Yo. It’s, erm, 2008. Back at school, trying to wrap it all up and get it out the fucking door — “it” being the entirety of my graduate education, of course. You can sort of see what it looks like here; at the moment, there are a billion little unraveling minutiae to be dealt with: bureaucratic, social, financial, emotional, physiological… and of course my struggle to contend with all of them is wonderfully enriched by the overbearing fact that the genesis of each of these dumb little things, originally, was a fuck-up or oversight on my part. Like forgetting to fill out a super-important form, or sleeping through my alarm when I had an important meeting… Blech. It sucks. The whole mess simply will not die quietly, much like a zombie, or the Cloverfield monster. It’s been a rough two months or so.

See why I’ve been keeping my blog-mouth shut?? So. Anyway I will spare you the worst of the retarded gripes. But so, what I have for you is this: last night, I had to do a bunch of writing excercises, and to distract myself late at night, I concocted the following design-music-cosmology system. I’ll dish up more stuff soon, now that classes have started again and I am therefore less droolingly antisocial. Fuck yes.

…

So. LET:

architecture = 80’s pop-rock,
graphic design = hip hop,

THEN:

type design = turntablism,
interior architecture = late 80’s alt-rock,
(… e.g. Atelier van Lieshout = The Pixies)
book design = the Wu-Tang Clan,
poster design = Tupac,
news/editorial design = Biggie,
web design = 50 Cent,
info design = the Ultramagnetic MC’s,
letterpress poster art = Snoop Dogg,

THEREFORE:

Design*Sponge = Russell Simmons.

AND:

urban design and urban planning = 90’s crybaby alt-rock,
contemporary art = American Idol,
furniture design = jazz,
textile design = The cross-genre continuum consisting of everyone ever cited or otherwise referenced by LCD Soundsystem, Mr. Murphy et al and his close associates, and all those who will come after them and rip them off,
apparel design = electroclash.

SO THEN:

package design = the Fugees,
contemporary calligraphy = the Digable Planets,
Felice Varini = Autechre,
exhibit design = Licensed to Ill by the Beastie Boys,

BUT THEN, LET:

structural engineers = rock drummers,
(… e.g. Cecil Balmond = Lars Ulrich, etc)
CAD = MIDI,
O-CAD = MAX/MSP,
BIM and parametric systems = Ableton Live,

THEREFORE:

Frank Gehry = the Postal Service,

AND:

Hektor = Atom and his Package.

FURTHERMORE:

critical theory = reggae,

THEN:

digital ethnography = Shaggy,
contemporary video art = Buju (or maybe Anthony B),
net.art (quote-unquote) = Bob Marley,
architectural theory = Rusted Root (or Dave Matthews, or maybe even 311, or some shit like that),
media theory = Hootie and the Blowfish,
Fluxus = the T-Connection (circa the reign of Kool Herc).

AND THEN:

motion graphics = the Black-Eyed Peas,
just video and film editing = just Fergie,
database design = the Game,
web-nerd non-design stuff = the rest of G-Unit in general,

THUS IT FOLLOWS:

industrial design = delta blues,
magazine design = Octagon-era Kool Keith,
contemporary painting = Will Smith,
contemporary sculpture = Eminem,
Bio-art = Rihanna.

IN CONCLUSION:

DADA = Run-DMC,
surrealism = Check Your Head by the Beastie Boys,
Andy Warhol = Robert Smith,
Marcel Duchamp = Kraftwerk,
Le Corbusier = Paul McCartney,
Robert Moses = John Lennon,
Jane Jacobs = Yoko Ono,
Robert Irwin = Sun-Ra,
Robert Venturi = Led Zeppelin,
Tibor Kalman = Sean Combs,
Benjamin Franklin = Elvis Presley.

Yo. Before I forget, there are many miscellaneous things you should know. I will now list them.

