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o q vc acha da escola de frankfurt? discorra sobre autores como adorno  e holkheimer..

gosto mt do Benjamin e do Marcuse (que eu prefiro classificar como expoentes da Teoria crítica, ao invés de Escola de Frankfurt), mas eles (sobretudo Adorno e Horkheimer) n dão conta de td pq têm uma concepção meio ingênua e eurocentrada do marxismo. o ônus dessa visão eh que eles acabam deixando em segundo plano (ou recalcando msm) a questão do colonialismo.

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‘Don’t believe everything you read on the internet’ is probably one of the best pieces of advice you can follow in the 21st century, and it is proving itself particularly true when meeting with Javier Perés. When entering his apartment in Schöneberg, Berlin, Javier welcomes you warmly with a cup of Japanese green tea—served in a Peter Shire cup, s’il vous plaît. The fact that his teacups are artworks reveals how important it is for him to be surrounded by art. And the fact is, there’s art in every single corner of his house. The aesthetic of his apartment is defined by architectural simplicity. White walls, little to no furniture, Italian marble for the kitchen and bathroom, and that’s it. The apartment itself has been designed as a showcase for art: contemporary paintings, many coming directly from his gallery, Peres Projects, dress up the walls; he has art brut drawings in the corridor, photographs in the dressing room, designer furniture in the dining room and office, ceramic sculptures in the kitchen and bedroom, floral arrangements in the living room, etc. However, and quite surprisingly, the strongest art presence you feel in Perés’ apartment comes from his collection of African sculpture. Very few people know that Perés is among the most active young collectors of classical African art, but one look at his house is enough to understand that he takes his collecting very seriously. Incredible sculptures and masks from Africa stand side by side with massive contemporary paintings and establish a subtle balance that echoes Perés’ passion for art, in all its forms. Everybody knows you as a contemporary art dealer. When did your interest in art start? I’ve always been interested in art: I’ve always gone to museums, I was always exposed to art through my family, even when I lived in Cuba as a child. By the time I was in my early teens, I began to get into the idea of actually collecting art. And so I began. I started collecting art brut when I was 12 or 13. Wow, that’s young. Do you remember the first piece you acquired? I do! It was a drawing by Adolf Wölfli, a Swiss outsider artist. At that time, I was looking at a lot of modern art, based on what my grandparents collected. Even though European art was my main interest, I was also curious about African art, pre-Columbian art, and art brut. Art brut was affordable and more accessible for somebody my age. It went on until my 20s, when I was working as a lawyer in San Francisco. I was able to collect directly from some of the centres for outsider artists in the area. When did you start becoming interested in contemporary art? And then, when did you shift from being a collector/lawyer to being a full-time contemporary art dealer? Collecting contemporary art was a natural extension of collecting art brut. When I was in my late teens I came to be more interested in the culture that was happening at that moment. I very quickly became fascinated by the idea of art from my own time. The first contemporary artist that I was really interested in was Jean-Michel Basquiat; he was a sort-of outsider artist. I also loved Jean Dubuffet. Both these artists had strong ties to art brut. I basically stopped practising law right after I saw the Eva Hesse exhibition in 2002 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Eva Hesse was an artist that I really admired, and seeing that retrospective was a real turning point for me. My mum had died quite young, and so had Eva Hesse. I felt connected to that experience. I started thinking about my own mortality, and I knew that if my life ended now, I wouldn’t be happy if all I had done was practise law. I was a bit pessimistic. So you were looking for a life change? Yes, exactly. I was already thinking I needed to do something different, and I wanted to be more involved with art. I was already seriously collecting African sculpture, because it somehow brought together my principal interests in art, like Basquiat, art brut, and the modernism of my grandparents’ generation. You started your gallery, Peres Projects, and focused on contemporary art. But you kept your interest in African sculpture private? Yes. Back then, I was living in San Francisco and travelling a lot for work, so I was seeing a lot of art and was excited by the pace and dynamics of contemporary art. I called my gallery Peres Projects because I wanted to use the gallery as a platform to develop projects, present them, and then keep doing that, but not necessarily always with the same artist. I was very inspired by galleries like Deitch Projects, in New York, and the galleries that were in Paris on the Rue Louise Weiss. And we know the rest of the story! Let’s talk about your African art collection, that side of you we don’t know so much about. What did you start to collect? I was very influenced by classical African art early on. I was looking at the Fang people, the Baule, the Dan, and the Bambara. The first pieces I bought were by the Baule, from the Ivory Coast, and also from an area called the Lagoonaire, located east of Abidjan. My entry into collecting African sculpture was focused on the female form. I was collecting objects that are considered classical within the canon of African art: objects that are beautiful, that are pretty, with shiny, patinated surfaces. You grew up with very strong female figures in your family—your grandmothers, your mother. Do you think that’s what drew you to the feminine representations and feminine power in classical African art? By the time I actually started collecting African art, both my mum and one of my grandmothers had passed away, and I wouldn’t be surprised if subconsciously that helped draw me to these kinds of sculptures. It’s always quite difficult for me to speak about my African art collecting because it comes from somewhere deep inside me; I can’t really put it into words. I have always been fascinated by all of that. I was a student of African art for years before I actually started buying it. It sounds like your collecting of African art is deeply rooted, yet I understand that at one point you wanted to stop. I’ve actually tried to stop collecting African art a few times. There have been different times in my life where it’s clearly been my passion, but I became obsessive about it. The minute I acquire one work, I have to go into this study mode to really learn about it. So every time I approached a new piece of African art it was like I had to learn a new language, and anybody who has studied languages knows that to really master one can take a good part of your life. Now to master two languages, three languages— Sometimes with African art the pull to collect is very strong, and so I’ve tried to stop. But the last time I tried—three, four years ago—it only lasted about five months and the result of it was collecting at the highest level that I’ve ever collected, which is where I am now. So, in the end, the result has been the opposite of what you wanted? At the time the intention was to stop collecting African art, and I don’t know what I was thinking. I was going to collect something else, of course. I mean, as you can guess by looking around my apartment, I collect art. I’ve always collected art, that to me is— That’s your thing. It is my thing. I don’t understand the idea of living without art; to me, it’s a foreign concept. After I stopped collecting for those few months I spoke to my original adviser, Guy van Rijn, who I worked with early in the 2000s. I ended up meeting his protégé, and we really hit it off. I realised right away that if I worked with him I could improve my collecting approach. It was the opportunity to have someone who could guide me in areas that I was less familiar with. So I entered a new phase where I started studying more and getting more works from other regions, especially Nigeria. Nigeria is the largest country in Africa, and it has one of the most varied cultural practices and a lot of different ethnic groups. For a number of those groups we didn’t even know about their artworks until the ‘60s or ‘70s, which is when the civil war in Nigeria happened, the Biafran War. During that time, and in the period that followed, huge amounts of artwork entered the international market. So, in a way, you started to collect the contemporary art equivalent of African art? That’s a good point because classical African art is arguably the equivalent of modernism and impressionism in Western art, whereas art from areas like Nigeria would be the equivalent of contemporary art. Of course it’s not contemporary—there are also antiquities—but there are areas that have not been collected as deeply, or for as long, except of course the bronzes from the kingdom of Benin. The art from Nigeria tends to be expressionistic, often to the point of being aggressive, and with heavily ritually coated surfaces. Also, they had very broad masking traditions that were a part of all aspects of life. You have a fascination for masking traditions, don’t you? Yes, I’m obsessed with masks. Among others, I have a large number of Bundu helmet masks, used by a female society called the Sande. For as long as I can remember, I have loved them. I don’t know what it is about them, but I’m fascinated—and I’ve always seen a connection with my interest in Greek art. I thought it was really interesting that in Africa we have this masking tradition that represents females, as opposed to the white marble busts you see in archaeological museums, which tend to be male. These masks are all about representing female power, female beauty, female decency. The Sande society controls everything related to womanhood, and the sculptures are varied. But there are certain things you see that every Bundu mask has to have in order to be a proper Bundu. They tend to have small eyes, very beautiful and elaborate coiffures, shiny black surfaces, small mouths, and they were used in various aspects of Sande society rituals. And before I knew it, it kind of—it snowballed from one to another. I started collecting them at a time when a great number became available: the French artist Arman had died, he had one of the most beautiful collections of Bundu masks, and his collection was being sold. I actually now own three that used to be his. And so, yes, it just became a thing for me; one wasn’t enough, and I kept collecting more and more of them. You mentioned earlier that you met the protégé of your old advisor. How did he affect your African art collecting? When I met Bruno Claessens my focus expanded to more expressionist styles of sculpture. The first piece that I acquired when I started working with him was a sculpture by a group from western Cameroon/eastern Nigeria called the Kaka. It’s a Janus casque with a figure on top. It’s the most important Kaka figure. It was exhibited in a landmark exhibition entitled ‘Africa: Art of a Continent’ that started at the Royal Academy of Art in 1995, later travelling to the Guggenheim in NYC and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. It’s a very expressionistic figure, completely covered in sacrificial matter, dark, oily, crusty. Bruno was really shocked that I was interested in the sculpture. Why? Well, because it was so different from what he knew I’d been collecting, and it’s literally the exact opposite of the Bundus. The Bundus are about beauty—they’re about femininity, they’re about female power—whereas the Kaka figures are really about male aggression. And visually they are very rough; they are tough sculptures. So he was surprised that I was interested in that style, even though it was with his support that I came to it. But I think it was also that a lot of things had changed in my life and I was more open to looking at art from a lot of different traditions. This Kaka altar figure really changed everything. When I acquired this, all of a sudden it was like I had opened the door to all these cultures from eastern Nigeria and there was no turning back. It opened my eyes to the beauty in the ugly, if you will—beauty in things that were rough and expressionistic—and I think maybe that living in Berlin has informed this aesthetic path. Are you saying that Berlin is ugly? In a way, yes. There is something beautiful in things that are ugly—and speaking of Berlin, I think it has one of the most amazing ethnographic museum collections. The collection has a lot of works from areas that were under German colonial rule, and primarily this eastern Nigeria/western Cameroon area. I think that was also a reason why I opened up to the more expressionistic and more aggressive sculptural traditions in Africa. You’ve become an important collector, and definitely one of the youngest there is in the field. How did the African art world welcome you into it? I am one of the most active younger collectors. It’s kind of interesting in the African art field; when I first started collecting in my 20s, it was like people didn’t know what to do with me. It was very different from when you go to a contemporary gallery or to an opening, which is more lively and happening. The African art field is more esoteric, and a lot of older people are involved. It’s really similar to collecting old masters, and it attracts a very idiosyncratic group of people. Some are more academic, others are more the adventurer type that went to Africa to collect art in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. There’s also another group of people who came into it via modernism—the people who were collecting Picasso and Matisse. Is it something that interests you, too? Absolutely. The history of African art as we know it is completely tied to the Paris school and the early 20th-century artists. Basically the whole field really grew from people like Picasso and also the dealers that represented artists from that period. Picasso wasn’t alone: Matisse, Vlaminck, a bunch of those guys collected. I’m really interested in this connection between Western art, contemporary art, and classical African art—in the way the main proponents of African art in early 20th-century New York were basically two men: Marius de Zayas and Alfred Stieglitz, who was the husband of Georgia O’Keeffe. I think we’re in a period in contemporary art that has some parallels with what was happening in the early 20th century. Those artists were breaking with tradition, and I think it’s similar to what has happened in the last 10 years or so. Artists have started to use a whole new medium—the internet—and now there’s art that’s postinternet and so on. For some reason it’s had me thinking quite a bit about the connections between contemporary art and African art. In my house I live with the two; they exist side by side. So you are really looking to make connections between African art and contemporary art? Yes. For me, there is a connection between artists from different places, from different periods. I think there is a thread, a line that connects our traditions. When we look at the early 20th century, if we look at the reviews from that time and the main theorists like de Zayas, he was saying that what a lot of European and American artists were doing was basically painting what they saw in African sculpture. I think these ideas are still there. I still see these objects as living together, and I am fascinated by that. I love painting, I love contemporary painting, it’s one of my great passions, and I love juxtaposing contemporary painting with classical African sculpture. Do you feel there is a dialogue being established between contemporary paintings and those ancient sculptures? Yes and no. I think there’s a connection, but sometimes the distance between the objects can be more profound than the affinities they share. And so it’s not necessarily about the fact that one gets you to the other. Sometimes it’s even like they are opposites. I’m really interested in all these spaces. About two years ago, I did an exhibition in my gallery for the first time that juxtaposed contemporary painting with African sculpture. The show was called ‘Group Spirit’; can you tell me a bit more about it? ‘Group Spirit’ was a show in which I tried to see if there was a connection between abstract painting and the Bundu masks—and specifically the elaborate coiffures of the Bundu masks. I called it ‘Group Spirit’ because when one of those masks was made, it only became an actual vehicle for the Sande society if the group of women involved accepted the mask—if they found it to have the spirit of the society within it. I thought there was an interesting parallel with contemporary abstract painting. In the last 10 years we have seen a lot of artists make works that are seemingly not understandable. The artists involved in making the works understand what they are about; the general public is mostly left unaware, but we can admire the works just for their beauty. I wanted to show artists like David Ostrowski, and bring out the parallels between his work and African art. Of course, if you look at the two objects there is no connection, but I think the space that was created allowed for a lot of contemplation. The show was very well received, and two paintings were acquired by museums. There were two parts to the way your African art interest ‘came out’ to the world. There was this exhibition and also the use of another medium, right? You mean Instagram? Yes. You have become known as an African art person on Instagram for using the #obsessed hashtag. Yes, I guess so. When I decided to start posting that, I think it picked up because I am obsessed by it. I really can’t imagine not collecting African sculpture, and I have been using Instagram to share my interest. I feel like classical African sculpture can have such an important role in contemporary life. I want to share that interest with other people because I think we are at a point in the history of collecting art and of exhibiting art that should really be pushing harder in the way African sculpture is presented. Sadly, a lot of great collections are buried in the back of museums. It’s really important that other vehicles for sharing, exploring, showing, and collecting African sculpture exist. And are you planning other exhibitions with African art? Yes. After I did ‘Group Spirit’ I came up with the idea of doing a second exhibition focused on figuration, called ‘Wild Style’. At the same time, I met this amazing painter in Cologne, Melike Kara, who makes incredible expressionistic, figurative paintings. I saw some parallels between her work and a couple of other artists that I have been working with, like Dorothy Iannone, Donna Huanca, and Marinella Senatore. I saw a connection between these four female artists, the start of my collecting in African art, and my interest in the assertion of feminine power and female representation. ‘Wild Style’ will explore notions of figuration in art, and I’m going to exhibit a group of important sculptures that are mostly from Nigeria. It’s going to be very different from ‘Group Spirit’. It’s really going to hark back to my interest in the way African sculpture was presented in the ‘10s and ‘20s in New York and Paris. Those two cities were culturally very connected at the time, and from that connection arose the idea that you could present drawings by Georges Braque next to masks from the We culture, or Fang reliquary figures. I’m inspired by these traditions and plan on exploring them with a mix of current-day and African art.

