Virtually Piranesian

Piranesi, Rome, and the Arts of Design

The San Diego Museum of Art

The Prado, Balboa Park

Through July 7, 2013

TheSanDiegoMuseumofArt.org

619-232-7931

On view until July 7 at the San Diego Museum of Art, Piranesi, Rome, and the Arts of Design surveys the work of one of art’s great design fabulists, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778).  The extensive and beautifully installed exhibition reveals a paradoxical figure, whose single completed building is a strange footnote, but whose numerous etchings of real and imagined places have influenced and inspired architects, painters and poets for two centuries.  Utilizing new computer skills and rendering methods, the show brings Piranesi into the virtual world of The Matrix, but it seems like the 18^th Century draftsman and architect was already there.

Deftly avoiding the risk of stuffy connoisseurship that can limit Piranesi’s appeal, the curators have taken a cue from Piranesi’s most entrepreneurial venture – his innovative etching techniques – and gives them a new life with a high-tech kick in the pants – a computer generated three dimensional walk-through of his famous series of etchings, Le Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons).

Produced by Factum Arte of Madrid, the animation takes the static images and projects them onto 3D models and slowly turns a series of these 2 dimensional prints – whose mysterious spatial extents have always intrigued architects  - into a phantasmagoria equal parts “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “The Draughtsman’s Contract.”  Accompanied by a haunting Bach prelude performed by Pablo Casals, the video is mesmerizing. It can be viewed online here.

Further pushing the boundaries between art history and art resurrection, additional videos show the elaborate and time consuming process of creating virtual models of some of Piranesi’s un-built projects and designs.  Slathered with elaborate ram’s heads and enigmatic faces (Sibyls? Nymphs?) a fireplace mantel jumps from an 18^th century etching onto a 21^st century computer.  Finally, using a stereo-lithographic printing process, the lost piece is brought into the museum as an actual object. 

Other objects brought to life from the etchings include Brobdingnagian urns festooned with griffins and other fantastic creatures, elaborate candelabra and lost antiquities.  Fragments of designs are scattered on tables in the style of an 18^th century wunderkammern, testimony to Piranesi’s art but also the technicians’ skill and science bringing these pieces to life from the black and white prints.

Bringing these historically “un-built” items back to life through science and technology might please Mary Shelley, as there is something monstrous and fantastic about even the smallest Piranesian detail.  His one built project is a church for the Knights of Malta, Santa Maria del Priorato on the Aventine Hill in Rome.  Covered with emblems and symbols for the military and naval heritage of the Knights of Malta, they are double-coded with Classical references and allegorical references to his patron, Cardinal Giambattista Rezzonico.  These are objects and symbols that try to transcend time and reference both tradition and innovation.  Like his un-built work, it is didactic and a bit creepy.  Not sure how Dan Brown missed this building as a plot device for “The Da Vinci Code”.

Rounding out this technological assessment of Piranesi is a side-by-side comparison of modern photographs and the etchings of the monuments and piazzas of Rome that Piranesi popularized for his European Grand Tour patrons. Piranesi’s vision of these monuments – with their extreme shadows, groups of brigands, overgrown ruins and wild sense of scale, contrasts nicely with the more somber reality of the photos.  

Previous assessments of Piranesi have championed his place as a pre-cursor of Romanticism – a purveyor of a mad worldview shared with Blake’s visions, Fuseli ‘s beasts or the late capriccios of Goya.  Championed by admirers as diverse as writers Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, art historians Henri Focillon and Siegfried Gideon, Piranesi was the touchstone for all things irrational during the supposed age of reason of the neo-classical 18^th century. Subsequent surveys emphasize his place in his own time – eagerly exploring the newly discovered wonders of the ancient world, wondering at the newly revealed variety and diversity of the ancients, and the discovery of other, older and more mysterious cultures outside the classical tradition. 

While his more popular counterparts championed the newly fashionable Greek influence on architecture, Piranesi stood firm in his conviction of the genius of Roman (and Italian) design.  One series of etchings was essentially an 18^th century flame war with a French theorist over the relative “genius” of Italian or Greek architecture.  Unfortunately, France and the neo-classicists were in ascendance, and while influential with late Rococo design and the Adams Brothers in England, the move to less, not more, and rational, not the uncanny, was already afoot.

