Posts Tagged ‘modernism’
“Everything in the physical environment—everything—either raises our spirits or dampens them”*…
The venerable Witold Rybczynski on how, starting with Adolf Loos and the Vienna Secession, ornament was “banished” from modernist architecture– and on what that’s cost us…
… The abandonment of ornament has levied a heavy toll on the practice of architecture, tantamount to misplacing a crucial instrument of one’s toolbox. With ornament, an architect could give meaning to a building not only by incorporating specific references to what went on inside… but also by simply dialing the intensity up or down. Thus the main entrance of the Philadelphia Board of Education Building is not merely larger than the service entrance, it is more elaborately decorated, topped by two winged female figures and a medallion containing what looks like a coat of arms. Without subjunctive ornament, a building risks being less nuanced, but without meaningful ornament, it risks becoming, well, meaningless.
The banishment of ornament means an end to the close collaboration between architects and artists. It is difficult to imagine an architect today saying, “I should like to do the plan and the massing of the building; then … turn the ornament over to a perfectly qualified sculptor, and the color and surface direction to an equally qualified painter.” Today, the art in public buildings tends to be divorced from the architecture. A large travertine sculpture, Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure, stands outside Marcel Breuer’s UNESCO Building in Paris. Inside is a Picasso mural, The Fall of Icarus. The sculpture and the mural are beautiful works of art, but they have nothing to do with the architecture. They are simply “a Henry Moore” and “a Picasso.” The days when architects and artists worked closely together are long gone, and the results are not necessarily architecture that is worse, but architecture that is more one-dimensional: a long solo unenlivened by the occasional duet.
Take away ornament, and what are you left with? When we get close to a building today, we are confronted by gaskets, caulking, nuts and bolts—the minutiae of building construction. Or worse: exit signs, ventilation grills, and fire-hose cabinets. There is an architectural consequence to this. Traditionally, buildings were built as relatively straightforward boxes, their distinctive quality provided by ornament. Lacking the latter, architects feel obliged to provide dramatic cantilevers, unusual shapes, vertiginous space, and soaring roofs. But these big moves are not balanced by the finer-grained experience of small moves—that is, by ornament…
Why ornament matters in architecture: “Give Us Something to Look At,” from @witoldr in @TheAmScho. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Christopher Alexander, in conversation with Rybczynski
###
As we make with meaning, we might spare a thought for Pier Luigi Nervi; he died on this date in 1979. An exemplar of the trend against which Rybczynski argues, Nervi was an architect who drew on his deep engineering expertise– especially in reinforced concrete– to create notable “thin shell” structures worldwide.
“He who can pay every day for a dinner fit for a hundred persons, is often satisfied after having eaten the thigh of a chicken”*…
In a review of Jacques Pépin’s recent book, Jacques Pépin Art of the Chicken, a collection of stories, recipes and the authors own paintings (like the one above), Daniel M. Lavery considers both its subject and its author…
If you are a bird, odds are that you are a chicken. Since the sixteenth century the global bird population has steadily decreased, in both the number of species and the number of individuals, and each year more of them are chickens. Today there are some 33 billion chickens in the world, although this number can fluctuate substantially according to slaughtering trends.
If you are an American, odds are that you eat meat. In this country roughly 4 percent of the population identifies as vegetarian. Americans who do eat meat most frequently choose chicken, the consumption of which overtook beef sometime in the late 1990s. Pork has maintained a steady position in third place for decades. Pigs become pork when they are processed and eaten; cattle become veal or beef. But chicken is chicken everywhere, and chicken is everywhere.
If you are a home cook preparing a whole carcass for dinner, you are almost certainly roasting a chicken. Only the very adventurous or committed will roast an entire pig or goat, and usually only as part of a special celebration. The home cook can still with relative ease purchase a whole chicken (albeit usually with the feet and head already removed) almost anywhere meat is sold. She can address the carcass herself: whether to split the breast or separate the drumstick from the thigh; to section the wing into flat, drumette, and tip or leave it intact; to toss the neck and innards or keep them for stock.
