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Andrew Motion (Photo: David Rose)
Like the awfulness of our National Anthem, the futility of the post of Poet Laureate is one of those running sores in our national culture which seem beyond healing. Every time the matter is aired, there’s a consensus that something ought to be done about it, and every time – because we ultimately prefer the comfortable slippers of tradition to the red cap of revolution – nothing ends up being done at all.
And now the debate resurfaces, as Andrew Motion reaches the end of his ten-year tenure, and a successor will be announced soon, through royal decree prompted by some mysterious cabal of Whitehall mandarins. Should the honour pass to a woman or someone of, er, diverse background? What’s the point, and does anyone care?
Andrew Motion has tried tremendously hard to liven the thing up and make it matter. He will surely get a gong and be remembered as one of the busier and better members of the line. He has, in his own words, been “a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry”, sitting on committees, making public appearances, talking in schools, inaugurating an online poetry archive, and promoting the classics and the Bible in the educational curriculum.
But despite his invigorating zeal, the function of Poet Laureate remains primarily that of a royal courtier, judged by the public on the grounds of the bowing and scraping he produces for state events – in particular, his response to birthdays, marriages and funerals.
Here I fear that Motion has performed no better than duds of his office such as Colley Cibber or Alfred Austin. His rap on Prince William’s 21st birthday doesn’t give Dizzee Rascal anything to worry about (“Better stand back/ Here’s an age attack,/ But the second in line/ Is dealing with it fine”), while his tribute to the Queen Mum on her centenary (“the balconies, the open wave/ And smile, the hats, the hats, the hats”) and the Queen’s diamond wedding (“Love found a voice and spoke two names aloud –/ Two private names, though breezed through public air”) have a genteel simpering tone that suggests something composed “by a lady” for the parish mag.
You might think that this does no harm, and I dare say that plenty of people sigh a pleasant little sentimental sigh when they read these effusions. But if a Poet Laureate is meant to promote the art of poetry, I really can’t see the merit in such soppy, cringing stuff, which only confirms the view of Kipling (who turned the Laureateship down) that poets shouldn’t be paid servants of the state.
Poetry does not take kindly to the formal panegyric, because flattery precludes the freedom of thought and language that are its lifeblood. The need to be complimentary, while keeping a polite distance required by protocol – you can’t be critical of the subject, and you can’t be in love with him or her either – puts fences round the imagination and leaves the poet hopelessly confined. It’s an open invitation to mediocrity.
Motion has also written poems about events of national moment, such as the Paddington rail disaster and the centenary of the TUC. These avoid McGonagallian banality, but there’s something forced about their tone, something absent from his more lyrically meditative “personal” poetry.
Great verse has, of course, been inspired by public events – Marvell’s Horatian Ode or Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland, for example – but what makes it great is its troubled ambiguity: it wasn’t motivated by a spirit of civic duty, which is what Motion’s seem to be.
Poetry doesn’t need a Poet Laureate: I’m not even sure it needs a “flag waver”. All poetry needs is poets, with a rich store of language to draw on.
Nobody, I would suggest, has ever added an iota to his literary stature by his laureate poetry, and I doubt that institutions such as National Poetry Day have made much difference either. What matters is inspiration, which is something that can’t be legislated or even encouraged – either it comes or it doesn’t.
We have nothing to fear. Plenty of great poetry is being written and read. Within the British Isles, Seamus Heaney, Douglas Dunn, Peter Porter, Christopher Reid, Don Paterson and Mick Imlah are only a few of those who have published work of the highest artistic order in recent years. And verse of a lighter, more ephemeral sort flourishes too, in performance poets such as Murray Lachlan Young and Attila the Stockbroker, as well as in the rougher-edged creativity of countless rappers, hiphoppers and writers of rock songs.
Anyway, I am whistling against the wind. Come the spring, there will be another Poet Laureate, so who should it be? Someone who deals in lyric verse, or someone who can do rousing rum-ti-tum with the common touch?
Carol Ann Duffy can do both, very well, and is justly celebrated for her imaginative engagement with children. Simon Armitage, a cool but blokeish Northerner with fluency and grit, could speak to the problem of disaffected teenage boys. Benjamin Zephaniah and Roger McGough do terrific rum-ti-tum and make people laugh. The delightful Wendy Cope has ruled herself out, describing the Laureateship “as an archaic post, with ridiculous expectations attached to it”. Jackie Kay and James Fenton are other names in the hat. Ruth Padel isn’t on the shortlist, but she’s hugely clever, a brilliant communicator, and a wonderful performer of her own poetry.
But I guess they’re all pretty sceptical of the brief, and would agree with me that there are plenty of things which would do poetry much more good than another royal appointment: schoolchildren learning Keats’s odes by heart, for example, or billboards on the model of Poems on the Underground. Why can’t we drop the whole Laureate charade and focus on those instead?
Rupert Christiansen
Telegraph
On Valentine’s Day, Pennsylvania Ballet staff members stood in the Merriam Theater’s lobby handing out coasters that bore what might have seemed a strange suggestion coming from an arts organization: Go to our YouTube channel.
What the mostly graying matinee audience made of the invitation to an online video-sharing site is unclear. What is clear is that the Pennsylvania Ballet is not alone in lusting after online social-network users.
