

Longway Planetarium, in the Cultural Center (photo: Lisa Zacks)

Regional Partners
Detroit Institute of Arts

Toledo Museum of Art

Great Lakes Urban Exchange

University of Michigan College of Architecture

Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative

Center for Creative Studies

UPSTATE: A Center for Design, Research, and Real Estate, Syracuse Architecture

Kent State University

Cranbrook Institute of Arts

Wayne State University

Michigan State University School of Planning, Design and Construction

National and International Partners

The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center

Institute for Urban Design

Storefront for Art and Architecture

New Museum

MoMA

Creative Time

General Services Administration Design Excellence Program

International Partners

Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

Urban China

Media Partners

Architect’s Newspaper

Domus

Flint Journal

Detroit Free Press

Lansing State Journal

Loudpaper

Ryan Eashoo Show

Urban Omnibus

Metropolis

Grant Sources

C. S. Mott Foundation

Community Foundation for Greater Flint

Ruth Mott Foundation

Ford Foundation

General Motors Foundation

UAW

Graham Foundation

State of Michigan

National Endowment for the Arts

Rockefeller Foundation

Corporate Sponsors

General Motors

American Express

AT&T Foundation

Bank of America Foundation

Comerica Foundation

DaimlerChrysler Corporation Fund

Exxon Mobile Foundation

Ford Motor Company Foundation

General Motors Foundation

Kellogg’s Corporate Citizenship Fund

Masco Corporation Foundation

Mervyn’s Corporate Giving Program

Steelcase Foundation

Director
Joel Rash, Red Ink Studios

Curator/ Producer
S tephen Zacks, Institute for Applied Reporting and Urbanism

Advisory council

Dayne Walling, Mayor of Flint

Tim Herman, Genesee Chamber of Commerce

Douglas Weiland, Genesee County Land Bank

Joel Rash, Flint Local 432

Jeremy Winchester, Flint Youth Theater

John Henry, Flint Institute of Arts
Michael Moore, director, Dog Eat Dog Films

Mark Robbins, Dean, Syracuse University School of Architecture

Monica Ponce de Leon, dean, University of Michigan School of Architecture

Olympia Kazi, Van Alen Institute

Adrienne Samos and Gerardo Mosquera, Ciudad Multiple

Srdjan Jovanovic-Weiss, School of Missing Studies/ Lost Highway Expedition

Tobias Armborst, Daniel D'Oca, and Georgeen Theodore of Interboro Partners

William Massie, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Architect-in-Residence

Kyong Park, International Center for Urban Ecology

Experiments in Applied Reporting

2010-12-08T07:31:00.037-05:00

Rosa Valado of Woven Spaces curated a great show in Greenpoint last month, Golden Blueprints: Grids, Blocks, Charts and Graphs, that displayed imaginative visions of North Brooklyn by local artists, hosted by the publisher of Williamsburg Greenpoint Art + News, Genia Gould, at the WG Gallery. I showed documentation of some of the projects I've participated in as an advocate and producer in the past year. Above is a slide show I created for the digital installation. It argues for an expanded role for reporters as cultural producers in response to changes in print and digital media, applying journalistic techniques to pragmatic activities in order to influence issues being reported on. The practice of applied reporting raises questions of conflict of interest that I will discuss in another place, but for now I'm posting this visual representation of how these different activities embody an engaged practice of urbanist reporting.

I met Valado through Ethan Pettit, an urbanist with a long history in North Brooklyn who used to be a co-director with me at the Collective: Unconscious performance space on Ludlow Street in the late Nineties. Pettit showed drawings of the land mass between the East River and the Newtown Creek-- the shipping canal was recently designated a Superfund site by the federal government and the area just received a $25 million community benefits package from Exxon Mobil as compensation for the massive decades-old underground oil spill. In one drawing, a statue of a Romantic figure inspired by Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog stands in a grandiose public plaza overlooking a view of the landscape from above, as if surveying it from the point of view of a helicopter, or maybe a massive skyscraper in Sunnyside, Queens. The absence of 20- and 30-story high-rises zoned for the waterfront in the piece--as in all of the works in the show--only defers the question of how the city will accommodate the million residents projected to arrive in the next decade, but I love the big gesture.

Moderately Effective Practices in Public Art

2010-11-15T11:29:00.033-05:00

COMMUNITY FRAGMENTS

It's been over a month since Creative Time, the once-pioneering Manhattan public art institution, convened an impressive list of speakers for its second annual conference, ambitiously titled, The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice. I hope the third summit, if there is one--and there should be--tones down the rhetoric and brings its name into closer correspondence with reality. Creative Time's curator since 2007, Nato Thompson, who organized the conference and served as its overall microphone-wielder for attendee participation, has a history of activism that goes back to the early 2000s, before he began ascending the ranks of the professional curatorial class. I interviewed him in 2001 for an unrealized Metropolis article--unrealized because the claims being made by activist groups were not very credible and the art was not very good--about the aesthetics of the post-Seattle World Trade Organization protest movement.

At the time Thompson was a Chicago organizer of the Department of Space and Land Reclamation, one of the unaffiliated Reclaim the Streets-type groups that took inspiration from the London anarchists who were throwing street parties, trucking big speaker systems into places like Trafalgar Square and having spontaneous flash raves. These types of events were meant as protests against cars and lack of public space and the commercialization of the visual landscape and a lot of other things, but they were shut down by the police wherever they happened and had little lasting impact. Nonetheless, in the past decade, a growing public desire for better pedestrian and bicycle pathways and a transportation-policy-reform spirit among city, state and federal officials has taken hold across the country, resulting in traffic-calming streetscape improvements and more bike lanes. Maybe these public-space protests were just a product of the process of reurbanization of the college-educated classes that has taken place over the past 30 years.

It almost impossible to remember how much activist culture was changed by the September 11th attacks and the wars that followed and continue today. The activist marches of that time were overwhelmingly preoccupied with the aesthetics of branded advertising in public space and McDonalds and Starbucks as symbols of globalization, led by people like Kalle Lasn of Adbusters and Naomi Klein, who wrote the book No Logo. It all seems incredibly superficial and practically irrelevant today. I always thought that the idea of protesting against the World Trade Organization itself was pretty seriously misguided, considering it was the only international organization that enabled poorer countries to negotiate for fairer trade policies, even if they were inevitably ignored by the more powerful countries. A small, poor, landlocked dictatorship like Burkina Faso was at least able to argue publicly against agricultural subsidies in the developed world, which it pointed out were creating more poverty than all the international aid in the world could compensate for. So it would have made more sense to me if the protests had been focused toward advocacy of specific issues, like an end to agricultural subsidies, rather than being against globalization, or against capitalism, which are pretty improbably abstract things to fight against with makeup and signs, or by breaking a Starbucks window, though that is pretty fun.

There was also the irreconcilable conflict between a critique of international trade as promoting inequality between richer and poorer countries and a critique from the point of view of nationalist labor interests: the first one called for freer trade--or should have--the second called for protectionism and enforcement of international environmental and labor standards. Somehow both joined in common confusion: anti-globalization. The reaction of Islamic extremism to cultural globalization would practically erase all that.

BILLIONAIRES FOR BUSH

The pre-9-11 protests were more entertaining and made more of a splash than the dreary anti-war protests that followed, with the return of all the hack puppeteers and bubble-letter poster-ers and face painters and angry costumes and overwrought street theater and false fake-preachers. I appreciated the festive presence of the Hungry March Band at these events, and Billionaires for Bush was among the rare humorous and entertaining exceptions, organized by a group of Living Theater performers, but they had been doing that since the 1960s. Judged by its result all of it was pretty meaningless and ineffective, along with being artistically uninspired, which is worse when you're writing about aesthetic innovations in contemporary protest movements.

In the aftermath of the failure of these large-scale protests, however, a more localized community-based, small-scale political art practice has emerged that has been moderately effective at the scale in which it operates. A number of groups whose events and projects I have participated in were represented at the Creative Time event, including Kickstarter, which I used to help fund a public art festival in my neighborhood. The Bruce High Quality Foundation University creates a great community for sharing ideas and meeting people and collaborating in the art world, despite their terrible presentation. They always seem to be trying to thumb their nose at the fancy art world that they have quickly become players in, which I respect. FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics), which helps raise funding for small-scale community-based projects by hosting dinners, in which attendees vote for the best project to give the money to, did an entertaining theatrical piece recounting the story of their organization and why they do what they do.

AGNES DENES, WHEATFIELD--A CONFRONTATION (1982)

It seemed to me that the presentations examining Food as a subject for activist art were the ones that had the most clarity of purpose and effectiveness at a local level. The amazingly sharp and focused keynote by Claire Pentecost inadvertently implied that these small efforts are probably vastly outweighed by the magnitude of the problem of unsustainable agriculture--this is what it sounds like when someone has something to say, finally!--but they're certainly exerting a cultural influence over the way we think about food, and it's having a broadening impact on municipal and federal policy.

My unanswered question for the conference, posed during the Geographies panel to my friend Eyal Weizman, the London-based Israeli architect whose work has immeasurably clarified the way that West Bank colonization processes operate within physical space, and Trevor Paglen, whose work I admire as a kind of aestheticized reporting on secret military practices, has to do with what it means to talk about "revolutions" in public art. Almost no one seemed at all concerned about indicating whether the work had any practical social and political effects. What is the word revolution supposed to mean in this context? The term is normally used to signify the overthrow of political institutions and fundamental changes to the social order. Here I think the word was only meant to signify well-intentioned and sometimes genuinely positive local practices that are promising and could some day have an impact if they were more widely adopted.

Creative Time, for its part, is an organization that has always relied on money from the city, state and federal government, along with grants from foundations, and was established through an integral collaboration of then-young artists with downtown development agencies, the city government, and real-estate developers. So it is not, and has never been, a revolutionary arts organization. It nonetheless has had a profound influence on the way public art is practiced, making the city itself and the world as we find it the site of artistic intervention, usually through temporary installations that are performative and interactive and make space more public in active and participatory ways. This is "revolutionary," in the weakest sense, in relation to the way public art used to mean statues installed in squares--but not revolutionary in any proper social or political sense. It's this confusion that reigned throughout the conference. Local practices that in many cases seemed to be temporarily effective in their small specific contexts and had modest social or political implications were often being presumptuously asked to claim a broader importance, though in most cases they would be unnoticeable beyond the clique of the art world or beyond their own local environment.

BRING TO LIGHT, NUIT BLANCHE NY

The conference came on the heels of a project I produced in my own neighborhood with the help of a group of young public space activists and associates from a class at the Bruce High Quality Foundation. We had the thrilling experience of temporarily transforming five blocks of the neighborhood from a series of underutilized industrial warehouses with almost no public access into a place lit up with art and video projections with thousands of people walking through the streets. My hope for the project was always that it could be made into a tool of advocacy for activating areas along the Greenpoint waterfront and making them public in a participatory way, a realization of a theory of applied urbanist reporting in which the investigation of spaces, the critique of their use, and the exposure of public policy could be done through realized projects in physical space alongside words in print and online.

No one had any illusions about the embeddedness of this project in real-estate development processes that were inevitably going to increase the value of property for the owner of the warehouses and make it easier for the buildings to be turned, according to current zoning law, into high-rise condos. Within that framework, though, I believe that participatory art and public programs can influence the way that public areas of the waterfront are planned and designed, and articulate new possibilities for their use. A window was briefly opened into a part of the city and how it could be transformed. It will take years and maybe decades to find out whether it will have any lasting impact.