Like uncomfortable and disturbing dreams, architectural fantasies haunt design theory and historically have disrupted contemporary orthodoxy.  From the allegorical and arcane imaginings of late medieval and early Renaissance romances such as Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to the blasted streets and crumbling dirigible like buildings dropped into war torn Sarajevo by Lebbeus Woods, the irrational and the sublime run a deep counterpoint to the rational and ordered precepts of Renaissance theory or today’s neo-Modernism.  The nature of Piranesi’s un-built work is a natural for an imagined or virtual place.  Now that Piranesi can be seen in an artificial way that strangely is more natural for us – in a movie, as a simulation, his influence will be felt again. 

Le Dingbat Nouveau

In “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” Reyner Banham popularized “dingbat” to describe the horrendously bland and ubiquitous developer driven apartment buildings that cover the flats of LA. Far away from the high design inhabiting the hills, canyons and beaches preferred by architects of the Case Study program, these clunky rent generating machines, consisting of 4, or 8, or 12 studio, 1-bedroom and two bedroom units were often the first arrival point for many recently minted Angelenos. Their desperate designers tried to compensate for the relentless mediocrity with a swanky name (The Versailles, The Lido, Beverly Arms), and, in extreme cases, a fancy metal mansard roof, an oversized swag lamp in the entry court, a couple of cartouches and…hold for it… glitter stucco. Like the romanticized bungalow courtyards of Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonely Hearts” they are now part of Hollywood's background scenery. They are comfortably ensconced as an easy shorthand for a certain despairing and striving social strata of Los Angeles – in the films these sad sack dumps are occupied by grifters or screenwriters.

San Diego has its own home grown version of the dingbat, thanks to wise guy developer Ray L. Huffman. North Park is blighted by these 6-pack, 8-pack and 12-pack apartment buildings. Even today realtors tout Huffman’s expertise in cramming as many units as possible into the ugliest box possible. There were few attempts to upscale or sweeten the relentless efficiency of these ghetto creators. San Diego’s dingbats lack even a veneer of style. In their defense, they are the mainstay of affordable housing in San Diego. They are just ugly and cheap.

Well, those were different times, right? Well, yes and no. We have now what I call the Dingbat Nouveau – new apartment and condo buildings no doubt lauded by fans of San Diego’s City of Villages plan. Denser and bigger these new buildings are thankfully more aware of the politesse required to shoehorn denser and bigger into the fine-grained neighborhoods of North Park, Hillcrest and Mission Hills.

Well, at least some of the time.

Here are some pics of some winners… and some losers. Let me know what you think. Are there new dingbats in your neighborhood?

Esther McCoy Appreciation

The MAK Center in West Hollywood has some great events this summer - to celebrate his centennial, a July 23 tour of John Lautner houses and an appreciation of Esther McCoy, the architectural critic and historian who Reyner Banham famously called "the mother of us all." (He was talking about architectural historians, so I imagine "us" was a pretty exclusive party.) McCoy's role championing the remarkable activities of a few architects in a nascent Los Angeles architecture scene cannot be overestimated. Far from the usual suspects of high culture in New York or Europe her words, and the images of Julius Schulman and Marvin Rand captured the world's imagination.

While introducing nearly forgotten early 19th century California pioneers Irving Gill, Greene and Greene and Bernard Maybeck, (as well as the more modern Rudolph Schindler) in her 1960 "Five California Architects" McCoy also championed the use of industrial methods of housing fabrication and new materials favored (in theory if not always reality) by Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood and others during the post-war boom. Starting in 1945 she began her nearly accidental career writing about architecture for John Entenza's influential Arts and Architecture Magazine and soon was writing for the LA Times, the LA Herald-Examiner and other popular publications.

Perhaps because she also had worked as a draftsman for Rudolph Schindler, her love of the new did not trump her respect for the continuity of architectural tradition, even in such a "new" place as California. In 1965, three years after the 1963 demolition of McKim, Mead and White's 1910 Penn Station in New York, McCoy made a film to publicize the planned demolition of Irving Gill's 1906 Dodge House. Her deft use of Hollywood style publicity was no match for other civic forces (the house was eventually demolished in 1970) but the story was big enough to create awareness of Gill and spawn an appreciation that grew into official protection and historic recognition of his (and other early pioneers) significant work.

