Dimitri Daniloff, photographe français connu notamment pour son activité publicitaire, a collaboré avec l’artiste allemand Sven Hauth pour le projet « Meshology ». Le photographe aime allier la technologie à son art. Il a donc demandé à Sven Hauth de modéliser les prises de vue afin de visualiser par avance les positions des acrobates. Les clichés colorés et les effets de légèreté et d’emmêlement des protagonistes sont criants de vérité.
Opinion: the architecture and film industries have quite a few things in common – including expensive projects and the lionising of a certain kind of success. But architects can still learn a lot from the approach of independent film makers, says Mimi Zeiger.
“The cavalry isn’t coming,” said indie movie director Mark Duplass, kicking off his keynote address at last month’s SXSW Film Festival.
I was in Austin, Texas, for a panel on architecture and civic participation with Mexico City architect Michel Rojkind and local technologist Leslie Wolke as part of SXSW Interactive. At SXSW, film and interactive run simultaneously the week before the famous music festival gets loud. And although design was somewhat of a running theme on the tech side, with talks by design world thought leaders Paola Antonelli and John Maeda as well as dozens of sessions with design in the title, I found myself drawn to the conversations happening in film.
Actor-director-producer Duplass epitomises the indie ethos, creating projects and roles that needle subjective experiences into a kind of absurdist comedy of everyday life. The Puffy Chair, written 10 years ago by Duplass and his brother Jay, was a hit of the independent film scene, and in the years since, the pair have steadily earned success. Most recently, he and Jay wrote the HBO series Togetherness (pictured top), a tale of slightly broken people in their late 30s trying to hold it together in contemporary Los Angeles.
For the SXSW keynote, Duplass deftly distilled lessons from his career. With his slogan-like caution “the cavalry isn’t coming” he dispelled the belief of overnight fame and instant success.
No cavalry will pluck your first or even third film from the festival circuit and make you a rich star. So instead of toiling away in the hopes of a mythical deal, he suggests that filmmakers begin modestly and steadily build their individual voice and networks of collaborators. Success, when it does come, is decidedly less flashy that it might look from the outside.
Sure, the structural mechanisms of the film world and the design worlds operate differently, but both are dictated by hefty price tags for projects, and share cross-disciplined teams and a belief that stardom is possible — that the cavalry indeed is coming.
If film success is a four-picture deal and a house in Bel Air, then what constitutes design success? When the doyens of recognition mount their steeds, what does the architectural cavalry look like? A Guggenheim or Whitney museum commission? A MoMA exhibition? A magazine cover? The Pritzker Prize? A Golden Lion? Starchitect status? Ivy-league tenure?
Recently, the ever-vociferous Patrik Schumacher mounted a defence of the cavalry while bayonetting design critics. In a sentence that gives more credit to the critic than most critics would claim, he writes: “Iconic architecture and the star system are both creatures of the architectural critic (rather than creatures of architecture itself), who plays the role of a mediator between the expert architectural discourse on the one hand and the mass media on the other hand.”
Or rather, the stars are stars, stop taking cheap shots. On the longevity of said stars, he notes: “[T]hey might stay in the game perhaps a little longer than is merited, while younger talent remains obscure for longer than they should.”
For ambitious practitioners, and especially for a generation of young designers whose education and early professional lives were marked by the economic crash and precarity of the late 2000s, the promise offered by the cavalry is both the carrot and the stick. In a post-internet condition, #winning perhaps inspires more than we’d like to admit. Beyond client commissions are a whole circuit of grants, institutional recognitions, and fellowships.
What, then, does it mean if the cavalry doesn’t come? For the Duplass brothers, it meant many failed attempts and making a lot of cheap, personal work early in their career, like the 2002 seven-minute short film of a man trying to record his outgoing message on an answering machine.
The New York Times reported that the film, entitled This is John, cost $3 – the cost of the videotape – but it was screened at Sundance. At SXSW, Duplass preached the gospel of the $3 movie, substituting the videotape for an iPhone shooting uncompressed footage.