SMALL SCALE, BIG CHANGE OPENING

There's also a worthwhile show curated by Andres Lepik at the MoMA, Small Scale, Big Change about a similar set of concerns in architecture, part of a really refreshing activist streak at the ultra-establishment institution that is totally unexpected--and that Barry Bergdoll has played a leading role in with his amazing Rising Currents show. A wonderful exhibition at Exit Art compiles an impressive body of research on the history of alternative spaces founded to address the needs of young activist artists, which also has an important relation to these issues.

In this context, I have to just mention the mixed efforts so far of the new Storefront director to engage public issues in architecture. I'm rooting for her and the institution, but I'm disappointed by the apparent capture of the proudly independent institution by Columbia GSAPP, another ultra-establishment institution that is less--almost not at all--engaged in important issues of our time. My friend Olympia Kazi is doing somewhat better at the helm of the Van Alen Institute, opening up some useful discussions, such as one on Ecological Urbanism and Green Gone Wrong, as part of her Reading Room Exchange series. I'm less interested in the subject of biennials for another series of discussions: they are already overexposed and overrated. But I'm especially concerned by the obsession of both institutions with securing associations with the most established names in the field, probably a symptom of the endless drive for fundraising, rather than focusing on finding new ways to engage issues, influence policy, reveal new practices, produce projects, and include young people outside the mainstream who have no institutional representation, no funding, and not many jobs either.

EXIT ART, ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES

I attended an absolutely pointless discussion at Storefront last week about Bernard Tschumi's new book--previous dean of the Columbia architecture school--that only reeaffirmed that he was out of ideas, as he practically admitted. I like his work generally, but the content here was utterly lacking. It was part of a new series of discussions called Interrogations, but the "interrogation" featured Tschumi and the British ultra-establishment eminence grise Peter Cook congratulating each other for their supposed importance. Add a couple more architects with exaggerated bad English accents and you've got a Monty Python skit. Apart from being complete self-absorbed bores, I was infuriated their failure to talk about anything of any distant relevance to the time we are living in. Words are fooorrmms. Really! Your drawings are so preciiise. It took everything for me to restrain myself from shouting, "What are you talking about and why should it matter in any way to us?" Yes, I also attended because of the significant names, but their words had no content.

What I'm looking for in all of this activist artistic culture is inspired work that has a transformative effect on spaces, discussions that bring important issues and facts into the public sphere, institutions that create communities and serve underrepresented groups, and ultimately, moderately effective practices with a demonstrable impact on public understanding, government policy, or people's lives. Otherwise it better be really fucking beautiful and cause everyone, especially architects, to stop speaking.
-STEPHEN ZACKS

Nuit Blanche NY: Illuminating the Greenpoint Waterfront

2010-10-01T14:37:00.046-04:00

You might have noticed that this year a huge new park has opened in Brooklyn, designed by the renowned landscape architect Michael Van Valkenberg. I was kind of laughing at its design a few years ago in a commentary about how waterfront parks are all soporific cow-grazing fields envisioned for mothers to push strollers and lonely people to lean over railings as if getting ready to jump, how there's rarely any drinking or eating imagined or incorporated, and nothing I would normally consider to be fun. The Brooklyn Bridge Park turned out beautiful visually. Its tiny cafe has more than a dozen tables. A lot of people lying on the grass. The park is great to look at.

Meanwhile, in Greenpoint, I've been waiting since 1998 for a little glimmer of legal public access to the East River in the neighborhood. Currently the entire Greenpoint stretch of the East River waterfront consists of private property, largely owned by Orthodox and Hasidic property owners, and street ends landscaped with fences and concrete blocks. Our amazing North Brooklyn parks administrator Stephanie Thayer was able to temporarily open the Transmitter Park site at the end of Greenpoint Avenue until the construction documents and money were collected, and it's now under construction for a 2012 opening.

On the Newtown Creek, the first phase of George Trakas's incredible waterfront walkway next to the sewage treatment plant was completed a couple years ago through the good graces of the Percent for Art program, and there's also a kind of parking lot park at the end of Manhattan Avenue. There's another East River park planned in the cove between Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Bushwick Inlet Park, which the city is still assembling parcels for. On the Williamsburg side a soccer field has been built and a community center is nearing construction. Otherwise, the bulk of the parks and waterfront walkways planned for the area are dependent on new construction that may or may not happen as a result of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning plan approved in 2005.

So a couple of months ago, when Anna Muessig, a curator friend from the Bruce High Quality Foundation University class I participated in last year, sent me a note about a public art event called Bring to Light being planned on Oak Street, within spitting distance from the waterfront and right in front of the Greenpoint Terminal Market, I was curious. It turned out that a group of young public space advocates called DoTank: Brooklyn who met through their work with Project for Public Spaces had been talking to businesses on the block about closing down the street for a Nuit Blanche, an all-night festival of light art and projection, in the manner of similar festivals in Europe and Canada. They had already sent out a call for proposals and received almost 50 submissions. It seemed like a great chance to talk about the waterfront issues in the neighborhood, try to get access to spaces on the river, and program them in a way that imagined a future public use.

I started sending emails to anyone who might be able to help with the process of getting a street activity permit from the city to close down the block and install art. Ken Farmer, one of the DoTank: Brooklyn organizers who led the permitting application process, was told that it was impossible. The local police precinct said it was too late, there were no more permits being issued. The permit office rejected our application, saying we could not close multiple blocks, and we needed to have the participation of a nonprofit organization and the Department of Cultural Affairs. Stephanie Thayer immediately said the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn would be our nonprofit sponsor. When we needed a tax-exempt ID, she sent them that. She suggested I call Cathy Peake, the constituent services liaison for 50th district State Assemblyman Joe Lentol, who immediately sent a letter to the Department of Cultural Affairs supporting our efforts. Anna Muessig called Rami Metal, the constituent services liaison to North Brooklyn for our city councilman, Steve Levin, who immediately mobilized dozens of people to call the Department of Community Affairs to ask them to give us a permit. The street permit office quickly relented, on the condition we stop calling. They said they would give us the permit for one block, that we had to choose one of three we applied for, that the event had to end by 9 PM, and there could be no amplified sound.

The process dragged on for another month, we got the support of more local politicians, advocacy groups, and neighborhood businesses. We chose Noble Street as the block to close when the residents of Oak Street expressed doubts about the event. We got in touch with Philip Tuan, one of the owners of From the Source, an Indonesia reclaimed-wood furniture company that has been in the Greenpoint Terminal Market since long before the fire in 2005, and told him about the event. They loved the idea of being a part of it. Penny Emmet shepherded the organizing process with us and Kristin Riccio took over its realization.

Another friend from the BHQFU class, artist and film producer Ethan Vogt and I started discussions with the site manager and agents of Seret Studios, the film production facility that rents out sites in the Greenpoint Terminal Market. We wanted the event to flow inevitably through the warehouse down the alleyway and culminate in a spectacular view of midtown from across the water, with an afterparty in the Seret Studios space. Local residents and community groups deeply mistrust the building owners and told us we should have nothing to do with them, but I believed that if we approached their agents openly and had discussions in good faith about the project, they would see how much it was contributing to the value of the property and the community. They wanted a minimum of $4,000, wanted us to apply for a temporary place of assembly permit from the Department of Buildings, and said we couldn't have alcohol. We tried to raise the money. My architect friend Philip Hesslein came with us to tour the site and advise us on its compliance with the fire code and buildings department regulations. He had serious doubts. There was a tornado.

I called some of the amazing artists I've met or written about over the years, Jenny Holzer, Leo Villareal, George Trakas, Krzysztof Wodiczko, to see if one of their patrons would sponsor an installation in the spectacular alleyway. It was far too late, less than three weeks before the event. We scaled back, tried to persuade them to accept $1,000 to allow us to use just the alleyway and the courtyard, project light on their buildings and get access to the water. They didn't accept. They wanted to prohibit any of their tenants from participating. Bob Fireman, the owner of From the Source, called the landlord and he said as long as they didn't touch any of the property they weren't leasing it was fine. Eventually, the owner reluctantly signed a letter allowing us to project light onto the buildings, which was required for the street activity permit.

This Saturday, October 2nd, it's happening, and in almost as big a way as I would have hoped. Sadly, for me, there will be no public event on the waterfront. But three square blocks of waterfront adjacent buildings, streets, a park, and a ten story water tower will be lit up with projections, beams of light, installations, and various art projects by nearly 80 artists. Our street activity permit for Noble Street is until 11:30 PM, and our park permit is until 1 AM. An event hosted by From the Source with lounging areas, an absinthe bar, Ahasi beer, Original Sin Hard Cider, and food vendors recommended by Joann Kim of the Greenpoint Food Market will provide rare public access to the guts of the 19th century Greenpoint Terminal Market, with its skywalks and courtyards, from 7 to 11:30 PM. Fowler Arts Collective will be having an opening party for its gallery and artist studios on the second floor. Le Gamin will host a $40 preview fundraiser from 6 to 8 in their new restaurant across the street from the festival. Greenpoint Open Studios will be having events and openings in industrial buildings and apartment houses all over the neighborhood all weekend.

My band the Depressionaires will be playing in the American Playground, which will be installed with projections and textiles and stand-alone light art pieces. Please come, and support the scene if you can. We think it will be a beautiful event. - STEPHEN ZACKS

This Summer's Playful Urban Engagements

2010-09-07T16:06:00.034-04:00

Back after a long break despite many many projects that deserved to be written about this summer so much more than they were and more than I will here. The summer began with the not-completely futile effort to engage the land-use and zoning process by testifying at a hearing of the New York City Council on the New Domino development. That project will continue in other forms in relation to the Domino site and many others and built lots of useful alliances, including with the old-school provocateurs at Ex-Static Press and Urbanum Tremendum, who are just issuing a downloadable, mystical ode to the theory, practice, and meaning of graffiti writing, In-Krylon-Not-Sharpie.

Harvard GSD issued its crucial tome on Ecological Urbanism, which defines an emerging field of research and practice that makes sustainability in architecture and urbanism as seductive and intellectually engaging as the subject deserves to be and must be to exercise a compelling influence. It will be the subject of a discussion on September 24 at the Van Alen as a part of its new Reading Room series, launched earlier in the summer with a talk with Sharon Zukin, Rosten Woo, and Samuel Zipp on Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York and CUP's new book Street Value: Shopping, Planning and Politics at Fulton Mall, another must read.

Speaking of which, CUP's latest Making Policy Public pamphlet, Immigrants Beware, focuses on the particular dangers to immigrants of getting caught in the criminal justice system. It's downloadable for free as a PDF. A close friend of mine who has been defending people threatened with deportation for many years was excited to be able to use this to explain the law to his clients. Their new project on Community Benefits Agreements also looks promising.

Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu of So-Il's Pole Dance project for WarmUp was the most playful winner of the Young Architects Program that I can remember. This is Kyra Johannesen's dance piece choreographed for the installation.

Cassie Thornton and Christopher Kennedy created School of the Future in a park next to a BQE onramp and turned this odd, neglected place into an extraordinary site for community outreach, an elementary school classroom, experimental arts education for adults, and lots and lots of playful moments and potluck feasts. I walked there frequently in the early afternoon for a break and was unable to tear myself away from the discussions.

A valuable show and series of talks on the long-term policy influence of the Lindsay administration, despite its ostensible failure to prevent the city from falling into crisis, at the Museum of the City of New York and the Center for Architecture. Don't miss the upcoming September 15 talk, Who Broke New York? John V. Lindsay & the Fiscal Crisis, featuring a heavy-duty panel of experts on the 1970s fiscal crisis, New York's recovery, and the lessons for today's lawmakers.

Socrates Sculpture Park had a wonderful series of installations for its annual summer show that were captivating explorations of material and site.