The Kimmel Center has a Flickr photostream. The Curtis Institute of Music is on LinkedIn. The Arden Theatre and the Franklin Institute use Twitter. The Philadelphia Orchestra has a MySpace page.
The Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, the Opera Company of Philadelphia, and just about every other arts organization in the city has a Facebook page. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has an RSS feed of its exhibitions on its Web site, and the Academy of Natural Sciences shares exhibit-construction videos.
The Philadelphia fine-arts scene has gone viral, and no one is hiding the reason.
“It starts with young people. . . . We want to create more of a dialogue with this age group, and guess what – they’re on YouTube and MySpace and Facebook,” said Shawn Stone, the Pennsylvania Ballet’s market director. “It’s an active part of their lives, so it needs to be an active part of ours.”
The ballet plans to post new videos, produced by Rittenhouse Square’s Parlay Films, on its YouTube channel at least once a month. Future episodes will vary in content – from choreographer interviews to day-in-the-life dancer features to chronicling stage construction and more – but the intent won’t waver.
“We’re hoping this is a way to introduce younger people to the ballet,” Stone said. “Most of our dancers are in this age group. That’s different than other fine-arts institutions.”
Perhaps – but the ballet is just like its Avenue of the Arts neighbors in recognizing that winning younger audience members is necessary for survival and that social networking is a promising means of reaching them.
Among other initiatives to entice young listeners, the Philadelphia Orchestra promotes its EZSeatU, which offers open season tickets to college students for a one-time $25 fee.
“Social media is the backbone,” said J. Edward Cambron, the orchestra’s vice president for marketing. The orchestra hosts Facebook nights – $10 rush tickets to those who visit its Facebook page – that draw 50, 60 or more youthful takers. It is tinkering with its podcast – the Podchestra – and has invested in Facebook ads focusing on young Philadelphia college students, Cambron said.
“There’s the formal stuff like Facebook and MySpace, but it’s really about getting these young people to use their own social networks online,” Cambron said. “It’s viral in that community.”
After promoting reduced prices for younger audiences through its Facebook page, the Arden Theatre acquired a hundred or more new fans, said Janine Zappone, a public relations associate at the Old City theater. Now, the Arden regularly promotes half-price Tuesday-night offers and other deals aimed at young people on all its social-networking tools – Twitter, Facebook and MySpace – in addition to its blog, the Arden Insider, said Zappone, who is charged with overseeing all of them.
“The job description has definitely expanded,” she said, noting that social media – upkeep, development and dialogue – now occupy almost a third of her workweek. The payoff is a more loyal audience, one that better understands the Arden’s mission and responds more readily to calls for comment and criticism. The lessons, Zappone says, may not have been learned quickly, but they have been learned.
“There were early hurdles to the fine arts’ using social media,” the orchestra’s Cambron said. “Arts organizations are about quality and always presenting nothing but the very best. With social networking, you let go of some control. But what we’ve learned is that if you’re proud of your brand, well, that shouldn’t be a big worry. In fact, people will usually say fabulous stuff.”
In June, the League of American Orchestras will host its annual conference. While using social media isn’t on the agenda for the Chicago meeting yet, Cambron said his discussions with leaders of other big orchestras in places like New York, Chicago and Cleveland suggest that the trend could become a major theme.
The San Francisco Symphony posts interviews with its artists in high definition on its Facebook page. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has a YouTube channel on which it touts the city’s growing fine-arts community. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta recently took the plunge and now actively uses Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook accounts.
“Big cultural institutions might have been behind the curve,” Cambron said. “But they’re largely ahead of their older audiences . . . and have come on strong of late.”
The push is generally directed at those in their 30s or younger, if only to develop habits, he said: “When young people are exploring what they will do socially on their own, encouraging them to visit the orchestra is an incredibly valuable seed for the future.”
Social networking, with its profiles, personal details, and constant updates, offers more information about an audience than ever before – which means it’s easier than ever to target the vital youth demographic.
“Using social media and e-mail marketing is a much-less-expensive way of marketing,” said the Pennsylvania Ballet’s Stone. “It’s more targeted and can save your organization money.”
It’s also creating a direct line of communication with potential audiences of the future, Stone said.
“The world is changing and technology is changing and everyone, including arts organizations, needs to keep up with that technology,” he said. “If we want to survive, we need to reach people in the ways that they are going about their days. The fine arts depend on it.”
Christopher Wink
Philadelphia Inquirer
Beauty is famously in the eye of the beholder; but it’s also in the beholder’s brain, and may work differently in the brains of men and women.
In men, images they consider to be beautiful appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms — x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Images considered beautiful by women do the same, but they also activate regions associated with relative location: above and behind, over and under. The difference could be the result of evolutionary pressures on our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are preliminary and based on a small number of people, but intriguing nonetheless.
“This the first study about neural activation in aesthetic tasks to include sex as a variable,” said study co-author Camilo Cela-Conde, an evolutionary anthropologist at Spain’s Universitat de les Illes Balears.
Earlier studies on sex-based cognitive differences have found that men seem to have a heightened sense of absolute location. Women, by contrast, are quicker to process relative values.