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her body and other parties

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@jennybagel always writing the words you didn’t know you needed, here, writing about Bolaño in The Atlantic

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Michael Ondaatje, _In the Skin of a Lion_

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We wait to buzz until 2.21pm, the exact time we have been appointed. Fernando receives us with his usual double pair of glasses covering his forehead. ‘Nothing is true or false, it all depends on the colour of the lenses you look through’, he says. Arrabal is considered one of the most important playwrights alive in France, but in his home country of Spain he is still remembered for a TV episode in which he appeared drunk in front of the cameras. He started drinking when he was 60 years old, so he didn’t have a notion of how much alcohol he could handle. After the program he had to be hospitalised. Maybe because of that, he feels very comfortable in his self-chosen exile in Paris. He was born in 1932, in Melilla; when he was 10 years old he won the Spanish national prize for exceptionally gifted children. During the Spanish Civil War his father stayed faithful to the Republic and was condemned to death, but escaped from a hospital and was never found. Fernando is missing a lung from a tuberculosis operation. He says he actually breathes better like that. In 1955 he moved to Paris, where he met Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, with whom he would create the Panic Movement; before that he spent time with the surrealists. His apartment is testimony to such a multiplicity of influences. Fernando Arrabal is not the easiest person to interview. He talks with scattered quotes and references. At the end they somehow make sense, but always taking into account the limitations of the listener. I think some of the references flew over my head, but I did my best to put them together and make some sense: controlling the chaos by letting it be. Wasn’t that the premise of the Panic Movement? How did you sleep? I slept pretty badly actually. And you? I slept well. May I offer you some wine? Let me open a bottle. I see you have a very professional set-up for visits and interviews here—a few bottles of wine and chocolates. I really like interviews, they are good for me. I think out loud and audit myself, sometimes even surprise myself. I may in fact hold some sort of interview world record, because I’ve done a lot. By the way, you have a pretty nice house. Spacious, high ceilings, maybe a little overwhelmingly decorated though. Being an artist is, in part, generating spaces of creation. I like to be surrounded by ordered chaos. You know, most artists, especially playwrights, live in deplorable conditions. André Breton lived in a janitor’s room, Samuel Beckett in a tiny apartment, the list goes on. I’m extremely lucky with this place; almost no artist has an apartment like this. Milan Kundera lives in 60m2, and so does my friend Michel Houellebecq, although he lives on the top floor of a tower with his wife. He can’t move too much now and needs police protection every time he leaves home. He is pissed. I’m lucky I can walk around freely after some of the things I’ve said. I see a tower of chessboards there. What do you think about the fact that machines are beating men at chess? I think it is absolutely normal, we’ve always known that would happen. How about that garrote? That’s a torture machine. You know that’s how the Spaniards condemned to death were executed. Do you want to sit there? Many writers do, some of them have even asked me to kill them with it. Are you ready to die? Do you go to church? Not really, just the Christmas Eve mass. Only once a year? That’s unacceptable. I hope you are at least baptised; otherwise you’ll just hang around in limbo for eternity. The sacred is essential to understand life. The sacrum bone is the closest to the butthole. Sacred and shit have a lot in common, as Dalí insisted. I see a lot of irreverent sacredness in the artwork that hangs on these walls. Like this Last Supper with Beckett, Borges, Wittgenstein, Kafka—and you as Jesus. I have a question about your presence in so many paintings. Is it sheer narcissism? You should stop asking the questions you brought, and stop recording this. OK. I stop the recorder and put my notes aside. Your name is Pau, right? That’s Paul in Catalan. The apostle Paul was like a secretary, a bureaucrat. Each of the gospels is a version of Jesus; you should do the same with this interview, just write your version of me. The gospel writers didn’t follow Jesus with a recorder! But Pau is a weak name, it sounds like a joke, you should change it. Oh yeah? What do you suggest? I like Jordi, George in Catalan. I like the connection with the dragon; he is the dragon that kills the dragon. Or just go with your last name: Guinart. It’s powerful. Mr Guinart. I really like that one. Names are very important. Like Arrabal. Why can’t everybody have a great name like Arrabal? I guess we would all be the same then. Are you satisfied with the life you had as Arrabal? Of course I am. How could I not be? I had the extraordinary privilege of living. Modernity has endowed me with the responsibility of celebrating figures like Benoît Mandelbrot, the great mathematician to whom I recently gave the Prize of Transcendent Satrap. Take into account that when he came up with his theory of fractals, Europe started dividing up, whereas when the Bourbaki group studied set theory, Europe came together—it was the origin of the unification of Germany, Italy, and the union of southern Slavs: Yugoslavia. Isn’t that interesting? Geopoliticians have no idea about that, but these theories do have an influence on reality. You mean that these abstract theories somehow apply to the real world? How about the most important logician since Aristotle: Kurt Gödel? He is an extraordinary figure. His two incompleteness theorems in many ways represent the state of the spirit of the 20th century. Man unable to understand itself. Did you know he believed in ghosts? Many of the greatest men of science believe in angels, demons, and all sorts of unscientific stuff. To me that need for transcendence is utterly fascinating. Do you think that with Gödel humankind definitively gives up on understanding itself through reason and logic? I would use a simpler term to explain that: tohubohu. It’s what preceded creation, which in the Bible is understood as the chaos before God gave order to it. It is chaos with the mathematical rigour of confusion. I’m not sure if I’m following. You mean like a controlled madness? No, we can’t control anything, we can’t even control ourselves. But at least we have maths to try to understand. However, tohubohu is always beyond. ‘Tohu’ is an inhabitable desert, commotion, and agitation before God’s intervention, and ‘bohu’ is the confusion of the moment of creation. Where there’s no confusion, there’s nothing. There’s no point in trying to understand everything. That all sounds very confusing. Is it because you like spreading chaos? Excuse me if I offend you, but I can’t help but see a deliberate Dionysian enactment in your performance. Not so much Dionysus, but Pan. He makes you laugh, but when you turn around he is totally unpredictable. That’s why he creates panic and madness. Dionysus is too round, cyclical, circular, like the seasons. Pan is more confusing, and therefore more interesting. He reconciles contraries with the mathematical rigour of confusion. With the Panic Movement there is something like a rationalised frenzy, controlled by mathematics and logic. Tohubohu. What is pataphysics? It is what is beyond metaphysics, a science of imaginary solutions. A branch of a branch of fantastic literature. According to its founder, Alfred Jarry, the world is an exception to the exception, that is why there can be regularity. Underneath reality there is only chaos. That has to do with Wittgenstein threatening Popper with a poker in Cambridge. We basically try to make sense of chaos. You always refer to Cervantes as your inspiration. Who else has inspired you? Salvador Dalí, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno— If you undust any part of Dalí, it is huge. What he says in 1937, ‘38, ‘39—it’s huge! His relationship with sex, for example—people like Unamuno or Valle-Inclán are tiny figures compared with Dalí. How about Pedro Calderón de la Barca or Federico García Lorca? About Lorca, Dalí said the exact precise thing. When Lorca, who was in love with Dalí, read out loud his Romancero Gitano to Luis Buñuel and him, Buñuel, who always told the truth, said the book was horrible. Lorca turned to Dalí with despair, asking him how Buñuel could not like that book when it had been so successful all over Spain. Then Dalí responded with the essential, as usual: this book is not bad, but it lacks trains. It’s like writing a book today without speaking of the internet. He was always so precise! It lacks trains. I see you are very connected with the present. Is that an iPhone 6? Yes. I’m 84 and I try to keep up with the times. But I also handwrite notes on the phone case. I use both analogue and digital. How about the rest of the European tradition? What inspires you? Our civilisation, which is extraordinary, has only created two myths: Faust and Don Juan. The monk Tirso de Molina did a great job with that last one. The world of seduction—Dalí actually wanted me to seduce his wife, Gala. He wasn’t really interested in sex, but in my presence he did very sexual things. Like what? He liked to be surrounded by weird people—mentally, sexually—like Amanda Lear. Dalí paid for Lear to go to Casablanca as a man, and she came back as a woman. But he wanted me to seduce Gala, and I still don’t understand why, because seduction doesn’t really exist. What do you mean? I see it everywhere, especially in literature. Seduction is a lie. The monk Tirso de Molina tells the truth: Don Juan wants to fuck four girls, and in order to do that, he lies to them, but none of them falls in love with him. When other European authors understand that, they copy it, and make it better; one of them is Molière, and the other is Mozart with his opera Don Giovanni. But seduction is still a lie, and thus it is never real. It is a contradiction in itself. How does seduction work in Dalí, if there is anything like that? Dalí was interested in the possibility of an explosion. This is a long story, but worth telling: Gala and Paul Éluard live with Max Ernst and have a love triangle. Éluard sends a letter to Ernst saying that he loves Gala because she is a formidable woman and she incarnates all the Russian spirit, but that he loves him even more. The surrealists, with Breton leading the group, couldn’t stand that. Until the last moment Gala keeps writing letters to Éluard, who has other women, but when he writes back to Gala he ends his letters with things like, ‘I make love to you’ or ‘I penetrate you’. And Dalí doesn’t give a damn about all that, because he is not attracted to Gala per se, but to the bizarre situation that the whole thing generates. He likes the fact that something strange is created, something that can unleash a hurricane at any point, but doesn’t. What he likes is masturbating, and that’s what he talks about in his real biography—the one he wrote when he was 17. Tell me an anecdote about you and Dalí. Once I visited him with five chained women. They were lesbian Maoist revolutionaries and came from Lyon to interpret my play Fando and Lis. I received a call from Dalí saying he wanted to perform a cybernetic work at midnight. When the five women heard it they went wild, they really wanted to come with me. I said, ‘Fine, but we can’t just show up there. It has to be somewhat special; you have to come chained. I’m going to chain you!’ But chaining someone is not as easy as it seems. We had to go to a department store, the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, where we bought five metres of chains, and the concierge lent us a few locks. I can imagine Dalí really liking your idea. Of course! He absolutely loved it. He was at the luxurious hotel Le Meurice, where the Nazis had their Kommandantur when they occupied Paris. When we got there, before I even asked, the doorman said, ‘Suite 103’. We went up to the room and Dalí was ecstatic. ‘They are my five slaves!’ he shouted. But I wasn’t sure, so I told him that none of them were at his service, that they wouldn’t do anything against their will. But then one of them took her pants off and said, ‘I want you to slap my butt!’ I was surprised, but decided to just enjoy the spectacle of Dalí hitting her with a nard. As hard as it is to find a nard in Paris. And what happened next? He said the ‘slave’ and I should go to an orgy with him that night. I then said that I was a chaste man and that I wouldn’t get involved. He got even more enthusiastic and assigned me the role of ‘chaste voyeur’. Do you identify with that role? I see you are very interested in sex. How about that painting with a naked man embracing a huge penis? It is very simple: men have a small penis and they wish they had one as big as that. We all wish we were bigger, in every sense. What do you think about life? I am extremely lucky for not having to fight for anything except for dreaming. The time is up. I tell him that I will have to do a lot of hermeneutics in order to write something worth reading. I quote Dalí, ‘Let them talk about me, even if what they say is good’, expecting his complicity. He gives me a dirty look, which I interpret as, ‘Don’t you dare write nonsense for my interview’. I tell him I’ll send him a draft before publishing it—but I won’t, it would be too risky. OK, thank you very much for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, it’s been my pleasure. I hope I can compose something interesting out of this chaos. You’d better. Otherwise I’ll whip your arse. The interview ends at 3.37pm. The artistic director of an opera and his assistants enter the apartment punctually. They want to propose an adaptation of Fando and Lis. He stares at me with condescendence as I begin to leave. Then he stands up, walks across the whole room and hugs me warmly. He looks up. I see a little child in his playroom: Arrabal as a self-made child.

