World of prefab
Weekly Dose of Architecture featured
last week a built instance of the prefab FlatPak House by Minneapolis architects Lazor Office. The occasion for the Weekly Dose feature appears to have been CBS Sunday Morning's recent coverage of the house (along with various other new 'Design' marketables large & small). FlatPak, it happens, is also one of three prefab products being marketed via
Dwell Magazine as
The Dwell Homes by Empyrean.
Dwell is one mag I maintain subscription to, as a relatively cheap window on currents in architecture & design, so I've noticed the prefab promotion before now; but I haven't bothered to look much past
Dwell into how the market for these things is shaping up, or into info about house schemes, themselves, as they're under development.
I was interested, though, to come across in June's
Metropolis – the other affordable title of the design/cutting-edge-consumption culture genre I get these days – an opinion piece that does a bit of pin-poking at the 'Dwell Homes' balloon. The article, 'Bringing back the box: Prefab is chic, but is it the answer to anyone's question?', is by Lyle Rexer, a writer covering contemporary arts (a couple of his books are to be found on Amazon), and the approach, as you'd expect from
Metropolis, is hardly anti-modernist. Here Rexer's angle isn't to consider prefab as a design phenomenon, though, but to sketch it as a set of practical and, to a degree, sociological problems. (This is gratifying – a nice example I think of editorial level-headedness that seems to hold at
Metropolis.) He's got an anecdote, happily, to come at the issue with (and this signals up front the limited nature of his criticism, if we're paying attention).
... Prefab would seem to be great as a starter home and even better as a second one outside the city someplace – a clean, uncluttered Donald Judd-type getaway. And who really wants to deal with architects and contractors anyway when you can get all that just by picking the house? [To keep things straight, here, we should acknowledge that's not quite the sales pitch you'd necessarily find prefab promoters making. – pb]
Fair enough. But as I recently watched a friend become a prefab Mr. Blandings, I began to wonder how this experience could be a model for any future anywhere. He had a brownstone apartment; he wanted a loft. He had nineteenth century; he wanted Modernism. He had city; he wanted rural, and he had the land in upstate New York already. He thought it would be 'fun' and 'cheap enough to be more fun.' He picked a whiz kid engineer-architect with international credentials and lots of cachet among those in the know. Although the house was not a kit assembly, many key components – foundation, footings, floors, ceilings, wall panels – were prefabricated and delivered to the site ready to build. Prefab can, of course, mean many different things. In this case the architect even had his own assembly team to eliminate contractors altogether. And with all the money he saved, my friend assumed there would be lots of room for the customized touches that would make this his own statement.
After nearly three years the house – a 24-by-72 foot Modernist box upon a box – was still not ready. ...
Among the false assumptions Rexer says he wants to dispel by way of his story there, 'First and foremost is the idea that you can get an architect without paying for one.' That's a point worth dwelling (
ah!) on, I'd say, even if the question isn't quite as simple as posing it that way suggests.
Toward the end of the piece Rexer broadens the scope of his discussion considerably, if only by way of providing a sort of talking point.
The more serious problem with high-design prefab housing is that it is a repackaging of the American Dream – and that dream may not be environmentally affordable. Although it has a futurist appeal, prefab embodies a bourgeois aspiration [tsk!] no different from 1950s suburbia, of a discreet dwelling for everyone. Satisfying that primarily North American expectation over five decades has led us to the open-space crisis of sprawl.... It's hard to see how a landscape littered with Modernist boxes – each requiring water, a sewer, and a driveway – will be part of anyone's green revolution, even if the boxes do have eco-friendly bamboo floors....
The limit of prefab now is the one imposed by the consumerist social model that has given it birth. On the global scale the every-man-a-Farnsworth-House-owner approach to shelter makes even less sense.
Whether or not there's indeed a Green Revolution on the horizon, or whether there's any use in framing it as a confrontation with the bourgeois or with (broadly speaking) the suburban, the direction his close indicates there does point to a good deal that might be pursued further (if one had time) concerning the promising & the doubtful potentials in this particular expression of the Modernist strand of the world of big-A Architecture.
Rexer's article isn't available to non-subscribers online, so if you want to read the rest, get yourself a June
Metropolis. (Big plus: many evocative full-page armchair, desk lamp, bath faucet ads.) There is though another, shorter report on efforts to boost the prefab marketplace at the magazine's site,
here, if the subject interests you. (Hey, you've read this far.)
Do at least take a look at the Lazor Office
FlatPak House site (Flash). It's colorful, blocky, interactivity-heavy – absolute www candy.