The Living Pavilion on Governors Island by Ann Ha and Behrang Behin installed a curving archway composed of recycled upside-down milkcrates planted with shade-tolerant liriopes to create an intimate shelter. I had the pleasure and good fortune to participate in a crit of Behin's amazing GSD engineering thesis project a few years ago, advised by Hashim Sarkis, which rethought the idea of a carbon-neutral city in the Arabian peninsula. It's great to see him collaborating on projects like these and working for the renamed Polshek Partnership office, now known as Ennead.

A rolling Mason Jar Cart designed by Janette Kim and Josh Draper and manned by Christopher Kennedy for Groups and Spaces to explore and share knowledge of artist groups and spaces in communities.

Swell, a great show by architect and curator Jacqueline Miro and Tim Nye on California surf art at Nyehaus Gallery, Friedrich Petzel Gallery and Metro Pictures.

Assemblyman Joe Lentol and Joann Kim fear the flying water balloons.

A water-balloon fight on India Street attended by Assemblyman Joe Lentol of the state's 50th district, who has been extremely helpful in supporting the light-art festival I'm producing in Greenpoint on October 2nd, Bring to Light, along with the indefatigable Stephanie Thayer of the Open Space Alliance and our new David Yassky, Steve Levin, representing the 33rd district in the City Council, with the tireless help of his Brooklyn Community Board 1 constituent service assistant Rami Metal. You can help support it as well on Kickstarter.

The Assemblyman looking brave in the face of battle.

The Assemblyman was on hand to raise money for another project happening the same weekend, Greenpoint Open Studios, a celebration of local artist studios, workshops, and apartments, open to visitors for one weekend this fall, October 1-3. You can donate to this great project, organized by Joann Kim, who also put together the temporarily ill-starred Greenpoint Food Market, at IndieGoGo.

Nicolai Ouroussoff: Radically Ambivalent Servant of the Master Class

2010-07-18T10:03:00.033-04:00

I keep coming back to one piece written by Nicolai Ouroussoff at the beginning of the recession in December of 2008, entitled "It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out" as the touchstone for everything that's wrong with architecture criticism. Here we have the overwhelmingly dominant New York Times architecture critic, the single-most powerful voice in architecture writing--not by virtue of quality of writing or acuity of vision or eloquence but by the stupid circumstance of having been hand-picked by the previous architecture critic--reflecting on the past decade in which he was responsible more than any other single voice for saying what was good or bad in the world of architecture. His conclusion: "one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history" might have been merely a "fantasy," a "poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion" that "threatened to transform [Manhattan's] skyline into a tapestry of individual greed." "Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich," he wrote. The "high-end bubble has popped" and the "public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted." But a lot of "wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad," especially a luxury skyscraper by Jean Nouvel that he dearly hopes will be completed (pictured above), along with a Whitney Museum satellite in the awful Meatpacking District by Renzo Piano.

It's not that the self-righteousness of this look backward was exactly hypocritical: Ouroussoff had been hedging each and every hyperbolic celebration of so-called starchitecture with a harsh condemnation of the capitalist and oligarchical system that was producing it. (He gives us a helpful cheat sheet here of the favored few: Jean Nouvel, especially, but also the half-dozen or so famously extraordinary "talents" he has been puffing up over the years: Koolhaas, Hadid, Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, and secondarily, Libeskind, UN Studio, Foster, Piano.) I had always seen this as part and parcel of the service aspect of architectural writing: as one friend, an architecture writer in Podgorica, Montenegro surmised, he has to write about famous architects. Does he? asked a New York architect. But assuming that he must, there's an equally powerful constituency of haters of contemporary architecture, preservationists, locals feeling threatened by new developments, the 99 percent of the city and the country that sees this kind of architecture as an imposition on its aesthetic sensibility and lifestyle. So the hedging, so I thought, is just covering all the bases.

On what basis, though, was he condemning this architecture of the rich, all the while glorifying its aesthetic quality, these "triumphs" piercing the "clouds of a bleak time"? In the previous year-end wrap-up, in December of 2007, he rhapsodized about a year in which serious architecture had arrived in abundance in the form of "major architectural landmarks" like a corporate headquarters by Gehry on the West Side Highway, a luxury condo by Nouvel in Soho, Bernard Tschumi's Blue Building in the Lower East Side (more luxury condos), and the New York Times building (another corporate headquarters) by Renzo Piano. Ground broken additionally on a high-end condo building by Gehry, and even then the promise of the vaunted Nouvel luxury skyscraper next to the MoMA, the greatest symbol of his reign as NY Times critic, it being the one building he has repeatedly championed, begging for its completion as originally designed by the hand of the Jean God-vel. All of these works of architecture have a dark side, however, in that the "majority of today's projects serve the interests of a small elite," suggesting that the "wave of gorgeous new buildings... [are] a mere cultural diversion." Moreover, a series of large-scale projects, including the Moynihan Station project, Columbia's Manhattanville expansion, and the World Trade Center site all heighten "our creeping awareness that when serious money is at stake, business will be as usual."

We could go further back and trace this theme throughout his six and a half years of writings--I'm especially fond of the ever-pompous and contradictory "Nice Tower! Who's Your Architect?" for its classic strategy of raising up the glory of these "preening, sometimes beautiful, sometimes obtrusive [luxury condo] towers [that] could well be the last testament to this century's first gilded age" before slapping them down as "gorgeous tokens of a rampantly narcissistic age." But there's not much more light to be be found there. Our basic theme is already established in these couple of would-be "thought pieces": a total failure to reconcile the architecture being glorified with the means by which it is being produced, the manner in which it is used, and the way it functions in and serves the city.

One of my favorite absurdities produced by this irreconciliation is the review of Nouvel's condo building on the West Side Highway in which he glorifies it in part for having a representational relationship with the adjacent women's prison, thus reflecting the "grit" of the city: "Rising on the brief stretch of 11th Avenue that doubles as the West Side Highway, directly across the street from the billowing glass forms of Frank Gehry’s IAC building and abutting a somber brick women’s prison on the other side, the tower is part of a taut composition of disparate — even conflicting — urban realities. Its shifting appearance in the skyline is a sly commentary on the conflict between public and private realms that is an inevitable byproduct of gentrification."

Not only that, it also has windows that allow you to see the neighboring prison: "The care with which the views are framed — reinforced by the windows’ simple heavy steel borders — is such that you can almost feel the city tugging at you...the building is a lesson on how to navigate an enlightened path in an era of extremes. It’s not utopia, but it demonstrates what a major talent can accomplish when he focuses his mind on a small corner of the city." This is what happens when a critic interviews the architect, and the architect alone, then uncritically swallows the entirety of his rationale, this ridiculous flimflam, practically undigested.

The effect of this composition on the critic is, as always, disconcerting and disorienting: "As you approach the corner, the facade’s riotous forms suddenly come into view, and it’s startling. Close up, the steel frames that support the windows look beefier, and the effect is more frenetic...Some of the window frames have been left intentionally empty, so that it may take a moment to sort out whether you’re indoors or out." I have described Ouroussoff's work as a sort of Pentecostalist criticism in this respect, since the experience of the architecture often resembles spirit possession or speaking in tongues. The architecture is "mesmerizing," "hauntingly gorgeous," "spectacular," "crystalline," suggesting "an atavistic preoccupation with celestial heights," and on. All the while he fiercely condemns, in ever higher pitches of emotion and contempt, the worldly means by which our "great citadel of capitalism" is being produced.

These conflicting forces are brought into relief through a not very delicate procedure. Each review holds up the review-worthy figure of the "talented" architect having produced a work of "serious" architecture--the only type of architecture dignified by reviews by the New York Times' only architecture critic. (The unanimous conclusion of our Public School New York discussion on the subject was that even if the NY Times insists on continuing to foist this most uncritical critic on the world, they should at least have one other voice, another critic to provide some balance. Why more than one for film, art and other culture but not for architecture?) Once this work, and this talent, have been raised up to sufficient heights, the straw man of money is brought in to give architecture a good thrashing for producing "pretty baubles, even if they tend to be hollow." And what about the many "inferior", "mediocre" buildings that go unnoticed? He is only interested in reviewing buildings for which budget is apparently never an issue.

Of course, the figure of the Talented Architect is crucial here: he (and almost exclusively he, except Zaha Hadid) must be given free reign to practice his art without restraints on costs, to produce Serious Architecture. But the only types of projects that this is possible for are projects for the Rich People. If this is meant to be architecture criticism serving as cultural analysis, it's pretty clumsy. It's not very useful for looking at how good architecture gets produced in the city by hard-working architects with actual budgets. These are architects with just as much "talent," if by talent one means great educational training, extremely thoughtful design processes, exceptional sensitivity to clients, wildly original form-making, extraordinary ability to think about materials, capacity to bring projects in under budget, and every award except the vastly overrated Pritzker, and thus slightly lower name recognition. (But probably only 50,000 people, at best, around the world recognize any of these names, judged by the readership of design magazines.)

On the whole, I don't disagree with Ouroussoff on particular buildings. I generally like the same buildings he likes, hate the same ones he hates, and I embrace the notions of tallness and vision that he celebrates. I don't enjoy reading him, though, and not only because of the pomposity of his descriptions, or the repeated resort to the long-dead notion of "talent," rooted in a prelapsarian Romantic idea of genius that is absolutely useless and irrelevant to the society we live in. Where he is grievously in error is in his broader failure to grasp the city as an economic entity and to consider architecture as a product of the prevailing economic forces that are creating it. You cannot like these buildings while condemning these forces. You cannot help improve the city, or be a critic of architecture, without being attentive to them. It's not enough to regard the whole contemporary city as a province of the rich. It is that, in part, in certain places, but it's also an incredibly complex and lively place with so many other things happening that remain untouched by this sort of architectural criticism that I'm tempted to say that the New York Times hasn't really run an actual architecture review in about a decade. If this is architecture, what are the other 8.5 million of us doing here? The city will survive. But will architectural criticism? Should it? - STEPHEN ZACKS

A Call for New Vision for Urban Development at the Domino Sugar Site

2010-06-18T14:57:00.037-04:00

I had planned to write about the "poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion" that is New York architecture criticism this week, the violent contradiction between its wild celebration of genius and its fire-and-brimstone condemnation of the economic system that generates the architecture being valorized, due to its utter lack of a framework for understanding urban economics. Then I got side-tracked by events and writing architecture criticism, or architecture reporting, at any rate. I was also going to write about the fun mushroom-hunting adventure in the New Cavalry Cemetery in Sunset Park with the very cool Janette Kim and Chris Kennedy as part of the Safari 7 project and the Queens Art Express, which began as a part of a project examining the city's landscape against the backdrop of the 7 train's path, a fantastic look at a slice of the communities and ecologies of New York.

I was also going to take that opportunity to talk about what a state of disarray the Columbia graduate architecture program otherwise remains in after years of inattention and institutional inertia, with a lot of the same faddish people who seem better equipped to train young fops than practicing architects still there--despite great new hires like Vishaan Chakrabarti and the emerging landscape architecture program--but maybe this has changed since I last spoke with some of the graduates and great people nonetheless teaching there. (I never totally understood who Mark Wigley was but he seems more politically connected with the architect establishment than intellectually engaged in the world. From what I gather his main credential is having curated the largely discredited Deconstructivist Architecture show more than 20 years ago. What does Columbia GSAPP have to say and what is it doing in relation to this enormous, dynamic, evolving city we live in? Producing more speculative studios? I love theory but the intellectual tradition that his framework for architecture criticism is grounded in is extremely outdated and useless for making anything happen. Columbia needs to take its great housing studio program led by Michael Bell and use it to start contributing to a vision for New York City affordable housing development that can be made into a reality. Bell ran a wonderful studio last year on Hunters Point South, the site on the edge of Long Island City that is being developed into a massive complex of 5,000 units of affordable housing by the NYC Economic Development Corporation, but without the studios being eventually gauged against to the economic feasibility of the designs, they cannot contribute to a new model for housing in the city. However, Rafael Vinoly's design for New Domino would not have made it past the first week in Bell's studio. It is a massing diagram, not a design much less a concept.)

