tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74757405595509739952024-02-20T23:05:52.901-05:00The Hooked Nosesurveys all things design and cultureAvinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-59677323183237828382010-09-29T14:19:00.001-04:002010-09-29T14:21:31.566-04:00A Bamboo Castle in the Air<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4TPUdVkx8Uggk2YGiajaEMHwAtp6QbYEw0NkO_-ln_OILXRRW9IxVVSD-Ekjx920alCTnjlQo-tO8XPduKlKV3VuGhkQF_ZhKIazjVKsIfx5Ea2-8ycHT2YvAHq9gtdRdTb4eq4aBy_k/s1600/DSC03450.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4TPUdVkx8Uggk2YGiajaEMHwAtp6QbYEw0NkO_-ln_OILXRRW9IxVVSD-Ekjx920alCTnjlQo-tO8XPduKlKV3VuGhkQF_ZhKIazjVKsIfx5Ea2-8ycHT2YvAHq9gtdRdTb4eq4aBy_k/s640/DSC03450.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Rather hesitantly, I stepped onto what looked like a completely ad-hoc pathway that disappeared into a crazy mess of bamboo above my head. In spite of having grown up in India—where tall bamboo structures go up every day, as temporary shelters or scaffolding —I was just a bit scared. Then the little old lady in my tour group passed me by; effortlessly climbing up the path with her grandchildren in tow. Duly ashamed, I entered <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Bamb</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ù</i>: <i>You Can't, You Don't, and You Won't Stop</i> – Mike and Doug Starn’s latest installation that rises 40 feet above the rooftop of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Bamb</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ù</i> has none of the precise order of the scaffolding one sees in Mumbai or Hong Kong. The installation’s defining visual characteristic is chaos. Pieces of bamboo stick out willy-nilly anywhere, the 4,000 poles crisscross the space all around me, till I can hardly see the sky above. From a thousand ties and knots, ends of coloured rope hang above my head. Initially, those knots are the only sign of human agency in a structure that otherwise looks like some supernatural hand dropped a bunch of sticks onto the museum’s roof. Then I notice two human figures, hanging in mid-air, off some poles in one corner of the installation, busily tying knots. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Bamb</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ù</i> is a work in perpetual progress – the artists and their team will continue adding to it over a six month period.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Mike and Doug Starn are both afraid of heights, so they had to hire others to build for them. They originally considered bringing traditional artisans from China, but they realized that the artisans’ experience might introduce an element of pre-determination into the artwork. At all costs, the Starns wanted their structure to be random. They hired a group of people who weren’t acrophobic, were good with knots, had no building experience, and came from outside the art world – rock climbers!<o:p></o:p><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">I can see little touches of the rock climbers’ creativity everywhere, in the choice of rope colour, in the myriad ways in which they have used the bamboo, celebrating its elasticity, the visual quality of its nodes. Every curve of the path is an opportunity to create a unique pattern, to bend the bamboo in a different way. A particular view of the city, seen from 110 feet above the ground, spontaneously inspired one climber to put a little bench into the structure.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am used to considering bamboo in rather functionalist terms: its structural strength, its sustainability. In India, bamboo is a utilitarian material, used in construction, in furniture, or in the stretchers that carry the dead bodies of Hindus to the cremation grounds. The bamboo that the Starns have used comes from South Carolina, not Asia, but I begin to see with new eyes a material I have known all my life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The artists liken <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Bamb</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ù</i> to a living organism. It is continually growing, yet fully complete at every stage. All human civilization operates this way, they claim, including our cities and our lives. That feels a bit of a stretch to me, but standing within a bamboo jungle, with the bright summer sun on my face and New York City stretched out below my feet, I do realize what an optimistic work of art <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Bamb</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ù </i>is. Though the Starns had a structural engineer look over their very sketchy plans, it would be impossible to control a structure that was being built by people who were learning on the job. Yet <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Bamb</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ù </i>manages to stand, and bear the weight of my tour group. It will continue to grow, and by the end of it, take the form of a cresting wave.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">The clock had struck noon by the time I got back to the ground, and the space under Big Bambu had completely transformed. The overhead sun cast dappled shadows on the museum’s roof, on the shoulders of the people walking between the bamboo poles, on the blond hair of children who were too little to climb the structure. In that magic moment, I felt a fleeting truthfulness in Mike and Doug Starn’s statements about life and organisms and suchlike, and realized what it is that they have actually managed to build – a bamboo castle in the air. I desperately want to believe that the Starns are right in their optimism, and that we will all have lives like that, learning every step of the way, and ending with some definite form. </div>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-5462812809921319922010-05-04T20:12:00.004-04:002010-05-04T20:41:45.120-04:00Putting Out Fires in Style: A History of the Fire Extinguisher<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9tR1-NTYOxqWclJmpdXj4QDscoyret52RQVFnWSFWtcX9GKrX4IJ0Zg0JUCT9duK9MU9nZspFbNhNSUAZ3BnOS8cek0sxiEm2o5MzPtjbQqtUIANZUxfY9-wBt6zMqVCMZ03U5lHsbgo/s1600/DSC03038+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9tR1-NTYOxqWclJmpdXj4QDscoyret52RQVFnWSFWtcX9GKrX4IJ0Zg0JUCT9duK9MU9nZspFbNhNSUAZ3BnOS8cek0sxiEm2o5MzPtjbQqtUIANZUxfY9-wBt6zMqVCMZ03U5lHsbgo/s640/DSC03038+copy.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
Tucked away in corners and niches, invisible in spite of being large and red, the fire extinguisher is one of the most controlled objects in our environment. Manufacturing standards for fire extinguishers in the USA are stipulated by the Underwriters Laboratories. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) regulates their use and maintenance with a national code; in addition to a fire code formulated by each state. Each extinguisher, therefore, bristles with the seals and certifications, the panels of instruction and information that painstakingly ensure its compliance with all these rules. However, outside the 15 seconds it takes for them to empty their contents (as stipulated by the NFPA), they hold little meaning or personal significance for their users.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>This wasn’t always the case, especially in the days when the only way of fighting a fire was to hurl a bucket of water at it. A law passed in 1687 called for every citizen of New York to own one leather bucket for every chimney, clearly marked with the initials of the landlord. These were to be at the disposal of firefighters in the event of a fire, and failure to comply would result in a fine of six shillings. Yet, leather fire buckets from the 1700s were beautifully crafted objects, often carrying a painting of the building or a portrait of the owner. They were clearly objects that people were proud to possess, whether or not the City required it. In 1803, a group of citizens in New York actually took up arms against city officials because their buckets were not being returned to them after the fire had been extinguished. This event has gone down in Fire Department history as the Great Bucket Revolt in the Third Ward.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>The Babcock fire extinguisher was the first popular fire extinguisher that resembles the ones we have today: a portable metal canister with a hose attachment that sprays pressurized water at a fire. Introduced in 1870, it was always positioned as a consumer product. In September 1871, for instance, the New York Times reported that a successful demonstration of the Babcock fire extinguisher had been held on the corner of Canal Street and East Broadway, “in the presence of a large and interested multitude.” The extinguishers were aggressively marketed with humorous advertisements that hinted at other possible uses for the extinguisher’s pressurized jet: replacing corporal punishment in schools, or calming down Mt. Vesuvius. Little or no mention is made in these advertisements of fire codes or city regulations.<br />
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The Babcock’s main competitor in the 1870s was an unobtrusive device called the Hand Grenade Fire Extinguisher. Decidedly cheaper, it consisted of a glass vial filled with an extinguishing liquid, usually Carbon Tetrachloride (CCl4). The modus operandi was idiot-proof: aim at fire and fling. Equally popular in warehouses and ballrooms, hand grenade extinguishers came in beautiful tints and shades of glass. The most popular brand was Haywards, but it was not uncommon for mantelpieces to be adorned by cut crystal hand grenades that looked more like expensive decanters than critical safety devices. The hand grenade continued to be used for a surprisingly long time. It is only in 1954 that the NFPA clearly states in its Fire Protection Handbook that hand grenade extinguishers were no longer acceptable to the Underwriters Laboratories. Studies had found that CCl4 decomposed at high temperatures to produce the toxic gas Phosgene.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQHvphjt1WJOSTqwakR4tcT_1zGjOCQ0Ek4MyjR49s9aMxWbaSmOAAH-p3VcCNZbFDs39yKtvF8NL0btCkzzQRUSu6bG1c2nHbBRslVL-HvvT71o_XxDmfKujzcJNiydvh9VvwJt6cqmE/s1600/FIRE019.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQHvphjt1WJOSTqwakR4tcT_1zGjOCQ0Ek4MyjR49s9aMxWbaSmOAAH-p3VcCNZbFDs39yKtvF8NL0btCkzzQRUSu6bG1c2nHbBRslVL-HvvT71o_XxDmfKujzcJNiydvh9VvwJt6cqmE/s640/FIRE019.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
The biggest breakthrough in portable fire extinguishers, however, was the development of the Soda Acid fire extinguisher. The technology had been available since the British inventor William Phillips patented what he called a “Fire Annihilator” in 1849. The idea was simple - the user pushed a knob which broke an inner vial of sulphuric acid into an outer container of Sodium Bicarbonate solution. This produced carbon dioxide and sodium salts mixed with water: a potent fire extinguishing combination that was released under pressure from the extinguisher. It was extremely effective, but apparently not very cost efficient: Phillips’ extinguisher had a number of tiny components that required careful manufacturing. As a result, it was aimed at larger establishments – industries, warehouses and hospitals – rather than private dwellings.<br />
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The credit for creating a safe, user-friendly Soda Acid fire extinguisher must go to an inventor and manufacturer from Boston, called Arthur Campbell Badger. In the period between 1904 and 1925, he filed a number of patents for Soda Acid fire extinguishers. The first of these established the generic form of the extinguisher. Users could now turn a wheel that screwed down to break the vial. This took considerably less effort than banging a knob, besides being immensely safer. Subsequent patents were for extinguishers that could be deployed in any position and fire extinguishers with anti-freeze. Clearly, Badger was an enterprising man in the best American tradition of the inventor.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiODXLNnrUgGb88QqxnL9yJTiga6NbjJpOSsGOlVLyeZ996hwoQBXqTYIG0jDGoO1ldunsoVVXzTrNFGHmRH2Zol2mHhy_1RhqibCtLdSpA6hwcquEamHyVaDtI1j7G-ljF2Nri4tz5rhg/s1600/7269.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiODXLNnrUgGb88QqxnL9yJTiga6NbjJpOSsGOlVLyeZ996hwoQBXqTYIG0jDGoO1ldunsoVVXzTrNFGHmRH2Zol2mHhy_1RhqibCtLdSpA6hwcquEamHyVaDtI1j7G-ljF2Nri4tz5rhg/s640/7269.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
Little is known about his life. A census record from 1900 identifies his birth date as 1861, and his profession as “Manufacturer, Copper.” This makes perfect sense, given the fact that early fire extinguishers were all made of copper, or copper alloys. It must have been around this time that he established the Badger Fire Extinguisher Company. The company itself has changed hands many times since, but survives today as Badger Fire Protection: one of the largest manufacturers and retailers of fire protection devices, with annual sales of over $22 Million.<br />
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All Badger’s modifications didn’t really change the target audience for the Soda Acid fire extinguisher. It was still aimed at larger establishments, while private individuals were sold simpler products by companies such as Pyrene. An advertisement in the 1936 Sears Roebuck catalog demonstrates this, but it also points to a new trend: fire extinguisher advertising had gradually become less about personal safety, and more about compliance with city regulations. In his pre-WWII term, Mayor La Guardia worked with Fire Commissioner John James McElligott to introduce a series of reforms in the fire department, including stricter enforcement of the fire code. In 1936, La Guardia prophesied on WNYC, “With modern fireproof structures, with our great increase in the number and quality of our fire engines, with our advent of training programs, the large fires will become almost a thing of the past, and I can foresee the day when the department is almost cut into half.”<br />
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Fire extinguishers continued to change considerably over the war years and the following decade. The City administration, in its effort to increase the efficiency of the Fire Department, took on a watchdog role by creating ever-more stringent fire codes. In 1954, the NFPA code and the NFPA Fire Protection handbook list lengthy rules not only about the use of fire extinguishers, but also about their positioning and maintenance. For example, a lead-and-wire tamper-proof seal was issued by authorized agencies, which indicated that a fire extinguisher was ready for use. Also, several new fire extinguishing chemicals and technologies had been developed over the war years. The code lists all of these, and provides illustrations of the extinguisher models approved by the Underwriters Laboratories.<br />
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Fire Extinguishers were not ignored in the post-WWII golden age of American Industrial Design. The star designers of the era, Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss both designed fire extinguishers for rival companies. Raymond Loewy’s client was the chemical giant Ansul, and Loewy’s office designed two models for them in 1954 and 1955. Uncharacteristically, the Loewy designs are unadventurous and don’t differ very much from the models already available. Loewy lost the Ansul account to an up-and-coming design firm called Latham, Tyler and Jensen (LTJ). They designed a truly remarkable disposable extinguisher for Ansul in 1960, its globular form recalling old hand grenade fire extinguishers (which were also disposable). Henry Dreyfuss worked for Walter Kidde and Co., creating a novel extinguisher design with an extremely simplified lever and the beautiful terse instructions “Remove Horn/ Pull Trigger” rendered in Futura.<br />
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In spite of the fact that Walter Kidde and Co. now owns Badger Fire Protection, very few of the innovative design features from the 1950s have survived to date. The modern fire extinguisher would be easily recognizable to Arthur Badger, barring the illustrations and the coding system (which was changed in 1997). This is probably because the bulk of the market for fire extinguishers are public buildings and large establishments, while sprinklers and alarm systems have taken over fire protection duties in private dwellings. Nonetheless, there have been some recent attempts at redesigning the fire extinguisher. Giulio Gianturco’s stainless steel design for Boffi won the Wallpaper design award for 2006, but it seems nothing more than a cosmetic makeover, intended to fit this ungainly object with high-end kitchens. The Home Hero Fire Extinguisher by Arnell Group LLC, which won the 2007 IDEA award, seems a more honest reconsideration, with its radical handle/trigger design.<br />
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Notwithstanding these sporadic attempts, the fire extinguisher seems to have passed its heyday as a consumer product. Several factors have worked towards this. The massive improvements in fire retardant materials mean fewer fires, and fewer occasions to actually use an extinguisher. Also, the weighty regulations have essentially ossified fire extinguishers and firmly entrenched the few companies who produce them. It is doubtful if designers can now rescue it from its fate as a utilitarian engineered device; and revive its historical status as a designed, user-oriented product.<br />
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</div>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-65653263461853855462010-04-04T09:43:00.004-04:002010-04-04T09:57:56.881-04:00The Missing Apartment of Holly Golightly<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS22y-TJnfJA5C1RlSiSE0TX8lqn5-XaDTFFc0TrC1Xn-lgfhS50qhvj6iMvHEQxMVRs_B6RcQTSh3cxU9AMRMtlJ3b8N5NwQqfQ09_Q_Dn-WpiOntVb_XN3FZ46V2T_uKbKq-BR1FV2c/s1600/05+Missing+Apartment.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" nt="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS22y-TJnfJA5C1RlSiSE0TX8lqn5-XaDTFFc0TrC1Xn-lgfhS50qhvj6iMvHEQxMVRs_B6RcQTSh3cxU9AMRMtlJ3b8N5NwQqfQ09_Q_Dn-WpiOntVb_XN3FZ46V2T_uKbKq-BR1FV2c/s400/05+Missing+Apartment.jpg" width="356" /></a><em>“I am always drawn back to places where I lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment.”</em><br />
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The opening paragraph of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a vivid description of his apartment. It is only one among the myriad other physical spaces that Capote describes in his story, each in great detail: Joe Bell’s bar, the New York Public Library and the interiors of Woolworth’s. All of these spaces find due place, albeit in slightly altered forms, in Blake Edwards’ eponymous 1961 film. But there is one space – absolutely vital to the film – that is never described in Capote’s novella: Holly Golightly’s apartment.<br />
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In the film, we first see Holly’s apartment when Paul Varjack rings the buzzer below. Until now we have only seen a sophisticated Holly, strolling down Lexington Avenue in a black Givenchy sheath and oversized pearls. Our first peek into her apartment presents a shocking contrast: she wakes up among rumpled bed linen in an incredibly messy room, a cat nonchalantly strolling among the piles of stuff. Who is this woman, we ask ourselves, whose interior life is so different from her exterior life?<br />