How these brain systems became tied to the perception of beauty, widely considered a defining human trait, is an evolutionary mystery. According to Cela-Conde, aesthetics may simply be a byproduct of other cognitive tasks.
Differences in cognitive tasks, however, may be less mysterious: For much of human history, men and women had different jobs. Their brains may thus have developed in subtly different ways.
“In current hunter-gatherer groups, men are in charge of hunting; meanwhile women collect,” said Cela-Conde. “If this is a scheme that can be extended to ancestors’ behavior, then we can think about a selective pressure to increase the capacity of spatial orientation in men, and the capacity to identify edible plants and tubers in women.”
In the study, 10 men and 10 women looked at images of modern and classic paintings, as well as photographs of landscapes, artifacts and urban scenes. The researchers recorded their reactions with a magnetoencephalograph, which monitors real-time neural activity by measuring magnetic fields generated by electrical currents in the brain.
The subjects varied as to what they considered beautiful, but brain patterns were consistent: coordinate-processing activation in both men and women, and category-processing in only women.
These differences do not seem to translate into differences in the actual experience of beauty. In earlier research, said Cela-Conde, both men and women describe beauty as being “original, interesting and pleasant.”
However, as the differences were expressed only in response to images the subjects found to be beautiful, they do not seem to reflect a general sex-based difference in perception.
As the brain regions involved are far more developed in humans than chimpanzees — our closest living relative — Cela-Conde’s team suspects that the differences are rooted in early hominid divisions between men and women.
Another possible explanation is language-based: Coordinate-reading brain systems are less activated by linguistic communication than categorical systems.
The differences observed in the study would then originate in another sex-based difference, albeit an arguable one: Women are especially talkative.
Brandon Keim
Wired
(Photo courtesy Of Matthew Carter)
It used to be that when Matthew Carter told people that he was a type designer, they stared back at him slack-jawed and said they thought all type designers had died.
Today, though, strangers in this Internet age at least know what a font is, and they might even know the names of some of them.
“I’ve had some comical conversations where people say things like: ‘Well, we’ve all been told we have to use this font called Verdana at work. Have you heard of it?’ “
Has he heard of it? He designed it.
Carter, 71, is the creator of Georgia, Verdana, Galliard and 70 other typeface families during his 53 years in the field, and the Design Museum in London hails him as “the most important typography designer of our time.” On Monday, he will speak at the Corcoran Gallery of Art about some of the typefaces he has created and explain why people are still designing new ones. (One reason: Fonts that are legible on such small hand-held devices as iPhones, BlackBerrys and Kindle e-book readers.)
Carter, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., and grew up in London, says he has created type by every means historically possible. His father, Harry Carter, was a typographer and a type historian. He never pressured his son to enter the family trade, but when Matthew Carter needed a job after graduating from high school, his father helped him get an apprenticeship at a type foundry in the Netherlands.
He carved letters into the end of a steel rod in a process called punch-cutting, which was already on its way to becoming obsolete. He could finish about one letter a day.
He still sees himself as a type “founder,” an anachronistic term for someone who makes type, even though today he’s pushing pixels rather than pounding metal. He also classifies his job under industrial design because he is perfecting a product — the English alphabet — that must perform a specific task for many people.
“All industrial designers have constraints, but they are particularly severe in type design,” he says. “Typefaces have to be readable and useable . . . and on the other hand, you have this impulse to bring some tiny measure of innovation into what you’re doing. The options are very limited. I can’t decide one morning I’m tired of the letter B and I’m going to redesign it from scratch. There’s frustration and fascination. If you’re going to serve a life sentence as a type designer — which I seem to be doing — you have to find the fascination greater than the frustration.”
When Carter designs a typeface, he typically starts with a lowercase h. It has an ascender (the stroke going up on the left), but it also reveals a lot about the character of the typeface. From a lowercase h, he explains, you can tell what a lowercase l, m and n will look like. Graphic designers, however, usually identify typefaces by more flamboyant letters of the alphabet, such as a capital “Q” or a lowercase “g.” The fact that Carter is more of a lowercase h guy says much about his design style.
He creates “the fonts that do the heavy lifting as opposed to being flashy,” says New York-based type designer Jonathan Hoefler, whom Carter points to as one of his favorite talents in the business.
Carter is best known for creating text typefaces that can be read for long periods of time. In the mid-’70s, he designed Bell Centennial for AT&T; the company still uses it in many phone books. Publications such as Sports Illustrated, Wired and the New York Times also have commissioned Carter to customize typefaces for them. In 1998, Carter created the font for most of the headlines in The Washington Post by reworking Bodoni. He named it Postoni.
For design inspiration, Carter often turns to old books. Galliard, his 1978 typeface, is a revival of a 16th-century design. Hoefler raves: “It’s not necessarily just a nice font but an entire approach to design.”
“If you imagine a type designer as a colorist — colorists talk about the amazing blue they saw or the green of their bathroom — Matthew is the guy who invented brown, then 20 years later invented orange,” Hoefler says.
Three of Carter’s best-known typefaces are Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana because they are all available in Microsoft programs. Microsoft commissioned him to create these fonts in 1994, because the fonts that work well in ink don’t necessarily look great on low-resolution computer screens.
