My guess is that tonight's James Turrell lecture at the Hirshhorn will be fantastically crowded. It's hard to pass up the prospect of seeing slides from Roden Crater. Then again, tonight's talk by Kathryn Cornelius for the Red Tape series sounds like the grittier city event—a talk with a local performance artist hosted in somebody's living room by a gallery with no physical space. Haven't decided where to go but I'll be scribbling notes somewhere tonight.
Notes! Soon I'll post some thoughts from the last talk I attended. Soon!
Tyler Green twitters: "So far that News Hour art blog has been notable for its commitment to error-making. I stopped reading."
What mistakes, specifically?
Look, lord knows that Twitter is a no-man's land. It's journalism's version of the Bleed, connecting bloggers and wire reports with cell phones and desktops. I'm sure if you ask someone like Tommy, he'd describe it in a way that betrays a very different understanding and use. For myself, I prefer to twitter dumb jokes, intimate texts meant for one person alone, or names of venues I'm standing in. Very useless and, I think, still totally in keeping with the medium.
But calling out a publication on its accuracy probably transcends even the boundlessness of Twitter, no?
Jean Nouvel, Agbar Tower. Photo by marcelgermain
I don't understand how to register to leave a comment at TNR, so I'll have to response here to a comment left there. If you were to take LEED certification and build it out to regulate for a coherent, totalistic notion of sustainability, you would see that much of the work that Risen and commenters correctly suggest as green would not pass muster. There is a difference between what green and sustainable, and to get from one to the other, architecture will necessarily change in some fundamental ways. There is much more to sustainability than energy efficiency and passive heating; it is misleading to say that the work of 2008 Pritzker Prize Jean Nouvel represents sustainable architecture because some of his projects feature innovative energy solutions.
You in fact see the U.S. Green Building Council addressing this limiting aspect of LEED certification today, as the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, with a revision to LEED cert that expands its scope:
The new system will award more points for such measures as using solar energy or building near a city center or mass transit. Those changes help reduce energy use, address climate change and combat suburban sprawl, Holowka said.That raises the bar and brings the field of architecture another (indirect) step closer to the carbon pricing scheme Avent describes.
Let's say that architecture invokes carbon pricing tomorrow. My prediction is that the work of Rem Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron, John Utzon, Zaha Hadid, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and Jean Nouvel would be transformed utterly, so as to be virtually unrecognizable. Glen Murcutt and Thom Mayne, architects who both work with smaller footprints, thrive. This list of names, of course, represents the Pritzker Prize winners from the last decade—a supremely elite sample. Going further back, it is possible to find architects whose works heralded significant achievements in energy efficiency and so on. (Renzo Piano looms large here.) But few—exceedingly few—champions on this list champion a robust sustainability.
More on the subject here, if I haven't totally and shamelessly and ex ante-ly talked out that piece by now.
Clay Risen responds to my story for the American Prospect on green design. Risen puts forward Renzo Piano's California Academy of Sciences as "proof positive that an established career and good design are no impediments to sustainable design."
Now, in fact, I think that this Piano is one building that puts forward its green credential as design accomplishment—an example of the sod-covered, greenhouse aesthetic if ever there were one. So possibly Risen and I have different notions of what looks good or what design should hope to accomplish.
In any case, I chose to lede with a story about another renowned architect, Robert A.M. Stern, who was removed from a high-profile project because his sustainable project didn't look sustainable enough for the client. More than to complain about green architecture being ugly I sought to describe that phenomenon: How an opportunity for architects to differentiate by going green, coupled with minimal experience with new materials and methods, has determined a lowest common denominator green look within architecture. A functional design restriction that is increasingly construed as its own formal design advance.
On a side note, LEED certification (an admirable goal) does not necessarily signal sustainability. As my story mentions, Richard Meier's Getty Center earned LEED silver certification: not the highest marks for energy efficiency, but very good. Yet the building brags about the hundreds of thousands of travertine stones that were flown from Bagni di Tivoli, near Rome in Italy, for facades and paving. In just 50 years, the travertine in high-traffic areas will need to be replaced. Visitors can actually see fossils in the materials; what better reminder of the unnecessary fossil fuels spent to enclose and maintain that space? The tradeoffs between green design and good design are everywhere, but they aren't always reflected in energy-use certification.
Dawn Black, The Quarrelsome Shepherds, 2009.
Over at Art in America, I've got a review of Dawn Black's "Masquerade" show at Curator's Office. Jessica Dawson wrote up the same show for the Washington Post.
Back at AiA, be sure to check out Joseph Del Pesco's take on the SECA Awards show at SFMOMA. I'll put my own notes on that show up tomorrow.
1990:
Batting just more than .500.
1991:
1992, the last year for which I'm able to retrieve quality data from Impel Trading Cards (also the year I left elementary school):
Today:
As strong as Galactus.
Compare Iron Man over time to the much more stable metrics fluctuation for Spider-Man (1990, 1991, 1992, today) or the more plausible inflation for Thor, who was revised over this period to be an actual god and not just an architect with a magic hammer (1990, 1991, 1992, today). For the purposes of this report, we'll ignore that none of the measurements appear in like units, gaps in the data, and other "rigorous" science stuff. Note that while I don't have any formal training in performing regressions analysis, I do have multiple Ghost Rider rookie cards. Also, the complete set of 1990-series holograms, which not even the House of Ideas can boast. (These cards, incidentally, represent my investment plan for outlasting the global financial crisis.)
I only hope these new data I've uncovered—which seem at first glance to suggest force metrics inflation over a relatively short period of time—will prove useful in the hands of the appropriate analyst. I'm thinking primarily, of course, of one Spencer Ackerman, whose presentation last week at Transformer ("Iron Man Vs the Imperialists") was rivaled only by his American Prospect feature on the same subject. A mashup with DoD/SHIELD spending over the relevant time-frame seems in order. Presumably Julian Sanchez, Tom Lee, Yglesias, and The Nabob (who in tandem represent a sort of informal government watchdog group for character continuity) could also weigh in on Shellhead's massive, massive powers inflation. Probably the course-corrective action required here is spending more stimulative funds on DC Comics.
this.heart's.on.fire. breaks the news that Stella McCartney has a vagina. The Glam Network is understandably upset by the revelation. Kenneth Courtney suggests that Madonna and a number of other women also bear vaginas, but those reports are at best unconfirmed at this time.
This morning, Art in America launched a new content-driven Web site under the editorial direction of Sarah Hromack, a longtime blogger and the former editor of Curbed SF. The site features a number of writers who have come to the publication by way of the Internet—writers such as Bosko Blagojevic and Paddy Johnson and yours truly.
Fittingly, the content on the Web site does not correspond precisely with the magazine. AiA has done a step better than promoting its features and reviews online. (A step that art magazines are loathe to take, even a decade into the 21st century. You would be surprised.) Rather than direct imports from print to Web, online content will feature the healthy mix of news-cycle commentary and astute art insight that makes online criticism so much more, well, relevant. See, for example, Bartholomew Ryan's reported feature on the 100th anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto.
And see also my own take on Brandon Morse's show at Conner Contemporary and its visual affinity to the ongoing global financial crisis. It isn't exactly a review—it's not supposed to be a review. Rather (I hope) it's a sort of real-time observation of the way that art responds to and corresponds with the lived-in world.
Brandon Morse, Achilles, 2008–9.
UPDATE: On a related note, Jeffry Cudlin takes the hatchet to Brandon Morse (in a matter of speaking).