Instead I ended up embroiled in discussions with a group of North Brooklyn natives and long-time residents who are kind of disappointed by the results of the rezoned waterfront so far. Though I had been arguing with them in defense of condo development for many months, I had to agree that it was merely OK, and the design, planning, programming, and overall vision could be so much better. I wrote a letter in support of their call for a new model of development in the plan for the New Domino project currently seeking approvals from the City Council, posted it as a note on Facebook, and invited people to sign on to it. I added a statement that in a very provisional way assembles some ideas to suggest another "vision" for the site and the neighborhood, inspired by my friends whose Domino University provocation started the conversation. I blame them. I intend to read whatever part of it is readable in 3 minutes to the City Council on Monday. There will also be a rally against the project at 10 AM led by some local pols, Steve Levin, Joe Lentol, and Vito Lopez, the head of the local Democratic machine, and one in favor of it at 9:30 led by district Council member Diana Reyna. (None of them even mention it on their websites.) If you would like to join me, read a part of the rest, or contribute your own new vision, please join us, or sign on to this statement:

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Dear Honorable Members of the New York City Council:

As a part of the New York City community of architects, designers, and urbanists, we recognize that condo developments in upzoned areas have brought enormous benefits to the public through new tax revenues, high-quality architecture, affordable housing, waterfront parks, and remediation of brownfield sites. But as the market has seemed to have been over-saturated by condos and the rental vacancy rate remains unaffected by the inclusionary rezoning process, we are inviting you to consider a new model of development for the Domino Sugar site, one of the great icons of manufacturing in the area of North Brooklyn and, indeed, the United States.

As you may know, Domino was the first sugar company to use branding to sell its products, and it remains one of the most recognizable brands in the country. We believe that the current plan to preserve the landmarked buildings and provide open space, affordable housing, waterfront access, and generous community space is a good start, but we think there can be a more ambitious and visionary approach to this site—and to waterfront development in general—which embraces the history of Domino and uses the site to prove that there is another way.

As a city, we have progressed far beyond the point when we had to beg developers to invest in New York. We are in the unique position of having investors compete for the right to put billions of dollars into complicated sites that require hundreds of millions in infrastructure, even during the worst recession in decades. The Domino site presents an absolutely unparalleled opportunity, and we ask whether its redevelopment according to the same model befits its enormous significance. While we have made great progress, this model still has not lived up to the standards for design and urbanism that the city must aspire to for the next century. The Domino Sugar site is Williamsburg’s High Line. It is clear that the market is still supporting well-designed, high-quality architecture and urbanism. These unique sites are opportunities to generate new forms of urbanism and orders of magnitude greater revenue, instead of producing the high volumes of similar units that are now languishing on the market. We believe that Rafael Vinoly is a superb architect capable of great work, but this inclusionary condo model does not permit the creativity and dynamism that could be supported by this architect, this community, this site, or this city. We ask you to send this plan back for revision, to incorporate the care and attention to detail in site planning and land use that it deserves.

As a body empowered with the ability to accept or reject this plan but not, perhaps, to propose a new model of development, we ask you to embrace a new vision. We all remember the terrible plight of New York during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, and we never want to go back to a time when burning buildings was more profitable than designing new ones. Rejecting a 1.5 billion dollar investment in our city, especially one that is loaded with community benefits, is an ambitious step. It’s a vote of confidence in New York City: that we can do better, that we can begin to create a city and an architecture, and a model of urban development that is fitting for a world-class city, a city that embraces its immigrant communities, a city that is in constant transformation as every generation takes hold of it and reshapes it for itself. We ask you to consider the Domino site an example for what can be accomplished in every neighborhood and every district in the city with more attention to detail, more care, more originality, and a greater level of inclusion, not represented by percentages of units, but by a vision that connects to the history of the place and the future of the city. The Domino University plan is the beginning of a process that can begin to impact the core problem that we still face after decades of redevelopment: a rental vacancy rate that remains below three percent. We need new housing in New York City, but not of this kind. It's time to explore a new way, and the Domino site is the place where it can begin to happen.

Respectfully,

James Andrews, artist and teacher
Magda Biernat-Webster, photographer
Kristi Cameron, editor
Cameron Campbell, designer
Daniel D'Oca, architect, planner and professor
Dennis Farr, community activist
Deborah Gans, architect and professor
Christoph Gielen, photographer
Lisa Kahane, photographer
Nadya Karyo, design talent headhunter
Olympia Kazi, director of the Van Alen Institute
Janette Kim, landscape architect and professor
Cedomir Kovacev, designer
Sara Kraushaar, filmmaker
Ryan Gabrielle Kuonen, community organizer
Garret Linn, artist
William Menking, architect, founder and editor of The Architect's Newspaper
Alan W. Moore, artist, activist, and co-founder of ABC No Rio
Amber G. Myers, activist
Thaddeus Pawlowski, architect
Ethan Pettit, urbanist
Arleen Schloss, performance artist and video pioneer
Jesse Seegers, Masters of Architecture candidate 2013, Princeton School of Architecture
Astrid Smitham, architecture graduate student, ETH Zurich
Amy Stringer-Mowatt, architect
Eva Schicker, photographer
James Trimarco, writer
Stephen Zacks, writer and reporter

A Vision for the Future

As architects, designers, urbanists, and city leaders we are constantly volunteering and being asked to imagine new ways of creating spaces and adapting old spaces to new uses. We participate in competitions and design studios, we engage in discussions and write reviews, we look at plans and proposals and give them our approval or disapproval. We are rarely agents of urban development and site programming. But now, with New York City having achieved a unique status as a “superstar” city, we are in a position to create a new model that corresponds to our idea of what a great city should be. A $150 million dollar investment in the High Line produced billions of dollars of value-added real estate investment around it; for a comparable investment in historic preservation and environmental remediation on the Williamsburg waterfront, we can transform Domino into a social, educational, economic, and commercial center for one of the most creative and diverse communities in the world.

The Domino Sugar factory is situated at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, which connects north Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan. The area is home to many of the city’s immigrant communities and a foothold for young migrants from the rest of the country and the world. It is a community filled with entrepreneurs busy inventing software, designing spaces, opening shops, crafting objects, making clothing, producing magazines and newspapers and websites, working in and starting some of the best restaurants, fashion houses, and design firms in the city. They’re college graduates turning rooftops into farms, and kitchens into start-up companies selling organic food and creating beautiful and unheard of fusions of ethnic cuisines. They’re milling the interiors and industrial designed products and modeling the high-design spaces of Manhattan and the rest of the city and country. They’re teaching in the city’s expanding universities, creating new musical genres, writing movies, books, and dramas for television. They’re performing scientific and medical research, curing diseases, and transforming our ability to live healthy lives.

Instead of taking the profits from market-rate condos and using it to pay investors and fund other market-rate developments, Domino Art City would be a self-sustaining development that nourishes creative and immigrant communities in the city. We propose to redevelop the site in such a way that 70 percent of the 2,200 housing units will be raw live/ work rent-stabilized units freely adaptable by tenants and maintained by a private nonprofit management company. These units would be rented on a preferential basis through a special lottery system to second-generation neighborhood residents unable to afford market-rate rents, past area residents displaced by development, and new under 35-year-old migrants to New York who will apply for artist and immigrant residencies. Another 30 percent of the units will be devoted to supportive housing for at-risk youth aging out of foster care, low-income tenants from other areas of the city, and other groups in need of supportive services, with the help of state and federal funds. The cost of site preparation and historic preservation will be funded by grants, matching funds, and the sale of tax-exempt bonds.

The 140,000 square feet of community space already allocated within the plan will be designed to accommodate the Domino Educational Community, including an elementary school, kitchens for entrepreneurial start-up food companies, an urbanism think-tank and development company that conceives and produces community-based projects, expandable annexes for educational workshops, green urbanism research and training, pilot schools such as Domino University, the School of the Future, and Public School New York, and a large open raw warehouse space for ad hoc musical and performance events, flea markets, exhibitions, art installations, and other large-scale indoor gatherings.

The area facing the waterfront esplanade would be rented to small-scale businesses and revenue generating recreational facilities, including a large beer-garden, a foodie village, and an amusement park. A part of the facility would be specifically programmed by stakeholders from the Eastern European, Puerto Rican, Italian, and Jewish communities that have made the area their home, along with the West Indian communities to the southeast whose historical relationship to sugar plantations and Domino sugar is particularly important.

This growing, vibrant community would be a part of a new vision for downtown Williamsburg that would extend its benefits to the under-served communities of the JMZ subway line, extending into Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Brownsville, Cypress Hills, Ridgewood, Middle Village, Woodhaven and Richmond Hill. A new subway stop for the JMZ trains at Broadway and Bedford and a reconfigured route that fluidly links it to the commercial and business centers midtown would ease pressure on the L train and support billions of dollars of new investment extending to the east. The subway stop would be integrated into an urban design plan for the transportation infrastructure of downtown Williamsburg, where automobile traffic from the Williamsburg Bridge and the BQE overpass haplessly intersect with the elevated JMZ train, the bus depot, and the pedestrian overpass. This would be integrated with the new landscape design for the BQE trench currently being undertaken by Susannah Drake of Dland Studio.

A series of public forums and short competitions would be held, including an ideas competition for the programming and overall landscape urbanism scheme for the site, an urban design competition for the downtown Williamsburg transportation infrastructure, and then the Domino site would be divided into separate parts to be designed by several different architecture firms to maintain the fine-grained character and diversity of the city.

ABOVE: An image from Dland Studio's study of a Cobble Hill section of the BQE: RECONNECTION STRATEGIES: BQE TRENCH IN BROWNSTONE BROOKLYN. It has expanded this work to the Williamsburg section of the BQE.

Towards a Greater City

This project if fine. It's OK. You should vote for it if you want New York to be fine. You should vote against it if you think we can make great neighborhoods. Don't just vote no. Let's start a process by which we can make this project great. Let's form a working group within the city's department of design and construction in cooperation with the NYC Economic Development Corporation that actively develops sites like these in neighborhoods everywhere around the city. Let's create special places that we LOVE and think of with affection. The skills and competency are here. We have great architects. They're doing great projects around the world, designing whole neighborhoods and cities. Let's let them work here too.

We'll form a committee composed of appointees from a couple of neighborhood organizations (NAG and OSA), the head of DDC as a representative of the mayor's office (David Burney), representatives from the council (Diana Reyna and Steve Levin), a development expert (Vishaan Chakrabarti), a representative of the city's Economic Development Corporation, a few architecture experts (James Corner, Mark Robbins), and a representative of the MTA.

We'll hold a 6-week competition for ideas for the Domino site and its relation to the transportation infrastructure of downtown Williamsburg that includes two programs, one for downtown Williamsburg, one for the Domino site. We'll have a well-publicized presentation of the ideas in a large warehouse in Williamsburg and take comments from the community. We'll revise the program according to the best ideas for design, development, and urbanism. We'll invite two short lists of architects, one with urban design, planning, engineering and landscape urbanism expertise, the other with architecture and landscape architecture expertise, to create landscape urbanism designs for the sites. Then we'll take that plan, divide it into separate projects for the housing, waterfront, community space, education, transportation, parks, and other components, and issue RFPs for each of them to be designed by separate teams of architects, landscape architects, and engineers.