Hoefler’s business partner, Tobias Frere-Jones, helped Carter finish the Verdana bold italic font. Frere-Jones, 38, first met Carter in 1991, when Frere-Jones was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. At his professor’s urging, Frere-Jones took the train to Cambridge to show Carter a typeface he was designing for an independent-study class.
“It was sort of like going to see the pope to show him some thing you’ve been doodling,” Frere-Jones says. “It was more than a little intimidating.”
Carter gave him some tips for his project, which became a typeface called Hightower. Carter delivered his feedback in his typically relaxed manner — “he has the basis to be kind of haughty or elitist, but that never occurs to him,” Frere-Jones says. They have kept in touch ever since and they now teach a class together at Yale, where Carter has taught type design since 1976.
His students today are entering a more democratic type design field. When Carter started cutting punches in the Dutch foundry in 1955, it was an austere business, hard to get into for technical reasons. Today, anyone with a computer and Fontlab software can give it a go.
“I’m eternally grateful I survived into the digital era,” he says. “I’m glad to experience the previous technologies, but am very glad to have left them behind.”
Rachel Saslow
Washington Post
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
New Yorkers have been understandably impatient about the slow pace of Lincoln Center’s renovation plans.
While musical institutions from Los Angeles to Copenhagen whipped out dazzling new concert halls, New York’s vast cultural complex seemed mired in indecision. An ill-conceived proposal by Frank Gehry to cover Lincoln Center’s central plaza with a gigantic glass canopy stirred such outrage among constituents that it was shelved in 2001.
A design by the French architect Christian de Portzamparc for a flashy new home for New York City Opera on Amsterdam Avenue came and went with barely a yawn five years later.
So Sunday’s opening of a remade Alice Tully Hall, the first phase of an overhaul of Lincoln Center scheduled for completion in 2010, is a revelation. Designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the womblike performance space, its surfaces flush with new life, makes it hard to remember the dreariness of the 1969 original.
The freshness springs from the architects’ willingness to break with worn-out urban design strategies. They aren’t scornful of the building’s history; nor do they treat it with undue reverence. With the precision of surgeons, they cut out ugly tumors and open up clogged arteries. In doing so, they suggest a way forward for a city in which preservation is all too often a form of embalmment.
Lincoln Center has never had the best karma. Conceived as part of a 1950s-era slum-clearance program, the immense superblock required the demolition of an entire neighborhood of dilapidated tenements and brownstones. When it was completed, the watered-down classicism of its travertine buildings seemed to capture all the anxieties of the cold war period, its confused stylistic references camouflaging a kind of emptiness.
The building that houses Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School, the last of the center’s structures to be completed, had a particularly brutal relationship to the street. Designed by Pietro Belluschi and Eduardo Catalano, its boxy white form was the modern equivalent of a medieval convent. The main facade was hidden behind a staircase leading to a small, ugly plaza, making the entry virtually impossible to find. From there a narrow walkway ran along the side of the building on West 65th Street, connecting to a meager bridge and another barren plaza at the rear of Avery Fisher Hall. If you were looking for a model of how to suck life out of city streets, this was it.
Rather than demolish Tully Hall or conceal it behind a new facade, Diller Scofidio & Renfro gleefully carve it up. They begin by tearing off the old staircase and elevated plaza. The upper floors are stretched out toward the edge of Broadway, creating more room for dance studios inside and a forceful presence along the avenue. A new incision between the building’s first and second floors rises up at its southeast corner to expose the lobby to the street, suggesting the building has been sliced open with a can opener.
This step-by-step approach has sometimes given the work of these architects a diagrammatic quality, like a couple following numbers on a dance floor. But here they use it to their advantage, artfully sidestepping the tiresome old dichotomy between preservation and the wrecking ball. It’s a subtle knock at those who define good and bad in terms of a period or style rather than through a direct emotional engagement with an individual work. Think something is ugly? Look closer. There may be moments of unexpected beauty inside.
This sensitivity to history is coupled with a blunt social mission. Only a delicate glass wall separates the lobby from an outdoor sunken plaza, so that the interior seems to bleed out onto the sidewalk. An unusual concrete seating area anchors the corner of Broadway and 65th Street, giving both the lobby and the plaza the feel of an outdoor meeting space. It’s a clear-cut defense of the public realm, something we could use more of in this age of corporate privatization.
There’s room for a bit of escapism here too. Inside, a sleek limestone bar snakes along the back of the lobby. Big concrete pillars lean out at precarious angles to support the cantilevered floors above. The contrast between the weighty beams and the fragile glass brings to mind the work of the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara, whose life’s work, it often seemed, was to create a protective frame for a small, private utopia. Yet here the contrast suggests how much energy is needed to preserve a quality of openness in the city.
The performance hall, on the other hand, looks as though it could have been designed by Apple technicians. The original proportions have not changed, but its smooth surfaces have been clad in a superthin veneer of moabi, a rich African hardwood. A balcony wraps around the back of the hall tapering toward the stage like fins at either end.
Diller Scofidio & Renfro has embedded LED lights behind the wood that can be subtly adjusted so patches of the wood’s surface begin to glow, shifting from pale orange to smoldering red. (Elizabeth Diller, a firm founder, said she wanted to make the room “blush.”) It is a wonderful sight, adding warmth to what is otherwise a modest, understated room.
