This summer’s big, unwieldy architecture show at MoMa, Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, has it that the architect “observed and imagined landscapes throughout his career." It’s an idea that challenges our conventional understanding of Corb, who favored frill-free, machine-inspired forms, and who rendered them, both sculpturally and scenographically, with unparalleled power. There are, on display, small watercolors Corb completed as a young man that capture landscapes with a lyrical economy. There are three recreations of rooms from his buildings, which all address the landscape through windows. And there are many, many drawings in which the architect renders landscapes and cityscaps as vigorous horizontal doodles, in the distance, visible above a roofline or through a window. But none of this suggests a deep connection to the landscape. Le Corbusier used windows to capture views, and landmarks to orient buildings and plans. But I can’t shake the received wisdom that Corb understood the landscape as a static field for buildings, which were its primary characters. When I visited Chandigarh, India I saw that the each of the main buildings, awesome in its sculptural gravity, stood apart from the walkways and pools of water that framed them, the broad roads that linked them, and the low-lying landscape all around. They were singular objects.

The great strength, and pleasure, of Le Corbusier’s buildings is their compositional mastery, the way they shape a dynamic interior landscape. The two Le Corbusier buildings I’ve visited that made the deepest impression – the Carpenter Center at Harvard and the ATMA Building in Ahmedabad, India – are essentially cinematic. These buildings lure a visitor inside and sweep her through with a sweet, practically supernatural power. The "modern landscape” Le Corbusier explored most deeply was an internal pictorial one, of the mind and the imagination, of platonic space and surface. The shadowed insides of the ATMA Building are enchanting, but arriving at the roof and wandering through its playground of forms is the climax. From here one can see the city and its river beyond, but also feel entirely liberated from them. As a friend of mine, an architect, noted, what are pilotis (the thin, unadorned round columns Corb advocated to lift buildings off the ground) but a refusal of the landscape? In his review of the exhibit Times critic Michael Kimmelman, who endorses its premise as a “provocation,” adds, “… Le Corbusier is too contradictory and controlling a genius to confirm to nature or any curator’s thesis." I agree.

ATMA Building, Ahmedabad, India. By Le Corbusier, 1956. Photograph by Nalina Moses

July 10, 2013 by Nalina Moses

There is no graphic that makes me as happy as the title screen for the HBO show Girls. After each episode's raunchy/funny opening scene, the title, which spells out G-I-R-L-S and nothing more in giant Sans Serif letters, fills the screen for about five seconds… and then the show goes on. Each week the letters are rendered in a different color across a different background, sometimes solid and sometimes patterned. For special episodes there are special graphics. For a first season show set at a buzzy, druggy party in a Bushwick garage, the letters were drawn in little light bulbs that blinked crazily like an old-fashioned Las Vegas casino marquee.

The graphics are crafted by Los Angeles design office Grand Jet'e, following Girls writer and creator Lena Dunham’s request for an elegant, Art Deco-like font. The simple forms are reminiscent of the iconic modern alphabet Helvetica, but with swelling eccentricities. The thickness of line in each letter remains consistent but takes odd turns. Look how low the return on the G dips, and how the big, proud belly of the R squashes its legs. And look at the swan-like poise of the S, perfectly balanced on its perfectly round base. The most powerful feature of the graphic is the way the letters crowd the screen so that there’s nothing else to contemplate when it appears; there’s no escape from G-I-R-L-S. Like the show’s four protagonists, its title is innocent, brassy and bright, and awfully hard to look away from.

July 03, 2013 by Nalina Moses

In London newspapers they’re debating who’ll take over directorship of the National Theatre next year, when Nicholas Hynter leaves, the same way New Yorkers might talk about who’d take over the Yankees if Joe Girardi left. The fuss brought my attention to the National’s remarkable facilities, a sprawling, Brutalist complex at the south end of Waterloo Bridge designed by architect Denys Lasdun that opened in 1973, just a few months after the Theatre’s founding director, Laurence Olivier, retired. For a structure housing a revered national cultural institution, the building is deeply aggressive, modern, and discordant, not stereotypically British. When it opened Prince Charles observed, smartly, “The National Theatre seems like a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting." Of course today, after the success of the Tate Modern, we’re all tremendously fond of power stations.

Yet I can’t get over how unattractive the National Theatre comes across in photographs. The structure is an immense one that encompasses three individual theaters, as if the three central theaters at Lincoln Center had been built under one roof. It’s composed as a jumble of skewed square towers and street-length floor balconies, all in poured concrete, unrelieved by openings or plantings, as if two cruise ships had collided with the aforementioned power plant. The National is too much building, broken into too many bits. Brutalism isn’t about being pretty, but this building doesn’t hold up well when compared with other monuments imagined in the same style. Its forms lack the the compressed sculptural drama of Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale, the hippiesh elan of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ‘67, and the hopeful, idealizing geometries of Peter and Alison Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens. I can’t help but believe that the British theater is indebted to its language, one of precision, lyricism and economy. What a shame that this building doesn’t reach for any of that.

July 01, 2013 by Nalina Moses

In a short piece in Wired Clive Thompson laments the persistence of skeuomorphs in digital design. He uses that word, achingly classical, to describe the way software applications often depict analog objects to describe digital functions. He is thinking of the way our calculator app looks like a handheld battery-operated calculator, our calendar app looks like a sheet-a-day calendar, and our note-taking app looks like a legal pad, with yellow lined sheets, brown binding, and ragged tendrils of paper along the top edge. Thompson argues that clinging to skeuomorphs, which can initially facilitate communication, ultimately holds back innovation in digital design.

I don’t mind skeuomorphs because they’re relatively superficial, and leave plenty of room for innovation and improvement. As people become more familiar with their devices and applications, they ultimately migrate to apps with fewer graphic distractions. That’s one reason Google is the leading search engine; it’s mostly-white landing page presents little graphic noise – no skeuomorphs here – to wade through. But skeuomorphs sadden me because they highlight the loss of pungent physical realities. My digital phone is set to ring like a conventional telephone, but this sound doesn’t bring back the weight of a traditional handset, the important feeling of picking it up when it rang and setting it down when a conversation ended, and the way one could get tangled up in the cord during a lengthy call and accidentally pull out the wall jack. We’re losing the physical memory of all kinds of ordinary objects to our smartphones and tablets: books, journals, scrapbooks, notes, letters, photographs, calculators, alarm clocks, business cards, radios, televisions. Do we remember what it was like to refold a blanket-sized road map so that our destination sat right at the center of it, to align photos in an album with cellophane corners, to cry into the pages of a diary? We carry fewer tactile memories with us and more images and messages. Before experience reaches us physically, we turn it into information.

June 24, 2013 by Nalina Moses