It is through the chicken that most American cooks acquaint themselves with the techniques of butchery, if they butcher at all, and often it is through the work of Jacques Pépin that the introduction is made…
…
It is difficult to become an excellent chef. Once you are an excellent chef, it gets easier to become a beloved chef, since people already love food. Pépin has the Chrysler Building of culinary reputations, prestigious but not daunting, popular but not inane, an amalgamation of influences and opportunities only possible in the midcentury United States. He has unimpeachable old-world credentials, having left home for his first kitchen apprenticeship at thirteen, only earning the right to turn on the stove after a year of scrubbing pans, hauling coal, and plucking chickens. He has served as official chef to two French prime ministers. In 1961 he turned down an invitation to cook for the Kennedy White House in order to become the head of research and development at the central commissary for the Howard Johnson hotel and restaurant chain.
Writing came as a relatively late-in-life reinvention for Pépin, who was unable to continue working restaurant hours after a 1974 car accident. At the time he had written only one book, The Other Half of the Egg, with two co-authors, the McCall’s editor Helen McCully and William North Jayme. Since then, he has written over thirty. He has been cooking on American television since 1982, usually on PBS and its San Francisco affiliate, KQED, and often appeared with his friend and collaborator Julia Child during her lifetime. There is a loose biographical framing to Art of the Chicken, but Pépin gave a fuller account of his career in The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen (2003). In the newest book, his life story is only drawn out insofar as it informs his relationship to chicken…
If it sounds pat to suggest that people enjoyed watching how easily French and American cooking traditions could come together when Jacques and Julia did it, we must remember that in the 1980s and 1990s, cooking shows were still in the business of generating ease. There remains excellent cooking on-screen today, but it is almost never permitted to be exhibited calmly. Pépin is one of the few remaining on-camera chefs who seems to have relaxed for longer than five minutes at a time. His quietly competent air, his teeth-sucking ease, and his gentle, affirming style all played beautifully with Child’s patrician heartiness (her maternal grandfather was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts). She was outdoorsy, unselfconscious, cheerful, unaffected, practical, uninterested in euphemism but given to nicknaming; she naturally complemented Pépin’s tidy, dynamic, unpretentious Gallic enthusiasm.
How unpretentious? Here Pépin recalls with equal parts alarm and delight the transition from Henri Soulé’s restaurant Le Pavillonon Park Avenue and 57th Street to the short-order grills at Howard Johnson’s:
Quitting one of the very finest kitchens in the country, I found myself standing over a grill flipping burgers and hot dogs at a Howard Johnson’s in the nether reaches of Queens…. Nothing in my career…had taught me the finer points of preparing food on a flat-topped griddle. I scrambled eggs, cooked them sunny-side up, and flipped them over hard. Piles of hash browns sizzled beside the eggs, along with hot dogs, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and pancakes.
This was cooking at a superhuman scale. The job of a chef in most restaurants, no matter how exclusive, is usually to make dinner for customers who order it, but at Howard Johnson’s Pépin was tasked with the general improvement of the menus for “more than a thousand outlets.” He describes being introduced for the first time to pressure cookers and the food-safety protocols necessary to cooking for an entire chain. More than almost any other public culinary figure, in his career Pépin has followed the trajectory of twentieth-century scientific development, as if he had been planned ahead of time as a shorthand for modernism. He went from learning to slaughter chickens efficiently and humanely as a child in his mother’s backyard, holding the head down carefully over a bowl after severing the jugular vein to ensure the bird bled out quickly, to mastering oeufs à la neige at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée as part of a forty-eight-chef brigade (a loose method is provided in Art of the Chicken), to poaching a thousand chickens simultaneously in an enormous commissary kitchen.