Ultimately, however, what’s most exciting about the design is how these pieces fit into the bigger picture. Next the architects plan to sink Lincoln Center’s taxi drop-off on Columbus Avenue below ground, extending the plaza outward and creating a grander, more formal entry to the complex.
In the final phase a new restaurant and reflecting pool will grace the elevated plaza in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Like the new entrance to Tully Hall, the restaurant will break down a fortresslike barrier that separates that plaza from 65th Street. The restaurant’s warping, winglike roof will be a lively contrast to Eero Saarinen’s theater.
Taken as a whole these interventions should create a lively tension between two very different philosophical approaches to the city. They may also silence some of those who think that being heartily engaged in the present rules out an appreciation for architectural history. In an enlightened society there is room for both.
Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times
Yale University Art Gallery
Cease and desist is the advice I give university administrators toying with thoughts of closing their campus museums and peddling the art, as Brandeis recently threatened to do. Just stop. Period. Bad way to go.
If it helps, consider your museum and its collection in purely materialistic terms, as a big chunk of capital, slowly and fortuitously accumulated. Once spent, it is irrecoverable. Your university can never be that rich in that way again. Or view the art in your care as something that doesn’t belong to you. Like any legacy it belongs to the future.
Such thoughts came to mind on a recent visit to campus museums and galleries at Yale University that have exceptional shows this winter. One, devoted to Picasso and writing, is drawn almost entirely from the university’s permanent collections. Another, on the role of tea in Japanese culture, is composed primarily of objects on loan from a single Yale alumnus. A third, imported from another university museum, brings together Degas, geology and gorillas to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. And they are supplemented by a tidy roundup of contemporary Indian artists.
All the shows are fairly small. All are, in different ways, beautiful. All are closely researched studies on fascinating subjects we know too little about. Yet each is just a shade too specialized or unglamorous or experimental to find a home in our public art institutions. If it weren’t for academic museums, these shows wouldn’t happen. And that would be a real loss…
One bad idea, that university museums are expendable commodities, remains alive in our collective system. Despite a lot of hemming and hawing in the face of protest, Brandeis still gives every indication of wanting to close its Rose Art Museum, opening the path to selling its art, as foolhardy as that would be in the present economy.
But at least one good idea seems to be gaining ground. In a bleak economy, when our big public museums threaten to sink under budget-busting excesses, the university museum offers a model for small, intensely researched, collection-based, convention-challenging exhibitions that could get museums through a bumpy present and carry them, lighter and brighter, into the future.
Holland Cotter
New York Times
Routemaster bus redesign The Routemaster bus, as reimagined by Foster and Partners and Aston Martin. Photograph: Foster and Partners
If Norman Foster’s design for a new London bus to replace the Routemaster really does happen in 2012, it’ll be a first. Not the first London bus to ever arrive on time, but the first time an architect has successfully designed a motor vehicle. The fact is, while architects are fine at designing chairs, tableware, even earrings, when it comes to automobiles, their efforts are usually flawed, if not just plain laughable.
You can judge how Foster and his peers did at a new exhibition at the London Transport Museum, displaying the winners of Boris Johnson’s New Bus for London competition (they shared first prize with Capoco), and 50 other entries – including one by architects Future Systems. Jan Kaplicky, who died last month, will be missed, but there are many things we’ll miss him more for than this frankly ugly design. It looks like an octopus on roller skates.
Yet it’s by no means the worst vehicle an architect has ever designed. Check out, for instance, Zaha Hadid’s Z Car from a couple of years ago. “Concept vehicle” is the right term here, as it’s only really suited to a virtual road in an imaginary city in a big budget sci-fi movie. Drive that in a real British town and its pristine curves would be spattered with mud and scarred with parking scrapes in no time. But then that’s what happens when your car has no bumpers or mudguards. Not to mention headlights, windscreen wipers, or any of those other dull little details that clutter up conventional cars. You’re better off with a Sinclair C5.
If Norman Foster’s design for a new London bus to replace the Routemaster really does happen in 2012, it’ll be a first. Not the first London bus to ever arrive on time, but the first time an architect has successfully designed a motor vehicle. The fact is, while architects are fine at designing chairs, tableware, even earrings, when it comes to automobiles, their efforts are usually flawed, if not just plain laughable.
You can judge how Foster and his peers did at a new exhibition at the London Transport Museum, displaying the winners of Boris Johnson’s New Bus for London competition (they shared first prize with Capoco), and 50 other entries – including one by architects Future Systems. Jan Kaplicky, who died last month, will be missed, but there are many things we’ll miss him more for than this frankly ugly design. It looks like an octopus on roller skates.
Yet it’s by no means the worst vehicle an architect has ever designed. Check out, for instance, Zaha Hadid’s Z Car from a couple of years ago. “Concept vehicle” is the right term here, as it’s only really suited to a virtual road in an imaginary city in a big budget sci-fi movie. Drive that in a real British town and its pristine curves would be spattered with mud and scarred with parking scrapes in no time. But then that’s what happens when your car has no bumpers or mudguards. Not to mention headlights, windscreen wipers, or any of those other dull little details that clutter up conventional cars. You’re better off with a Sinclair C5.