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zodiac witch aesthetics

aries: candle magick, glamour spells, a super extensive online grimoire, loves pop culture witchcraft, big bonfires with friends to celebrate the sabbats, string lights hung up around their altar , online covens, palmistry

taurus: plants in the windowsill, a purse full of spell sachets, browsing the animal shelter thinking “is this cat my familiar?”, love spells, boxes upon boxes of tea on top of the refrigerator, wire-wrapped crystals, a home that smells like cranberries and acorn squash

gemini: pendulum readings, faerie gardens, an affinity for creating sigils, making witch tip masterposts, a pantry full of sweet magickal syropps, all-year beltane planning, always browsing etsy for beautiful wands and divination tools

cancer: excessive jars full of every type of moonwater imaginable, past life regression tarot spreads, messy and warm kitchen/cottage witchcraft, handcrafted appalachian cleansing brooms, collecting onion cutting tears for use in spells, folk magick

leo: emoji spells, carefully thought out offerings, always burning incense, always answers tumblr asks for tarot readings, an emptied out ice cream tub full of eggshells for protection spells, draws witchsonas 

virgo: beautifully arranged altars, forest witchcraft, “rose quartz is probably the answer”, browsing etsy for tarot card carrying bags, handmade sage bundles, jar spells, keeping witch materials in a thrift store suitcase under their bed

libra: grey witchcraft, pressed flowers in their grimoire, so much selenite, inability to decide what materials to use in a spell so they just throw in everything, attuned to the position of venus in the sky 

scorpio: so many craft store halloween decorations, polished carnelian, placing garlic EVERYWHERE in their house, sex magick, self-protection spells, makes amazing magickal teas and ciders, burning sage leaves with wishes on them

sagittarius: obsidian scrying mirrors, listening to witchcraft podcasts in the car, always willing to help out baby witches, moodboards, hexing corrupt politicians, red jasper bracelets, playing music during rituals, fire witch

capricorn: study sigils scribbled on the inside of their notebooks, solitary meditative hikes, tea leaf readings, keeping a piece of apatite inside their jacket, zombie tarot, rhaspodomancy 

aquarius: detailed dream journaling, analyzing the position of the planets on important days in politics/history, using latin in their incantations, always doing research, weather witchcraft, loves historic witchy art, wants to use witchcraft to make the world a better place 

pisces: bath magick, checking out every witchcraft book the public library has, spells protecting their family, rewriting their grimoire page 10 times because the handwriting doesn’t look right, sleeping with azurite under their pillow

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Romantic Misinterpretation: The Bell Jar in Pop Culture

Thanks to the end of the semester/the holiday season/complete laziness, I haven’t posted on here in a couple months, which I would like to change. This was my final essay for a class I took on Sylvia Plath (and Elizabeth Bishop) where I talk about The Bell Jar, young women in pop culture, and Woody Allen being a dick. I think it’s pretty good, but you should tell me what you think about it!

Keep reading

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Bath III

like indoor soccer like Eduardo’s skinny boy abs like the raggedy jersey shirt tucked into his shorts like Monsanto, who created the artificial turf in the 60s like bristles of the phony grass tickling the back of my knees like learning, a decade after the fact, about Monsanto like Eduardo, appearing once again, inquiring about New York rent like deciding to live in Eduardo’s mouth like learning about gum disease on WebMD like vigorously flossing in the bath 11 days in a row like falling asleep at 11 like telling Eduardo you wish you were better friends in high school like telling everyone you wish you were better friends in high school like walking into a dispirited bar feeling dispirited like getting hard reading the Iliad like waiting for the guy in plaid and thick emerald frames to walk away from the podium at the front of the bar like hearing a girl with real yellow hair, real yellow, announce the next reader like hearing the reader’s poems being called “quietly devastating” by the girl with real yellow hair like wanting to put my hand on your hand, or in your pocket, or on your knee, but not knowing if I’m capable of it like observing everyone around you and wondering if they also feel slightly bloated like realizing it doesn’t matter (3x)