From Howard Johnson’s he went on to found La Potagerie in Manhattan in 1970; from there, television, Julia Child, and the world. Each reference to a new career highlight comes without either arrogance or false modesty and is almost always framed as a gentle request: “I was asked” to consult for the Russian Tea Room’s remodeling of its menu in the mid-1980s or to start teaching at Boston University—a casual, unanxious relationship to excellence…
Fascinating and delightful: “Coq au Pépin,” from @daniel_m_lavery in @nybooks.
* Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste
###
As we reach for the deep fryer, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that Simon & Garfunkel released their paean to a suite of herbs often used as seasoning in the cooking of chicken, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
“A suburb is an attempt to get out of reach of the city without having the city be out of reach”*…
In mid-twentieth century, in contrast to the noisy and diverse city, the suburbs were seen as spacious, segregated, and quiet— a much more promising state of affairs to corporations bent on expansion. American cities had been spreading out into metropolitan areas since the 19th century; but for most of that time city centers remained the hub of economic and social life. As Luise A. Mozingo explains, that began to change after World War II; residents and businesses alike began to leave…
… As a number of scholars have emphasized, the iconic suburbs of white, middle-class, nuclear families were a well-known part of this story but by no means all of it. Added to prewar suburban expansion, the rapid restructuring of postwar metropolitan areas formed a complexity of patches, spokes, and swaths of separated, specialized, and low-density land uses in the peripheral zones around older city centers, including industry, retail centers, ethnic enclaves, and working-class neighborhoods. This rapid decentralization created the conditions that were conducive to the invention of specialized suburban management facilities by large corporations.
To many privileged Americans of the 1950s and 1960s, the center city appeared to be in a state of inexorable decline. The proliferating automobile inundated the center city’s gridded 19th-century street pattern, and “congestion” seemed intractable and highly detrimental to economic activity. Increasing numbers of people of color walked the streets. Vacancies and abandoned properties were on the rise as tenants relocated to the suburbs and owners could find no replacements. New construction in the city center required homage to an ensconced and layered system of political patronage. Even then, wedging in new skyscrapers that could accommodate large corporate staffs in a single building proved difficult in blocks divided into multiple parcels of land and built out with varied buildings, including many used for industry. To redress these perceived shortcomings, the urban renewal process acquired property, removed tenants, destroyed buildings, and reparceled land in order to insert freeways, offer large lots for corporate offices, supply parking, and confine the poor to mass public housing. In the process, it took apart what remained of the vitality of the old urban core and added to the inventory of open urban lots and dysfunctional neighborhoods. The center city was noisy, diverse, crowded, unpredictable, inflexible, expensive, old, and messy — a dubious state of affairs for postwar capitalists bent on expansion.
In contrast, the suburbs seemed to warrant a sense of forward-looking optimism. At the city’s edge, an effective alliance of well-financed real estate investors, large property owners, local governments, federal loan guarantors, and utopian planners opened property for speedy development. Building along federal- and state-funded road systems that brought these large tracts of land into the economy of metropolitan regions, this alliance conceived of low-density, auto-accessed landscapes of highly specified uses with plenty of parking, and wrote these forms into stringent zoning and building regulations. Once built, these suburban expansion zones were deliberately resistant to change, with the end of producing both social stasis and secure real estate values.
The suburbs as a whole may have been diverse, but the process of building their component parts created insidious racial and class divisions. While the separation of different classes and races of home dwellers is the best-understood part of this spatial process, all kinds of workers were categorically set apart in discrete landscapes as well — corporate executives from factory labor, retail clerks from typists, electronics researchers from accountants. Hence the suburbs were predictable, spacious, segregated, specialized, quiet, new, and easily traversed — a much more promising state of affairs to corporations bent on expansion.