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Holly’s pad is a place in transit, a place about escaping. Production designers Hal Pereira and Franz Planer took the spare white sets and scattered odd curios all over the place. The couch, made of a bathtub sawn in half, has become famous because the camera lingers over it lovingly; but there are many other little things that the camera catches only in passing. A weather vane stands near the door, large and unexplained. A half-painted canvas sits on an easel. Suitcases are piled up everywhere; one of them contains Holly’s telephone. Paul Varjack goes for the easy explanation and assumes that she has just moved in. But all the signifiers of travel reveal a more complex reality – Holly is waiting to move out.<br />
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Travel, or ‘drifting’, is the theme of Moon River – the song written especially for the film. Holly sings this song sitting in the window on her fire escape. In the novella the fire escape is a conduit between Holly’s and Fred’s apartment, but the film makes it distinctly theatrical. Here it is a liminal space, a space of truth and transparency. Paul uses it to look at Holly singing, and Holly uses it to look at Paul sleeping. The fire escape is the place of the gaze.<br />
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The gaze is an important visual leitmotif. Capote actually mentions only two mirrors in his novella, one in Joe’s bar, and the other being Holly’s compact. But the film’s production designers connive with cinematographer Martin Jurow to turn mirrors into a fetish! Scarcely ten minutes pass between each time Holly looks into a mirror. Any mirror will do: the one above her sink, the one on her dresser, the round mirror in Paul’s apartment, the little one in her mailbox, the ornate mirrors in Tiffany’s or even the glass vitrine of a showroom. Every time she looks into a mirror, Holly reveals a new fact about herself, allowing us to “see” her. How significant it is then, that when she hears of her brother’s death she breaks a mirror.<br />
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Screenwriter George Axelrod took outrageous liberties with Capote’s novella, losing a lot of the verbal nuances. The production designers more than make up for this, throwing in subtle visual hints that hark back to the original story. There is a horse piñata in Holly’s bedroom that vaguely fits into the general disarray, but is otherwise unexplained in the film. This mysterious object choice becomes startlingly clear upon reading the novella: Holly dreams of buying a ranch in Mexico where her brother Fred can raise horses. <br />
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When Holly is finally ready to escape New York, thanks to a liaison with a Brazilian Diplomat, her apartment undergoes a transformation. Gone are the sparse, quirky settings. The rooms are filled with bric-a-brac. A table appears, complete with table cloth and a stained glass lampshade. Holly knits a sweater seated in an armchair, because the bathtub-couch now holds flowering potted plants. In the novella, at the same point in the story, Capote only describes Holly’s mad shopping spree. The production designers go one step further. By populating her apartment with the purchases, they underline Holly’s uneasy relationship with a settled life. She is drawn to signifiers of permanence, they seem to be saying, but this too shall pass.<br />
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a film with a lasting design heritage, particularly through Givenchy’s dresses and the “Audrey Look”. But it is also a rare film adaptation that gives a beautifully designed gift back to Truman Capote’s novella: it supplies the missing apartment of Holly Golightly.Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-14103864424547599692010-03-31T15:17:00.001-04:002010-03-31T15:19:19.359-04:00Part Human, Part Machine, Part Fantasy, Part Real<em>Download a pdf of illustrative images</em><a href="http://www.archive.org/download/PartHumanPartMachine/Cyborg.pdf"><em> here.</em></a><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip9FNrA4_IUNn0jAuKnImBhnhaJNbbhiW3JFukQk8M6eNS7_gyQVLTGuC3cn1iCLXXFY4NjGVTEwmuak1VcXhy_15yQAO6AamC8kOpvdKfzHyNVQal6qxbN5oMXi0fu9XcjaR42XmhTxA/s1600/oscar-pistorius.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="172" nt="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip9FNrA4_IUNn0jAuKnImBhnhaJNbbhiW3JFukQk8M6eNS7_gyQVLTGuC3cn1iCLXXFY4NjGVTEwmuak1VcXhy_15yQAO6AamC8kOpvdKfzHyNVQal6qxbN5oMXi0fu9XcjaR42XmhTxA/s640/oscar-pistorius.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
The sight of <a href="http://www.ossur.com/?PageID=13008">Oscar Pistorius</a> running unsettles me. All the visual tropes of the running athlete – bulging calves, stretched tendons, flexing ankles – are conspicuous by their absence. This is because Pistorius’ legs end at the knees. He runs on two curved pieces of carbon fibre that are sold under the name <a href="http://www.ossur.com/?PageID=13462">Cheetah Flexfeet</a>. The cutting edge in prosthetic design, modeled on a cheetah’s feet, they will allow the disabled Pistorius to compete against abled runners in the 2012 Olympics. Cheetah Flexfeet are prosthetic limbs that actually work better than human limbs.<br />
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I am ashamed to admit it, but all I can think when I see Pistorius is “Cyborg.”<br />
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The word Cyborg has its origins in the 1960s, in the space research work of Manfred Klynes and Nathan Kline, who proposed a “cybernetic organism,” a self-regulating human machine combination that could withstand the rigors of outer space. It is a beautiful concept: a unity of contrasts; organic and mechanical complementing each other.<br />
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As always, science fiction and comics were early adaptors. Cyborg 009, a Japanese Manga from 1964, was the first one to actually use the word. Cyborgs have gone under many names over the next twenty years, the greatest among them being that supervillain with the heavy breathing and raspy voice – Darth Vader. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/">Bladerunner</a> was the crowning glory of a new sub-genre of science fiction, Cyberpunk. Defined rather wryly as “High Tech Low Life,” Cyberpunk was a dark seamy view of the future, where the Cyborgs were the dregs of society, mongrel trouble makers that nobody cared for. (Perhaps this explains my uncharitable reaction to Oscar Pistorius.)<br />
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People react with wonder and amazement at the unity of man and machine, but there is also a strong undercurrent of unease. This can probably be best traced back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who was a creation of the mad scientist’s laboratory, composed of both human and mechanical parts. There have always been good Cyborgs, like the Marvel Comics’ superhero Cyborg, or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Scissorhands">Edward Scissorhands</a>. The bad Cyborgs included the Cybermen, who were Doctor Who’s arch enemies, and the villains with prostheses: Long John Silver, Captain Hook,<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._No_(film)"> Doctor No</a> and Doc Ock. There was even cyborg feminism, at least in the imagination of Donna Haraway and her seminal “<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html">Cyborg Manifesto</a>” of 1991.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpo0SSYwVKSRjbMeU1XLYdOENBiExMS8CabDLwuiD_e6CjiSgt-roFduJ8MWJkuO-WaLyUP6KlmoJJJDALRYQxlN6y_p_QRiF3NCzJWOdbdLfQdcftX-GDsuQN0K-9yTnUNKo8yLrAu5c/s1600/kraftvader.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="284" nt="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpo0SSYwVKSRjbMeU1XLYdOENBiExMS8CabDLwuiD_e6CjiSgt-roFduJ8MWJkuO-WaLyUP6KlmoJJJDALRYQxlN6y_p_QRiF3NCzJWOdbdLfQdcftX-GDsuQN0K-9yTnUNKo8yLrAu5c/s640/kraftvader.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
The same underground culture of the 1970s that produced Cyberpunk also provided ripe grounds for the new age of electronic music. Synthesisers had been around since the 1960s, and were even used the Beatles’ Abbey Road album. But the electronica of German bands such as <a href="http://www.kraftwerk.com/">Kraftwerk</a> was of a completely different nature: using electronic sounds on par with the human voice. The covers of Kraftwerk’s albums make this idea clear: they all feature mechanistic humans or Cyborgs. Today, the use of digitally created sounds is ubiquitous in popular music. <br />
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Our digital age is far more comfortable with human-machine continuums. We are all virtually inseparable from our personal laptops and cell phones. The idea of prosthetic enhancements, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant">cochlear implants</a> used to improve hearing, is no longer so appalling. The future of computing interfaces is the human body. Gamers are slowly advancing to the stage where the movements of the human body will replace joysticks and Wiis. When Pranav Mistry unveiled his “<a href="http://blog.ted.com/2009/11/the_thrilling_p.php">Sixth Sense</a>” concept at the TEDIndia conference in 2009, people applauded the idea of attaching sensors and display devices to the human body so that we may have a computer wherever we go. Nobody cringed at the final, true realization of the Cyborg. <br />
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There was a time when mankind’s imagination was captured by the Sphinx, Ganesha and Werewolves. Our 21st century werewolf, Wolverine, is actually a Cyborg, with his veins of adamantine and his metal claws. In the long history of part-human fantastical creatures, the Cyborg will be the only one to actually come alive. We will soon be Cyborgs, you and I. <br />
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<em><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">This is a written summary of a presentation made for Andrea Codrington's Criticism Lab</span></em>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-81192648251599684692010-03-20T09:04:00.001-04:002010-03-20T09:05:01.304-04:00Ode to a White Coffee CupO white porcelain hemisphere,<br />
O quotidian receptacle<br />
of caffeinated elixirs!<br />
Do you comfort me<br />
with your fragility, <br />
or mock me<br />
with such extreme perfection?<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Your inscrutable translucency<br />
belongs to paper rooms<br />
where soft voices<br />
murmur haiku.<br />
What are you doing here, <br />
nestled in my palms?<br />
How do I own you?<br />
<br />
My life is a maelstrom<br />
of delayed decisions<br />
and unruly possessions<br />
chosen for riotous colour.<br />
They vie for my attention,<br />
occupying my mind <br />
with their clamour<br />
and keeping me sane.<br />
<br />
And yet it is you I need<br />
to begin each crazy day,<br />
with your calm whiteness<br />
and irritating superiority.<br />
The scents of coffee<br />
are never so tantalizing<br />
as when they come<br />
from your depths.<br />
<br />
Your profound roundness,<br />
and the zen of your sheen,<br />
the sensation of<br />
the hot liquid flowing<br />
over your cold rim:<br />
these are the things<br />
I strive each day<br />
to live up to.<br />
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<em><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">This ode was written as part of Akiko Busch's <a href="http://dcrit.sva.edu/curriculum/reading-design/">Reading Design</a> Class</span></em>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-32535497266239213512010-03-20T09:02:00.000-04:002010-03-20T09:02:09.961-04:00Love Thy Neighbour: the Sad Tale of the West Park Presbyterian Church<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy-APIoo30WASA6SZM2iSAz0qvHRZYa0X9BWmnNtaSVM133m0VxwUTeLTZdN6Mcs3tNqDll5SSeknmALJHecJugQCbvKR7iQBerkJrshaZvM6LEaQqq14hJML6wsNGnZviLMoc67Lg_Qo/s1600-h/westparkchu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="388" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy-APIoo30WASA6SZM2iSAz0qvHRZYa0X9BWmnNtaSVM133m0VxwUTeLTZdN6Mcs3tNqDll5SSeknmALJHecJugQCbvKR7iQBerkJrshaZvM6LEaQqq14hJML6wsNGnZviLMoc67Lg_Qo/s640/westparkchu.jpg" vt="true" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The bright blue plywood roof of a pedestrian protection corridor wraps around the massive red sandstone walls of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West-Park_Presbyterian_Church_(New_York_City)">West Park Presbyterian church</a> at 86th street, clearly marking it as a construction site. “For Sale” signs on the plywood list the numbers of real estate agents, but you may be sure their phones aren’t ringing off the hook. Under the dark shadows of the pedestrian corridor, the notice board carries only one sign: Services are now being held two blocks west, at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_St._Paul_and_St._Andrew_(New_York_City)">Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew.</a></div><br />
This was the sorry state of affairs at West Park Presbyterian even before the <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/html/about/about.shtml">Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC)</a> officially designated it a historical landmark in January 2010. Designed by Leopold Eidlitz and Henry Kilburn in a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesque_Revival">Romanesque Revival</a> style and completed in 1889, this gabled church, with its rose windows and high tower, richly deserves the designation. It was a landmark in its time, with a wealthy Upper West Side congregation. However, that congregation steadily dwindled, putting the church in financial straits and causing the building to fall into disrepair. <br />
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Since 2003, the church’s pastor, Rev. Dr. Robert L. Brasher, has been desperately trying to revive the church’s fortunes. The first suggestion – to replace the building entirely with a luxury condo tower and a modernist chapel – was met with an outcry by the community group <a href="http://www.landmarkwest.org/westpark.htm">Friends of West-Park</a>. The church officials then worked with the community group to come up with a second option, which ultimately proved financially unviable. A third proposal - to retain most of the structure, but to sacrifice the chapel for a residential tower - was seen by irate members of the community as an attempt to mutilate their beautiful neighborhood icon for monetary gain. All this wrangling soured the relations between the church and the community groups, and any joint effort to find a solution was derailed by petty bickering.<br />
In 2008, neighbors’ complaints forced the church to turn away homeless people seeking refuge, for the first time in its history. Later that year, the neighbors espied construction workers coming out of the empty building. Fearing that church officials were sneakily undertaking demolition, the community group raised an alarm with the LPC and precipitated the landmark designation. Church officials remained bitterly opposed: the architecture of a church is so tailored to its religious function that a landmarked church would attract few investors. And they hardly had the money to repair and maintain the building themselves. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdu5g5xjIBnVDPYsMtiGScHrNhEDAIxzfldDgMtzb_jk3nJvpyLui9PaHuiHw2eYpUqDGufR7fFSUbsS2QbEH3yck9AcpUsfgvfiavs74ZGINkhm48Bjc1DDY5ln3mQsVobqW4oUEuU0/s1600-h/spsa2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdu5g5xjIBnVDPYsMtiGScHrNhEDAIxzfldDgMtzb_jk3nJvpyLui9PaHuiHw2eYpUqDGufR7fFSUbsS2QbEH3yck9AcpUsfgvfiavs74ZGINkhm48Bjc1DDY5ln3mQsVobqW4oUEuU0/s200/spsa2.jpg" vt="true" width="150" /></a></div>But West Park Presbyterian might be overlooking a role model that is just down the road: the Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew. Besides providing a new home for the Presbyterian congregation, this equally historic church hosts its own services, and those of the Jewish B’nai Jeshurun community. It also runs a food-for-the-homeless program, and earns revenue by renting out a performance space on its second floor. It has stayed out of the red by transforming into a multi-purpose cultural space.<br />
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This might be West Park Presbyterian’s way out of the impasse which, though caused by the LPC’s decision, is ultimately a product of the distrust between the church and its neighbors. The funds for immediate repairs to the building could come through the LPC’s “hardship” process: a provision that bails out landmarked buildings which need expensive restoration. Then the challenge will be to become financially self-sufficient. In this regard, the Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew might show it how to be “all things to all men”: a home for its congregation, a social and cultural force for the community, and a living, functioning, historical landmark for its city.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><em>This piece was written as part of Justin Davidson's </em></span><a href="http://dcrit.sva.edu/curriculum/criticism-lab/"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><em>Criticism Lab.</em></span></a>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-49427990417253693562010-02-07T12:39:00.001-05:002010-02-07T12:40:09.119-05:00Harry Potter and the Historic District<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMnilvKIem_VXVHG3Qo7Foq_dZJTjb4eSUB9Y8vGZqS2EPpfdVfgcuxrxsVDYD0YpXKQvmqCuNAFYifYV_OYavNHcZ_HoMfxFYOvXxC_SElZ22Q_f6dHKd6G58xqtWLLwVMwN8SpFUS6k/s1600-h/forblog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" kt="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMnilvKIem_VXVHG3Qo7Foq_dZJTjb4eSUB9Y8vGZqS2EPpfdVfgcuxrxsVDYD0YpXKQvmqCuNAFYifYV_OYavNHcZ_HoMfxFYOvXxC_SElZ22Q_f6dHKd6G58xqtWLLwVMwN8SpFUS6k/s400/forblog.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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</div>By early evening on 20th June 2003, a gaggle of pointed hats and starry capes had formed around Broadway and Prince Street. They had come to hold a midnight vigil for the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This was the first Harry Potter book to be launched from the newly completed Scholastic Building on Broadway, designed by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Rossi">Aldo Rossi</a>. It seems fitting that the largest publisher of children’s books in the world had the addition to their office designed by a man who Ada Louise Huxtable called “a poet who happens to be an architect.”<br />
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In 1992, Scholastic Inc. moved its headquarters into the Rauss building next door, at 555 Broadway: a 10-storey cast iron and stone structure from 1899. Scholastic spent $35 million on renovations, but their eyes were on the adjoining lumber yard and garage. In 1995, they finally acquired a lease on it, and hired Aldo Rossi to create the building that would serve as Scholastic’s front door. <br />
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Rossi, reputed for designing with sensitivity to historical context, had his work cut out for him here. At 561 Broadway the garage was flanked by the famous Little Singer Building, designed by Ernest Flagg. With its green iron tracery, terracotta tiles and glass, it has a completely different character from the Rauss building. And if this weren’t enough, the garage lot had its other face on the far less glamorous Mercer Street, where Beaux-Arts rubs shoulders with industrial warehouses.<br />
