Nicholas de Monchaux, an architect and academic who’s written a book on the Apollo spacesuits, wrote a bittersweet farewell to the American space program in the Times.  He sees it as the inevitable end to an arm of the industrial-military complex that’s outserved its purpose.  But he’s nostalgic about the Apollo missions which, although pointedly political, embodied genuine heroism and curiosity.  He recalls handling a spacesuit in the archives at Cape Canaveral, one worn by an astronaut walking the lunar surface, and finding moon dust in the creases.

In the story of how the Apollo spacesuits were developed De Monchaux sees an ideal blend of American ingenuity and determination.  The project engineer for NASA was a former television repair man who recruited seamstresses from Playtex to stitch together the twenty-one layers of materials, including lycra and teflon, that were required.  The garments (or are they appliances?) were fashioned iteratively, in response to individual technical problems.  They didn’t end up looking what NASA wanted them to look like – slick, metallic shells – but they did the job and have become iconic.  De Monchaux  points to the spacesuit project as a model for American business.  The pragmatic design method, with isn’t governed by an idea of what something should be, certainly appeals to me.  It’s efficient, allows for innovation, and doesn’t fetishize appearances.  I don’t know if it’s a realistic model for all industries, but there are certainly lessons for architects here.  Sometimes tinkering is the best way.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is once again playing with their graphics.  The agency is testing updated platform signs that list the stops along each subway route.  The previous graphic was an 11x17 black and white sheet that looked as if it had been designed and printed at an MTA worker’s cubicle.  The new ones are finer graphically but unnecessary.  What confuses riders aren’t the stops along the route, but the way old, iconic routes like the F have changed, and the way trains, particularly on the weekends, take alternate routes.

Much more troubling to me are the graphics for the five-borough subway map.  In 1979 the MTA abandoned the graphically exciting but informationally confusing 1972 Massimo Vignelli-designed map (shown above) for one by Michael Hertz, a predecessor of today’s map, which added layers of information about the above-ground world, including major streets and bodies of water.  Then last year, after years of incremental changes, the TA unveiled a more thoroughly updated map which distorted the already-not-accurate landmasses for clarity.  So now Manhattan, that elegant sliver of an island, looks like a pickle, and Brooklyn and Queens run together together like wet pancakes.  The map’s been drained of any last bit of physical reality and become a diagram entirely unrelated to geography, like the London subway map, although without that map’s dazzling complexity.  New Yorkers might have the best subway system in the world, tying together diverse communities and running at all hours.  But we do not have the best map.

For reasons I don’t really want to go into, I watched an episode of South Park the other night.  It was one from 2004, a response to “The Passion of the Christ” called “The Passion of the Jew,” a gleeful skewering of the movie, its director, and the passions (religious and political) they stirred up.  What pleased me most was how happily scrambled the graphics are.  They combine elements of cartoon, collage, drafting, film and photography, to create bold, aspatial imagery.

As the story goes, Stan and Kenny sneak into the movie, don’t like it, and visit Mel Gibson in Malibu to get their $18 back.  His house is depicted in crude perspectives, a Spanish-style pleasure palace with a tile roof, a circular driveway, and a fountain with lions spewing water from their mouths.  Inside it’s done up minimally, with white walls, not enough furniture, and bad modern art.  Stan and Kenny are depicted as they always are, construction paper cut-outs, and Mel is depicted, at twice their size, Simpsons-style, with paparazzi photographs for his head.  Over the seasons South Park has incorporated increasingly sophisticated computer-generated animations.  So the graphics have gotten sharper, and the backgrounds more fanciful.  But this episode, a relatively early one, has a nice thrown-together feeling.  The passages when Mel is talking (and singing, and leaping across the room) go beyond comedy.  They’re graceful, manic, and surreal.

There are found objects, but are there found photographs?  Some of Mark Cohen’s photographs on display now at Bruce Silverstein seem like just that, the sorts of shots you find on your camera, interspersed between the real ones, if you carry it around in your purse for too long.  They are obscured, ambiguous views, uncomfortably close, of you’re not really sure what.  I think it must be very difficult for a professional photographer to capture images like this, that seem to be drained of all formal conventions, and of any discernible subject.

There are photos here of corners, cracks in the sidewalk, paper bags, and lines of ants.  Some have people in them, severely cropped, so that we recognize only a kneecap or a hand, and don’t get a sense of them as characters.  The images are highly-calibrated accidents, like Gary Winogrand’s.  But, unlike Winogrand’s, they’re myopic; they don’t open themselves to expose a small real-world drama.  And while they’re assiduously crafted and printed they’re rough; they don’t settle easily into abstraction, like Edward Weston’s.  They have a strong pull.  Each print, about twenty inches wide, holds your attention the way a larger painting would.  The photos call you into their fractured, unpretty worlds.