The $3 iPhone movie is an exercise in iteration. Made with friends over the weekend, it’s collective and low risk. If it’s crap, delete. It’s a distinct, if perhaps a tad self-indulgent means of testing ideas and developing an authorial voice. For filmmakers in the audience, this blessing to go forth and experiment must have come as a welcome relief.
For me, it stirred another question: what is the architectural analogue of the $3 iPhone movie?
The answer could be a series of iterations we’ve seen over the past couple of decades — micro-movements of cultural production that have built into trends above and beyond what we once called “paper architecture”: pavilions and pop-up exhibitions; little magazines, comic books and print-on-demand; rapid prototyping afforded by fabrication technologies such as laser cutters, CNC mills, and 3D printing; and tactical or DIY urbanisms. Architecture performed at scale is expensive and complex.
The proliferation of these smaller architectural acts illustrates a kind of searcher’s compulsion to find outlets for production, even as these practices come under critical scrutiny.
Historian and theorist Sylvia Lavin compared formalist follies to party décor, editor and writer Allison Arieff cautioned against the rise of tchotchkes within the maker and 3D-printing movement, and Neil Brenner wondered aloud if tactical urbanism isn’t just camouflage for neoliberal urbanism. But the continual pursuit of the $3 iPhone movie equivalent seems vital for the health of the discourse, even if attempts run aground, and especially if these acts are only performed as an end in themselves.
In remarks in Architectural Record announcing the participants of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, architect-curator-editor Joseph Grima took a more optimistic stance.
“We’re looking to the younger generation,” said Grima. “Our ambition is to reaffirm the role of architecture as a form of cultural production. The way we practice today is based on mobility and shared ideas, as opposed to the proprietorship of the heroic architecture of the 20th century.”
Biennials and fairs function much like film festivals. They are the places for the introduction of vetted new works and a chance for advanced lessons in networking in our totally globalised field.
For Duplass, the film festival (or biennial) is not a place to find fame, but rather a place to find the collaborators, partners, and investors needed not to make a multi-million dollar blockbuster, but a $1,000 movie and then another $1,000 movie and then maybe even another one that might, just might, lead to something bigger.
The robust list of Chicago participants on deck for October represents a spectrum of modalities, from well-established offices like BIG or Tatiana Bilbao to research or art-oriented practices like Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation or SO-IL.
The Graham Foundation’s Sarah Herda is co-director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. For decades, the Graham Foundation has generously supported a wealth of architectural cultural production. I’m indebted to their largess for the funding of my very first architecture publication as well as other projects.
As other revenue streams run dry, the Graham Foundation’s holds course. With the biennial, however, it is establishing itself as a more visible arbiter of the discipline, not simply a much-needed support system.
The question of funding leads directly to Duplass’ penultimate point, which seemed the most poignant: as you do gain some success, produce your friends’ work. In a competitive field like ours I would hasten to add that this is different than peerage or nepotism.
Being a producer in design is also different from being a curator or editor. The role is not very familiar in architecture and design where funding sources are in service of clients, developers, academic institutions, and grant foundations. Yet, the potential for peer-to-peer producing, even with the smallest of funds, presents a somewhat thrilling and certainly idea-rich alternative for stirring up discourse. Because, as Duplass closed his talk, let’s just forget about the cavalry.
Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic. She covers art, architecture, urbanism and design for a number of publications including The New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center. Zeiger also is editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.
From the botanical gardens in Brera to the industrial warehouses of Lambrate, designers presenting across the city were showcasing projects relating to smell. This reflected a wider trend that has been emerging for the past year, which has seen both large brands and new graduates make the move into the world of perfume.
Garden of Wonders pavilion by Lissoni Associati. Photograph by Gionata Xerra
One example from Milan was The Garden of Wonders, organised by creative thinktank Be Open, which featured eight designers’ interpretations of defunct perfume brands housed within identical gold-coloured capsules. The exhibition took place in the serene botanical gardens in Brera and included contributions from Nendo, the Campana brothers, Tord Boontje, Jaime Hayón and Front.