• Bryan and I were up very late indeed making and installing the SPACE ROCKS! poster (as you see above), and it would be great if you came! It’s next Saturday at the GSD, and a bunch of graphic designers and artists, etc, will be speaking about SPACE. And how it ROCKS, no doubt… the full info is here. Indeed!
• In the course of the making of this poster, I paired Johnston ITC with Mr. Barnbrook’s Bastard Fat, which I am like rilly pleased with in some perverse way. I can’t explain that shit. Rilly, you tell me:

• The day after that, though, I got totally busted by the Mason building’s sysadmin for circumventing the school’s print system. He had documentation of how much ink I had (allegedly!) used, down to the microliter or somesuch. So I am now in some serious trouble. Whoops.
• I love ffffound. My paean to it has been up on SpeakUp for a little while, so maybe you knew that, but still. It’s fucking awesome. Yeah.
• My show went up. I call it “my show”, which is wrong, really; I was one of many many participants in what was the graphic design graduate show, which I curated along with Jerlyn and Hoon. So not at all entirely mine (although I did do the identity posters for it) but in my mind I still call it “my show”, however erroneous that might be. Erm. It was a blast, I’ll have you know, yis.
• Through all of these things, I took copious notes on tumblr, where I post both thesis-related and non-thesis-related miscellaneous shit. In the course of our space rocks work bender, Bryan asked me what the value-add of tumblr was, and I described it much as I described ffffound’s allure: more of a value-subtract, really; the lack of control over minutia that you have with most bloggy things (tags, comments, RSS, APIs, etc) make it kind of a pleasure to use. Many of my friends have been using them, because who cares about most blog features? I, for one, could give less of a shit, for the most part, and so yeah hey.
• I got the thirty-inch monitor, like finally, and the ipod touch, on an impulse. Laura pointed out that these are exactly the things I’d throw out my window, if I wanted to make a Yaz record… but frankly I like “Situation” and its ilk as they are, for the moment. The one thing I will always go gaga for is a bigger fucking monitor, and I think I can safely say with this one that I’m good for a little while w/r/t monitor envy and whatnot. Ok. Yes!
• Looking for thesis advisors. Need to find them, like this week. Can’t I summon my recently graduated friends???? Argh.
• Sleep cycle is pretty fucking abnormal. As such I will kill this list now, cuz bleah. But yeah I have to churn out the writing for thesis, so there will be more drivel here soon, I will warn you. Yis!

love ya

-fish

See, back when I wanted to do the double whammy of an architecture degree and a law degree, people would always be like, WTF?? To which I would respond, “Architecture is written in law. Like building codes and whatnot? And I like code, because I’m a geek, and so.” And still, the quizzical expressions of doubt would remain unabated. But look: Andrés Duany suggests suspending code in New Orleans, so that reconstruction can, you know, actually happen for reals. And this one Wes Janz has fantastically illustrated how most of the once-prosperous United States is now a complete hole, due initially to economic factors but now held in place by fucked legal situations.

If I were still an architecture student, I would use this stuff as a starting point for a thorough investigation of the International Building Code, and the cultural and economic normativities that lurk within. I can’t find the fucking link but a few days ago, I saw some article that offhandedly attributed the nature of all the new glass-box condo construction in Vancouver to a specific code exception about the tower’s core and egress stairways and that sort of thing. But I’m a graphic designer, so it’s in your court… All you architecture nerds better drop the bullshit archibabble and subscribe to Harvard Law Review if you know what’s good for you. Fuck yeah.

Blech. So MCAD was great. I saw lots of good shit and also got blisters on my hands from ripping staples out of a wall. We had a raging party in a luxury hotel room, too. All very good. Listened to Jose Gonzales and Girl Talk freakout mixes on loop. It was cold, but not unbearable. Need a real break, tho. Not sure what is going to go on for “spring break”, but you can bet considerable money on the fact that it will be AWESOME.

Also, in case you were curious, OFR was not so great. Or at least, it could have rocked considerably harder, most definately. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, because it would be much easier for me to say “it was awesome”, so that you would feel bad about missing THE EVENT OF THE SEASON and show up for sure at the next jammy jam. But no, rest assured that whatever you did then was an excellent use of your time, indeed.

