At the McNay

Posted on October 19, 2010 1:26 pm

I attended the annual Texas Society of Architects convention in San Antonio last week, and took part in a tour of museums, which included the recently completed Stieren Center at the McNay. (BTW, I designed the identity for the McNay years ago, and I’m delighted to see that it’s still in use.) The Stieren is a minimalist glass pavilion designed by the noted French architect Jean-Paul Viguier – his first museum project in the U.S. Complementing the exhibit Landscapes from the Age of Impressionism, was an installation of paintings and photographs from the McNay’s collection of postwar and contemporary art. As the tour group rounded a corner, everyone was knocked out (“Can I take it home!?”) by an extraordinary, immense chromogenic diptych of an Italian beach scene by Massimo Vitali, a new acquisition by the Museum. I’ve seen Vitali’s work published in books and magazines, but never before in person. Ethereal, yet richly detailed. Of this world, or some other? Documentary, or surreal?

Waiting for the Biography

Posted on October 12, 2010 2:00 pm

Carla and I first visited Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa back in the ’80s. The combined experience of the West Texas high desert landscape (“The Big Empty”), the former U.S. Army fort that Judd acquired to house his art, the art itself, the town, and the blanket of stars above, is unlike anything anywhere else. We were immediately hooked, and remain so. There are two books being released this month that look to be must-haves: Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd, by Marianne Stockebrand, the longtime director of the Chinati Foundation; and Donald Judd: Specifics, by David Raskin, which is, remarkably, the first major monograph devoted to Judd. As tasty as these books appear to be, the one Carla and I long for is an unauthorized biography of Judd. Man-oh-man, the stories we hear from the locals and long-timers… Could be a great miniseries. Or perhaps a sequel to Giant.

Doug Michaels

Posted on September 1, 2010 10:09 am

I’ve had the good fortune to know and work with a number of great architects, designers, and personalities over the years. Doug Michaels founded Ant Farm with Chip Lord in 1968. Ant Farm was a subversive art and design collective (a practice modeled more on a rock band than a corporate entity) that staged happenings, made films, and created installations and architecture. Their best known works are Cadillac Ranch (Amarillo Texas, 1974), celebrating the rise and fall of the great American tail fin, the House of the Century (with architect Richard Jost, 1972), and Media Burn (1975), in which astronaut-clad Ant Farmers drove a Cadillac through a wall of flaming television sets. Somewhat less well known is their film The Eternal Frame (1975), a frame-by-frame reenactment of the Zapruder film, in which Doug played Jackie Kennedy, complete with pink suit and pillbox hat. Doug has been described as part Buckminster Fuller and part Abbie Hoffman. Ant Farm disbanded in 1978 following a fire that destroyed their San Francisco studio. I met Doug in 1979 when I joined the New York office of Philip Johnson and John Burgee Architects. Doug, the quintessential counter-culture provocateur-artiste-wildman transformed himself, for a while anyway, into a buttoned-down corporate architect. The real Doug revealed himself one day when he appeared at the Seagram Building office in head-to-toe green leather believing, incorrectly, that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee were traveling that day. Doug later established his own studio where he continued to pursue interesting and provocative projects. In 1996, he created a design for Lafayette Square, across from The White House. The National Sofa was a landscape design project that included a curved marble “sofa” and giant pop-up television screen. Doug said that “the sofa is sort of an American icon – a disarming, friendly, social setting. Americans like to just sit on a sofa and hang out.” Doug died in a fall while climbing to a whale observation point in Eden, Australia in 2003. Stanley Marsh, the Amarillo-based art patron, had the Cadillacs of Cadillac Ranch painted black upon Doug’s death.

PKN Austin #9 on November 18

Posted on August 11, 2010 9:12 am

After a break, we’ll present the 9th edition of Pecha Kucha Night Austin on Thursday November 18 – venue to be announced. As many of you know, we showcase extraordinary emerging and mature Austin creative talent (architects, artists, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, etc&etc), usually to an audience of several hundred. For the upcoming edition we will for the first time feature an out-of-town guest. Jason Roberts is a Dallas-based community organizer, citizen urban designer, and middle-of-the-night guerilla bike lane creator. His work has been showcased at TEDx Washington DC and GOOD magazine. Yes, there are things that Austin can learn from Dallas. Take nine minutes and check out this video:

The Better Block video:

Happy Summer. Be cool.