Ballpoint
Thought I would respond briefly to
Darrell Reimer's comment
below with three ballpoint pen sketches from past drawing days, sketches that have always seemed to me particularly successful. (For each successful sketch in old sketch books, let me immediately interject, I have many more that are bad or abortive, pitiful reminders of erratic practice of the skill over the years. Here though you will be spared having to consider them!) Part of the reason these do rise to a degree of success, I think, is just that the instrument is limited – ballpoint's plainly not especially subtle or expressive for drawing, as I say. It can do certain things readily, but not many things. A drawing tool with a good deal of expressive potential – ink handled with a good brush, say – demands much; it calls for ability approaching more nearly to mastery, in order to be used satisfyingly. But a ballpoint pen is limited – and therefore unintimidating. If you've got some ability, though you fall short of mastery, a limited & unintimidating medium can be a great thing, a freeing thing, for sustaining & gaining confidence in what ability you've got. If, of course, you do mean to draw (hmm) closer to a fuller kind of mastery, you also have to wrestle with the more intimidating media, not merely satisfy yourself with the successes possible with the limited ones. (Could be plenty of further discussion from this point, I imagine, if there were time.)
So, these are three sketches of people's heads from probably about the same year, at a time when I was drawing relatively more consistently and confidently. It's interesting to me that each occasion seems to have brought more to the fore diverse components of what could be called personal stylistic spectrum, though each was done with the same pen on similar or identical paper. (Or rather, with the same
model of pen. A ballpoint handles pretty differently at different stages of its life, as may be obvious. The 1st of these is plainly in the later stages of one pen's life, and the 3rd plainly from a more fresh pen. This factor does affect what you end up trying to accomplish, even on the fly, in my experience.)
First sketch subject was a guy who joined me in the room where I was reading in a library I used to frequent on Sunday afternoons, when I attended church some distance from where I was living. The fellow came in, lay down & took a nap – and I whipped out the sketchbook. Second sketch, thoughtful friend
Dan Schantz – can't remember the situation. Third, the worthy
Fisher, absorbed, as I recall, in a game of cards. (This last, I should say, in some ways illustrates particularly well what I'm thinking of when I write, below, of achieving clarity & economy in a sketch.)
(Sometime I expect I'll post together several old drawings of Mr Fisher, done on widely varying occasions over some years, – interesting for comparison.)
(I've been meaning to mention that I'm indebted to Darrell Reimer for the sidebar link to Canadian illustration site
Drawn! – which you should check out, if you haven't already.)
Weekly sketch
If you've been following along, you know that I'm newly on
a plan to do a little drawing each week with my excellent friend
Mr Fisher. Last week, it happens, I was staying down in the Fairfax, Va. area while under way with re-doing a bathroom floor (about which I hope to post something, upcoming) for friends. So our second weekly early morning session was yesterday, Monday.
Again – only naturally – it was awkward getting into the sketching. But I know well enough that here it does little good to sit & think about what you're doing, however awkward you feel. You've just got to start. Among the stuff lying decoratively about at Jeff's place is a deer skull found in the fields nearby, and I've been eyeing it for a while as something to fool with a bit on paper. It was somewhat more a challenge to my rusty drawing skills than I was altogether ready for this morning, truthfully. As I say, though, it doesn't pay to stop & think too much. So I sat & just kind of went at it – using a ballpoint pen, fairly fluid, moderately fine-pointed (not, of course, a terribly subtle or expressive instrument). And I felt the challenge thoroughly – fighting doubt-creep all the way.
The resulting sketch certainly isn't impressive for clarity or economy, but at the same time it's not too painfully strained, tentative, either. Under the circumstances, I'll take that.
Solid reading
Made an impulse buy this past week of
Paul Johnson's 2003 popular-audience text
Art: A New History. It was on the bargain racks at Borders for $13. I didn't know of the book beforehand. In fact, till now I've been little familiar with Johnson, and haven't had any particular impression of him as an historian or an opinionist, beyond being aware that he's generally well regarded among some of the folks I know who'd be conventionally classed as conservatives. The book's bright contrasty cover caught my eye as I was headed to the cashier (bearing a late Mothers Day gift – my excuse for allowing myself to go into a bookstore); I picked it up, leafed through it a bit, put it back, picked it up again and leafed some more, decided I could do considerably worse for that amount of change, and took it with me. It looks like an enjoyable read, whatever the limitations or strengths its author's point of view or temperament may bring to treatment of the subject itself. I expect I'll be reading it in bits & pieces, here & there, for a while, unless other reading comes to seem more pressing and crowds it from the pile's top tiers – altogether, of course, a possibility.