In the early days of the 20th century, architects eulogised motor vehicles, both for their functional beauty and their utterly modern manufacturing processes. It was inevitable that trailblazing modern architects would try their hand at them. Le Corbusier admittedly came up with a radical new shape for his Voiture Minimum, in 1929, but that was really all he bothered to think about – the shape. How such a thing would actually work he left to others, like André Lefèbvre and Flaminio Bertoni, designer of the remarkably similar Citroen 2CV. It’s a similar story with Adolf Loos’s back-of-envelope design for a new Lancia. Except one look and it’s clear why it was never built: it’s the ugliest thing on four wheels.
Others wisely stuck to pimping existing rides. Bauhaus head Walter Gropius did some rather elegant coachwork for the Adler Standard in the late 1930s. And Frank Lloyd Wright, arguably architecture’s greatest car nut, attempted to restyle existing models to suit his own brand identity. Let loose on a 1940 Lincoln Continental, his “improvements” included slicing off half the roof, filling in the rear window, lowering the front windscreen and painting the whole thing a ghetto-fabulous bright orange. He was the Westwood of his day.
Perhaps architects are secretly jealous of automobiles. Cars reduce architecture to mere background. Buildings will never mimic their mobility and their freedom. All they can do is stand still and watch. Cars still need architecture, though, to accommodate their factories and to park in front of for their glossy adverts. Many an architect has benefited from the big manufacturers’ desire for buildings that reflect their prestige marques. You can pair them up: Zaha and Co-Op Himmelblau with BMW, UN Studio with Mercedes, Massimiliano Fuksas with Ferrari, Future Systems with Maserati and so on. And let’s not forget Foster and McLaren. And Foster and Renault.
here is one architect, however, who really took car design seriously, and who really did succeed in reinventing the wheel: Richard Buckminster Fuller. True to fashion, Fuller rethought the automobile from first principles, and came up with the amazing Dymaxion Car, a smooth, three-wheeled aerodynamic torpedo. It beat conventional cars hands down when it came to efficiency, visibility, manoeuvrability, spatial efficiency and many other aspects. It still looks way ahead of its time today. Fuller tested prototypes and was ready to go into production, but a funny thing happened on the way to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933. The Dymaxion Car was involved in a collision with another vehicle that killed its driver. The other vehicle was allegedly driven by a politician, and was removed from the scene before reporters got there. Fuller got all the blame, and even though he was later exonerated, the damage was done, and the Dymaxion Car remains a curious dead end.
A glimpse of the future … The 1934 Dymaxion by Buckminster Fuller. Photograph: Getty Images
Foster and Partners have wisely played it safe. For one thing, they teamed up with Aston Martin for their London Bus. Also, they’ve not departed too far from the original Routemaster design. They have reinstated the popular “health and safety be damned” open rear platform, and the facing benches inside, but updated the design with rounded off bodylines and maximum glass. There are also new features, like a solar-panelled roof and a central ramp entrance for wheelchairs and pushchairs. “We wanted to change people’s image of the bus as just something for getting across the city,” says Foster partner Alistair Lenczner. “The idea was to make it a more social sort of bus, where people felt free to interact with each other. A sort of roving living room.” Tellingly, the architects extensively consulted drivers, conductors and actual punters about what sort of vehicle they’d like – a simple step that seems to have slipped the minds of most other architect-car designers. Let’s see if they actually get the thing built. If they don’t, I’m catching the first Dymaxion out of here.
Steve Rose
Guardian
It is probable that at 101 years old, Oscar Niemeyer, the guru of modernist architecture whose greatest project was the city of Brasilia, is old enough to withstand disappointment, even as large as the one he has just suffered. He thought he was on course to adorn the city’s skyline with one last flourish. But now, suddenly, he isn’t.
Brasilia, widely considered an architectural masterwork and an unparalleled urban catastrophe, will turn 50 next year and it had seemed natural that it should fall to Niemeyer, who is still working at the cusp of his second century, to come up with a suitable new monument to mark the occasion.
Thus was born his blueprint for the “Plaza of Sovereignty”, involving two structures bang in the middle of Brasilia’s main ceremonial avenue, the Monumental Axis. As drawn by Niemeyer it consisted of a 1,000ft curving spike resembling the fin of a spaceship, and a low building before it in the shape of a shallow new moon. It was classic Oscar, a bold gesture of bombast and supple curves in concrete and cement.
To call Niemeyer beloved in Brazil is to get nowhere near describing his stature. An exile in Europe for 21 years during his country’s military dictatorship and still today a self-described communist, he was honoured by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who declared 2008 the Year of Oscar Niemeyer to mark his centenary.
But no sooner had the master architect unveiled his plan, than the complaints started. On blogs, in newspapers and magazines, fellow architects and preservationists fretted that the Plaza would just not do.
It would block the sightlines of central Brasilia and might violate regulations about the preservation of open space between the buildings, many of which Niemeyer designed, including theBrasilia Cathedral and the Ministry of Justice.
Acampaign was launched to protect Niemeyer from himself. “What we normally see is an architect interfering in the work of another architect,” said Sylvia Fischer of the University of Brasilia. “In Niemeyer’s case, he is interfering negatively in his own work. It will be Oscar Niemeyer fighting Oscar Niemeyer.”