Curators Susan Morgan and Kimberli Meyer will also explore her fiction and other non-architectural writing, no doubt looking for parallels with her keen psychological observations and appreciation for movement through space that forms her best architectural writing.

Her books are still cribbed by designers looking at Soriano or Gill or Neutra or Schindler or Harwell Hamilton Harris for compositional tropes or clues to organize a building or how to marry it to a site. More importantly, her emphasis on the use of the building and its place in the social, political and economic threads of the day is a tonic for the breathless hype surrounding our jet-setting starchitects.

This exhibit isn't scheduled until late September, so there is plenty of time to read (or in my case re-re-read) Five California Architects, Case Study Houses, Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys, Second Generation or any of her many articles published in Arts and Architecture Magazine.

Post 4th Posting

Perfect mise-en-scene for nostalgic Hollywood take on a summer afternoon. Normal Heights again.

'90s Funky Po Mo in Normal Heights

Bit of Venice style funk down the street from the Carmelite Monastery on Hawley. I'll do some research and find out more. Very Bay Area vibe. I like the picnic set with the Mission Valley view.

More Charmer pics

The Charmer: Its Beauty and the Moonlight Overthrew Me

Clean and white against the cacophonous funk of Midtown, Jonathan Segal’s latest venture, the Charmer, could be a lost piece of Stuttgart’s famous Weissenhofsiedlung of 1927. The Bauhaus inspired architects of the Weimar Republic were exploring industrial and scientifically based models of living to replace traditions challenged by technology and rapid urban growth. Here, San Diego’s most visible architect/developer continues to explore the intricacies of traditional row homes and, in these economically anorexic times, maintain a positive spreadsheet. Corbu and Mies may have asked “architecture or revolution?” but Segal might ask “architecture or recession?”

Crisp volumes etched with elegantly proportioned black window frames step down a hillside site towards busy, one-way India Street. Here in Midtown India loses its Little Italy charm and functions more as a freeway access road. This nowhere land non-appeal has invited the appearance of a couple of outliers of hipdom – the Starlight, the Regal Beagle and retro-dive bar Aero among others. They blend in well with long time neighborhood stalwarts, El Indio and Shakespeare & Co. Charming in their own way, the bungalows and ‘50s apartments, car repair and other gritty services provides Segal’s project a messy counterpoint to the self contained “calme, luxe et volupte” qualities of this neo-modernist exercise.

From the street, the Charmer provides few clues to the individual unit layouts, aiming for a larger compositional unity with those large open windows, open walkways, balconies and expanses of white stucco, while the enigmatic entries within the court coyly declaim their physical separation. Here the ghost of Segal’s previous etudes on the row house model are apparent - and these post-modern and neo-traditional elements rub shoulders well with Segal’s new International Style moves.

The elongated proportions of the entries, flanked as they are by skinny cypresses, betray a certain soignee Hollywood Regency elan, but the atavistic simplicity of the ka’bah reminiscent black asphalt shingle covered cubes immediately sobers up any playfulness. Where a ‘80s architect may have joked it up with a fake wall or a twee reference to Palladio, Mr. Segal plays it straight. This is serious good work – jokey one-liners are not Mr. Segal’s style.

And jokes are luxuries in this economy, but several years ago Segal made a very cheeky one by framing, on the walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, not renderings or professional photographs of his projects, but financial pro forma for several of his design/build projects. Pulling back the curtain on the “art of the deal” he was characterized as a walking, talking, designing Howard Roark manqué – and was criticized by some aesthetic mandarins for being financially involved with projects where his bottom line could trump his aesthetic aspirations.

Whether through luck or a strategic decision to play the rental market rather than the condo market, Mr. Segal thrives where other architects, and their aesthetic aspirations, struggle. Segal continues to champion the DIY aesthetic and economics of the design/build model. Like the Farm-to-Table movement, Segal’s design/build strategy is based on locally available resources and - more critically – local demand. Given the continuing flat state of the economy, Mr. Segal’s ventures and their financial and aesthetic success are remarkable, and the success of the Charmer is a sign of hope for a more intimate integration of the building site, construction techniques, design, designer and the public that uses the building.