Bertif Timeless Scent for Bertif, shown at the Garden of Wonders by Be Open. Photograph by Gionata Xerra
“Perfumes [at the exhibition] create spaces, experiences and even epochs, while design demonstrates how much it can contribute to our perception and interpretation of perfumes,” Be Open founder Yelena Baturina told Dezeen.
Over at the Triennale di Milano museum, design collective Outofstock presented a series of dip-dyed scent diffusers formed from an extruded ceramic material usually used for filtering exhaust fumes in cars, motorcycles and trucks.
Students from forward-thinking design schools including Design Academy Eindhoven and Lund University were among those showing more experimental concepts and contraptions relating to smell.
Eindhoven graduate Mickaël Wiesengrün worked with Norwegian scent designer Sissel Tolaas to create a giant apparatus that mixed scents associated with a specific location’s past to recreate how it might have smelt. First shown at the institution’s graduate show last year, the installation was brought to the academy’s Eat Shit exhibition in the Ventura Lambrate design district and Wiesengrün created a bespoke scent for the building where it took place.
“I started at Design Academy, where the whole of the building is an old factory so there the smells were sweat, grease and metal,” Wiesengrün told Dezeen. “This place (Eat Shit) used to be a warehouse for wine and hardware and orangeade components so the smells here are a wet basement, oranges and alcohol.”
Nära by Britt Jönsson
Across the road from Eat Shit, Britt Jönsson of Lund University presented a collection of handcrafted natural perfumes made by steam-distilling locally grown flowers and plants in a micro-laboratory. Her goal was to highlight the amount of toxins we put on our skin through synthetic fragrances and beauty products.
“Perfume is a product that used to be very expensive and exclusive and that today has become a blend of chemicals,” Jönsson said. “I asked myself how did we get from the handcrafted perfume to the poison and mass-produced scents that are everywhere.”
Nära by Britt Jönsson
A host of other students and graduates from Eindhoven, the Royal College of Art and École Boulle presented fragrance-themed projects at their school exhibitions over the past year.
Royal College of Art alumni Sasa Stucin and Nicholas Gardner designed an oval mirror that emits a scented vapour cloud, partly obscuring the reflection as it perfumes the air.
École Boulle student Charline Ronzon-Jaricot created a device that releases a bespoke scent during a moment users would like to remember, as well as a “scent vase” that enables people to detect the different notes of a perfume usually only identifiable to experts.
“Perfume is an art and its creators – perfumiers – are artists,” she told Dezeen. “But the image we have of perfumes today is stuck in the luxury and fashion context. We never take the time to contemplate a perfume for its own beauty. Too much importance is given to the packaging and the brand image but not enough to the smell.”
For example, Kentaro Yamada has created a fragrance suitable for Neanderthals. Contained within a porcelain bottle shaped to looked like a primitive stone tool, Yamada’s eau de toilette contains notes intended to trigger memories of our prehistoric roots locked in our DNA.
“The world of scent is exciting for designers because scent is invisible, but the story that scent can tell is very vivid,” Yamada told Dezeen.
Luca Nichetto worked with tailors AW Bauer & Co and Ben Gorham, founder of Swedish perfume house Byredo, to create both a Murano-glass bottle and a bespoke scent called Ombra delle 5 that debuted during Stockholm Design Week in February.
Fashion houses and department stores have been in on it too. Dior has produced a funnel-shaped glass fragrance tester to replace the normal slips of card, while Selfridges gave over an large area of its London store to a “laboratory” that helped shoppers find a scent to match their personality.
Sections of perforated brickwork set into the walls of this Bangkok residence by local architect Jun Sekino allow light to filter into terraces while screening residents from the street (+ slideshow).
