Eva Hagberg

Dark Nostalgia

Dropping September 29, 2009. Monacelli Press.

Dreamland Review (LOFT)

Published Spring 2009 in LOFT

Although architecture is not generally a numbers game, there is a very high probability of any given architect having read Delirious New York.

First published in 1978 and written by the now seminally- ahead-of-the-trend Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, this book was introduced as “A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.”

In his relatively short and surprisingly easy-to-read tract, written long before he co-founded Volume Magazine with the theoretician Mark Wigley, long before he wrote that other great book SMLXL and introduced shopping as a critical and architectural idea, and long before he started breaking ground in then-mysterious China with his loopily geometric CCTV Tower, Koolhaas outlined the way in which cities – Manhattan specifically – developed, changed, and grew.

Delirious New York became a textbook for the next generation – always generally, often literally, and it put this young Dutch architect on the critical and practical world map. Over the next thirty years, Koolhaas’s Rotterdam-based firm OMA became a touchstone for young architects, any employment there a stamp of approval not only of their creative capacity but also of their infinite patience for endless hours in the model shop and serious hardcore work ethic. And, over the next thirty years, Delirious New York, particularly its dreamy, dark renderings by the early-century illustrator Hugh Ferriss, became canon.

It is only fitting, then, that it is a speculative project of Koolhaas’s – the watercolor Plan of Dreamland, created the year before Delirious was published – that sparked this small and wonderful exhibition up until March 2, 2009 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. 

David Rockwell: The Storyteller (Wallpaper*)

Published December 2008, Wallpaper*

It’s 1967. And David Rockwell is a New Jersey boy who loves community theater and the beach, probably in that order. His mother and stepfather are a vaudeville dancer and a business entrepeneur, in charge of four older boys, and that year seems like a good year to get out of Deal. ‘My father decided to sell the house and within eight weeks of talking about moving we were in a station wagon driving to Guadelajara, Mexico,’ says Rockwell, telling this one of a hundred stories on a hot August afternoon in his Union Square office. David Rockwell is all about stories.

‘That was the best way to move,’ he continues. It’s good to know he was happy, but this isn’t a story about relocation and how it affects the family. This is a story about how David Rockwell, now 52, makes the playful, engaging, literally theatrical (in that it has to do with theater and its cuts and scenes and stages and transitions) architecture he does, and maybe even why. 

‘It was all public space,’ he says of that first trip. ‘All of the life happened in marketplaces, and in the space between different buildings.’ Rockwell is looking back in what he calls the ‘rearview mirror’ of his life and filing all the events into a narrative that can explain his work today. And it’s clear, looking at Rockwell’s colorful, often outsized and always entertaining work, that this first introduction to public space, and that eleven-year-old’s observation that most of the interesting stuff happens on the periphery and in the places between, that he has been working and re-working that idea ever since.

Brad Cloepfil: Mad Men (Wallpaper*)

Published December 2008

The way Brad Cloepfil tells it, when he and Terence Riley -- former architecture and design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and current director of the Miami Art Museum -- met, Riley gave Cloepfil a word of advice. This aw-shucks thing? Riley, all smooth edges and polished words said to the blond and blue-eyed Cloepfil, an Oregonian who would very clearly never truly leave his green and chilled-out state. It wouldn’t last. 

Aw-shucks might have been one way of describing Cloepfil’s rejection of the usual tropes of architectural discussion, in which the questions asked and answers given rarely make any sense whatsoever, in which architects sketch wordlessly to music by way of explaining their bridges and others play a convoluted game of “Who’s on First?” with anyone asking for a concrete answer. Complete dedication to the actual practice of architecture itself might have been another.

Cloepfil tells the story on a Monday afternoon at his Morrison Street office in Portland, a city so beloved by Americans interested in urban planning – not only for its completely forward-thinking urbanism, one of controlled sprawl and appreciation for civilized togetherness, but for its trees and hills and grassy greens and coffee. It’s easy to see why, even though he’s made it in New York, he calls this Oregon city home.

