Karrie Jacobs

Copenhagen’s lovely, minimalist budget airline terminal.

At long last, the debut of my airport critic column appeared in the May issue of Travel + Leisure. Sadly, it’s not going to run as often as I would like and the first one, about Copenhagen’s sweet new budget airline terminal, shrank markedly from its assigned length.  Arguably, nothing essential is missing, just gobs of detail.

Here are a couple of the missing paragraphs:

In fact, I am arriving on a flight from Paris Charles De Gaulle to Copenhagen,  disembarking at the newest terminal at an airport that prides itself on functionality.   Copenhagen’s airport is, generally speaking,  a terrific one.  The main building, Terminal 2, is as handsome and efficient an example of 1960s modernism as I’ve ever seen, a monumental box with sunlight streaming through a double-row of round skylights.  At regular intervals, illuminated signs inform passengers of the waiting time at the centralized security checkpoint.  It never seems to top five minutes. Much of the airport flooring is wood, lowering the overall noise level  and upping the overall Scandinavian-ness.   And even the airport seating – like the iconic   blue Ammundsen chair – is exceptionally nice.  But the reason I fell for the new terminal –it opened in late October – is because it elevates efficiency to an art form.  Just imagine if all airports did that; the world would be a far happier place.

CPH Go, designed, built and priced for low cost airlines,   is so far served by only one:  EasyJet.  Founded in 1995, EasyJet  flies  directly to a number of primary destinations, like Paris and Milan, and scores of secondary cities, some 500 routes in Europe and North Africa.   Unlike the legacy carriers, which have cut back in recent years, the budget airline business continues to grow.  EasyJet’s  2009 annual report boasts a 3.4 percent jump in passenger load.   The airline’s low fare formula  (midweek roundtrip fare CDG to CPH: $61) is predicated on aggressive (as opposed to artistic) efficiency: it permits passengers only one small carry-on bag (and no  additional “personal item”) which speeds up boarding. And they charge for absolutely everything,  including any checked bags ($29 if you pay online, double if you pay at the airport) and in flight coffee ($4).  The EasyJet answer to business class is called Speedy Boarding.  You pay about $20 extra and they let you into the plane ahead of the masses to grab exactly the seat you want.

Also, here’s a Metropolis column that I wrote while all my books were in boxes. (Now only about a third of them are still waiting to be unpacked.)

The America Now and Here truck awaiting its maiden voyage.

Last night on Greene Street, this truck covered with words by artist Barbara Kruger was parked for a few hours.  It was about to depart for Kansas City, the first stop on a long road trip  cooked up by painter Eric Fischl and his crew.  The project, America Now and Here, is an attempt to use art (including visual art, literature, and performance) to promote a thoughtful conversation about the meaning of America.  Fischl was motivated, I’m told, but the current state of discourse in this country which is, as you may have noticed, pointlessly acrimonious and sadly degraded.  (See: Donald Trump.)

The first exhibition/performance/conversation/whatever is scheduled to begin on May 6, in the Crossroads District of downtown Kansas City.  It will be part of the general First Friday hoopla there.  (I was happy to hear that my pals at the KC architecture firm El Dorado are somehow in cahoots.)

Anyway, I like the idea of the project and hope to catch up with the roadshow, maybe when it hits Detroit this summer.  But I also love the truck, designed to be a traveling art warehouse, because I see it as part of a Barbara Kruger resurgence (which began, as far as I can tell, with her exhibition last fall at the Whitney Museum construction site near the High Line).  I would love to see our nation’s highways filled with trucks bearing Krugerisms.  (And, for that matter, wouldn’t big semi-trucks make a great medium for a national Interstate Highway Biennial?)

“Belief + Doubt = Sanity,” according to Ms. Kruger.

Top: Robert Scarano addition to a warehouse on Carroll St., Brooklyn (NY Times photo by Gabrielle Plucknette). Bottom: Frank Gehry’s museum for the Louis Vuitton Foundation.

A. The mezzanine trick.

From the very entertaining March 18 NY Times Magazine feature by Andrew Rice on Brooklyn’s least loved architect, Robert Scarano:

In early 2006, after a meticulous review, the city filed a series of civil charges against Scarano in an administrative court, among other things claiming that he “made false or misleading statements” in submissions for 25 self-certified projects. Most of the violations concerned mezzanines. The buildings department had just promulgated new guidelines, holding that if the mezzanines had more than five feet of headroom, they could not count as storage space.

From today’s New York Times article on a Parisian neighborhood’s  opposition to a museum Frank Gehry designed for Louis Vuitton’s Bernard Arnault:

In addition, they say, the 150-foot-high building violates height requirements by cleverly using an architectural subterfuge, creating split-level mezzanines inside that are not formally “floors,” to get around a legal restriction banning buildings higher than two floors.