Jun Sekino designed Ngamwongwan House for a client and his parents in Bangkhen, one of the 50 districts that make up the Thai capital.
The 235-square-metre brick house is split over two storeys, with two bedrooms and adjoining balconies on the upper floor, and a further bedroom and living areas set around a decked patio at ground level.
Rows of slim red bricks are spaced out and laid in a staggered arrangement to create the small gaps that allow light to enter the patios. These grates are framed by larger sections of solid wall, which are patterned with columns of protruding bricks.
“Sometimes, an ordinary brick wishes to be something beyond itself,” said the architects. “By repositioning the customary materials using the ordinary technique, a new result is formed.”
“Due to the increasing cost of the land in the urban area like Bangkok, the demand to own a house needs some prudent deliberation,” said the architect, who chose brick as an inexpensive building material that could be used to achieve an “exotic” result.
A decked patio and dark timber staircase are arranged across the middle of the house, dividing a ground-floor living room from a bedroom and kitchen at the rear.
Upstairs, two further bedrooms are also separated by this well. The first is located above the living room and has an adjoining terrace that overlooks the street, while the second has access to a smaller balcony set at the side of the house.
The two outdoor areas face each other but are are concealed from passersby by the brick grills, which are set into the outer walls. Corresponding grates in the side wall, which is pushed away from the body of the building, let light filter into the spaces.
The bulk of the structures shades the central space from the heat of the afternoon sun, allowing cool air to circulate to the rooms and terraces. Light shines through the gaps in the brickwork, casting checkered patterns of shadow and light onto the interior surfaces.
“This building was built in the tropical area; thus, it needs to reflect the tropical-living lifestyle,” explained the architect. “The construction of a two-layer brick wall in which each wall is 30 centimetres thick with space in between functions as a heat insulator, since the heat can only pass through the outer wall but not the inner wall.”
A wide porch protrudes from the front of the property, sheltering a car-parking space and a set of steps leads up from the driveway to the entrance. A narrow entrance hall between the brick end wall and the glazed walls of the living space leads into the courtyard and rooms beyond.
Bisazza may be known for their glass mosaics and ceramic tiles, but lately they’ve branched out into a new material: Cement.
Their new Mahdavi Collection, created by Paris-based designer/architect India Mahdavi, gives a surprising new look to the humble material.
Mahdavi’s bold patterns are retro in more ways than one: The tiles are reportedly made by hand (!) with subtle variances from one tile to the next. “Dimensional and chromatic variation is intrinsic of this production process,” Bisazza states, “which involves a number of manual steps and is a distinctive feature of the product.”
If you’re wondering how to maintain them, the answer is: Wax. They come from the factory with two coats on ’em already, and the installer is meant to add a third. Following that, “the surface should be waxed regularly.”
And cement though they may be, these were designed for interior use only; the bright colors, it seems, will fade in the face of direct sunlight.
They come in both square and hexagonal, the latter choice being offered for those of you that want your installer to suffer a bit.
One-time New York Post city reporter Julia Dahl is on a roll with her series of novels featuring NYC tabloid journo Rebekah Roberts.
Invisible City, released in 2014, has racked up rave reviews and prestigious literary prize nominations. Run You Down, the second in the series, comes out June 30. And as Dahl recently told Sandusky Register reporter Tom Jackson, she’s working on a third and anticipates most likely at least one or two more narratives centered around Roberts’ New York Tribune journalism.
Dahl started out her career as an EW intern, where she made a key connection with future Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn. In the Register Q&A, she also revisits her 2007-to-2010 Post days:
“It was a very hard job, mostly because every day I was forced to make pretty complex moral decisions. Do I wait an hour to knock on the door of this woman who has just been informed of her daughter’s stabbing death? Or do I go right after the cops leave and make my editor happy because he’ll get a quote before our competitor?”
“I tended to err on the side of the former – I’ve always considered myself a human being before a reporter – which is probably why I didn’t last more than a few years at the Post. The job was also an invaluable learning experience. I became braver as a reporter, and as a person; I learned how to ask strangers intimate questions without being offensive; and I saw more of this city I love than I imagine most New Yorkers do in a lifetime.”