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Rossi’s design fits in with a magical mix of interpretation and inventiveness. On the Broadway side, riveted red steel girders rise floor after floor, in step with the Rauss Building on the left. Massive white columns on the façade draw the eye upward, giving this newcomer some gravitas among its veteran neighbours. Surprisingly, though the building was designed as an extension of the Rauss building, it pays quiet homage to Flagg’s ornate design. The glass panes are framed in green steel, just as in the Little Singer Building; and the red girders echo its terracotta tiles.<br />
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The façade on Mercer Street is more daring. The columns and girders are replaced by webbed steel arches, each two floors high, giving the building an industrial and geometric air. The two facades are united in colour and in the size of the window grid, but in not much else. And most critics agree that each façade seems perfectly appropriate for the block it is on.<br />
<br />
Therein lies Rossi’s wizardly genius, for neither façade actually derives any features directly from its neighbours. There are no other exposed steel girders or webbed steel arches to be seen on the block. If taken out of the context, the Scholastic building has nothing that overtly suggests its surroundings. What Rossi coordinated was not the materials of architecture, but its feel. And in doing so, he raised the bar for building in the historic districts of New York.<br />
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While the design was ready in 1995, the building wasn’t completed until 2001. Scholastic Inc.’s fortunes waned in 1996. Then it bought the publishing rights to a novel about a boy wizard and the building was underway. In the meantime, Aldo Rossi had died in a car accident in September 1997. But the legacy he left behind has much in common with its illustrious tenant. Harry Potter is a very modern boy in a novel teeming with history, and he negotiates his own place between two worlds. There is nothing really historical about Rossi’s design either, yet it acts as a conduit between New York’s past and its present. There is definitely poetry in the Scholastic Building, but there is also magic.Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-83235447485697649852010-01-26T21:35:00.000-05:002010-01-26T21:35:35.382-05:00Times Square on Foot<em><span style="color: #e69138;"><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/05/25/2009-05-25_broadway_stroll_walk_bike_or_sit_and_check_email_carfree_in_times__herald_sqs.html">All cars are now banned on Broadway in the Times Square Area.</a></span></em> <br />
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</div>Times Square has never been a Square. Not geometrically, because as Broadway sashays across the perfect grid of Manhattan, and passes 7th Avenue, it creates a series of trapeziums. It has also never been a square in terms of its urban function.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Squares are pauses in the traversal of cities. To locals and visitors alike, squares are places to watch the city while they catch their breath a little. Like Tiananmen Square in Beijing, they may be political spaces. Or, like Trafalgar Square in London, they might be living landmarks of the city’s history. But most importantly, they are places where people celebrate and encounter other people. Squares are not traffic conduits. It is unnecessary for cars to either congregate or meet other cars. Squares are public spaces for pedestrians.<br />
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There are a number of squares in New York City. All of these, with the exception of Times Square, are parks. Even Columbus Circle, with its busy traffic turnabout, has recently become a park, complete with benches and fountains. Yet none of these squares will ever be considered representative of New York. That function has always been performed by Times Square. Because of its consumerist glitz, the world outside sees it as a synecdoche for the city itself. With the busiest subway station in New York, it is also the nerve centre of the city. A study conducted by Gehl Architects/Urban Quality Consultants in 2007 found that the Times Square area had more pedestrian users than any other public space in the city. If ever New York had to have a true Square, this is where it would be.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigY1gf-wV7CpPmYyVfFKb__6STIcqX0UN3k9H1v88wUnLL7g_y-sOlTUJ0aQ5InhndrrVkFAwYDQ5QkWmUDyAhM1ydi4JI505shDBmFMSMkfGrsiKGmkW68Y-5wRLbdfIUyy43Gl1J2M0/s1600-h/DSC02451.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" mt="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigY1gf-wV7CpPmYyVfFKb__6STIcqX0UN3k9H1v88wUnLL7g_y-sOlTUJ0aQ5InhndrrVkFAwYDQ5QkWmUDyAhM1ydi4JI505shDBmFMSMkfGrsiKGmkW68Y-5wRLbdfIUyy43Gl1J2M0/s320/DSC02451.JPG" width="214" /></a><br />
</div>But Times Square wasn’t planned for pedestrians. The same study found that over 100,000 people walked in the area on any typical weekday, but only 11% of the space was actually available to pedestrians. Based on this study the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Times Square Alliance (TSA) initiated a number of projects. The most controversial of these was implemented on the 24th of May 2009–all vehicular traffic was banned on Broadway, between 47th and 42nd Streets.<br />
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Many voices were raised against this move. Businesses in the area felt that it would affect their sales. Others opined that diverting traffic onto 7th Avenue would create bottlenecks. Some journalists weighed in with the notion that banning traffic was a distinctly un-New York idea. One even suggested that the experience of Times Square wouldn’t be the same without the honking of cabs. Over the following working days, the New York Times reported that traffic flowed smoothly along 7th Avenue, without any obvious bottlenecks. New Yorkers and tourists alike rushed to fill this new public space that was made available to them. <br />
<br />
The only hitch was the kind of chairs provided at Duffy Square. The TSA had supplied lawn chairs, but promised that those would soon be replaced. Having nothing left to complain about, newspaper columns insinuated that the chairs were unsuitable, which somehow cast doubts on the whole exercise. When the chairs were replaced, the replacements were deemed unsuitable as well. The jury is still out on what exactly would be the perfect chair for Times Square.<br />
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In the meantime, Times Square has held its own. It is now a curious urban experience: a tiny oasis of calm for people to sit down and look at the chaotic drama unfolding around them. Before this, Times Square could be experienced on foot only twice annually, on New Year’s Eve and at the Thanksgiving Parade. Being able to do it every day makes the place seem festive throughout the year. Banning the cars and allowing pedestrians to take over Times Square has finally made it a square. <br />
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<em>You can read the New York Times article mentioned above, </em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/nyregion/27broadway.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss"><em>here.</em></a>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-90687233575053059622010-01-06T16:31:00.004-05:002010-01-06T17:24:55.466-05:00Super Ram and Durga Woman: Contemporary Indian Comics<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwntQ7GsF7raZrjB2fqxSzLrqkNiJCdi3sw_L0WCFtSDUtMRgEjMQiiiuvxVjZ32cWR7Ix-68P07TRjbmG3MuXN6Fs4CZYhNInTQqe8KjZkJTmpSnQvQ8d9HQXc6wk9TBg2VZEEZq0WwU/s1600-h/Comics+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" ps="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwntQ7GsF7raZrjB2fqxSzLrqkNiJCdi3sw_L0WCFtSDUtMRgEjMQiiiuvxVjZ32cWR7Ix-68P07TRjbmG3MuXN6Fs4CZYhNInTQqe8KjZkJTmpSnQvQ8d9HQXc6wk9TBg2VZEEZq0WwU/s640/Comics+copy.jpg" /></a><br />
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If I had a rupee for every time I’ve heard the sentence, “This is about the battle between good and evil”, I’d be a multi-millionaire. I could bet that every book that tells a story from Hindu Mythology has this sentence somewhere in its pages. It is a cliché I have truly come to hate, because it grossly and erroneously oversimplifies the truly complex stories of Hindu Mythology. So I was pretty dismayed when this phrase showed up as a tagline for a recent exhibition at the <a href="http://www.lacma.org/">Los Angeles County Museum of Art.</a><br />
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Luckily, “<a href="http://www.lacma.org/art/ExhibIndianComics.aspx">Heroes & Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics</a>”, is a forgivable case of inappropriate titling. I completely sympathise with the exhibition’s curators, Julie Romain and Tushara Bindu Gude. Coming up with a title that bundles together <em>Chitrakathi</em> art from Paithan, Miniatures from Guler, Amar Chitra Katha, Wonder Woman, and <em>Ramayan 3392 AD</em> and <em>Devi</em> from Liquid Comics, must have been a pretty uphill task. But once you get past that unfortunate title wall, painted so stereotypically in fuchsia pink and orange, the richness and diversity of the material on display gives lie to any one-liner analysis of the fascinating development of comics in India.<br />
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The focus of the exhibition is definitely the artwork for Liquid Comics’ <em>Ramayan 3392 AD</em> and<em> Devi</em>, released between 2006 and 2008. The exhibition begins with a series of pages from both these comics, which are astounding in their nuances. There is no doubt that Abhishek Singh, Saumin Patel and Mukesh Singh are not only among the finest comic artists in India, but also talented illustrators with a very strong sense of the contemporary Indian imagination. The post-liberalisation Indian psyche has at its disposal an excitingly democratic range of visual references. Abhishek Singh’s re-imagination of the epics makes full use of this arsenal. Every frame contains within it a heady mixture of India’s tradition of visual narratives coupled with heavy contemporary referencing. If his Vishwamitra looks suspiciously like Gandalf, it is only a mark of the times. <br />
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Some other visual influences are also immediately apparent: <a href="http://www.amarchitrakatha.com/">Amar Chitra Katha</a> (ACK), for instance. This comics giant from the 1970’s defined the visual language for Hindu Mythology for at least two generations of young Indians. Certain scenes from the epics - The killing of Mahishasura, Ram and Sita in the forest, Hanuman at Ravan’s court and the Breaking of the Bow - have been visually codified by ACK to such an extent that it is difficult to frame these visuals in a different way without making them look alien. Pages from ACK’s comics <i>Valmiki's Ramayana</i> and <i>Tales of Durga</i> find due place in this exhibition, allowing the knowing viewer to draw interesting comparisons with more contemporary work.<br />
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It has long been my contention that Bollywood has defined Indian notions of masculinity in more ways than one. Now it looks like there are parallels in Indian comics as well. In 1978, Ram on the iconic ACK <i>Valmiki's Ramayana </i>cover by artist Pratap Mullick is a muscular thickset man with features that are unmistakably from Uttar Pradesh: much like Dharmendra, the superstar action hero of that era. Abhishek Singh’s Ram for <i>Ramayan 3392 AD</i> is more like today’s Bollywood heartthrob Hrithik Roshan, with sharp exotic features and an impossibly V-shaped torso. But add messy dreadlocks (Pirates of the Caribbean?), fabulous sword (He Man? Lord of the Rings?), and mysterious eyes under a brooding forehead (Batman?), and you have a truly 2008 Indian Superhero. <br />
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The exhibition reminds you that the tradition continues far beyond ACK. The idea of telling stories in action-packed panels is as old as the hills in India. The <em>Chitrakathis</em> from Paithan (c.1850) are fairly recent, but this visual device is used in many older Indian art forms: the temple murals at Lepakshi and the <em>Pabuji no Pad</em>, for instance. However, the truly Indian way of visual storytelling is to seamlessly meld many sequential actions in a single panel. The exhibition has only one example of this: a Kangra painting titled <em>Sugriva Sends Emmissaries</em> (c.1830). This is strange considering how prevalent this device is in the contemporary comics. The finest example from this exhibition is probably <em>Kalanemi Transforms into Asura</em> by Abhishek Singh, a breathtaking treatment of a comparatively minor episode from the Ramayana.<br />
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To represent the international influence on Indian Comics, the curators have showcased a rare gem. In 1999, DC Comics ran a Wonder Woman series titled <em>Godwar</em>. The series is about Wonder Woman teaming up with gods from other cultures. Unsurprisingly, when she comes to India, she chooses to team up with Ram. While the pages on show are truly delightful in their obvious ACK inspiration; (“Behold! Mount Mandara”, Ram says in one panel) they also pave the way for the treatment of Indian Heroes in the true tradition of the comic book Super Hero, complete with wrist bands and bulging muscles. <br />
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This exhibition also pays due diligence to the development of the Super Heroine, by tracing the journey of the Durga Icon. First, there is the <em>Devi Mahatmy</em>a painting from the Guler tradition (c.1750), showing a nubile Durga in Mughal armour. Then there is Souren Roy’s brilliant imagination of Durga for ACK (1978), which is essentially a Bengali Durga with muscles, achieving curious shades of masculine aggression in a very motherly goddess. Saumin Patel’s <em>Devi</em> (2006) is all Comic Book Woman, complete with oversized breasts and tight leotards. Catwoman is an obvious influence, and he certainly likes Halle Berry. But when you are confronted with the illustration <em>Devi Vanquishes Bala</em>, you realize that the history of the Durga icon is too strong to shake off. As she plunges her spear into the chest of the demon, she is so unmistakably <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durga">Mahishasuramardini</a>! The weight of a 1500-year-old art heritage lends a pulsing, melodramatic quality to this image, and indeed to most of the illustrations on display.<br />
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Unfortunately, this larger-than-life quality of the comics is not reflected in the design of the exhibition itself. The museum’s in-house design staff is possibly too ingrained in the tradition of the art gallery. Thus all the exciting material described above is mounted in frames, and hung on the walls like so many paintings. Some of the pieces, such as Abhishek Singh’s illustrations, are powerful enough to transcend this bad choice, and to speak beyond the frame. But the pages from ACK and Wonder Woman seem rather uncomfortable being confined to the straight-jacketing conventions of High Art. The design team has made a feeble attempt to counter this by painting the walls bright fuchsia pink and cobalt blue, but all that they pull off is a colourful art exhibition. As it stands, the design adds nothing to the message of the exhibition.<br />
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This message is also not very clear at times. A viewer familiar with Indian art and mythology might easily be able to make some sense of the exhibition, but I wonder if it provides a sufficient introduction to those who are not already initiated into the mad world of Indian popular culture. The text is inadequate, providing only broad descriptions and too few comparative insights. Another serious oversight was to leave out the narrative content of the comics themselves. Amar Chitra Katha, a name long synonymous with comics in India, literally translates as 'Immortal Picture Story'. With its skewed focus on the art work rather than the narratives, this exhibition is all picture and no story, in more ways than one.<br />
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But in splitting these hairs, one must not lose sight of the sheer ambitiousness of the exhibition. It is true that ACK has been receiving a lot of critical attention in recent years, but ACK is easier to analyse because it has been at least two decades since it has produced any original comics. The truly great challenge is to deal with contemporary popular culture with any sort of critical distance. The work of Abhishek Singh, Saumin Patel and Mukesh Singh looks like mature art, highly developed in the fluency of its language. But the fact remains that the contemporary comics industry in India is still in its early years. The curators of this exhibition bravely attempt to catch this form as it develops, and to provide a flexible critical framework within which to view this development. Given the difficulty of the task, they have been surprisingly successful. This exhibition has made one thing, at least, crystal clear. As far as the quality of the artwork in Indian Comics is concerned, the Battle for Good seems to have been won.<br />
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<em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">'Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in Indian Comics' is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art till February 7, 2010.</span></em><br />
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<em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">You can view the collection online </span></em><a href="http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=epage;id=502130;type=803"><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">here.</span></em></a>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-7586141381313106922009-12-25T22:45:00.001-05:002009-12-25T23:30:54.493-05:00I'm a Mac (Just a Regular Guy)You can download an illustrated version of this essay <a href="http://www.archive.org/download/MacaRegularGuy/Avinash_imAMac.pdf">here. (pdf, 1.02 MB)</a><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><em>"What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet;”<br />
</em><span style="font-size: x-small;">- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II</span><br />
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<strong>The Many Macintoshes</strong><br />
Once upon a time, a Mackintosh was a rather unglamorous looking raincoat made in Britain. Then, on January 24, 1984, the word Macintosh (without the letter ‘k’) acquired a new meaning: a personal computer manufactured and sold by Apple Computers, Inc. This computer was sold with two applications developed by Apple: MacWrite and MacPaint. Thus was born the brilliant nickname that would stick to every subsequent computer product that Apple released – “Mac”. In both Apple’s products and their marketing, this nickname has played out in a delightfully unforeseen but meaningful way.<br />
