AND A MICROPHONE

Architect Sekou Cooke spoke last month in support of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, a survey exhibit he curated at the New York Center of Architecture in 2019. He authored a manifesto on the subject, The Fifth Pillar: A Case for Hip Hop Architecture, in 2014, and is completing a book about it. I didn’t visit the show, which sounded gimmicky, but in photographs, and in Cooke’s presentation, the work collected has power and presence.

So it’s strange that in both speech and in writing Cooke is reluctant to define what hip-hop architecture (HHA) actually is. In the article, after failing to find an adequate definition for “architecture,” he moves on to describe hip-hop as a “subculture” that is at its core countercultural and multi-disciplinary. At the lecture, when someone asked what the formal ideas behind HHA were, its Five Points, he paused, sighed tiredly, and said only that hip-hop architecture was many things, that it really had no rules.

This echoes the words of Deconstructivists. And, formally, HHA might be the inverse of what that movement was. If Deconstructivism, in architecture, suggested forms coming apart centripetally, broken into smaller shards and sucked away into a vast neutral field, then the works Cooke showed might be understood as forms coming together centrifugally, of different parts from different places fitted together within a sliver of space in a city to make a vital new thing. That new thing is characterized by sculptural movement, calligraphic ornament, and percussive rhythm.

The most beautiful works Cooke showed were from his own studio, a series of models made by 3D printing the mass of an existing single-family house while spinning the printer. The resulting forms are bright and bold, human scaled, and accepting and recharging an existing vernacular. Architecture is made, ultimately, of forms and materials, not of ideas. There’s an architecture here; let’s look at it.

August 30, 2020 by Nalina Moses

FIRST LOVE

The movie Columbus, shot on site in the Indiana city, is about a young woman who has trouble leaving her home and her hometown, where she’s tantalized by the celebrated modern monuments around her. When a well-known professor of architecture is hospitalized there, his son and his protege visit, befriend her, and hatch a plan.

The movie is shot almost entirely in one-point perspective, an optical scheme in which all orthogonal lines meet at a fixed point on the horizon, so the viewer is always looking flat onto a surface or deeply into a space. It’s a vantage that gives the city’s iconic twentieth-century buildings a grave formal beauty. The landscapes, lush late-summer lawns and ancient hardwood trees, are rendered similarly. The scenes, firmly and quietly composed, hold the buildings and grounds still so the characters can roam freely in front of them.

The story unfolds slowly with generous spaces and silences that are unusual in an American film. We see that the young woman does not feel secure, the son does not feel loved, and the protege stifles any feelings that might arise. We see that all three characters are slightly unmoored and slightly enamored of one another. They move together and then apart, until they reach a kind of social detente.

Columbus is the only movie I know that shows what it’s like to love a building. Not to find supreme beauty in it, but to be sustained by it. Each night the young woman leaves the home she shares with her mother and drives to Deborah Berke’s Irwin Union Bank, a small, elegant building with a bold parti and deceptively banal detailing. At night its upper floor – a glowing cantilevered bar – casts a cool blue light across the lot below, where the heroine sits on the hood of her car. This building is the only one part of her world that makes sense, that is correctly ordered, that gives her a home. This is a power of architecture, to hold one together, that’s rarely expressed.

Deborah Berke Partners, Irwin Union Bank, Columbus IN, 2009

May 05, 2020 by Nalina Moses

TALKING OF MICHELANGELO

The first half of The Two Popes, a movie about the friendship and rivalry between Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis, is screamingly beautiful, offering astounding views of Rome, Vatican City and Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence. Watching, one feels goddess-like, peering into a resplendent private world.

But then the overall formal beauty of the movie starts to oppress. In flashbacks we see Frances as a young priest in Buenos Aires forging a prudent and costly alliance with the fascist government, and then exiled in rural southern Spain. These scenes are shot in recognizable movie styles: the city in a romantic black-and-white, like Casblanca, and the country in flat acrid tones, like The French Connection. These palettes aren’t linked to any spirit, but serve as tinny pop cultural references.

When Benedict, the reigning Pope, calls Francis to the Sistine Chapel one morning, before public hours, to broach his voluntary retirement, the opulence of the surroundings feels slightly obscene. The room is empty and floodlit, the frescoes rendered in crisp candy colors like wallpaper. One marvels at the architectural spectacle rather than the anguish in the human figures stretched across the ceiling or sitting quietly below.

This scene made me remember my own experience at The Vatican. While waiting in line to enter an older man, dressed in a fine pinstriped grey wool suit that hung off his ravaged frame, threw himself from his wheelchair and crawled on elbows to the altar. There’s no expression of faith like that in this movie. Even Francis, a complex, articulate, and self-questioning priest, doesn’t emerge as a full-blooded person. He gets lost in the surroundings.

April 08, 2020 by Nalina Moses

A BRAND NEW UGLY

There’s lots of talk about beauty, but what about ugly? That which doesn’t possess beauty can be simply insipid, unimpressive, unimportant, while something truly ugly possesses its own power. It agitates, upsets expectations.

OMA’s new building for luxury retailer Galleria in Seoul is ugly. Popping up in my twitter stream among prettily groomed interiors and houses, the masonry behemoth had a beastly presence. The structure’s dark outer skin is split by a run of faceted glass windows that swells like a cancerous growth at an outer corner. Its facade has no grid, no consistent measure except for its small stone triangular tiles, which blend like pixels into mud-colored strata. Its palette of dark stone and garish sea-green glass is unharmonic. The volume is rich in associations, none particularly flattering, and none architectural. This building reminds one of a geographical specimen, a molten chocolate desert, a subterranean mammal.

But one can’t mistake this for bad architecture. It’s complex, vivid and deliberate. It makes no attempt to look like a building, veering courageously from convention, particularly in the service of a luxury retailer peddling established European brands. This building is admirably ugly; it might even be deeply ugly. Is it arriving ahead of a larger wave, forecasting a new normal? And is it quietly dismantling some flaw in our thinking, pushing us towards a new beauty?

Photograph courtesy of OMA.

April 07, 2020 by Nalina Moses