In addition to novel writing, Dahl currently covers crime as a freelancer for CBSNews.com vertical Crimesider. She has also taught courses for our sister company Mediabistro.
Stephanie Chan at our sister publication The Hollywood Reporter has all the relevant tweets, shared today by Eva Chen.
Chen’s announcement that she will be leaving the evolving Lucky magazine brand “to spend some time with my family” confirms Alexandra Steigrad’s April 29 scoop:
Multiple sources have indicated that the magazine is going all digital, and that several investors in Silicon Valley have been interested in an acquisition of the company.
Chen rejoined Lucky as editor-in-chief in June 2013. In an interview that fall with our colleague Emma Bazilian, she talked about how she segued back to the publication:
“I was brought in as a consultant by Anna [Wintour], and she has given priceless guidance and perspective. She does understand the innate differences between the magazines — actually, all the magazines in the portfolio — and that’s why it’s been so enjoyable working with her. She understands the tone and vision for Lucky as I see it.”
Rebecca Wesson Darwin was only planning to be in New York City for a year, spurred by that all-too-common postgraduate curiosity about big city life. But an internship on the business side at GQ turned into a full-time job, then a promotion, and then a move to The New Yorker, where she would soon become that magazine’s first female publisher.
When she finally returned to her native South Carolina in 2004, Wesson Darwin brought her publishing experience with her. Working with Pierre Manigault, chairman of the Evening Post Publishing Company, Wesson Darwin started sporting and lifestyle mag Garden & Gun in 2007. But as any student of recent economic history could tell you—the timing was unfortunate. With the recession hitting less than a year into the magazine’s run, and the Post Publishing Company ready to offload the title, it looked like Garden & Gun wasn’t going to make it.
Refusing to give up on the magazine, Wesson Darwin went independent with the title, retaining Manigault as a partner. With a devoted cadre of staff that stayed on, despite being paid very little, the magazine managed to make it past the recession and thrive. Wesson Darwin recalls just how fragile a time it was.
“We had to skip an issue [and] I wrote a letter in the next issue and explained to the readers why I had to make this decision: we either skipped an issue and re-grouped or we shut off the lights and left. And I think that letter made such a difference and such an impact on our readership. People mention it to me all the time and they feel like we were honest with them and that our editorial pages are honest. So they just have this tremendous respect and trust for what we do.”
Wesson Darwin spoke with FishbowlNY about breaking into the boys’ club at The New Yorker, how Garden & Gun was able to persevere and why the pub’s name is here to stay.
FBNY: Your first publishing industry job after moving to New York was in the GQ promotions department. How did you transition to The New Yorker?
Wesson Darwin: GQ was part of Condé Nast and owned by Si Newhouse, and when he purchased The New Yorker, I was asked to go over with Steve Florio who was [GQ’s] publisher. I went over as the marketing director and then was kind of given this carrot. If we could turn business around—because The New Yorker at that point had been in decline for a number of years—I would be made the publisher. I did, and so I became the first female publisher of The New Yorker. It was really an amazing thing because The New Yorker is such a legendary magazine, and to have been given that challenge and then to have such a big responsibility—not only to lead the team, but to honor the tradition of what The New Yorker was all about. It was just an amazing experience.
FBNY: As the first female publisher, you had this “breaking into the boys’ club” experience at the age of only 34. How has this shaped your career?
Wesson Darwin: Well, even back at GQ when I was selling advertising, there were very few women on the sales team, and I think if you looked today it’s probably completely flip-flopped in terms of the number of women that are on sales teams versus men. It was a boys’ club and I guess I did break through, but I never really thought about it that way. I always thought, ‘What can I personally do? What’s my best?’ And not comparing myself really to a man or woman, but ‘How can I be the best at this job?’ I do think things have certainly changed, although probably in some ways they’re still the same.