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The origins of this inspired branding decision lay in the personal whim of an Apple employee. In 1979, Jeff Raskin first conceived of an easy-to-use, low cost computer for the average user. In his mind, this was going to be his favourite Apple product, and quite logically, he wanted to name it after his favourite apple, the McIntosh (also referred to as a “Mac”). <br />
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Both the fruit and the raincoat get their names from Scottish progenitors. The mackintosh raincoat was named after Charles Mackintosh, the inventor of a method of water proofing. The fruit is named after John McIntosh, who discovered this particular apple cultivar growing on his farm in Canada. In Gaelic and Scots, the word “MacIntosh” is a patronymic that means “Son of the Chieftain”. The word ‘Mac’ means “son” in those languages, and is thus a part of many Scottish surnames. By the 17th Century, the word “Mac” had passed into colloquial usage as an informal term of address to a man or a boy; much like the words “fellow” or “chap”. A Mac, therefore, is just Average Joe, a regular guy.<br />
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<strong>Thinking Different</strong><br />
But for the longest time, Apple didn’t want to be a regular guy. In 1984, Steve Jobs’ slogan for Apple was “Think Different.” Apple Computers Inc. were the small guys with the big idea. All of Apple’s advertising and marketing efforts were aimed at converting people to the Mac dream. The most evangelical of these has to be <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxShzoUjiAQ">Ridley Scott’s commercial from 1984</a> that has since become an advertising classic. It showed the Macintosh, personified by a female runner, hurling a hammer at ‘Big Brother’, the computing establishment. This was the commercial that launched the first Mac. Significantly, this was also the first Apple commercial where the Mac was personified as a human being. <br />
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Among other technological innovations, the first Mac came with a mouse and a radically redesigned interface that used icons for the very first time. In terms of industrial design, however, the Mac tried very hard to find a way to be different. Seven design firms were chosen to present concepts for the design language that would define the look of the Mac. Out of these seven dwarves, Jobs finally chose the concept “Snow White”: monochromatic cuboids with curved edges designed by German designer Hartmut Esslinger. This look is exemplified by the Apple IIc and the Macintosh IIcx, released in the late 1980’s.<br />
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The real design revolution came in 1998, with the release of the iMac G3. Along with other design features such as portability and transparency, the iMac introduced colour into the world of computers. As a product, it helped revive the fortunes of Apple Computers Inc. and Steve Jobs. But the key introduction of colour changed the rules of the game in computer marketing. The computer was no longer just an appliance or an electronic tool. Neither was it a sacred and sophisticated piece of machinery that had to be handled with care. The iMac made the computer a personal object, an extension of the owner’s identity. Apple was truly thinking different.<br />
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<strong>I'm a Mac</strong><br />
Fast forward to 2009, and the idea that the computer expresses its owner’s identity is no longer as earth-shattering. Apple’s competitors caught on rather quickly and jumped on to the bandwagon. HP ran a very successful advertising campaign on the slogan “The computer is personal again.” Sony and Dell both began to offer colour customization in their computers and laptops. Soon, the industry trend progressed beyond colour, and customers can now purchase laptops that incorporate artwork by prominent digital artists.<br />
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In the meantime, Apple had diversified its product range. It introduced the iPod, which spawned a revolution of its own. The computers had moved through the G4, G5 and MacPro models, and the laptops went from iBooks to the Macbook series: Macbook, Macbook Pro, and Macbook Air. Yes, the Apple computers were Macs again, and this time they truly deserved the name. Jonathan Ive carefully worked his way towards an aesthetic that is so generic that it stands out. The monochromatic cuboidal shapes were back, but handled this time with sensitivity, and precision worthy of Dieter Rams and Ulm. Minimalism in industrial design became the hallmark of Apple design, aided by a colour palette strictly limited to aluminium, white and black. With the exception of their cheapest product, the iPod Nano, this austere design language was applied to every single Mac. When Apple’s website asks, <a href="http://www.apple.com/getamac/whichmac/">“Which Mac are you?”</a> it almost seems a joke. Except for variations in size, all the Macs look the same. <br />
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But the framing of that question is no joke. It reflects the way that Apple and its loyal customers have begun to see their Macs in relation to themselves. The Mac no longer has to fit the personality of its user, it has a personality all of its own. And you can see this person in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCL5UgxtoLs">the latest commercials for Apple</a>. The PC is a stuffy, balding, middle aged man in a suit, trying a little too hard to appear cool and up to date. The Mac is a cool, confident youth in a t-shirt and jeans, who doesn’t have to try at all. No more heavy convincing required; no more hammers needed. It is just plain common sense that the Mac is better. You’re just a regular guy if you use a Mac. <br />
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<strong>Steve Jobs is the Ultimate Mac</strong><br />
If the Mac is the personification of its user, then surely Steve Jobs is the personification of Apple Inc. Over the years, he has become a widely admired cult figure. Thousands of his followers, who affectionately call themselves Macheads, assemble every year to hear him speak at the Macworld Conference and Expo. Jobs’ presence at this annual event, where new Apple products are traditionally launched, is critical to the image of Apple Inc. When he could not be present at Macworld 2009 due to health reasons, Apple stock actually lost value. <br />
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The image of Steve Jobs has also changed over the years, with the changing face of Apple and the Mac. A photograph of him from 1984, with the newly launched Macintosh, shows a smiling young businessman in a suit. If that smiling business man put on a few pounds and lost some hair, he might have become the suited middle-aged PC in the new Mac commercials. But Steve Jobs was quick to re-invent himself. No more suits, no more standard corporate publicity shots. Today, Steve Jobs carefully dresses like Average Joe, in a black turtleneck t-shirt and Levi’s 501 blue jeans. It isn’t a stretch of imagination to see that the Mac in the new commercials is the 1985 Steve Jobs who dresses like today’s Steve Jobs.<br />
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At what is possibly the height of its commercial success, Apple Inc. delivers a remarkably consistent message to all existing and potential Macheads. The multi-millionaire Steve Jobs who dresses like you and me is the perfect allegory for computers that hide a supposedly superior performance behind a polished but minimal exterior. Apple Inc. has understood that portraying itself as Average Joe while delivering above-average products has an irresistible allure. It has finally turned its nickname into a powerful weapon. For once, Shakespeare has been proved wrong. That which we call a Mac, by any other name wouldn’t sell as sweet.<br />
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<em>Apple Inc. is still scaling the heights of its commercial success: <a href="http://beta.thehindu.com/business/article70238.ece?homepage=true">its stock just reached an all-time high</a> today, 25 December 2009.</em><br />
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<em>This essay was written as part of Ralph Caplan's "The Critical Imperative" class.</em>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-10534393254740227162009-12-22T20:56:00.001-05:002009-12-22T20:59:18.911-05:00Pedicab Wala<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" height="24" id="_41459227594642" width="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf?0.4390568860515569" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="w3c" value="true" /><param name="flashvars" value='config={"key":"#$b6eb72a0f2f1e29f3d4","playlist":[{"url":"http://www.archive.org/download/PedicabsAndRickshaws/avinash_PEDICABS_20091216.mp3","autoPlay":false}],"clip":{"autoPlay":true},"canvas":{"backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"none"},"plugins":{"audio":{"url":"http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.audio-3.0.3-dev.swf"},"controls":{"playlist":false,"fullscreen":false,"gloss":"high","backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"medium","sliderColor":"0x777777","progressColor":"0x777777","timeColor":"0xeeeeee","durationColor":"0x01DAFF","buttonColor":"0x333333","buttonOverColor":"0x505050"}},"contextMenu":[{"Listen+to+PedicabsAndRickshaws+at+archive.org":"function()"},"-","Flowplayer 3.0.5"]}' /></object><br />
Listen to me talk about Rickshaws in New York City, or download the file <a href="http://www.archive.org/download/PedicabsAndRickshaws/avinash_PEDICABS_20091216.mp3">here (mp3, 6.45MB).</a><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Rickshaws in New York City? Oh yes, they exist. And they're thriving.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">(Clockwise from Top Left)<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">1. <a href="http://www.oconnorgreentoursnyc.com/index.htm">Stan O'Connor</a>, who's been a pedicab tour guide for 14 years now. He loves giving tours to Indians, can sing "Chamma Chamma", and hum "Kuchh Kuchh Hota Hai". He says that the one building Indians love to see in New York is the United Nations. Yup, that's us: world peace lovers.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">2. An anonymous cycle rickshaw driver from India, and his passengers who luckily brought their own weatherproofing. The basic frame is the same as the pedicab's. The drivers are very different, as you can see.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">3. Just Married, on a pedicab rented from <a href="http://www.ponycab.com/">Tony Roy's Pony Cab rental service</a>. Movie and TV appearances are also part of their services.<br />
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Thanks to Stan, Tony and Ismail. The music is "Main Rickshawala" from the film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0255050/">"Chhoti Behen" (1959)</a>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-80907947620009375582009-12-12T07:11:00.002-05:002009-12-12T07:18:44.107-05:00The Belle of the Ball<div align="center" class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioRGGNQ8eoyL5AI8aajdgloMpeRjdN2-wyNpX_ADC2Peq_bPwV70-2BhHa-cNTcCUZPg5zIvHIHDb-3JVxw3vB-kuL4JQVhr7xCUnqduV-frzE8yZzkhZjBC8-Vp64dPhoPgpYWCxbdLo/s1600-h/450px-GWBridge-BusTerm+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" ps="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioRGGNQ8eoyL5AI8aajdgloMpeRjdN2-wyNpX_ADC2Peq_bPwV70-2BhHa-cNTcCUZPg5zIvHIHDb-3JVxw3vB-kuL4JQVhr7xCUnqduV-frzE8yZzkhZjBC8-Vp64dPhoPgpYWCxbdLo/s640/450px-GWBridge-BusTerm+copy.jpg" /></a><br />
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</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: left;">The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Bridge_Bus_Terminal">George Washington Bridge Bus Station (GWBBS)</a> once dreamed of fame. She had been encouraged to, because the men who created her in 1963 obviously suffered from incurable optimism, and a very strong idea of how things should be. To Robert Moses, she was to be the gateway to upper Manhattan. She was raised to take in all the traffic that poured off the Bridge and politely show it where to go: “Cars this way please, Heavy Vehicles go there, and Buses come to me.” She was trained to wave goodbye to the thousands of people leaving Upper Manhattan for Jersey and other points East: a warm goodbye that would make them want to come back to the greatest city in the world.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYBfswxCTqSlWMLtsaoj8yIyTLH2vVskRSf-JaGxLyl8fLFcdKLUQ3y7cCOJpp0b4GjM-4EmG1JlrEhhlKyH1odRM45RaTdNOifheL7YUfdhiEp3r3tnSivlFtivHiUu2R84ph90mbz4E/s1600-h/DSC02885.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" ps="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYBfswxCTqSlWMLtsaoj8yIyTLH2vVskRSf-JaGxLyl8fLFcdKLUQ3y7cCOJpp0b4GjM-4EmG1JlrEhhlKyH1odRM45RaTdNOifheL7YUfdhiEp3r3tnSivlFtivHiUu2R84ph90mbz4E/s320/DSC02885.JPG" /></a>A girl needs a dress, they said, and so <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier_Luigi_Nervi">Pier Luigi Nervi</a> was invited to come in and wave the fairy-godmotherly wand. He created an elaborate concrete canopy in his Italian high engineering style. A central spine of columns rising up along the median supports two enormous wings that span the 186 foot wide highway. Writing when it was opened, Milton Bracker of the New York Times called it “the spine of a Mesozoic monster.” Later writers have been more kind, likening it rather to a butterfly perched atop the Cross Bronx expressway. Each wing is made of 13 triangular sections of concrete, laid out over a triangular filigree of beams. Triangulation seems to be the theme here. Triangular grids, tapering columns; a conscious avoidance of the right angle, of anything that would relate to the modernist glass boxes springing up all over midtown. Contrary to Bracker’s unfortunate prehistoric association, this was to be the bus terminal of the future: its capsule-like waiting areas curiously reminiscent of the first Starship Enterprise. <br />
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Today, one rarely sees passengers looking up to admire Nervi’s concrete pavilion. This isn’t because it isn’t beautiful, in its own way. It is because they just can’t see it for what it is. How could they? Nothing that they have encountered while walking into the bus terminal hints to them that an unappreciated gem sits above. Nervi’s butterfly is only the tip of the iceberg. Before passengers coming in from Manhattan see the concrete ball gown, they must go through two levels of rather matronly undergarments: A lower level of bus platforms which is also the connection to the Subway station, and a middle level concourse with the obligatory retail space.<br />
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<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">As the GWBBS approached middle age, someone at the Port Authority decided she needed some Botox. This was applied in the form of a nearly $14 million dollar investment between 1999 and 2004, mainly to <a href="http://www.panynj.gov/bus-terminals/gwbbs-shops-food-services.html">rejuvenate the middle level concourse</a>. There is now shiny signage, a newspaper shop, a café, Off Track Betting, and that crowning glory: a Terminal Barber Shop. But it hasn’t really worked: perhaps because nobody thought of replacing the rather aged ceramic tiling on the walls. Or because they didn’t consider that the false ceiling was as far removed as possible, architecturally, from the ventilated Nervi pavilion above. <br />
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<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Another reason why that pavilion is invisible is because the GWBBS isn’t in the ballroom; she is almost in the Bronx. Her sister at the Port Authority Bus Terminal receives the business commuters and tourists pouring in and out of busy Manhattan, connecting them to Times Square: the navel of the world. The GWBBS sits at 178th street: her passengers are the lower-income denizens of the Upper reaches of Manhattan. These passengers have been trained to a very low expectation from urban infrastructure. They are used to the Subway stations at 175th and 185th streets: run down, water damaged, low-ceilinged, dimly lit places. The two lower levels of the GWBBS are all they expect out of a bus station. A Terminal Barber Shop? It must be so much more than they ever dreamed of - they must be thrilled! <br />
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</div>Yet, what the GWBBS does for them on a daily basis, barber shop or no barber shop, is nothing to be scoffed at. On a map of the area, the GWBBS looks rather like an intravenous syringe, with expressways and roads streaming into it like tubes, carrying a steady flow of traffic in and out. Granted, the syringe is plunged into an unglamorous part of the urban body, but that does not make it any less vital. Every day, an estimated 17,000 passengers get on and off 950 buses under the expert supervision of the GWBBS. She dutifully does the best she can for each one of them, decked out in a dress they will never look at.<br />
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</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">A cloud of melancholy hangs around the GWBBS. This frumpy matron was once Cinderella, very briefly the envy of all, at a ball that ended all too soon. As she continues to cheerily and uncomplainingly sweep the house, the knowledge of her story makes her beautiful in my eyes, once again the belle of the ball. And if reports of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/nyregion/02terminal.html?scp=3&sq=%22george%20washington%20bridge%20bus%20station%22&st=cse">a proposed $152 million dollar renovation</a> are to be believed, it appears that Prince Charming might be on his way with the Glass Slipper.<br />
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You can go to the website of the George Washington Bus Station <a href="http://www.panynj.gov/bus-terminals/george-washington-bridge-bus-station.html">here</a>.<br />
A collection of photographs of the Station (mostly by me), can be downloaded <a href="http://www.archive.org/download/GeorgeWashingtonBridgeBusStation/GWBBS.pdf">here.</a> (pdf,3.2MB)<br />
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</div>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-16751614054035094612009-12-02T13:21:00.004-05:002009-12-02T13:30:31.373-05:00The Tall Bank Building Sustainably Considered<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpOcYJBkAzokilSrCV030oOqxEIw0bIoC7kYVnDeadvyefGAf0GUi5gg74Bs-uRp2y6uj6LHVyUc7hxh7hyphenhyphen4rm5oo00Zeq4FgxhzZg1lKuCA1nU1EpNUcfDta9FHl6Yap2FRAUG4wxlEM/s1600-h/Untitled2+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" er="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpOcYJBkAzokilSrCV030oOqxEIw0bIoC7kYVnDeadvyefGAf0GUi5gg74Bs-uRp2y6uj6LHVyUc7hxh7hyphenhyphen4rm5oo00Zeq4FgxhzZg1lKuCA1nU1EpNUcfDta9FHl6Yap2FRAUG4wxlEM/s640/Untitled2+copy.jpg" /></a><br />
</div>In December 2007, a 255.5 ft architectural spire was added to the new <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America_Tower,_New_York_City">Bank of America building at One Bryant Park</a>, finally giving it its intended height of 1,200 ft. This made it the second tallest building, and the tallest glass‐walled skyscraper in New York City. However, its biggest claim to fame is something that is unfortunately not visible in the architectural renderings, or to the passer‐by on the street: it is being touted as the world’s greenest skyscraper.<br />