Posted on July 26, 2010 11:32 am

RIP

Posted on July 20, 2010 2:00 pm

I was in a cemetery in Waco, Texas the other day and, quite by accident, came upon the grave of Poodie Locke, the well-known and much-loved road manager for Willie Nelson for over 30 years, and the proprietor of Poodie’s Hilltop, a honky-tonk in Spicewood, just west of Austin. Poodie died last year of a heart attack at the age of 56. His tombstone caught my eye from across the way, with it’s orange stone and super-sized Texas Longhorn emblem.

Headstones have been an interest of mine for many years, and I have profound and sweet (and sad) memories of times at Mission Park Cemetery in San Antonio.

Should a headstone make a personal statement? Where’s the line between good taste and silliness? How does one, or one’s family, distill a life into several words? With the decline of traditional stone-carving craftsmanship, what can reasonably be designed and produced that stands up to the best that’s been done in the past? What role can, or should, technology and digital iconography play in headstone design? (I’m thinking none, but maybe I need to get over it.)

The headstone of Paul Rand, one of the 20th century’s great designers, is composed of two stone cubes, one atop the other and turned 45 degrees. The lower stone is inscribed in Hebrew, and the lighter upper stone has Rand’s carved name and years of birth and death filling one face of the cube. The effect is modern yet timeless, solid yet dynamic, simple yet rather grand.

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of England’s great architects. His eccentric and atmospheric home in London is open to the public, and is a totally cool museum experience. (Go at night for a candlelight tour.) While small, every nook is cram-packed with the art and antiquities he obsessively collected throughout his life. There’s a basement room Soane designed for Padre Giovanni, an imaginary monk. (Yes.) And there’s a crypt for his wife’s lap dog. The exquisitely simple inscription on the crypt reads, “Alas, poor Fanny.”

Unimark

Posted on July 6, 2010 9:35 am

Although I was educated as an architect, I was aware of and interested in graphic design from my high school days. My first job with an architecture firm was a summer internship with the Houston office of Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson, where I spent a lot of time press-typing Helvetica Medium from Letraset sheets. I became quite proficient, with first-rate kerning skills that still serve me well. My first job out of college was in the graphics department at Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS, later CRSS), the innovative Houston-based firm. By this time the Italian architect and designer Massimo Vignelli had become a hero of mine, and a kind of bridge for me as I moved from architecture to graphic design. Seemingly effortlessly, but with extraordinary discipline, he designed interiors, products, furniture, signage, and print graphics. Unimark, the firm he founded with several others in 1965, was the first truly international design firm, with eleven offices in five countries. Unimark’s spectacular successes, failures, and lessons have been documented in an engaging monograph published last Fall.

Modern 50

Posted on July 6, 2010 9:17 am

Uncommon Objects is a very cool store. Located on South Congress in Austin, it’s a great place to kill an hour or so, and it’s a shortlist stop for out-of-towners, whether your elderly aunt from Tyler, or your hipster buddy from LA. We recently bought a vintage quilt there that looks like it was made by an insane, minimalist, dizzy, Savile Row, Sol Lewitt type. You just never know what you’ll suddenly find to be irresistable.

La Pianta Grande di Roma

Posted on June 23, 2010 9:10 am

Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome has fascinated me since I happened on four panels of the twelve panel map at an antiques store in Houston some 30 years ago. The dealer didn’t know the map’s significance, but I did, thanks to Blake Alexander’s architecture history class. I bought the four for $10 each(!), and got out of there as fast as I could. They’ve graced walls at every apartment and house I’ve had since, and my daughters were told at an early age “… if there’s ever a fire, grab the Nolli’s.”

Pope Benedict XIV commissioned the map in the mid 1730s, and the work was completed with its engraving in 1748. Amongst many innovations, the map reorients the city to magnetic north from the previous east convention.

Several years ago, researchers and historians at The University of Oregon created a spectacular interactive website focusing on the map and its history. From that site: “The map depicts the city in astonishing detail. Nolli accomplished this by using scientific surveying techniques, careful base drawings, and minutely prepared engravings. The map’s graphic representations include a precise architectural scale, as well as a prominent compass rose, which notes both magnetic and astronomical north. The Nolli map is the first accurate map of Rome since antiquity and captures the city at the height of its cultural and artistic achievements. The historic center of Rome has changed little over the last 250 years; therefore, the Nolli map remains one of the best sources for understanding the contemporary city.”

http://nolli.uoregon.edu/

Iconic and Ironic

Posted on June 23, 2010 9:09 am

What could be more heroic than this famous Arnold Newman photograph of Robert Moses, looking like the God of New York – which, of course, he was. (Or was he the devil?) I’ve been a fan of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s “Learning From Las Vegas” since college, but I never before made the visual connection between the two photographs. I’d like to pair the pics on the cover of a book. Gotta get some “content” though. Ha.