Consisting of two more or less U shaped buildings surrounding a parking/entry courtyard, the project is remarkable for the apparent openness of the units – window treatments will be in demand- and the embrace of one California tradition often praised but rarely revived – the bungalow court. Esther McCoy’s “The Second Generation” must have been a constant reference point for the design team. This neo-modernist touchstone is certainly “The American Vignola” for a certain generation of California architects, and whether generally referencing Corbusier’s Villa Savoye or possibly Raphael Soriano’s Colby Apartments of 1952, the focus on the courtyard pays deep homage to McCoy’s sensibilities regarding the possibilities of civilized and gracious accommodations for communal living.

The courtyard is carefully arranged composition of landscape and building that – seriously – must be the best outdoor space built in San Diego since Louis Kahn’s courtyard at the Salk. Shaded with Chinese Elms, the courtyard has a casual but formal air – European, almost French, but not doctrinaire and certainly unexpected. An allee of trees frames a tapis vert, but the vista leads to a bit of borrowed landscape from the car repair shop next door. The object of desire is to the right of the classical axis where – folly like, truly the machine in the garden- a more luxurious apartment unit takes on the light hearted seriousness of Gabriel’s Pavilion at Versailles, though in glass and stucco and bereft of putti or allegorical groupings. Happy tenants will celebrate summer not with a suburban barbeque but with a hipster fete galante.

The Charmer celebrates this place between the units – where before - at least on Mr. Segal's stern pro forma, only each unit’s financial stats would have been honored. I think Esther would be happy here. And that is saying something.

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Back for another run... Adams Avenue

Greetings from along time ago…three years and I still don’t write consistently. Once again I will try and push some bemused benighted and perhaps less than benign thoughts.

Last night went to the “Night on Adams” event . Bookstores, art galleries, art supply stores, ice cream shops and most of the other cute places on Adams were open until 9pm and offered deals and special events. Could develop a real Old Town Pasadena vibe if the city would stop throwing all the redevelopment money (not that THAT game can go on for much longer) downtown. But if success would only mean an Urban Outfitters next to Back from Tomboctou - forget about it!

As opposed to any other Saturday night, there didn’t appear to be too much additional activity. But after walking a few blocks east of the 805 bridge clusters of musicians on the sidewalks strumming folky riffs in front of an ice cream store and a pop up store of lady’s apparel in front of Blind Lady Ale House it was obvious that there was a bit more fun tonight.

The real draw was the 20% off sale at Adams Street Books. Found two out of print books by Anthony Blunt (the art historian and soviet spy) on Sicilian Baroque and Borromini. Good times!

Another interest was the exhibit of Tijuana artists at Adams Point Gallery. Called “Tijuana Ahora” it features 11 artists who work in TJ and the gallery claims this is the first exhibit of their work in the US. I wish I had made the opening - group shows are much better with a crowd and more difficult to assess alone, especially if only one piece is included. These brief introductions to the artists are frustrating - not sure how the piece fits in with the rest of their work, if an anomaly (good or bad), or, if unmoved and uncertain what the artist might be trying to do, just not so great.

The group show with a crowd is a bit like sharing tapas - you can quickly find the popular ones and the ones with octopus that some may avoid, but have some unusual combination or flavor. The artist that jumped out at me was Mario Rodriguez. Represented by three densely detailed and overworked pencil sketches, these pieces were like the fever dream of a bored high school student channeling intense and disturbing visions on the back of a school notebook.

Naïve and sophisticated at once, the smudged and then precise pencil shadings open up a world one part de Chirico, one part Dali, a bit of Bosch, maybe some Bruegel. Arcades reminiscent of a Venetian capriccio are haunted by figures watching a black leaden sea that seems to fall off the face of the earth. These could illustrate lost chapters of a Renaissance allegory. The language is gone but the poetry remains.

Less Than Bright

I reference James Wolcott's arch dismissal of the '80s precursor of chick-lit - the phenom of "Bright Lights Big City" and "Less Than Zero" (coke lit?) as a way of setting the stage for the sadly familiar and dusty tropes rolled out at last Thursday's SDMOCA "gallery talk" with Sarah Wookey, Howard Blackson and Michael Stepner.