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The Bank of America Tower is the first skyscraper designed to attain a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_in_Energy_and_Environmental_Design">Platinum LEED certification</a>: the ultimate stamp of approval for sustainable construction. The developers, the Durst Organisation, and the architects Cook+Fox are confident their building will achieve this rating. At One Bryant Park, they claim to have bettered their earlier efforts with the Four Times Square building, creating a compendium of best sustainable practices using the technology that exists today.<br />
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Most of the evidence of this lies concealed in the innards of the building. All the mechanics of a skyscraper this size are customarily located at the top of the building. At One Bryant Park, these mechanics have been shunted to the bottom of the building, in a foundation several feet below bedrock level. Here a complex circulation system provides air conditioning for the entire building. 44 enormous storage tanks turn water into ice, using electricity drawn from the city’s grid at off‐peak hours. The building is cooled by melting this ice, thus reducing the load on the electricity grid during peak hours. Grey water from the building is recycled back into this system, and all the washrooms are fitted with waterless urinals, reportedly saving 8 million gallons of water per year. Condensation towers concealed at the top of the building are used to cool the air, which is then supplied to each worker in the building, who will supposedly be able to individually control their microenvironments. Under construction is a 4.6 megawatt cogeneration plant, which will make the building at least partially energy self‐sufficient. <br />
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Whether all this effort will actually prove successful remains to be seen. Only the analysts of the future might be able to truly gauge the long‐term consequences of these systems. To the common visitor of today, however, the outward indicators of sustainability are few and far between. The materials of the building have been sourced locally as far as possible, in most cases from suppliers operating within 500 miles. But those immediately visible at street level - such as the champagne coloured granite flooring, the large limestone clad walls, or the bamboo roof in the lobby ‐ are certainly not local. Greenery and plantations are conspicuous by their absence, save for two large living sculptures in an enclosed garden room on 43rd Street and 6th Avenue. Above this ground floor, the building rises for another 52 floors in two Siamese‐twinned glass towers that seem to twist into each other, culminating in an asymmetrical top and that allimportant spire.<br />
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Nothing in this extensive faceted façade suggests that this enormous skyscraper is among the greenest buildings in the world. With a budget of US$ 1 billion, this is probably one of the most expensive architectural efforts towards sustainability. One would imagine that the architects were aiming at a form that would fix the building forever in the public imagination as a symbol for sustainable design. After all, this is the one issue that immediately concerns every single person that looks at the building; and it is an urgent issue that could very well do with some prominently visible cultural icons speaking for it. Yet, there is nothing about One Bryant Park that visually distinguishes it from the multitudes of other inefficient, energy guzzling skyscrapers that dot midtown Manhattan.<br />
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This tower follows in the fifty year old tradition of the glass‐and‐steel, curtain wall skyscraper as the architecture of choice for the large corporation. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_House">Lever House</a>, designed by Gordon Bunshaft in 1952, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagram_Building">Seagram Building</a> designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1958, created the archetype for this kind of building: an all‐glass façade, and a simple, modernist, geometric form. The shape of the skyscraper has since undergone some transformations, in the hands of Philip Johnson, Robert Venturi, and other architects of post‐modern persuasion, but glass and steel façades have remained the norm.<br />
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The architects explain that the inspiration for the design of One Bryant Park was crystalline structures found in nature. Cook+Fox partner Richard Cook said in a press release, “The transparent, faceted surfaces of the building function as a permeable membrane for shifting qualities of perception and light.” The crystalline inspiration seems a tad anachronistic: fiftyseven years ago, Lewis Mumford described Lever House as crystalline. As for the permeable glass membrane, it might be just a little too permeable for a tall sustainable building. A glass wall does result in savings in terms of lighting during the day. Construction costs are lower, and there is considerably less load on the structure. But it puts a tremendous burden on climate control within the building: thus all the fuss about air conditioning. Also, people are not always happy with so much daylight: it is mindboggling to think of the sheer volume of plastic in the venetian blinds that cover the walls of at least 50 floors of the Bank of America Tower.<br />
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At the turn of the century, rising pressures on commercial urban spaces, and the invention of the safety elevator, pushed office buildings up towards the sky, creating the mode of building that we now know as the skyscraper. Most architects of the time responded to this challenge by harking back to historical antecedents of tall buildings: the Renaissance Chateau, and the Gothic Cathedral. But some architects, such as<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Sullivan"> Louis Sullivan</a>, argued that a new method of building demanded an appropriate aesthetic. He insisted that the form of a building was linked to its function, and that floors with the same function should be architecturally identical. It was this aesthetic idea that developed over time into the modernist glass skyscraper.<br />
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One hundred years after Sullivan, we find ourselves in a strikingly similar situation. Today, all architecture, the skyscraper included, is subject to the pressures of sustainability. Every architectural decision must be weighed against this standard, including the outer form of the building. And yet, tall sustainable buildings continue to hark back to recent historical antecedents. They continue to be completely enveloped in glass skins, heedless of whether this is appropriate to the immediate surrounding environment and to the future of the planet. But is there really an alternative?<br />
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</div>Long time proponent of green architecture, Malaysian architect Ken Yeang might have one answer. In his smaller buildings such as the Menara Mesiniaga (1994) and in his unrealized concept for the Tokyo Nara tower (1995), he offers his prototype of a bioclimatic tower: concrete and glass buildings, but with plantations and solar paneling included in the outer skin. Buildings developed for harsher climates might have another answer, because they are built to respond to their environments. The triangular National Commercial Bank Building (1984) that Skidmore Owings & Merrill built in Saudi Arabia, uses cutouts in its stone façade to shade an inset glass wall. BEP Architect’s Dayabumi Complex in Kaula Lumpur uses an outer skin fretted in Islamic patterns to achieve the same objective. There is also a spate of more recent conceptual work that offers imaginative solutions. Oppenheim Architect’s proposal for the COR tower in Miami has just enough glass surface for the building to be sustainable without unwarranted heat gain. But this glass is in the form of amoebic windows that give the building a decidedly ‘organic’ air.<br />
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In this milieu, as one of the largest buildings to claim the title of ‘sustainable’, One Bryant Park had the opportunity to show the world a definitive new archetype: a form that reflected a deep engagement with the environment; a solid, soaring billboard for sustainability. Sadly, the architects have missed this opportunity, delivering a building that is not particularly groundbreaking, especially in this age of ‘starchitects’ like Norman Foster and Santigo Calatrava. Cook+Fox Architects have given us a building that only serves to even more urgently underline the architectural imperative for today: it is time for the tall, sustainable building to be artistically reconsidered. <br />
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Louis Sullivan wrote an essay in 1896, titled "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered". This is a seminal piece that contains that famous maxim "Form ever follows function". Read it <a href="http://academics.triton.edu/faculty/fheitzman/tallofficebuilding.html">here</a>, or download it as a pdf <a href="http://www.personalweb.unito.it/andrea.carosso/nyc/texts/Louis%20Sullivan%20-%20The%20Tall%20Office%20building.pdf">here</a>.<br />
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<em>Image 1 (L to R)</em>: One Bryant Park under construction; A height comparison to the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings; One Bryant Park at street level.<br />
<em>Image 2 (L to R)</em>: The National Commercial Bank Building; The Menara Mesiniaga; The Tokyo Nara Tower; The COR Tower in Miami.Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-16279288626068585822009-12-02T12:20:00.000-05:002009-12-02T12:20:08.076-05:00Celebrating Design<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6cy2-U3Grh1of-gac_t3ye17KOLFvKtO5dxJjsNQ-s-6IO3xa3EsMBBKY_WQNDloTcQFhhYqvjFM4WtkvyijLAn9IvnHippRBmpAXNgdSlZVkQsryukxFoCwLoidFXNrZx0joxyT2z_k/s1600-h/10319_159209354095_507664095_2605043_3405799_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" er="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6cy2-U3Grh1of-gac_t3ye17KOLFvKtO5dxJjsNQ-s-6IO3xa3EsMBBKY_WQNDloTcQFhhYqvjFM4WtkvyijLAn9IvnHippRBmpAXNgdSlZVkQsryukxFoCwLoidFXNrZx0joxyT2z_k/s400/10319_159209354095_507664095_2605043_3405799_n.jpg" /></a><br />
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September is the best time to visit Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal, India. In the gentle autumn weather the Bengalis celebrate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durga_Puja">a ten day festival</a> in honour of their favourite diety: the ten-armed Mother Goddess Durga. There is private worship in every home, but each neighbourhood organizes public worship at a stall, or pandaal. These pandaals are elaborate affairs: ranging from small sheds to enormous halls that are several hundred square feet in area. They are designed and built by local artisans, and have the most diverse inspirations. Last year’s pandaal themes included Victorian, Tribal, Gandhi, and Harry Potter. The highlight of each pandaal is a large idol of the Goddess Durga, designed in keeping with the theme. The Harry Potter pandaal was shaped like Hogwarts castle and the idol had moons and stars on her sari. <br />
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February is the best time to visit Rio de Janeiro, and to join in the riotous mania of the Rio Carnival. Neighbourhood Samba schools design their own parades, called blocos: complete with floats, dances and outrageous costumes. The competition of these blocos is a highlight of the carnival. In June, Lisbon celebrates the <a href="http://images.google.com/images?rlz=1C1CHMA_enUS353US353&sourceid=chrome&q=marchas+populares&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=8KAWS4rQGMGwlAem863VBQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=11&ved=0CD8QsAQwCg">Marchas Populares</a>. Come August, in Mumbai, the locals <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesh_chaturthi">celebrate</a> in honour of the God Ganesh, ending the festivities in a procession to immerse the God’s idols in the ocean. On the 1st of November, the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dia_de_los_Muertos"> Dia de los Muertos</a>, every building in Mexico has a specially decorated public altar. And then, at the end of November, is the Thanksgiving Parade in New York.<br />
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Television channels cover these events as they take place. Travel writers showcase them. But rarely does one get an insight into what goes into creating these amazing experiences. There has been no serious study of the annual design variations of these festivals, no utilization of these designs as indicators of social change. No design magazine is out there: deciding which Samba school had the best float in this year’s Carnival; or which neighbourhood’s Durga Puja pandaal was most innovative and - most importantly - why. <br />
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</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">An enormous amount of human creativity and ingenuity goes into these events every year. Every year, design decisions are anonymously taken by numerous artisans, seamstresses and other neighbourhood talents. Money is raised, designs are commissioned and they go into production. The designs are used and the user feedback is instantaneous. One never hears of a traditional festival that was an utter failure. They are annual exercises in experience design at the largest scale possible, with a near one hundred percent success rate! I doubt there is a design studio today which could make a similar claim.<br />
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Not everything is gung-ho about the design of festivals, though; and this requires public attention too. What happens to all those enormous floats, all that tinsel and plaster, on the day after the Rio Carnival? The Durga idols in Kolkata are ritually immersed in river water on the tenth day of the festival. The idols are made of sundried mud which disintegrates rapidly, but the paint on them leaches noxious chemicals into the water. The Ganesh idols from Mumbai are worse: they are made of Plaster of Paris, which is insoluble in water. Because the design of festivals is rarely discussed, they also pass under the radar as far as sustainability is concerned. Indeed, how must traditional festivals take sustainability into consideration? As of today, there are too few answers to this question. <br />
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Many festivals are religious ones, and they operate upon mechanisms of deep faith and tradition. It is faith that impels the designs of the Dia de los Muertos or the Durga Puja. Professional designers have rarely considered that religion or spirituality might influence the practice of design. But the fact remains that religious faith is a valid and essential part of the human experience. It is a social function that creates opportunities for celebration. And perhaps we cannot truly celebrate design until we understand the design of human celebration. <br />
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<em>Title Photo courtesy <a href="http://priyankargupta.blogspot.com/">Priyankar Gupta</a></em>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-31818014381425288192009-11-17T07:03:00.004-05:002009-12-02T22:38:26.438-05:00My Pressure Cooker Fascination<embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" flashvars="config={"key":"#$b6eb72a0f2f1e29f3d4","playlist":[{"url":"http://www.archive.org/download/PressureCookers/AVINASH_Commentary_091001.mp3","autoPlay":false}],"clip":{"autoPlay":true},"canvas":{"backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"none"},"plugins":{"audio":{"url":"http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.audio-3.0.3-dev.swf"},"controls":{"playlist":false,"fullscreen":false,"gloss":"high","backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"medium","sliderColor":"0x777777","progressColor":"0x777777","timeColor":"0xeeeeee","durationColor":"0x01DAFF","buttonColor":"0x333333","buttonOverColor":"0x505050"}},"contextMenu":[{"Item PressureCookers at archive.org":"function()"},"-","Flowplayer 3.0.5"]}" height="24" src="http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" w3c="true" width="350"></embed> <br />
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Listen to me talk about pressure cookers, or <a href="http://www.archive.org/download/PressureCookers/AVINASH_Commentary_091001.mp3">download the file</a>. (4.22 MB .mp3)<br />
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1. The ubiquitous aluminium Hawkins pressure cooker<br />
2. The Hawkins Futura, introduced in 1985, became an instant design classic.<br />
3. Typical publicity material that always comes in the pressure cooker carton: in this case, a recipe book for a Futura.<br />
4. How do you open a Hawkins pressure cooker? Opening pressure cookers is never easy for first-timers, no matter what pressure cooker you buy.<br />
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1. The design of the stainless steel Prestige pressure cooker has changed very little over the years.<br />
2. TTK Prestige's senior management at new product launches in 2003 and 2004.<br />
3. A page from a Prestige catalogue from the early 90's.<br />
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Do you have any pressure cooker stories to share?Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-29044766169743279072009-11-16T12:31:00.005-05:002009-11-16T15:30:44.366-05:00Revolution on a Keyboard<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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</div>IBM’s place in history is secure, as one of the 20th century’s largest drivers of technology and purveyors of the most advanced products in electronics and computing. But their consumer products, even acclaimed seminal ones such as the Selectric typewriter or the IBM PC, never achieved the cult status accorded to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettera_22">Olivetti Lettera 22</a> typewriter, or the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3">Apple iMac G3</a>. How did these objects, from much smaller competitors, create their cults?<br />
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There are some outstanding similarities in the rhetoric around the Lettera 22, released in 1949, and the iMac, released in 1998. For one, reporters and analysts invariably find it necessary to write at disproportionate length about the companies behind the product. Jay Doblin, while including the Lettera 22 in his list of One Hundred Great Product Designs in his eponymous book from 1970, spends so much time contemplating the evolution of the ‘distinctive <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti">Olivetti</a> style’, that his comments on the Lettera itself must be confined to the concluding paragraph. Time Magazine, reporting on the iMac through 1998 and 1999, never once mentions the design team, always crediting design aspects to Apple and Steve Jobs.<br />
