ft ground

Support evidence for first argument of Windows Without Buildings.

For all the time I have spent in federal buildings I have never managed to convene in a room with windows. This is strange because the archetypal federal building, dating from the post-war population swell of government bureaucrats but before the retraction into privatization, is outstanding in most city landscapes for having the most windows. Certainly there are all-glass buildings, but these are single gigantic monolithic windows. The federal building is characterized by the Cartesian relentlessness of its glazing subdivision where what is expressed is the window frame rather than the window opening. There couldn’t be a more Kafkaesque resolution to the federal building design problem. A building envelope that fluctuates between communicating the sovereign existence of the individual as one of many or the loss of that individual identity through the homogenization of bureaucracy and bean-counting, all expressed through the primary conveyance of hope in a structure: a window to the sky; and all of this meeting a building whose interior we are fortunate enough to gain access to (sorry K!) only to find that there are no real windows.

Belated feelings of being upstaged by Thos. More lead to the below list of my preferred distractions of 2000-2009:

2000 – IRM – ‘Oedipus Dethroned‘
2000 – Nolan – ‘Memento‘
2001 – Converge – ‘Jane Doe‘
2001 – Lynch – ‘Mulholland Drive‘
2001 – Kurosawa – ‘回路 (Kairo (Pulse))’
2002 – Barney – ‘The Cremaster Cycle (Paris)’
2002 – Sokurov – ‘Русский ковчег (Russian Ark)’
2003 – Darkspace – ‘I’, ‘II’, ‘III’
2003 – Cat Power – ‘You Are Free‘
2004 – Castle – ‘The Stanley Kubrick Archives‘
2005 – the wrk.grp – ‘Marquis: A Post-Dated Picaresque Romp‘
2007 – Coen(s) – ‘No Country For Old Men‘
2007 – Schnabel – ‘Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)’
2009 – Kulper – ‘Texas Range (Austin)’

I recall spending an inordinate amount of time below the horizon in a concrete trench. Even if the proportion of time I recall it occupying is flawed it remains a delightful prompt and a sign-off PK uses a great deal in his ‘e-flares’ to me “from below the horizon.” Like most plains cities (except the terrifyingly blind approach to Chicago from the west) Fort Worth rises up slowly, almost endlessly, from the south. A railroad could make the ascent across the rising peel of its roofscape. It rises so gently that I was dizzied by the immediacy of its presence like the chance palpation of some tumorous mass. “Where did that come from?” It might seem more likely that a city like Pittsburgh erupting out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel nothing would promote the effect more. However the lull of the slow creep towards something improbably contradictory to the surrounding milieu (either of the story (like the drive)) or of the cultural context (a piece of disruptive art that functions by virtue of its exploitation of convention (banality, Koons)) is more unsettling (effective?) to me. I prefer transitions and unapparent distinctions to sore thumbs. I prefer to generate my own stopping points over landmarks and guided tours. I drove straight to the Modern. My head was almost so clear that I didn’t know where I was, where I had just been, or what my hopes were with an empty sky that would be too easy to forget. (more…)

When the only remaining light in the sky seems to be thrown back over the horizon like the strangely peaceful hair of a drowned woman the light in the windows of the studios stacked in the north wall of the courtyard arises. I’ve had an affinity for the archetype of the glowing window at dusk since I worked a construction project on a farm in central Georgia in my early twenties. Their warmth and their ability to telegraph a completely identifiable spatial tone I felt was strong enough to humor the guts like a pull of brandy from a real St. Bernard as I died across the snow from a Swiss chalet and its twinkling purr. Of course that transcendent interior space of milkglass lamps, wood and upholstery settees, and beapron’d grandmothers pulling hot olive boules from the oven to nibble with some Glühwein is a statistically improbable confluence. It is the obstruction of the sheer curtain that makes this illusory phenomenon possible. It both allows the light to escape and protects the reality of the situation. The process of uniformly distributing light across the fabric surface turns the window solid, an object that distinguishes itself from the night air and from the building being consumed by shade. It is alone and it speaks. The windows of the architecture studios weren’t doing quite that. They lacked the sheer curtains and a worm’s eye view of the rooms could be seen through them, mostly ceiling. They still transmitted a uniform glow from bouncing throughout the large white rooms that seemed to hit the glass and stop there, halted by the not-yet-complete darkness of the courtyard. (more…)

Also, as my life continues on, day after day like the grey suit of the genius, the sameness builds up in columns of like items where an occurrence that was long ago a ‘one-off’ is now in a stack of familiars that are warmed by their approaching a constant ‘room temperature’ and ooze together into a single item. That unforgettable visit to the Marquis as a youth, wandering alone to Peachtree Center mall to look at Stephen King books in B. Dalton is now, although still distinct as a base, the beginning of a long dive through what now must be hundreds of visits, no one separable from the others. Conversations, even those with friends or those with stimulating content become grouped together. As Merrill spoke on the terrace over Congress at the Stephen Austin one night I sadly told myself that I would forget every word she said. Unfortunately it is not as easy as flipping the switch to the recording mind. That mind has contextual controls. I don’t think conversations can be picked up this way unless their grain is somehow concurrent with the material of the experience (either reflecting it or shaping it, more likely the latter, see the numerous ‘getting dumped by your fiancé in the Zocalo ruminations’). Conversations are more of a way of marking time. They are necessarily fleeting. They don’t create space. (more…)

Cathy Fox sends out an email every time her site is updated so I only look at perhaps 1% of the material. It is the blog that cried wolf. I had the misfortune to read her alert about urban hikes as art this morning.

