GROUNDED

Architect Francisco Sanin opened the recent symposium Past as Prologue, which honored the fifty-year career of Michael Graves, with an incisive and touching lecture. He highlighted the moment in the mid-1960’s when Graves began working as an architect, describing the avant garde thinking that gripped the schools, the radical politics that swept the culture, and the conceptual projects that were being published in architecture journals.

The images of Graves’ paintings that Sanin showed seem alive with these ideals. They are elegant and audacious: flat Mediterranean landscapes rendered in sunburnt hues and inhabited by still streams, rows of cypress trees, and a variety small freestanding structures, all of which are rendered in platonic geometric forms. The paintings are, presenter Adelle Chatfield-Taylor later commented, “faint landscapes,” with a delicate, empty feeling. They are mapped only lightly, and left open to dream, desire, and imagination.

The influence of Corot, Cezanne, deChirico and Morandi are all apparent. But what’s unique about these paintings is the charged presence of the buildings within the landscape. Each one is an architectural cipher – with its own geometry and syntax – as well a physical structure – a primitive hut. Each one is its own character. Sanin described Graves’ understandings of “the city as a series of fragments,” and of “building as composite.” Even more than his best-know buildings, Graves’ paintings make these ideas apparent. And they show a spatial and narrative complexity that’s not always apparent in his architecture.

Image courtesy of Michael Graves.

January 03, 2015 by Nalina Moses

SCREEN WRITING

There’s been lots of talk about how the internet is changing the way we read, but little talk about how it’s changing the way we write. So a recent Times Magazine article about the video game platform Twine strikes a chord. Like other video games, Twine games are immersive, shaping participatory narratives that stir up real-life emotions. But Twine games are entirely text-based, so they are also a (new) kind of literature.

The software has a deliberately unsophisticated feeling: most games are composed with a single font style, on a single-color background, with no more than a single paragraph on each screen, and in language punctuated very loosely, in the manner of text messages. Playing a Twine game requires less focus than reading a novel and more decision-making. One moves from screen to screen by selecting between different highlighted passages of text, which gives the story a strong sense of linearity, and cause and effect. These are qualities that are appealing, and that aren’t always served up in literary fiction. Though if one plays the same game more than once, one finds recurring routes and brushes up against the limits of the narrative.

Like the graphics, the writing in Twine games is deliberately unsophisticated. In Breakfast on a Wagon with your Partner, Porpentine, one of the platform’s most celebrated authors, depicts a critical early-morning conversation between two lovers. The game is written entirely as dialogue, without any clear indication of historical time and place, and with few physical descriptions. An early screen that alludes to physical devastation (asking the player to choose between asteroids, a plague, and bombs), and soft country-inflected music playing in the background, are all that set the scene. The game is entirely gender-neutral, and we know nothing about the two characters except that one is called Sam. It lasts only about two minutes, yet at its conclusion the fate of the relationship is settled, convincingly and often sadly.

Twine is simple to use; basic commands can be learned in about five minutes. It’s free, and programers typically distribute their games through sites that are also free. The software’s genre-busting potential is amazing. Twine calls those who aren’t particularly artsy, or articulate, to write stories. And it calls those who aren’t tech-savvy, or escapist, to play video games.

Screenshot from Breakfast on a Wagon with your Partner, by Porpentine.

December 28, 2014 by Nalina Moses

OF GRAVE CONCERN

“It was December, I had never felt so cold, the eel soup lay heavy on my stomach, I was afraid I’d die, I turned aside to vomit, I envied them." Has there ever, in English, been a sentence as dreadfully elegant as this? It’s like six small stories, all miserable, smashed into one another. It’s by Samuel Beckett, from a short story called First Love. The narrator, an unstable young man, walks through the cemetery where his father has just been buried, eating bananas and looking down on the dead.

The story conjures Pere Lachaise, the sprawling nineteenth-century Parisian cemetery. It’s a place Beckett, who spent his adult life in the city, knew. And it’s where he’s buried, alongside his wife, in a low tomb topped with a suitably austere slab of black granite.

The cemetery is immense, over 100 acres, and its oldest parts are laid out in a web of curving stone paths that, gently, rise and fall and turn in upon themselves. I visited on a summer afternoon when the air was heavy and still, and there were few other tourists. I ignored the maps highlighting major attractions, including the graves of anti-austerity icons Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. Instead I wandered, following the footpaths so far inside I didn’t know my way out, and didn’t care. The cemetery’s turning walkways hold what lies just ahead tantalizingly out of sight and pull one forward, as if one is moving toward something, while one may very well merely be walking in circles. It’s a notion – both funny and sad – Beckett would have approved of.

December 20, 2014 by Nalina Moses

WITH THE GREATEST OF EASE

Author and interior designer Maureen Footer opened her book-talk about the legendary George Stacey at the ICA last week by making a distinction between style and chic. Chic, she explained, was spontaneous and not belabored. It’s a quality that’s notoriously difficult to achieve in both exterior and interior architecture, which require substantial time and labor, but one that Stacey brought to all his commissions. In the dining room of the Levy House in Palm Springs, for example, Stacey sets a baroque Italian stone transom over a sleek moderne fireplace, and playful flamingo-pink upholstered chairs beneath neo-Gothic blackened steel candelabras. He paints the wall a creamy white and bookends the entire arrangement with giant-sized potted ferns that look as if they’ve just been carried inside from the patio.

Interiors are by nature ephemeral, as they are transformed to best serve the changing lives of their inhabitants. But there’s something particularly immediate about Stacey’s work, which always looks fresh, and just a pinch underdone, with splashes of open space and bright light throughout. It’s as if the room arrived all in a moment, like a happy explosion. There’s no doubt that this sensibility requires a lot of work from the designer to get right, so that it feels unified. But it leaves a feeling – improvisational, unorthodox, free – that’s deeply modern and deeply American.

Dining Room, Levy House, Palm Beach, by George Stacey. Image courtesy of Rizzoli.

November 21, 2014 by Nalina Moses