The narrative is the stuff of story. Ten years ago, Brad Cloepfil was a forty-year-old architect with two kids and just as many employees. He’d done a few projects here and there, the best one so far a bar called Saucebox. That’s where the Wieden + Kennedy kids went to drink after they were done for the day with their ads for Nike and Miller High Life, and it’s where, one day, after rounds and rounds of meetings with architects who weren’t quite cutting it, one of them looked around and said “Hey, who did this place?”

Art Goes Apocalyptic (Wallpaper*)

Published in Wallpaper* November 2008

New Yorkers love to practice the destruction of their city. The Will Smith-fights-vampires movie I Am Legend showed, again and again, a desolate Times Square, lions ripping up deer flesh while grasses whispered in a space currently alive with five-abreast tourists gawking at Sex & the City ads. J J Abrams’ Cloverfield imagined a monster ripping through the city with the force of a thousand furies. And the War of the Worlds had Tom Cruise just across the river, watching cracks in the streets open up for attacking aliens. It’s a post-9/11 condition, this desire to rehearse, prepare for and control our destruction before it happens. At the same time, we’ve become obsessed with the Greenmarket, with eating locally, seasonally, with sustainable futures, with trying to be as close to a Michael Pollan version – “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” -- of an omnivore as we can. It seems like two completely separate channels, but three art events this summer only showed that our love for nature and our obsession with the apocalypse are, in fact, closely entwined.

After Nature is a brilliant show put on by the New Museum, suddenly a big hitter since the opening of their SANAA-designed building last December. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni and curatorial assistant Jarrett Gregory, After Nature uses a Werner Herzog film and a W.G. Sebald essay as starting-off points for a series of pieces that explore how the world might be, once nature is something we remember rather than look forward to. The works span aesthetics and media, sharing only polemic drive. A tree sawed apart and put back together with massive brackets and screws by the artist Zoe Leonard makes you realize the inanity of the idea that nature needs our help to survive, while a piece by Tino Sehgal in which a series of dancers writhe on the floor -- changing every two hours with a few minutes of synced-up overlap – is, through its face-to-face (or body-to-body) communication, about the translatability of oral history. It implies that, one day not so far away, person-to-person contact might be the only technology we’ve got.

Luck of the Draw (Wallpaper*)

Published in Wallpaper* November 2008

Alan Aldridge is so LA. It’s taken a while for him to become so LA – answering the door to his La Brea Park apartment in bare feet, hair dyed black and slicked back, stereo playing music that would fit just as well in a raucous yoga class as in this spare art-decorated space – but he made it. It’s taken a few career shifts, a few absurd stories, and one self-described Machiavellian move, but Aldridge is settled in this fair city of angels. And, after years as a Hollywood screenwriter, Aldridge is back to his art.

Aldridge designed this month’s magazine cover and, when we speak a bright August afternoon, is about to start designing the word “Wallpaper.” He doesn’t really have a plan for how it’ll go – “when it’s right it just hits” – and he’s not really worried about having to get ready for a big retrospective of his work slated to open this October at the Design Museum London –“it’s not a problem.” Mostly, right now, he wants to tell the story of how he got here.

Carbon Footprint (Metropolis)

Published September 2008 (link)

It is probably a bad idea to drive a Hummer to a Scandic Hotel. It is probably a bad idea to leave it idling while you run in looking for a single-packed toiletry item (which you won’t find) and an equally bad idea to ask the staff to change your sheets every night. It is definitely a bad idea to ask for your own hermetically sealed packet of jam at breakfast (you won’t get it) or not to separate your trash from your recycling (because it means the hotel has to do it for you).

It might seem like a lot to ask of guests, but taking a hard line on some choices, and a gentler, encouraging touch with others, is all part of the Swedish chain’s program to reduce its carbon emissions to zero. The company is giving itself a little bit of time to get there—“By 2025, we shall not contribute to the carbon emissions at all with our operations,” says Jan Peter Bergkvist, the vice president for sustainable business—but Scandic is trying. And so far, its efforts are working. 