If you're curious, Google turns up a few reviews – usual fare as far as I can tell. There's a
longish one, interestingly, in
First Things, Mar 2004. WSJ's
Opinion Journal has
one too. Both, I suppose not surprisingly, are fairly favorable. Less favorable is
one from the UK's
Guardian; but even here, after a good deal of doubtlessly worthwhile fault-finding, author Julian Bell comes around to conclude that "To my surprise I find I don't wish to kick it: it's generous in spirit."
Contained also in Bell's critique – to consider now briefly something of Johnson's content – is this useful generalizing observation about the approach taken in
A New History:
He reveres constructive ingenuity and technical prowess. Architecture is usually to the fore of his mind, which loves to investigate the world's great engineering systems and to laud the mighty men who have directed them, from ancient Egypt's Imhotep to the contemporary designer Santiago Calatrava. In fact his ability to carry the reader persuasively through constructive processes of all types, from bronze-casting to watercolour, is probably the book's most solidly [ahem] useful aspect.
Coincidentally, I began reading Johnson a few chapters in, where he gets into Rome, pivot of Western Civ. Last, then, let me give you here a passage I've marked. Relatively a commonplace sort of description of the Roman world, maybe, but a passage that illustrates Bell's observation exactly and that probably serves pretty well to demonstrate the engaging quality of Johnson's style, too.
Roman culture, then, had a largely Etruscan base and an overwhelmingly Greek superstructure. But it had Roman elements too. What Romans were good at were law and justice, war and defence, communications and transport, the conquest of dangerous and destructive barbarians, and the suppression of organised brigandry on land and piracy at sea. Hence, once the Romans were established in power all over the Mediterranean, it became a pacific inland sea bordered by huge, prosperous towns and splendid estates and vineyards, a vast area where the rule of law prevailed, where trade, industry and commerce begat vast wealth, and where men could hang on to their wealth, bequeath it and lavish it on civilised living.
Thus if the Romans did not as a rule do things better than the Greeks, they did them much more often, on a larger scale and over a much wider area. The Greeks spread their culture over Magna Graecia and the fringes of the Levant and North-East Africa. The Romans did all this and more – they added most of Europe. Indeed they effectively created Europe as the 'natural' centre of civilisation, a position which it held virtually to our own times. Moreover, they added one man-made material which was central to all this grandeur and monumentality – concrete.
. . . Without being quite aware of how it worked, the Romans began to use pozzuolanic mortar as a binding agent with a mixture (caementa) of stone chips, brick nuggets, broken tiles and other hard materials, the operation being carried out on the building site itself, and the product slapped on quickly. This opus caementicium, as they called the method, was put into timber shuttering or formwork, and laid out as courses running continuously across major buildings, and especially for piers, arches, vaults and main walls. In time the Romans learned to dispense with the shuttering, using stone instead, and as concrete was hideously ugly – it still is over 2,000 years later – they put a film of stuccoing on both exterior and interior.
Concrete proved immensely strong, cheap and easy to use, and the Romans, as they strengthened their grip on Italy, and expanded their Empire, employed it in ever-increasing quantities for the infrastructure of roads, bridges, aqueducts, viaducts and harbours, which was the secret of their success. . . . Concrete helped the Roman authorities to get the troops wherever they were wanted, in the largest numbers, at the maximum speed, and with their heavy equipment. Once Roman military power was established, the excellence, uniformity, relative impartiality and honesty of Roman law ensured that the inhabitants of Romanised provinces were, on the whole, well content. Concrete, then, was an essential element in the material structure of the Roman Empire, which reflected its strength and durability.
But was it something more? The Romans took their culture from Greece, their openly admitted superior in this respect, but in time concrete – and the added wealth and universal transmission of goods which it made possible – enabled the Romans to do things which the Greeks had never even contemplated. Thereby the Romans were able to give architecture a grandeur which is their principal achievement in the arts. The salient element in grandeur was size. In the twentieth century we became accustomed to dismiss mere size as an artistic element, though it is often impossible to achieve sublimity without it. But to our forbears size was a key component of art, if for no other reason than that it was so difficult to achieve. [Consider, by the way, monumental size as a feature of Tolkien's Numenorean ancientry.] In the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome in the West, ordinary people judged the greatness of Rome by size. . . . It was the sheer size of Rome's ruins which caught their imagination.
Concrete, then, was the foundation of both the reality and the myth of Rome. Rome, and its empire, were indeed set in concrete.
(You may wish to object to Johnson's parenthetical blanket dismissal of concrete's value as a finish material. Please do – you won't get any disagreement from me.)