In the 1950s, President Juscelino Kubitschek ordered the construction of a new capital on open, unpopulated savannah at 3,500ft, fulfilling a constitutional requirement that the government leave Rio de Janeiro. The task of conjuring the new city fell to the French-born urban planner Lucio Cost, who turned to Niemeyer to provide the plans for myriad buildings, from ministries to housing blocks.
Though now populated by more than two million, Brasilia was condemned by many for being pretentious but inhuman, shortcomings described by Simone de Beauvoir who attended its inauguration in 1960. “What possible interest could there be in wandering about?” she asked. “The street, that meeting ground of ? passers-by, of stores and houses, of vehicles and pedestrians ? does not exist in Brasilia and never will.”
Theblueprint for the Plaza of Sovereignty was presented to the governor of Brasilia, Jose Roberto Arruda, two weeks ago. “The monument will have a triangle shape to show progress the country has achieved,” Niemeyer said then. “It is designed to perplex whoever looks at it.”
Yet by last week, word was coming from the governor’s office that there was no money to build the Plaza, nor had there ever been. And in a letter to the Correio Braziliense newspaper, Niemeyer said he was ready to give up on ever building the Plaza. But forgive an old man for feeling frustrated.
“In my last visit,” he wrote, “I could feel with clarity the need to create a plaza on a compatible scale with the capital of a country so admired such as our own.”
David Usborne
The Independent
Most human vices have enough sense to be very, very tempting. Lust, gluttony, sloth, hurling powerful if unimaginative expletives at a member of the political opposition, buying a pair of Thierry Rabotin snakeskin printed shoes at 25 percent off even though you just bought a pair of cherry-red slingbacks last week — all these things feel awfully good to indulge in, which is why people must be repeatedly abjured not to.
One vice, however, dispenses with any hedonic trappings and instead feels so painful you would think it was a virtue, except that there’s no gain in lean muscle mass at the end: envy. Skulking at sixth place on traditional lists of the seven deadly sins, right between wrath and pride, envy is the deep, often hostile resentment you feel toward somebody who has something you want, like wealth, beauty, a promotion or the admiration of peers. It is a vice few can avoid yet nobody craves, for to experience envy is to feel small and inferior, a loser shrink-wrapped in spite.
“Envy is corrosive and ugly, and it can ruin your life,” said Richard H. Smith, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky who has written about envy. “If you’re an envious person, you have a hard time appreciating a lot of the good things that are out there, because you’re too busy worrying about how they reflect on the self.”
Now researchers are gleaning insights into the neural and evolutionary underpinnings of envy, and why it can feel like a bodily illness or a physical blow. They’re also tracing the pathway of envy’s equally petty foil, the sensation of schadenfreude — taking pleasure when those whom you envied are themselves brought down low.
Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan and their colleagues described brain-scanning studies of subjects who were told to imagine themselves as protagonists in social dramas with characters of greater or lesser status or achievement. When confronting characters that the participants admitted to envying, brain regions involved in registering physical pain were aroused: the higher the subjects rated their envy, the more vigorously flared the pain nodes in the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and related areas.
Conversely, the researchers said, when subjects were given a chance to imagine the golden one’s downfall, the brain’s reward circuits were activated, again in proportion to the strength of envy’s sting: the subjects who felt the greatest envy the first time around reacted to news of their rival’s misfortune with a comparatively livelier response in the dopamine-rich pleasure centers of, for example, the ventral striatum. “We have a saying in Japanese, ‘The misfortunes of others are the taste of honey,’ ” said Hidehiko Takahashi, the first author on the report. “The ventral striatum is processing that ‘honey.’ ”
Matthew D. Lieberman of the psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-wrote a commentary that accompanies the report, said he was impressed by how the neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude were tied together, with the magnitude of one predicting the strength of the other. “This is the way other needs-processing systems like hunger and thirst work,” he said. “The hungrier or thirstier that you feel, the more pleasurable it is when you finally eat or drink.”
The new findings are preliminary, and some scientists have expressed reservations about what they or other scanning results from the fast-moving field of behavioral neuroscience really mean. Nevertheless, the research throws a spotlight on a potent emotion that we deny or deride but ignore at our peril. Much of the recent economic crisis, Dr. Smith suggested, may well have been fueled by runaway envy, as financiers competed to avoid the shame of being a “mere” millionaire.
Envy can be seen in other social animals with personal reputations to defend. Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta noted that monkeys were perfectly happy to work for cucumber slices until a person started giving one monkey a preferred treat like grapes. Then the others stopped working for cucumbers and started nursing a grudge. “The underlying emotion is likely envy or resentment,” Dr. de Waal said.
When children realize they have siblings, their lives become dominated by the calipers of envy. Why does she always get to sit by the window? His cupcake has more sprinkles! No siblings? No problem: you can envy the cat.
Researchers often distinguish between envy and the jealousy you feel by, say, seeing a loved one flirt at a party. Jealousy is a triangle, Dr. Smith said, in which you fear losing a loved one to the embrace of another. Envy is a two-bodied affair, an arrow proceeding from your covetous breast to the heart of the well-endowed Other. Yet envy is restless and gregarious and can embrace popular cliques, honor rolls and entire nation-states. “It’s a fact of life that we pay close attention to status, to who’s doing well and who isn’t and how we stand in comparison to others,” said Colin W. Leach, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, who studies envy.