Mais, non!  It is not a floor.  It is a mezzanine.   Paris or New York,  starchitect or a hack, the same trick fools the buildings department.  Incroyable!

Views from the front window of the Detroit People Mover: the RenCen (top), Cobo Center (middle) and a streetscape with the Rosa Parks Transit Center (aka bus station) in the distance.

Has Wim Wenders ever made a movie in Detroit?  I don’t think so.  But I started to see the city as a Wenders movie while riding the People Mover, a 2.9 mile theme park ride in search of a theme (and a park) that runs around downtown Detroit in a clockwise loop.  A product of the 1970s, the elevated train was supposed to be a feeder for a larger mass transit system.  Except that there isn’t one.

I have been on sillier mass transit systems, like the Las Vegas Monorail.  (It costs $5.00 for 3.9 miles, while Detroit’s PM is only 50 cents. Bargain.) I’ve been on less substantial ones; the Seattle Monorail is only a mile long.  I’ve even been on ones that seem more infuriatingly pointless; New York City’s AirTrain comes to mind.   But I’ve never been on one  more poignant. There was something about seeing the city come at me framed by the front window of the largely empty two-car train that was like watching The American Friend or Alice in the Cities.  All that was missing was the subtitles.  (And the actors.)

P.S. The city did get federal money last year to begin building a light rail system up Woodward Avenue, from downtown to a proposed commuter rail link in a part of town known as the New Center. Which would hook up to the People Mover and give it something to do besides going around in circles.

George Clooney, Griswold Street, Detroit.

Driving around downtown Detroit, we noticed a corner storefront done up as a campaign office, with camera crews buzzing around outside.  In the window were posters, reminiscent of Shepard Fairey’s Obama, except the face on them was clearly George Clooney’s.  As it turns out, Clooney was in town directing and starring in  a movie, The Ides of March, about — you guessed it — a political campaign.    It’s fiction.  But, given the opportunity, I’d vote for Clooney.  Wouldn’t you?

The Dormer House by Ben Wolf (top) and Renaissance Center by John Portman.  Both in Detroit.

Just back from Detroit.  My first visit.  I am astonished.   At first glance, Detroit looks like a memorial to the 20th century.  All the big ideas we Americans had about civilization in general, and cities in particular, are on display.  It’s not pretty.

But when you begin to dig in, to meet people who are investing their creative energy in the place, it seems possible that Detroit will someday re-emerge as a credible 21st century city.

Detroit is famous for its abandoned buildings, from burnt out houses to the iconic dead train station. But the single spookiest thing I saw was the Renaissance Center, the John Portman designed hotel and office complex initially developed by Ford in the late 1970s and now owned by GM.  Like all Portman projects, it was intended to shut out a decaying city and replace it with a sparkling new substitute city.  The place still largely functions that way although GM, to its credit, built  a “winter garden” in the 1990s that better connects the complex to the scenic (truly) Detroit River.   Outside the RenCen’s big atrium is a newly landscaped, but conspicuously underpopulated Riverfront.  (On a sunny morning run, we noticed just one other runner and maybe five strollers.) Inside the RenCen are all the gainfully employed people who are missing from the downtown streets, striding purposefully along the complex’s circular walkways, going round and round.

The rebirth of Detroit, to the extent that there is one, is small-scale, entrepreneurial and driven by people who, unlike Portman, are inspired by the existing city. For instance, we toured the neighborhood near the little municipality of Hamtramck, where Gina Reichert, Mitch Cope and many collaborators — The Power House Project — are buying up unwanted houses one by one and turning them into art installations, artist studios, and community facilities (like a hand-made ice rink).   The idea is to stabilize one small neighborhood by re-infusing unoccupied, disused buildings with activity and treating them as objects of value.

The burnt out house shown above,   reconfigured by sculptor Ben Wolf, is actually owned by the city, but it’s on one of the blocks where the Power House Project operates.  It strikes me as a metaphor for Detroit as a whole; a ruin recast as aesthetic object.

I don’t know that the creative homesteading movement will be enough to resuscitate Detroit, but I see it as a good sign that the city has begun to attract entrepreneurs and artists who understand the unique opportunity afforded  by a severely undervalued place.

More later.

Vortex by Tomoko Shioyasu, at the Japan Society

Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art, which opens tomorrow at the Japan Society, was intended by curator David Elliott (former director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum) as a refutation of “kawaii,” the Japanese penchant for all things cute that is best represented by Sanrio  megastar, Hello Kitty.  Indeed, the press release declares: “Cuteness Gives Way to Darker, More Disorienting World Views.”