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Los Angeles: Joel Chen’s eponymous shop on Highland Avenue in Los Angeles is a mental and visual whirlwind. 30,000 square feet of seemingly endless space is filled to capacity by a sprawl of hand-chosen furniture and decorative arts that represent virtually all periods and every country. With another 20,000 square feet spread over two other locations, Joel’s ever-expanding enterprise is on its way to becoming the Noah’s Ark of furniture and decorative arts. A Shanghai native, Joel got his start as an antique dealer in Los Angeles in the 1970s, and has spent the last four decades diversifying and developing his interests, and creating a wildly eclectic but singular perspective on design. Joel’s circus of objects was built by thousands of craftsmen and designers who have laboured away, throughout the centuries and across the globe, perfecting their crafts. While Joel is unwavering about the fact that he doesn’t curate his shop—he brings together the widest range of objects with the best possible provenance, so that designers and collectors can do the curating—his home is another story. Joel’s abode, which he has shared with his wife Margaret for over thirty years, is a depository for the objects that he holds dearest. Each object marks a memory of his days travelling the world in search of antique treasure, and a narrated tour of these possessions by Joel releases a crystalline universe made up of samurai craftsmen, ancient philosophers, 18th century guildsmen, Frits Henningsen, Ruth Asawa, and many more past and present personas. Where did this all begin: your shop, your collection, a life engulfed with objects? It was the mid-70s; I was working for my father who was a wholesale jeweller in downtown LA. It was a really cutthroat environment. You sold a ring for $50, some one else was selling it for $49, and so you cut your price to $48.50. It was that kind of competition. Anyway, I drove down Melrose Avenue one day and saw an antique store. It was closed, and when I knocked on the window the guy kept signalling me away, so I just asked, ‘Why?’ He opened the door and said he was open only to the trade. So I asked, ‘What’s the trade?’ He explained that ‘the trade’ was made up of interior designers, architects, or other antique dealers. I thought it was a racial thing. So I went back to my father and said, ‘I want to open an antique store,’ which I did. Where did you first open up? On Melrose Avenue, which is now the Marc Jacobs store! I think I had around 800 square feet. By the time I left Melrose I had 6,500 square feet. I started with Chinese antiques. My father co-signed a bank loan for me. I borrowed $6,000, went to Hong Kong and filled a container with pure junk! I had no idea what I was buying. Slowly I started snooping into other people’s stores and found out there was a lot more to it than the junk I was buying. So where did your interests first expand to? First I branched out to other Asian antiques, then I started looking at European antiques, Italian painted furniture, be it Genoa or Piedmontese, and then there was a time when English Regency and Brown furniture were popular. Along the way I discovered modern furniture. I am totally self-taught. I learned by going to other people’s stores and auctions and by travelling. I was going to Italy, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. I would go to Hungary looking for Bauhaus furniture. But it was already slim pickings, because immediately after the fall of communism the Italians started trucking all the good furniture and propaganda art out of Eastern Europe. Over the years you became a generalist, interested in furniture at large, across periods and style. Few design museums—actually none that I can think of—have as eclectic a collection as you. But your collection, if we could call it that, is always moving, changing and expanding… There are pros and cons to selling so widely. The pro is you can focus on the best examples of each era or historical period. But the con is that you’re going to be running out of money because you can’t concentrate on one thing that people will come to you for. An 18th century Italian console comes in, and I have to buy it, or a beautiful 11th century Gandhara piece, I have to buy that too. When did contemporary design enter the mix with all the historical work? So after Bauhaus I turned to the ‘50s and ‘60s, but I basically stopped in the ‘60s. I skipped the ‘80s entirely, because I don’t care too much of what I call glam art, which happened in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Now I represent contemporary artists, I worked with Paul Johnson, and we brought in Max Lamb and Kwangho Lee. This is where things get really kaleidoscopic… you put these things next to each other, and there’s little-to-no program in terms of what can go next to what. You’ll have a Joe Colombo sofa, next to 18th century Chinese cabinetry, next to 19th century toy trains—the kind Eames would have loved—next to Carlo Molino. This creates an exhilarating shuffle of unexpected encounters, which I’ve experienced before in the sprawl of furniture that populates your shops. Likewise for my house; here is a Danish table from the ‘60s, then scarce armchairs by the Chicago architects Krueck and Sexton, and we have a 19th century Anglo-Indian box with a red camphor wood and ivory inlay. With such broad interests, how do you identify the pieces you will buy, collect and sell, aside from quality, what’s the red thread, what draws you to them? I actually don’t look for anything. I stumble onto things, and that’s an incredible feeling. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Every time, I find something that speaks to me, I struggle not to buy it, but I always lose. Quality is an extremely important criteria for me. I don’t look for crudity. Everything has been gradual of course, like my career; the things I have become interested in have developed over time. Like this little articulated crayfish, an 18th century bronze from Japan, I discovered them and loved them. Each little part of its body works and moves, and each of its parts were cast separately. But I’ve stopped collecting them. The man-hours it would have taken to train to make such a piece, and then to actually make it… Astonishing. The craftsmen who made these, back in the 19th century in Japan, had been masters of making weaponry and armour, but with the slow demise of samurais and shoguns, these craftsmen were left without work. With nowhere to go they started making bronzes. I can’t imagine anybody who would want to make that today. So labour-intensive. In your home and in your shops I sense the millions of hours of labour, poured into so many objects, from so many periods, and I get the sense of being in an enormous labour bank, as if all the time people spent designing and making these things were somehow captured here. You can really feel the presence of people who cared about something, who stood for something. They spent the time and perfected everything. See that? (Joel points to a torso-sized rock, ornately shaped with a cavity in its centre.) It’s a natural Chinese scholar’s rock. Its surface is eroded and formed by lake waters over thousands and thousands of years. And then here, this is a man-made scholar’s rock carved by hand from a solid piece of marble, it was made to simulate and imitate the natural scholar’s rock. With the expanding categories and quantities of objects, I feel that you have crossed the threshold into being a singular museum, like the Henry Ford Museum, or the Museum of Jurassic Technology, you have created a very particular brand of museum… Yes, but it’s my worst nightmare. I’m running out of space for it! So I now have five different buildings storing and keeping it all. A lot of the pieces can’t be seen because they’re in storage. My wife says I have to slow down. Some people might say such a focus on material things is unhealthy. The TV show Hoarders comes to mind. Where does your connection with these objects transcend the materialistic? I think all objects are really just borrowed, because when you’re dead, you’re not going to be carrying them with you. So you get to spend time with an object for a while, and then if you’re like me, you sell it because you can’t carry it with you to the next world. And what does it contribute to your space and life while you do live with it? The quality experience actually comes from when I travel, gathering so many things along the way. Then, when I have the pieces at home, they bring me the memories. I think life is basically memories. You construct a memory and you remember the year, the moment. Travelling constructs a lot of memories for me and I bring things back with me that keep those memories close. Tangency seems to be important to you. You have a way of placing things next to each other that invokes humour, curiosity, and surprise, where the collective arrangement changes the meaning of the individual pieces. Yes, like here, I put a tiger-patterned velvet pillow on a Hans Wegner chair. Hans is so paired down, where it was all about shape and how the carved parts come together so carefully, all for comfort. The pillow is 19th century decor, from the guild culture, and I love to put it on the chair. In your Highland Avenue shop I remember seeing two dining chairs, a Friso Kramer and a Jean Prouvé, flanking a premodern Chinese table. Next to the old table, the two mid-century chairs seemed like brothers from different mothers, like a couple of young rebellious dudes. I found it all very funny! Yes, brothers, except one is $550 and the other one is $15,000! But even Kramer is getting depleted, and more expensive too. You used to be able to buy Kramer for nothing, like $90 when I first got them, nobody wanted them because they were made for schools and hospitals, and there were so many of them. The wide net you cast brings in some incredible things that don’t end up in traditional design museums. I was really excited to see—and get to lie on—Bruce Hannah’s day bed for Knoll which you had in the shop last summer. He was a professor of mine at university, so I had studied his work through images. I like to think of your shop as a place where furniture is given a second or third life. More like sixth or seventh life! Bruce Hannah is under the radar. Nobody is collecting it, and it’s really very reasonable. It’s a good design and it is comfortable, the day-bed especially. Within your widely varying array of furniture and objects, you keep a very neat space, even at your home I have the feeling of being in a showroom. It’s always like that. When I read a book, I always close it up and put it back in its place. So when I want to re-read it, I know exactly where to go. The only bad thing is in my store, I have no control over it. I have five guys moving things constantly. When a sofa is sold, I replace it with another one. Recently I started placing similar things together, which I’ve never done before, so now black leather goes with black leather… Sorry to interrupt, but can you tell me about this crew of baby Jesus figures you have standing at the entrance to your home? El Santo Niño Jesús. Each one is from a different place—Columbia, Italy, the Philippines… You can see how huge the influence of Catholicism was in those days, across the globe. This one is a survivor; it is a remnant from a fire, you can see the char marks on its legs, and it's missing a foot. Many of the pieces you collect hold great spiritual value within their cultures. What draws you to this class of object? There’s always a story. They had certain values. With the scholar’s rock for instance, the scholars would spend time contemplating this object, and from it they took inspiration for poems and novels. The rock pushed them to further achievement, and increased creativity. I used to travel more than I do now, and, back in those days, I travelled and carried pieces with me that I loved. It was less about a prize than finding something that was significant within a culture. Finding these objects is about living in the present, and once I have them they help me remember my past. The pieces in my home may seem random, but they are here to remind me of certain stages of my career. Why have you slowed your travel schedule? I used to travel to fill containers, but now, the things I seek are more universally dispersed and rarer thanks to the computer. People are online all the time. This is positive and negative. Positive because if you want to find something you will find it, but negative because the prices have become universal. There is no such thing as a bargain anymore. All the designers go for the same price no matter what website you go to, maybe they deviate 20 percent but not more. And so now that you spend more time in LA, what’s changed in your approach to collecting and buying? I spend time trying to find emerging and local artists, coming out of the gentrified districts of Los Angeles. I’m looking for the next wave. I don’t like the idea of the next wave, but business-wise you need to be keen on all that. I think antiques are coming back in a big way, more to the point that they are affordable—these days you’re buying 16th century pieces for less than you pay for a 20th century piece. I just bought a new building and I’m thinking of doing more shows than ever. Profit or no profit, that comes after. Anyway I can’t look at my Aladdin lamp and know what will be profitable and what won’t be. Los Angeles is still young in a certain way, it’s growing up but is not yet mature, you can see all the galleries coming up on my street, on Highland Avenue, and that gives you a lot of hope that things will have a good ending. Of the thousands of objects that have passed through your doors, is there one in particular that may have taught you something significant? When I first started out in Chinese antiques, I came across a pair of elaborately carved Imperial throne chairs of zitan and burl, they were 18th century, from the Qianlong period. The carvings showed a phoenix and a dragon on opposite ends. I had them in my garage for like ten years, and one day Sotheby’s came in and said that they wanted them for auction, and low and behold they brought in $200,000. I recognised them enough to buy them and store them, but I didn’t really recognise them for what they were. They were museum pieces. It was an important lesson for me. I overlooked them. It taught me that I shouldn’t judge an object by what’s popular in interior design or style

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Our past is not something we can choose to leave behind. It guides our hands and sways our gaze, it is our blood and tears and bliss. Paint chip trails and ghost images are left behind in abandoned places, lived in to death and to pieces. Every life leaves an imprint. Plants shoot out roots and break through foundations found under the floorboards. You rub your eyes clear for the first time and see the war paint that has always been there, running rainforest colours across your cheeks. These past histories unearthed are not a thing that you’ve lost, but a veil sitting just behind your eyes, weaving, running, somewhere beyond the treeline. These old faces are your faces and your hands have built things without permission. Every tiny effort feeds and is recycled… The universe is so large that all we can do is hold on and take care of one another.

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I recently read a book by Georges Perec, called Les Choses. It struck me as a similar sort of principle, in that it tells a story of two people but describes the couple through their material setting. He wrote about objects to describe the people.

Yes, that’s right! In a way the best thing to do with the photos would be not to have the name even—just the number and a reference at the end. Because in a way if you see it without a name—the exhibition is like that—you think, ‘Who could it be, what do they do?’ This is the idea, yes!

Right, and in the same way Perec uses objects to describe the way people were living in the ‘60s, have you noticed a change in the way people are living and presenting their homes between 1995 when you first started in New York and 2014 when you were shooting in Berlin?

Well, I don’t think that way. I think the French, the Germans, and the Americans are very different. I think in New York, anything goes. In Paris, it’s very bourgeois. Berlin is a city in reconstruction, full of foreigners; I think there’s only one person born in Berlin in the book. Berlin looked a lot more egalitarian, and you don’t have the feeling these people spend much time in their places. It’s extremely organised, precise.

One that I really liked very much was Michael Kewinig. At first for two years I couldn’t photograph his living room because it was being done, so finally he let me photograph and I thought, ‘Well, his office, his living room, he’s there all the time’. I was absolutely fascinated by the perfection: the pens were put like that, and the papers were put like that.

But when I was young I loved movies. My sister is actually a movie director. When I came to visit my parents in Paris I used to go to the magazine stands; they had all the American magazines, and I was fascinated by the way the movie stars lived: the house, the swimming pool. It came from there—the desire to see how it is on the other side of the fence. From Tony Curtis or Eddie Fisher, Frank Sinatra—to glimpse something of the aesthetic in those days. It was in the ‘60s, you didn’t go to America just like that.