FBNY: When you acquired Garden & Gun as an independent co-owner, did you feel you had the freedom to do things you couldn’t do at a larger media company?
Wesson Darwin: Even though [the Evening Post Publishing Company] is a large media company in that it owns a lot of fairly small newspapers and television stations, magazines were not its world. When I wrote the business plan, [the intent] was to create a magazine division within the company for them. And then, when the economy was so bad and they felt they just really need to focus on their core businesses, they let me know they were going to have to pull the plug.
And so I went to the chairman of the board of The Evening Post and said, you know, ‘We can’t let this thing go. It’s too good. I know times are tough, but I feel like we’ve made this connection with these readers. Everything is kind of poised, we’re winning awards. Let’s see if we can’t buy this thing ourselves and tough it out.’ So he and I bought it and then we ultimately brought in a third partner a couple of years later.
It didn’t change that much from that experience, but I can certainly talk about how it’s very different than when I worked with a Condé Nast or a Time Inc., which were wonderful, wonderful companies, but this is different. It’s entrepreneurial. In some ways we’re just able to be more nimble. I don’t have layers of bureaucracy when I want to do something. I either make the decision or I discuss it with my partners. When we started [the Garden & Gun Club], we had a meeting, we decided we were going to do it, and we announced it in the next issue of the magazine. We didn’t call in consultants and we didn’t research it. We just went with our gut. And I hope we don’t ever lose that here.
FBNY: Speaking of the initiatives you’ve implemented, such as the club and G&G Store, what was the goal for these projects?
Wesson Darwin: The club started at a time when things were very, very difficult. I wanted to find a way to be more in touch with [readers], but it turned out to be a nice vehicle to help with cash when cash was lacking. The highest level was what we called The Secret Society and it was a $500 membership to get a subscription to the magazine, but then have access to special invitations to really wonderful events we did around the country. And we had [a] real outpouring of readers who were willing to pay $500 for this membership. To this day, I’m friends with many of those people.
[As for the store], we’ve got all of these amazing Southern craftsmen and Southern products that we thought people would love to have more access to, not only in the South but nationally. And so we started the online store and it has just grown and grown. We also do an annual event in the first week of December called Jubilee, an event where we are selling a lot of these made-in-the-South products. We’re actually now exploring a bricks-and-mortar retail venture. The whole retail thing has evolved.
The reality is we don’t necessarily do them [to make money]. We only do six issues a year, and a lot of these initiatives are ways to stay connected with [readers] when there isn’t a magazine sitting in the mailbox or on the newsstand. It all is to really build up the brand. We’re, at the end of the day, a pretty old-fashioned magazine. The bulk of our revenues still come very much from print advertising and from circulation, so those other things are really kind of icing on the cake.
FBNY: In a New York Times article from a few years ago, you mentioned that one of the things you liked about the name of Garden & Gun was that it was bold, but you were later thinking of possibly changing it to G&G. What would prompt the name change? And by bold did you mean provocative?
Wesson Darwin: I would never change the name Garden & Gun. It certainly can be provocative, and I like that about it. I think that a lot of other names we could have come up with would have been pretty boring and we might not be around [today]. But what I meant was, around here, we call it G&G a lot. And I hear people say something is ‘very G&G,’ kind of like GQ being Gentleman’s Quarterly originally. The “garden” and the “gun” are really just metaphors for the land and for the sporting life, which is a lot of what the magazine is about.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The New York Post has made changes to its leadership team. Details are below.
Sean Giancola has been named chief revenue officer. Giancola was previously VP of national sales East for Aol Advertising.
Howard Adler has been named senior VP and general manager of print products. Adler has been with the Post since 2006, most recently serving as senior VP sales. Adler will continue to oversee Alexa, the Post’s lifestyle publication.
Sarah Cravetz Kleinhandler joins as head of consumer marketing. She was previously Weight Watchers’ senior director for digital strategy and marketing.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
