FACE TIME

This winter’s Polar Vortex turned our city into a festival of silly hats. People ran around dressed conventionally from foot to forehead, and then topped themselves off with extravagant, irrational headware. I saw fur-trimmed hunters’ hats, lacy cashmere skull caps, mink pillboxes, extravagantly twisted turbans, and even balaclavas. There’s something essentially menacing about the balaclava. This mask, that only leaves a person’s eyes and mouth open, always conjures for me the famous photograph of a rooftop terrorist at the Munich Olympics in 1972. In the context of face-burning cold, the balaclava might be acceptable city headware. But it’s a sinister fashion; it evokes violence and fear.

So Pussy Riot, the all-female Russian punk/art collective who disguise themselves in crayon-colored balaclavas, seized a ripe symbol. They took the balaclava and charged it further, with justice politics and female rage. Two former Pussy Riot members, Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, appeared this winter at an Amnesty International concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. They’d been imprisoned for performing, while masked, an anti-Putin rant in a Moscow church. Here they were without their masks, in hipsterish street clothes, tasteful makeup, and long, loose hair. Though they’d lost the assaultive impact of the balaclava, they gained a different kind of power by showing their faces. They are stunning, radiant young women. To see them plainly makes their politics personal, and drives home powerfully the price they paid for their actions.

Maria and Nadezhda addressed the audience that night in a feverish Russian that was translated sentence-by-sentence, moments afterward, into placid English by an American translator. But their intentions shone through. They shouted in barely-controlled bursts, held their microphones like knives, and paced the stage like wild cats. I was sitting in the stadium’s highest tier, and even from there the spectacle of this – two attractive young women lit by pure fury – was transfixing. As both performance artists and political activists they possess monstrous charisma. They might not need the masks.

Photo by Igor Mukhin.

April 21, 2014 by Nalina Moses

ASTRONOMIES

The first time I saw the Barclays Center, the controversial new stadium in Brooklyn by SHoP, it was peripherally, as I was rushing from the Atlantic Avenue subway station to meet friends for dinner. At that moment it looked like an enormous spaceship. It’s not an instantly likable structure. Its low, swirling, swollen, turtle-like shell has no perceptible symmetries, front and back, or roofline. Its entrance canopy – a gigantic, cantilevered loop – offers no protection from the elements. And its skin, a lattice of rusting steel tiles the size of pizza boxes, gives it the desolate aspect of an abandoned parking garage. As I ran by the stadium seemed unmoored: to Atlantic Avenue, to Brooklyn, and to earth.

Then, months later, on a lazy, sunny summer afternoon, as I walked through the plaza on my to the subway station, I got a different feeling altogether. When I reached the center of the canopy and looked up I stopped in my tracks. The big loop circled the cloudless sky and pulled it down around me. It was if the sun had fallen right through to my feet. The web of LED lights that line the inside of the canopy flickered happily, signs of the building’s inner life. Standing there, I felt rooted in that place, under the skies and inside the city. The building was like an astronomical instrument that called the sky down to the street.

Photograph by Magda Biernat, courtesy of SHoP.

April 17, 2014 by Nalina Moses

I recently interviewed nine well-known American architects to find out what house has made the biggest impact on them, and why, for a piece in AIArchitect. I’d expected them to name family houses, fictional houses, or houses they’d built. Instead they all named modern houses in the United States and Europe, most of them canonical. But Brian Phillips, who leads Philadelphia office ISA, made a bold choice: the 1960 Prairie House in Norman, Oklahoma by Herb Greene.

This sloping, funnel-shaped, two-story, wood-frame house, clad with fans of cedar shingles and strips of aluminum, dominates its flat, grassy plot like a wild animal. And this is exactly the idea. Phillips says that the house “needed to show its aggressive plume to stand against the relentless minimalism of the prairie landscape." And Greene, on his website, writes, "The aim is to introduce a reference frame of feeling usually reserved for sentient creatures. Pathos, vulnerability and pain are juxtaposed with the more familiar house-meanings of sheltering, protection and comfort.”

What I love most about the house is its joyous, raucous formal freedom, and its contrarian, macho style. This house was built at the height of the international style, when less was more, and prominent architects were building houses with glass walls, flat roofs, and marble floors. Greene is one of a strain of energetic, unmannered, individualistic American architects – let’s call them Wild Men – who follow the visions in their heads rather than the demands of good taste, or their clients. He trained with Bruce Goff, who had trained with Frank Lloyd Wright, whom the name of this house, deliberately I think, conjures. If the heart of Wild Man Architecture is in the midwest, where these three men hail from, there is also another healthy strain of it today in Los Angeles, where architects like Eric Owen Moss and Thom Mayne are going at it, and Frank Gehry has become elder statesman. I hope they never stop.

Photograph by Julius Shulman, courtesy of Herb Greene.

April 14, 2014 by Nalina Moses

ASSORTED BEAUTIES

As a police procedural, following an ambitious female detective as she tries to protect a pregnant pre-teen girl, the miniseries Top of the Lake falls flat. There are too many artfully placed red herrings, and the mystery is resolved unconvincingly and all-at-once during the final minutes of the final show. But as an essay in different kinds of loveliness – in the natural landscape, in house interiors, and in types of people – the shows is richly satisfying. The series was filmed in remote parts of New Zealand, and the views of the lake there, the surrounding mountains, and the disturbed luminous skies, are breathtaking. The people at the lake live in cottages with blank white walls, drenched in natural light, and decorated sparingly, with roughly finished wood furniture and stuffed animal heads. The insides of the rooms feel modern and also ominous, as if danger could erupt from within. The whole setting of the story feels unearthly. I doubt the country’s tourist board could have crafted a finer fantasy.

Most memorably, Top of the Lake shows us people we don’t see very often in movies and television. There is the detective’s cancer-stricken mother, and a cultish new age leader named CJ, and CJ’s band of followers, who are all women in their 50’s and 60’s. The actresses portraying them aren’t starved and botoxed and waxed, but naturally sagging and sluggish and greying. It’s shocking to see them, and so many of them, again and again, at the center of the narrative. That’s not only because they don’t conform to the dominant ideal of what we think women should look like, but also because we don’t often see women this age in movies and television, at all. The detective’s mother, who wears her white hair in an untamed mane, is shockingly graceful. There’s also her lover, Tarangi, a maori with bronze skin, dark hair and a placid, unfathomable expression. He wears traditional ink-black markings across his forehead, like the ones Mike Tyson has. On Tarangi they’re less martial than romanticizing, emphasizing his outsider status in this rural white community. Despite that he, like the middle-aged women in the cast, are fascinating to watch. They possess a physical beauty that’s all the more powerful because we don’t see it so often, at least not on TV.

Photograph courtesy of Sundance Channel.

March 02, 2014 by Nalina Moses