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In the 1960s Ricardo Bofill set up the Taller de Arquitectura (Architecture Workshop) by bringing together a multidisciplinary group of architects, engineers, sociologists and philosophers to create the basis for what would become his career. After several residential projects, the Taller de Arquitectura set out to design buildings that would break with conventions and explore new forms of social relationships for families and neighbours. In the early 1970s, Ricardo discovered an old cement factory on the outskirts of Barcelona, surrounded by a large plot of land. This is where he carried out two major projects that we talk about in this conversation. Firstly, Walden 7, a vertical neighbourhood heavily influenced by philosophical and political schools of thought of the time. Its name comes from Frederic Skinner’s science-fiction utopia book Walden Two. Secondly, La Fábrica (The Factory), the building where this conversation took place, a project that turned an old factory into Ricardo’s own home and the office for the Taller de Arquitectura. Accompanied by Guillermo López, architect and editor of Quaderns magazine, Ricardo met us in his office inside the cylindrical silos of the former cement factory. We sat around the table on which he made the first sketches for most of the projects in his career and talked as he smoked one cigarette after another. Ricardo Bofill: The story of my house is the story of my life. I started studying architecture at university in Barcelona, but I was thrown out so I had to leave. Later I returned to the city and started working on some housing projects with my father, who was also an architect. Some years later, at the height of Franco’s dictatorship, I was thrown out again when I tried to experiment with larger-scale projects such as ‘Ciudad en el espacio’ (City in the space) in Madrid, a new neighbourhood with social housing designed to promote different forms of organising families and property. The guy who threw me out was the Mayor of Madrid at the time and he told me I would never work in Spain again. My life story stems from those circumstances. At the time I thought Catalonia was great; somewhere where it was possible to do avant-garde projects. But there wasn’t space to think big, in terms of neighbourhoods and towns, which is what interested me. The prefabricated houses and Le Corbusier-esque apartment blocks that were used to plan whole neighbourhoods were very much in fashion then and something of an obsession at the Barcelona School of Architecture. But I hated Le Corbusier: he might have been highly talented, but ultimately he was just a man from La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland with a Calvinist, Puritan mentality. Someone who essentially hated the city. The city is where a utopia can take shape, but it is also clearly the site of corruption. When Le Corbusier arrived, cities were horrible, dirty and full of beggars, and he was horrified. So he started to make plans to knock down half of Paris, Barcelona, Algiers… Wherever he went he came up with this sort of idea. This was also the time of the Athens Charter, with its clear division of functions —this is where you work, this is where you sleep, this is where you eat— which is the worst thing imaginable. The Athens Charter was a disaster whose effects are still being felt today. I fought a really tough personal battle against this, which started at university. My whole career has been an endeavour to rescue the Mediterranean city, the European city, a city with streets, squares, public spaces and mixed uses. That’s what my life has been about. Imagine a world without cities. It would be a world without any culture, without any civilisation. Nothing would have happened because all major advances always take place in cities. They are a meeting point, a gathering place, the site where people meet and things happen. Obviously there are contradictions in cities, but it’s one thing to untangle these contradictions and quite another to say we simply won’t make any more cities.   Example of the monumental scales of Walden 7 ARQUITECTURA-G: In your book Espacio y Vida (Space and Life) you say that an architect should not only come up with solutions to a client’s specific requests, but also go beyond a purely utilitarian approach. In other words, architecture should have a soul. Both Walden 7 and your house-studio, La Fábrica, can be understood as housing experiments where the decisive factors are the scale, the pre-existing structures and in the case of La Fábrica, the fact that you are your own client. Ricardo: In the early 1970s, I wanted to make a leap in terms of scale, to go from planning typical Barcelona apartment blocks to planning a whole neighbourhood. This wasn’t easy because developers at the time wouldn’t even hear of it. However, I made my first attempt in Reus (south of Barcelona), with the Barrio Gaudí (Gaudí neighbourhood). The houses I had built before were made using very few resources, almost like a craftsman, using very primitive techniques and materials like bricks. At that time I identified myself very closely with so-called vernacular architecture. Architecture without architects, made up of volumes integrated into their context and made out of local materials without any major technical resources. I started planning with this idea very much in mind, both when I made my first buildings in Barcelona and also the Barrio Gaudí in Reus. Then I moved on first to Ciudad en el espacio and then Walden 7, which was an attempt to build a vertical neighbourhood following these criteria. What happened with these neighbourhoods, both Ciudad en el espacio in Madrid and Walden 7 here in Barcelona, is that no developer wanted to take the risk of backing such an operation. So I had to team up with an economist friend of mine and between the two of us we bought this plot of land on the outskirts of Barcelona and undertook the project ourselves. At that time we were a big work group, with people from different disciplines. First and foremost we wanted to build a different kind of community, roughly following the communitarianism of philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who collaborated with us. Although it might not seem so now, this was a fairly revolutionary idea at the time. Walden 7 wasn’t just a property, but a property with shares: everyone bought part of the building and chose a way of life. Walden 7 was built out of modules, so if there was just one of you, you could just buy one; if you were a couple, two; or if you formed part of a bigger group, several. Everyone could choose how they wanted to live there. The way of life inside was different, since the spaces were mainly multifunctional. The housing we were putting forward at the time didn’t have an entrance, living room, bathroom, etc.; each module could serve for anything. In addition, the modules fitted together in space to form a kind of monumental building, all the while influenced by vernacular architecture. It is monumental in scale, so that it can be seen, so that it really exists, but inside it also has small streets, nooks and crannies… It’s an object on a double scale, monumental and human. As a result, the project was severely criticised because at that time creating a monument in suburbia was frowned upon. There was a trend of opinion in society that believed that cheap houses had to look cheap, as well as being cheap. If you turned that on its head, people got angry. As far as La Fábrica was concerned, I was looking for a place for a broader experience that would encompass both my home and my workplace. In Barcelona, there was a series of regulations that made this impossible. But one day on the way out of Barcelona, I saw this factory from the road. I went in, spoke to the manager and he told me they were leaving in a month. A-G: Everything was still working when you arrived. How did you go about changing things? Ricardo: That’s right, it was still belching smoke and since it was a cement factory, there was dust everywhere. We spoke to the owners and we bought it. Then we spoke to the town council of Sant Just Desvern (a town on the outskirts of Barcelona where the factory is located) and told them we wanted to do something different. It was the end of the dictatorship and there weren’t many regulations that applied to the outskirts of Barcelona, so we could get on with the project. After that we moved the Taller de Arquitectura from Barcelona to some huts next to the factory. I set up there and started to build. As the developer, I had some financial problems during construction and we were affected by a series of changes to regulations. Later, the town council even expropriated part of the factory. I had got myself what people thought was the most horrific place on earth, full of smoke and cement dust. Transforming it was an exciting challenge. I thought it was important to conserve cities and change them without having to knock everything down, exactly how things had been done throughout history. In the Renaissance and also in the Baroque period, somebody would turn up and add a new bit to an existing building that remained in place. I wanted to repeat this experience, only not with a normal building, but the most complicated one, a cement factory. The work went on for ages. It took two years just to clean the place. The space where we are now was a silo full of cement. We had to empty it and then clean it. In the same way that there is vernacular architecture, there is also industrial vernacular architecture. Traditionally, factories were not planned; they just took shape bit by bit. The sum of these parts is incredible, but in the case of La Fábrica we had to gradually uncover all the pure forms hidden underneath all the mess. After we had emptied it, what came next was like moulding a sculpture: cutting out walls, removing bits to adapt things for a new use, cutting out holes to create new windows, preparing areas to make slabs and other pieces. In addition, the goal was that after all these cuts, the new forms would be pure geometric forms. There were lots of bits and pieces covering the interesting parts that we wanted to uncover. From an aesthetic perspective, as you move through the spaces you can see that each part is a very different world. This project has taken shape over many years, so although it is based on vernacular industrial architecture, it passes through different visions of architecture. After cleaning everything and leaving pure geometric forms, we planted lots of vegetation. It has a touch of the Brutalist movement, but also a certain Romantic attitude. The plants everywhere made an unliveable space a bit more human. The process also has a kind of historicism to it. How do you create a window in a closed cylindrical silo? It’s very complicated, especially from the rationalist perspective. The windows in the silos are inspired by traditional Catalan architecture, in accordance with this historicism I mentioned. Each space is also influenced by my travels around the world. The result is very eclectic, because there is a lot of space and it has taken shape over a long period of time. I started the transformation of the factory slowly and it was never completed. In fact, my house-studio is still unfinished forty years later. It is so big and complex that it can never be finished. In addition, seeing La Fábrica as a house-studio is linked to the idea from Catalan craftsmanship of having the work space and house in the same place. This is where I live and most of the projects I’ve done in my life I’ve done at this very table.     