Click on Scandic’s Sustainability Live Report on its Web site (www.scandichotels.com) to see a delightfully graphic tally of “the environmental savings we have made since 1996.” For now, the company shows the numbers for four target systems—measuring consumption levels for energy, water, unsorted waste, and fossil carbon dioxide—a framework created by the Natural Step, an international NGO dedicated to improving corporate sustainability. For now, you can calculate the environmental gains from your Scandic sojourn (achieved by drinking the tap water, sharing the jam, and staying in a place heated and lit by alternative energy sources) by clicking on how many nights you’d like to stay and seeing just how many lightbulbs pop up. That number is compared to a benchmark released by the International Tourism Partnership, a hotel-industry NGO set up by the Prince of Wales Trust. They’re not exact, but they’re close enough that Scandic can tell that it’s making a difference. 

John Powers: Captain America

John Powers: Captain America

Maiden Lane Exhibition Space, 125 Maiden Lane, New York

Up through January 30, 2009

Suburbs (Architectural Record)

Published September 2008

Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000, by John Archer. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 496 pages, $27.50

Sprawling Places, by David Kolb. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2008, 267 pages, $22.95.

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, by Fritz Haeg. New York, Metropolis Books, 2008, 128 pages, $24.95

Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, edited by Andrew Blauvelt,  Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 2008, 336 pages, $34.95

A brilliant scene in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian finds a crowd chanting, in complete unison, “We are all individuals! We are all individuals!” One man, standing slightly aside, says, as if perplexed, “I’m not.”

Scholars, writers, artists, architects, urbanists, and now, a subset of thinkers we could just as well call suburbanists, seem to be in the same situation. Entranced by the idea that citizens – suburban, rural, and urban alike -- are all convinced that the suburbs are all the same, they shout, together, “The suburbs are all individuals!”

Four recent books – two by academics, two not – address that individuality of sameness of the suburb: how it came to be, what it can be, what it could be, and how we can (and should) look at it. Three of them address the suburbs as fact, and seem to say: “History happened, we’re here, now let’s play with it.” But what is that history? 

Read John Archer's book Architecture and Suburbia to find out. Really. Read it. Ignore the standard-sounding title, its bland cover, its academic origins, the fact that it has footnotes. It is quietly fascinating, engagingly thorough, and completely riveting.

Archer's narrative takes social history and renders it architectural, explaining how a seventeenth-century interest in notions of selfhood turns into an eighteenth-century obsession with privies, and then transforms, centuries later, into that developed same-same suburb. Ideas we take for granted -- the family that eats dinner together stays together, separate bathrooms save a marriage -- are traced back here, not only philosophically and historically, but visually as the book is full of plans and sections and illustrations that show exactly how Enlightenment philosophy translated into a room for the resident male, or how General Electric's need to sell more stoves turned into the American obsession with "the dream house."

Architecture and Suburbia is not only about architecture and suburbia. It is about how we think, how we live, and how we want to live. It is about how architecture -- even when it might not look like much -- is the outward articulation of our deepest questions, a physical sign of our search for answers, and, in the end, a symbol of it all.

The philosopher David Kolb is entranced by the symbol. Suburbs are not monolithic," he writes in his new book Sprawling Places. This tract-tome (it was right there!) sure is.

Boundary Issues (New York Times T: Style Magazine)

Published September 28, 2008 (link)

Architecture is, by definition, site-specific. In some buildings, however, the idea of site transcends the physicality of landscape to engage with the environment on multiple levels — emotional, spiritual, conceptual. For example, the guesthouse that the architect Brad Cloepfil designed for a couple of art collectors in upstate New York doesn’t just sit nicely next to a bubbling brook, in its bucolic, sun-dappled setting. With its articulated steel frame and sleek wood paneling, the 1,200-square-foot house plays off its densely wooded hillside setting, flipping back and forth between shelter and openness, protection and enclosure, inside and out.

‘‘We spent a lot of time just reading the landscape,’’ says Cloepfil, who was commissioned to design not just the guesthouse but also the main house and an art barn. The architect walked around all 350 acres of this hilly, winding property, siting the main house (which is still under construction) first and situating the guesthouse just down the road but completely out of view. The land itself was a big inspiration. ‘‘The meadows look almost like they’re carved out of the forest,’’ Cloepfil says, describing the trees as a ‘‘field of black lines against the foliage.’’