Mesmerize

A video posted by Seb Lester (@seblester) on May 15, 2015 at 4:55am PDT

What can you make in fifteen seconds? You can’t knit a hat or sew a dress. You can’t cook a meal or bake a cake. You can’t 3-D print a thingamabob or build your IKEA hack. But you can write a word. And a word, written in black letter, uncial, Copperplate Script, Roman capitals, or even the “Star Wars” font by a professional, has all the virtues of those far more complicated handmade things. With an Instagram video, you can spend fifteen seconds watching something exceptional being made before your eyes.

The artist and designer Seb Lester (@seblester) is the resident celebrity of Instagram calligraphy, with a half million followers, and another half million across other social-media platforms. “So much of calligraphy is about movement and rhythm, and a short video can capture the beauty and the magic of calligraphy in a very Internet-friendly format,” he said. “Recurring words in people’s comments are ‘mesmerizing,’ ‘hypnotic,’ and ‘satisfying.’ For reasons I don’t fully understand, people clearly enjoy watching the process of something perceived as ‘perfect’ being made from start to finish.” Two weeks ago, Lester posted an Instagram video of him lettering the word “mesmerize” with two pencils in one hand and flourishes above and below. It now has more than eighteen thousand likes.

Tour Montparnasse, Paris, chosen by Daniel Libeskind. Photo by Luc Boegly/Artedia, via View.

Can the field’s top minds change the way we think about a doomed housing project in Naples or the most abhorred skyscraper in Paris? Allow them to try.

For T Magazine’s Beauty issue, I interviewed Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Annabelle Selldorf, LO-TEK, Norman Foster, Amanda Levete, and Vincent Van Duysen about their favorite Ugly buildings.

Instagram hashtag search for #MITchapel

From May 28 to May 30, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will host the symposium Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in the Digital Age. Since I could not participate in person, the organizers asked me to contribute to the Superscript Reader, an online adjunct to the talks (which will all be livestreamed) at the symposium.

When I’m invited somewhere new, the first thing I do is go to Google and type in “[city name] modern architecture.” Mexico City, San Francisco, Sarasota. It’s a way to structure my time and a quick aide-memoire. Some cities I don’t even have to Google. Mention Detroit and I’ll say general­motors­technical­center­cranbrook­mies­at­lafayette­park­and­that­pretty­yamasaki­at­wayne­state.

Portland? Halprinopenspacesequencethemichaelgravesportlandbuildingisright­nextdoor. The drive to Alvar Aalto’s Mount Angel Library is worth it, I might add.

Boston?

Saarinen­chapel­at­mit­gropius­house­carpenter­centerand­of­course­paul­rudolph­at­government­center. Pause for breath. Brandeis has a great postwar architecture collection also.

From my vantage point in Brooklyn I visualize the map of the United States not as foreshortened, as in the great Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, a poster of which hung in my childhood breakfast nook, but as a dark space filled with twinkling lights. Some of those lights are big cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, but many of them are stars only of the slide room in which, in college, I used to file images from art history lectures. Bartlesville. Eureka Springs. Moline. In many cases I learned to put them in alphabetical order before I’d seen the pictures on the screen. These were and are the all-star towns in the modern architecture firmament, still absent from the typical tourist map. We have the tools to make our own maps now, but they haven’t yet reached the design heights of the subject matter.

Stairwell, Cambridge, 2013 © Lee Dykxhoorn

It’s a detail too perfect, better suited to a novel. Architecture critic goes to kindergarten at modernist school. Years later, she returns to the city of her birth and discovers the school again, surrounded by construction hoardings, on the brink of destruction. Can she save it? Except that was me, and I was too late.

My school, Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was designed by the firm of Josep Lluís Sert: Spanish architect and planner, former Harvard Graduate School of Design dean, designer of the superb Peabody Terrace apartments just across the street, as well as buildings for Harvard and Boston University. My school came late in his career, late for the concrete walls and rhythmic geometric shadows that were signatures of his architecture, and late, too, for the architecture’s relationship with the surrounding stick-built residential neighborhood known as Riverside. My school was demolished during the spring of 2014. Another King School is now under construction, this one of terminal beige exterior blandness, designed by Perkins Eastman. King School 2.0 trumpets its community connections, zones for students of different ages and natural lighting—just like the one it will replace.

Leonore Tawney at her loom (Courtesy MAD Museum)

The journalists, artists and curators at the press preview for the Museum of Arts and Design’s new exhibition, Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Mid-century and Today, were about 90 per cent female – an unusually high percentage, according to the museum’s publicist.