No kidding.  What might have been just another curatorial conceit a week ago, now has an eerie resonance.  And it’s not just the title.  The show opens with an epic painting by Makato Aida called “Ash Color Mountains” which shows a rolling landscape made up of the corpses of salarymen.   And one of the most astonishing pieces in the show, a cut paper mural by Tomoko Shioyasu, is called “Vortex” (see above) and can be viewed as a giant wave.

Speaking as an occasional scholar of  Kitty (I have been known to dispatch my SVA D-Crit students to the Hello Kitty store on 42nd Street),  the works on display don’t strike me  as a repudiation of her cuteness.  Rather, they are more a rebuke to her simplistic style.  Hello Kitty can be regarded as the world’s best selling work of minimalism.  As Charlie Haas wrote in his definitive 1980 New West Magazine article about Hello Kitty:

The Mona Lisa is a hundred times easier to divine:  Her smile teases, sure but it is a smile.  Hello Kitty has no mouth.

Bye Bye Kitty includes some of the most maximalist, obsessively detailed works of art I’ve ever seen.  Yamaguchi Akira’s dense representations of Narita Airport and Manabu Ikeda’s attempts to put the entire history of civilization on canvas hint at nothing.  There is more information on those canvases than any viewer not under the influence of very good mescaline could possibly take in.

It’s a terrific exhibition, worth the trek to the far east (47th St. and First Ave.), but I’m not sure that Elliott has succeeded in undoing cuteness.  Although perhaps the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster will.  After last night’s Bye Bye Kitty!!! opening, I stopped in at the Nohre Haime Gallery near 57th St. for the opening of an exhibition by Hugo Bastidas, huge, mind-boggling,  photo-realistic images painted in gorgeous black and white.   I was telling my friend, artist Elizabeth Demaray (who is, among other things, Hugo’s wife) about Bye Bye Kitty!!!.  She speculated that, just as we refuted irony in the wake of 9/11, the Japanese might respond to their disaster by renouncing cuteness.  Maybe.  But, as I recall, the death of irony was short-lived.  Cuteness, I suspect, will be every bit as resilient.

Cuteness triumphant: Hello Kitty by Tom Sachs at Lever House, 2008.

P.S. The Japan Society will donate half the amount they collect from ticket sales (for Bye Bye Kitty and all their other events) until June 30 to the Society’s Japan Earthquake Relief Fund.

Bikes, Lafayette and Spring.

I moved.  About a month ago. That’s where I’ve been. In flux.  I am no longer in beautiful Downtown Brooklyn.  Instead, I’m back in Manhattan.  Soho, to be precise.

The long answer is that I’ve been living, by default, at my BF’s place in Soho for quite some time.  Sleeping here, then sneaking back to Brooklyn in the morning, using my place as an office.   But now I’m officially here.

Soho is different animal.  Brooklyn, at least downtown, which is dominated by courthouses, city offices, and fast food franchises, is still stubbornly unfashionable.  Soho, well you know about Soho.  Even if you don’t live around here, you come here to shop.  I’ve seen you queued up outside the Uggs store.  (Yes, the Uggs store on Mercer St. often has a doorman and a line.  Go figure.)

So the challenge is to see this place as a neighborhood.  As my neighborhood. And I have noticed a funny thing happening.  Art is trickling back in.  Little, unflashy galleries still exist here and there, especially south of Broome St.. New ones seem to be popping up.

And then there are the crocheted bicycles.   They were a mystery for a while.  But in the age of the internet, there are no mysteries.  They are made, it turns out, by an artist named Olek.  And, of course, Olek has a website.  I love the crocheted bicycles she deposits on the streets because they are reminders that this is not just an urban mall where people inexplicably line up to buy things, as if things were scarce, but a neighborhood that is still partially inhabited by artists.

(Also, the bikes remind me of the guy who covered endless East Village lamp poles with mosaics.  I never knew his name when I lived in the neighborhood — there were still mysteries back in the ’90s — but I can now find him with a little rudimentary Googling: meet Jim Power, Mosaic Man.)

P.S. Here are links to a few pieces that have recently been published.

Made in the USA?, a Metropolis column about the terrific exhibition, Vertical Urban Factory, now at the Skyscraper Museum.  Read the column.  See the show

Quick Fix Urbanism, a Metropolis column about Greg Lindsay’s book Aerotropolis.

And two Travel + Leisure web features.  America’s Coolest Houses (that you can actually visit) and the relentlessly viral World’s Most Beautiful Buildings.

The 39571 Project in DeLisle, Miss. by SHoP Architects.  December 2006.

The other night I went to a party at the Four Seasons in honor of a new book, The Power of Pro Bono, a compendium of worthy projects for which architects donated their services. Nice.  The book was published by my friends at Metropolis Books.  Nice.  And beautifully designed by Paula Scher at Pentagram.  Extra nice.