The beauty of the hidden geometry of La Fábrica Guillermo López: Following on from this, in your book Espacio y Vida you refer to La Fábrica as a manifesto that not only contains some of your ideas on architecture, but also, as you were just saying when you talked about the long construction time, distils your experiences and references from your travels. Now, over two decades since the book was published, do you still see La Fábrica as a manifesto? Ricardo: I’m often asked about my favourite work and I never know what to say. I always like the latest one the most… until I stop liking it. When I’m planning any project, I like it, but afterwards, when I stop designing it and I see it built I start to see shortcomings. What I can say is that the place where I live, here, is where I’m at my best, where I feel most comfortable and where I can think most clearly. This is where I can lead a more disciplined life. Here I can live an almost monastic life —in a nonreligious sense— and although it can sometimes be quite uninhibited, it is also completely controlled and structured, hour by hour. This is the best place for me to concentrate. If you look you’ll see this space here is very empty, with no references around me. Here there is no awareness of space or time, which is what I need to begin a project. I tailor-made this world for me. A-G: Going back to Espacio y Vida again, you start this essay by saying you are a ‘nomad’, a ‘traveller with no haven, forced to set his points of reference by his route’, quite a declaration of principles set against the static nature of architecture. How does the personal construction of your own world and the shelter it offers sit with your nomadism? Ricardo: I met many Tuareg people and became friends with some of them. Whenever I could, I went to see them and travelled with them throughout the Sahara. I liked their way of life and their philosophy a lot. They were nomads and had a whole ritual of behaviour that enabled them to live in a hostile territory like the desert. From the way they dressed to the way they had tea in the morning, every ritual had a meaning in that environment. If you get it wrong, you have a really bad time. It’s a life in which everything is used to the minimum. Something else amazing is their sense of space. Without a compass or anything, they know how to cross a huge territory without getting lost. I really like that way of living, with the absolute minimum and on the move. Nomads have certain reference places where they stop. This happens to me when I go to the Sahara desert, where there are places I really like or when I go to see a certain building by Palladio in Venice. The same thing happens when I go and see something in particular by Wright. There are places I have as a reference when I travel. I spend half my time travelling and the other half here. I’m a nomad who can return home to find an atmosphere ready for getting on with intellectual activity. Guillermo: At the start you referred to vernacular architecture, to volumes that multiply and fit together. In projects like Walden 7 this same logic applies, but also includes vertical growth. Although your projects are very different in nature, we can see a common thread running through your work in the form of the geometric laws that structure them, sometimes more obviously than others. In the case of La Fábrica, you didn’t start with a blank plot of land; there were pre-existing structures there with very clear, striking geometries. On the ground plan the silos are perfect circles that you then approach following a strategy of subtraction… Ricardo: Destruction. Guillermo: Destruction? Well, that’s a bit of a different concept… Ricardo: Yes, completely. It was all about destroying in order to find the hidden beauty inside the factory. It’s an almost sculptural work of destruction. A-G: One thing we noticed is that although the pre-existing structure is monumental in scale and has huge dimensions, when you actually need to find yourself, when you need to concentrate and face the blank page, you come to the place where we are now, which is completely the opposite, bounded and shielded. Ricardo: I like things that are monumental in nature, but you have to be very careful with them. I’ve had to mix two concepts. This difference is very subtle and you have to know how to handle it. Monumental architecture is institutional architecture linked to language with a neoclassical undertone and the architecture of power. So you always have to introduce this double scale into projects to ensure they are both monumental and welcoming; you have to introduce the human scale into projects so people can feel comfortable. A-G: That double scale you refer to is found in your house-studio, where a certain monumental nature sits alongside a more domestic and intimate side. What strategies did you follow to adapt the domestic scale to the enormous scale of the pre-existing structure? Did you follow a process that evolved as you went along or did you start with an initial plan? Ricardo: It evolved as we went along, although the process and strategies for the project were clear: to clean, destroy, plant, introduce historicist aspects, include the accumulated influences of my different travels, etc. What wasn’t so clear were the different uses of each space. The construction had to be done point by point. The walls of the silos are only 12cm thick and we had to make a series of grooves in which to place the brick slabs because at the time it was too expensive to make them out of concrete. We built it all point by point. I addition, I liked building it like that, cheaply. I don’t like luxury, I really don’t. This is very important, because architecture that is an expression of luxury really bothers me. You can see that there are as few things as possible in the rooms in this house-studio. I like brick walls without covering them with luxury materials; I like minimal things. All the tables and chairs in the offices and rooms are the same as they were forty years ago. I don’t like changing anything. I like the minimum, the bare necessity, the purest look possible. That’s how I live best. Guillermo: You talked before about eclecticism and specifically about how different actions have been superposed over the course of the process, and you also criticised the separation of functions as set out in the Athens Charter. Seen as a manifesto, your house-studio, La Fábrica, appears to challenge the idea of zoning, of life understood as a series of pigeonholed functions that occur in a linear fashion. Rather, the project suggests a mixture, a constant game of opposites in which the industrial blends with the domestic, your private life with work, vegetation with the artificial, etc. What we see is a sum of deliberate ambiguities as a response to everything that was attributed to the modernist movement, which is far more likely to mark things out. Ricardo: The thing I know how to do best is oversee the work processes and change them in accordance with the project, managing the change of scale, going from large scale to small scale. When I was young I thought that one day I might build a entire city, but I later realised I couldn’t do it. The strategy I followed with the Taller de Arquitectura was to plan pieces of cities, pieces made in such a way that someone could put them all together and the end result would be a city. However, style and architectural language no longer interest me as much. When I started out, the International Style was in fashion. In the United States, the results of Mies’ architecture were everywhere: glass with steel structures. The language was being pared down more and more and we were heading towards an absurd monotony. Mies could reduce his language to the minimum, but that didn’t mean we all had to write a novel with the same four words. That’s how we started postmodernism, aiming to regain the language of historical architecture. Suddenly people realised there was a broader language in which to write architecture. In truth, what happened is that very bad architecture emerged. The vulgarization of postmodernity in particular was appalling. So after two or three years I decided I wasn’t interested in postmodernism any more. But I did want to write in a different way or try to invent languages, or at least not repeat myself, because it is very hard to invent. As you said earlier, it’s geometry that underpins our buildings. Geometry has always been key to my work. A photograph of La Fabricá from the exterior☄️☄️☄️ A-G: Going back to La Fábrica, we’re particularly attracted to the idea of ruins. First you carry out work in a former factory by emptying and destroying and then, following a Romantic idea, you plant vegetation that devours the construction. It could almost give the impression that you want to inhabit a ruin. Ricardo: I like the idea of a ruin a lot, but in a metaphorical sense. I like the fact that the building never ends, it isn’t finished, that this kind of ruin constantly stands out. I like the idea of a ruin philosophically. Life is a ruin. The incomplete, half-finished work in ruins is a subject that has always fascinated me. The work of art doesn’t exist; it’s like a greyhound race in which you run towards something but never manage to reach it. All work has something wrong with it. I’m drawn to the idea that there are other worlds under something. Guillermo: In this project, the aspect of a ruin comes about not only because it is unfinished, but also by the lush vegetation, which superposes itself onto the clear geometry of the silos and gradually conquers it as it grows, until it separates the building from the outside context. In fact from your house-studio, the only clearly visible reference of the outside is Walden 7. Ricardo: I wanted the vegetation to devour the building and cover it. I wasn’t interested in creating a façade here. Not for me. If you take a walk around here, you won’t see anything of this building; it’s covered by the gardens for two reasons. Firstly because from these windows here I didn’t want to see anything happening outside; I want a closed world. And it’s also covered with vegetation because I didn’t want this building to have a composed façade. None of the houses I’ve made for myself have had a façade. I design façades because clients ask me to, because I have to. But the façade isn’t the aspect that most interests me; it’s the space. To understand the space you have to open your eyes as wide as possible, have the widest field of view, 180˚, and also see the context, the space. When you turn around, remember what there is behind you as well; notice you’re surrounded and appreciate that spatial feeling of pleasure. A-G: We’re interested in the everyday side of life, finding out how you move through such a large space, how you colonise it, whether you have to learn or let things go to be able to inhabit it. You spoke before about rituals… Ricardo: You have to create your own way of life, lifestyle and pleasure. You have to organise your pleasurable situations in accordance with your personality, and more so as time passes. As you get older it’s more and more difficult. In my case, I have to ritualise time and space. One space to do one thing, one time to do something else—the times are very clearly set out. All this is a ritual to conserve your creativity, interest and learning. For that you have to be increasingly strict. The older you are, the greater the risk of your creativity decreasing. At the start of a project, my way of working is being here alone. I’m interested in carrying out a project, but the moment I enjoy most is the blank page, the conception of a project. During the creative moment I don’t like to have any influences; I don’t like to have books or magazines around to see what other people have done. I like to start with my head as clear as possible. I’ve already had plenty of influences travelling and visiting work by architects I like. Here I don’t want any. Some people root themselves a lot in the past when they work. I find thinking about everything I’ve done in my life, step by step, incredibly boring. Going back over it all, what I did in such and such a year, what happened etc., isn’t for me, and that’s why I don’t keep memoirs. On the other hand, I still have fun thinking about a project; it’s exciting to think about what I’m going to do in each new project. Guillermo: When you started to talk about La Fábrica, you said how regulations affect what we build. In this sense, La Fábrica is a place that lets you challenge highly restrictive regulations. Do you think that in this context a project like La Fábrica would still be possible today? Ricardo: Not if you stick to the regulations, play by the rules of the game. Neither La Fábrica nor Walden 7 would have been possible today. In the more highly regulated countries, where people are more careful, there are fewer problems, but it’s also more difficult to be inventive. There is more invention in third-world countries than in places like Holland or Denmark, where everything is perfectly regulated. If I had to do it for myself, if I couldn’t do it here, I’d go somewhere else. I’d keep changing countries until I found a place where I could build my world.

