As I read the profile of architect Bjarke Ingels of BIG in last week’s New Yorker, I pictured the envy it would generate as a substance, like clouds of steam rolling off the page. Ingels is thirty-seven (alarmingly young in architect-years), leads a staff of over 100 in New York and Copenhagen, manages a slate of significant international building projects, and wears hoodies and sneakers convincingly at public appearances. The article focuses on Ingels’ ability to sell projects – to communicate complex spatial and structural ideas in pithy, sexy ways to clients and the media – and the traditional architectural skills (discipline, detail and materiality) he seems to lack.

While Ingel’s outrageous success and preternaturally relaxed style really are enviable, I read the piece cheering him on. He won me over with his bright, bold monograph Yes is More, where he depicts himself as a superhero flying around the world building buildings, which is basically what he does. That book gave a pragmatic, blow-by-blow account of how major buildings get built, not as ideas crystallizing into form, but as earthbound constructions continually battered and reshaped by budgets, schedules, client preferences, public opinion, site conditions, accident and whimsy. There are some less than hagiographic details in the New Yorker piece. (Ingels moves around Manhattan in a black Porsche, and has a comical reputation as a womanizer.) But he’s as clear-eyed about what he wants to do (build buildings) and what he thinks architecture is (building buildings) as a sage. If he succeeds, that is, if he keeps going, which I think he will, he’ll have established a new model for the starchitect – one that’s entirely unshackled from theory and pretension.

September 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses

It was with considerable reluctance that I moved off my couch on Friday evening to see the exhibit of Josef Albers drawings at the Morgan Library. I had little interest in seeing more of the artist’s canonical, clinical square-on-square (Homage to the Square) compositions that I felt I already knew too well. So I was taken aback at the work on display, which included studies for those square paintings, and wells as more robustly figural works that I’d never seen before. These drawings revealed a warmth and workmanship that, for the first time, brought the artist’s work to life for me.

Most remarkable were a series of studies Albers made while living in Mexico from 1947 to 1948 called Variant/Adobe. Based on the serene, severe geometries of a native house facade, they’re painstaking investigations into the alchemy of color and form. In each panel the artist constructs the same basic figure – an oblong house front with two windows – from different color schemes. There’s a gorgeous hesitancy to these pieces. The shapes are outlined lightly in pencil on rough blotter paper. Then Albers takes a color, straight from the tube, and, after applying some daub of it, selects another to try right alongside. It doesn’t look as if he’s always working incrementally, trying to pin down the exact right shade of yellow within a spectrum, but following crazy hunches, doing everything he can to allow the correct color, whatever it is, to reveal himself. Albers had always seemed like the most tiresome of painters, a pedagogue who painted what was already known to him in order to make it perfectly clear to everyone else. These drawings, that show him searching and struggling, show otherwise.

September 10, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Among the snapshots my mother sent of her recent visit to Washington DC was one of the National Museum of the American Indian, which was under construction the last time I was at the Mall in 2001, for an anti-war rally, and that opened in 2004. My first thought when I saw the photo was, Surely Native Americans deserve a better building than this. It’s an ungainly mass with a banded facade that undulates, as the museum’s website explains, “evoking a wind-sculpted rock formation." In photographs the building looks less geological – like a form shaped molecule by molecule over eons – than Brutalism manque. It’s composed with the kind of kooky eccentric language that’s fine for a small house, like those by Bruce Goff, but not for a monument meant to celebrate Native American cultures built by a government that very nearly eradicated them. This bold, unsettled building just doesn’t feel right.

While the website text goes on to explain that the building and landscape were conceived with attention to Native American beliefs, the museum looks more like a testament to the formal willfulness of its designers, and entirely insensitive to any kind of belief. (There are eleven firms credited with collaboration in the building’s design, including Polshek Partnership, who built the elegant, modernist Pequot Museum near Foxwoods Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut.) The next, and final, museum to be unveiled on the Mall will be the National Museum of African American Culture and History, which is rising now on the last available plot. This building, designed by London-based architect David Adjaye, uses a language that’s mercifully unreferential. Its flat planes and stark geometries confer dignity.

September 07, 2012 by Nalina Moses

This week everyone’s talking about the reddish brocade Tracy Reese cocktail dress Michelle Obama wore when she spoke at the DNC and, in contrast, the cherry red Oscar de la Renta shirtdress Ann Romney wore when she spoke at the RNC last week. Full disclosure: I liked Ann’s look better. But I remain far more captivated by what Bill Clinton wore when he took the podium last night at the DNC. His performance was magnificent, perhaps because he was given the adoring the audience he craves without any of the attendant responsibilities. He wore a two-button navy blue suit (Donna Karan?), which, as handlers know, photographs better than black. It fit his tall frame gracefully, far better than the suit he wore two years ago at Chelsea’s wedding, which looked as if it had been sized for the pre-heart-attack, Big-Mac-guzzling Bill.

But it was his silk necktie, a striped, muted red with blue undertones, that clinched the look. Just as Bill explained, midway through his speech, that Obama values partnership over partisanship, the red-mixed-with-blue of his tie, which was both not-true-blue and not-true-red, went far to suggest ideological subtlety and sophistication. Compare it to the necktie Mitt Romney wore for his RNC speech, a schoolboy, stop-sign red one with narrow cobalt stripes. Mitt’s necktie wasn’t about anything but the color red. While there’s a huge divide between red and blue states, red is used across the board at mainstream political events to symbolize upstanding American politics. One has to admire both men for having enough sense to stick with the classics.

September 06, 2012 by Nalina Moses