The link below is a sketch of the initial Domino University proposal on the part of long-time Williamsburg residents and colleagues, Dennis Farr, Ethan Pettit, and Eva Schicker. I think it needs to be expanded and revised and could use the help of professional architects, planners, and developers, but it could be the seed perhaps of a new way of thinking about sites like these that could take advantage of the many other ideas and possibilities out there.
http://www.facebook.com/notes/urbanum-tremendum/domino-university-further-consideration/10150189551780371

William Harvey at Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts has penned an editorial calling for a North Brooklyn creative economy zone that resonates with this project as well.

Notes on N.O.: On representational architecture, political design, the importance of ideas, social and economic processes, and aesthetic judgment

2010-06-07T06:00:00.165-04:00

Several years ago I wrote a slightly unfair article making fun of a vacation house for a Serbian expatriate who emigrated to Ohio that was designed to be built in suburban Belgrade. (Unfair in the sense that he is a young and unrecognized architect, but he submitted it for publication, it landed on my desk, and I thought it was funny.) Now I'm compounding the error by using it as a primary example of the difference between architecture that could conceivably have a real effect in the world and architecture that is emptily representational but has no practical consequences. The house was designed by a one-time student of Peter Eisenman and was intended as a symbolic critique of the NATO bombing campaign of Serbia that helped stop Albanians from being forced out of Kosovo. I bring it up because it reminded me recently of the claim that Jean Nouvel's condo in Chelsea has some representational relationship with an adjacent women's prison that gives it a political significance. This is obviously the kind of nonsense architects spoon feed to critics all the time, and it's part of the responsibility of critics to ridicule them for it, not valorize them. We'll come back to this though.

I've been harping on this a lot lately, but another favorite example of inconsequential political design is the work of Teddy Cruz. Since he continues to appear as a lecturer with a disturbing regularity at any meeting having any vague claim to be about serious issues in architecture and urbanism--one would think that he was the only Latin American architect in the country or the only one talking about immigration issues, and he's so busy lecturing that he usually has to apologetically leave panels early before taking questions to go to his next lecture--I'll take the liberty of criticizing him again in this context. Above is a rendering of a shantytown or series of dwellings designed by Cruz to be built of recycled materials from San Diego exported over the border to Tijuana to build what looks like a flimsy town at the bottom of a future mud-slide. It's a celebration of the ad hoc manner in which people of little means construct their own dwellings and then get crushed by them whenever there's an earthquake, flood, or other natural disaster. (Then Architecture for Humanity can hold a huge competition and architecture schools can go down there and do design studios and build a chicken coop or a soccer field.)

Cruz has been showing this image for probably a decade as part of his broad gloss of the north-south dimension of immigration and the "neo-liberal" economic system that he continually confuses with an imperial system that was destroyed about a half-century ago by two world wars and successive national liberation movements. (What about South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, India, China, South Korea, etc. etc.?) The imperialist critique that he is using is at least a half-century out of date, and there are very real reasons why political scientists don't use these terms any more. They don't work. They don't apply in any useful way to the present organization of the economic and political system. They are not useful for providing more power to disempowered populations. They are not useful for building houses. They are not useful for planning. They don't help explain why the United States has the most open immigration policies of any country in the world and conceives of itself as a nation of immigrants. They have no application except for the purposes of his career lecturing to very politically naive architects with good intentions who have never studied social or political science. This is probably why Cruz has not produced any architecture or changed any zoning regulations or had any useful effect on the lives of the people for whom he claims to work and to speak. He was also written about very uncritically by Ouroussoff--glorified really--relatively early in his Times reign, but that's worthy of its own separate investigation.

Incidentally, Cruz also sees his work as a reaction against the symbolic and representational formal architecture of the previous generation. The problem is that his explicitly political and economic critique of architectural practice, apart from being based on an outdated understanding of contemporary political and economic structures, does not hold itself to a pragmatic standard of trying to achieve real political and economic effects in the world. His critique is so ideological, in fact, that it could not even conceivably have any real consequences. He even admitted in an interview a few years ago, in which he was shocked and angry to be asked implicitly critical questions, that he was against micro-credit regardless of its positive effects and concerned that shantytowns could be "gentrified" if the residents are given title over property! If poor people are granted the ability to buy and sell property and improve their conditions through their own initiative, this is "neo-liberalism."

A few years ago, architect and Columbia professor Michael Bell completed this lovely house in upstate New York, intended as a vacation home for a gay couple, one of them a screenwriter and the other a photo editor and writer. Bell is the kind of architect who cares deeply about ideas and devotes an extraordinary amount of time to coaching and encouraging his students. He committed a huge amount of time and energy to thinking about this house. As a result, it is invested with a lot of ideas, some of which were possible to be realized in it--experiences of visual perception and space that orient the self in relation to other people in the house and produce a very special sense of the natural world--and others that are not really possible--a transformation of consciousness that would extend a political critique of the contemporary social order beyond its practical use as a weekend and summer home for bourgeois intellectuals. That's just to say that I do believe that ideas have consequences and that the unique experiences produced by architectural spaces have the capacity to make us think differently and exist in the world differently, but one has to be very careful about attributing a larger significance to these effects beyond the context in which they are situated.

This addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City by Steven Holl Architects is an extraordinarily beautiful (and expensive, at $550 million) project that takes a similar set of ideas, especially in regard to spatial experience and perception, and applies them to public space (admission is free), so that these effects could have some broader social consequence. As a project partly intended to boost the civic pride, tourism, and international profile of a city still recovering from the decline brought on by suburbanization, I also think it's a kind of work that, when successful, deserves a certain amount of credit for operating in a useful way in relation to its social and economic context.

And finally, I just want to put in a word about Dubai, that much-ridiculed poster-child for the supposed excesses of the Oughts. Here, again, is an architecture that aspires to a larger social and political significance, the building of a modern city-state in a region that has remained crucially at odds with the West and dependent on a single natural resource for its economic relationship with the world. The notion is to build a city that engaged the world and produced a non-petroleum-dependent economy through design, architecture, urban planning, infrastructure, ports, international trade, tourism, new technology, financial markets, and liberal social policies. I don't hesitate to continue to support that project and hope for its recovery from the financial crisis. One could easily ignore the context in which this city is being built and fulminate against "excesses" and conspicuous consumption and "evil paradises," but that would be simply a refusal to try to come to terms with the contemporary world, and not hugely informative or a great service to criticism.

This is an image of a middle-class housing development in Dubai that I found out about by doing the normal research you do as a reporter investigating other aspects of a story that are not being covered. Many many of the master-planned developments are of this non-spectacular nature, built for people working in the technology and financial sectors, which to a large extent has been locating regional headquarters there. This, along with major shipping ports and airports that serve as hubs for the region, is the foundation of the Dubai economy and the basis for the emergence of its tourism sector. This has a slightly tangential relationship to the work we'll be talking about in New York, but it has to do with thinking about the social and economic processes and the extent to which aesthetic judgments bear a relationship with the framework through which their objects are understood to be produced.

Now to the Pentecostalist Criticism of Ouroussoff, a wild celebration of his direct relationship with a few architects possessing a mysterious and extraordinary talent, combined with an equally wild fire-and-brimstone condemnation of the social and economic processes by which their work has been produced in the contemporary world. The bewildering, mesmerizing, delirious, glittering revelations produced by these works and processes may yet have our dear critic speaking in tongues. - STEPHEN ZACKS

And Now For a Word about Sewage, er Biosolids

2010-06-06T08:40:00.024-04:00

On a recent Saturday afternoon (yesterday), the excellent Radical Cartographer (and friend) Lize Mogel was up in Harlem's Riverbank State Park, an incredible landscape built on top of one of the city's biggest sewage treatment plants, for a picnic and talk sponsored by the Whitney Independent Study program and the Design Trust for Public Space. She baked a (delicious) chocolate cake plotting out the locations of the city's sewerage infrastructure and recounted the exciting and harrowing tale of the movements of the city's emanations--from the private sphere of the individual through the public water treatment system, into the arms of private companies, and from there to the various states that allow the sludge to be spread upon the land as "biosolids" for fertilizer.

I live blocks from the Newtown Creek plant (seen here in a view from George Trakas's blossoming Newtown Creek Nature Walk), and one of my first news stories for Metropolis in 2001 was about the Polshek Partnership's redesign and the accompanying park, educational exhibit, and public art installation by Vito Acconci. (This was also NOT a page, needless to say, that the magazine's advertisers were clamoring to be placed opposite.)

The takeaway from this perhaps is that humans have been living in a terrain composed of recycled biomass since the beginning of time, but we have only been introducing man-made chemicals, heavy metals, biological agents, and manufactured compounds into the water cycle since the modern age. Nobody really knows what the consequences are of combining, concentrating, and growing vegetables in these industrial products. Luckily we have reason to be 100 percent confident that federal regulations and government agencies would never let a man-made catastrophe destroy the ecosystem of an entire region and threaten the sustainability of life on earth.

There's also a story here about the extent to which landscape architects are now theorizing about and beginning to be actively involved in creating large-scale infrastructures that remediate the effects of human activity on the environment, which I will report on in greater detail in another place. - STEPHEN ZACKS

Notes on N.O.: Using a Pragmatic Standard to Evaluate Political Design

2010-06-05T08:09:00.015-04:00

I started out looking for examples of architecture and design that had had real political effects in the world. Political and social claims should be judged by a strict pragmatic standard: did the work have demonstrable consequences that supported its rhetoric. This was meant as a critique of a previous generation of architecture and architectural criticism that took representational and symbolic formal gestures to be politically significant. I wanted to be as literal as possible about what I meant by politics. Ideally these would be works or projects that could be proven to not only have a social impact (local demonstration projects, for instance) but to effect political systems and governance.

In September 2000, for an article that would appear in the November issue of Metropolis, I wrote about the use of a graphic image of the fist by the Otpor movement in the former Yugoslavia as a symbol of resistance against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. It was a small forgettable news story for a small trade magazine reported from my desk in New York, but it turned out to be hugely consequential as an example. The fist graphic was being spray-painted in graffiti around the country, printed on T-shirts, carried on protest flags, used as banners at rock concerts. Kids were getting arrested and interrogated by the police for wearing the T-shirts, and before long their brothers in the police and army started refusing to arrest them. Protesters occupied the Parliament building on October 5 and the government fell. The New York Times later reported that the graphics campaign had been partly funded by U.S. civil society groups and the CIA, but no matter, they had managed to finally drain popular support from the dying remnants of Socialist party.

In 2002, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I was frustrated by the hyper-ideological confusion of terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda with Palestinian suicide bombings. One was grounded in a real political struggle over human rights and territorial issues, while the other was grounded in religious fundamentalist ideology. A fantastically vivid journal by Chris Hedges in Harpers in October 2001 and a devastatingly graphic report in the New York Times on the bombing of a nightclub in Tel Aviv in June 2002 got me thinking about how to report on the architecture and planning of the settlement process. That July, I decided to go to Jerusalem to travel around the Palestinian territories and meet with Israeli and Palestinian architects and peace and human rights activists who were doing research and organizing demonstrations about the physical, material, and territorial context of the Israeli colonial occupation.

One of the people I met with was Eyal Weizman, who was working on his Ph.D. thesis (later published by Verso) on the use of civilian and military architecture and planning to occupy and control territory within the West Bank. I had found his amazing analysis of the vertical segmentation of space within the West Bank while doing some initial online research. Weizman had partnered with the Israeli human rights group B'tselem to obtain maps and planning documents, and created the most extensively detailed map of the West Bank that had ever been produced. Yehezkel Lein of B'tselem was already being consulted by the State Department to discuss its implications for the two-state solution and the shattered peace process--it was the era of a "roadmap to peace" with no coordinates. With his partner Rafi Seigel, Weizman had also been commissioned by the Israel Association of United Architects to produce A Civilian Occupation, an exhibition for the Berlin World Congress of Architecture later that month. By the time I got back to New York and was filing my story for the September issue of Metropolis, the IAUA canceled the Berlin exhibition on the grounds of it being "too political," and it became a big story in the New York Times. My front-of-book news story was bumped to the February 2003 issue and became my first feature for Metropolis. One advertiser later screamed at the sales reps and one of the editors about it, and the February 2003 issue was forever tagged in the magazine stacks with a post-it note that read, "DO NOT SEND TO ADVERTISERS."