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There is considerable mythmaking as well. The bulletin for the 1952 MoMA show titled ‘Olivetti: Design in Industry’, begins, “The Olivetti Company, many critics agree, is the leading corporation in the western world in the field of design”, going on to praise Olivetti’s dedication to design in every aspect of the company. And then there’s that apocryphal story of Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive discussing the design of the iMac while pacing a vegetable patch. Little picturesque details like this add to the aura of the product in retrospect.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgr5NvLEFnJ63HIDgMEGuXnfqAECGJLy80GPDeMhk8sDF1GJT0lRJuH4ZdmQ_-oWUf5AVzOH2fmVlM4KY2ylIj7oLjOyifAT4dAK8LAQh41ekI6b5OSCfrLLCxDZ-nLmWSzxCO97wZiwo/s1600/nizzoli.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgr5NvLEFnJ63HIDgMEGuXnfqAECGJLy80GPDeMhk8sDF1GJT0lRJuH4ZdmQ_-oWUf5AVzOH2fmVlM4KY2ylIj7oLjOyifAT4dAK8LAQh41ekI6b5OSCfrLLCxDZ-nLmWSzxCO97wZiwo/s320/nizzoli.jpg" /></a>By 1949, Olivetti was an established brand and <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O:AD:E:4316">Marcello Nizzoli</a> had already designed the hugely successful Lexicon 80. The Lettera 22 was conceived as the compact, portable version of the Lexicon, and these distinguishing qualities ended up making it an icon in its own right. Engineer Guiseppe Beccio worked to cut down the number of components of the typewriter: the standard model had 3000 parts, the Lettera 22 had only 2000. But it was Nizzoli’s design response to this technological change that created what historian Stephen Bayley calls “a visual type which has been continuously imitated since.”<br />
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The design has been called “sculptural”, with “sleek fluid lines and a low profile”, with the entire volume contained in one compact form. Even the roller has been almost completely integrated. The fact that the keys float in the air is still a source of delight for contemporary critics who are rediscovering their typewriters. And nobody fails to be charmed by that one red tabulator key. The Lettera 22 has also been praised for its ergnomics: not only is it light and portable, but the carriage handle and keys are sculpted to receive the action of the hands of the user. The Italian-ness of the Lettera seems a key contributor to all this talk of sculpturalism and quality. Doblin called the design “high puristic Italian style…surrounded by an aura of taste and intellect lacking in many American firms.”<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7UFB1M6ETZU28Xt7KzYWYZntZnSEe1q6UoUBw3oIkp7gKIo8ErUTYaK1M18CiCKZScLrE2phxFssrBdzLM7kljxvtbGxghTE-i-7VROWz1mHd4K8nC-IhpN0In2vN3JFKXUQCAHvNWn4/s1600/StGallenOlivetti+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7UFB1M6ETZU28Xt7KzYWYZntZnSEe1q6UoUBw3oIkp7gKIo8ErUTYaK1M18CiCKZScLrE2phxFssrBdzLM7kljxvtbGxghTE-i-7VROWz1mHd4K8nC-IhpN0In2vN3JFKXUQCAHvNWn4/s400/StGallenOlivetti+copy.jpg" /></a><br />
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Nearly instant fame followed. In 1954, it won the newly instituted Compasso d’Oro prize in Italy, for “its aesthetics and technical production.” In 1959, the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago ran a survey in which the Lettera 22 emerged on top of a list of the 100 best designed products of modern times. Soon, Bayley reports, it was displayed at Olivetti’s Fifth Avenue store in New York, “on pedestals and supplied with rolls of commercial paper…available to influence a whole generation of young American Designers.” This smacks of déjà vu for anyone who has been to an Apple Retail Store.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0Qbci5r4UDKX8XqjKti48xklzsOHEMQt4EMHSorTegzqmNA6MXAVT86oCxDYoaLYP-_AbTdmGofLMkquPojEl8h3OU8S3OU0QDDsiJCjAzhZYETl3z8v5LOtuKyThxfG1i3rLwTa5ck/s1600/apple_jonathan_ive_steve_jobs(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0Qbci5r4UDKX8XqjKti48xklzsOHEMQt4EMHSorTegzqmNA6MXAVT86oCxDYoaLYP-_AbTdmGofLMkquPojEl8h3OU8S3OU0QDDsiJCjAzhZYETl3z8v5LOtuKyThxfG1i3rLwTa5ck/s200/apple_jonathan_ive_steve_jobs(2).jpg" /></a>We may see the iMac today as a revolutionary idea in the world of personal computers. But the fact is that contemporary commentators recognized it as a revival of the all-in-one models that Apple had been launching since 1984. One writer felt it was a nostalgic moment when Jobs lifted the veil off the iMac; another one called it a ‘refreshing blast from the past.’ These writers felt that it was the design of the exterior shell, with its innovative use of material that made this model stand out. Andrew Gore at Macworld writes about staying up overnight at a computer store on the 5th of May 1998, and he wasn’t disappointed when it arrived. “Technology aside,” he says, “there’s that striking industrial design: translucent plastics; easily accessible ports; and a clever use of curves, angles, and varied textures…So what if it looks like an alien chicken egg?”<br />
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The ‘i’ in the iMac was a finishing flourish: instantly projecting this as an object designed for that portal to the future: the Internet. Time magazine’s reviewer Michael Krantz called the iMac a “marvel of simplicity” because of its ease in connecting to the internet, but author Alan Deutschmann wryly differs, “The machine wasn’t an Internet computer any more or less than the Intel-Microsoft PCs (or other Macs for that matter).” Average users actually had no trouble connecting to the Internet on other machines. But the slick positioning, added to the bright colourful industrial design and the media blitzkrieg, had consumers lining up: they put in 150,000 orders even before the computer went on sale.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJEvcOZYjxX7gaCnkAWqvvKXsHJSplfQO9eL2Avbe_XIgXWC2f-I2SEbgUs8DIgl_iR2kd9-UWOW-_7W0kXFfPXjeCHzAtfj0NUJ4Pi2-jndjXoclscmvt47wAGW-9h1IToRfLeSWgbfw/s1600/colors_imac.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJEvcOZYjxX7gaCnkAWqvvKXsHJSplfQO9eL2Avbe_XIgXWC2f-I2SEbgUs8DIgl_iR2kd9-UWOW-_7W0kXFfPXjeCHzAtfj0NUJ4Pi2-jndjXoclscmvt47wAGW-9h1IToRfLeSWgbfw/s200/colors_imac.jpg" width="200" /></a>Critical acclaim, as in the case of the Lettera 22, followed soon. The iMac made it into the ‘Best of the Category’ section of I.D. magazine’s Annual Design Review of 1999. In this issue of the magazine, Jonathan Ive revealed that he was inspired by the Jetsons. And indeed, in the popular imagination of the time, the iMac looked like the future had already happened. I.D. magazine claimed that it had “redefined what a computer can look and act like- as easy to operate as a home appliance, as warm and fuzzy as a giant Tamogotchi.” A Tamogotchi is a key chain toy from the time: a plastic egg with a screen that displayed a ‘virtual pet’. It came in bright pop colours, just like the iMac.<br />
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No discussion of the iMac can be complete without reference to colour. The iMac was released in Bondi Blue (there are far too many apocryphal stories about that colour choice), and was soon offered in eleven colours and two patterns. This was considered a revolution, that “smashed the decades-long tyranny of monochromatically sterile PCs brought out by almost every company”. What made it even more alluring was the translucency of the body: showing off the internals of a computer for the very first time.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8uDJZTLKU5stCZ1h5LpoqlQECsqm2Tu4icRg0i4s0E4d3wvAh2fweAjS5ifZzMb4M_iZ3ECs8BBrRei609NNKaJ7uXiqNpnAohjpasYA6V9IRyn04Kc46EaV60Xj4Jp3n0WTdUDdGKMU/s1600/tumblr_kq83gvB3kJ1qzsu0yo1_400.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8uDJZTLKU5stCZ1h5LpoqlQECsqm2Tu4icRg0i4s0E4d3wvAh2fweAjS5ifZzMb4M_iZ3ECs8BBrRei609NNKaJ7uXiqNpnAohjpasYA6V9IRyn04Kc46EaV60Xj4Jp3n0WTdUDdGKMU/s320/tumblr_kq83gvB3kJ1qzsu0yo1_400.jpg" /></a>But this isn’t as new a revolution as it seems. As in so many other things, the Lettera 22 was an early fore-runner. Early typewriters were all black, as Adrian Forty explains in his brief analysis of office equipment from the time. By the 1950’s, the trend had shifted to “light-coloured, all-enveloping steel cases which concealed the mechanism and attempted to give some elegance to the overall proportions.” This trend was seeded by Olivetti. The Lettera 22 was available not just in beige, but in other colours too, including powder blue and pistachio green. While the guts of the machine were covered, there was a signifier of transperancy: the floating keys.<br />
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What ultimately unites the Lettera 22 and the iMac is not just the fact that they broke away from the mainstream and set industry trends. This innovation came out of putting the experience of the user - visual, tactile and functional - first. Anybody could use the internet on an iMac, and every secretary on the Lettera could “reveal her talents in a virtuoso performance”. And then they could pick up this hitherto fore exclusive product and carry it around with them: both the iMac and the Lettera22 made portability a key design feature. Even as these products went up on pedestals, the technology they used had transformed into something more human and democratic.<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This essay was written as part of Ralph Caplan's class, 'The Critical Imperative'</span></span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Do look at <a href="http://wemadethis.typepad.com/we_made_this/2009/07/regular-visitors-to-we-made-this-will-know-that-they-are-big-fans-of-old-printed-ephemera-and-the-like-so-i-thought-id-c.html">the beautiful instruction manual for the Lettera 22</a>.<br />
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</div>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-41155203177623134762009-11-01T13:51:00.003-05:002009-11-16T15:30:19.710-05:00The Japanese Total Design Idea<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: 9px;"> </span></span><br />
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</div></span><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My conception of Japanese Society has been shaped mainly by films. For images of the traditional, rule-bound, society of aesthetes, there were Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant films, set in the age of the Samurai. To get the essence of a rapidly modernizing society that still retained its gentle traditional core, I saw Yasujiro Ozu, especially his masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953). For an outsider’s view of contemporary Tokyo, there was Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-Ga (1985); and for an insider’s conception of a fantasy Japanese world, there is, of course, Hayao Miyazaki. But to find an object that encapsulated all these ideas in one compact envelope of cuteness was completely beyond my expectations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">When I entered the Sanrio store on 42nd Street in New York, I was prepared to encounter a cult that I did not understand. Sure, I have little cousins who have Hello Kitty lunch boxes, and who tote tiny pink Hello Kitty bags, but I could not conceive how people of all sizes, ages, and genders found something they liked on shelf after shelf of Hello Kitty madness. Yet, there they were: picking out not just toys and stationery, but laptop cases, iPhone covers, and even rear view mirrors with a mouthless Kitty saying ‘Hello!’ to them. I joined them, scanning every item, not willing to believe that anything in all this madness could possibly appeal to me. But on a shelf right near the entrance to the store, I found it: a Hello Kitty Dairi-bina.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhShA4IXHrufXPjXv3faD30dy7p8H2F4TvPohLY65De639qEhSJje6hLD-fwvAXc_RcWzih9dR2SR6qW-wVDgTCVYfch3F-5Wuj0bwo-SNMJYrcJGNwewqIgO2v4k69N2jSrzZu_8U1sYw/s1600-h/dairi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhShA4IXHrufXPjXv3faD30dy7p8H2F4TvPohLY65De639qEhSJje6hLD-fwvAXc_RcWzih9dR2SR6qW-wVDgTCVYfch3F-5Wuj0bwo-SNMJYrcJGNwewqIgO2v4k69N2jSrzZu_8U1sYw/s320/dairi.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size: medium;">The Dairi-bina consists of dolls of the Japanese Emperor and Empress, dressed in full regal attire, with all the attendant paraphernalia, seated on a platform. This piece is, more often than not, a family heirloom that is brought out for display on Hina-Matsuri: the Japanese Festival of dolls. The Dairi-bina has pride of place in the festival, occupying a place of prominence in the exhibit of dolls that Japanese girls create for the festival. The dolls are representative of the Imperial court from the Heian period, and must be historically accurate in all details of costume.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Make no mistake, the Hello Kitty Dairi-bina is authentic in all things but one: the Emperor and Empress are both Kitty! And Kitty does a very good job in the double role. Her beatifically expressionless face becomes stunningly imperial when she dons the appropriate robes. She needs no extra make-up: her skin is already the required shade of white. And she makes an excellent cross-dresser: all she has to do is lose her pink bow, and the inherent androgyny of felines helps her become a very male emperor.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">This makes for such an intriguing, shape-shifting object: something right out of a Miyazaki film. The old order is the new, the new takes over the old, and somewhere there is a gaggle of Japanese girls who are perfectly comfortable with this ambiguity, and who will crown their display of dolls this year with a Hello Kitty Dairi-bina. Some die-hard American fan of Kitty will buy this, because in this one object Kitty is unmistakably, unshakably Japanese. Collectors of curiosities will love it, for what could be more symbolic of popular Japanese culture today, than the crowning of Hello Kitty as Emperor?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">The Japanese, it seems, do nothing half-heartedly: making tea becomes High Art, folding paper becomes Sculpture. If they must make swords, they must be the best. If there is a philosophy of perfection and excellence, it must be carried through to the smallest object and the simplest act. When translated to design and branding, this compulsion becomes a maniacal form of creativity, what I call the Japanese Total Design Idea: if one thing can be Hello Kitty, how can I turn everything into Hello Kitty? This Idea can have a flipside, and I found it at Muji.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Muji is the mass-produced, modern, design manifestation of the High Japanese aesthetic. Their products have an appealing aura of rationality and functionalism. Everything is designed only as much as it needs to be. It is made only of the materials it needs, and it only has the features it needs to have. There is no concession anywhere to extravagance or whim. Everything agrees with our preconceptions of an earlier, ordered, sophisticated Japan: one that probably no longer exists.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">For all that they exude this air of purity, Muji’s products manage to be surprisingly insightful and human. The paper and fabrics have rough tactile surfaces, the ceramics are translucent and delicate. Little needs are taken care of: there is a tiny portable washing board available, to help wash your delicates in the hotel bathroom sink. But amidst this smorgasbord of efficiency was one whimsical object that disappointed me miserably: the City in a Bag.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhheAjRYE_WVHfjYKTaJeOoIDs1y47VSZi03PNLnsY4lGM_E3Zy5kCOnptgvRAZKa1rnyo7E9MBYIXE5LwC4b0a-m5K4pwzA08KIIvGJb7fgmC9TBQdEnErgeE3OZvtcCAa5FpF9khM2hE/s1600-h/MUJI-New-York-In-A-Bag-MC-BargainBabe-fb-53920522.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhheAjRYE_WVHfjYKTaJeOoIDs1y47VSZi03PNLnsY4lGM_E3Zy5kCOnptgvRAZKa1rnyo7E9MBYIXE5LwC4b0a-m5K4pwzA08KIIvGJb7fgmC9TBQdEnErgeE3OZvtcCAa5FpF9khM2hE/s320/MUJI-New-York-In-A-Bag-MC-BargainBabe-fb-53920522.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size: medium;">The City in a Bag has been widely acclaimed as a designed souvenir. When you buy Tokyo, London, Paris or New York in a Bag, you get a white cotton bag containing pinewood blocks that are little models of prominent city landmarks. But the idea of simplification has been carried a bit too far, and it is debatable whether these are delightful miniatures or gross simplifications. The Statue of Liberty block looks more like Lisa Simpson, The Chrysler building has lost its characteristic crown, and the Guggenheim is reduced to three fat discs piled on a slat of wood.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">If this is a toy for children, there is no added meaning in the blocks being famous icons: kids these days can access much more informative photographs and models. The blocks have a false sense of scale, too: the cars that come with them in the bag are completely out of proportion. Yes, kids will play with them, but only because kids will play with all oddly shaped wooden blocks. The fact that it is a City in a Bag is more for the edification of the adults who watch them. The City in a Bag is not a particularly great souvenir for the adults either, unless they are Muji enthusiasts. Souvenirs should be full of character, or have that little personal story that makes you reminisce nostalgically about your travels. The City in a Bag is a trick of Japanese simplicity that Muji has pulled out of its bag, and serves mainly to elicit the response, “Oh, that’s so Muji.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">In his films, Miyazaki often visualises grand catastrophes that will wipe out an entire civilization, and I often imagine his fantastic stories coming true. If Japan and all other evidence of its culture were to suddenly vanish off the face of the earth, or if the Japanese advance so much that they bundle everything else into a space ship to inhabit an alien planet, I will feel very sorry for everybody whose only memento of Japan is Tokyo in a Bag. They would have been so much better off buying the total design signifier of all things Japanese that is the Hello Kitty Dairi-bina.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">This piece was written for Karrie Jacob's <a href="http://dcrit.sva.edu/curriculum/urban-curation/">Urban Curation</a> class.</span></span></i><br />