Now I’m back in the studio. Because that’s what I do, right? It would appear to be the case. OK. Yes. Love you. Right.

-fish

In an interview with Ellen Lupton in 1994, Michael Rock said something about meaning coming from “the forms of design itself”, and mentioned that the aesthetics of letterpress having class identity encoded within. I assume by “the forms of design”, he was referring to the relationship between process and meaning, rite?

Similarly, my drafting critic last fall in the BEB said that each drawing methodology (orthographic, isometric, perspective et cetera) can tell a story, and by privledging different viewpoints, you change the story. Seems obvious when I write that point down here, but it was quite illuminating at the time.

Figures 1 and 2: Two views of my final Design Principles project, Geometric Confusion.

But so this weekend, I was having a drink with Laura on the roof of the Gansevoort Hotel, kicking off a >48h bender of idiotic decadence and intoxication, and I was amused that I could see some brilliantly clean examples from the typology described in Steven Holl’s Pamphlet Architecture number 5, The Alphabetical City. I’ve always been sort of a fan of this book, probably just because it addresses urbanism in terms of type, however formally.

Figure 3. T-shaped airshaft in some building in the meatpacking district.

I could only see this shit, however, cuz I was on the roof of a pricey hotel. Generally this is the case with any sort of planometric design: you have to be high up to actually see what’s what, or be the architect.

Figure 4. The cover of the book in question.

My mom used to be the head of the dance department at Wellesley College, where she worked for almost 20 years. I grew up playing around on its campus, which really is quite elysian and gorgeous. I was always struck, specifically, by the distinctly non-elysian science center. The building is actually a strange mashup of an older building, Sage Hall, and newer construction. When I was a kid, I would enjoy getting lost in there, because it was deliciously disorienting.

I revisited the science center when I was in college, and I was amazed at how completely incoherent it seemed. Bridgelike pathways went everywhere, the signage was kind of nuts, and you couldn’t get to where you thought you could get when you looked around. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really, but hey.

My friend, one of my mom’s students, knew how to get up onto the roof, tho, so we did that in short order. When you looked down into the building through the one of the skylights, it suddenly made a great deal more sense, visually. The crazy bridges were actually radially arranged around a central core. Programmatically separate areas were deliniated cleanly. And so forth.

(At this point in my life I had much to learn of bullshit design language, it should be noted, so I didn’t say anything about programmatically separate areas or radial fuckshit. I just probably blurted, “oh so now it makes sense” or something like that.)

So yeah, you could say that planocentrism (a word I just made up just now) is a class thing, no? And a problem, I think. The idea that a program diagram can become a plan is so tempting, given the nature of drafting technique (including, of course, the methodology enforced by contemporary CAD systems). But people end up looking up at buildings way more often than they look down on them, cuz of gravity and whatnot… one could postulate a class gradient that follows elevation from sea level linearly, as well.

Indeed. As I ranted about two or so years ago, these starchitects enjoy their helicopter rides. At that level, one can free-associate with elaborate metaphor, and talk about a monstrous idea like a city as if it was a painting. Such thinking is constrained by the viewpoint, and makes little sense outside of the narrow socioeconomic strata the thinker is operating in. The upshot, then, is that we get coffeetable books filled with baroque but useless theory, and designers who earnestly believe that they are operating somewhere outside their own navel.

Not like I’m any better, of course; I was up at the rooftop bar having an overpriced mojito with the rest of ‘em. I’m just sayin’. Yeah.

-fish

I saw a picture, the other day, of OMA’s proposal for Park de la Villette. It was in some fancypants hundred-dollar book at spoonbill, of course. and I must say that that shit is completely incoherent. Say what you want about Mr. Tschumi and his wacky deconstruction games… his approach made some sort of semiotic and graphical sense. which is what that shit should be all about, rite? rite. I go for a walk in the park, I am not particularly thinking about the meaning of my context and whatnot. I want pretty flowers, and if they come in the form of a deconstructed cube folly red thing, then hey.