As a rule, we envy those who are like us in most ways — in sex, age, class and curriculum vitae. Potters envy potters, Aristotle observed.
Paradoxically, this most socially driven of emotions is among the least socially acceptable to confess to. Jealous hostility toward a romantic rival is an acceptable topic for conversation. Envious hostility toward a professional rival is more like an embarrassing body function: please do not share. When asked by researchers about their envy, study participants have said, “I’m privately ashamed of myself.”
As evolutionary scientists see it, envy’s salient features — its persistence and universality, its fixation with social status and the fact that it cohabits with shame — suggest that it serves a deep social role. They propose that our invidious impulses may help explain why humans are comparatively less hierarchical than many primate species, more prone to a rough egalitarianism and to rebelling against kings and tycoons who hog more than their fair share.
Envy may also help keep us in line, making us so desperate to look good that we take the high road and start to act good, too. We struggle with our private envy, our longing for more esteem than we command, and the struggle only sharpens the painful contrast between the imagined perfection of the envied adversary that we have enshrined on an imaginary throne, and the defective merchandise that is ourselves.
“If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon,” Bertrand Russell said. “But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.” If envy is a tax levied by civilization, it is one that everyone must pay.
Natalie Angier
New York Times
The RAND report — which is truly worth the detour — is first and foremost a literature review. Its authors have painstakingly trawled through the vast and scattered sources that address why cultural activity is — or more accurately may possibly be — of value; classified that literature (economic, social, psychological, aesthetic etc.); and then sought to give a broad account of how robust are the conclusions of the various studies.
They conclude, as others have before them, but never with such crushing evidential force, that the recent literature is a bit flaky, and that the wilder claims for the social and economic impact of the arts are overblown. This is not surprising. Much of the literature was generated in the context of the ruthless pursuit of money rather than the fearless pursuit of truth. Its purpose is not to increase the sum of human understanding but to persuade particular constituencies (usually public sector funders) in particular contexts (a capital project, a fiscal crisis) to maintain or increase levels of financial support.
I doubt many of the authors cited thought they were carrying responsibility for the intellectual underpinning of the Enlightenment. Their job was to play on the sensibilities of a particular group of decision makers. The arts constituency has been extremely successful in raiding the budgets of adjacent and better funded policy areas – education, urban renewal, tourism etc…
Some of the instrumental arguments are obviously a bit of stretch. Others are obviously true. But the arcane and (pace RAND) flawed methodologies employed rarely generate conclusions that are not accessed more easily, convincingly and cheaply by the application of common sense.
The overall ‘impact’ of the instrumental enterprise has been to leave the sector over-hyped, over-extended and cowering as it waits to be found out. Hence the reaction within the sector to the RAND report – “So whose side are you guys on then?” I got the same reaction to the debate on the same issues that we got going in the UK in 2003 and referenced in the right-hand sidebar to this blog. My perspective, like Midori’s, was that it’s not ‘either instrumental or intrinsic’ but that there are a wide range of arguments that apply differentially to a wide range of cultural activities and seeking to fit the whole of cultural endeavor into a single straight-jacket is both uncomfortable and unhelpful.
The current preoccupation with re-grounding the arguments for the public support of cultural activity is a result of this gut-churning awareness by the arts policy community that the hard-won gains in arts funding have been, in large part, as a result of aggressive but shakily-grounded lobbying. The re-grounding, heralded by the RAND authors and others like John Holden, as and when it happens – incrementally, awkwardly, partially — will bring with it not only changes in the gross level of arts funding but changes in the type of organizations and activities funded. This is no bad thing and indeed rather exciting.
My gripe with the current preoccupation with this vast literature and its methodological shortcomings is that it is something of a side show. This is not primarily because, as the RAND report demonstrates, the re-grounding of economic and social arguments in more analytically defensible research methodologies would take a long time and cost a lot of money that could be better spent elsewhere – though this is undoubtedly the case. It is primarily because the cultural sector seems to feel the need to hold itself to higher (or maybe just odder) evidential standards than other sectors – for example, health, environment, or education. In these sectors, the academic preoccupation is not with, for example, what health can do for urban regeneration or tourism, but with the policies required to ensure a healthy community.
If we stopped looking so neurotically for epiphenomena — the impact of the arts on X, Y and Z — and diverted our attention to what constitutes — say — a vibrant cultural community: what distribution of what art forms, what forms of participation etc. — and if we could come up with well grounded answers to this question, I suspect that those answers would be significantly more compelling to the decision-makers we lobby than another damned economic impact study. We would spend less time waiting for the other shoe to drop as decision makers discover what we already knew and what the RAND report has spelled out in merciless detail. And we would address some of the patently daft misallocations of scarce resources that our shakily-grounded arguments for the arts have encouraged, such as the resource-draining building boom we are emerging from, which has left the sector over-expanded, under-capitalized and with a fundamentally and adversely altered ratio of fixed to variable costs.
Adrian Ellis
Arts Journal