In a symbolic reclamation of Atlanta for pedestrians, Stuart Keeler will walk from Midtown to I-285 in each of three performances on December 16, 18 and 21. You are invited to join him. Dressed in primary colors, armed with maps and his cell-phone GPS system, the Atlanta artist (and co-founder of Le Flash) will depart at 9 a.m. on the appointed days at the intersection of Peachtree Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue.

It seems typically suburban-millennial to not recognize that the ‘piece’ you are doing was done 50 years ago in Paris, to not recognize the preposterousness of reclaiming the city streets when your carrying of a gps device is an outright admission that you still fear them, that the thousands of people you champion with far less idle time who make such pedestrian/public transit jaunts every day because they are forced to will either know nothing about what you are doing or would think you were a fool for walking to the perimeter if you didn’t have to, and that the other idle people whose interest might be piqued by your work will never have an interest in reclaiming the streets that they will have to share with the former group. I see this being about as well thought out as your standard balloon-boy, sex-tape, party-crashing ‘happening’ that relies on the notion that if you tell someone about something you are doing loud enough they will find it interesting. i guess that has always been the mo of the art community. i dont know, maybe his drawings will be fresh.

But I enjoyed speaking with him about his own work and the subtleties with which he was approaching it. In academia it is hard to bank on subtleties. Complexity becomes a cipher for labor and thought (not necessarily talking about complexity of form here, but complexity in the constellation of factors that bear the work). No one would argue that the contributing or governing factors behind architecture are not complex. In fact they are and that is the problem. An enormous barrier that must be surmounted is the orchestration of just those givens, the parsing or triage of contributions into a constructed solution that is so fine tuned and appropriate, has fitness, that you can then sculpt the subtleties like light falling on a surface. (more…)

‘The body’, no longer ‘her body’, there in a diorama almost set precisely in an alcove filled out with flowers, two roseate globe lamps and two red-shaded tapers, become as a whole array, a fetish upon which the emotions and memories about the woman are channeled, but try as I might, looking upon the face, not quite right, slightly off, as though molded and coated with the crushed petals of a dry mauve flower, and dust, I could not picture a moving living memory, the body had taken them from me, it was not until later, in bed, that I could ’see’ her laughing, with her partial plate and coffee-rasped throat, because what was there and the way it sat in the room was the hinge point in the forgetting process, where life becomes the caricature of ‘the sleeping body’, of ‘her sleeping body’, and it is at that point you are shaken to abandon your attachment to embodied memories, by depositing them onto the fetish doll, and the final time you turn your back, after all the receptional and conversational dismissals, you leave those desires and applications, and equations of ‘her’ upon ‘it’ and you take her away as a completely memorial construction. (more…)

Most everything north of the Capitol, before I got to West MLK, was closed. An off assortment of daycare centers, old law offices, and a bootmaker lined the street in low-slung 1960s far-past-modernism main street USA storefronts made of deep-raked painted-over brick or stucco with mold constellations. They felt like they were turning their backs on me. The gold foil lettering on the plate glass blistered. I loved stretches like this where the glass was so black and dirty and the spaces so dark or dim that I could place myself in them via reflection and transparency. But also I stop to try to pick something out of their architecture. (more…)

Entering my thesis work I was very concerned, from slights I had felt tremendously injurious in my fully one-summer-long professional career, with the reformation of practice into a more democratic or pluralistic adventure. I foresaw a chorus, or at least some kind of organized chaos where I could make some marks and have them left to be noted by someone who took an interest. But perhaps what shook out of that professional experience was not that I wanted to reform practice, but that I want practice to be reformed. I had learned that I had not the ego strength to run an office, and destined to wallflowerdom in the field I wanted to imbue those peripheries with some kind of voice, an intern’s bill of rights. It is hard for me to recall ten years later what made me nauseous every morning I went to the office. I think at the time I saw it as a personality conflict. But I can see a more lasting reading being the acclimation to loss of control. This was not only the loss of creative control, which I had held to varying results over my five years down of schooling and studies, but the loss of lifestyle control that every person must choke on as they edge into the professional world. It was like a first time smoker suffering through those first several butts. I had to really want to stick to it. Having no interest in acclimating beyond emersion enough to provide me fodder for my intellectual inquiries, the experience made me gag emotionally.

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