…
My book “Pastoral Capitalism” describes how pioneering projects established the essential landscape patterns of the corporate campus, corporate estate, and office park and how, from those few early projects, other corporations followed suit in great numbers. These landscape types became embedded in the expectations of the corporate class and could, at a glance, embody both the reality and prospect of capitalist power. Hence, the development forms have remained remarkably consistent for six decades. By the end of the 20th century, the suburbs, not the central business district, contained the majority of office space in the United States. This was a new and potent force in the process of suburban expansion…
More at “The Birth of the Pastoral Corporation.”
###
As we ponder the prominence of the periphery, we might send altitudinous birthday greetings to Louis Sullivan; he was born on this date in 1856. An architect, he was hugely influential in the Chicago School, a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an inspiration to the Chicago group of architects who have come to be known as the Prairie School. He is considered by many to have been the “father of modernism” in architecture (the phrase “form follows function” is attributed to him) and (as he pioneered the steel high-rise) “the father of the skyscraper.”
Indeed, in Sullivan’s honor, this date is National Skyscraper Day.
“The functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility”*…
Meet the new boss, painfully similar to the old boss…
While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we call “high-tech modernism”—the application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life—has a dual logic. On the one hand, like traditional bureaucracy, it is an engine of classification, even if it categorizes people and things very differently. On the other, like the market, it provides a means of self-adjusting allocation, though its feedback loops work differently from the price system. Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes…
From Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade, a reminder that’s what’s old is new again: “The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism,” in an issue of Daedalus, edited by Farrell and Margaret Levi (@margaretlevi).
See also: “The Algorithm Society and Its Discontents” (or here) by Brad DeLong (@delong).
Apposite: “What Greek myths can teach us about the dangers of AI.”
(Image above: source)
* “The functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility–space itself–to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.” – Michel de Certeau
###
As we ponder platforms, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that the first computer operating system was demonstrated…
Computer pioneer Doug Ross demonstrates the Director tape for MIT’s Whirlwind machine. It’s a new idea: a permanent set of instructions on how the computer should operate.
Six years in the making, MIT’s Whirlwind computer was the first digital computer that could display real-time text and graphics on a video terminal, which was then just a large oscilloscope screen. Whirlwind used 4,500 vacuum tubes to process data…
Another one of its contributions was Director, a set of programming instructions…
“March 8, 1955: The Mother of All Operating Systems“
The first permanent set of instructions for a computer, it was in essence the first operating system. Loaded by paper tape, Director allowed operators to load multiple problems in Whirlwind by taking advantage of newer, faster photoelectric tape reader technology, eliminating the need for manual human intervention in changing tapes on older mechanical tape readers.
“What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”*…
Studying the display of personal wealth across time can help us better understand the history of socioeconomic inequality. Tim Brinkhof explains…
To ask what it was like to be rich in the past is about more than comparing the lifestyles of modern-day billionaires like Elon Musk to Mansa Musa or Marcus Licinius Crassus. When you study the history personal wealth, you are also learning about the history of income inequality, and the economic developments that allowed these upper-class individuals to build their private fortunes.
According to the historian Peter V. Turchin, who relies on mathematical modeling to make sense of the societies past and present, those developments turn out to be cyclical rather than linear, with patterns in the global financial system repeating themselves across centuries. In other words, Musa and Musk may have more in common than you’d think…
A fascinating account: “Here’s what being filthy rich in Europe looked like in 1000 BC, 1 AD, and 1000 AD,” in @bigthink.
* George Bernard Shaw
###
As we contemplate how the other half lives, we might spare a thought for a chronicler of upper class, Henry James; he died on this date in 1916. Considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language, he was a successful purveyor of ghost stores (most notably, his novella The Turn of the Screw); but he best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between upper class emigre Americans, the English, and continental Europeans– e.g., The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove.
His later works were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character’s psyche. (Perhaps not coincidentally, his brother was psychologist and philosopher William James.) For their unique ambiguity and other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to impressionist painting– and he is considered by many a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism.
You must be logged in to post a comment.