'Goliath' back on track
I've just checked on the
'Goliath Expedition' site, and find there that the legal obstacle which, upon his entry into Russia, had blocked British adventurer Karl Bushby's walk around the world was cleared last week. He evidently has to return to Alaska, from where he & a fellow trekker had recently walked across the frozen Bering Straight. But he'll be allowed to re-enter Russia (with paperwork completed this time) and pick up where things are now halted. I can't help feeling that the good of spending 12 or so years of one's life demonstrating that a man can walk from the southern end of Argentina through North America & Eurasia back to the UK can never come near comparison with the cost, but I also can't help feeling relieved that Bushby will be able to go forward, since he remains determined and since so much (of his life, particularly) has already been given to seeing it accomplished.
On being, or not being, an artist
Sarah Irani, who is an
artist and whose ideas on art & other subjects I value and am grateful to have some opportunity to engage, replies in comments
below with a question – or rather, better, with a challenge – upon my mentioning that I don't regard myself as an artist. 'What makes someone an artist?' she asks. (My friend
Jeff, too, challenged me on this point, in an email.)
This is exactly the kind of question
I want to be addressing here, for my own if no one else's development of thought. So I'm glad she's put it to me. It's something I'd like to find approaches to from a variety of angles, moreover – and I'm certainly not going to exhaust the matter in a single post in any case. There's a wealth of things to consider. Greater wealth than I can handle, truthfully, since I've had only very limited reading & discussion in what's obviously an issue of widespread & age-long interest within our culture.
Sarah says, 'You make stuff and you draw well.' (Sincere thanks are due to Sarah here for the compliment.) I'm wondering if she's going to amend & develop the question from there; I hope she will. But for the moment, let me take this at face value and think a bit about ways in which we look at making/drawing/&c as sufficient to distinguish someone as an artist. It's true, of course, that one everyday usage of 'artist' simply acknowledges, more or less subjectively, a person's achievement of a greater-than-average degree of skill at something 'creative'. In fact most of us are prone to go further and use 'artist' very loosely, by way of a kind of analogy, for someone who does almost anything especially well. ('Yeah, ya know he's more than a mechanic when it comes to bike repair – he's an
artist.') Plainly, Sarah's got too much personal interest in the word to be fairly read in a very loose way on presumption; and I'm aiming to clarify, not confuse, the kinds of meaning she may have in mind. But it's useful to consider the common habits of speech a brief comment like this one from her can derive from or be connected with.
I think it's safe to assume that if Sarah Irani notes habits or skills a person's gained and says, 'You make stuff and you draw well,' there are specifics attached in qualification, whether spoken or unspoken. For Sarah, to say someone draws well most likely isn't going to amount merely to flattery or a gesture of confidence in someone's good intentions, because Sarah's been intensively trained in & become personally invested in the study of drawing in a traditional idiom. We know her judgment about a sketch or a drawing is measured against some array of definite & history-bound criteria. Again, if she says in the same context, 'you make stuff,' we understand what she has in mind isn't a category of kinds of effort that include unthinking assembly of parts 'following the instructions'. 'Making' in the terms she's allowing is (among other things perhaps) a matter of a certain level of intentionality in combination with skill and, more, has its end in contributing in material forms to a world ordered for our living.
But if Paul Bowman does happen to
make stuff and/or
draw well according to one artist's or many artists' considered, relatively objective criteria, should he also, for that reason alone, be said to be an artist? From here we might find our way into a variety of valuable further questions – and possibly also to a variety of useful yesses and nos in answer to the initial question.
The working problem I want to suggest as a frame for such questions, and the theme I want to try to continue introducing into my own discussions as I can, is the problem of recognizing, acquiring, and inhabiting a discipline – which is a problem that covers a lot of territory: partakes of a lot of other kinds of problems, and certainly isn't just about art in any sense narrow or broad. But it seems to me that bringing this lense over our questions above, questions about whether or not one's making/drawing/&c qualify one to be called an artist, gives us a way to talk about them in terms broader than what have to do with an individual's will & experiences played out – in other words, a way to talk abou them in social & cultural terms – and at the same time gives us a way to see the individual's will & experiences, in respect to making/drawing/&c, as meaningful for the sake of something more than any apparent or real value, understood as contribution to social or cultural life, things he or she makes might have.