Sarah Wookey is a choreographer, recently relocated to Los Angeles from the Netherlands via Illinois and Ohio dance degrees. Howard Blackson is a San Diego-based urban planner who has recently left his own firm the join with Stantec, one of the giant octopus AE firms like AEC that are buying up firms all over the states - (this consolidation of smaller and mid size firms into larger corporate hydras is one of the untold stories of current architecture practice), and Michael Stepner, the former City Architect for San Diego (when there was such a position) and general all around point guy for urban studies and land use stuff in San Diego.

There was a moderator, but there was really precious little to moderate. Ms. Wookey earnestly described for us her amazement at arriving in Los Angeles and finding there is a fine grain to the City that is rarely seen in standard descriptions of Los Angeles... that she was intrigued to find these places that were really between the stuff you know about (Freeways, Billboards, Sunset Strip, Venice Beach, the Hollywood sign) and that the stuff was sort of dirty and unkept, and she found that she rather liked that part because she found all this unheralded work by simply walking or, like any good Dutchman, riding her bike! What the fuck is it about people coming from Anywhereinthefnworldistan and insisting on explaining Los Angeles to its benighted residents? I thought these people had been executed during the '84 Olympics.

But I am harsh. The charm and ersatz-worldliness of making one's way through any large city in large part means making your own discoveries and insights that thousands of other wide eyed innocents had previously unearthed long before your peepers took in the scene. Of course the brighter pilgrims would have done some homework and would have read Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler, Charles Bukowski and Joan Didion. The would know the work of Ed Ruscha, Hockney, Chamberlain, Pettibone, even Millard Sheets. The hater in me wonders why we had to listen to this naif at an Art Museum sponsored lecture instead of surreptiously eavesdropping on the earnest twit with her group of out of town visitors at the Getty Museum coffee shop.

But enough about my problems... Ms. Wookey insisted (at least three times) that her interest in these spaces was romantic and poetic, and that she really couldn't explain how these spaces got this way, exactly why they intrigued her, but that they did and that is what interested her. Well. Maybe that second degree in Economics could help out with that, huh? But she will continue to search these spaces out - her grail to find something significant about Los Angeles outside of freeways, billboards, and one supposes- the taut tan skin of Baywatch lifeguards. Godspeed, Sister! Godspeed!

Mr. Blackson and Mr. Stepner stepped in on occasion, and considering their urban planning backgrounds, I thought they would have been a bit more "me too" about observing those lost places. Hell, they want to be artists too! But they couldn't make the connection between the interest our intrepid artist felt about those lost and vague spaces inbetween, and (drum roll, please) urban redevelopment. Her nostalgia for what was (a deliciously decayed urban sublime mis-en-scene) and her uncertainty about what they are, appears honestly tempered by her fear that once they are seen -especially by someone with her sensibilities and her privilaged ability to describe them to the hoi polli - they will vanish. Well, those spaces inbetween that our inchoate artist was describing is the very life blood of bohemia and artistic recovered memory- the madelaine fragrance merely replaced by the stench of the sweat of the working immigrant poor and the drying piss of the dispossesed.

If Ms. Wookey was Donald Trump, her observations would be read like an analysts report for the next big opportunity for investors. Just find these areas that artists like - eventually the gentrification process will clean the streets and another dream will arrive on Main Street. Of course that pretty dream will fail as well, as all things do, and the cycle will start again.

Once Mr. Stepner and Mr. Blackson found their voices, it was the voice of redevelopment. Smarter, greener, transit-focused and seriously concerned about the plight of the urban working class, but redevelopment nonetheless. Their partner in this was of course Ms. Wookey. As the advance scout, she, and other artists will continue to inadvertantly tame bohemia for redevelopment.