Although this work still has not produced any positive political results, the way that it illuminated Israel's relationship to the Palestinian territories has been hugely consequential in terms of making new information publicly available and framing the issue in less abstract and ideological ways. Ouroussoff wrote about Weizman's work relatively early in his tenor at the New York Times, which made me sympathetic to him, though I later questioned whether there wasn't in fact, apart from Weizman's brilliant analysis of territory and planning issues, an ideological dimension to the use of suicide bombings as a tactic of resistance (apart from the disgusting brutality and immorality of killing innocent civilians) that couldn't be ignored. It seems undeniable that some combination of the separation wall, Israeli military action, and a political decision by Hamas and Islamic Jihad were responsible for the decline in successful terrorist attacks. - STEPHEN ZACKS

Notes on N.O.: On Political Philosophy and Design

2010-05-30T12:05:00.007-04:00

While I was writing my master's thesis on the phenomenon of posthumous fame in the life and work of Walter Benjamin at the New School for Social Research, I was doing demolition and construction work for the architect John Philip Hesslein in the Flatiron District. I became absorbed in the historical building types in that area, early steel frame construction that had structural redundancies and surface aesthetics that were still not reconciled with the new material--six courses of brick and Beaux-Arts facades. Hesslein is an architect who works in a modern vernacular but is a devotee of historical figures like H. H. Richardson and Ernest Flagg, having worked on a restoration of one of his buildings uptown, the 1913 Louis Gouvernor Morris house on 85th and Park Avenue; he was always eager and willing to talk about the architectural history of the building we were working on at 682 Sixth Avenue, as well as the Ladies Mile Historic District that runs down Sixth Avenue.

When I finished my thesis, almost by accident I got a job two blocks away factchecking at Metropolis magazine, just as Marshall Berman's review of the first English edition of Benjamin's Arcades Project was appearing in the February 2000 issue. As a result of this coincidence, I had the notion that it would be possible to write about architecture and urbanism there from the perspective of political philosophy. The combination of this physical labor-- punching holes through the facade for new windows, tearing out floors to install new plumbing, and the installation of pristine modern interiors--alongside the reading of Benjamin's writings on how material culture, objects and buildings are reflections of their political and historical moments--conceived as a fight for an oppressed past that could project messianic possibilities forward into the present--formed a slightly mystical backdrop to my somewhat programmatic early reporting. - STEPHEN ZACKS

Notes on the Nicolai Ouroussoff class: Why I write about architecture

2010-05-28T06:02:00.010-04:00

Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times' sole architecture critic, has an overwhelming dominant position in the field. This is not really his fault: the New York Times still operates as if it were the 1960s and it is providing some extraordinary public service by even having an architecture critic at all. If it's true, as Mimi Zeiger of Loud Paper noted in the recent What would Nicolai Ouroussoff say? class at Public School New York, that the Home section gets 6 million unique page views a day, the probable audience of this one loud and deeply conflicted voice is orders of magnitude greater than any other architecture critic.

The New York Times has several art critics; why only one for architecture, roving the globe like some smug jetborn parasite? It has many reporters who cover buildings from the point of view of local politics, development, real estate, or travel, but no other voice offers an authoritative perspective on the debates raging within the field of architecture about social activism, politics, sustainability, aesthetic form, the architect as builder, the role of celebrity, condo culture, or the architect's role in urban development.

Moreover, why do major cultural institutions continue to offer this overwhelmingly dominant voice exclusive advance coverage of projects? This is tipping the scales of an already outrageously imbalanced media landscape in which one hand-picked celebrity-obsessed critic, who lacks any theory of urbanism or understanding of the role of economic development in the city, frames the terms of debate in a way that is consistently deeply contradictory and usually off the mark.

I reiterate that I'm not pretending to be a candidate to replace or supplement N.O. or even claiming some moral high ground in relation to him but hoping to ask a series of questions in relation to his work, his role, and the role of architecture criticism. For that reason I have offered this synopsis of the motivations that brought me to reporting about architecture and urbanism. To the extent that I have functioned as a critic, it has been through activist reporting, which offers as good or even better possibilities for engaging issues of public concern by bringing new information into the public sphere and framing it in a way that can be productive of new forms of knowledge or engagement.

The photo above is my second grade elementary school class in Flint, Michigan, and I was reminded of it recently when someone asked me where I was from, and instead of having to rehearse the sad, tired history of Flint's decline as a factory town, they reminded me of the incredible diversity that I would have been exposed to in a place like that. I'm wearing the striped shirt on the top right. It's not about ideology; it's about improving the lives of real people, focusing on the actual effects and experiences produced or likely to be produced by the work.

This bank building in downtown Flint was the first tall building I ever saw, and it seemed unimaginably tall to me at the time. Turn this parking lot across the street into a beautiful building by an internationally renowned architect! It should be funded entirely by General Motors in honor of its birthplace, a few blocks away, to celebrate the incredible history of American automobile manufacturing here.

It should be funded generously. Its exhibits should be modeled after the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart, which frames its story in the context of the century of technological, social, and political changes that accompanied the formal evolution of cars and shows off the gorgeous products that have been sold by this major U.S. industrial corporation. The commission should be awarded through an international competition of at least 30 architects selected by a jury of well-respected experts, only one of which is from Flint and at most one other from Michigan, to favor the best ideas rather than the narrow provincialism of local politics.

The museum project should be linked to small-scale neighborhood development and streetscape initiatives that extend across the highway to create walkable and actively programmed connections between downtown Flint and the Flint cultural center. It should be done in coordination with the University of Michigan Flint to locate new dorms and student facilities within the context of a broader urban design plan. The focus of this activity should be real estate development to generate economical growth that would produce tax revenues to support city services.

From 1986 to 1990, I went to boarding school at Cranbrook, about an hour south of Flint, at the edge of the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. This enormous campus, a former farm every square inch of which was designed and landscaped by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen--from chairs to buildings to lakes to forests--was an almost mystical environment to be immersed in for four years, as a once-hardcore punk kid from Flint. Its political, economic and geographic relationship to the city of Detroit as well as Flint was also profoundly affecting; in my first year Michael Moore's film Roger & Me about the closing down of GM factories in Flint came out. Moore was a family friend and a recognizable local personality, but I also recognized the faces of the GM board members he was harassing: they were the fathers of my friends and schoolmates at Cranbrook. This totally designed environment undoubtedly had an unconscious effect on my understanding of how ideas could be immanently manifested in the built environment and intentional spaces could become staging grounds for transformational experiences. - STEPHEN ZACKS

On the Uses and Abuses of Urbanistic Social Research

2010-04-20T12:14:00.021-04:00

I've been reading Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age, this incredible study of recent second-generation immigrants in NYC co-authored by John Mollenkopf, director of CUNY's Center for Urban Research. Mollenkopf wrote a ground-breaking analysis of the Koch administration, Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics on Ed Koch's ability to consolidate voter blocs and convert them into governing majorities in the 1980s. I highly recommend this latest book for people interested in urban development issues that touch on immigration. Its longitudinal survey of a broad range of randomly selected subjects over the course of decades reveals new information on how Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Jamaican, Filipino, Chinese, Indian and other new groups have fared in recent years, potentially shedding light on that ever-present urbanistic red herring, the specter of gentrification. It was reviewed here when it came out two years ago. This kind of serious social science will be required to really transform urban policy and influence the coming immigration debate.

In the past, I have often championed urban research by architects and advocacy groups who have promoted underprivileged groups and sought to improve urban conditions and advance social justice--Laura Kurgan's excellent GIS visualizations of social scientific data in her justice mapping work, for instance, or CUP's outstanding exhibitions and pamphlets using visual tool to explain how the systems that govern urban space are organized. I also enjoy the type of exploratory and avant-garde research performed in the manner of participant observation or psychogeography, which ethnographers have used for over a century to discover new facts and document conditions that otherwise remain invisible. But I have also regularly complained about the confusion between pure advocacy, which assembles the facts according to their usefulness and ignores information that doesn't correspond to its goals, and real social science that leaves open the possibility that its conclusions will contradict its presuppositions. To state the obvious, this is important because without testing a hypothesis and subjecting it to verification, there's no way to know whether these strategies and projects are effective. The previous generation's political claims about architecture were to a large extent empty rhetoric that created little more than pleasing anecdotes in the form of visual representations. It would be a pity for generation after generation to rehash the same warmed-over Frankfurt School-based negative dialectical approach that has never in its history produced any discernible effect.

I think in particular about an activist architect like Teddy Cruz who has been using the poor residents of San Ysidro, California for years as an example of his attempt to restructure architectural practice by rethinking the relationship between architecture and the entire economic and political order. It seems pretty clear that what he's really talking about is a simple rezoning initiative that would allow smaller lot sizes so that the residents could build more affordable units. This is normally just called urban planning or design. It demands advocacy, grassroots mobilization, or insider political influence. But by inflating the issue to global dimensions and conflating it with a grossly misconstrued critique of capitalism, he has produced a great academic speaking career but no discernible changes in the conditions for his clients.

The path to a better life for a majority of immigrants seems to be, as ever, through education, hard work and some combination of assimilation and strong fealty to community. It's a path that continues to reshape the American idea as each generation grows up and consolidates its power. This book adds an enormous amount of nuance and detail to that story. It could be a great tool to encourage and promote successes and warn against the many dangers and pitfalls faced by new groups since the 1965 immigration reform act. It probably should be required reading for discussions on urbanism today. - STEPHEN ZACKS

What would Nicolai Ouroussoff say? Understanding your NY Times Architecture critic

2010-03-31T12:54:00.007-04:00

The Public School New York has invited me to lead this discussion on the NY Times architecture critic and the role of architecture criticism. I happily accepted with the caveat that I would love the discussion to be as collaborative as possible. It would be great if other design writers as well as architects and urban designers participated. It's ~~tentatively~~ ~~scheduled for Mon., Apr. 26 at 7 PM~~ (re) scheduled for Monday, May 24 at 7 PM. This school is open free of charge to anyone who's interested, so please sign up and suggest reviews that you might be willing to examine for their basic arguments, rhetoric, quality of writing, nuance, and contribution to the understanding of architecture and urbanism. I will try to suggest some major themes to explore, such as economic development, "stars," how to report on architecture, reviewing renderings, evaluating mega-developments, ideas vs. practices, and how to consider economic and political processes. -STEPHEN ZACKS

Architecture is Great for Selling Cars

2010-03-30T10:33:00.009-04:00

I noticed this Sprint ad shot inside Steven Holl's addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, which the Wall Street Journal also reported on a few weeks ago. This was the best public building I visited in the past decade as a reporter, really an amazing experience to walk through. Cadillac is also using the new Cooper Union building by Thom Mayne in one of its spots for the CTS, as Arch Newpaper's excellent reporter Matt Chaban also noted in February. (I also just stumbled on this 2006 CTS ad that aired in Europe featuring all kinds of Calatrava, I believe.) Mercedes is also using Ben van Berkel's fantastic Mercedes museum in Stuttgart for its E-Class commercials--the museum has a great descending corkscrew progression that recounts the industrial, social, and political history of the past century in a really compelling way and then lands you in a Mercedes dealership. This spot for the Buick LaCrosse also struck a chord with me recently.