I’ve been leafing through the book, which contains projects I’ve seen before, like the butterfly-roof Roxbury Estates houses that Rick Sundberg designed for Habitat For Humanity in Seattle.  And some that I’ve never seen, like the marvelous little cabins that Gensler drew up for a Catalina Island Boy Scout camp.  They’re fashioned from shipping containers, and as tired as I am of shipping containers as the default strategy for low-cost architecture, I find these little buildings  exceptionally elegant.  (Or maybe they’re just exceptionally well photographed.) Nice.

The book represents the philosophy of a San Francisco firm, Public Architecture, founded to encourage architects to do good deeds, not just in emergencies, like Architecture for Humanity, but all the time.   On the firm’s website, under the heading, “What We Don’t Believe” I noticed the following:

Beauty is trivial
No. Beauty dignifies. Architecture doesn’t just function; it expresses the human condition. It’s about human dignity. It’s about respect. It communicates identity and enables people to speak, to participate, to act. If you want to see what design has to do with identity, look at people’s clothes, their cars. Architecture does the same things; it just lasts longer.

What can I say? Nice!

Slowly, it dawned on me that I recognized the building on the book’s cover.  In fact, I’d been there.  In December of 2006, Allison and John Anderson of the Bay St. Louis, Mississippi based firm Unabridged Architecture took me for a drive to some of the neighboring Gulf Coast towns to see what had been built since  Katrina.  The 39571 Project in DeLisle, Miss. near Pass Christian, designed by William Sharples of New York’s SHoP Architects, was one of the first new buildings of any note.  The idea was to create a little bit of critical mass — a distribution center for donated goods, a restaurant, a beauty parlor, a place to gather.   39571 is two simple boxes joined by a canopy that creates a shaded, sheltered place for people to hang out.  Nothing fancy, but in the post-Katrina landscape, it looked pretty damn nice.

Anyway, seeing the 39571 Project in Pro Bono reminded me of that trip.  So I dug up my old photos, and then I went over to the Unabridged Architecture website to see what the Andersons had been up to lately.  As it happens, they  recently completed a new parking garage for Bay St. Louis.  It’s got photovoltaics, LEDs, and a rainwater fed irrigation system to keep its living walls (which haven’t grown in yet) fresh.   Yet another green parking garage for my  oxymoron collection. Nice.

P.S.  Check out my new Metropolis column on our nation’s timid approach to infrastructure.  Not nice.

Fake tank, 100% Design, London 2007.

I’ve been thinking about guns a lot since the shooting in Tucson of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and nineteen others on Saturday.   Clearly the shooter was deranged.  His kind of shooter, by definition, always is.   And whether or not the malevolent political climate is to blame, this massacre has focused attention on the emergence of the gun, especially high-powered automatic weapons, as the political symbol of choice on the right.

The fashion among Tea Partiers and their ilk for showing up at political rallies with their biggest guns on display is disturbing for a number of reasons.  First, there’s the implied threat; vote for our candidate or else… But more than that, all the gun waving strikes me as cheap symbolism, a time-tested shortcut for attracting attention.  So what, if you don’t have a coherent message?  Violence sells.  Ask Hollywood.  You don’t need a  plot to sell movie tickets as long as there’s lots of  shooting.  Ask video game manufacturers.  The gun waving wingnuts aren’t just making a statement about their Second Amendment rights.  They’re maximizing box office.  They’re inflating  the visibility  of otherwise utterly marginal politicians.

Over the past month or two, I’ve been reading a doorstop sized book called Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin by Alexandra Richie.  It traces the city’s history from  the Middle Ages and ends in the 1990s.  On Saturday, as it happens, I was reading the section about how Hitler dispatched a young Joseph Goebbels to Berlin in 1926 to build support in Germany’s capital for the Nazi party.  At the time, there were only 200 party members in the city, as compared to 250,000 members of the Communist Party.   His very effective strategy was to attract attention by inciting violence,  specifically street brawls between his cadres and the Communists.  And also  to demonize the enemy: the Jews, the capitalists, and the Weimar government, which the Nazis painted as too weak to maintain order.     Goebbels in short:  to achieve power,  you incite violence and then assign blame.

So far, we’ve been luckier than the Weimar Germans.  The cheap symbolism  hasn’t been especially appealing to voters.  But it has made an impact on our political culture.  Whether or not the intensified gun waving of the past two years (and related acts of actual violence) influenced the kid in Tucson, the embrace of the automatic weapon as a political symbol makes it that much more frightening for elected officials to step up and do what needs to be done,  to restrict access to such weapons.

P.S. Maybe the best response to the cheap symbolism isn’t to ignore it or shout it down, but to subvert it.

P.P.S. Speaking of Joseph Goebbels, Sarah Palin just introduced the term “blood libel” into the debate.

Cheap symbolism, genuine sentiment.