Mr. Blackson is a self-proclaimed New Urbanist, which on the left coast is not considered cool at all. But one of the odd things about the rearguard aesthetics of the New Urbanists is their reaching back to olden days for sustainable practices, something they share with the Greens. Like Christopher Alexander they are frustratingly consistent and wierdly pragmatic (brick stoops everyhere!). But here is one rule to reconsider: An old agricultural practice of allowing the fields to go fallow for 7 years provides an analogy for our current real estate indigestion. Gorging on unripe fruit and planting in depleted soils - well, pick your own metaphor. Our artist was trying to describe that delicious place of promise, the meeting of what was and what will become. The artist allows that potentiality all its grace and promise. I'm not sure what we architects and planners and developers do with the same opportunity. Leave it alone might work.

Ann Jarmusch Shit Canned!

That may be too harsh, but with the continued blood letting at the UT, several arts writers and staffers have been let go, including the recently more than reclusive Ms.Jarmusch. I really hope she was able to get a buyout offer - it has never been clear if she was a stringer or a staffer.

This is a real bummer for architectural discourse in San Diego as we are the largest US city without a fulltime architecture critic at a major newspaper. Oops, Dallas and Phoenix may not have one either… Great company I guess if you like Texans or Zonies.

I never cared for Ms. Jarmusch’s content, but her writing style was crisp, direct and, when her knickers were in a twist about the Port Commission, confrontational. She also was a shameless shill for the UT when needed. Her bizarre and overheated defense of the Copley Addition to the Baggage Handling Building for the downtown Museum of Contemporary Art praised an unbuilt building with purple prose that would have embarrassed the sadly departed Herbert Muschamp.

Though too numerous for my taste, her pieces on San Diego’s ubiquitous Craftsman neighborhoods were always educational and fun. Her other strength was for Historic Preservation, and though that angle may have made Ada Louis Huxtable a career, the pickings for significant buildings left in San Diego are pretty thin. She totally missed the Mid-Century Modern revival and the destruction of important Tiki restaurants (Islands! What a waste!) .

Which leads to my other gripe - her yearly article on Wayne Donaldson and her yearly article on James Hubble. Both admirable architects, each with a great body of work, but with so few articles about architecture in San Diego being published by the UT, her choices - if indeed they were hers to make - struck me as lazy or disinterested in what was going on around her.

San Diego was transformed while she was on duty at the UT and I don’t ever recall her slapping some of the more egregiously ugly buildings that grace downtown. During the “debate” on the Copley building she took a really unnecessary potshot at Carrier Johnson’s condo across the street. Why pick on that one? What gives?

I spent some time rereading her articles on the Broadway Naval Development... Why couldn't she say it was a cluster fuck and be done with it? Oh, no, San Diego deserves a WORLD CLASS waterfront. Gee, didn't Rob Quigley develop a masterful plan for the entire embarcadero about five years ago? Despite her penchant for history, Ms. Jarmush seems to have selective memory about some development proposals.

Great buildings may be printed in the UT, but the coverage is limited to how cool the building is, what the buzz is, how sophisticated the architect is, what furniture has been used, which countries the clients just traveled to, and all that other shit. No analysis, no opinion on how a building works in the City. Get ready for more AP or New York Times reprints of stories about other cities that actually give a damn about the urban environment.

All in all, I kvetch not so much for her, frankly, admirable and straightforward body of work, but the general lack of discourse in the burg.

I'm Trying to Write Right

I’ve been trying too hard. This blogging thing is going to take me some time to get into… I think I’m so spoiled from my previous career - actually being paid to write - that writing for free - and the corollary that you (dear reader) will get what you pay for - will effect both the length and the format of these entries. The magazine or short essay format will give way to shorter snippets. Once this style and format are more or less mastered, I may return to more reasoned, rational, and potentially “better” written entries.
Obviously I had some kind of writers constipation and the result was the first entry. Trying way too hard to make sense of the world after a three year writing hiatus.

You saw the hyped up neo 60’s look the resurrected Orchids and Onions embraced. Perhaps you wondered if they expected- if not a street riot - at least a sit in. Vox populi indeed. A riot between the neo traditional urbanists of North Park and the deconstructivist acolytes of gentrifying Barrio Logan? Or a third wave of late modernist hold outs from Poway fighting in the street? Sadly, the excitement was oversold, and the promise of true dialogue within the design community, and within the larger public remains a pretty dream despite the sincere efforts of the San Diego Architecture Foundation and the AIA.