[ripstocking]

New York City: Philip Crangi’s grandmother used to tell him every dog has his day. Lately, it seems his day has arrived. Two years ago he won the prestigious CFDA/Vogue fashion award for best accessories designer and his life has been non-stop ever since. I met him at his loft in New York City’s industrial Flatiron District. He sits in his dimly lit bedroom answering a questionnaire for Style.com about why he thinks now is a good time to open up his first store. It’s a magic moment, his home, business and life are exactly as he intended. This makes spending time with him fun. With his fast talk and electric enthusiasm I easily got lost in his world. A world that feels like you stepped 100 years back in time, but as you adjust you notice that it’s cohesive in taste, not time period. Inspired by growing up by the ocean in Florida and his grandparent’s houseboat, Phillip thoughtfully carved his enormous loft into ship-proportioned spaces. The front of the space is the factory where you are greeted by sixteen metalsmiths using the building as originally intended. This room snakes into an elegant showroom/design studio, that’s wallpapered with cork, ideas are pinned up everywhere. A tiny red kitchen transitions into his private quarters that are dark and cosy, much more coast of Maine than midtown Manhattan. What does the tattoo across your chest say? ‘Je ne regrette rien’. That Edith Piaf song. It used to make me cry when I was a little kid, and when I understood what it meant, I was like, ‘holy shit, that’s heavy!’ What does it mean? It means ‘I have no regrets’. It’s basically this kind of sad song. It’s triumphant but it’s really sad, she’s basically like, ‘This is my life, I made it myself. I’m not gonna regret it’. It’s a cautionary note to myself. I need to look at my life, and say ‘You know, you made this shit, this is your lot in life’. (laughs) Have as much fun as possible! Does it work? I don’t see my tattoos anymore but it does work, ‘cause people always ask me about it, so I have to tell that story and it reminds me not to regret. Do you do many regrettable things or is it about living life to the fullest? I think it’s really what you don’t do is the thing you regret. Like forgetting to buy Grace Jones tickets last month. That sticks with me more than the crazy shit I’ve done. You have this opportunity in your life, and you have to just take things when they come. I wanna know that I did it then. I grew up in South Florida, I had a very middle class upbringing. I was always searching for the crazy relative who lived in New York, or was a drag queen, and there just wasn’t a single one! I mean my family was nuts, but in a very suburban way. Is that what brought you to NY? To be your own role model? Well I went to RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] and ended up doing jewellery! It took me extra years to graduate, when I finished all my friends had moved here and it just seemed like the natural thing. Did you start your line right away? I was doing a lot of 20th century decorative art restoration, working for interior designers and antique dealers and on the side I was selling to clients but I don’t think that stores and magazines knew what to do with it—its time hadn’t really come. But I was showing them the work all along, and then suddenly in 2000, all of a sudden everyone was like ‘Wow, why didn’t you show us this before? This is so cool!’ So has the style of your apartments always been cohesive with your design work? I always had a really strong idea of what it was, but I didn’t really know how to get there. I learned from working with decorators for years, the lie of the interior editorial. What, like tricking out the place so it’s spectacular but has no resemblance to the owners actual place? Yeah! I remember working on someone’s house for an Architectural Digest shoot. The antique dealers I worked with, basically loaned half the shop for the shoot! And I was like, ‘What! So many lies!’ That kind of thing always weirded me out, decorators that invent a clients total look. It’s actually creating a personality for them? Yeah, they buy their books, their art, everything! But for me, it’s about layers of stuff, and it’s about the things that I’ve collected that I feel comfortable around. I don’t really make separations between my jewellery work, the art that I make, the way I dress or how I decorate my house. It’s all different versions of the same thing. So that took a while to get to that point, to realize that... They are all aspects of the same ideas? Yeah. I always looked at them as different things. It took ages. It was an evolving thing. I think that now it’s the place I meant it to be. I feel very comfortable here. It’s the first place I’ve ever lived where I feel that it’s totally me, 100%. It’s a cool feeling. How long have you lived here? Since February 2002. And it’s officially a factory? Yeah, it’s industrial space. And you have a factory! I do have a factory, yeah! It had been vacant for years before I took it. It’s an old fur building and it was just a big open space with fluorescent lights from window to window. I took it right after September 11th, and apparently they couldn’t give the place away. So, as far as living in your workspace, this is a new extreme, living with a factory and a showroom. How do you deal with that? It’s pretty heavy. It can be really intense. That’s why having a place in Cherry Grove for the summer is so important, ‘cause at least I’m not ‘here’ when I’m not working. The winter’s rough. I’m busy all the time… I’m running the business all day so I do my design work at night. I’m very regimented, so every morning I’m up, at my computer—dressed, teeth brushed, ready to go at 10 o’clock when everybody comes. No pyjamas wandering through the factory, hung-over? Often hung-over, but always in clothes! Even if I have the same ones from the night before I’m always dressed! Can you explain why you have a trick sliding bed? Oh yeah! So when I built the place, I didn’t really know whether I could live here. The only thing that was in the bedroom was that wall, and it’s actually two and a half feet off the ground, so the bed can roll all the way underneath the closet. So if I was inspected I could roll the bed under the wall so it would look like a full couch sticking out. I used to do that every morning. Sneaky. What’s your favourite possession? It’s these crazy House of Jansen chairs. An antique dealer that I work for owed me money and he gave me the chairs instead. Their amazing, camping-style folding chairs made from leather, and brass, and steel. My favourite room in this place is my bathroom. I think I have a real knack for the tiniest spaces, which is why I’ve cut this giant loft into, a bunch of small rooms. You quickly forget you’re in Manhattan. Yeah! I like the bathroom because that was the first thing that I finished that was exactly how I wanted it. I painted it black, and hung all those little pictures. I also love the kitchen, I built this tiny kitchen ‘cause I’m a bachelor, I can fry an egg just fine over there! It looks like a boat. The thing about this space that I love is that it’s very boat-shaped, long and narrow. Is that coming from growing up in Florida? I think so, my dad had a sailboat for a while, I always felt most comfortable by the ocean. I like the idea of a houseboat, my grandparents lived on one when I was a kid. So you divide your giant loft into houseboat proportions? Yeah, like a tiny boat kitchen, and the tiniest bathroom in the world! I remember when we finally got the toilet in there, you can touch all the walls with your knees while you’re sitting on the toilet, I think that’s perfect. Do you think black in a small room gives the feeling of infinite space? My grandmother was a decorator in Miami, Christine Crangi, and her idea was always ‘If it’s small, put mirrors on the wall, and paint it bright colours’. I would never want to see that much of myself and I’m not into bright colours, if it’s smaller, really accentuate what’s most prominent about the space. And I love a black ceiling. So you rebel against your grandmother? She was very Florida! Is she alive still? She’s alive still, she still works. She’s 96, the most incredible woman. Her aesthetic is very WHITE. It’s a very scroll-y, Italian aesthetic. Growing up, I was constantly looking for the secret compartments in my house! I was waiting to find a dungeon or something. I watched the Addams Family allot. In 1976 this family moved across the street their son, Jeremy, became my best friend and his Mom, Mrs. Jones, was the craziest nutter I had ever met. She was always in these flowery Laura Ashley dresses that looked like nightgowns, and she had on all this jewellery. She wore her mother’s engagement ring, her grandmother’s engagement ring and her husband’s grandmother’s engagement ring. She wore these baby rings that I’d never seen before, and she wore them on the tops of her fingers. She had so much amazing antique jewellery, she wore it all the time, she never took it off. She’d be in the garden, digging, and she’d have the jewellery on. And her house was all antiques, and weird old crap, but in a Florida house with terrazzo floors and jalousie windows. It looked amazing to me! It was, like, this mythical thing. She was really my inspiration. And it wasn’t to that extent, but my mother was always really into decorating and making things for the house. We’d stay up all night rearranging all the furniture. So it’s kind of a combination of those influences. I like the mix of it all. The fun part is fitting things together, As I’ve gotten older though, it’s cleaned up a lot. I don’t want it to be that Steampunk, or I call it Erie Canal, that style that’s been so popularized at the moment. It’s really become NY’s overarching aesthetic, like the Freeman’s (a trendy NYC restaurant) kind of look. I mean I love a patina on a wall, I love a great old thing, but I’m not so interested in a lot of that aesthetic. It becomes boring if it isn’t countered with something chicer, or more vulgar. The three together make... ...up your style? A little bad taste goes a long way, and I think it’s really important. What do you think is bad taste in here? Probably that kangaroo claw bottle opener that hangs on the wall over there. I have things that are kind of gaudy, like this crazy giant rhinestone letter M that’s from some theatre. It’s tacky, but it’s also kind of gorgeous. That Indian chief pillow is pretty bad taste. It’s freaking ancient. People gave me looks at the flea market when I bought it. Is it annoying to you that your aesthetic that has been growing over so long out of the life you lead and the things you make, gets grouped with this trendy New York moment you were talking about? It’s a little bit annoying, but actually though, it’s the same thing as when you open up a magazine and see something that looks exactly like something you’re making by somebody else. At first you’re like, ‘oh, they’re knocking me off’, but I don’t really think that way. I think we’re all kind of connected... this sounds really... Go for it! Well, I really think that there’s kind of an evolution of aesthetic, of creativity. I’ll be working on something, and I’ll see that someone else is working on the same thing. I don’t know that person and they’re in Japan and I’m in New York, but we’re responding in exactly the same way to the world that we live in. That makes me feel like I’m doing the right thing. When I open up Bazaar and there’s somebody making the earrings that look exactly like the earrings I’m making or I just made. It makes me realize that I’m connected to something bigger, I’m on-trend, as they say! Well, it goes two ways, you’re a part of an international creative community, and you’re working from similar ideas because maybe you know each other or maybe your sharing the same references, it’s a dialogue that’s thoughtful and how culture develops but then there’s something much different, an industry that takes those ideas and capitalizes on whatever you’re making cause it’s cool and new. They don’t go through any process to get there. Yes, but that’s the thing that pushes you forward, ‘cause then you’re like ‘Oh, this doesn’t look like me anymore’. So then your pushed to make something new. I’ve never heard anyone say it like that before. I joke that I’m most motivated by vanity and envy. If I see somebody doing something—whatever it is, an interior or a look, jewellery, whatever—if it’s a thing I wish I had made, in a sense then I can go to the next step with the thing. I was gonna make it, had I thought of it. And then I can move on to the next idea. It’s like I don’t have to make it—they made it. When I make something, when I finish decorating a room, or I do whatever, as soon as I’m done, I’m like, ‘oh, now I get how I should have done it’. Now I’m on to the next idea—it’s an evolution. And so I love to see work by other people and be like, ‘oh my God, I wish I had made that’. But why make it when someone else already made it? Plus I can only make the things that only I can make, I’m gonna be thinking about that piece when I make my work, it’s gonna inform decisions about my next project. I love that flow. Without being inspired by how brilliant people are around you, would be so depressing! You know what I mean? It really makes me crazy when I hear people talking about ‘Oh, they tried to rip me off’, or, ‘Oh, I’m so over this’. You know, haters, who always have something negative to say. It’s like - open your eyes, man! There is crazy shit going on out there! And if you’re good you’ll be able to make a better thing next! Well, I like this positive take on... The world at large? Yeah. Well, obviously it’s nicer. I dunno, I mean, I feel lucky that I’m getting to live the life that I live. This is a stupid question to ask at this point but I don’t know if your name is Philip or Beau? I think my Mom always wanted to name her son Beau, and my dad wanted Philip and so there’s some kind of passive-aggressive power-play by my mother, like, ‘sure, he can be named Philip, but we’re gonna call him Beau!’ No one has ever called me Phillip. Philip is somebody else that I put on when I have to go be a professional person. (laughs) I see, like Jack Spade... Andy Spade called his line ‘Jack Spade’ just because he saw that his wife always had to be ‘Kate Spade’ wherever she went, and he didn’t want that for himself! I don’t want that! I don’t think it’s being duplicitous. I’m not being fake when I’m that person. It’s another part of me, but it’s not who I am when I’m with friends. It’s a different mode of operation? My nom de guerre. (both laugh) Actually, at the beginning I just felt like, I dunno, ‘Beau Crangi’—was a kid with crazy hair, who bartended in the East Village. And I felt like whenever I’d go to 47th Street, I could pretend to be Philip’s assistant Beau if I needed to be. You know, they never saw Philip! I was very influenced by Remington Steele. Ah! Quality inspiration! Is there anything you haven’t said? Any closing ideas you would like to get out there? Oh my God—yeah! Hmm….I think I have a theory about creativity, and the idea about the flow of information, and what you need to learn. I feel like as a designer I had to learn how to swim in the current and now I know the only way to make important work is to make the work that only you can make. Only you can do that thing. And it doesn’t matter what’s going on around you. Sometimes you’re in perfect sync, and sometimes you’re in total discordance, but that’s the most important thing I’ve learned to date. Do the thing only I can do. And it’s not just jewellery, it’s anything in my life. You know, I think that’s the most important thing. That’s a nice lesson! It took me a long time to figure that out. I wish somebody had just sat me down. Is that wisdom from Philip Crangi or wisdom from Beau? (laughs)