Anyway – coming down from the exuberant generalizing —
The fact that comes most immediately to my mind, in answer to a challenge like Sarah's or Jeff's, is the fact that I don't make a pursuit of producing art works, either as a way to make my living or as something I'd do to make a living if I could. Nor (at present, anyway) am I ever really more than faintly concerned, beyond the most utilitarian & non-subjective reckoning, with the value that any things I may make (or even draw) might have for adding shape to a world of meanings & meaning. So there are simple, concrete senses in which I can't call myself an artist – that is, with respect to work – any more than a tax accountant or a used car salesman or a carpet-layer can. On the other hand, I do have a long-standing desire to study architecture and to enter, in some fashion, that profession. And in some ways (adding confusion here, maybe) this does begin for me in drawing, which has always been part of my life. Moreover, I think of my work now, and various of my pursuits apart from work, as at least a leading-up-to gaining architecture as a discipline for life. That being so, there's some discussion warranted about whether or in what sense architecture is art, and whether by aiming for it I'm in process of becoming an artist somehow.
We'll see to what degree I'll be able to take these questions up here, over time.
'They forget that those cats listened to somebody, too.'
From a
Baltimore Sun interview with jazz trumpet player Roy Hargrove, by
Sun pop critic Rashod Ollison, in this past Sunday's arts & culture section:
"Man, there's a lot of jazz being produced today that – I don't know," Hargrove says, frowning. "I feel like it may be over people's heads. The swing element is missing, the element that makes people feel good and want to listen to it. There are a lot of cats that feel like they want to prove something, like [jazz] is the Pythagorean Theorem and [stuff]," he says with a chuckle. "They forget that people are listening to it."
Further on:
"Right now, I'm expressing the importance of tradition, something I think is being overlooked," he says, leaning back in his chair. "I find that when I go to schools, the young players gravitate more toward the progressive side of jazz. Pianists want to play like McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock; the saxophone players are all, like, Coltrane-influenced. And they forget that those cats listened to somebody, too. There's so much more to explore except what came after 1960. ... It gives you a more complete picture and maybe you'll have your own thing to put in there."
(Note, by the way, that Hargrove got his start under the influence of Wynton Marsalis.)
The last line from Hargrove above in mind, finally, toss in your blender this mid-life quote from
Le Corbusier (a Ruskin devotee throughout his studies & into his early career; later well-known for argument from Classical models), excerpted in the biography
Le Corbusier's Formative Years:
Today I am accused of being a revolutionary, yet I confess to having had only one master: the past; and only one discipline: the study of the past.
Habit (re)forming – cont.
Jeff Fisher, whose site I recommended a few posts ago, suggested to me a couple of weeks back that we try drawing together on a regular basis. This invitation has been something of a jump-start to actual activity, where the return to maintaining a place for drawing among my habits (introduced briefly
below) is concerned. I'd been thinking about how to get a start; in fact taking up this blogging about a month ago was a step that I thought might develop toward some sort of renewed graphic creativity. But I hadn't expected or thought of initiating something so straightforward as time set aside each week to do a little sketch-work with Jeff. Now it seems like the obvious thing to do, and I'm very grateful he's taken the lead.
We can both use it. I simply need to move from thinking about drawing to actually doing it again. Jeff is already drawing frequently, of course, but he needs (if I may presume to account for him here) more occasion for raw, undirected drawing than he's been getting for a while.
So we managed to get in a first session today. We're going to try to manage early morning time-slots, in part just because we both have a degree of freedom for it, being self-employed. I showed up at his door at 7:45, a little late. Of course, Jeff was still in bed – I'd forgotten to confirm for today.
It was an awkward start for me in some ways, I'll admit; but that's pretty much to be expected. Drawing,
it's long been popularly understood, is a right-brain thing. Certain thinking functions have to be backgrounded, or denied their usual dominance, and others given more than usual rein – though I don't like describing what this amounts to to myself too neatly. I've got a pretty good feeling, from experience, for this mode of operating & its vagaries, and I knew I wouldn't find my way into the right state of mind right away today. Nor did I; but things still went well enough. In any case, it's sufficient to think that something's under way here, to be satisfied with this morning's effort.
Brought along an item that's made for much good exercise in past, a common art-school plastic human skull, wherewith Jeff & I soon enough both got a little start. The immediate tendency with an object like this, given a pencil & a blank piece of paper, is to treat it as something to be rendered neat, small, & isolated in the middle of an area of white space. I was conscious of the impulse, and didn't really resist: was feeling tentative, and I didn't want to find I was pushing myself. But I broke out of this fixity before too long. Dropped my 'good', softer-lead, more potentially expressive drawing pencil for the old unartistic .5mm click-pencil, switched from my set-up subject, the plastic skull, to a more inviting subject, Jeff's gorgeous young dog
Loki lying (miffed, plainly, that no one wanted to play) on the floor at my feet, and managed to lose that tentativeness, imperfectly but sufficiently, for the short remainder of time. There isn't much to show for it, but what there is, you can check out by clicking on the image.