It's shot in downtown Chicago and has been out since last fall, but I didn't notice it until recently, and I couldn't help identifying with the Buick brand. Although GM demolished its Buick City complex in Flint years ago, I felt cheered by this really well-designed GM car that's killing in the affordable luxury sedan category. Apparently the LaCrosse is doing especially well in China, where Buick is a prestigious luxury brand, according to this great review in the LA Times last August, and was co-designed by GM's studio in China. It's the favored brand of chauffeur-driven business executive-class as a status symbol, and for its ample leg room in back. I wonder who benefits from GM doing well in China--they still make lots of parts in Flint anyway, and there's one truck assembly plant left--maybe GM pensioners, stockholders (or is just bondholders now that the company is in Chapter 11?), and we taxpayers who own a share of the company now? -STEPHEN ZACKS

Condos vs. McMansions

2010-03-29T16:12:00.003-04:00

The New York Times just published a great news report on a study by the Environmental Protection Agency, Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions, showing urban development outpacing suburban development in the past decade, a major shift and one of the reasons I've been arguing that high-rise condos are a very good thing. This shift happened in the terrible oughts that we've been told since last year we're supposed to hate now. -STEPHEN ZACKS

The Gowanus as Oyster Farm and Tidal Calming Reef

2010-03-26T10:27:00.001-04:00

A little shout-out to super-smart landscape architect Kate Orff of Scape for this fantastic vision of the Gowanus Canal as an Oyster breeding ground as a part of the MoMA's Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront exhibition. Orff and team uncovered the history of the canal as a source of New York's biggest and juiciest oysters and researched the little mollusc to discover that it's basically a living machine for purifying water, then imagined a watery landscape in New York harbor in which oyster farms serve as tidal attenuation reefs to protect the shoreline against rising water levels.

I'm especially gratified by the payoff image of happy people eating oysters in the end, having complained often about the tendency of landscape architects to imagine the waterfront as a place for unhappy people to push strollers and contemplatively lean over railings as if getting ready to jump. It's also striking how much the thinking behind this project is marked by empirical, research-based processes typical of architects coming out of Harvard GSD, among them Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Interboro and all the students of Hashim Sarkis. I love this kind of work for its firm rootedness in everyday practices that can be observed and then extended into larger visions of possible futures.

Curator Barry Bergdoll is particularly excited about the exhibition's blog site and its Respond to the Exhibition link that opens up the Institution to public comments and criticism, though its buried so far from the main MoMA page that it has only received four pointless comments so far. -STEPHEN ZACKS

Google Mapping the Israeli Colony in "East Jerusalem"

2010-03-18T13:19:00.055-04:00

View Larger Map

It's a fun little game to look at the conflict over the expansion of the suburban colony in Ramat Shlomo with 1,600 units of new housing using Google Maps. In the satellite image, the development currently housing roughly 1,800 ultra-Orthodox Jews takes the round-and-winding form typical of hilltop settlements, extensively documented by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman through his research in collaboration with Israeli human rights group B'tselem. You can also see the beginning of two highways that extend north and east from Ramat Shlomo. These are Israeli bypass roads that reach into the West Bank and connect its network of settlements and military installations.

A terrible article in the New Republic claims this is all uncontested Israeli territory now because it was claimed by Israel in the final status Oslo agreements that the Palestinians in the end rejected. Not so. It's just that the apparatus of urban planning and territorial control that Israel has perfected has been able to exercise its will to build these suburban-style enclaves, which it afterward argues illustrate an established fact. Basically they're applying the Possession is Nine-Tenths of the Law rule. For evidence of the ongoing contestation of this area, here's a regularly updated list of newsworthy events published by B'tselem, including protests, arrests, confiscation of property, house demolitions, revoking of identity cards, and other tools of Israeli suburban development. For a reminder of how aggressive this process has been, take a look at this 2002 territorial map documenting the configuration of built-up Palestinian and Israeli areas.

If you zoom out, Google provides a nice dotted line that corresponds to the 1967 borders before the Israelis took over the area after the Six-Day War. To the upper right you can see some disorganized areas alongside a narrow north-south road. These are small Palestinian towns, and the narrow road is the one that Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and surrounding areas use to get to Ramallah. The thicker road to the far right is another Israeli highway that connects to the suburban colonies woven throughout the area and zigzags into the northwest.

CLICK IMAGE FOR MORE DETAIL

If you zoom out a little further, in the bottom right corner you can see a highly concentrated mass of dwellings opposite another highway. That is the Shu'fat refugee camp, established by the UN in 1965. You can also see a series of these winding suburban-style Israeli colonial developments on the right side of the highway. When you travel on the Israeli roads, they are constructed so that you don't see the Palestinian areas. The disorganized areas on left side of the road are all Palestinian, the round winding ones on the right are all Israeli settlements.

CLICK IMAGE FOR MORE DETAIL

Scroll the map down and you see two more disorganized concentrations of inhabited areas. These are the al-Ram and Qalandya refugee camps. This is where the Israeli military checkpoints would stop you to check your papers if you were traveling on the Palestinian road to Ramallah. On the opposite side of the road to the lower right is another Israeli suburban colony.

CLICK IMAGE FOR MORE DETAIL

The entire area we're talking about from the Israeli border to Qalandia checkpoint is about 5 miles long. Most of it, apart from the Qalandia and al-Ram refugee camps, is contained within the Israeli side of the separation wall begun after the Oslo talks collapsed. Since all of the Palestinians living in this area are not Israeli citizens, they are required to have special Jerusalem identity cards issued by the Israeli government to travel back and forth through the checkpoints into Jerusalem. This area is being identified as East Jerusalem, but it is only a part of Jerusalem by virtue of having been annexed and built up with these suburban enclaves occupying the higher ground and connected to Jerusalem by Israeli highways that bypass the Palestinian villages in the valley between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

CLICK IMAGE FOR MORE DETAIL

I did some reporting in Jerusalem in July 2002 for an article on the mapping and planning of West Bank settlements and went on daily trips into the West Bank to meet up with Palestinian architects and Israeli activists on either side. At the time Israel was gradually reoccupying the areas it had ceded control of during the Oslo peace process, which were otherwise surrounded by these informal border posts. A checkpoint is basically a line of concrete blocks and sandbags behind which rows of Israeli soldiers check the passports and papers of Palestinians as they travel between towns. Here's a shot of the Qalandya checkpoint in 2002.

The areas where Palestinians lived were therefore all turned into prison camp-like areas that required Israeli permission to move between, and permission could be refused for any reason, or for no reason at all. Here's a shot of the checkpoint at Bir Zeit, just north of Ramallah, where a bunch of young Palestinians were stopped while their passports were examined and checked against wanted lists.

We hung out there for a few hours, and the young men were gradually moving closer to the solders out of impatience. A soldier came out and told them to back off, then shot a tear gas grenade. One guy got hit in the leg by the canister.

The soldiers were usually hostile in their tone, especially to me, someone with a recognizably Ashkenazi Jewish name and an American passport. It was not generally taken kindly to be going into the Palestinian areas. This guy was an older soldier though, and he was laughing at me because I have a mustache in my passport photo.

At the airport coming in and out of Israel, admitting to visiting the Palestinian territories was equivalent to admitting you were among the highest security threats to the state, and it meant enduring long interrogations by security officials, having your luggage rifled through piece by piece, and possibly having your computer taken away from you to be disassembled and examined. However, at the time there were constant suicide bombings, including this one in the French Hill area near Ramat Shlomo. These guys are cleaning up body parts and pieces of skin and putting them in bags, and spray washing the wall near a bus stop that had been attacked a few hours earlier.

Please let's not go back to those days.

- STEPHEN ZACKS

On the Ourroussoff Critiques: Economic and Cultural Transition

2010-03-05T00:39:00.014-05:00

It's impossible to ignore the current context in which the desire to evaluate Nicolai Ouroussoff's work as the New York Times' architecture critic arises. Not only in the midst of a recession, and therefore a convenient endpoint to an extraordinary period in the history of architecture, but also a time in which so many local institutions are undergoing a significant transition. The Van Alen Institute has appointed Olympia Kazi as its new director, bringing a new and bountiful energy to a place that has stimulated so many useful discussions about public space. Anne Guiney, former editor at Architect's Newspaper, is taking over her role at the Institute for Urban Design, which Kazi single-handedly rescued from political turmoil with the support of people like Michael Sorkin. Storefront for Art and Architecture is looking for a new director, which many hope will reground a place that for the past three years has been a great foothold for experiments by young European architects more firmly in the local New York scene.

At the same time so many design publications are being turned upside down: several have closed down altogether or appear to be on their last legs; Architectural Record will have to adjust to a new role next year, no longer the official publication of the AIA; others are suffering from catastrophic declines in ads and editorial pages. As a result there are simply fewer voices reporting on what's happening in architecture. And there's still an enormous amount happening, both in terms of buildings of significance that were begun before the recession--so many of them, such as Behnisch's Unilever headquarters in Hanover or SANAA's Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, deserve much more and better coverage--and in terms of the conditions of the profession and its products during this strange turbulent time.

Reporters and critics accustomed to commenting on new projects are therefore left to helplessly read the few voices that do, for sometimes inexplicable reasons, continue to find a place in print. There is, however, an inescapable feeling that the concerns of this community of editors, reporters, and critics are of a certain parochial character, reflecting the obsessions of the NY design media perhaps more than the public interest claimed by its arguments. There remains the question of the extent to which this process of evaluation and criticism, especially on the part of magazines that explicitly characterize themselves as trade publications, are by definition and by design serving the interests and concerns of the architecture profession, along with advertisers appealing to its ability to specify their products.

Trade magazines serve a legitimate and necessary function, helping the profession understand itself, publicizing less well-known work, uncovering innovative methods, sharing best practices, raising the bar for aesthetic quality, educating potential clients. But it's not the same as the public interest, or the interest of the various publics affected by its promotion of things that can withstand the glare of full-bleed images. The professional deformation of the design press is probably at odds with many of the things its better angels believe are good for the world.

This week Alexandra Lange, an erstwhile colleague at one such trade magazine, posted an engaging critique of Ouroussoff, a writer who holds one of the handful of offices that stand on the edges of the design media. Along with Paul Goldberger at the New Yorker, Ada Louise Huxtable at the Wall Street Journal, James S. Russell at Bloomberg, Chris Hawthorne at the LA Times, Blair Kamin at the Chicago Tribune, and Robert Campbell at the Boston Globe, Ouroussoff's potential access to a wider public could give his position a special responsibility, if he chose to accept it. It's a position that he could use to influence public policy, or at least perhaps to stall the implementation of political decisions. He could use it to advocate for architecture, or for particular architects, or for political positions about architecture, or for ideas, or for the realization of certain projects, or types of projects.