</div></span><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: 9px;"> </span></span>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-58955070014488739402009-11-01T13:16:00.000-05:002009-11-01T13:16:49.254-05:00The New Park on the Old High Line<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-a5FdaxYB85ZCHM9KvD0Bk8TF_9wItGGlWqjw57qKB0WWyYhryx9fmxnQWG_ySB969YZbhpo7zzK4z4tWwCGd41AiS2LrqBDfrR1Tsjehxd-_PMvprKH-4zJWIjKzskUEJlUAWsYnyN0/s1600-h/highline01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-a5FdaxYB85ZCHM9KvD0Bk8TF_9wItGGlWqjw57qKB0WWyYhryx9fmxnQWG_ySB969YZbhpo7zzK4z4tWwCGd41AiS2LrqBDfrR1Tsjehxd-_PMvprKH-4zJWIjKzskUEJlUAWsYnyN0/s320/highline01.jpg" width="214" /></a><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">For a park so young, <a href="http://www.thehighline.org/">the High Line Park</a>, built on an abandoned freight train track that runs from </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to 34th</span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Street, between 10th</span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">& 11th</span></span><sup><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></span></sup><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Avenues, has already created a mythology of sorts for itself. Reviews of the park in various publications, a packed events calendar and a multitude of blog posts ‐ such as the one claiming that the park is a <a href="http://blog.thehighline.org/2009/08/27/even-the-new-yorker-knows-the-high-line-is-a-babe-magnet/">‘babe magnet’</a> ‐ have given it a larger‐than‐life presence. Other American cities are queuing up to emulate it: on the Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago and on the Skywalks in Morristown, Tennessee. But the High Line Park is a very particular product of the people and circumstances that brought it into being.</span></span></span></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The Friends of the High Line, a non‐profit group formed by concerned members of the community, wanted to find a viable way to preserve what was essentially a defunct piece of urban infrastructure. The last train ran on the High Line track in 1980, carrying, as they are strangely pleased to remind you, a load of cold turkeys. A small piece of urban wilderness soon took root on the track, beautifully documented in the photographs of <a href="http://www.joelsternfeld.com/">Joel Sternfeld</a>. Property owners in the area began to lobby for tearing the whole thing down, but by 2002, a resolution was passed reserving the High Line for reuse as a public space.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When the firms <a href="http://www.fieldoperations.net/">Field Operations</a> and <a href="http://www.dillerscofidio.com/">Diller Scofidio + Renfro</a> took on the challenge of re‐imagining this iron behemoth as a public park, they were handling a bristling set of contradictions. They had to make people believe that they were strolling in a park while they were actually walking on a train track thirty feet off the ground. The park had to be modern, clean and sophisticated, but it also had to serve the purpose of historical preservation: both of the rusted, outdated High Line, and the wilderness that had grown on it. It had to deal with convoluted zoning laws while maintaining its integrity. The architects initially proposed to achieve these lofty aims with semi‐transparent concrete threaded with fibre optics, snaking between plantings designed by the Dutch designer <a href="http://www.oudolf.com/piet-oudolf">Piet Oudolf.</a> What finally got built isn’t as futuristic, but it preserves the contradictions of the design brief, creating a taut solution that is stretched along those lines of tension.</span></span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXAZH4yypJWOqVAScY-RBRrb5X8pXxZyzAcirnBgBLeU4asPHiUCiEcQysGPDRSwAbx5TwNDhNDDnlAui-vKqshyphenhyphenVtSbKA7oR7eSqBPpbAiRwPPk5N5mzDIDLZo5d28ReRalgw-vhEKKg/s1600-h/highline03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXAZH4yypJWOqVAScY-RBRrb5X8pXxZyzAcirnBgBLeU4asPHiUCiEcQysGPDRSwAbx5TwNDhNDDnlAui-vKqshyphenhyphenVtSbKA7oR7eSqBPpbAiRwPPk5N5mzDIDLZo5d28ReRalgw-vhEKKg/s320/highline03.jpg" width="214" /></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The concrete that forms the path in the High Line Park today isn’t reinforced with fibre optics, but with gravel, creating a textured surface that tips its hat to cobbled park pathways. The architects create many features just by casting this concrete in different ways. The slabs of the path peel up from the walking level to form seating. In the water feature the slabs are subtly faceted, and on the sides of the path they lift gently to mark its boundaries. But most interesting are the places where the path rakes into the greenery, clawing at the soil below the plants with long tapered fingers. It sets up a tension that gives a vague impression of impermanence, rather than the integration the architects intended. You feel as if this pathway has only temporarily been snatched from the green patches. It is a </span><i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">memento mori </span></i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">unwittingly built into the design: a subtle but unsettling hint that one day the park may well meet the same fate as the rail track did; that all this elaborate design effort may give in to the unruly growth; and that the High Line will again be as it was.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In fact, the architects have gone to great pains to retain the feel of the “High Line as it was”. The </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">original structure has been painstakingly cleaned and restored, and repainted to a suitable industrial grey. But as a memoir of the orange rust that covered the High Line, there are judicious accents of COR‐TEN steel near the entrances at Gansevoort Street and at 14th</span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Street. The staircase at Gansevoort brings you up from under the High Line, allowing you to see its structural components, but there will also be a cut‐out at 30th</span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Street: a glass floor that exposes the riveted guts of the High Line. And in the plantings, Oudolf’s wilderness seeks to recreate the weeds and shrubs that had grown over the railway tracks. But this is a meticulous dissemblance, in keeping with the larger concept of an arrested unruliness: the plants are far from weeds, and will supposedly flower all year round.</span></span></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This is a park that has been built on a railway track, and signifiers of movement are everywhere. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The railway tracks of the High Line were tagged during the restoration so that many of them could be returned to their original positions. As you walk in the park, rusting tracks on their beautifully weathered wooden sleepers disappear into the dense plants, and gleaming tracks set in the path converge and diverge into nowhere. The starkly linear furniture, the fingers of concrete and the lines of the path are always speeding towards a vanishing point in the distance. You could be purposefully aimless on the walking path, but to call the path “meandering” (as the architects do) is a stretch of imagination. It changes levels, branches off and comes together, but it bears you inexorably forward. This flow of traffic pools in a few islands along the High Line: such as the Diller‐von Furstenberg Sundeck and Water Feature, and the 10th</span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Avenue Square. These islands are essentially vantage points for watching the city rush by.</span></span></span></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Elevated views of New York City aren’t scarce. But knowing that you are standing in what is, nominally at least, a park, adds a certain charm to the view. Parks weren’t traditionally meant to offer views of the city. They were an escape from those views, an opportunity to replace the vista of the urban jungle with that of a pastoral idyll. The High Line Park, in sharp contrast, is carefully designed to give you as many eyefuls of the city as possible. Nothing, not even the lighting of the park, obstructs the panorama that is quickly filling up with the latest offerings of star architects. Large, attention seeking buildings loom all around you and, in the case of the Standard Hotel, directly above you.</span></span><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ2DGLvSDoTBAFh6E1Zc3TvEFgjmcusUahTmD53QBdKaKnzwJvlhRrSMCOKrPeVji0jxlon-Kg923HplPapz-tgVZyj60qYHTMlDf2Fe66aJu_MoswmwzuOIZrD162mvkaBFZPBxkdQD0/s1600-h/highline04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ2DGLvSDoTBAFh6E1Zc3TvEFgjmcusUahTmD53QBdKaKnzwJvlhRrSMCOKrPeVji0jxlon-Kg923HplPapz-tgVZyj60qYHTMlDf2Fe66aJu_MoswmwzuOIZrD162mvkaBFZPBxkdQD0/s320/highline04.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And so you don’t lose your sense of what’s below you, a special viewing area has been created in the 10</span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">th </span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Avenue Square. A wooden pit dips below the level of the high line, hovering above the speeding traffic, offering a rather unusual spectacle through its huge glass window. Nothing in the park allows you to forget that you are in the city, because this conjunction of the urban and the wild is the essential experience of the park. One small design detail proves this hypothesis: the concrete slabs of the path are laid to always run parallel to 10th</span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Avenue, constantly reminding you of the street below, even if the High Line itself makes angular turns away from it.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In some of its features, the High Line follows the traits of older parks, at least in spirit. Thus there is the mandatory water feature at the Sundeck; and the uneven topography. In the time‐honoured tradition of parks there is the public art in the form of Spencer Finch’s </span><i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The River Flows Both Ways,</span></i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> and an already long list of temporary exhibitions. There are planned performances, with Felix Pitre, for instance; and spontaneous ones: the High Line Renegade Cabaret was performed on Patty Heffly’s fire escape that looks out onto the park. The favourite park pass time of people‐watching is also provided for. You can present yourself to be watched on the reclining loungers at the Sundeck, or ogle the hapless guests of the Standard Hotel in their rooms and in the hotel’s glass‐fronted restaurant.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The High Line also preserves another part of its history: the idea that it is a precarious place, a strip of green snatched out of the hands of real estate developers who might have built who‐ knows‐what in its place. Walking under buildings that envelop the High Line, you feel the pressure of the city around it. Legal rights over a column of air, it seems, are all that prevent them from swallowing it. The High Line wants you to feel lucky that it exists. It wants you to know that this may well be the future of parks, that the extravagances of Hyde Park and Central Park may no longer be possible in today’s urban reality.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The nineteenth‐century park was the antithesis of the industrial yard: a place where you went to purge yourself of the poisons of modern life. The High Line Park is something else entirely. It heavily references the industrial but is seemingly overcome by nature, a place for relaxation that is utterly surrounded by outsize billboards and fashionable architecture. It preserves a historical monument, but freezes it at the moment of its deterioration. It is a postmodern park: completely conscious of the city, easily accommodating contradictions and continually self‐referential.</span></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', fantasy;">______________________________________________________________________________________________</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">This piece was written for Alexandra Lange's </span></i></span><a href="http://dcrit.sva.edu/curriculum/architecture-and-urban-design-criticism/"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Architecture and Urban Design Criticism</span></i></span></a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> class.</span></i></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The High Line has an excellent website at </span></i></span><a href="http://www.thehighline.org/"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">http://www.thehighline.org/</span></i></span></a><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-61350719732264899002009-10-24T11:51:00.006-04:002009-10-24T23:47:41.262-04:00A New Mythological<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDHPdihmQlB_mTUpFFXz8VWJXjNOVcVuMVQfZhu0au62LcHUdqsXzFkNeTV1u6SGrF23dax3n4sh_0W7RYfQh2oAPNn0_u37MSNdmfwVyzdrchqQk7eGNZY5RPL2HIn4nkdFGRMe9Ryf8/s1600-h/the_fall_movie_poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDHPdihmQlB_mTUpFFXz8VWJXjNOVcVuMVQfZhu0au62LcHUdqsXzFkNeTV1u6SGrF23dax3n4sh_0W7RYfQh2oAPNn0_u37MSNdmfwVyzdrchqQk7eGNZY5RPL2HIn4nkdFGRMe9Ryf8/s320/the_fall_movie_poster.jpg" width="216" /></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The first feature length film made in India was ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Harishchandra">Raja Harishchandra</a>’ in 1913. It isn’t surprising to any Indian to find out that the film was a ‘mythological’: it told stories of Hindu Gods and Goddesses, of ancient kings and curses. The medium of film provided the means, for the first time, for visual spectacles such as Gods flying in air and actors burning on funeral pyres to emerge unscathed. The mythological film was a prominent part of Indian Cinema till the 80’s, when television took over that genre. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0802248/">Tarsem Singh</a> grew up in India, and while his film ‘<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/">The Fall</a>’ bears an unmistakeable Bollywood stamp, I could not shake off the thought that its true progenitor is the bollywood mythological. <br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">The film is a freefall into a world of fantasy. A stuntman in Los Angeles of the 1920’s breaks his legs in a fall, and then, while he is in hospital, discovers that his true love has betrayed him. After a failed suicide attempt, he befriends a little Spanish girl in the hospital. Hoping that he can trick her into getting him pills for a second suicide attempt, he begins to tell her a story. The audience now tumbles into the girl’s imagination, and the story unfolds through her eyes.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">The opulent visuals are vaguely reminiscent of Sergei Paradjanov’s fantasy film ‘<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashik_Kerib_(film)">Ashik Kerib</a>’: characters appear out of nowhere in outlandish locations, and the narrative continues as if nothing has changed. Thus an actor begins his dialogue in Bali, and completes it as he walks into a palace in Jaipur. Time is on hold, geography is ignored. Easily recognisable costumes and locations changed meaning for me; and transformed into new spaces. The tropes of the mythological film were all in place: here is the regenerated hero, there is the magic of the gods, here is the vision of paradise and the glimpse of the netherworld. In film, this is the closest anybody has come to the magic realism of Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">It certainly pushes the envelope far beyond the other fantasy magnum opus that released three years earlier: the last instalment of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. The ‘Lord of the Rings’ depends on a fantasy world that is complete and sufficient in itself, that must be recreated for us in its entirety and in painstaking detail, with the best that computer generated effects can provide. Tolkein’s imagination can allow no loose ends, no inconsistencies. The world of ‘The Fall’ is loose, and it is unstructured. The floor disappeared under me in a Florentine Palace, and I found myself at an earlier point in the story, in the middle of a desert. I felt the edit, but no blue screen, no computer effects. What I saw was an enormous screen of silk soaring into the sky, fluttering in the desert breeze. This is the farthest the film goes as far as elaborate sets are concerned. And yet, the effect is thrilling. <br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">As I joyously fell through the film (and perhaps there is no other way to watch this film), I felt that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadasaheb_Phalke">Dadasaheb Phalke</a> (who made that first Indian mythological) would have been proud except for one thing: the hero dies in the end.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i>This piece was written for Ralph Caplan's class, <a href="http://dcrit.sva.edu/curriculum/the-critical-imperative/">The Critical Imperative</a>.</i></span></span><br />
</div>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-7647332411943851082009-10-24T10:37:00.002-04:002009-11-01T14:04:07.518-05:00Exhibitions for a Living World<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhleJQLVHgVESDw-lw2xDo7wH3eU6DUSzgv2d-5_BT6lth5CD3ZOi89qtpfMxHSk40riaOiR48qKLajXYwswLGWHDuQ8z8mfCLqeTcehQyfP6wvNSX4iu1Zgq7nIN1ImHWpFgXgdvUmAY0/s1600-h/DLWBk_Cover_350.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhleJQLVHgVESDw-lw2xDo7wH3eU6DUSzgv2d-5_BT6lth5CD3ZOi89qtpfMxHSk40riaOiR48qKLajXYwswLGWHDuQ8z8mfCLqeTcehQyfP6wvNSX4iu1Zgq7nIN1ImHWpFgXgdvUmAY0/s320/DLWBk_Cover_350.jpg" /></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>“There are many ways of working for the needs of underdeveloped and emergent countries. The simplest, most often employed, and probably shabbiest is for the designer to sit in his New York, London, or Stockholm office and to design things to be made in, say, Tanzania. Souvenir-like objects are then manufactured, using native materials and skills, with the pious hope that they will sell in developed countries.”<br />