Those same graphics - a peculiar combination of a ‘60s agitprop featuring a bearded speaker with megaphone and a font style that can only be described as Hello Kitty meets Peter Max- perfectly illustrates the inherent contradiction in this ultimately top down approach to architectural dialogue. Because talking about design is elitist, but everything about the program tried to claim otherwise. It will therefore fail, not at creating controversy, which is very different from dialogue, but at sustaining any interest beyond a couple of cute comments or singling out some particular design gaffe for which everyone who had to good fortune not to be involved with can at least breath a sigh of relief…

Is this program commentary or criticism? Criticism is essentially telling people what you think about things and it's subversive goal is to convince or persuade you (the, uh, informed reader) about what the reader should think about things, or better yet, how to think with ideas rather than unformed opinion - once again these ideas preferably supplied by the kindly writer. Commentary allows one to hide behind "I'm only saying..." and basically get a pass to state half thoughts, half truths and otherwise "offer up for discussion" ideas or halfbaked notions that they (the commentator) doesn't have the guts to claim for his or her own.

Thus, Orchids and Onions. Peeling this "Power to the People" onion was really not fun and really didn't standup to much scrutiny. The erudite readings of today’s cosmopolitan iPhoners or iPodders and Wallpaper subscribers is at serious odds with the opinions of the “man on the street” - particularly when that man is also willing to sign on the Union Tribune’s website in order to vote. The already noted bizarre nostalgia UT- for a time when culture could arise from street action or political action - and equally puzzling ignorance of exactly who those guys behind the megaphone thought they were (Vanguard of the Proletariat, anyone? Shining Path? Red Brigade? Oh, the high jinx! Yes the ‘60s were fun!)illustrates the sincere lack of seriousness. I'm all for cute PR stunts - but this one, especially on the web pages of the UT really rankled. If the program - and the awards ceremony - wants to be, as they use to say back the ‘60s - uh - relevant, they will need to bridge and explore those contradictions instead of relying on recycled revolutionary tropes. Dialogue indeed.

As you might guess, the demographics of the voters must have been skewed towards those who sign their indignant letters to the or the Coronado Eagle with a deservedly proud “U.S.N., Ret.” But no disrespect is intended as the final results were truly skewed by the jury. What? A jury? What about the exalted vox populi? Indeed, the jury posted awards for projects that were not on the original voing website - where did they come from? Where did the jury come from? Who were those people?

While not as sinister as the Magesterium, the good stewards at the San Diego Architecture Foundation apparently wanted to both hedge their bets and sharpen a few political axes. So, in the great tradition of San Diego muddle headedness, they adjudicated on buildings and landscapes with serious headings such as “landscape” or "public art" and left the true vox populi portion of the awards to a single Onion and a single Orchid. I imagine those critical voices were seated somewhere at the AIA’s version of the young peoples’ table at their close to Thanksgiving Day Gala. I should have been there of course. But so what. The buildings are still there, as are the website pictures and though the estimable Keith York from ModernSanDiego.com surely kept the proceedings lively and fun - I suspect that the audience was entirely design professionals intent on congratulating each other. Schmoozateria.

The voting site - which was available only through the Union Tribune’s Sign On San Diego website was unremarkable, unsophisticated and dull. And probably free for the SDAF and the AIA. The UT will do anything to get people to the website and I hope the SDAF realizes it got what it paid for...The single photograph of each project was especially annoying. The good projects look bad and the bad projects look merely dull. There was no context, no stories, no site plans, - nothing other than an isolated image. I mean why not a YouTube video walk around of each building? A bad website is as bad as no website at all, and this one seriously sucked. Not finding any content of interest or information, voters, after logging on (which required UT registration) voters would have fled in boredom to Archinect to complain about the site. The followup article by Roger Showley was as wierd as the entire awards program - I'm still reading it trying to figure out what he was trying to say.

So, with that kvetching out of the way, we'll next review the projects. Projects that are all over the map stylistically, but in retrospect seem to offer some inkling of both the jury's thinking, and what the "people" are thinking. Or not.The SDAF has a tough job. Successfully promoting “architecture” is not the same as successfully criticizing architecture. For that you need a critic.


Labels: Architecture, criticism, orchids and onions, San Diego, san diego american institute of architecture, san diego architecture foundation, union tribune