Has Ouroussoff expanded the number of readers who would read an architecture review or be interested in urban issues, and if so whose interests has he advocated for? My sense is that the office been diminished by his tenor, reaching a smaller audience that mirrors the self-interested readership of the trade magazines. Say what you like about Herbert Muschamp's exaggerated love for certain major figures, he had an enormous and colorful voice that expanded the role of architecture in cities across the world, defining the so-called Bilbao effect that many critics have been intent on dismissing of late. The professional deformation of a writer is to be nostalgic for the heroic age of writing in which it had an expansive role in public life. -STEPHEN ZACKS

Crass Promotions: Editorial Perp Walk

2010-02-26T14:43:00.004-05:00

I cannot resist posting this screenshot from the J Crew page, head slightly bowed, having worked with half of them and having regarded the magazine as a possible future model for print after the Internet. I like J Crew, a couple of them are decent fellows. I'm not against cross-promotions. The magazine industry has to majorly rethink the way it does business in the context of media dollars being sucked up by broadband, cable, satellite TV, and cellphone subscriptions. But ever since Monocle laughably named Zurich the most livable city and neglected to even put New York in the top 25, I've had serious doubts about its taste and good sense, which has gradually resolved itself into basic questions of editorial integrity. That's not even mentioning its total disregard for journalistic standards and practices. -STEPHEN ZACKS

After the Bauhaus Exhibition: Dutiful Critics, Forgotten History

2010-02-25T01:18:00.018-05:00

BAUHAUS APARTMENTS IN BERLIN/ STEPHEN ZACKS

The 90th anniversary exhibition of the Bauhaus has come and gone. The MoMA has paid homage to one of the great stories, an essential moment, the ur-historical moment really in the emergence of modern design. Barry Bergdoll, elegant writer, thoughtful historian, until this exhibition capable of being a popular curator, able to capture the public imagination through shows like the critically unloved but totally enjoyable and well-attended Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, has dutifully done his job of cobbling together the mishmash of ornaments, objects, media and art that constituted the direct products of the Bauhaus School during its existence as a school. It was all so much less than expected. I was not surprised by how dutifully critics praised it. It was a show only a design critic could love.

WINDOW IN THE HAUS AM HORN/ STEPHEN ZACKS

The core vision of the Bauhaus was to reconcile craft--the handmade--with an industrial capacity that had outmoded entire artisan trades and steadily transformed workmen into servants of machines; it therefore had assembled every sort of artist, artisan and craftman to tame this machine by designing objects in accordance with the demands of modern life. Sometimes this relied on perversely mechanistic notions, such as a basic dwelling unit of measurement that would determine the planning of every aspect of domesticity, the 4 x 8 gypsum drywall of humanity. It invented the language of modern design by harmonizing machine-made products with the most forward-looking ideas then in circulation in art and architecture. But if the Bauhaus was responding to what German philosopher Jurgen Habermas called the uncoupling of the system and the lifeworld--the alienation of workers from the products of their activity--this exhibition gives us an already colonized lifeworld in which the fragmentation of work into narrower and narrower categories and specializations was accomplished long ago and we're left to emptily wonder at its relics.

KITCHEN IN WEISSENHOF HOUSE/ STEPHEN ZACKS

In the 90 years since the founding of the Bauhaus School, enormous, monumental, world-historical changes have come to pass that should have influenced the way we received these objects. Small things like the extermination of a people from central and eastern Europe, the virtual enslavement of the region for the next half-century under totalitarian dictatorship, the exile of the group's teachers into a booming capitalist world where they produced enormous office parks that had almost nothing to do with the school original egalitarian ideals, the radical fragmentation of architecture in relation to other arts and crafts.

This, among other things, is a story worth telling, and the failure to appreciate the presence of monumental figures like Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky as teachers at this very early stage in the formation of modern design speaks volumes about the MoMA's general failure to fluidly reconcile its narratives about modern art, beginning with the experience of Americans in Paris, with other modern forms, despite the resurfacing of an anecdote about Alfred Barr's visit to Germany in 1928. You need the Bauhaus, and a painter like Lyonel Feininger, a teacher at the school, to make any sense of it. This exhibition left that chasm still unexplored except through the vague inclusion of representative knicknacks.

LYONEL FEININGER/ GABERNDORF II

As if that were not enough history to ignore there was also, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolutionary reopening of that closed-off and half-abandoned history, the reconstruction of the institutions, experimental housing developments, and demonstration projects--the Haus am Horn in Weimar, the creation of the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar (much better than the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin), the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau (now under the capable leadership of Philipp Oswalt), the Weissenhoff Museum in Stuttgart--all completed in the past decade, in a way that suddenly made available this rich historical archive. A forceful narrative of the recovery of that past could have spoken in a wildly meaningful way to today's designers interested in craft and social consciousness--and even, possibly, to the non-design-caring-about public. And how about just a little nod to Black Mountain College, where Josef Albers essentially brought the school to the United States in its purest form and spawned generations of avant-garde practice?

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE TEACHERS

Perhaps it was the dimly lit spaces somewhere in the ass-end of MoMA that made it all seem small, insignificant, and forgettable. Perhaps it was the extraordinarily narrow and academic way in which this incredibly rich trove was condensed into the decade and a half of the school's actual existence that made it seem somehow historical without history, historical-ish. The school and history deserved better. But that was a month ago. Go ahead and forget about it. -STEPHEN ZACKS

Discussions on Networked Publics: Thoughts on the Archipocalypse

2010-02-15T06:39:00.011-05:00

A panel of youngish architects and writers were invited to Columbia's "Studio X" space in the architecture ghetto at 180 Varick on Tuesday to discuss the current archipocalypse and how new forms of media and communication are changing the landscape of contemporary practice. The premise of "Networked Publics" recapitulates the theory about the Internet and democracy popular in the late 90s. The explosion of independent voices through online media would liberate new forms of democratic participation. In architecture, small inventive practices could gain access to clients aided by free forms of networking, publicity and expression. Newly responsive architecture would be produced through 3D design and automated production. In keeping with Columbia's sometimes effete theoretical tradition, there was a call for new critical theories and models of practice to be developed in response to the past decade's purported shortfalls and current recessionary conditions. One of the panelists noted that the real stakes of their practices was less the production of buildings than of a thought-leading discourse that would have a pervasive intellectual influence, and no one could disagree. It would be good for the panelists, therefore, to get out of the architecture-speak bubble and recognize what's actually happened in the profession in the past decade, as opposed to the way it is being misrepresented by professional critics and would-be thought-leaders.

It is true that large firms continue to dominate the landscape and small inventive practices have benefited from small clients looking for new approaches and economical solutions. There's nothing new in this. The decade-old tools that young architects have access to allow them an incredible capacity for self-initiated activity, original work, high design produced at a reasonable cost. These tools have also been used for the past decade by the much-maligned "starchitects." Corporate firms are using these same tools, and producing work of a much higher quality as a result. This is very important, and seems to have been entirely missed by the thought-leaders and professional critics. The architecture produced in the past decade is light-years ahead of anything produced in the several decades before, both in terms of sustainability and aesthetic quality. The housing bubble, the banking crisis, and the current recession have almost nothing to do with architecture.

This is a pervasive and profound misunderstanding of the past decade and necessarily also of the present moment. It has been swallowed uncritically by the profession. The past decade was not a "boom" era or a period of "excess" in architecture. It was a period of abysmal government, faulty regulation, low interest rates and absurd lending practices that led to a price bubble in real estate. It is perhaps the architects' exaggerated self-importance that is causing them to let architecture to be made the fall guy for corrupt bankers and real estate corporations, ridiculous tract housing developments, and inflated land values that were not produced by architects or architecture. Ask any real estate developer what has been driving the cost of buildings, construction, and housing, in any part of the country. They will certainly not say architecture. They will tell you that in New York it's first of all the cost of the land itself. In much of the country, it's materials and labor. And apart from that it's the market itself. Architects who build lots of buildings know this. If they're good architects they probably spend a lot of their time fighting with developers for that extra five or ten percent of the budget that will allow them to produce the aesthetic and sustainable features of their designs. If they're great architects - Jeanne Gang, Peter Gluck, Stefan Behnisch - they have probably figured out how to make aesthetic, social, and sustainable features so integral to their designs and building processes that they won't even be noticed as such by their clients or by critics. These are the "excesses" that the critics are apparently decrying, and they're precisely what architecture produces that is in the public interest.

The profession is suffering badly now from the economic downturn, and it's wearying to continue to hear "thought-leaders" blame architecture for things it is not responsible for. Especially when there are so many other things architects can be justly blamed for - vanity, self-importance, sanctimoniousness, duplicity, pomposity, buffoonery - but not housing prices. -STEPHEN ZACKS

The Education Meme in Artistic Practice

2010-02-08T12:33:00.004-05:00

It started for me with last summer's less-than-anticipated University of Trash exhibition at the Sculpture Center and blossomed into a 2010 mini-trend. Fake educational institutions are springing up in New York City, probably as a cash-poor free content-producing strategy. There's a theory that it's related to the fact that about half the city's artists and designers subsist on paltry stipends from schools like Parsons, Pratt, SVA and Columbia. No matter, I'm a greedy consumer of art and architecture events and these ones are not bad at all.

There are about a half-dozen of these crypto-schools happening at the moment, among them the Public School for Architecture, organized in New York at the Van Alen Institute by the nice guys and a girl at Common Room. (Their recent project for the NY Foundation for the Arts got no press despite its potential recession-friendly cost-slashing story line. Are editors tired of this angle after only 16 months or are a few things happening in the world for other reasons?) I'm hoping to make it to their sliding-scale benefit at 177 Livingston next Saturday (Feb. 20) and would love to teach the proposed course on how to write a predictable Nicolai Ouroussoff architecture review (but preparing a decent class takes so much time and pays nothing, kind of like reporting). A lot of what's happening in "courses" is that they are being used to publicize work already underway or air justified professional grievances. This used to just be called a lecture or a talk, but fine, call it a school if you want.

My favorite crypto-school at the moment is the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, sponsored by Creative Time and organized by the semi-anonymous art collective that seems to be absolutely everywhere right now. They have a series of attractive but forgettable art-historical-ish installations in the 1969 show at PS1, and I went to their pretty funny douchebag art history lecture at the X-Initiative during last fall's Performa festival. I used to harbor a slight resentment against them for being immediately puffed up by professional art critics - they take the fun out of everything - but anyway I went to the "registration" event at their West Broadway meeting space. Conversations with artists in front of boards displaying their proposed courses devolved into a hilarious YouTube karaoke party. I signed up for Philosophy of Motion Pictures on Wednesdays, and so far the discussions of continental philosophy and film screenings have been a better-than-expected chance to revisit ideas I used to think were important (but now mostly don't) after the seduction of those great book covers has faded, in a group way more motivated than your average college class.

The latest one I heard about recently is Trade School, based on the idea of bartering goods and services in exchange for acquiring skills, which I guess gives you a good chance to consider the actual value of the course compared to your time in relative terms. Adam Kleinman, who organizes the great Access Restricted lecture series for LMCC, this time on the theme of Law and Representation at extraordinary courtroom sites in lower Manhattan, even proposed a good "course" on the subject. -STEPHEN ZACKS

Forthcoming: David Wojnarowicz biography

2010-02-05T08:01:00.007-05:00

The struggle of C. Carr, David Wojnarowicz's forthcoming biographer, to present a full-screen image of the artist's work in her slide presentation last night at Fales Library, home to the astonishing downtown New York archive - including the new Riot Grrrl Collection - was unfortunately paralleled by a failure to present any kind of narrative that would allow the audience to engage with the artist and his work. This is hopefully just a reflection of the early stage of this project. For now do check out a copy of the somewhat overstimulating David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, a collection of interviews with friends and collaborators, among them Carlo McCormick, Kiki Smith, and Nan Goldin. Take a life-size glimpse at the Downtown Collection's goldmine at the Grey Art Gallery's Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives, 1961-1991, curated by former New York Times photo editor Philip Gefter, whose Michael Bell-designed Hudson Valley glass house I wrote about a few years ago. -STEPHEN ZACKS

Hero or Charlatan? A Prince Ramus

2010-02-05T07:21:00.009-05:00

I used to just not care about this haircut masquerading as an architect, constantly profiled in celebrity magazines decrying celebrity architecture. Now I would rank him among top-notch gasbags like Teddy Cruz for his ability to talk at length about almost nothing. Recently this TED talk made the rounds of the archiwankerverse: http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prince_ramus_building_a_theater_that_remakes_itself.html. -STEPHEN ZACKS

Jim Carroll Memorial Reading

2010-02-04T23:49:00.003-05:00

http://poetryproject.org/program-calendar/jim-carroll-memorial-reading-2.html