</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD: HUMAN ECOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE,<span style="font-size: medium;"><i> </i></span></span></span></span></span></i><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Papanek">Victor Papanek</a>, 1971.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">I returned to this passage in Victor Papanek’s seminal book today, and with good reason. I recently saw an exhibition that has a name so similar, it set off alarms in my head. “<a href="http://www.nature.org/design/">Design for a Living World</a>”, an exhibition by the Nature Conservancy, co-curated by Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, and designed by Pentagram, opened at the Smithsonian-Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum on the 14 May, 2009.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">When <a href="http://www.nature.org/">The Nature Conservancy</a>, the world’s largest conservation organisation, approached the show’s curators to create an exhibition on “landscape, conservation and sustainability”, the curators hit upon the idea of basing the exhibition on ‘materials’. This in itself is problematic, and undermines the whole exercise. Just because a material is natural, or certified as sustainable, it does not automatically ensure that any design that uses it will be sustainable in the true sense of the word.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Ten prominent designers were given ten natural materials to work with for the exhibition, each material hailing from a specific geographic location. Among these 10 design projects, the one most egregiously at fault, to my mind, is the use of Alaskan salmon leather by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Mizrahi">Isaac Mizrahi</a>. Sheep’s wool is the only other animal material in the exhibition, but salmon leather is more precious for a simple reason: sheep don’t have to die to give us their wool, but the salmon have to die so we can use their skin for leather. And when he is given this rare, beautiful, versatile material, Mizrahi doesn’t turn to the amazing possibilities of leather working. Instead, the material is shipped to him in New York, from where he ships it to Paris, where it is pasted on a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">plastic</i> substrate and cut into pastilles that are then shipped back to him. The white dress he created from these is fit for an angelic Nereid straight out of Neptune’s palace. But as far as sustainability is concerned, it is a criminally empty signifier, for the pasting process ensures that the pastilles are headed for the incinerator after their life cycle.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqHH4y3xQlt35_yTCs-upqg84G3s0OR4UwgMdc9qBGMfojEkeMWgVUoX4s_K7UZhAR7o6dgs_dHQNsdMZlqDAOUOwkYCkfnNHGJSwWzWqmZCex7MigoOD4J8xXojJZLgazw3kiHJD0DNI/s1600-h/3527798121_d9aca687ab.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqHH4y3xQlt35_yTCs-upqg84G3s0OR4UwgMdc9qBGMfojEkeMWgVUoX4s_K7UZhAR7o6dgs_dHQNsdMZlqDAOUOwkYCkfnNHGJSwWzWqmZCex7MigoOD4J8xXojJZLgazw3kiHJD0DNI/s640/3527798121_d9aca687ab.jpg" /></a><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Mizrahi says that in fashion, aesthetics and sustainability are of equal importance to him. This is but obvious. But the fact is that high fashion has a very unique and critical role to play in sustainable design. The successful use of a material in an haute couture collection can give the material a ticket into every designer’s and manufacturer’s repertoire. This in itself is a great responsibility to bear, and one that is not completely understood by critics of fashion.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Three of the other projects are noteworthy exceptions. <a href="http://www.tedmuehling.com/">Ted Muehling</a> carved <a href="http://waynesword.palomar.edu/pljan99.htm">ivory nuts</a> into truly stunning pieces of jewellery with a delicacy of colour and form that would have been impossible in any other comparable material, even ivory. And he was thinking of the local community as he designed these pieces: their nature-inspired forms are very close to what the craftsmen can already produce. Hopefully some enterprising craftsperson is already working on Ted Muehling knock-offs! <br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Yves Behar artfully sidesteps the whole controversy by designing a product that isn’t made of his chosen material at all. Considering his chosen material was cacao beans, this makes sense. He has created a chocolate grater that is to be used with the cacao patties that the women in La Amistad, Costa Rica already make.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVJZKeeqLu5dTRWLLzMgmnei7QXszxKdyN5HL4OFBJioSbExweuB3L-5GCZZ4wypstm1MuZs6oioaVieZsyTrMKzvTUtFmA6Ges0rcvuswolfqa2Gx6K6XRdhkkMeKzwEjQtWT4f9BCHw/s1600-h/CM_Rug_Facedown.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVJZKeeqLu5dTRWLLzMgmnei7QXszxKdyN5HL4OFBJioSbExweuB3L-5GCZZ4wypstm1MuZs6oioaVieZsyTrMKzvTUtFmA6Ges0rcvuswolfqa2Gx6K6XRdhkkMeKzwEjQtWT4f9BCHw/s320/CM_Rug_Facedown.jpg" /></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The project I found most endearing is <a href="http://www.christienmeindertsma.com/">Christien Meindertsma</a>’s one-flock rug that is knitted with felted wool. Her storytelling is engaging, certainly, with all her talk about one-sheep sweaters and one-sheep rug units that come together to make a flock. But the technique is nothing to scoff at either, because it is an innovative way of looking at both felting and knitting. It could have a much wider impact: there are communities of expert felt craftspeople in India, for example, who could go wild with the idea.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">The other projects fail to lesser or greater degrees, as far as efficacy is concerned. Even Abbot Miller’s own plywood chairs fall short, with their awkward use of a truly beautiful joinery detail. Why would Ezri Tarazi spend so much effort boring though the nodes of bamboo only to create structurally weak hollow columns, when societies all over Asia have been using bamboo far more successfully for millennia? His process does not explain this. Kate Spade’s cotton bags with their cosmetic application of carved wooden tiles do not achieve anything new, and neither do the straw bags she designed. <a href="http://www.jongeriuslab.com/site/html/work/design_for_a_living_world/">Hella Jongerius</a>, at least, is honest enough to admit that chicle rubber defeated her for the purposes of this exhibition. Hopefully a longer engagement with the material will yield better results. <br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">True to its intent, the exhibition does bring the design process to the forefront: due place and emphasis are given to the designer’s sketches and prototypes, and the designers themselves are filmed talking about their process. But it is interesting to note that two of the projects with successful outcomes employ what is essentially a crafts approach towards both materials and communities. Less famous designers and communities with rich craft traditions, in countries like India and South Africa, have already shown the way in this area. Perhaps the curators would have done well to look for those success stories. To me, all that this exhibition seems to suggest is that design for mass production still has a lot of catching up to do, to use new material in beautiful, useful ways that are also sustainable. <br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">This brings us to the materials of the exhibition itself. Usually, the most wasteful things in exhibitions are the printed panels. In “Design for the Living World”, the panels are made of aluminium, with the images printed directly onto the aluminium substrate using a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sublimation_printer">dye-sublimation process</a>. It is debatable if the reflective surface thus produced adds to the effect of the images or not, but the idea is certainly admirable because aluminium is so easily recycled. What are not admirable are the wooden lattices to which these panels are screwed. Because the size of the aluminium panels is small, each lattice has a number of vertical wooden members. Sure, the wood is <a href="http://www.fscus.org/faqs/what_is_certification.php">FSC certified</a>, but what happens to these blocks once the exhibition stops travelling and closes down? Who will want a lot of long blocks of wood with holes drilled in them? How will they be reused? Is such a temporary use of large amounts of good, construction quality wood justified? Nobody knows. This is a recurring story: the fibreboard they use in the display cases is made of recycled wooden fibres, but those fibres are trapped in a resin that will make further recycling impossible. <br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Exhibition design really needs to take a long hard systemic look at sustainability, and this particular exhibition has a few good ideas, but it doesn’t exactly blaze a trail: neither in its design nor in the projects it showcases.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.cooperhewitt.org/.../Design-for-a-Living-World/">Design for a Living World will be on view at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum</a>, New York from May 14,</span></i></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"> 2009 through January 4,</span></i></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"> 2010.</span></i></span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Curators: Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton.</span></span></span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Exhibition Design: Abbott Miller, Jeremy Hoffman, Brian Raby and Kristen Spilman.</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Book Design: Abbott Miller and Kristen Spilman.</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Website Design: Abbott Miller and Kristen Spilman.</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span> <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Principal Location Photography: Ami Vitale.</span></span></span><br />
</div>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-61521529495580549572009-10-24T01:46:00.005-04:002009-10-24T11:38:20.095-04:00Indian Design Edge: From the Top of the Pyramid<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl5iprf-RYZaVpj43JyC8hK42QdmUmmJuTTLzSGY3BC8olWgY6Bu_HHN9KfgGUFRZMlht9qLnhGw_7ljWgyacx1mFZlwzZx_7xkesNLfXoPhXB_DtFYzkpUIDgcKgcZRE5W0W9IQY19Xg/s1600-h/india-design-edge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl5iprf-RYZaVpj43JyC8hK42QdmUmmJuTTLzSGY3BC8olWgY6Bu_HHN9KfgGUFRZMlht9qLnhGw_7ljWgyacx1mFZlwzZx_7xkesNLfXoPhXB_DtFYzkpUIDgcKgcZRE5W0W9IQY19Xg/s200/india-design-edge.jpg" /></a><br />
</div>On the 25th of October 2008, <a href="http://www.darliekoshy.com/">Dr. Darlie Koshy</a> retired from the post of Executive Director of the National Institute of Design (NID), a position he held for eight years. Within the Indian Design World, this is about as high a position as one can hold, and he has literally filled that capacity to bursting with a long series of much discussed actions. His coup de grace is definitely his book, ‘<a href="http://www.rolibooks.com/lotus/lotus.../-/indian-design-edge/">Indian Design Edge: Strategic Insights for Success in the Creative Economy</a>’, written from his ‘enviable ringside view’ of the world of design.<br />
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Following a good many years after <a href="http://www.djad.in/bala.html">Prof. S. Balaram</a>’s ‘Thinking Design’ (1998), this book positions itself as the next macroscopic view of Indian Design. In Dr. Koshy’s inimitable style, it is filled with case studies, vision strategies, ‘design for-’ sub-headings and heavy doses of design evangelism. If not anything else, the book brings Indian Design out into the sunlight, in riotous jubilation and in considerable detail. It is unsurprising that Chief Secretary Shri Ajay Dua, of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, publicly acknowledged Dr. Koshy as his mentor in all things Design, at the launch of the book in Mumbai.<br />
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Beginning with ‘design for development’, and quoting the Ahmedabad Declaration of 1979, the book works its way through design history, comparisons with other Asian design achievements, ‘crafts as foundation of design innovations’ and ‘designs for grass roots innovations’. The chapter ‘change for design’ is in large part devoted to the author’s perspective of his role in shaping NID, ending with a charming classification of ‘progressive’ and ‘retrogressive’ designers: those who saw eye-to-eye with him and those who didn't. The chapters on ‘Strategic Design’, ‘Sectoral Growth by Design’, and ‘Creating GenNext Designers’ are large in their scope, and in the vigour of their arguments. One sector or topic after another is taken up, and the author’s view of the potential of design is forcefully sketched out for the unconverted.<br />
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Any glitches in this sumptuous smorgasbord are perhaps purely semantic. Delineating the ‘strategic perspective of the first national design policy’, the author begins the list with ‘Bottom of the pyramid model: design for masses, source of innovation and wealth’. This little loose end might well be the unravelling of the edifice. It positions the designer/policy maker at the top of a pyramid of money, power and class reaching down, as it were, to those at the bottom. It also presents a view of these ‘masses’ at the bottom of the pyramid as the new frontier for design and business, where business conquistadors can ride on horses called design and discover new treasure viz., ‘innovation’ and ‘wealth’.<br />
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Case studies in a book of this stature take on the colour of advocacy, and may reasonably be held as illustrations of the book’s argument. With a foreword by Ratan Tata, the book’s first advocacy is that of the <a href="http://www.tatanano.com/">Tata Nano</a>. The Nano is not mentioned within the text of the book, but has pride of place on the cover and the inner title page. By the author’s admission the Nano typifies his vision of what he calls ‘Design Democracy’: the key concept of his future scenario. As the wisdom of putting so many more cars on Indian roads continues to be debated across the world, the author is lucky he does not consider Sustainability a systemic tool to building that democracy, or even a part of the Indian Design Edge.<br />
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The book acknowledges that the beginnings of Indian design are in Indian Culture and Crafts, and devotes to them 16 pages in all. Relegating crafts to the status of a river of inspiration flowing into design, it ignores some of the great success stories in the Indian handloom and handicraft world. Rushing through the achievements of <a href="http://industreecrafts.com/">Industree Crafts Pvt. Ltd</a>. it presents an inordinately long case study of <a href="http://www.kaaru.com/">KAARU</a>. While KAARU’s veneering of corporate boardrooms, floor lamps and tables has its place within the spectrum of crafts design, it is certainly far from illustrative of crafts as a force to reckon with in the modern Indian Design world. The book alludes to crafts as ‘innovations of yesterday’ instead of a living tradition where innovations continue to take place. It looks at craft objects solely as end products, or as a resource for contemporary designers, rather than building on the belief that craftspeople and designers can come together to really build communities, empower the disenfranchised, and give us viable models of social and economic development.<br />
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It is so tempting to typecast this book because it remains remarkably consistent to its world‐view. The title ‘Strategic insights for success in the creative economy’ is in reality the book’s final statement on design, hinging on its own definitions of ‘insights’ and ‘success’, described within the framework of a ‘creative economy’. The book’s economic ideology is at the core of its argument. As India herself ever more firmly entrenches her position as a burgeoning free market capitalist economy, the book is very much the voice of the times. It presents a vast expanse of design sectors, and its future visions for them are underpinned by the idea of financial success as a touchstone for Design, continually grouping all other parameters under ‘quality of life’.<br />
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There is not much wrong with this view, except its potential for ideological hegemony. It is a view that some designers in the developed world, most famously and recently <a href="http://handmadezwonull.blogspot.com/2008/03/die%E2%80%90zeit%E2%80%90interview%E2%80%90with%E2%80%90philippe%E2%80%90starck.html">Philippe Starck</a>, have begun to grow increasingly disenchanted with. As a developing nation, with the kind of complexity that India deals with, we see the strength of design as a role player in inclusive, sustainable growth. Designers work in this country at many different levels and function in many different ways. If the mentors of our policy makers are careful to maintain a sufficiently broad view, then India, standing as she does at the threshold of an explosive growth in design, can take the lead in being able to provide a plurality of positions from which designers can meaningfully engage with society. This planned and deliberate encouragement of diversity within the design arena could well be the Indian Design Edge.Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7475740559550973995.post-12581232861454629762009-10-24T00:28:00.009-04:002009-11-17T12:20:05.266-05:00A Nose for CriticismThere is something to be said about stereotypes: hooked noses turn up with alarming regularity on the faces of critics of every historical age, gender or genre.<br />
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Before you decide that I am exaggerating, please consider these: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruskin">John Ruskin</a>, the art critic and culture sage of Victorian times, stared down an aquiline nose that matched perfectly with his long flowing white beard. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot">T. S. Eliot</a>, who was a great literary critic apart from being one of my favourite poets, had a roman nose with a magnificent hook. Architecture and culture critic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford">Lewis Mumford</a> had one too, and so does one of Britain's finest literary theorists and critics, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton">Terry Eagleton</a>.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAD06z6Daf1cX3yVSk6RpGFcnmZnjPUNCLnxkdIzkj4VXRBpdmfuaGd5_qsVLoMlAjcB_ZuektgAlQXFl5hzkDHvPFcR3XTd4qS_tec00RhKBO4ejrrFU9R6LHUwwyfmtjSwkkIhAO2Yk/s1600-h/john-ruskin-1+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAD06z6Daf1cX3yVSk6RpGFcnmZnjPUNCLnxkdIzkj4VXRBpdmfuaGd5_qsVLoMlAjcB_ZuektgAlQXFl5hzkDHvPFcR3XTd4qS_tec00RhKBO4ejrrFU9R6LHUwwyfmtjSwkkIhAO2Yk/s640/john-ruskin-1+copy.jpg" /></a><br />
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</div>What began as a simple curiosity has now become a question that keeps me awake some nights: if I continue to write criticism, will I also end up with an extra-prominent proboscis?<br />
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I thought it was just male critics who were thus afflicted, or just caucasian critics, but I was wrong on both counts: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananda_Coomaraswamy">Ananda K. Coomaraswamy</a>, the definitive scholar and critic of Indic art, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael">Pauline Kael</a>, hard-nosed influential film critic, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapila_Vatsyayan">Kapila Vatsyayan</a>, the doyenne of Indian art and aesthetics, all bear the trademark nose of their trade.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7WUHHPoOEyUPZgldez0KThu-Pu_8oz7kKqHOiPELsH7UpRemBBrqF41q-9TvIAe8m6PLZG_qjL-TRum1BNjMWXDBcmpj9VR_3KG7usAsDSN3rmqDYPpB0_XhQxdCxU9agXFCuPJP59XI/s1600-h/Ananda-coomaraswamy+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7WUHHPoOEyUPZgldez0KThu-Pu_8oz7kKqHOiPELsH7UpRemBBrqF41q-9TvIAe8m6PLZG_qjL-TRum1BNjMWXDBcmpj9VR_3KG7usAsDSN3rmqDYPpB0_XhQxdCxU9agXFCuPJP59XI/s400/Ananda-coomaraswamy+copy.jpg" /></a><br />
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But in all fairness, I must consider one important fact. While it is a myth that the human nose and ears never stop growing, the cartilage in the nose does continue to grow slightly, making older people's noses look longer. And of course, none of these photographs show the critics in their not-so-hooked-nose youth.<br />
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However, these fine critics weren't the inspiration for the name of this blog. That distinction goes to an entirely fictional critic: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Ego#Main_characters">Anton Ego,</a> from the animated film, Ratatouille.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBeBnD_4lcqgPP6icLYD1ZyBBQ5acWSmPx0ub3X3iKx1pTETLgCnv6PQRy1GSVxdWSZqZQb_G7CjosAF0tOhCFjvl5U2Zh_UlzF7pj8FmLC70NknMWf-EeAcSMC-THF85vKtVLul_pUNM/s1600-h/2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBeBnD_4lcqgPP6icLYD1ZyBBQ5acWSmPx0ub3X3iKx1pTETLgCnv6PQRy1GSVxdWSZqZQb_G7CjosAF0tOhCFjvl5U2Zh_UlzF7pj8FmLC70NknMWf-EeAcSMC-THF85vKtVLul_pUNM/s400/2.jpg" /></a><br />
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Ego's critical nose is backed not only by a colourful story, but also by a wonderful soliloquy on criticism, that you can watch <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ik3yHjP2I">here.</a>Avinash Rajagopalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15062380203783927064noreply@blogger.com3