As far as I am concerned these days: architecture is fashion, and urbanism is typography. It kind of kills me that the only work I have come across that highlights anything resembling the latter analogy is that “alphabetical city” pamphlet by Mr. Holl. But it also kills me that you almost can’t get a fucking architect to even say the word “typography”, much less practice it or get the significance. I mean, it is practically a crime that the word, or any of its related conjugants, does not appear on page 216 of “atlas of novel tectonics”. WTFFFFFFF??!?

But yeah anyway. That aside, I like the book, despite the fact that I have heard whispers in the subways that he (Reiser) is a dildo. I have not seen any prima facie evidence of dildoism in the book or on the internet, typographic ignorance notwithstanding, so if you have any such knowlegde please pass it along. Innocent until proven guilty, that’s how it is, yes.

Ok. Yeah. This shit, too, has become incoherent. Time for dinner. Yeah.

-fish

The High Line was urban infrastructure and architecture, in harmony. It came about in accordance with the economic logic of the day, that which produced buildings whose programmatic ties to train-based logistics were physically manifest… the remnants of which can be seen along any of the rundown exurban areas Amtrak’s northeast corridor passes through, where sagging warehouses directly interface with little rusty side-branches of track that split off from the main route. There was no abstraction between commerce, logistics, infrastructure, and architecture… all such interactions were right there, in the open, and quite legible.

Figure 1. High Line train passing through what is now Westbeth Artists’ Community.

… When Bryan had talked about infrastructure in housing as an API, my first thought was something like

Ok yeah, but unless you are stamping like thousands of these things out, all with slightly different structural, logical, and perhaps programmatic requirements, the API idea kind of breaks down, cuz it’s overkill, I mean after all an API is something you use in order to approach a component-based system of structures in a black-box sort of way, whereas in architecture that makes little sense considering the amount of post-construction, errm, dynamism in the system.

… points which, I should mention, a) went unuttered outside of my own bedroom and b) were summarily addressed, more or less, immediately afterwards. But I am always wary when ideas from software engineering are brought into other disciplines, because really most everything in software is metaphor to begin with. That, coupled with the “fail better” mentality fostered by apple-Z and, more recently, the whole agile-development thing, seems like a philosophy that would complicate things faster than it could simplify them.

But fuck that, really, because “complex” and “simple” is probably the worst false dichotomy like ever. The manhattan grid, and later the 1916 zoning law, created (by dint of abstracting the ideas of “city block”, “avenue”, etcetera) a simple system in which people could build shit. This happened to coincide with the advent of individualism in the last century, and the dovetailing of said individualism with rabid hypercapitalism, and so volia, yes, the modular and slightly abstract system made a lot of sense. so people built shit.

The edge cases are the most interesting, tho… like when people want or need to programmatically exceed that system. The inevitable friction between the parties involved when such things are executed is, too, a consequence of the abstraction; if we’re still talking in terms of things like APIs, it’s kind of like “DLL hell” I would say. The almost balletic integration of the High Line with the buildings it serviced does, I will concede, have a nice parallel with the earlier days of computer engineering, before APIs were trans-national legal concerns, when code was written for love, and not much else.

Figure 2. The High Line, immediately prior to the commencement of reconstruction.

Most designers (including myself on most days) would like to ignore the cold, hard, logical fact of the economic context. It is always the thing in the background that drives all of these engineering decisions, whether you’re building an API for software or for plumbing. I mean, the Friends of the High Line are going to end up with a mighty fine bullet-point to lend to nearby luxury condo developers, despite their proclaimed 501(c)(3) status. It looks to be very pretty, yes. But I fear that the simultaneous decoupling of the place, from both its economic and physical contexts, will rob it of its power.

Is this sort of universal abstraction simply the spirit of the times, or is it a fluke of globalization? Who knows. I don’t. If you know, tell me. In the meantime I’ll be reading more Houellebecq, which is what started me thinking about all this nonsense in the first place. Yes.

-fish