But the imbalance seemed about right, in that it reflected the continuing, uneasy, and gendered relationship between people who make things out of yarn, clay or cloth and people who make things out of glass, steel or plastic. The editors of a few blogs seemed unsure whether the contents of the show – four hanging woven-wire sculptures by Ruth Asawa, screen-printed geometric textile designs by Anni Albers, a test panel for the gold-embroidered tapestries for the Ford Foundation by Sheila Hicks, along with work by 39 other artists – even counted as “design” for their purposes.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, an era when painting, sculpture and architecture were dominated by men, women had extensive impact in alternative materials such as textiles, ceramics and metals,” reads the wall text.

A late 1950s church by Eladio Dieste in Uruguay (Leonardo Finotti / MoMA)

Carolina Miranda, who writes a terrific and wide-ranging culture blog for the Los Angeles Times with recent posts on Chilean modern and contemporary architecture, invited me for an email chat on “Latin America in Construction.”

“Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-80” looks at a quarter-century of Modernist architecture on the continent, from experimental housing projects on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, to the epic undertaking that was the design and construction of Brasilia, which emerged from the savanna like a Modernist sci-fi mirage. There are thought experiments (poetic architecture, anyone?), historic models, park design, affordable housing developments, vintage construction photos and schematics for buildings that are all about color.

Needless to say, there is a lot to see. Which is why rather than tackling this on my own, I invited architecture critic Alexandra Lange to chat with me about the show. Lange writes for the New Yorker and the New York Times and recently joined Curbed, where she is doing some awesome stuff. Better yet, she recently reviewed “Latin America in Construction” for Architect magazine.

Carolina Miranda: This is a dense show, with more than 500 objects, including models, drawings, renderings, photographs, video and more. As you point out in your Architect magazine review, it is “a remarkable collection of everything you could call Modernism — diagrid skyscrapers, abstract landscapes, megastructures, cities of slabs.” But as in any show, no matter how cluttered, there are always going to be pieces that pop.

Mexican Pavilion, Triennale di Milano (1968)

The Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition, “Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980” (until July 19), is an assembly of work that may never be repeated. With more than 500 original drawings, models, photographs, and films from the last half-century, by architects working in 10 countries and one commonwealth, the show reveals a depth to the region’s architecture well beyond Oscar Niemeyer, Roberto Burle Marx, Luis Barragán, and the insurgent Lina Bo Bardi. While all of the above appear multiple times across the exhibition’s five galleries, they are flanked by equally talented colleagues, collaborators, and mavericks.

It is a remarkable collection of everything you could possibly call Modernism—diagrid skyscrapers, abstract landscapes, megastructures, cities of slabs. The tricky part is figuring out how to navigate the treasures. You could get stuck in the front room where, on a set of seven screens reminiscent of some 1960s World’s Fair pavilion, filmmaker Joey Forsyte has assembled vintage footage into jaunty eight-minute documentaries on the region’s cities. We see palm trees and old cars, zeppelins and beaches, skyscrapers and hand-of-God architects placing little blocks in a sea of the same.

Donald Judd + Renzo Piano. Photo by Max Touhey

The best view of the new Whitney (which opens today) is west on Gansevoort Street, if by best view you mean the one where Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s $422 million museum building makes sense. From there, just outside Gansevoort Market, you see the four levels and 50,000 square feet of galleries stepping back above the leafy frill of the High Line, the thrust of the exterior gray steel staircase, a fire escape on steroids, and the sawtooth skylights that say Art Lives Here. The mind edits out the concrete core and the northern block that contains offices and conservation spaces, the back-of-house glimpsed only when the doors of the elevators open on the wrong side. From there, you can imagine those galleries as trays akin to the High Line trestle, an industrial framework for whatever sculpture, paintings or trees the curators choose to deploy.

That’s what Piano’s building wants to be: an elevated and unpretentious set of concrete floors, their edges exposed on the outside. That’s the prevailing idea, at least, when looking at the section sketches for the Whitney: emphasis on the floor as organizing principle, with natural light at the east and west ends, and minimal distinction between inside and out. A building closer to his firm’s hillside Genoa office—gorgeous, green, light-filled trays stepping down a slope—than to either his Neoclassical art palaces, with their fussy layers of scrim and motorized shade, or the high-tech, guts-out Centre Pompidou. So why did he have to go and wrap the thing up? The pale blue metal shell, bulging and tapering, with jet-age round edge windows and sloping sides, has made critics think of many similes, few of them complimentary. Nothing on the inside speaks the same aeronautical language, and the carapace covers what the lumps and bumps seem to want to reveal: the split between back and front of house, which, in the case of the new Whitney, divides the northern exposure from the southern one. The museum would be much more powerful as architecture if it had articulated that split in simple, material language, the kind of back-to-basics choices made on the inside. (A similar move, intriguingly, that Piano’s firm used for the High Line Headquarters building right next door, made of exposed steel and dark brick.)