[ripstocking]

Philadelphia: The night before our interview, Denise Scott Brown called. ‘Hello, Amelia’, she said, ‘This is Denise Scott Brown’. She hoped I didn’t mind her phoning so late, but was I driving from New York to Philadelphia? Which roads would I take? There’s a café she likes in town; could we break for lunch? And had I seen The Garden of the Finzi-Continis? It might help me envisage her garden. Denise is, as they say, formidable. She is considered one of the most influential architects and planners in recent history, known for developing a theory and practice of postmodern architecture that emphasised pop vernacular and urbanist strategies as critical concerns. Her work permeated broader culture in a way such things rarely do; many who don’t know or care about design or city planning have learned from Learning from Las Vegas, the first survey of Las Vegas’ strip urbanism, co-authored by Denise and her husband, Bob Venturi, in 1972. Denise lives with Bob, Grant (their 20-year-old ‘handyperson’), and Aalto the dog in an art nouveau-style house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Inside, constellations of form and pattern cover every surface. Although Denise no longer formally practises architecture, she remains prolific. Her digital slideshows combine her own work with found images of CT scans and Paul Klee paintings in associative digital fields communicating complex arguments about activity and structure. ‘They used to say you can’t learn anything past age 30’, she said. ‘But I say the great lessons in life are in your old age. You have to learn or you won’t survive’. Most of this interview took place as I trailed Denise around her garden, which stretches behind the house on a gentle slope. Like everything she creates, the garden is a nuanced yet intuitive construction of space, on which Denise is perennially and fervently at work. How did you find this house? Driving to Bob’s mother’s house, we saw this driveway. And down it and through layers of window, we spotted the ‘front’ yard behind. I say the garden side is the front—do you have this problem? No, I’d call this the back of the house. Well, English people call it the front lawn. Anyway, like everyone else in the world, we drove down to see how the house could be transparent. Near the end I said, ‘I can’t believe those two windows—art nouveau is not an American house style. In California, there’s mission style, but that’s really arts and crafts. An Australian—an itinerant carpenter, earning a living as he travelled—recognised our woodwork as a Venezuelan hardwood much used in Germany. You can’t believe how hard it is. In the early 20th century a German architect, Hermann Muthesius, wrote Das Englische Haus. Germans loved his descriptions of the English house and landscape. So ours is an American version of a German art nouveau house, in a German version of an 18th-century English romantic landscape. We maintain the garden as the first owners built and planted it; so before an old tree dies we plant a new one of the same species near it. So that it will grow to replace the old one? Yes, the new one’s already begun. We have two locations for each tree; this is part of stewardship. Everything here is to do with stewardship. But although the new one is there, it won’t provide shade for years, and new patterns form in the sunlight. These things here are ‘weeds’, but they’re showing us a new pattern. To fill in gaps, we interpret the changing patterns and follow the forces that condition them—natural, structural, and more. Working with them is fun and inspiring. During our last repainting of the house, my cataracts were removed and my lenses replaced. Before the operation, the sky looked greenish, autumn leaves technicoloured, and the rest shades of parchment. Then one eye was fixed and I had two visions: one Las Vegas, the other North Pole. Today, things have settled down and look merry enough, but at first I missed the warmth of my cataract eyes. While I still had them, I gave instructions for painting the house. That’s why it’s a chalky white. It was meant to be mushroom-coloured. Your relationship to colour is so strong; did it trouble you when you had problems with your eyesight? I see colour well now, and I love what I see—except for the white house. It wasn’t all bad. Given my links to all things visual, I tried to make the most of my temporary bicolour perception, and I returned to photography. Years ago I told myself, ‘Just shoot’, reasoning that if you pause to edit, it’s gone. And then you kick yourself when you work out later why you wanted it. Last year I looked out of my window and saw icicles hanging from the eaves. They were beautiful in the early dawn, and as the sun rose a pink blush moved across them. I caught it by iPhone. I had stopped photographing in 1968. Why did you stop? I dropped the camera and hurt the lens. But basically, with a child, a practice, and studios to teach, I was too busy. But I didn’t really give up, as we used photography in lecturing and in our practice. I’m writing now on how architectural photography has changed during our careers. It was something architects did for the record. Robert Scott Brown and I journeyed to see buildings in the round that we had studied in books; we photographed them while we could. During apartheid, South Africans feared losing their passports and travelled as soon as the opportunity arose. We spent some years abroad studying, working, travelling, and photographing as if we might not go again. Along the way our ideas grew, and we took shots to convey them as well as to record buildings. Later, I used them in lecturing, and eventually they and photographs by our students supported our Learning from Las Vegas study and ‘Signs of Life’ show at the Smithsonian Institution in 1976. In our practice, photography aided research, design, documenting, recording, and marketing. Its role grew over the years and, with computers, it spread throughout architecture. It can now be considered one of architecture’s disciplines, like history, theory, and structures. We worked with many photographers, but Henri Cartier-Bresson is my beacon. Although ‘just shoot’ did not come from him, catching the propitious moment did and seeing the camera as part of your hand. And to learn about urban patterns, I tell students to examine his pictures of people in public places. Do you draw? Architects in English schools learn to draw very well. I took life classes and several forms of architectural drawing and I drafted very well. Bob draws marvellously, but he thinks drafting is more important. And we both had to learn to work with people who use computers. Bob didn’t photograph, but he would sometimes ask me, ‘Can you please get that? Can you make sure you get that?’ We have a couple of pictures taken by his eye and my finger. We also photographed each other in the Las Vegas desert. The differences are telling. Mine of him plays with scale, makes mannerist digs and refers to René Magritte. His of me is a record shot, but in it I was playing—hamming. How often did you go home to South Africa after you left? Twice while I was in England, then in 1957 to 1958 we spent a year and a half working and travelling in South Africa before making for the US. In 1959, when Robert died, I went home, my life upended. But both families pushed me to return to Penn. I went again with Bob in 1970 to show him my childhood. That was the last time. I hesitate when saying ‘I went home’, because in South Africa to call England ‘home’ was to announce your social superiority. An article I wrote, called ‘Invention and Tradition in the Making of American Place’, started with my overhearing three women in a bus in Johannesburg. The first said to the second, ‘I can tell from your accent that you’re from home’. She replied, ‘Yes, I left home 30 years ago’, and the third said, ‘I’ve never been home but one day I hope to go’. They were not just being sociable, they were establishing themselves as members of a caste. I read that your father’s family owned a boarding house and your mother grew up on a farm. Is that right? Not quite. No? We were from Eastern Europe. My father’s father was a businessman, but his parents took in lodgers from the old country. A picture shows my mother’s mother as an elegant 18 year old in Riga, with her hair swept up, wearing a white Edwardian lace shirt. She looks like a Gibson Girl. But when next you see her, she’s wearing an apron and cooking with a three-legged iron pot over an outdoor fire. That was when they had moved to Africa, the family? Yes, there are African huts in the background. My mother’s family went from Courland, in Latvia, to the Rhodesias, and my father’s from a shtetl in Lithuania to Johannesburg. I come at things as an African. Care for the environment—sustainability, we say now—was a necessity there. Robert’s family had a small farm and grew their food. Land erosion was an enormous problem that had involved them in soil conservation and organic farming. And we learned methods of sun protection and water retention in architecture school. But in America, when I said, ‘You’re facing the building the wrong way’, people in the office responded, ‘That’s why we have air conditioning’. Now they don’t say that. Here’s where the water runs down—you can see the lines over there, and the moss. Isn’t this moss lovely? The smell is beautiful. From that end, you see a symphony. Cherry blossoms and azaleas come out first, then dogwoods. Living things answer each other over time and make patterns in our garden through their relationships to sun, soil, and each other. In architecture, too, there are basic relationships. As beginners we learn simple ones: the size of a closet and where it should be in a bedroom, how bedrooms relate to bathrooms, and the living room to the dining room. We know these patterns—although for unconventional clients we might change them, combine rooms or leave the tub in the open, in general, clients want architects to maintain accepted patterns. It’s the same in cities. Forces of nature and society form patterns of settlement long before architects get there. Planners call the basic city-forming relationships ‘linkages’ or ‘city physics’. They’re functionalism for cities. Yet while we accept linkage relationships inside buildings and call ourselves functionalists, we run from them on the outside. Put the word ‘urban’ in the chapter title and architects go on to the next chapter. That’s where I think we lose our creativity, not to speak of our ability to satisfy people. And we have caused a lot of social harm. Urban renewal upsets of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the admonitions of Jane Jacobs, and the reasoning of Herbert Gans derive from what architects would not let themselves learn. When we first moved in to this house we got cold feet— What year was this? It was in 1972. How could we have been so crazy as to buy this old white elephant? The developer who intended to build houses on unbuilt land in the front couldn’t proceed until the old house was sold, so eventually his price came down to one we could afford. But when the deal was done, Bob cried, ‘How can we support all this?’ I was frantic; we had a 15-month-old son and a monster of a house, and I had a husband saying, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing here’. ‘Who can help?’ I pondered, ‘Who might like to?’ Architecture students, of course! We could pay them grad student hourly rates for their work if we also put them up and fed them, and if they saw their summer with us as a seminar. We went ahead on faith. Architecture students painted and mended the house, and pruned and weeded the grounds. We never failed to find a ‘handyperson’. Our attic floor has two small rooms and a bathroom. They stay there. ‘If you want friends to visit’, we say, ‘that’s fine’. And some help to mulch or clean the fishpond. The companionship of these young architects was wonderful for Jim, our son, as he grew up. And Bob and I, having worked with them most of our lives, loved and needed the company, too. We still do, and their architectural training makes them especially useful. They think holistically. In architecture, if you misstep on even one item, the building may fail. So we must research and design in the overall, like it or not. But urbanists from the social sciences see architects as totally intuitive—‘Oh, those artists!’ they say. Yet they’re less holistic than architects. And in deciding what to research, they too can be irresponsible and egotistical. Peter and Alison Smithson were starting their careers in London when I studied there. Although I could not be their student, I turned to them for advice. Peter said, ‘Go to Louis Kahn’. Kahn taught that while an artist may sculpt a car with square wheels to symbolise something, we architects must design them with wheels that work. It’s an interesting difference—perhaps the interesting difference—and if you believe no art can come from it, I think you’re wrong. In the ‘50s, city rebuilding was the main task, and architects with intelligence and talent saw urbanism as a focus for good and for architectural art. Now architects think you turned to urban planning because you weren’t a good designer. Do you want to see our frogs? Yes, definitely. Cheeky things—there’s a tonne of them. They don’t move when you go near. I’ve got too much algae in the pond, but if you take it out, it just grows back. We’ve got a vegetable garden over here, too; when I first came to this house, we got various tradespeople to come and work with us, and they’d always tell me about the old woman who lived here and how they always went off with a basket of tomatoes. She must have been overwhelmed with tomatoes. And, see, these are very old hedges that we’ve planted. What sort of conditions do tomato plants like? Lots of heat, lots of sun. We have done a little urban plan for this garden. It’s got a crossroads where you can take the wheelbarrow and turn it around. We have a whole lot of them down there and we’re going to make sure that they don’t fall on the floor. They’re looking happy, those tomatoes. They’re looking nice and fat. Yes, but we had other trees, which were really more climbing trees than these are. If you look down there, there’s a coach house, but these split-level ranchers were built later. This is a racially mixed suburb, integrated for idealistic reasons during Philadelphia’s post–World War II era of liberal Democrat government. That government had close ties with the University of Pennsylvania, where social planning originated. No one knows how good Penn’s planning school was! And it’s indirectly why Peter Smithson said, ‘Go there’. I was in both the planning and the architecture department. The planners were more interesting than the architects—Bob apart. He understood. His mother, Vanna, was a socialist and pacifist. She went to school hungry as a child and dropped out of school when her winter coat got too short. But before she left, a schoolteacher had noticed her brilliant young pupil. Vanna and Miss Caroll formed a lasting friendship and out-of-school teaching guided the young woman to become the poised beauty her husband-to-be saw at a ball at the Bellevue Hotel. Bob’s dad hoped to be an architect, but left school when his father died to help his mother run the family business, a retail fruit and produce market on South Street—the street we later helped to save. After World War I, Venturi Inc. became a purveyor to institutions and hotels, and it prospered. Bob went to private schools and Princeton and on to the American Academy in Rome. His was not too different a family story from mine, but their ascent was more vertical take-off than upward mobility. We met at my first Penn faculty meeting and, in the debate that day, found we were kindred spirits. To me, other Penn architects seemed aloof and rigid. I felt they were taking the worst, not the best, from ‘30s modernism, and I disliked the authoritarianism of their studios and juries. Planning school was different. In studio, we worked in teams and on one project, which contained many elements of design but also went beyond the physical to include social, economic, and environmental policy, research as well as design, and processes for bringing them all together. By spanning disciplines and working to link our analysis to our design, we hoped our plans would be functional and creative—even beautiful, but in their own way. My approach added a return to early modernism and concepts of ‘firmness, commodity, and delight’ to planning doctrines and methods. And as we critiqued modern architecture, Bob and I took it up in a new way. Form, for us, emerges complexly from more than function, and so does beauty. Forces make form, too, and letting ‘volunteer’ vegetation grow and following its patterns is one way. Another is ‘city physics’. Both bring richness and fun to the far-from-simple search for functionality and beauty. Architects design public places that the public doesn’t use, and sociologists say you can’t name a place ‘public’; the public makes it so when you satisfy their needs. But mapped analyses of our projects’ campus movement systems and activity patterns, and planned sequences of steps to pull them into a design, result in people moving along routes and using places as we had hoped. I suppose architects are often accused of thinking they’re making independent objects—the structure as this sovereign entity, without even necessarily a relationship to the structures that surround it. Absolutely, but I bang them on the head. I think lessons on where vegetation grows help. As small children, my mother took us walking in patches of veld remaining near us on the outskirts of Johannesburg. She showed us, as her governess showed her in Rhodesia, what lived in grass and sand. And like Miss Tobin, her governess, she coaxed musical notes from grasses and leaves and was always making things—with a walnut shell, a scrap of paper, glue, a pin, and a flag, she made a boat to float under a bridge and down a stream. As a beginning architecture student, I excavated for fossils in the wilderness during our July vacations. We camped, and our work was hard, but when I could I lay under a tree, looked up at foliage patterns and listened to veld sounds. My mother kept a pet monkey on a roof near her studio at Wits University. She had three brothers and no sisters and thought playing with girls was not what you did. You played with boys. She thought playing with the girls was boring? Yes, and so, of course, did I. As a student I would say, ‘I’d like to share my apartment with someone, but it’d have to be a man’. Then I found some women I liked, and they too wanted to play with the boys. Later we learned we were wrong: women must move up together or not at all. This group formed women’s lib. When Bob and I married, we each had years of experience—the last seven we’d spent in close collaboration, even teaching together. So when I joined the still-new office of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, we adapted our patterns of working together to fit professional routines and practices and to include the creativity of others. Design ideas were generated in many ways, mostly under our leadership, but also under that of others—and often, though not always, via ping-pong with a team. Many offices know the excitement of this unrecognised creative process. But critics in the profession said, ‘Well, she must be Bob’s business manager’ or, ‘She moved up by marrying the boss’. They couldn’t, and many still can’t, conceive that we were colleagues from the start; that I was inspiration to him and he to me, and that our practice was a joint work where design ideas came from both of us, and others. I read your piece ‘Sexism and the Star System’ about the way people have tended to assume your practice was peripheral to Bob’s. This has come up again recently, with the campaign out of Harvard to have your work recognised with a Pritzker. Do you think this has had an impact on your design? Do you think it made you tougher, or fiercer in your convictions somehow? No, I think it made me feel inadequate. It said, ‘You must be no good, they all say you’re no good’. It was debilitating. But as long as I was working with Bob and others, and our ideas were flowing, I felt happy. At Penn, I listened to Bob’s weekly theory lectures and loved his take on things that I loved, too. Feeling incredibly energised, I wanted to run out and do things. So did he. And through our collaboration, our themes crept into each other’s work. When I joined the practice, my abilities expanded Bob’s and broadened our scope. I remember his happiness at discovering I’m good at patterns—I’m an urbanist after all, and I photograph—because they’re necessary, but not quite his thing. And I can say, ‘On the other hand—’ which makes me a pain, but useful. For example, the opposite of collaboration is individual work, and a studio or office must have both. At certain points, people need to go away from the group, think on their own, and come back with something. Each one must offer something. And a project leader’s skills must include sensing when each is needed. All this makes for a full life. I adore practice; I adore teaching. I used to think, how could practice ever be as interesting? Yet I got to love it even more, and now it’s not open to me—no one is going to give us jobs. But everyone wants to do what you’re doing—come and talk with me. This is nice; I love it. And I love making collages of my slides to illustrate my points when I lecture. I call it curating, and I can talk to one slide for 20 minutes. I put together things that are evocative, heuristic, and interesting—but they must also be beautiful or no one will watch them. Sometimes I see two images together that look absolutely wonderful but make no point at all, but I can’t resist showing them, so I do. Then, suddenly, the reason they go together becomes apparent. This is my locus today for creativity, my venue for ‘making things’ as my mother taught me, and for finding beauty. It and writing are what I do now.